I should’ve predicted the way people would scurry away from us as we straggled into town, clutching their hats and muttering. We made an unsettling gang: an armed black woman, a sickly young man, a glaring dog, and an odd-colored girl with ill-fitting clothes and no shoes. I tried to ask one of the scurrying women for directions to the nearest train station, but Jane stamped on my bare foot.
“Well, excuse me, but I thought you said we’d take the train?”
Jane sighed at me. “Yes, but as we will not be purchasing tickets, it’s best not to draw attention to ourselves.” She jerked her head at the railway snaking east out of town. “Follow me.” She walked on without waiting for assent.
Samuel and I looked at one another for almost the first time since our conversation the night before. He raised his brows, eyes sparking with humor, and made a grand after-you bow.
Jane led us to a small, mostly empty train yard, where we slunk aboard a flat railcar labeled MONTPELIER LUMBER CO. and waited. Within the hour we were hurtling east, deafened by the roar and rattle of the rails, coated in coal smoke and dust, grinning like children or madmen. Bad’s tongue lolled in the wind.
The next two days are blurred in my memory, lost in a haze of heat and aching feet and the ever-present fear that there were eyes on the back of my neck, hunting me. I remember Jane’s voice, cool and certain; a night spent curled in an overgrown field with the sky hanging like a spangled quilt above me; greasy fish sandwiches bought from a roadside store; a ride from a farmer hauling blueberries to Concord in a mule-drawn cart, and another from a chatty postal carrier at the end of his route.
And I remember Jane lifting her face to the breeze as we limped down an unnamed road just over the Maine state line. “Smell that?” she asked.
I did: brine and cold stone and fish bones. The ocean.
We followed the road until it turned to smooth pebbles and salt-stunted pines, our footsteps muted in the moonlight. Jane seemed to be navigating from my father’s instructions rather than any map or memory of her own. She muttered to herself, occasionally reaching out to touch an odd-shaped rock or squinting up at the stars. The rhythmic rushing of the sea drew closer.
We rounded a dense wall of pines, scrabbled down a short bluff—and there it was.
I’d been to the seaside dozens of times: I’d strolled along the beaches of southern France and sipped lemonade on the coast of Antigua; I’d taken steamers across the Atlantic and watched the neat parting of the sea before us. Even storms felt small and distant from inside a hotel or a steel hull. I’d thought of the ocean as something pleasant and pretty, a slightly bigger version of my own familiar lake. But standing there on the rock ledge with waves crashing beneath me and the vastness of the Atlantic roiling like the black contents of a witch’s cauldron—it seemed to be something else entirely. Something wild, something secretive, something that might swallow you whole.
Jane was picking her way down a lichen-slick path, hugging the cliff side. Samuel and I followed, Bad scrabbling ahead of us. My lungs felt strangely constricted, my pulse shuddering in anticipation: A Door. A real, actual Door, the first I’d seen since I was a half-feral child running through the fields.
A Door my father had left hidden and open just for me. Even now, when he was trapped or caged or dead on the other side of the planet, he had not abandoned me. Not entirely. The thought warmed me, like a candle flame held safe against the whipping sea wind.
Jane had disappeared into a low, damp crevice. I leaned forward eagerly, but Jane reemerged tugging a jangled pile of planks and rotten twine behind her. She sighed heavily. “Well, it was too much to hope it would last in this weather, I suppose. We might be able to float the supplies alongside us with whatever’s left.” And then she began—methodically and quite unself-consciously—to undress.
“Jane, what are you—where’s the Door?”
She did not answer but merely pointed out to sea.
I followed her finger and saw a lumpy gray smudge on the horizon, with patches of bare rock gleaming silver in the starlight. “An island? But surely we can’t—you’re not swimming to it?”
“Inaccessible. Inhospitable. Just as advertised, I believe.” Her tone was dry. She was already splashing into the sea, her underthings shining white, her limbs vanishing into the dark. Bad dove joyfully after her.
I turned to Samuel in search of an ally and found him unbuttoning his shirt. “Bet you the last loaf of bread I can beat you,” he murmured, as if we were children playing in the lake rather than weary, desperate adults standing on the coast of a cold sea, running away from God-knew-what. I laughed, helplessly.
I caught the bright curve of his answering smile, glimpsed the paleness of his chest, and then he was wading after Jane and Bad. There was nothing to do but follow him.
I shouldn’t have been surprised at the cold—it was summer, but summer in Maine is a fleeting, cautious creature that disappears as soon as the sun sets—but I don’t think it’s possible to step into water that cold without being surprised. Swimming through it was like swimming through a cloud of stinging insects. We clung to the rotten raft-planks with frozen fingers, tugging our belongings alongside us, our breath coming in thin gasps. Even Bad was lifting his head high out of the water as if trying to levitate rather than swim. The salt seeped through my bandages, burrowing into the words carved on my arm. If I could have turned back, if I could have given up and crawled back home to the rosy fireplaces of Locke House, I would have. But I couldn’t. So I kept reaching my stinging arms out into the chill black sea, kept inching closer to the gray blur of the island.
And then somehow my knees were scraping stone and Jane was heaving the raft up the shore and Samuel’s breath was a harsh wheeze beside me. He crawled a few feet farther and collapsed in a goose-fleshed heap, face pressed into the pebbled shore. “I do not,” he gasped, “like the cold. Anymore.”
I remembered the piercing chill of Havemeyer’s touch, Samuel’s sickly face as he fell, and fear sent me scrabbling to his side. I touched his back, numb-fingered. “Are you all right?”
He propped himself on one elbow and craned his head wearily upward. He blinked at me, clearing the salt water from his eyes, and his face went curiously blank. I became aware that the ocean had transformed my underthings from shapeless cotton sacks into something more like a second skin, clinging and nearly translucent. Neither of us moved. I felt frozen, snared by his oil-and-ember eyes—until Bad positioned himself several inches away and shook, spraying us in freezing salt water.
Samuel closed his eyes very deliberately and returned his forehead to the pebbles. “Yes. I am,” he sighed. Then he staggered upright and limped to the raft. He returned with his own mostly dry shirt and draped it over my shoulders without letting his fingers brush my skin. It smelled of flour and sweat.
“Almost there. We’ll go through, I think, before we make camp.” Even Jane sounded weary now.
We stumbled after her, winding up the shore and climbing a low bluff on shaking legs. The wind whipped us dry, leaving a white rime of salt on my skin.
On the far side of the island, perched like the skeleton of some long-dead guardian, stood the abandoned bones of a lighthouse. Its tower sagged and leaned and its paint, which might once have been cheery white-and-red, had weathered to the same grayish-brown as the rock beneath it. Where there should have been a doorway there was only a gaping mouth. Jane ducked through it first, picking her way over tumbled rafters and missing floorboards, and Bad and I followed.
Standing inside was like standing in the rotted rib cage of a sea creature, dark and strewn with seaweed. A single bright moonbeam shone through the broken window and illuminated a door on the western wall, where there had been no door on the outside. My heart shivered in my chest.
The Door was old-looking, even older than the lighthouse decomposing around it, built of lashed-together driftwood and strips of curving ivory. A faint breeze whistled through the gaps, carrying a hot, dry smell like hayfiel
ds in the August sun.
Jane tugged the whalebone handle and it flowed smoothly toward her, oiled and silent. She looked back at us, flashed her gap-toothed grin, and stepped into the black.
I rested one hand on Bad’s skull and reached the other toward Samuel, impulsively. “Don’t be afraid, and don’t let go.”
He met my eyes. “I won’t,” he said, and his fingers wrapped tight around mine.
We stepped across the Threshold together. The nothingness was just as terrifying, just as empty, just as suffocating as it had been before—but somehow it felt less vast with Samuel and Bad beside me. We sailed through the dark like a trio of comets, like a many-legged constellation spinning through the night, and then our feet crunched on dry grass.
We stood in the orange, alien dusk of another world. I had a single reeling second to see the endless golden plain, the sky so wide open it felt like an ocean suspended above me—before a rough voice spoke.
“Jesus, it’s a goddamned parade. All right, folks, you’re going to stop where you are and turn around real slow. And then you’re going to tell me what your business is, and how in the name of sweet Christ you found our door.”
The Burning Door
When you’ve stepped into a foreign world and you’re cold and weak-limbed and only half-dressed, you tend to do as you are told. The three of us turned slowly around.
Facing us was a rangy, raggedy old man, very much like a scarecrow if scarecrows grew patchy white beards and wielded spears. He wore a vaguely martial-looking gray coat, a pair of rough sandals made of rope and rubber, and a bright feather tucked into the white tangle of his hair. He grunted, jabbing the spear point toward my belly.
I raised shaking hands. “Please, sir, we’re just trying to—” I began, and it was no effort at all to sound pitiful and terrified. But the effect was undercut somewhat by Bad, who was making a sound like an idling engine, hackles spiked, and Jane, who had drawn Mr. Locke’s revolver and pointed it directly at the old man’s chest.
His eyes flicked to the gun and back to me, hardening. “Go ahead, miss. But I bet I could gut this girl before I bled out. You want to make the same bet?” There was a brief stillness, during which I imagined how unpleasant it would be to be disemboweled by a rusty homemade spear and silently swore at my father for his poor judgment—and then Samuel stepped between us.
He leaned gently forward until the spear point dimpled his shirt. “Sir. There is no need for this. We don’t mean any harm, I swear to you.” He made a sharp put down your weapon, woman gesture at Jane, who ignored him entirely. “We’re just looking for a, ah, place to hide for a little time. We didn’t mean to intrude.” The old man’s eyes remained narrowed and suspicious, a pair of damp blue marbles set in deep folds of flesh.
Samuel licked his lips and tried again. “Let us try again, yes? I am Samuel Zappia, of Zappia Family Groceries in Vermont. This is Mr. Sindbad, more often called Bad; Miss Jane Irimu, who will lower her gun very soon, I am sure; and Miss January Scaller. We were told this was a good place to—”
“Scholar?” The man spat the word, tilting his chin at me.
I nodded over Samuel’s shoulder.
“You Julian’s girl, then?”
My skin prickled at the sound of my father’s name. I nodded again.
“Well, shit.” The spear point dropped abruptly earthward. The man leaned comfortably against it, picking at his snaggled teeth with one fingernail and squinting amiably at us. “Sorry to scare you, hon, that’s my mistake. But the whole point of guard duty is to guard, ain’t it, and you can’t be too careful. Why don’t y’all follow me and we’ll get you some hot food and a place to set down. Unless”—and here he gestured toward the gnarled, age-wracked tree just behind us, at the narrow Door nestled in its roots—“there’s anybody likely to come running through after you?”
Samuel and I stared at him in slightly stunned silence, but Jane made a considering sound. “Not immediately, I shouldn’t think.” The revolver had vanished again into her tight-knotted bundle and Bad’s growls had turned to intermittent grumbles. His tail gave the smallest of wags, not indicating friendliness so much as a cessation of open hostilities.
“Well, c’mon, then. Might make it back for dinner if we hustle.” The man turned toward the setting sun, bent to pluck a rusted red bicycle from the tall grass, and began wheeling it down a narrow track. He whistled tunelessly as he walked.
We exchanged a series of looks, ranging from what the hell to at least he’s not trying to kill us anymore, and followed him. We waded across the plain with the last red sunbeams warming our cheeks, driving the frigid Atlantic from our bones. The old man alternated between whistling and chatting, entirely undeterred by our weary, edgy silence.
His name, we learned, was John Solomon Ayers, called Sol by his friends, and he’d been born in Polk County, Tennessee, in the year 1847. He’d joined the 3rd Regiment of the Tennessee Infantry when he was sixteen, deserted at seventeen when he realized he was likely to die miserable and hungry on behalf of some rich cotton grower who wouldn’t give a bent penny for him, and was promptly taken prisoner by the Yanks. He’d spent a few years in a Massachusetts prison before busting out and running for the coast. He’d stumbled into this world and been here ever since.
“And have you been, uh, all alone? Until my father came through?” It would, I felt, explain a few of Solomon’s more eccentric qualities. I pictured him squatting alone in a dirt hovel, whistling to himself, perhaps shunned by the natives… And where were the natives of this world? Were they likely to swoop down on us in a thundering horde? I glanced up at the bare horizon but saw nothing more alarming than a low line of hills and a jumble of sand-colored stones ahead.
Solomon cackled. “Lord, no. Arcadia—that’s what we call it, who knows what it used to be called—is about halfway toward being a proper city these days. Not that I’ve seen many of those. We’re nearly there, now.” No one answered him, but Jane’s face expressed deepest skepticism.
The tumbled stones loomed larger as we walked, growing into massive boulders that leaned against one another at precarious angles. A few birds—eagles, maybe, or hawks, the same shimmering golden color as the feather in Sol’s hair—watched us mistrustfully from their craggy perches. They took flight as we approached, seeming by some trick of the fading light to vanish into the sky.
Solomon led us to a gap between the two largest stones, which formed a shadowed tunnel with a strange, shining curtain strung across it. It was only when we stood before it that I realized it wasn’t fabric at all, but dozens of golden feathers tied and dangling like soft wind chimes. I could see through them to the other side of the standing stones: a few empty hills, endless swaying grasses, the last rose glimmer of the sun as it set. No secret cities.
Solomon leaned his bicycle against the stone and crossed his arms, staring at the feathers as if waiting for something to happen. Bad gave an impatient whine.
“Excuse me, Mr. Ayers,” I began.
“Sol’s fine,” he said absently.
“Right. Um, excuse me, Sol, what are you—” But before I could find a polite way to ask if he was an honest-to-God madman who spent his spare time knitting feathers into curtains, or if he had an actual destination in mind, I heard padding footsteps. They came from the darkness behind the curtain, but there was nothing there except stone and dusty earth—
Until a wide hand swept the feathers aside and a squat woman in a black stovepipe hat stepped out of the empty air and stood before us, arms crossed and eyes narrowed. Jane said a series of words I didn’t recognize, but which I was sure were impolite.
The woman was roundish and brownish, with silver-streaked hair. She wore a collection of clothes just as motley as Solomon’s—including a silver-buttoned tailcoat, pants sewn from burlap, and some sort of bright beaded collar—but somehow contrived to look imposing rather than comical. She glared at each of us in turn with heavy-lidded eyes.
“Guests, Sol?” She said
the word guests the way you might say fleas or influenza.
Solomon gave an exaggerated bow. “May I introduce our most esteemed chieftainess—don’t growl at me, darlin’, you know you are—Miss Molly Neptune. Molly, you remember that black fella with the tattoos, name of Julian Scholar? Came through a few years back and mentioned a daughter?” He turned both palms toward me like a fisherman displaying a particularly large catch. “She’s finally come to call.”
Molly Neptune looked only slightly appeased. “I see. And these others?”
Jane lifted her chin. “Are her companions. Charged with keeping her alive and safe.” Companions. See the curve of that C like a pair of outstretched arms? It implied the sort of friends who might slay dragons or go on hopeless quests or swear blood oaths at midnight. I swallowed the urge to fling myself at Jane in gratitude.
Molly ran her tongue over her teeth. “Doesn’t look like you’ve done too good a job, so far,” she observed. “She’s three quarters drowned, half-naked, and banged up all over.” Jane’s jaw tightened, and I tried to pull Samuel’s shirt cuffs lower over the grayish bandaging around my wrist.
The woman sighed. “Well, never let them say Molly Neptune doesn’t keep her word.” And, with a slightly mocking flourish, she drew back the feathered curtain.
The view between the stones—that dull triangular patch of sky and grass—disappeared and was replaced by a confused jumble of shapes. I ducked under Molly’s arm and into the short tunnel, trying to squint the images into focus. Steep stairs rising up hillsides; thatched roofs and clay bricks; a rising murmur of voices.
A city.
I stepped out into a sandstone plaza with my mouth hanging slightly open. The empty hills had been suddenly populated by a messy sprawl of buildings and streets, as if some enormous child had tossed his blocks into the valley and wandered away. Everything—the narrow roads, the walls, the low houses and domed temples—was built of yellow clay and dried grass. It glowed gold in the cooling dusk: a secret El Dorado hidden on the coast of Maine.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January Page 25