My muscles felt unmoored, as if they’d come unhooked from my bones, and my head pounded. I was desperately thirsty. But I didn’t really begin to be afraid until I tried to reach for my waistband to feel for the silver coin and couldn’t: soft woolen cuffs circled my wrists.
Being afraid did nothing at all, of course, except make me sweatier.
I lay there with my fear and my thumping head and my gummed-up mouth for hours, thinking of Bad and Jane and my father and how much I missed the dusty, aged smell of Locke House. And how badly, deeply wrong everything had gone. By the time the nurses finally arrived I had wrung myself out with waiting.
The nurses were iron-spined women with lye-roughened hands and coaxing voices. “Let’s sit up now and eat, be a good girl,” they ordered, and I was. I ate something mushy and bland that might have once been oatmeal, drank three glasses of water, pissed on command in an open steel container, and even lay back down on the bed when they asked and let them refasten the cuffs around my wrists.
My only act of rebellion (and, God, how pathetically small) was to slip the coin from my waistband and clasp it hot and round in my palm. I survived the first night by holding it and dreaming of silver-faced queens sailing foreign seas, unbound.
The second morning I was convinced a legion of grim doctors would arrive at any moment to administer drugs or beatings, the way they did in the most sensational news stories about asylums. It took me many more hours of lying on my back, staring at the dingy sunlight inching across the floor, before I remembered the lesson I’d learned as a child: it isn’t pain or suffering that unmakes a person; it’s only time.
Time, sitting on your breastbone like a black-scaled dragon, minutes clicking like claws across the floor, hours gliding past on sulfurous wings.
The nurses returned twice and repeated their rituals. I was very biddable, and they cooed at me. When I stuttered that I’d like to speak to the doctor please, because there had been a terrible mistake and I wasn’t crazy, really, one of them even giggled.
“He’s very busy, pet. Your evaluation is scheduled for tomorrow, or at least before the end of the week.” Then she patted my head, the way no adult would ever pat another adult’s head, and added, “But you’ve been very good, so we can leave these off for tonight.”
The way she said it—like I should be grateful simply to be uncuffed, to have the basic human liberty of moving my arms and touching something other than overstarched sheets—lit like a coal in my belly. If I’d let it burn it would have ignited a conflagration, a ravenous blaze that would have ripped apart my stiff sheets and smashed my oatmeal against the wall and turned my eyes white-hot. No one would have believed I was sane, after that. I smothered the coal.
They left and I stood at my window, pressing my forehead against the summer-warm glass until my feet began to ache. I lay back down.
The hour-dragons stalked me. They grew larger as the sun set, multiplying in the shadows.
I think I might have shattered into pieces that second night, and never quite found all of myself again, had it not been for an irregular, half-familiar pattering against the window. I stopped breathing.
I crept out of bed and struggled against the stiff window latch, feeling the liquid weakness of my arms. It wedged open only a miserly few inches, but it was enough to let in a sweet summer-night smell. Enough for me to hear, far below, a familiar voice say, “January? It’s you?”
It was Samuel. I felt for just a moment like Rapunzel must have when her prince finally showed up to rescue her from the tower, except that I couldn’t have wedged myself out the window even if my hair had been long and golden rather than curled and matted. Still.
“What are you doing here?” I hissed down at him. I couldn’t see much more than a man-shaped shadow several floors below, holding something in its hands.
“Jane sent me, she says to tell you she tried to see you, but could not—”
“But how did you know which window was mine?”
I saw his shadow shrug, one-shouldered. “I waited. I watched. Until I saw you.”
I didn’t say anything. I pictured him hiding in the hedges, staring up at my prison and waiting for hours and hours until he saw my face in the window—and a shiver ran down my breastbone. In my experience, the people you cared most about did not linger. They were always turning away, leaving you behind, never coming back—but Samuel had waited.
He was speaking again. “Listen, Jane says it is important that you have—”
He stopped. Both of us saw the yellow glow of lights flicking on through the first-floor windows, heard the muffled thumps of footsteps coming to investigate. “Catch!”
I caught. It was a stone tied to a length of twine. “Pull it up! Quick!” And he was gone, disappearing into the landscaped grounds just as the hospital doors creaked outward. I yanked the twine up through my window in panicky jerks and jammed the window closed. I slid down my room wall, panting as if it were me sprinting into the night instead of Samuel.
There was something smallish and square tied to the end of the line: a book. The book. Even in the dark I could see the half-worn lettering smiling at me like gold teeth through the gloom: THE TEN THOU OORS. It had been a long time since Samuel had smuggled a story to me; I wondered dizzily if he’d dog-eared his favorite scenes.
Several hundred questions occurred to me—how had Jane recognized the book, and why did she want me to have it? And how long would Samuel keep waiting for me, if I was trapped here forever?—but I ignored them. Books are Doors and I wanted out.
I crawled to the center of the floor, where there was a slanted yellow square of light from the hall, and began to read.
Chapter Three
Much on Doors, Worlds, and Words
Other worlds and the flexibility of natural laws—The City of Nin—A familiar door seen from the other side—A ghost at sea
It is a heartless thing, but it is at this juncture in our narrative that we must abandon Miss Adelaide Larson entirely. We leave her just as she sails The Key into a foreign ocean, with the salted wind blowing the pine sap out of her hair and filling her heart with glowing certainty.
We do not abandon her without good reason: the time has come when we ought to discuss more directly the nature of doors themselves. I must first assure you I did not delay this instruction out of any sly sense of theater, but simply because I hope by now that I have gained your trust. I hope, simply, that you will believe me.
Let us begin with the first conceit of this work: doors are portals between one world and another, which exist only in places of particular and indefinable resonance. By “indefinable resonance,” I refer to the space between worlds—that vast blackness waiting on the threshold of every door, which is hideously dangerous to pass through. It is as though the borders of oneself grow dissolute with nothing pressing against them, and your very essence threatens to spill away into the void. Literature and myth are rife with tales of those who have entered the void and failed to emerge on the other side.7 It seems therefore likely that doors themselves were originally constructed in places where this blackness is at its thinnest and least deadly: convergence points, natural crossroads.
And what is the nature of these other worlds? As we have discovered in previous chapters, they are infinitely varied and ever-changing, and often fail to comply with the conventions of our present world, which we are arrogant enough to call the physical laws of the universe. There are places where men and women are winged and red-skinned, and places where there is no such thing as man and woman but only persons somewhere in between. There are worlds where the continents are carried on the backs of vast turtles swimming through freshwater oceans, where snakes speak riddles, where the lines between the dead and living are blurred to insignificance. I have seen villages where fire itself had been tamed, and followed at men’s heels like an obedient hound, and cities with glass spires so high they gathered clouds around their spiral points. (If you are wondering why other worlds seem so brimf
ul of magic compared to your own dreary Earth, consider how magical this world seems from another perspective. To a world of sea people, your ability to breathe air is stunning; to a world of spear throwers, your machines are demons harnessed to work tirelessly in your service; to a world of glaciers and clouds, summer itself is a miracle.)
My second supposition is this: that doors generate a variable but significant degree of leakage between worlds. But what sorts of things leak through, and what is their fate? Men and women, of course, bringing with them the particular talents and arts of their home worlds. Some of them have come to unfortunate ends, I believe—locked in madhouses, burned at stakes, beheaded, banished, et cetera—but others seem to have employed their uncanny powers or arcane knowledges more profitably. They have gained power, amassed wealth, shaped the fates of peoples and worlds; they have, in short, brought change.
Objects, too, have trickled through the doors between worlds, blown by strange winds, drifting on white-frosted waves, carried and discarded by careless travelers—even stolen, sometimes. Some of them have been lost or ignored or forgotten—books written in foreign tongues, clothes in strange fashions, devices with no use beyond their home worlds—but some of them have left stories in their wakes. Stories of magic lamps and enchanted mirrors, golden fleeces and fountains of youth, dragon-scale armor and moon-streaked broomsticks.
I have spent most of my life documenting these worlds and their riches, following the ghost trails they leave behind them in novels and poems, memoirs and treatises, old wives’ tales and songs sung in a hundred languages. And yet I do not feel I have come close to discovering them all, or even a meaningful fraction of them. It seems to me now very likely that such a task is impossible, although in my earlier years I harbored great ambitions in that direction.
I once confessed this to a very wise woman I met in another world—a lovely world full of trees so vast one could imagine whole planets nestling in their branches—somewhere off the coast of Finland in the winter of 1902. She was an imposing woman of fifty or so, with the kind of ferocious intelligence that burns bright even through language barriers and several flasks of wine. I told her I intended to find every door to every world that ever existed. She laughed and said: “There are ten thousand of them, fool.”
I later learned that her people had no number higher than ten thousand, and claiming there were ten thousand of a thing meant there was no purpose in counting them because they were infinite. I now believe her accounting of the number of worlds in the universe was perfectly correct, and my aspirations were the dreams of a young and desperate man.
But we need not concern ourselves with all those ten thousand worlds here. We are interested only in the world that Adelaide Larson sailed into in 1893. It is not, perhaps, the most fantastical or beautiful of all possible worlds, but it is the one I long to see above every other. It is the world I have spent nearly two decades searching for.
Authors introducing new characters often describe their features and dress first; when introducing a world, it seems polite to begin with its geography. It is a world of vast oceans and numberless tiny islands—an atlas would look strangely unbalanced to your eye, as if some ignorant artist had made a mistake and painted too much of it blue.
Adelaide Larson happened to sail into the near-center of this world. The sea beneath her boat had possessed many names over the centuries, as seas often do, but was at that time most often called the Amarico.
It is also customary to supply a name when introducing a new character, but the name of a world is a more elusive creature than you might suspect. Consider how many names your own Earth has been assigned, in how many different languages—Erde, Midgard, Tellus, Ard, Uwa—and how absurd it would be for a foreign scholar to arrive and give the entire planet a single title. Worlds are too complex, too beautifully fractured, to be named. But for the sake of convenience we may loosely translate one of this world’s names: the Written.
If this seems an odd name for a world, understand that in the Written, words themselves have power.
I do not mean they have power in the sense that they might stir men’s hearts or tell stories or declare truths, for those are the powers words have in every world. I mean that words in that world can sometimes rise from their ink-and-cotton cradles and reshape the nature of reality. Sentences may alter the weather, and poems might tear down walls. Stories may change the world.
Now, not every written word holds such power—what chaos that would be!—but only certain words written by certain people who combine an innate talent with many years of careful study, and even then the results are not the sort of fairy-godmother-ish magic you might be imagining. Even a very great word-worker could not casually scrawl a sentence about flying carriages and expect one to come winging across the horizon, or write the dead back to life, or otherwise subvert the very underpinnings of the world as they are. But she might labor for many weeks to craft a story that would increase the likelihood of rain on a particular Sunday, or perhaps she could compose a stanza that would hold her City’s walls fractionally more firm against invasion, or guide a single reckless ship away from unseen reefs. There are half-forgotten stories, too faint and unbelievable even to be called legends, of greater magics—of writers who turned back tides and parted seas, who leveled Cities or called dragons down from the skies—but these tales are too unlikely to be taken seriously.
Word-magic comes at a cost, you see, as power always does. Words draw their vitality from their writers, and thus the strength of a word is limited by the strength of its human vessel. Acts of word-magic leave their workers ill and drained, and the more ambitious the working—the more it defies the warp and weft of the world as it is—the higher the toll. Most everyday sorts of word-workers lack the force of will to risk more than an occasional nosebleed and a day spent in bed, but more-gifted persons must spend years in careful study and training, learning restraint and balance, lest they drain away their very lives.
The people who have this talent are called different things on different islands, but most of us concur that they are born with a particular something that no degree of study can emulate. The precise nature of that something is a contentious subject among the scholars and priests. Some have claimed that it is related to their certainty of self or their scope of imagination, or perhaps simply the intractability of their will (for they are known to be obstreperous people).8 There is also great disagreement on what ought to be done with such people, and how best to limit the chaos they naturally cause. There are islands where certain faiths preach that writers are the conduits of their god’s will and ought to be treated as blessed saints. There is a series of townships in the south that have proclaimed that their writers must live separately from unlettered folk, lest they infect them with their unruly imaginations. Such extremes are rare, however; most Cities find some functional-yet-respectable role for their writers, and simply carry on.
This was the way of things on the islands surrounding the Amarico Sea. Talented writers were most often employed by universities and expected to devote themselves to the civic good, and granted the surname Wordworker.
There are, as my old acquaintance would say, ten thousand other differences between that world and yours. Many of them are too insignificant to merit documentation. I could describe the way the smells of brine and sun have permeated every stone of every street, or the way the tide callers stand at their watchtowers and cry out the hour for their Cities. I could tell you of the many-shaped ships that crisscross the seas with careful writing stitched on their sails praying for good fortune and fair winds. I could tell you of the squid-ink tattoos that adorn the hands of every husband and wife, and of the lesser word-workers who prick words into flesh.
But such an anthropological documenting of facts and practices will tell you little, in the end, about the nature of a world. I will tell you instead about one particular island and one particular City, and one particular boy who would not have been remarkable at all were it not
for the day he stumbled through a door and into the burnt-orange fields of another world.
If you were to approach the City of Nin in the early evening, as Adelaide eventually did, you might see it first as some hump-spined creature coiled around a stone outcropping. As you sailed closer the creature would divide itself into a series of buildings standing in rows like whitewashed vertebrae. Spiraling streets would fall like veins between the buildings, and eventually you might begin to pick out figures strolling along them: children chasing skittering cats down alleys; white-robed men and women walking down avenues with sober expressions; shopkeepers hauling their baskets back from the crowded coastline. Some of them might pause to stare out at the honey-tinted sea, just for a moment.
You might suppose that the City was a small, sea-soaked version of paradise. On the whole this impression was not inaccurate, although I admit I find it difficult to be objective.
The City of Nin was certainly a peaceful place, and neither the grandest nor poorest island City that circled the edges of the Amarico Sea. It had a reputation for fine word-working and fair traders and had gained a small degree of fame as a center of prestigious scholarship. The scholarship was rooted in Nin’s vast tunneling archives, which were some of the oldest and most extensive collections on the Amarico. Should you ever find yourself on the island I urge you to visit them and wander through the endless vaults packed full of scrolls and books and pages written in every language that has ever been documented in that world.
Of course, the City of Nin suffered all the usual maladies of human cities. Poverty and strife, crimes and their punishments, disease and drought—I have not yet seen any world free entirely of such things. But none of these sins touched the childhood of Yule Ian, a dreamy-eyed boy who grew up on the eastern edge of the City in a crumbling stone apartment above his mother’s tattoo shop.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January Page 13