The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

  We left the hall in the same gray lines. I tried to make my shoulders curve inward and my back stoop, like everyone else’s, and when Mrs. Reynolds and another nurse escorted me into my room I said “Thank you” in a soft, docile voice. Mrs. Reynolds’s eyes flicked up to mine, then away. They did not cuff me to the bed when they left.

  I waited until their steps had clicked down the hall to the next locked door, then dove for my mattress. I ran my fingertips along the spine of my father’s book, lightly, but left it where it lay. Instead, I found the cool silver of the coin from the City of Nin.

  It sat heavy in my palm, wider than a half-dollar and twice as thick. The queen smiled up at me.

  Slowly, I scrubbed the edge of the coin against the rough cement stucco of the wall beside my bed. I held it back up to the light and saw that the smooth curve of the coin had been worn away, ever so slightly.

  I smiled—the desperate smile of a prisoner as she digs her escape tunnel—and pressed the coin back against the wall.

  By dinner, my arm muscles were wrung-out rags and my finger joints ached where they curled around the coin. Except that it wasn’t a coin anymore. There were two angled sides leading to a single point, with nothing left of the queen’s face except one wise eye in the center. I kept scraping after dinner, because I wanted to be sure it was sharp enough and also because I was scared.

  But night was coming—I watched the light on my bare walls turn from rose to palest yellow to dim ash—and Havemeyer would return soon. Creeping like a penny-dreadful monster along the halls, reaching his cold fingers out for me, drinking the warmth from my flesh…

  I rolled back my blankets, pressed bare feet to the floor, and crept to the locked door.

  The coin lay gleaming and thin in my palm, transformed into a tiny blade or a sharp silver pen nib. I touched it lightly to my fingertip, thought of Havemeyer’s hungry eyes, and pressed down.

  By moonlight, blood looks like ink. I knelt and drew my finger across the floor in a shaky line, but the blood beaded and pearled on the slick-polished tile. I squeezed my hand, forced the reluctant drops into a puddled, smeary T, but I already knew it wouldn’t work: it would take too much blood, and too much time.

  I swallowed. I laid my left arm across my knees and tried to think of it as paper or clay or slate, something not-alive. I touched the silver knife to my skin, right where the stringy muscle of my forearm joined up to my elbow.

  I thought Hold On January, and began to write.

  It hurt less than I’d thought it would. No, that’s a lie—it hurt precisely as much as you’d think to carve letters into your own flesh, deep enough for blood to boil up like red oil wells; it’s just that sometimes pain is too unavoidable, too necessary to feel.

  THE DOOR

  I was careful to cut my lines away from the ropy veins in the middle of my forearm, out of a dim sense that I might exsanguinate myself on the hospital floor and cut my whole escape attempt tragically short. But I was equally afraid of cutting too lightly, as if it might signal some secret hesitancy or unbelief. It’s believing that matters, remember.

  THE DOOR OPENS FOR HER.

  The coin edge bit and twisted around the period, and I believed it with all my shaken heart.

  The room did that same almost-familiar reshuffling of itself, a subtle wrenching, as if an invisible housewife were tugging at the corners of reality to shake out the wrinkles. I screwed my eyes shut and waited, hope thudding through my veins and dripping out onto the floor—God help me if it didn’t work—in the morning they’d find me lying in the curdling muck of my own blood—at least Havemeyer wouldn’t have any life-heat left to steal—

  The lock clicked. I opened my eyes, blinking through sudden exhaustion. The door swung inward just slightly, as if pulled by a faint breeze.

  I slouched forward and rested my forehead against the tile, letting waves of fatigue roll and crash over me. My eyes wanted to close; my ribs ached as if I’d swum to the bottom of the lake and back.

  But he was coming, and I couldn’t stay.

  I limped back to the bed in a three-limbed crawl, smearing red behind me, and fumbled for my book. I hugged it close to me, just for a moment, breathing in that spice-and-ocean smell. It smelled exactly like my father’s ancient, shapeless coat, which he left draped over the back of his chair at dinner whenever he was home. How had I never realized that before?

  I tucked the book beneath my arm, gripped the coin-knife tight in my palm, and left.

  There was no Threshold here, of course, but stepping from my room into the hall was still crossing from one world into another. I swept down the hall with my stiff gown rustling against my legs and blood drip-dripping behind me in a long line of spatters. I thought absurdly of bread-crumb trails leading through dark fairy-tale forests, and quashed a slightly hysterical urge to laugh.

  I crept down two flights of stairs and into the pristine white of the front lobby. I passed doors with neat gold lettering on the glass, blinking blurring eyes at the titles. Dr. Stephen J. Palmer. I had an irrational urge to slip into his office and upend all his neat files and folders, shred all his careful notes—perhaps steal that hideous pen of his—but I kept padding forward.

  The entranceway was cool marble beneath my bare feet. I was reaching for the stately double-paned doors, already smelling summer grass and freedom, when I realized two things simultaneously: first, that I could hear raised voices echoing on the floor above, a rising clamor of alarm, and that I’d left a spattered red trail through the halls leading directly to the front doors. And second, that there was a blurred figure standing on the other side of the door, drawn in shadow and moonlight. The tall, attenuated silhouette of a man.

  No.

  My legs went weak and slow, as if I were wading through knee-deep sand. The silhouette sharpened as it came closer. The doorknob turned, the door opened, and Havemeyer stood framed on the threshold. He had abandoned his cane and gloves, and his white-spider hands hung naked by his sides. His skin was lambent and alien in the darkness, and I suddenly thought how strange it was that he seemed so human by daylight.

  His eyes widened as he saw me. He smiled—a predatory, life-hungry smile, and God help you if you’ve ever seen a smile like that on a human face—and I ran.

  The voices had grown louder, and electric lights snapped and buzzed ahead of me. White-frocked nurses and staff were scurrying toward me, shouting and scolding. But I could feel Havemeyer behind me like a malevolent wind and I kept running until I was nearly face-to-face with them. They slowed, hands raised in placating gestures, voices soothing. They seemed reluctant to touch me, and I had a brief disorienting vision of myself through their eyes: a feral, in-between-girl with blood staining her nightgown and words carved like prayers into her flesh. Teeth bared, eyes fear-black. Mr. Locke’s good girl had been replaced by someone else entirely.

  Someone who wasn’t prepared to surrender.

  I dove sideways through an unlabeled wooden door. Brooms and buckets crashed around me in the dark, an ammonia-and-lye smell: a janitor’s closet. A dangling pull-cord turned on the light and I jammed a stepladder inexpertly beneath the doorknob. Heroes were always doing that in my stories, but it looked much more tenuous in real life.

  Running footsteps pounded outside the door and the knob gave a violent rattle, followed by swearing and shouting. An ominous thump shook the ladder. My pulse rocketed and I fought the panicky whine in my throat. There was nowhere left to run, no doors left to open.

  Hold On January. The stepladder made a worrying splintery sound.

  I needed to run, far and fast. I thought of the blue door to the sea; of my father’s world; of Samuel’s world, his cabin by the lake. I looked down at my left arm, thrumming now with pain like a marching band in the distance, and thought: Why the hell not?

  I hesitated for a half second. It comes at a cost, my father had said; power always does. How much would it cost to split the world open like this? Could I afford to pay it, shiverin
g and bleeding in a broom closet?

  “Come, now, Miss Scaller,” a voice hissed through the door. “How childish.” It was a very patient voice, like a wolf circling a treed animal, waiting.

  I swallowed cold terror, and began.

  I started high on my shoulder, where I could barely reach, and kept my letters tight and small. SHE WRITES A DOOR

  The thundering sounds on the closet door paused, and that cold voice said, “Out of my way.” Then came harassed-sounding bickering, shuffling footsteps, and much stronger, frame-rattling thuds.

  OF BLOOD

  Where? My eyes felt distant in my skull, as if they longed to soar upward and leave my bleeding, hurting body on its own. I didn’t have an address, couldn’t even point to the place on a map, but it didn’t matter. Believing is what matters. Willing.

  AND SILVER. I curled the blade around the final letter and thought of Samuel.

  The new letters quashed up next to the first sentence I’d written, so that it all ran together in a single story I desperately, madly believed: She writes a Door of blood and silver. The Door opens for her.

  The stepladder gave a final, fatal crunch. The door pressed inward against the tumble of cleaning supplies and broken wood. But I didn’t care, because at the same moment I felt the swirling, shifting madness of the world reshaping itself, followed by the most unlikely thing in the world: a fresh breeze against my back. It smelled of pine needles and cool earth and warm July lake water.

  I turned and saw a strange, gaping wound in the wall behind me, a hole that glinted with rust and silver. It was an ugly, crudely drawn thing, like a child’s chalk sketch made real, but I recognized it for what it was: a Door.

  The closet door was wedged halfway open and a white-fingered hand was reaching around its edges. I scuttled backward, sliding through my own blood and realizing from the queer ache in my jaw that I was grinning a fierce, flesh-rending grin, like Bad when he was a few seconds away from biting somebody. I felt the Door at my back—a blessed absence, a pine-scented promise—and crammed myself through it, shoulders scraping raw against the rough-hewn edges.

  I fell backward into the swallowing darkness and watched as faces and hands swarmed into the closet, a many-armed monster reaching after me. Then the nothingness of the Threshold ate me.

  I’d forgotten how empty it was. Empty isn’t even the right word, because something that’s empty might once have been full, and it was impossible that anything had ever existed in the Threshold. I wasn’t entirely sure I existed, and for a terrible moment I felt the edges of myself dissipating, unraveling.

  That moment scares me even now, with solid wood beneath me and warm sun on my face.

  But I felt the worn leather of The Ten Thousand Doors beneath my blood-sticky fingers and thought of my mother and father diving from world to world like rocks skipping across some vast black lake, unafraid of falling. Then I thought of Jane and Samuel and Bad, and then, as if their faces were a map unfurling in the void, I remembered where I was going.

  Rough edges pressed against me again, and a darkness formed that was infinitely less dark than the Threshold. Musty wooden floorboards appeared beneath me. I fell forward and curled my fingernails against the floor as if I were clinging to a cliff face, the edges of my book pressing painfully, wonderfully against my ribs. My heart, which seemed to have disappeared in the Threshold, thundered into existence again.

  “Who’s there?” A shape moved across the floor, casting moon-edged shadows over me. Then, “January?” The voice was low and female, rolling through the vowels of my name in a fashion both foreign and familiar. The word impossible sprang to mind, but the past few days had fatally weakened my entire concept of what was and wasn’t possible, and it slunk furtively away again.

  Oily golden light flared. And there she was: short hair limned with lamplight, dress disheveled, mouth slightly open as she knelt beside me.

  “Jane.” My head felt far too heavy. I laid it down and spoke to the floor. “Thank God you’re here. Wherever here is. I know where I was aiming, but you never know, with Doors, do you.” My words were soupy and slurred-sounding in my ears, as if I were shouting underwater. The lamplight seemed to be dimming. “But how did you get here?”

  “I think the more interesting question is how you got here. ‘Here’ being the Zappia family cabin, by the way.” The dryness of her tone felt brittle, forced. “And what happened to you—there’s blood everywhere—”

  But I was no longer listening. I’d heard a sound from the shadowy edges of the room—a lurching, dragging sound, followed by the click of claws on wood—and ceased to breathe. The footsteps padded closer, moving with an uneven hesitancy. Impossible. I raised my head.

  Bad limped into the light. One eye was swollen, his back leg was hovering and shaking above the ground, and his head hung low and haggard. For a stretched half second he blinked at me, as if unsure it was really me, and then we dove toward one another. We collided, a desperate mess of dark limbs and yellow fur. He rooted around my neck and armpits as if trying to find a place he could crawl into, making a hoarse, puppyish whine I’d never heard from him before. I wrapped my arms around him, resting my forehead against his shivering shoulder and saying all the stupid, inane things you say when your dog is hurt (I know, love, it’s all right, I’m here, I’m sorry, I’m sorry). Some jagged, broken thing in my chest began to mend.

  Jane cleared her throat. “I hate to interrupt, but should there be anything… else, coming out of this hole?”

  I went still. Bad’s tail ceased its thumping against the floor. Scuffling, creeping sounds echoed behind me, like something crawling closer. I looked back over my shoulder at my Door—a ragged black tear, as if reality had been careless and caught itself on a loose nail—and saw, or thought I saw, a malevolent gleaming in its depths, like a pair of hungry eyes.

  “He’s coming for me.” My voice was calm, almost detached, while my thoughts ran in terrified circles. Havemeyer would emerge, white and wicked, and take whatever it was he wanted from me. Others would follow once they gathered their courage. They’d lock me up forever, if there was anything left of me to lock up, and probably Jane too. Certainly nothing good would happen to an African woman found in the company of a clinically insane fugitive at midnight. And who would take care of poor, battered Bad?

  “I think I have to—I have to close it.” Anything open can be closed. Hadn’t my father discovered that when the Door closed between the City of Nin and my mother’s field? He’d never known why or how it happened, but then, my father was a scholar: his tools were careful study and rational evidence and years and years of documentation.

  My tools were words and will, and I was out of time. I found my coin-knife, so blood-crusted it no longer gleamed silver. I pulled my knees under my belly and laid my poor, aching arm before me. I pressed the coin to my skin a final time, blinking a little against the weird blurring and unblurring of the room.

  “No! January, what are you—” Jane tugged my hand away.

  “Please.” I swallowed, swaying a little. “Please trust me. Believe me.” There was no reason in the world she should. Anyone else would have happily dragged me back to the doctors with a note pinned to my chest suggesting they lock me in a small room without any sharp objects for the next century or so.

  (This was the true violence Mr. Locke had done to me. You don’t really know how fragile and fleeting your own voice is until you watch a rich man take it away as easily as signing a bank loan.)

  The scuffling sounds grew louder.

  Her eyes flicked to the hole in the wall behind me, and to the congealed lettering on my arm. A strange expression moved across her face—shrewdness, perhaps? A wary understanding?—and she let go of my hand.

  I chose a bare, unbloodied patch of skin, and began to carve a single word: JU

  Movement in the blackness, the harsh sound of breathing, a white-spider hand reaching out of the darkness toward me—

  JUST.

&
nbsp; The Door opens just for her.

  I felt the world pull itself back together, like skin pulling tight around a scar. The blackness receded, the white hand spasmed—there was a terrible, inhuman screech—and then I was staring at nothing but a patch of unremarkable cabin wall.

  The Door was closed.

  Then my cheek was pressed to the floor and Jane’s cool hand was on my forehead. Bad limped closer and lay down with his spine pressed against me.

  My last, wavering sight was of three odd, pale objects lying in a row on the floorboards. They looked like the white ends of some unusual mushroom, or maybe candle stubs. I’d already closed my eyes and begun to drift into a pain-hazed sleep when I recognized them for what they were: three white fingertips.

  I was somewhere else for a while. I don’t know where, exactly, but it felt like another kind of Threshold: lightless and endless, a silent galaxy without stars or planets or moons. Except I wasn’t passing through; I was just—suspended. Waiting. I remember a vague sense that it was a nice place, free of monsters and blood and pain, and I’d quite like to stay.

  But something kept intruding. A warm, breathing something that nestled against my side and rooted in my hair, making small, whimpering sounds.

  Bad. Bad was alive, and he needed me.

  So I rose up out of the black and opened my eyes.

  “Hello, you.” My tongue was cottony and thick, but Bad’s ears pricked. He made that whining sound in his chest again, somehow inching closer to me despite the absence of spare inches, and I laid my cheek on the warm slab of his shoulder. I made a motion to throw my arms around him but desisted with a small yelp.

  It hurt. Everything hurt: my bones felt bruised and aching, as if they’d been forced to bear some impossible load; my left arm was too hot and throbbing, wrapped tightly in strips of sheet; even my blood beat sluggishly in my ears. In all, it seemed a fair price to pay for rewriting the very nature of space and time and crafting a Door of my own making. I blinked away an urge to laugh or possibly cry, and looked around.