The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

  I was breathless, blind, panicked. But there was a fraction of a second—suspended now in my memory like an axis point around which all else turns—when I might have chosen differently. I might have dived back toward the stern, toward Ade. I might have died, or been damned to unravel in the endless in-between, but at least I would have done so with Adelaide at my side.

  Instead, I planted my feet and curled myself around you.

  I think of this moment often. I do not regret it, January, not even at my darkest and most despairing.

  The moment passed. The crushing intensified, until you and I were flattened against the groaning hull, our lungs empty and our skulls aching. My arms were a vise around you and I was no longer sure whether I was protecting you or crushing you—my eyes pressed inward—my teeth ground against one another—

  Air. Thin, frost-sharp, smelling of pine and snow. We burst through some unseen barrier and our ship scudded against the ground. We were pitched forward, smashed against the cold earth of another world.

  Here my memories grow reeling and confused, blinking in and out like a bad bulb in a projector; I believe my head knocked against some stone or flying timber. I remember you, tensed and screaming in my arms and therefore impossibly, wonderfully alive. I remember staggering upright, spinning back toward the scattered remains of our ship and looking desperately for some flash of white or gold, except my eyes weren’t focusing right and then I was back on my knees. I remember looking for the great timber-frame door Ade told me about and finding nothing but rubble and ash.

  I remember shouting her name and receiving no answer.

  I remember a figure looming out of the shadows, silhouetted by the dawn.

  Something connected with the back of my head and the world fragmented. My nose crashed against pine needles and stone and the ocean-taste of blood filled my mouth.

  I remember thinking: I am dying. And I remember feeling a distant, selfish relief, because by then I knew: Ade had not come through the door with us.

  The Ivory Door

  As a general rule I’m not a person who cries much. When I was younger I cried over everything from sneers to sad endings, and even once over a puddle of tadpoles that dried up in the sun, but at some point I learned the trick of stoicism: you hide. You pull yourself inside your castle walls and crank up the drawbridge and watch everything from the tallest tower.

  But I cried then: lying bloody and exhausted in the Zappia family cabin, with Bad beside me and Jane’s voice rolling over us, telling my father’s story.

  I cried until my eyes were prickly-feeling and the pillow was soggy with snot. I cried as if I’d been assigned to cry the unshed tears of three people instead of one: my mother, lost in the abyss; my father, lost without her; and me, lost without either of them.

  Jane finished reading and didn’t say anything, because what do you say to a grown woman crying herself to sleep? She closed the book gently, as if the pages were flesh that might be bruised, and tucked the pink quilt around me. Then she drew the curtains against the midday sun and sat in a rocking chair with her cold coffee. Her face was so still and smooth-planed I suspected fierce emotions lurking beneath it; she’d learned the trick of stoicism, too.

  I fell asleep watching her through hot, puffy eyes, my arm around the rise and fall of Bad’s ribs.

  I have dreaming memories of Jane moving around the cabin, leaving once and returning with an armload of firewood for the cooling evening, working at the table on something dark and metal, her face inscrutable. Once I half roused to see the door propped open and Jane and Bad both sitting on the stoop, framed in summer moonlight like a pair of silver statues or guardian spirits. I slept better after that.

  I woke fully the following morning, when the sun was drawing the first faint line against the western wall, a bluish-pale light that told me it was far too early for civilized people to be awake. I watched the line turn taffy-pink and listened to the birds begin their hesitant scales and felt, for perhaps the first time in my life, truly safe.

  Oh, I know: I grew up in a sprawling country estate, I traveled around the world with first-class tickets, I wore satin and pearls—hardly a perilous childhood. But it was borrowed privilege and I knew it. I’d been Cinderella at the ball, knowing all my finery was illusory, conditional, dependent on how successfully I followed a set of unwritten rules. At the stroke of midnight it would all vanish and leave me exposed for what I truly was: a penniless brown girl with no one to protect her.

  But here in this cabin—musty, forgotten, perched on a pine-covered rock a dozen miles away from the nearest town—I felt truly, finally safe.

  Jane had evicted Bad from the bed at some point in the night and taken his place beside me, and only the black burr of her hair was now visible. I tried not to disturb her as I climbed over the headboard. I stood for a moment, swaying and sick with tiredness that had nothing to do with how much I’d slept, and then stole a lightly mildewed blanket from the corner. I whispered Bad’s name and we limped together to the front step and sat, watching the morning steam coil off the lake in puffy white curls.

  My thoughts drew circles in my skull, returning again and again to the same fragments and trying to fit them together like shards of some broken, precious thing: the Society, the closing Doors, Mr. Locke. My father.

  There was still a chapter or so left to read, but it wasn’t hard to fill in the missing years. My father had been stranded in this miserable world with his baby daughter, had found himself employment that permitted travel, and spent seventeen years looking for a way back home—back to her. My mother.

  But I’d found their Door, hadn’t I? The blue Door in the field, with the silver coin waiting on the other side, which had so briefly opened. And my father had never known, had perhaps died searching for the Door that his own daughter had opened. It was so… stupid. Like one of those tragic plays where everyone dies at the end from a series of preventable poisonings and misunderstandings.

  Although perhaps it hadn’t all been preventable or accidental. Someone had been waiting outside that mountaintop Door; someone had closed it. My father’s book was riddled with references to other Doors closing, to some nameless force stalking his footsteps.

  I thought of Havemeyer telling me he wished to preserve the world as it was, thought of Locke inviting me into the Society with a grand speech about order and stability. Doors are change, my father had written. But… did I really believe the New England Archaeological Society was a secret organization of malevolent Door-closers? And if they were—had Mr. Locke known? Was he the capital-V Villain of this story?

  No. I wouldn’t, couldn’t believe it. This was the man who had sheltered my father and me, opened his own house to us. The man who had given me nursemaids and tutors and fancy dresses, the man who had left me seventeen years of gifts in that blue treasure box. And such unusual, thoughtful gifts—dolls from faraway countries, spice-scented scarves, books in languages I couldn’t read—perfectly suited to a lonely girl who dreamed of adventure.

  Mr. Locke loved me. I knew he did.

  The ammonia-stink of Brattleboro seemed to waft from my skin, a dull reeking. He’d done that. He’d sent me to that place, locked me away where no one could hear me or see me. To protect me, he’d said, but I wasn’t sure I cared about the why.

  By the time Jane emerged—eyes narrowed at the sun, hair slightly flattened-looking on one side—my legs were numb and the lake steam had sizzled away. She sat beside me without saying anything.

  “Did you know?” I asked, after a silence.

  “Did I know what?”

  I didn’t bother to answer. She gave a short, resigned sigh. “I knew some of it. Never the whole story. Julian was a private man.” That past tense, slinking through sentences like a snake in the grass, waiting to bite me.

  I swallowed. “How did you meet my father, really? Why did he send you here?”

  A longer sigh. I imagined I could hear a kind of release in it, like the unlocking of a doo
r. “I met your father in August 1909 in a world of wereleopards and ogres. I very nearly killed him, but the light was fading and my shot went wide.”

  Until that moment, I didn’t think people’s jaws actually dropped in real life. Jane looked rather pleased with herself, watching me sidelong. She stood up. “Come inside. Eat. I’ll tell it to you.”

  “I found the door the fourth time I ran away from the mission school. It wasn’t easily found: the northern side of Mount Suswa is riddled with caves and the door was hidden down a twisting, narrow tunnel that only a child would think worth exploring. It shone at me through the shadows, tall and yellow-white. Ivory.”

  I’d traded my starched and bloodied smock for a spare blouse and skirt from Jane and raked my fingers through my hair (to no discernible effect) and now we sat across from one another at the dusty kitchen table. It felt almost normal, as if we were hidden in one of the attics of Locke House, drinking coffee and discussing the latest issue of The Sweetheart Series: Romantic Adventures for Young Girls of Merit.

  Except that it was Jane’s story we were discussing, and she hadn’t started at the beginning. “Why did you run away?”

  Her lips pursed slightly. “The same reason everyone does.”

  “But didn’t you worry about—I mean, what about your parents?”

  “I had no parents.” She hissed a little on the s. I watched her throat move as she swallowed away her anger. “I only had my little sister left, by then. We were born in the highlands on my mother’s farm. I don’t remember much of it: the tilled earth, black as skin; the smell of fermenting millet; the scrape of the shaving blade against my skull. Mucii. Home.” Jane shrugged. “I was eight when the drought came, and the railroad. Our mother took us to the mission school and said she would return with the rain in April. I never saw her again. I like to think she died of some fever in the work camps, because then it is possible to forgive her.” Her voice oozed with the bitterness of abandonment, of waiting and waiting for a parent who never returned; I shivered in recognition.

  “My sister forgot her entirely. She was too young. She forgot our language, our land, our names. The teachers called her Baby Charlotte, and she introduced herself as Baby.” Another shrug. “She was happy.” Jane paused, the muscles of her jaw hard as marbles, and I heard the unsaid I was not.

  “So you ran. Where did you go?”

  Her jaws unclenched. “Away. I had no place to go. I returned to the mission twice on my own, because I got sick or hungry or tired, and once tied behind an officer’s horse because I’d been caught stealing buns from the barracks. The fourth time I was older, nearly fourteen. I made it much farther.” I saw myself briefly at fourteen—uncertain, lonely, wearing pressed linen skirts and practicing my penmanship—and found I could not imagine running alone through the African bush at that age. Or any age. “I made it all the way home, except it wasn’t home anymore. There was just a big ugly house with shingles and chimneys, and little blond children playing out front. A black woman in a white apron was watching them.” She shrugged again; I began to see them as practical gestures, designed to shed the weight of resentment threatening to settle on her shoulders. “So I kept running. South, where the highlands fold up into valleys and mountains. Where the trees are dry and wind-burnt and food is scarce. I grew thin. The cattle herders watched me pass and said nothing.”

  I made a sound, a sort of disbelieving tsk, and Jane spared me a pitying look. “The empire had arrived by then, with its borderlines and deeds and railroads and Maxim guns. I was not the only motherless, feral child running through the bush.”

  I was silent. I thought of Mr. Locke’s lectures on Progress and Prosperity. There were never any orphan girls or stolen farms or Maxim guns in them. Bad, lying beneath my chair with his splinted leg sticking stiffly out from his body, shifted so that his head was more completely covering my foot.

  Jane continued. “I found the ivory door and went through. I thought at first I had died and passed into the world of spirits and gods.” Her lips parted in an almost-smile, and her eyes crimped with some new emotion—longing? Homesickness? “I was in a forest so green it was almost blue. The door I’d come through was behind me, set among the exposed roots of a vast tree. I wandered away from it, deeper into the woods.

  “I know now how foolish that was. The forests in that world are full of cruel, creeping things, many-mouthed monsters with a bottomless hunger. It was mere luck—or God’s will, as the mission workers would have it—that I found Liik and her Hunters before anything else found me. It didn’t feel all that lucky at the time: I stepped around a tree trunk and found an arrowhead inches from my face.”

  I covered my gasp with a cough, hoping to sound less like a small child listening to a campfire story. “What did you do?”

  “Not a damn thing. Surviving is often a matter of knowing when you’re beat. I heard rustling behind me and knew others were emerging, that I was surrounded. The woman holding the bow was hissing at me in a language I didn’t know. Apparently I didn’t look like much of a threat—a hungry girl-child, wearing a white cotton shift with the collar torn off—because Liik lowered her weapon. Only then could I get a proper look at them all.”

  The hard lines of Jane’s face softened, just a little, warmed by fond reminiscence. “They were women. Muscled, golden-eyed, impossibly tall, with a kind of rolling grace that made me think of lionesses. Their skin was mottled and spotted and their teeth when they smiled were sharp. I thought they were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.

  “They took me in. We couldn’t understand one another but their instructions were simple ones: follow, eat, stay, skin this creature for dinner. I patrolled with them for weeks, maybe months, and learned many things. I learned to creep through the woods in silence, and to oil bowstrings with fat. I learned to eat meat raw and blood-warm. I learned that all the ogre-stories I’d ever heard were true, and that monsters lurked in the shadows.”

  Her voice had gone rhythmic, nearly hypnotic.

  “I learned to love Liik and her Hunters. And when I saw them change—their skins sloughing and shifting, their jaws lengthening, their bows clattering forgotten to the forest floor—I was envious, rather than afraid. I’d been powerless my whole life, and the shape of the leopard-women as they leapt into battle was the shape of power written on the world.” I didn’t think I’d ever heard such emotion in Jane’s voice; not when a book ended poorly or the coffee was burned or a party guest said something scathing behind their gloved hand. Hearing it now felt almost intrusive.

  “The patrol ended, eventually, and the women took me home: a village surrounded by fruit trees and farmlands, hidden in the cauldron of a dead volcano. Their menfolk greeted them in the streets with fat babies on their hips and fresh beer in clay pots. Liik spoke to her husbands and they looked at me with pity in their eyes. They led me to Liik’s home and fed me, and I spent that night and the next and the ones after that sleeping in a pile of soft furs surrounded by the gentle snoring of Liik’s children. It felt”—Jane swallowed, and her voice sounded briefly constricted—“like home.”

  There was a small silence. “So you stayed there? In the village?”

  Jane smiled, crooked and bitter. “I did. But Liik and her Hunters did not. I woke one morning to find that all of them had gone back to the forests, to the patrol, and left me behind.” She’d gone very brusque; how much had that second abandonment hurt? “I knew enough of the language by then to understand what the husbands were telling me: the forest was no place for a creature like me. I was too small, too weak. I should stay in the village and raise babies and grind tisi-nuts into flour and be safe.” Another crooked smile. “But by then I was very good at running away. I stole a bow and three skins of water and made my way back to the ivory door.”

  “But—”

  “Why?” Jane rubbed her finger along the wood grain of the table. “Because I didn’t want to be safe, I suppose. I wanted to be dangerous, to find my own power and write it
on the world.”

  I looked away, down to Bad now growling phantom-growls in his sleep. “So you left the leopard-women’s world. Where did you go?” People never got to stay in their Wonderlands, did they? Alice and Dorothy and the Darlings, all dragged back to the mundane world and tucked into bed by their handlers. My father, stranded in this dull reality.

  Jane gave a great, scornful ha. “I went straight to the nearest British outpost, stole a Lee-Metford rifle and as much ammunition as I could carry, and went back through my ivory door. Two weeks later I walked back into the village, my rifle over my shoulder and a stinking, blood-crusted skull under my arm. I was hungry and thin again, my cotton shift was a tattered wrap around my waist, I’d broken two ribs in the battle—but I could feel my eyes burning with pride.” They were doing so now, gleaming dangerously through the cabin shadows.

  “I found Liik in the village street and rolled the ogre skull at her feet.” The gap between her front teeth winked as her smile widened. “And so I patrolled with the leopard-women for the next twenty-two years. I had twelve kills to my name, two husbands and a hunt-wife, and three names in three languages. I had an entire world, full of blood and glory.” She leaned toward me, eyes fixing on mine like a black hunting cat, invisible tail lashing. Her voice when she spoke again was lower, rougher. “I would have all of that still, if your father had not arrived in 1909 and closed my door forever.”

  I found myself wholly, profoundly speechless. Not out of shyness or uncertainty, but because all the words had apparently been shaken out of my skull and left nothing behind them but a dull, staticky buzzing sound. Maybe if we’d had longer I would’ve recovered, said something like My father, closing Doors? or maybe How do you know? or, perhaps most honest and necessary of all: I’m sorry.

  But I didn’t say any of that, because there was a sudden pounding at the cabin door. A chill, drawling voice called: “Miss Scaller, my dear creature, are you in there? We never finished our conversation.”