The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

  He was removing the glove from his left hand as he spoke, tugging on each white fingertip. “Lies spread by superstitious peasants, in the main, repeated in story papers and sold to Victorian urchins.” Now his hand was entirely free, fingers so pale I could see blue veins threading them. “Stoker should’ve been summarily executed, if you ask me.”

  And he reached toward me. There was perhaps half a second before his fingertip touched me when all the fine hairs on my arm stood straight and my heart seized and I knew, in a scrabbling, animalish way, that I shouldn’t let him touch me, that I should scream for help—but it was too late.

  His finger was cold against my skin. Beyond cold. An aching, burning, tooth-hurting absence of heat. My body warmth drained desperately toward it, but the cold was ravenous. My lips tried to form words but they felt numbed and clumsy, as if I’d been out walking in freezing wind.

  Havemeyer made a soft sighing sound of deepest contentment, like a man warming his hands by the fireplace or taking his first sip of hot coffee. He pulled his finger reluctantly away from my skin.

  “Stories always have a grain of truth, don’t you find? I believe that was the principle that kept your father trotting around the globe, digging up scraps for his master.” His cheeks were flushed an unhealthy consumptionish crimson. His black eyes danced. “So tell me, my dear: How did you find out about the fractures?”

  My lips were still numb, my blood sluggish and congealed-feeling in my veins. “I don’t understand what—why—”

  “Why we’re so concerned? Cornelius would give you a speech about order, prosperity, peace, et cetera—but I confess my own purposes are not so lofty. I merely wish to preserve this world as it is: so accommodating, so obligingly full of undefended, unmissed people. My interest is therefore personal and passionate. It would be wise to tell me everything you know.”

  I looked at him—still confidently smiling, running his bare thumb across his fingernails—and was more afraid than I’d ever been in my life. Afraid I would drown in a sea of madness and magic, afraid I would betray someone or something without really knowing how, but mostly afraid he would touch me again with those cold, cold hands.

  A sharp rap at the door. Neither of us made a sound.

  Mrs. Reynolds entered anyway, her shoes tapping officiously across the tile. “It’s time for her bath, I’m afraid, sir. Family are asked to return later.”

  Barely contained rage curled Havemeyer’s lips away from his teeth. “We’re busy,” he hissed. In Locke House, it would’ve been enough to send nearby staff scurrying for cover.

  But this was not Locke House. Mrs. Reynolds’s eyes narrowed, lips pursed. “I’m sorry, sir, but regular schedules are very important for our patients here at Brattleboro. They’re easily agitated and require a sober, predictable life to keep them calm—”

  “Fine.” Havemeyer breathed deeply through his nose. He shook out his glove and pulled it over his bare hand. Something about the showy slowness of the gesture made it obscene.

  He leaned toward me, hands crossed atop his cane. “We’ll talk more soon, my dear. Are you free tomorrow night? I’d hate to be interrupted again.”

  I licked my slowly warming lips, tried to sound braver than I felt. “Don’t—don’t you have to be invited in?”

  He laughed. “Oh, my dear, don’t believe everything you read in the story papers. You people are always trying to invent reasons for things. Monsters only come for bad children, for loose women, for impious men. The truth is that the powerful come for the weak, whenever and wherever they like. Always have, always will.”

  “Sir.” The nurse stepped toward us.

  “Yes, yes.” Havemeyer flapped a hand at her, smiled a hungry smile at me, and left.

  I listened to the merry tapping of his cane down the halls.

  Halfway through my bath I started to shake and couldn’t stop. The nurses fussed and rubbed warm towels down my arms and legs, but the shaking only intensified and then I was crouched naked on the tile floor, holding my own shoulders to keep them from shattering. They took me back to my room.

  Mrs. Reynolds lingered to fasten the cuffs around my goose-fleshed arms. I seized her hand with both of mine before she could finish.

  “Could I—do you think I could have my book back? Just for tonight? I’ll be good. P-please.” I wished I’d had to feign that stutter, wished it were all some clever ruse designed to lull them into trusting me before I made my daring escape—but I was precisely as terrified and hopeless as I seemed, and I just wanted to hide from the howling thoughts in my head. Thoughts like: Havemeyer is a monster and The Society is full of monsters and What does that make Mr. Locke? And: Bad is dead.

  I didn’t really think she would say yes. The nurses had treated us so far like bulky, poorly behaved furniture that needed regular feeding and grooming. They spoke to us, but in the light, chattering way a farmer’s wife might speak to her chickens. They fed and bathed us, but their hands were rough stones against our flesh.

  But Mrs. Reynolds paused and looked down at me. It almost seemed accidental, that looking, as if she’d forgotten for a half second that I was an inmate and saw instead a young girl asking for a book.

  Her eyes skittered away from mine like startled mice. She tightened the cuffs until I could feel my pulse thumping in my fingertips and left without looking at me again.

  I wept then, unable even to wipe the glistening snot-trail away from my lip, unable to press my face into the pillow or curl my head into my knees. I kept crying anyway, listening to the shuffling sounds of women in the halls until the pillowcase was damp beneath my head and the hallways went silent. The electric lights buzzed and crackled as they clicked off.

  It was harder, in the darkness, not to think about Mr. Havemeyer. His white fingers spidering toward me out of the gloom, his blue-tinged flesh glowing in the moonlight.

  And then a key scraped and thunked and my door eased open. I spasmed against my restraints, heart seizing, already seeing his black-suited form edge into the room, his cane tap-tapping nearer—

  But it wasn’t Havemeyer; it was Mrs. Reynolds. With The Ten Thousand Doors tucked beneath her arm.

  She scurried to my bedside, a furtive white smear in the darkness. She tucked the book beneath my sheets and unfastened my cuffs with fumbling fingers. I opened my mouth but she shook her head without looking at me, and left. The lock snicked behind her.

  I just held it, at first; rubbed my thumb against the worn lettering, inhaled the faraway, free scent of it.

  And then I edged into the slanting moonlight, opened the book, and ran away.

  Chapter Four

  On Love

  Love takes root—Love takes to the sea—The simultaneously predictable and miraculous results of love

  It is fashionable among intellectuals and sophisticates to scoff at true love—to pretend it is nothing but a sweet fairy tale sold to children and young women, to be taken as seriously as magic wands or glass slippers.11 I feel nothing but pity for these learned persons, because they would not say such foolish things if they had ever experienced love for themselves.

  I wish they could have been present at the meeting of Yule Ian and Adelaide Lee in 1893. No one watching their bodies crash together in the waist-deep surf, watching their eyes glow like lighthouses leading stray ships home at last, could have denied the presence of love. It hung between them like a tiny sun, radiating heat, remaking their faces in red and gold.

  But even I must admit that love is not always graceful. After Ade and Yule peeled themselves apart they were left standing in the waves, staring at the perfect stranger before them. What do you say to a woman you had met only once in a hayfield in another world? What do you say to a ghost boy whose boot-leather eyes have haunted you for twelve years? Both of them spoke at once; both of them stuttered to silence.

  Then Ade said, passionately, “Shit,” and after a pause, “Shit.” She ran her fingers through her hair and smeared seawater on too-warm cheeks. “Is i
t really you, ghost boy? What’s your name?”

  The question was a perfectly natural one, but it dimmed the sun between them. Both of them became abruptly aware of how unlikely it was that two people who did not even know one another’s names should be in love.

  “Yule Ian.” It came out in a rushing whisper.

  “Nice to meet you, Julian. Could you give me a hand?” She gestured back toward her boat, now bobbing amiably southward. It took long minutes of wrangling and thrashing before the two of them had the little ship hauled into the bay and anchored to a standing stone in the surf. They worked in silence, studying the movements of each other’s bodies, the miraculous geometry of bone and muscle, as if it were a secret code they’d been assigned to translate. Then they stood on the shore in the red bloom of sunset, and it became difficult to look directly at one another again.

  “Would you like—I have a place to stay, in the City.” Yule thought of his cramped room on a washerwoman’s second floor, and wished very much that he were inviting Ade to a castle or palace or at least one of the costly balconied bedrooms rented by traveling merchants. Ade nodded, and they wound back up through the City of Plumm side by side. The backs of their hands brushed timidly together sometimes on the narrow streets but never lingered. Yule felt the heat of those passages like matches struck against his skin.

  In his room he perched her on the end of the unmade cot and skittered briefly in circles, consolidating piles of books and raking empty ink bottles into corners. Ade didn’t say anything at all. If Yule had known her for longer than a few hours in her youth, he would’ve realized how very unusual this was. Adelaide Lee was a woman who wore her desires openly, without shame or artifice, and generally expected the world to accommodate them. But now she sat in a cluttered room that smelled of ocean and ink, and could not find the right words.

  Yule sat hesitantly beside her. “How have you come here?” he asked.

  “Sailed through a door on a mountaintop back in my world. Sorry it took me so long to get here, it’s just there are an awful lot of doors out there.” A little of her usual swagger slunk back into her voice.

  “You were looking for this world? For me?”

  Ade tilted her head at him. “Of course.”

  Yule smiled, hugely, and it seemed to Ade it was a smile stolen from a much younger boy. It was the same smile he’d given her in the field when she promised to meet him in three days, giddy at his own good luck, and it was suddenly clear to Ade what she ought to do next.

  She kissed him. She felt the grinning curves of his lips reshape themselves against hers, his delicate scholar’s hands settle lightly on her shoulders. Ade pulled back very briefly to look at him—the red-edged dark of his skin, the very different smile now gleaming at her like a scimitar moon, the seriousness of his eyes on her face—then laughed, once, and pushed him downward.

  Outside Yule’s room, the City of Plumm sank into a sweet evening stupor, its citizens caught in that quiet hour after dinner but before nightfall. Beyond Plumm the Amarico Sea shush-shushed itself against a thousand tarry hulls and rocky islands, and blew salt-heavy breezes through doors into other skies, and all the ten thousand worlds reeled in ten thousand twilit dances. But for the first time in their lives, neither Ade nor Yule cared about these other worlds, for their own universe was now contained in a narrow cot on a washerwoman’s second floor in the City of Plumm. It was some days before they emerged.

  Once we have agreed that true love exists, we may consider its nature. It is not, as many misguided poets would have you believe, an event in and of itself; it is not something that happens, but something that simply is and always has been. One does not fall in love; one discovers it.

  It was this archaeological process that so occupied Ade and Yule during their days in the washerwoman’s room. They discovered their love first through the strange and miraculous language of the body: through skin and cinnamon-sweat, the pink-edged creases left by rumpled sheets, the deltas of veins charting the backs of their hands. To Yule it was an entirely new language; to Ade it was like relearning a language she thought she already knew.

  But soon spoken words filtered into the spaces between them. Through the underwater heat of the humid afternoons and into the relief of the cool nights, they told one another twelve years of stories. Ade told her story first, and it was a thrilling confabulation of starlit train rides and foot-worn journeys, of leaving and coming, of doors standing slantwise in the dusk, half-open. Yule found he couldn’t listen to her without a pen in his hand, as if she were an archival scroll sprung to life, which he had to document before she vanished.

  She finished with the story of Mount Silverheels and the door to the sea, and only laughed when Yule pressed her for details and dates and specifics. “That’s exactly the kind of nonsense that ruins a good yarn. No, sir. About time you told me your story, don’t you think?”

  He lay on his stomach on the cool stone floor, legs tangled in sheets and forearms smeary with ink. “My story is your story, I think.” He shrugged.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean… That day in the field changed me just as it changed you. Both of us have spent our lives seeking out the secrets of doors, haven’t we, following stories and myths.” Yule laid his head on his arm and looked up at the golden sprawl of her in his cot. “Except my quest involved much more time in libraries.”

  He told her about his dreamy childhood and dedicated youth, his respected scholarly publications (which never directly asserted the existence of doors but merely presented them as mythological constructions offering valuable social insights), his unending quest to discover the truest nature of the doors between worlds.

  “And what have you found out, Julian?” He reveled in the foreign, rolled-together way she said his name.

  “Some,” he said, gesturing at the many volumes of A Comparative Study of Passages, Portals, and Entryways in World Mythology that lay stacked on the desk. “And not enough.”

  She stood and leaned over his desk, perusing the angles of foreign words on the page. Her body looked strangely calicoed to Yule, her skin shifting dramatically from palest milk to burnt freckles. “All I know is there are these places—sort of thinned-out places, hard to see unless you’re doing a certain kind of looking—where you can go to somewhere else. All kinds of somewhere elses, some of them packed full of magic. And they always leak, so all you have to do is follow the stories. What else you got?”

  Yule wondered if all scholars dedicated their lives to questions that other people had already casually answered, and if they found it vexing or pleasing. He suspected Ade would often be both. “Not very much,” he told her dryly. “There are, as you say, thinned-out places, where worlds bleed into one another. But I have this idea that this leakage is somehow… important. Vital, even.”

  Doors, he told her, are change, and change is a dangerous necessity. Doors are revolutions and upheavals, uncertainties and mysteries, axis points around which entire worlds can be turned. They are the beginnings and endings of every true story, the passages between that lead to adventures and madness and—here he smiled—even love. Without doors the worlds would grow stagnant, calcified, storyless.

  He ended with a scholar’s solemnity. “But I don’t know where the doors come from in the first place. Have they always been there, or were they created? By who, and how? It might cost a word-worker her life to split the world open like that! Although—perhaps not, if the worlds are already hovering so close together. Perhaps it is more like drawing aside a veil, or opening a window. But they would first need to be persuaded that it was even possible, and I doubt—”

  “Why’s it matter so much where they came from?” Ade had lain down beside him while he spoke, watching him with a mix of admiration and levity.

  “Because they seem so fragile. So easily closed. And if they can be destroyed but not created, won’t there be fewer and fewer doors over the years? The thought… haunted me. I thought I might never find you.�
�� The weight of twelve years of fruitless searching pressed down on the two of them.

  Ade flung an arm and leg over Yule’s back. “That doesn’t matter anymore. I found you anyhow, and there won’t be any more closed doors for us.” She said it so fiercely and fearlessly, a tigress growl rumbling in her ribs, that Yule believed her.

  It took another generous handful of days before Ade and Yule could simply lie still and quiet beside one another in the cot, without the frenzied need to know one another. They had unearthed the rough shape of the love between them and were content to let the rest of it proceed more sedately, unfurling like an endless sea before their prow.

  To Ade, it was a kind of homecoming: after years of rootless wandering, years of drifting down the subtle trails of stories with a restless ache in her heart, she found herself at last content to be still. To Yule, it was a departure. He had lived his life within the comforting confines of research and scholarship, driven to pursue his studies with single-minded fervor, rarely looking up toward the horizon. But now he found himself adrift, unmoored—what did his studies matter now? What were the mysteries of doors compared to the far grander mystery of Ade’s long white heat stretched beside him?

  “What do we do now?” he asked her one morning.

  Ade had been half drowsing in the pink-pearl light of dawn. The worry in his voice made her laugh. “Anything we like, Julian. You could show me your world, for starters.”

  “All right.” Yule was quiet for several long breaths. “There’s something I would like to do, first.” He rose and scrabbled through his desk for a pen and a thick, jellied bottle of ink. He crouched beside the cot and stretched her left arm straight against the sheets. “When something happens, something important, we write it down. If it is something important that everyone ought to know, we write it down here.” He tapped the softness of her inner wrist.