The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

  He returned with the leather-bound book and a pen clutched in his hands. I flipped to the last rustle of blank pages in the back and tore them gently away from their binding, not looking at Samuel’s worry-dark eyes, his solemn mouth. “Would you—will you come with me?”

  He reached for my hand in answer and I hesitated—I’d never accepted his offer, never told him yes—but then I reflected that we were both trapped in a dying world for the rest of our short lives, and laced my fingers through his.

  We walked together out of the city and into the deep blue night, with Bad slipping like an amber-eyed ghost through the grass ahead of us. It was so late the moon was skulking near the horizon and the stars seemed to hang low and close around us.

  The tree emerged from the darkness like a gnarled, many-fingered hand reaching toward the sky. Neat planks of wood nestled among its bulbous roots, looking strangely forlorn—a Door, now reduced to a mere door. A heavy stink of smoke and char filtered through it, and I knew the lighthouse was burning on the other side. I imagined that my father’s final Door had the same funeral-pyre reek.

  I walked until I was so close I could have stroked my fingers along the dark wood of the door, and stopped. I stood unmoving, palms sweating against the crumpled pages, the pen heavy in my hand.

  Samuel let the silence stretch, then asked, “What’s wrong?”

  I laughed—a despairing, humorless huff. “I’m afraid,” I told him. “Afraid that I’ll fail, that it won’t work, that I’ll—” I broke off, the iron tang of fear filling my mouth. I remembered the bone-deep bite of exhaustion in my limbs, the sick reeling of the room around me after I’d written my way out of the asylum. How much more would it take to open a way between two worlds?

  My father had said Doors existed in places of “particular and indefinable resonance,” thinned-out places where two worlds brushed delicately against one another. Perhaps it is more like drawing aside a veil, or opening a window. A thin supposition on which to bet my life.

  Samuel was squinting up at the stars, his expression casual. “Do not do it, then.”

  “But Jane—Arcadia—”

  “We will find a way to survive, January, trust us that far. Do not risk yourself if it will not work.” His voice was even and calm, as if we were discussing the likelihood of rain or the unreliability of train schedules.

  I looked down, uncertain and ashamed by my uncertainty.

  But then I felt a hesitant touch beneath my chin, a gentle push as Samuel tipped my face upward with two fingers. His eyes were earnest, his mouth half-curled with a sideways smile. “But if you are willing to try, I believe in you. Strega.”

  A heady warmth sizzled over me, as if I were standing in the center of a blazing bonfire. I didn’t recognize it, didn’t know what to call it—but then, no one had ever believed in me before. Or they’d believed in some other, less able version of me. Locke and my father and Jane had each believed in the timid January who had haunted Locke House, who so desperately needed their protection. But Samuel was looking at me now as if he expected me to eat fire or dance on rain clouds. As if he expected me to do something miraculous and brave and impossible.

  It felt like donning a suit of armor or sprouting wings, extending past the boundaries of myself; it felt an awful lot like love.

  I looked into his face for another greedy second, letting his faith soak into my skin, then turned to the door. I breathed the smoke-and-ocean air into my lungs, felt Samuel’s trust at my back like a warm wind filling a ship’s sail, and touched the pen to the page.

  The Door opens, I wrote, and I believed every letter of it.

  I believed in the black gleam of the ink in the night, in the strength of my own fingers wrapped around the pen, in the reality of that other world waiting just on the other side of some invisible curtain. I believed in second chances and righted wrongs and rewritten stories. I believed in Samuel’s belief.

  A wind blew noiselessly across the plain as I lifted the pen away from the door. The stars pulsed above me and the moon-shadows drew mad patterns in the dirt. I felt myself smiling, distantly, and then everything slid sideways and Samuel’s arms were warm around me.

  “Is it—did you—”

  I nodded. There was no need to check; I could already hear the rhythmic crash of the Atlantic, could already feel the infinite emptiness of the Threshold stretching beyond the Door. A triumphant laugh rolled in Samuel’s chest, rumbling against my cheek, and then I was laughing with him because it had worked. It had worked, and I wasn’t dead—it had been almost easy, compared to the words I’d carved into my own arm at Brattleboro. Like drawing aside a veil.

  We staggered back toward the city, dizzy with relief, leaning drunkenly into one another. I could almost pretend we were two ordinary young people stealing an unchaperoned stroll past their curfew, sure they’d catch hell in the morning but too giddy to care.

  Until Samuel said, quietly, “This means we are safe, you know. They think this world is gone forever, don’t they, so they will not come looking. We could stay, at least for a while.”

  There was a question in his voice, but I didn’t answer it. I pictured Ilvane’s spinning copper compass and the way he’d sniffed the air like a hound on a trail. He would find me again.

  And when he did, would I be cowering in some other world? Hiding behind the protection of better and braver people? A movie reel spun and clicked in my skull: Samuel falling pale and lifeless to the cabin floor; Solomon wrapped in that white sheet; Jane lying in her own blood, eyes on the stars.

  No.

  I might be young and untried and penniless and everything else, but—I clutched the pen in my hand until my knuckles were white crests—I was not powerless. And now I knew no Door was ever truly closed.

  I looked sideways at Samuel’s silhouette in the graying almost-dawn. “Yes,” I answered him. “Of course we’ll stay.”

  I’ve always been a good liar.

  I wrote three letters before leaving.

  Dear Mr. Locke,

  I want you to know I’m not dead. I almost didn’t write this letter at all, but then I pictured you worried and irritable, pacing your office or yelling at Mr. Stirling or smoking too many cigars, and figured I owed you this much.

  I want you to know, too, that I don’t hate you. I think perhaps I should: you knew my father’s true history but kept it from me; you’re part of an archaeological society that’s actually some kind of malevolent cult, you fired Jane, let them hurt Sindbad, shipped me off to Brattleboro—but I don’t. Quite.

  I don’t hate you, but I don’t particularly trust you, either—were you really trying to protect me? From creatures like Havemeyer and Ilvane? If so, you should know your protection was woefully inadequate—so forgive me for not telling you precisely where I’m going next.

  I wish I could come back to Locke House, to that little gray room on the third floor, but I can’t. Instead, I’m following my father. I’m going home.

  I’m sorry I couldn’t be your good girl any longer. But not very.

  Love,

  J

  Jane,

  Just in case: I’m officially willing you my entire book collection. Consider this letter a binding legal contract. Maybe one day you can show up at an estate sale and show it to the auctioneer and walk away with the first edition of The Jungle Book or the entire run of Pluck and Luck.

  It’s funny—all that time I spent longing for a chance to escape, to fling myself into the endless horizon without worrying about keeping my skirts pressed or using the right fork or making Mr. Locke proud—and now… Now I think I might trade it for another rainy afternoon rereading romance novels with you, curled in the towers of Locke House like stowaways in some vast, land-bound ship.

  But looking back, I realize both of us were secretly waiting. Holding ourselves in careful, painful suspension, like women standing at the station with our luggage neatly packed, looking expectantly down the tracks.

  But my father never came
back for me, or for you, and now it’s time to stop waiting. Leave the luggage at the station and run.

  Jane: you are released from the promises you made to him. I am my own keeper now.

  I might wish you’d move to Chicago and find a comfortable job as a bank security guard, or go back to Kenya and meet a nice young lady who helps you forget about the leopard-women and their wild hunts—but I know you won’t. I know you’ll keep looking for your ivory Door. Your home.

  And—though the word of a Scholar might not be worth much to you anymore—I want you to know:

  So will I.

  Love,

  J

  S—

  I wish we had more

  I have always lo

  It’s so typical of me to leave the most difficult letter for last, as if it would magically become easier. I don’t have much space so I’ll be brief:

  My answer is yes. For always.

  Except that there are monsters pursuing me, haunting my footsteps, breathing down my collar. And I will not, cannot place you in their path. I’m strong enough to face my monsters alone—you showed me that, just a few hours ago. (It turns out that only in loving you am I brave enough to leave you. There’s some terrible irony there, don’t you think?)

  So go home, Samuel. Go home and be whole and safe and alive, and forget all this dangerous madness about Doors and vampires and secret societies. Pretend it’s all just the plot of a particularly outlandish paperback, something we can laugh about on the lakeshore.

  And look after Bad, won’t you? I don’t seem to have taken very good care of him so far, and I think he’d be safer with you.

  J

  P.S. Actually Bad is coming with me. I don’t deserve him, but that’s just how it is with dogs, isn’t it?

  I slunk into the kitchens and stole a sack of oats, four apples, and a few salted hunks of prairie rat for Bad. I stuffed it all into a pillowcase with my silver coin-knife and my father’s book and slipped back into the streets of Arcadia, now glowing pink in the rising dawn. I had nearly reached the feather curtain when a graveled voice stopped me.

  “Headed out so soon?”

  Bad and I froze like a pair of deer caught in the headlights of Mr. Locke’s Model 10. “Ah. Morning, Miss Neptune.”

  Molly looked like she hadn’t slept either—the lines in her face were deep-carved cobwebs and her hair was a black-and- silver tangle—but she’d recovered her stovepipe hat and beaded collar. She squinted at me with flint-chip eyes. “You won’t last three days out on the plains, girl. I’d stay, if I were you.”

  She thought I was slinking away into the hills, running away from my guilt. I felt my shoulders straightening and a smile curving my lips. “Thank you, but there are things I need to attend to back home. Back through the Door.”

  Watching the realization settle over her face was like watching a woman age in reverse. Her spine unbent and her eyes went round with hope. “No,” she breathed.

  “We opened it last night,” I told her softly. “We didn’t want to wake everyone, so we—well, Samuel—was going to tell you in the morning.”

  Molly closed her eyes, then buried her face in her hands, shoulders heaving. I turned to leave. “Wait.” Her voice was tear-thick and shaky, unlike her usual growl. “I don’t know who or what is chasing you, and I don’t know how it followed you here, but be careful. Sol”—I heard her swallow, choking back grief—“Solomon’s feather, the one he wore in his hair—it’s gone.”

  A chill prickled my spine as I imagined the golden feather clutched in Ilvane’s hand, the horror of being hunted by something you couldn’t see. I made myself nod calmly. “I’m sorry for the loss of the feather. Thank you for warning me.” I adjusted the pillowcase on my shoulder, not looking at her. “Don’t tell Samuel, please. I wouldn’t want him to… worry.”

  Molly Neptune ducked her head. “Good luck, January Scholar.”

  I left her sitting in the warming sunlight, looking up at her city like a mother surveying her sleeping children.

  The Door seemed somehow smaller by day, dark and narrow and terribly lonely. It brushed softly against the grass as I pulled it shut behind me and stepped into the void between the worlds.

  When you travel with money, you follow a smooth, well-worn path through the world. Wood-paneled train cars lead to shiny black cabs, which lead to hotel rooms with velvet curtains, each step effortlessly following the last. When I’d traveled with Jane and Samuel the path had grown narrow and twisting, frequently terrifying.

  Now I was alone, and the only path was the one I left behind me.

  Bad and I stood for a moment in the charred skeleton of the lighthouse, looking through the mist to the pocked and rugged coast. I felt like an explorer at the precipice of some new, wild world, armed only with ink and hope; I felt like my mother.

  Except that she hadn’t been pursued by invisible monsters with fox-toothed smiles. The giddy grin faded from my face.

  I floated my pillowcase on an unburnt plank from the lighthouse and waded back into the icy sea with Bad at my side. Clouds settled like eiderdown around us, a feathered fog that swallowed everything: the sound of my splashing, the sight of the shore, the sun itself. It was only by the rough scrape of stone beneath my fingers that I knew we’d reached the other side.

  We climbed the cliffside on jellied legs, found the road, and began to walk. At least I had boots this time, although I’d had difficulty in identifying them as such when Molly presented them to me—they’d looked more like the remains of small, unfortunate creatures. I thought briefly of the shined, patent-leather shoes Mr. Locke had bought me as a girl, with their narrow toes and stiff heels; I didn’t miss them.

  By midmorning I’d realized fewer trucks or cars were willing to stop for an in-between girl and her vicious-looking dog, without Samuel’s respectable whiteness nearby. People swerved around me without slowing; it was as if I’d fallen through the cracks, slipped down into some invisible underworld that decent people preferred to ignore.

  It was a horse and buggy that eventually stopped beside me, with a jangle of harnesses and a querulous “Dammit, Rosie, I said whoa.” The driver was a raggedy, nearly toothless white woman wearing yellow boots and a strange sort of home-sewn poncho. She let Bad ride in the cart among her potatoes and string beans, and even gifted me a sack of them when she let me off near Brattleboro.

  “Don’t know where you’re headed, but it seems far.” She sniffed, then offered: “Keep your dog close, don’t take rides from men in nice cars, and steer clear of the law.” I suspected she’d fallen through the cracks, too.

  I made it across the New York State line just as the day purpled into dusk. I’d only taken one more ride, perched in the back of an empty logging truck with a dozen or so stolid, sawdusted men who did their best to ignore me. One of them fed Bad the leftover rinds from his bacon sandwich. He raised one hand in a sort of salute when they left me standing at a crossroads.

  I slept that night in a three-sided sheep shed. The sheep baaed suspiciously at us, watching Bad with their queer, sideways eyes, and I fell asleep missing the soft sounds of Jane and Samuel beside me.

  I dreamed of white fingers reaching toward me, and a fox-toothed smile, and Mr. Havemeyer’s voice: They’ll never stop looking for you.

  It took me five days, three hundred miles, a road map stolen from the Albany train station, and at least four near-misses with local law enforcement to reach the western edge of New York State. I might’ve traveled faster, except for the wanted poster.

  I’d stopped at a post office on the second morning to mail Mr. Locke’s letter, after some sweaty-palmed hesitation outside. But he deserved to know I wasn’t trapped forever in a desolate, foreign world, didn’t he? And if he tried to come after me, my letter would lead him on a rather inconvenient detour to Japan. Locke didn’t know there was another way home, a back Door just waiting to be unlocked.

  I pushed the letter across the counter, and then I saw it: a fresh white p
oster tacked to the wall. My own face looked down from it, printed in smeary black and white.

  MISSING CHILD. Miss January Scaller, seventeen, has gone missing from her home in Shelburne, Vermont. Her guardian urgently seeks information relating to her whereabouts. She has a history of hysteria and confusion and should be approached with caution. She may be in the company of a colored woman and an ill-behaved dog. SUBSTANTIAL REWARD OFFERED. Please contact Mr. Cornelius Locke. 1611 Champlain Drive, Shelburne, Vt.

  It was the picture from Mr. Locke’s party, the one my father had never liked. My face looked round and young, and my hair was so ferociously pinned that my eyebrows were slightly raised. My neck stuck out from its starched collar like a turtle tentatively looking out of its shell. I checked my own reflection in the post office window—dust-grimed and sun-darkened, my hair suspended in an unruly knot of braids and twists—and thought it unlikely that anyone would recognize me.

  But still: a chill, creeping fear slunk up my spine at the thought that every stranger on the street might know my name, that every police officer might be looking for the timid girl in the picture. It seemed to me the Society hardly needed their masks and feathers and stolen magics when they had all the mundane mechanisms of civil society at their fingertips.

  I stuck to the winding back roads after that, and took fewer rides.

  By the time I reached Buffalo, though, I was hungry and worn enough to take a risk. I staggered into the front office of the Buffalo Laundry Co. and begged for paying work, half-expecting to be tossed out into the street.

  But apparently there were three girls out sick and a big load of uniforms recently arrived from the reform school, so the proprietress handed me a starched white apron, informed me that I would earn thirty-three and one-half cents every hour, and placed me under the jurisdiction of a muscly, humorless white woman named Big Linda. Big Linda looked me over with an expression of deepest misgiving and set me to shaking out wet clothes and feeding them into the mangle.