The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

  There was a single, crystalline moment of stillness.

  Then the latch lifted and the cabin door swung toward us. Jane’s chair clattered backward as she stood, hands plunging into her skirts. Bad clawed to his feet, hackles high and lips peeled back. My own body felt as if I’d been submerged in cold honey.

  Havemeyer stood on the threshold. But he was hardly the same man who’d attended Society meetings and snubbed us at Christmas parties: his linen suit was wrinkled and faintly gray with too many days’ wear; his skin was flushed; something about his smile had gone sickeningly wrong. His left hand was a wad of wrapped gauze, soggy brown with blood. His right hand was bare.

  But it wasn’t Havemeyer who brought me stumbling to my feet, my hands reaching uselessly toward the door. It was the young man he half dragged beside him, battered and dazed.

  Samuel Zappia.

  Samuel’s hands were bound behind his back and his mouth had been jammed with cotton gauze. His skin, normally the color of browned butter, had gone a sick yellow, and his eyes reeled in his skull. The prey-animal panic in them was familiar to me; if I’d looked into a mirror after Havemeyer touched me, I’d have seen the identical expression on my own face.

  Samuel blinked into the gloom of the cabin. His eyes focused on me and he made a hoarse sound through the gauze, as if the sight of me had been an invisible blow.

  Jane was in motion. Everything about her promised violence—the angle of her shoulders, the length of her stride, her hand emerging from her skirt with something dully gleaming—but Havemeyer raised his bare right hand and placed it around Samuel’s neck, hovering just above the warmth of his skin.

  “Now, now, ladies, settle down. I shouldn’t like to do anything regrettable.”

  Jane wavered, hearing the threat but not understanding it, and I found my voice. “Jane, no!” I stood shakily, bandaged arms outstretched as if I could restrain either Jane or Bad if they lunged for Havemeyer. “He’s some kind of, of vampire. Don’t let him touch you.” Jane went still, radiating red tension.

  Havemeyer gave a short laugh, and the laugh was just as wrong-seeming as his smile. “You know, I feel similarly about that appalling animal beside you. How did he survive? I know Evans isn’t bright, but I thought he could at least drown a dog properly.”

  Rage curled my nails into my palms and hardened my jaw. Havemeyer’s not-smile widened. “Anyway. I’ve come to continue our conversation, Miss Scaller, as you missed our previous appointment. Although I confess my original purposes have been somewhat amended since your little magic trick.” He waved his bandaged, bloody left hand at me, eyes flashing with malice. I watched the muscles of Samuel’s neck move as he swallowed.

  “It appears you’re quite a remarkable creature—we’re all unusually talented people, each in our separate ways, but none of us can open a hole in the world where there was none. Does Cornelius know? It would be just like him, collecting all the best things and locking them away in that mausoleum he calls a house.” Havemeyer shook his head fondly. “But we’ve agreed he can’t keep you to himself any longer. We’d very much like to speak with you further.” My eyes flicked around the room—from Jane to Bad to Havemeyer’s white fingers held like a knife blade to Samuel’s throat—as if I were solving a math equation again and again, hoping for a different answer.

  “Come with me—immediately and without fuss—and I won’t suck the life out of your poor little grocery boy.”

  And Havemeyer let his fingertips rest, with obscene tenderness, against Samuel’s skin. It was like watching a flame flicker in the wind: Samuel’s entire body seized and shuddered, his breath drawing harshly against the cotton gauze. His legs sagged.

  “No!” I was moving forward, reaching for Samuel and half catching him as he pitched forward. Then both of us were on the floor, Samuel’s shivering weight slumped over my knees, my left arm burning as the barely scabbed wounds split and bled. I tugged the sodden cotton from his mouth and he breathed easier, but his eyes remained vague and distant.

  I think I must have been whispering words (no, no, Samuel, please) because Havemeyer tsked. “There’s no need for hysterics. He’s perfectly fine. Well, not perfectly—he was quite uncooperative with me when I tracked him down last night. But I was insistent.” The not-smile returned. “All I had to go on when you vanished—taking some of me with you, of course—was his little love note. Which you so heartlessly left behind at Brattleboro, and which he so foolishly composed on the back of a Zappia Family Groceries receipt.”

  Hold On January. Such a small, brave act of kindness, repaid with suffering. I’d thought only sins were punished.

  “He’ll recover, if nothing else unfortunate befalls him. I’ll even leave the dog alone, and your maid.” Havemeyer’s voice was confident, almost casual; I pictured a butcher calling a reluctant cow onto the slaughterhouse floor. “Simply come with me now.”

  I looked at Samuel’s pale face below me, at Bad with his splinted leg, at Jane, jobless and homeless on my behalf, and it occurred to me that, for a supposedly lonely orphan girl, there were a surprising number of people willing to suffer on my behalf.

  Enough.

  I slid Samuel off my lap as gently as I could. I hesitated, then let myself brush a dark curl of hair away from his clammy forehead, because I was probably never going to get another chance and a girl should live a little.

  I stood. “All right.” My voice was a near-whisper. I swallowed. “All right. I’ll go with you. Just don’t hurt them.”

  Havemeyer was watching me. There was a kind of cruel confidence in his expression, the swagger of a cat stalking something weak and small. He reached his bare hand toward me, white and somehow hungry-looking, and I stepped toward him.

  There was a scrabbling behind me, a snarl, and Bad leapt past me in a streak of bronze muscle.

  I had a sudden movie-reel memory of Mr. Locke’s Society party the year I was fifteen, when it had required the intervention of several party guests and a butler to dislodge Bad’s teeth from Havemeyer’s leg.

  There was no one to intervene this time.

  Havemeyer made a shrill not-very-human sound and staggered backward. Bad growled through his mouthful of flesh and planted his feet as if they were playing tug-of-war for possession of Havemeyer’s right hand. If Bad hadn’t been already injured, if his splinted back leg hadn’t folded beneath him, maybe he would’ve won.

  But Bad stumbled, whimpering, and Havemeyer ripped his hand away in a spatter of blackish blood. He clutched both hands to his chest—the left one bound in gauze, missing three waxen fingertips, the right one now punctured and torn—and looked at Bad with an expression of such wrath that I knew, with perfect clarity, that he would kill him. He would bury his ruined hands in Bad’s fur and hold on until there was no warmth left in him, until the amber light of his eyes went cold and dull—

  But he was unable to do so, because there was a metallic click, like flint-stones striking—and then a sudden thunderclap.

  A small hole appeared in Havemeyer’s linen suit, directly above his heart. He blinked down at it in confusion, then looked up with an expression of absolute incredulity.

  Darkness bloomed around the hole in his chest and he fell. It wasn’t a theatrical or graceful collapse, but more of a sideways, melting-candle slump against the doorway.

  He took a hideous, wet-sounding breath, as if he were sucking tar through a straw, and met my eyes. He smiled. “They’ll never stop looking for you, girl. And I promise”—the tar-sucking sound again, as his head slumped forward—“they’ll find you.”

  I waited for the next gargled breath—but it didn’t come. His body looked somehow smaller as he lay there, like one of those desiccated spider-corpses that collect in windowsills.

  I turned slowly around.

  Jane stood with her legs planted wide, arms raised and perfectly steady, both hands wrapped tight around—

  You know how it feels when you see a familiar object out of its usual context? As
if your eyes can’t quite make sense of the shapes they’re seeing?

  I’d only ever seen that Enfield revolver in its glass case on Mr. Locke’s desk.

  A single coil of oily smoke rose from the barrel as Jane lowered it. She inspected the revolver with a cool, detached expression. “I’m a little surprised it fired, to be honest. It’s an antique. But then”—she smiled, a vicious, gleeful smile, and I suddenly saw her as she must have once been: a young Amazon reveling in the thrill of the hunt, a hunting cat prowling through the jungles of another world—“Mr. Locke always kept his collections in very good shape.”

  Of the four of us—five of us? Did Havemeyer count?—only Jane seemed fully in possession of her own body. Bad hopped in agitated, three-legged circles around Havemeyer and made whimpering, muttering sounds, apparently complaining that he’d been cheated of a good fight. I sank back to my knees beside Samuel, who was stirring weakly, grimacing and twitching as if he were locked in some unpleasant dream battle. I felt my pulse thud-thudding through my bleeding, bandaged arm and thought, inanely: It’s not like our story papers at all, Samuel. Shouldn’t there be more blood? More fuss?

  Jane didn’t seem concerned. She laid a cool hand against my face and met my eyes with a weighing expression, like a person checking a recently dropped china doll for fractures. She nodded once—a questionable diagnosis, because I felt pretty fractured—and began moving purposefully around the cabin. She unfolded a moth-chewed sheet beside Havemeyer, rolled his body neatly onto it, and hauled him out the door. There was a series of unpleasant, meaty thunks as he cleared the threshold—Thresholds are awfully dangerous places, I thought, with a semihysterical hiccup of laughter—and then nothing but the shush of something heavy dragging through pine needles.

  Jane returned with two rusting buckets of lake water, her sleeves rolled up to the elbow, looking for all the world like an industrious housewife rather than a murderess. She saw me and stopped, sighing a little. “See to Samuel, January,” she said softly.

  It seemed to me she was also saying: Pull it together, kid, and maybe Everything will be all right. I nodded, a little shakily.

  It took half an hour to get Samuel settled, even with his dazed cooperation. First I had to wrangle him to the bed and coax him sufficiently awake to crawl into it. Then I had to convince him to relax his feverish grip on my wrist—“It’s all right, you’re safe, Havemeyer’s—well, he’s gone, anyway—that hurts, Sam, Jesus”—and then build up the fire and pile extra blankets over his still-shivery legs.

  There was a wood-on-wood scrape as Jane dragged a chair beside mine. She used a handful of skirt to scrub her still-damp hands. The blotches they left behind were stained pale pink.

  “When he hired me to look after you,” Jane said softly, “your father told me there were people following him, chasing him. He said one day they might catch him. And then they might come for his daughter, whom he kept as safe as he could.” She paused, and her eyes flicked toward me. “I told him, by the way, that daughters do not want to be kept safe, that they would prefer to be with their parents—but he did not answer.”

  I swallowed, quelling the child in me that wanted either to stamp her foot and say How come? or to throw herself into Jane’s arms and wail inconsolably. Too late for either.

  Instead, I said, “But what was my father even doing? And if there were mysterious villains following him around the world—and I guess I shouldn’t roll my eyes, because you did just shoot an actual vampire—who are they?”

  Jane didn’t answer immediately. She leaned forward and picked my father’s leather-bound book from the floor beside the bed. “I don’t know, January. But I think they may have caught up with your father, and come for you. And I think you ought to finish this book.”

  How fitting, that the most terrifying time in my life should require me to do what I do best: escape into a book.

  I took The Ten Thousand Doors from her hand, tucked my feet beneath me, and opened the book to the final chapter.

  Chapter Six

  The Birth of Julian Scaller

  A man shipwrecked and saved—A man hunting and hunted—A man hoping

  Yule Ian drifted in roiling darkness, unanchored from his body. This was, he felt, for the best, and he determined to remain adrift as long as he could.

  It wasn’t easy. The darkness was marred sometimes by strange voices and lantern light, by the inconvenient demands of his body, by dreams that left him gasping and awake in a room he didn’t know. Once or twice he heard the piercing, familiar crying of a baby and felt a stabbing in his chest, like broken pottery shards grinding against one another, before diving back into oblivion.

  But—fitfully, reluctantly, slowly—he felt himself healing. There were hours at a time now when he lay fully awake but motionless and silent, as if reality were a tigress who might overlook him if he was sufficiently quiet. He could no longer escape the brusque, morose-looking man with a black leather bag who came to check his temperature and change the bandaging wrapping his skull. He could ignore his questions, though, and lock his jaw against the steaming bowls of broth set on the bedside table. He could also ignore the squat little woman who trundled in sometimes to badger him about his daughter—was he the father? Why had he taken her up that mountain, alone? Where was her mother?—by the crude but effective means of pressing his injured skull into the mattress until the pain and darkness swallowed him up again.

  (Among the many things that haunt me about my own cowardice, perhaps the worst is the knowledge of what your mother would’ve said if she’d seen me then. I took a bitter satisfaction in the thought that she was gone, and I could not therefore disappoint her.)

  Yule woke some days or weeks later to find a stranger sitting at his bedside—a wealthy-looking man in a black suit, blurred slightly in his squinting vision.

  “Good morning, sir,” the man said pleasantly. “Tea? Coffee? Some of this rather vicious bourbon these mountain savages drink?”

  He closed his eyes.

  “No? Wise choice, my friend, there’s a whiff of rat poison about it.” Yule heard a tinkle and splash as the stranger poured himself a measure. “The proprietor here tells me you were addled in the accident, that you haven’t said two words together since they dragged you in here. He adds that you’re stinking up his best room, though I find the word ‘best’ to be highly flexible in this case.”

  Yule did not answer.

  “He went through your things, of course, or at least such things as could be fished from the strange wreckage on the mountaintop. Rope, canvas, salted fish, rather odd clothing. And bundles and bundles of pages written in some kind of gibberish, apparently, or code. The town is neatly divided into those who believe you’re a foreign spy sending missives back to the French—except who ever heard of a colored spy?—and those who think you were perfectly mad prior to your head injury. Personally, I suspect neither.”

  Yule began pressing his head against the straw-stuffed mattress. Small, fizzing constellations burst against his eyelids.

  “Enough, boy.” The man’s voice changed, shedding its unctuous skin as if dropping a fur coat to the floor. “Has it occurred to you to wonder why you are sleeping in a nice warm room, benefiting from the dubious skills of the local doctor, rather than dying slowly in the street? Did you think it was the goodwill of the natives?” He laughed, short and sneering. “Goodwill doesn’t extend to penniless, tattooed Negroes—or whatever you are. I’m afraid it’s entirely my will—and my money—that keeps you so comfortable. So I think”—and Yule felt an ungentle grip turn his chin toward the stranger—“you owe me your fullest attention.”

  But Yule found himself far past any of the usual bounds of social convention and reciprocation, and his primary thought was that his path toward the perfect darkness of death would be much faster without this man’s intervention. He kept his eyes closed.

  There was a pause. “I am also making weekly payments to a certain Mrs. Cutley. Should I cease to do so, you
r daughter would be tossed on a train to Denver and stuck in a state orphanage. She’d either grow up lice-ridden and mean, or die young of consumption and loneliness, and no one in this world would care which.”

  That pottery-shard feeling stabbed his chest again, accompanied by a kind of silent shout in his skull that sounded very much like Adelaide’s voice saying Over my dead body.

  Yule’s eyes opened. The dim setting-sun light felt like several hundred needles inserted into his skull, and at first all he could do was blink and gasp. The room came slowly into focus: small, grubby, furnished in rough-cut pinewood. His bed was a knot of stained sheets. His own limbs, emerging from the tangle at careless, random angles like debris from a flood, looked thin and wasted.

  The stranger was watching him, eyes pale as dawn, jade-glass tumbler in one hand. Yule licked his cracked lips. “Why?” he asked. His voice was lower and rougher than it had been before, as if he’d replaced his lungs with rusting iron bellows.

  “Why have I acted so magnanimously on your behalf? Because I happened to be in the area considering some mineral investments—the market is saturated, incidentally, and I’d advise against it just now—and heard rumors about a tattooed madman shipwrecked on a mountaintop, raving about doors and different planets and a woman named, unless my informants are mistaken, Adelaide.” The man leaned forward, the fine fabric of his suit shushing a little. “Because I am a collector of the unique and valuable, and I suspect that you are both.

  “Now.” He produced a second glass—a muddy cup quite unlike his own carved-green cup—and filled it with more of the greasy liquor. “You are going to sit up and drink this, and I will pour you another and you’ll drink that as well. Then you are going to tell me the truth. All of it.” On those last words the man caught Yule’s eyes and held them.

  Yule sat up. He drank the liquor—a process very much like swallowing lit matches—and told his story.