The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

  (Of course, I know better now.)

  He often liked to imagine the scene: Perhaps he would find her home after weeks of hard traveling, and she would look up from her work to see him striding toward her, and that wild smile would split her face. Perhaps they would meet in that same field and they would run toward one another through springtime-green grasses. Perhaps he would find her in some distant city he could scarcely imagine, or in a howling thunderstorm, or on the shores of an unnamed island.

  With the baseless arrogance that so often plagues young men, Yule never once considered the possibility that Adelaide would not be waiting for him. He never imagined she might have spent the past decade flitting in and out of worlds with the instinctive ease of a gull swooping from ship to ship in the harbor, without a single book or record to guide her. He certainly never imagined she might build herself a rickety boat in the mountains and sail it onto the indigo waves of the Amarico Sea.

  It was such an outlandish notion, in fact, that Yule almost dismissed it entirely when he heard a strange rumor on the docks of the City of Plumm. It came to him as most rumors do: as a drifting set of jokes and have-you-heards that assembled themselves slowly into a single story. The most often-repeated details seemed to be these: There had been a strange ship sighted off the eastern coast of the City of Plumm, with sails of eerie white canvas. One or two fisherwomen and traders had approached it, curious to see what species of madman would sail a ship without blessings stitched into the canvas, but they had all veered quickly away. The ship, they claimed, was sailed by a woman as white as paper. A ghost, perhaps, or some pale undersea creature come to the surface.

  Yule shook his head at the superstitions of seafolk and returned to his borrowed room in the Plumm libraries. He had come following local legends of fire-spewing lizards that lived in the centers of volcanoes and only emerged once every one hundred thirteen years, and spent his evening in careful review of his notes. It wasn’t until he lay in his narrow cot, mind spiraling freely in and out of half dreams, that it occurred to him to wonder what color the ghost sailor’s hair was.

  Yule returned to the docks early the next morning and interrogated several startled merchants before he extracted an answer. “It was as white as she was!” a sailor assured him in a spooked tone. “Or, well, I suppose it was more a kind of straw color. Yellowish.”

  Yule swallowed, very hard. “And was she coming this way? Will she come to Plumm?”

  The man could offer no certainties here, for who could guess at the desires of sea witches or ghosts? “But she’ll run straight into the eastern beaches if she keeps her course. Then we’ll see who’s telling tales, won’t we, Edon?” Here he abandoned the conversation in order to elbow his doubtful shipmate and engage in a spirited debate about whether merfolk wore clothes.

  Yule was left standing alone on the dock, feeling as if the world had suddenly tilted on its axis. As if he were a boy again, reaching toward that thin curtain with un-inked hands.

  He ran. He didn’t know the way down to the eastern beaches—a rocky, barren stretch of coast frequented only by odds-and-ends collectors and a certain breed of romantic poet—but a series of breathless questions and answers saw him perched on the edge of the sea well before midday. He curled his legs to his chest and stared out at the gold-topped waves, watching for the thin white line of a sail topping the horizon.

  She did not arrive that day, or the next. Yule returned to the coast each morning and watched the sea until dusk. His mind, restless and driven for so many years, seemed to have settled in upon itself like a cat curled up to sleep. Waiting.

  On the third day, a sail crept over the waves, full-bellied and perfectly white. Yule watched the ship lumbering closer, awkward and squarish in the water, until his eyes burned from salt and sun. There was a single figure aboard, facing the island with a challenging, prideful stance and a flaxen tangle of hair whipping around her head. Yule felt a hysterical desire to dance or scream or faint, but instead he simply stood and raised one arm into the air.

  He saw her see him. A stillness fell over her, despite the lolling of the ship beneath her feet. Then she laughed—a wild, whooping laugh that rolled over the water to Yule like summertime thunder—removed several layers of dirt-colored clothing, and dove into the shallow waves beneath her ship without a trace of hesitation. Yule had half a second in which to wonder precisely what manner of half-wild madwoman he had been questing after for twelve years, and to doubt his sufficiency for the task, before he was splashing out to meet her, laughing and dragging his white scholar’s robes through the waves.

  And so, in the late spring of the year 1893 in your world, which was the year 6920 in that one, Yule Ian Scholar and Adelaide Lee Larson found one another in the noonday tides surrounding the City of Plumm. They were never willingly parted again.

  The Locked Door

  I dreamed in gold and indigo.

  I was skimming over a foreign ocean, following behind a white-sailed ship. There was a blurred figure standing at the prow, hair running bright behind her. Her features were smeary and uncertain but there was something so familiar in the shape she made against the horizon, so whole and wild and true, that my dreaming heart broke.

  It was the feeling of tears sliding down my cheeks that woke me up. I lay on the floor of my room, stiff and chilled, my face aching from where it pressed against the corner of The Ten Thousand Doors. I didn’t care.

  The coin. The silver coin I’d found as a girl, half-buried in the dust of a foreign world, the coin that now lay blood-warm in my palm—it was real. As real as the chill tile beneath my knees, as real as the tears cooling on my cheeks. I held it, and smelled the sea.

  And if the coin was real… Then so was the rest of it. The City of Nin and its endless archives, Adelaide and her adventures in a hundred elsewheres, true love. Doors. Word-working?

  I felt a shiver of reflexive doubt, heard an echo of Locke’s voice scoffing fanciful nonsense. But I’d already chosen to believe, once, and written open a locked door. Whatever this story was—this unlikely, impossible fantasy of Doors and words and other worlds—it was true. And, somehow, I was a part of it. And so were Mr. Locke, and the Society, and Jane, and maybe even my poor lost father.

  I felt like a woman reading a mystery novel with every fourth line missing.

  There’s really only one thing a person can do when they’re hip-deep in a mystery novel: keep reading.

  I snatched the book and flipped through the pages to find my place, but stopped: a thin slip of paper peeked out from the back pages. It was a note, written on the waxy back of a receipt labeled Zappia Family Groceries, Inc. It read:

  HOLD ON JANUARY.

  The letters were stiff capitals, written with the careful pressure of someone uncomfortable with a pen in their hand. I thought of Samuel talking about his family’s cabin on the north end of the lake, his dusk-colored hands gesturing in the darkness, his cigarette drawing comet trails in the night.

  Oh, Samuel.

  If I hadn’t been holding that scrap of paper and thinking of those hands, I might’ve heard the nurses’ footsteps before the lock clunked and the door opened, and they stood on the threshold like a pair of gargoyles in starched white aprons. Their eyes surveyed the room—unslept-in bed, unlatched window, patient on the floor with her nightgown rucked past her knees—and landed on the book. They moved toward me with such synchronous efficiency it had to have been some kind of Procedure. Procedure 4B, When an Inmate Is Out of Bed and in Possession of Contraband.

  Their hands came down like harpy claws on my shoulders. I froze—I had to stay calm and sane-seeming, had to be good—but one of them scooped my book off the floor and I lunged for it. And then they were twisting my wrists behind my back and I was kicking and howling and spitting, fighting with the unscientific chaos of young children and madwomen.

  But they were older and stronger and depressingly capable, and soon my flailing arms were pressed tight to my sides and my feet were hal
f marching, half skidding out into the hall.

  “Straight to the doctor, I think,” one of them panted. The other nodded.

  I caught glimpses of myself as I passed the windowed doors of other rooms: a dark ghost in white cotton, mad-eyed and tangle-haired, escorted by women so upright and starched they must be either angels or demons.

  They steered me down two floors to an office door with gold lettering painted on the glass: Dr. Stephen J. Palmer, Chief Medical Superintendent. It struck me as darkly, terribly funny that all my good behavior and polite questions couldn’t get me into this office, but a little howling and thrashing had brought me right to his door. Perhaps I ought to howl more often. Perhaps I ought to be again that obstreperous girl-child I was when I was seven.

  Dr. Palmer’s office was wood-paneled and leather-chaired, full of antique instruments and gold-framed certificates in Latin. Dr. Palmer himself was aging, aloof, with tiny half-glasses that perched on the end of his nose like a well-mannered wire bird. The asylum smell of ammonia and panic was entirely absent.

  I hated him for that. For not having to breathe in the stink of it every day of his life.

  The nurses corralled me into a chair and loomed behind me. One of them handed Dr. Palmer my book. It looked small and shabby on his desk, and not very magical at all.

  “I think Miss January will behave herself now. Won’t you, dear?” His voice had a hearty, unassailable confidence that made me think of senators or salesmen, or Mr. Locke.

  “Yes, sir,” I whispered. The gargoyle-nurses departed.

  Dr. Palmer reshuffled a series of folders and papers on his desk. He took up his pen—a heavy, ugly specimen that looked like it could double as a rolling pin in an emergency—and I felt myself go very, very still. I’d written open one door, hadn’t I?

  “Now. This book.” The doctor tapped the cover with a knuckle. “How did you sneak it into your room?”

  “I didn’t. It came in through the window.” Most people can’t tell the difference between truth-telling and madness; try it sometime, and you’ll see what I mean.

  Dr. Palmer gave me a small, pitying smile. “Ah, I see. Now. From what Mr. Locke tells me, your decline has much to do with your father. Would you like to tell me a bit more about him?”

  “No.” I wanted my book back. I wanted to be unchained and unfettered, to go find my dog and my friend and my father. I wanted that damn pen.

  Dr. Palmer smiled his pity-smile again. “A foreigner of some sort, was he not, and colored? An aborigine or Negroid fellow?”

  I considered, briefly but longingly, how nice it would feel to spit directly into his face, to spatter those neat spectacles with slime.

  “Yes, sir.” I tried to marshal my familiar good-girl face, to arrange my features in that dewy, biddable expression that served me so well in Locke’s world. It sat wooden and stiff on my face, unconvincing. “My father worked—works—for Mr. Locke. As an archaeological explorer. He is often away.”

  “I see. And he passed away recently.”

  I pictured Jane telling me that Locke was not God and that she hadn’t given up yet. Oh, Father, I haven’t given up either.

  “Yes, sir. Please”—I swallowed, tried to reassemble my good-girl mask—“when can I go home?”

  Home. See that H like a house with two chimneys? I meant Locke House when I said it—with its familiar labyrinth of hallways, its hidden attics and warm red-stone walls—but I was unlikely ever to return there now.

  Dr. Palmer was reshuffling his folders again, not looking at me. I wondered how long Mr. Locke had paid him to keep me here, mad or otherwise. “It’s not clear at this time, but I shouldn’t be in a rush if I were you. There’s no reason you shouldn’t rest here for a few months, is there? Recover your strength?”

  I could think of at least thirty good reasons I didn’t want to stay locked in an asylum for months, but all I said was, “Yes, sir. And can I—do you think I could have my book back? And perhaps a pen and paper? Writing… eases my mind.” I attempted a timorous smile.

  “Oh, not just yet. We’ll discuss it again next week, if you’ve been on your best behavior. Mrs. Jacobs, Mrs. Reynolds, if you please—”

  The door opened behind me. The sharp steps of the nurses clicked across the floor. A week?

  I flung myself across his desk and seized the slick smoothness of the doctor’s pen. I tore it from his grasp, spun away, barreled into the nurses—and then they had me, and it was over. A starched white arm crushed itself against my throat, quite dispassionately, and I felt my fingers being peeled inexorably away from the pen.

  “No, please, you don’t understand—” I scrabbled, bare feet sliding uselessly across the floor.

  “Ether, I think, and a dose of bromide. Thank you, ladies.”

  My last sight of the office was Dr. Palmer placing the pen fastidiously in his pocket and tucking my book in his desk drawer.

  I hissed and cried and screamed down the halls, shaking with hate and need. Faces peered out at me through the narrow door windows, pale and blank as moons. It’s funny how quickly you descend from civilized young lady to madwoman; it was as if this beastly, boundaryless creature had been living just beneath my skin for years, lashing her tail.

  But there are places built for holding beastly women. They hauled me into bed, fastened the cuffs around my ankles and wrists, and pressed something cold and stickily damp over my mouth. I held my breath until I couldn’t and then I drifted into tarry blackness.

  I don’t want to talk much about the next few days, so I won’t.

  They were dull and gray and long. I woke at odd, arrhythmic times of the day with the sick tang of drugs on my breath; at night I dreamed I was suffocating but couldn’t move. I spoke to other people, I think—nurses, other inmates—but the only real company I had was the silver queen on her coin. And the hateful, stalking hours.

  I tried to hide from the hours by sleeping. I lay very still and closed my eyes against the dull sameness of the room and made my muscles go slack and soft. Sometimes it worked, or at least I achieved a stretch of time that was even grayer and duller than the rest, but mostly it didn’t. Mostly I just lay there, staring at the pink veins of my eyelids and listening to the shush-shush of my blood.

  Nurses and orderlies appeared every few hours, slate schedules clutched in their hands, to unfasten me from bed and prod me into motion. There were meals to be eaten under close supervision, starched white gowns to be worn, baths to be taken in rows of tin tubs. I shivered beside the fish-pale nakedness of two dozen other women, all of us made ugly and unsecret, like snails pulled from their shells. I watched them furtively—twitching or weeping or silent as tombstones—and wanted to scream: I’m not like them, I’m not mad, I don’t belong here. And then I thought: Maybe they didn’t belong here, either, at first.

  Time went strange. The hour-dragons stalked and circled. I heard their belly scales susurrating against the tile in my sleep. Sometimes they crept into bed and stretched out beside me the way Bad used to, and I woke wet-cheeked and terribly alone.

  At other times I would be engulfed instead by righteous rage—How could Locke betray me into this hell? How could I let them hurt Bad? How could my father leave me here, alone?—but eventually rage burns out and leaves nothing but ash, a muted landscape drawn in charcoal gray.

  And then on the fifth or sixth (or seventh?) day of my imprisonment, a voice said, “You have a visitor, Miss Scaller. Your uncle came to see you.”

  I had my eyes screwed shut, hoping that if I feigned sleep long enough my body would give up and play along. I heard the click of the door, the scrape of a chair. And then a voice drawled, “Good lord, it’s half past ten in the morning. I would make a Sleeping Beauty joke, but it’s only half-true, isn’t it?”

  My eyes snapped open and there he was: alabaster-white, cruel-eyed, hands like white-gloved spiders resting on his cane. Havemeyer.

  The last time I’d heard his voice, he’d been ordering his men to get r
id of the mess that was my dearest friend.

  I lunged for him. I’d forgotten that I was despairing, weak, cuffed to my bed; I only knew I wanted to hurt him, bite him, rake my nails down his face—“Now, now, let’s not get excited. I’ll have to call the nurses in, and you’re no good to me drugged and drooling.”

  I snarled and twisted against my restraints. He chuckled. “You were always so biddable, so civilized at Locke House. I told Cornelius not to believe it.”

  I spat at him. I hadn’t intentionally spit on anyone since Samuel and I were kids holding contests on the lakeshore; it was comforting to see I hadn’t entirely lost my aim.

  Havemeyer wiped his cheek with one gloved finger, his amusement turning brittle. “I have some questions for you, Miss Scaller. Cornelius would have us believe this is all blown out of proportion, that you simply eavesdropped on your betters, that you’re distraught over your father, that you’re no threat, really, et cetera, et cetera. I think otherwise.” He leaned forward. “How did you find out about the fractures? Who have you been talking to?”

  I bared my teeth at him.

  “I see. And how did you get out of your room? Evans was sure he locked you in, and he’s not foolish enough to lie to me.”

  My lips curved into a not-smile. It was the kind of expression that makes you think That person is unhinged and Someone should lock them up; I found I didn’t care. “Maybe I cast a magic spell, Mr. Havemeyer. Maybe I’m a ghost.” The smile turned into a lopsided snarl. “I’m mad now, didn’t you hear?”

  He tilted his head at me, considering. “That vile dog of yours is dead, in case you were wondering. Evans tossed it in the lake. I would apologize, but someone ought to have done it years ago, if you ask me.”

  My body recoiled like a kicked animal. My ribs were shattered shards, pressing into the soft meat of my insides. Bad, Bad, oh Bad—

  “It seems I have your full attention. Good. Now, tell me, have you ever heard of upyr? Vampir? Shrtriga?” The words rolled and hissed in his mouth. They reminded me, for no clear reason, of the trip I’d taken with Mr. Locke to Vienna when I was twelve. It’d been February and the city was shadowed, wind-scoured, old. “Well, the name hardly matters. I’m sure you’ve heard of them in general outline: things that creep out of the black forests of the north and feast on the lifeblood of the living.”