The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

  “To find my father.” I was tired of lying, too.

  Havemeyer’s not-smile turned saccharine. Something unseemly—anticipation? delight?—lit his eyes as he leaned toward me and curled one gloved finger beneath my chin, tilting my face upward. “Your late father, I think you mean.”

  I should’ve let go of Bad’s collar right then and let him chew Havemeyer into red ribbons. I should’ve slapped him, or ignored him, or lunged for the door.

  Anything but what I actually did.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he’s just lost, out there somewhere. Maybe he found a Door and fell through it and he’s in some other world, a better world, where there aren’t people like you.” As comebacks go, it was somewhere between outright lunacy and pitiable. I waited for Mr. Locke’s sigh, for that sibilant sound that passed for laughter from Havemeyer.

  But instead, both of them went very still. It was the kind of stillness that makes the hairs on your arms stand up, and makes you think of wolves and snakes waiting in the high grass. The kind of stillness that makes you realize you have just misstepped very badly, even if you don’t see how.

  Mr. Havemeyer straightened, letting my chin fall and flexing his hands in his driving gloves as if they’d grown restless. “Cornelius. I thought we’d agreed to keep certain information preserved for Society members. I thought, in fact, that it was an essential tenet of our organization, as laid down by the Founder himself.” For the second time that morning, I had the sensation that the conversation was suddenly being conducted in an unfamiliar language.

  “I didn’t tell her a damn thing.” Locke’s voice was brusque, but there was a strangled note in it I might have called fear, except that I’d never heard Locke afraid.

  Havemeyer’s nostrils flared. “Is that so,” he breathed. “Luke! Evans!” A pair of hulking men thumped down the stairs at his shout, half-packed luggage in their arms. “Mr. Havemeyer, sir,” they panted.

  “Escort this girl to her room, won’t you, and lock her in. And watch out for the dog.”

  I’ve always hated it in books when a character freezes in fear. Wake up! I want to shout at them. Do something! Remembering myself standing there with my canvas bag hanging stupidly over my shoulder, my fingers gone slack on Bad’s collar, I want to shout at myself: Do something!

  But I was a good girl, and I didn’t do anything. I was silent as Havemeyer tapped his cane to hurry his men along, as Locke huffed and protested, as heavy-knuckled hands closed above my elbows.

  As Bad erupted, snarling and brave, and one of the men threw a heavy coat over his thrashing head and tackled him to the floor.

  I was half dragged up the stairs and slung into my bedroom, and the lock rolled and snicked into place like the oiled metal hammer of Mr. Locke’s revolver.

  I didn’t make any sound at all, until I heard furious barking and men swearing and then a series of boot-on-flesh thuds, and then hideous silence. And by then it was too late.

  Let that be a lesson to you: If you are too good and too quiet for too long, it will cost you. It will always cost you, in the end.

  Bad Bad BadBadBad. I scrabbled at the door, twisting the knob until my wrist bones creaked. Men’s voices spiraled up the stairs and slid under my door, but I couldn’t hear them over the rattling of the hinges and an awful, sourceless moaning. It was only when I caught Havemeyer’s irritated voice on the landing—“Can someone shut her up?”—that I realized the sound was coming from me.

  I stopped. Heard Havemeyer shout back down the steps, “Get that out of here and clean up this mess, Evans,” and then there was nothing but the thunderous shushing of blood in my ears and the silent sound of my own unraveling.

  I was seven again and Wilda’s key had just turned in the black-iron lock and left me caged and alone. I remembered the walls pressing me between them like a botanical specimen, the sick-sweet taste of syrup on a silver spoon, the smell of my own terror. I thought I’d forgotten, but the memories were crisp as photographs. I wondered dispassionately if they’d always been there, lurking just out of sight and whispering their fears to me. If behind every good girl lurked a good threat.

  Shuffling, swearing noises from the distant parlor. Bad.

  My legs bent beneath me and I slid down the door, thinking: This is what alone feels like. I only thought I knew, before, but now Jane was gone and Bad was taken, and I might rot away to cotton and dust in this shabby gray room and no one on Earth would care.

  That black Thing descended again and settled its coal-smoke wings around my shoulders. Motherless, fatherless. Friendless.

  It was my own fault. My fault, for thinking I could just run away, just gather my nerve and walk out into the wide unknown like a hero beginning a quest. For thinking I could bend the rules, just a little, and write myself into some better, grander story.

  But the rules were made by Lockes and Havemeyers, by wealthy men in private smoking rooms who pulled the world’s riches to themselves like well-dressed spiders in the center of a golden web. People of significance; people who could never be locked away in small rooms and forgotten. The best I could hope for was a life spent creeping in their generous shadows—an in-between creature neither loved nor reviled, but permitted to scurry freely so long as I didn’t cause trouble.

  I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes. I wanted to cast a spell and unspool the last three days, to find myself standing innocent and bemused in the Pharaoh Room, reaching for the blue chest. I wanted to disappear back into The Ten Thousand Doors, to lose myself in Ade’s impossible adventures—but Jane had taken the book, and Jane was gone.

  I wanted to find a Door and write my way through it.

  But that was madness.

  Except—there was the book, which echoed my own memory. And Jane’s urgent, black-eyed expression when she held it. And Havemeyer and Locke, freezing at the barest mention of Doors. What if—?

  I teetered on that invisible cliff’s edge, holding myself back from the seething, teeming ocean below. I stood up, slowly, and crossed to the dresser. My jewelry box was an old sewing box I’d stood on end and stuffed with the accumulated treasures of seventeen years—feathers and stones, trinkets from the Pharaoh Room, letters from my father folded and refolded so many times the creases were translucent. I ran a finger along the lining until I felt the cool edge of a coin.

  The silver queen smiled her foreign smile at me, just as she had when I was seven. The coin was heavy in my palm; quite real. I felt a dizzy rushing, as if some great-winged seabird had swooped through the center of me, trailing salt and cedar and the familiar-but-not-familiar sun of another world.

  I took a breath, and then another. Madness. But my father was dead and my door was locked and Bad needed me, and there was no way out except through madness.

  I dove over that unseen edge and plunged into the dark waters below, where the unreal became real, where the impossible swam by on glimmering fins, where I could believe it all.

  And in believing came a sudden calm. I tucked the coin into my skirt and crossed to the writing desk beneath the window. I found a scrap of half-used paper and smoothed it against the desktop. I paused for a moment, gathering every speck of my dizzy, drunken belief, then took up the pen and wrote:

  The Door opens.

  It happened just as it had when I was seven and still young enough to believe in magic. The pen nib swirled around the period and the universe seemed to exhale around me, to shrug its invisible shoulders. The light streaming through my windows, gone dim and watery with afternoon clouds, seemed suddenly more golden.

  Behind me, the hinges creaked open.

  A heady, giggling sense of madness threatened to swallow me up, followed by aching tiredness—a gluey, dizzying darkness that pulsed behind my eyes—but I didn’t have time for it. Bad.

  I ran on shaking legs, flashing past a few startled guests, past display cases with their neat brass labels, and flung myself down the staircase.

  The scene in the foyer had changed: Hav
emeyer was gone, the front door still standing open behind him, and Mr. Locke was speaking to one of his hulking manservants in a terse, low voice. The man was nodding, wiping his hands on a white towel and leaving behind rust-colored smears. Blood.

  “Bad!” I’d meant to scream it, but my chest had gone airless and tight.

  Their faces swung toward me. “What have you done?” Now I was almost whispering.

  Neither of them answered me. Havemeyer’s man was looking at me with an unnerved, blinking expression, like a man who doubted the evidence of his own eyes. “I locked her in, sir, I swear I did, just like Mr. Havemeyer said—how’d she—”

  “Be quiet,” Locke hissed, and the man’s jaw snapped shut. “Get out, now.” The man scurried out the door after his master, looking over his shoulder at me with fearful suspicion.

  Locke turned back to me, his hands rising in either placation or frustration, I didn’t care which. “Where’s Bad?” There still wasn’t enough air in my lungs, as if my rib cage were caught in a giant fist. “What did they do to him? How could you let them?”

  “Sit down, child.”

  “The hell I will.” I’d never spoken to anyone that way in my life, but now my limbs were shivering with something hot and towering. “Where is he? And Jane, I need Jane—let go of me!—”

  Mr. Locke had crossed to the stairs and grabbed my chin roughly, fingers pressing into my jaw. He tilted my face upward, eyes on mine. “Sit. Down.”

  My legs shuddered and folded beneath me. He caught one arm and half carried me into the nearest side room—the Safari Room, a parlor filled with taxidermied antelope heads and masks made of dark, tropical wood—and slung me into an armchair. I clung to it, reeling and dizzied and still racked with that sick exhaustion.

  Locke dragged another chair across the room, rucking up the rug beneath its feet, and sat so close in front of me his knees pressed against mine. He leaned back in a posture of false calm.

  “I’ve tried very hard with you, you know,” he said conversationally. “All these years spent caring for you, polishing you, protecting you… Of all the items in my collections, I’ve treasured you most of all.” His fist closed in frustration. “And yet you insist on flinging yourself into danger.”

  “Mr. Locke, please, Bad—”

  He leaned forward, arctic eyes on mine, hands resting on the arms of my chair. “Why couldn’t you learn to mind your place?” His voice went low on the last three words, heavy with some foreign, guttural accent I didn’t recognize. I flinched; he leaned away and drew in a long breath.

  “Tell me: How did you get out of your room? And how in the name of every god did you find out about the aberrations?”

  Does he mean—Doors?

  For the first time since I’d heard those awful boot-on-flesh sounds, Bad was driven entirely out of my mind. But nothing seemed to replace it except the distant thought that Mr. Locke had certainly not given me The Ten Thousand Doors.

  “It wasn’t your father, I think we can be fairly sure. Those tepid little postcards barely had enough room for postage.” Locke snorted through his mustache. “Was it that damned African?”

  I blinked at him. “Jane?”

  “Oh-ho, she does have something to do with it, then! I suspected as much. We’ll track her down later.”

  “Track her—? Where is she?”

  “She was dismissed this morning. Her services, whatever they might have been, are certainly no longer needed.”

  “But you can’t! My father hired Jane. You can’t just get rid of her.” As if that mattered. As if I could get Jane back through some technicality or loophole.

  “Your father no longer employs anyone, I’m afraid. Dead people rarely do. But that’s not our chief concern right now.” Somewhere in the conversation Locke had lost his wrathful edge and become clipped, cool, dispassionate; he might have been presenting at a board meeting or dictating orders to Mr. Stirling. “In fact, it hardly matters how you came by your information at this juncture; what matters is that you know entirely too much, entirely too independently, and had the infinitely poor judgment to reveal such knowledge to one of our more, mmm, imprudent members.” He gave a little sigh and a what-can-you-do shrug. “Theodore employs rather rough-and-ready means, and I’m afraid he’ll be even more excited by your little magic trick with the locked door. Well, he’s young.”

  He’s older than you. Is this how Alice felt, tumbling through the rabbit hole?

  “And so I must find a way to keep you safe, keep you hidden. I’ve already made a few calls.”

  I floundered, free-falling. “Calls to whom?”

  “Friends, clients, you know.” He waved a square hand. “I’ve found you a place. I’ve been told it’s very professional, very modern and comfortable—nothing like those Victorian dungeons they used to throw people into. Brattleboro has an excellent reputation.” He nodded at me as if I should be pleased to hear it.

  “Brattleboro? Wait”—my chest seized—“Brattleboro Retreat? The asylum?” I’d heard the name whispered among Locke’s guests; it was where rich people put their mad maiden aunts and inconvenient daughters. “But I’m not crazy! They won’t take me.”

  Locke’s expression turned almost pitying. “Oh, my dear, haven’t I taught you the value of money yet? And besides: as far as anyone knows you’re a little half-breed orphan who heard about her father’s death and started gabbling about magic doors. Took a little extra convincing for them to overlook your coloring, I admit, but I assure you: they’ll take you.”

  It played in my head like a movie reel: the title cards flashing out Mr. Locke’s lines to the audience, “Your father is dead, January!” and then jerky scenes of a young girl crying, raving. “She’s gone mad, poor dear!” And then a black streetcar slides beneath a stone archway reading ASYLUM, lightning flashes in the background, and it cuts to a scene of our heroine strapped to a hospital bed, staring listlessly at the wall. No.

  Mr. Locke was speaking again. “It’ll only be for a few months, a year maybe. I need time to talk to the Society, let cooler heads prevail. Demonstrate your tractable nature.” He smiled at me, and even through my reeling horror I saw the kindness in it, the apology. “I wish it could be otherwise, but it’s the only way I know to keep you safe.”

  I was panting, muscles quivering. “You can’t. You wouldn’t.”

  “Did you think you could just dabble at the edges of things? Dip a toe into these waters? These are very serious matters, January, I tried to tell you. We are enforcing the natural order of things, determining the fates of worlds. Perhaps one day you might still help us.” He reached toward my face again and I recoiled. He drew a finger down my cheek the way he might have stroked a piece of imported china: delicate, covetous. “It seems cruel, I know—but believe me when I tell you this is for the best.”

  And, as his eyes met mine, I felt a weird, childish longing to trust him, to curl up inside myself and let the world flow around me, as I always had, but—

  Bad.

  I tried to run. I really did. But my legs were still weak and wobbly and Locke caught me around the middle before I’d made it out of the parlor.

  He hauled me to the coat closet, clawing and spitting, and slung me inside it the way the cook slung beef sides into the icebox. The closet door slammed and I was trapped in the darkness with nothing but the musty, rich smell of unworn fur coats and the sound of my own breathing.

  “Mr. Locke?” It came out quavery and high-pitched. “Mr. Locke, please, I’m sorry—” I babbled. I begged. I cried. The door didn’t open.

  A good heroine is supposed to sit stiff-lipped in her dungeon cell, formulating brave escape plans and hating her enemies with righteous heartiness; instead I begged, swollen-eyed and shivering.

  It’s easy to hate people in books. I’m a reader, too, and I know how characters can turn into Villains at the drop of an authorial hat (those capital Vs like dagger points or sharpened teeth). It just isn’t like that in real life. Mr. Locke was
still Mr. Locke—the man who had taken me under his suit-coated wing when my own father couldn’t be bothered to raise me. I didn’t even want to hate him; I just wanted to undo it all, to unmake the last few hours.

  I don’t know how long I waited in the closet. This is the part of the story where time becomes fickle and flickering.

  Eventually there was an officious rap at the front door, and Mr. Locke’s voice said, “Come in, come in, gentlemen. Thank God you’re here.” Shuffling, footsteps, door hinges. “She’s a bit wild at the moment. You’re sure you can cope with her?”

  Another voice said it would be no difficulty at all; he and his staff were very experienced in such matters. Perhaps Mr. Locke would like to retire to another room, so as to avoid distress?

  “No, no. I’d like to see it through.”

  More booted footsteps. Then the slide-thunk of the closet door unlocking and the silhouettes of three men framed in the afternoon light. Rough, gloved hands fastened around my upper arms and hauled me into the entryway, numb-legged.

  “Mr. Locke, please, I don’t know anything, I didn’t mean to, don’t let them take me—”

  A cloth clamped itself over my nose and mouth, damp and honey-sweet. I screamed into it but it only grew larger and larger until my eyes and limbs were covered in muffling, sugared blackness.

  My last sense was of distant relief; at least in the darkness I no longer had to see Mr. Locke’s pitying eyes on mine.

  The first thing you notice is the smell. Before you’re even awake the smell twists into the darkness with you: starch and ammonia and lye, and something else that might have been panic, distilled and fermented in the hospital walls for decades. You smell yourself, too, a greasy, sweating scent like meat left out on the counter.

  So when I opened my eyes—a process much like pulling apart two caramels that have melted in your pocket—I wasn’t surprised to find myself in an unfamiliar room with gray-green walls. All the normal elements of a bedroom seemed to be missing, leaving only a smooth expanse of polished floor and two narrow, stingy-looking windows. Even the sunlight filtering through them was somehow muted.