Except there was something weirdly dead-looking about it, as if I were standing in the leftover bones of a city rather than the thing itself. Tumbled-down bricks and slumping buildings dotted the hillsides, surrounded by broken statues of winged men and eagle-headed women. In some places gnarled trees had rooted themselves in rotted-thatch roofs, and tufts of grass sprouted in the cracked streets. The fountains were all dry.
A ruin. But not an empty one: children laughed and screeched as they rolled a rubber tire down an alley; laundry zigzagged from window to window on what looked like telegraph wires; greasy cook smoke hung low over the square.
“Welcome to Arcadia, Miss Scholar.” Molly was watching me with a slightly smug expression.
“I—what is this place? Did you build all this?” I gestured a little wildly at the eagle-headed statues, the rows of clay houses. Samuel and Jane had emerged behind us with similar expressions of startled awe.
Molly gave a small shake of her head. “Found it.” A bell clanged twice from somewhere in the city, and she added, “Dinner’s ready. C’mon.”
I trailed after her, feeling like a cross between Alice and Gulliver and a stray cat. Questions buzzed in my skull—if these people didn’t build the city, then who did? And where were they now? And why was everyone dressed like some weird cross between a circus performer and a tramp?—but a heavy, mute exhaustion had fallen over me. It was the weight of a new world pressing against my senses, perhaps, or maybe the half mile of freezing ocean I’d swum across.
We joined a stream of other people who gawked at us curiously. I gawked back; I’d never seen such a wildly disparate group of humans in my life. It reminded me of the London train station when I was a girl—a human zoo, Locke had called it.
There was a freckled, redheaded woman wearing a canary-colored dress and carrying a toddler on one hip; a group of giggling girls with their hair braided in intricate swirls around their heads; an ancient-looking black woman speaking some language that involved periodic clicks and tocks; a pair of older men walking with their fingers interlaced.
Solomon saw me staring and grinned. “Runaways, like I said. Every type of person that ever needed a place to run has ended up in Arcadia at one time or another. We got a few Indians, some Irish girls who didn’t care for the cotton mills, some colored folks whose ancestors jumped overboard on the way to the auction block, even a couple of Chinamen. After a few generations we get all mixed together. Take Miss Molly—her granddaddy was a Indian witch doctor, but her mama was a Georgia slave that run up north.” He sounded rather proud, as if he’d personally invented her.
“So none of you are actually from here. From this world.” Jane was listening from Solomon’s other side with her eyebrows drawn together.
Molly answered. “When my grandfather first found this place it was empty except for eagles and bones. Not a single living soul, and not much food or water—but no white men, either. It suited him just fine.”
“Although a few of us white fellas have slipped in sideways, since then,” Solomon stage-whispered. Molly swatted at him without looking backward and he dodged, and something in the ease of their motions made me think they’d been friends for a very long time.
We ate outdoors, seated at a series of long tables made of weathered wood that looked suspiciously like it had once belonged to the lighthouse floor. We were too stunned and exhausted to do much more than chew, and the Arcadians seemed content to leave us be. They chattered and argued like a great, untidy family, laughing as they exchanged heaping bowls of food: dark bread the approximate texture of unleavened bricks, baked yams, unidentifiable meat on skewers that Bad heartily approved of, and something alcoholic served in tin soup cans that only Jane dared to drink.
My shoulder leaned against Samuel’s as the sky blackened and the wind chilled, and I found myself entirely unable to pull away. It was so warm, so familiar in this foreign world. Samuel did not look at me, but I saw the corners of his eyes crimp.
We slept that night in one of the unclaimed houses, lying on the clay floor in a nest of borrowed blankets and quilts. I lay staring at the stars glimmering through the missing hunks of thatch, at all the constellations I couldn’t name.
“Jane?” I whispered.
She made an annoyed, half-asleep sound.
“How long do you think we’ll have to stay here before the Society gives up on us? When will it be safe to go look for my father?”
There was a brief silence. “I think you should go to sleep, January. And learn to live with what you have.”
What did I have? My father’s book and my silver coin-knife, both wrapped tight in a stolen pillowcase. Bad, snoring lightly beside me. Jane. Samuel. My own unwritten words waiting to change the shape of the world.
Surely all that outweighed what I didn’t have: a mother, a father, a home. Surely it would be enough.
I woke abruptly, feeling like something that had washed up on the shore and been left to cure in the sun: salty, sweaty, sour-smelling. I might’ve forced myself back to sleep through sheer force of will, except that Bad yipped in greeting.
“Morning to you, too, dog.” It was Molly Neptune’s slow, graveled voice.
I sat up. So did Samuel. Jane made a pathetic flopping motion, like a beached fish, then pressed her face deeper into the blankets.
“That was Sol’s brew she was drinking last night. She’ll survive.” Molly stepped across the threshold and settled herself cross-legged on the floor. “Probably.” She produced two jars of plums and a half loaf of dense bread. “Eat. And we’ll talk.”
“About what?”
Molly removed her stovepipe hat and considered me gravely. “This is not an easy world to survive in, January. I don’t know how much your father told you”—far too little, as usual—“but it’s dry, harsh land. We can’t say for sure what happened to the original inhabitants, but my grandfather had a theory that this was the original Dawn Land our stories talk about, and that our ancestors communed closely with these people. Perhaps, then, they suffered the same sicknesses and evils that came to us. Except they didn’t make it.”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, really. But it means that everyone here must do their fair share to keep us from going the same way. We need to determine what your fair share might be.”
I felt a queasy pang of doubt—what could I contribute to these tough, practical people? Accounting? Latin lessons?—but Samuel was nodding comfortably. “What work is there to help with?”
“Oh, all kinds. We haul water from a spring to the north, we farm what we can, we hunt prairie rats and deer… We make everything we need. Almost.” Molly’s eyes on us were sharp, watchful, as if testing our cleverness.
I didn’t feel clever. “So… what do you do? If it isn’t enough?”
But it was Samuel who answered. He held the jarred plums up to the light and ran his thumb over the embossed glass. BALL MASON JAR CO., it read. “They steal.” He did not sound particularly perturbed by this.
The folds around Molly’s eyes deepened with grim humor. “We scavenge, boy. We find, we borrow, we buy. And sometimes we steal. We figure your world stole enough from each of us, it won’t hurt it to give us some back.”
I tried and failed to picture the Arcadians strolling casually into the small towns of Maine without being immediately noticed, apprehended, and possibly imprisoned. “But how—?”
“Very carefully,” Molly answered dryly. “And if it does not go as planned, we have these.” She reached two fingers beneath her beaded collar and extracted a shimmering golden feather. “You saw the eagles as you walked in, yes? Each of them sheds just a single feather in their lifetimes. The children search the plains for them every morning and every evening, and when they find one we call a citywide meeting to decide who carries it. They’re our most precious possessions.” She brushed the edge of the feather, delicately. “If I were frightened or cornered, and if I were to blow my breath against this feather, you would no longer see me sitti
ng before you. It tricks the eye in some way we don’t understand and frankly don’t care to—all we know is that, to the casual observer, you become almost invisible.” She smiled. “A thief’s dream. No one has ever followed us back to the lighthouse.”
Jane, who had struggled up to one elbow and was listening now with puffy-eyed effort, made a grunt of enlightenment. “But then how did Julian find you?” she asked. Her voice sounded as if her throat had been lined with sand in the night.
“Well, there are still rumors. Stories about mischievous spirits that haunt the coast, stealing pies from windowsills and milk from cows. Julian knew how to follow a story. We are fortunate that there are few men like him. Well”—Molly heaved herself back to her feet, dusting her tailcoat—“we can hardly send the three of you out scavenging if you’re wanted criminals.”
“We’re not—” Samuel began.
Molly flapped an annoyed hand at him. “Are there powerful people after you? People with money and influence and patience?” We exchanged uneasy looks. “Then you’ll be criminals soon, if you aren’t already, and we sure as hell don’t have feathers to spare on you. We’ll have to find other work for you.”
This threat proved to be both earnest and immediate; the three of us spent the next week laboring alongside the Arcadians.
I—as the member of our party with the fewest practical skills—was sent to work with the children. The children were unnecessarily amused by this. They taught me how to skin prairie rats and haul water with almost offensive enthusiasm, and delighted in the discovery that I was slower and clumsier than the average Arcadian nine-year-old.
“Don’t worry,” advised a gray-eyed, dark-skinned girl on my second morning. She wore a grimy lace frock and a pair of men’s work boots. “It took me years to get really good at balancing the water buckets.” Demonstrating both maturity and nobility, I resisted the urge to knock the bucket off her head.
Even Bad was more useful than me; once his leg had healed enough to remove the splint, he was recruited to join Jane and the hunters. They trotted out onto the plains before dawn each morning, armed with a truly random assortment of weapons and traps, and returned with limp rows of furred bodies slung over their shoulders. Jane was unsmiling, but she moved with a predatory ease I’d never seen in the narrow halls of Locke House. I wondered if this was how she’d looked as she’d prowled through the forests of her lost world, hunting with the leopard-women; I wondered if her Door was closed forever. Or if I could open it, if I were brave enough to try.
Samuel seemed to be working everywhere with everyone simultaneously. I saw him repairing a thatched rooftop; bent over a steaming copper cauldron in the kitchens; stuffing mattresses with fresh-dried grasses; tilling the gardens and sending clouds of yellow dust into the air. He was always smiling, always laughing, his eyes glowing as if he were on some grand adventure. It occurred to me that perhaps he’d been right: he wouldn’t have made a very good grocer.
“Could you be happy here? Truly?” I asked him on the fourth or fifth evening. It was the slow-moving, after-dinner time of the day when everyone lounged, full-bellied, and Bad crunched contentedly on the small bones of prairie rats.
Samuel shrugged. “Perhaps. It would depend.”
“On what?”
He didn’t answer immediately but looked at me in a steady-eyed, serious way that made my ribs tighten. “Could you be happy here?” I shrugged back, eyes sliding away. After a short silence I moved to sit with Yaa Murray, the gray-eyed girl, and cajoled her into braiding my hair. I fell quiet beneath the hypnotic twist and tug of her fingers.
Could I truly be happy never knowing my father’s fate? Never seeing the seas of the Written or the archives of the City of Nin? Leaving the Society to their obscure machinations, their malevolent Door-closing?
But then—what else could I do, really? I was a misfit and a runaway, like everyone else here. I was young and soft and untried. Girls like me do not fling themselves against the crushing weight of fate; they don’t hunt villains or have adventures; they hunker down and survive and find happiness where they can.
The sound of running steps thudded down the street and Yaa’s fingers froze in my hair. The comfortable babble of the Arcadians ceased.
A boy came hurtling into the square, chest heaving and eyes wild. Molly Neptune stood up. “Something wrong, Aaron?” Her voice was a mild rumble, but her shoulders were squared with tension.
The boy bent in half, panting, his eyes white-ringed. “It’s—there’s a old lady down by the tree, real upset, saying a man chased her through the door. No sign of him now.” Fear clotted my throat like cold cotton. They found us.
But the boy was still trying to speak, looking up into Molly’s eyes and moving his lips soundlessly.
“What else, boy?”
He swallowed. “It’s Sol, miss. His throat’s been cut clean open. He’s dead.”
If Mr. Locke had successfully taught me anything, it was how to be quiet when I wanted to howl or shriek or claw the wallpaper to ribbons. My limbs stiffened like stuffed appendages tacked onto some poorly taxidermied subject, and a ringing silence filled my skull. I tried hard not to think anything at all.
While Molly shouted orders and Jane and Samuel sprang to their feet to help—I didn’t think: Oh God, Solomon. I didn’t think about his jaunty golden feather, his scarecrow clothing, his genial winks.
When a crowd of people departed and left the courtyard mostly empty except for children and their mothers, I didn’t feel the fear slinking snakelike through my belly, didn’t think: Will I be next? Are they already here?
And when they returned, when Molly Neptune herself lay the scrawny, white-draped form on the table, her eyes like open graves, I didn’t think: My fault. All my fault. Bad leaned his warm weight against my leg and I felt a tremor run through me, a shiver of grief.
Samuel entered the courtyard in a hunched shuffle, guiding a frail-looking woman in long gray skirts. She clutched pathetically at his arm, blinking watery eyes over the twisted root of her nose. He seated her carefully, adjusting her shawl with such tenderness that I wondered if he was thinking of his own grandmother—a cackling crow of a woman I’d seen perched on the Zappias’ porch, muttering Italian curses at Mr. Locke’s Buick as it rolled by. I wondered if Samuel would ever see her again. My fault.
The old woman’s eyes flicked from face to face until they landed on me. Her mouth gaped, moist and unpleasant, and I flinched. It was a familiar sensation—I’d been stared at by rude old white women for seventeen years as they speculated whether I was from Siam or Singapore—but it jarred me. I’d already gotten used to the luxury of invisibility among the Arcadians.
Jane was speaking in low, urgent tones with Molly and the other hunters, discussing rotating patrols and all-night watches. A flock of women had encircled the old lady, cooing with pity. She answered their questions in a tremulous, timid voice—yes, she’d been rowing along the coast, but she’d gotten lost; yes, a man in a dark coat had chased her; no, she didn’t know where he’d gone. Her eyes skittered over mine too often as she spoke. I looked away but could still feel the clingy, cobwebbed sensation of her eyes on my skin.
I found myself resenting her. How had she even found the lighthouse? Why had she invaded this tiny, fragile paradise, bringing death on her heels?
Samuel came to collect me eventually, like a shepherd gathering a wayward sheep. “There is nothing else we can do tonight, except sleep.” I trailed after him through the dark, cracked streets.
Several times I thought I heard footsteps shuffling behind us, or long skirts trailing on stone, or breath rattling from an aged chest. I chastised myself—don’t be stupid, she’s a harmless old woman—until I noticed Bad standing stiff as a copper statue, staring behind us with his lips peeled back and a growl radiating in his chest.
A silent coldness slipped over me, like when you dive too deep in the lake and stir up the winter-chilled waters at the bottom. I nudged Bad with my knee, dry-m
outhed. “C’mon, boy.”
I lay beside Samuel in the moon-streaked dark of our adopted house, thinking things like surely not and it’s impossible and then reflecting on the word impossible and its many abrupt fluctuations in recent days and continuing to stare sleeplessly at the ceiling.
Jane came in sometime after midnight and crawled into her blanket pile. I waited for her breathing to deepen, for the soft whistle of her not-quite-snore, and then crept to her side. I slid Mr. Locke’s revolver carefully from her skirts and stuffed it beneath my waistband. It rested cold and heavy against my thigh as I ducked out of the house and into the bright black night.
I followed our street upward, Bad padding at my side, until it petered into tufted grass and tumbled brick. The plains rose around me, painted silver by the half-moon. I waded through the grasses, trying to ignore the sweat prickling my palms, the quivering in my belly that said this was a very, very stupid idea.
Then I stopped. I waited.
And waited. Minutes thudded by, measured in too-fast heartbeats. Be patient. Be brave. Be like Jane. I tried to stand the way she would, tense and ready as a long-legged hunting cat, rather than shivering and uncertain.
A whispering shuffle sounded behind me, so soft it might have been some small creature runneling through the grass. Bad growled, low and deep, and I believed him.
I drew the revolver from my skirt, turned, and pointed it at the hunched figure behind me. I saw the long twist of her nose, the saggy folds of flesh at her throat, the tremor of her hands as she raised them.
I strode closer. “Who are you?” I hissed.
How terribly, painfully cliché. Even with blood pulsing in my skull and my throat terror-tight, I felt conscious that I was doing a fairly poor impression of one of the Rover Boys, if the Rover Boys had ever threatened any innocent old ladies.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January Page 26