The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

  “And keep your damn hands away from the rollers, if you like your fingers,” she added.

  It was hard. (If you don’t think laundry is hard, you’ve never lifted several hundred soaked wool uniforms in the steamy heat of a washroom in July.) The air felt like something you drank rather than breathed, a cottony steam that seemed to pool and slosh in my lungs. My arms were wobbly-feeling and shaky after an hour, aching after two, and numb after three. A few of my not-quite-healed scabs split and wept.

  I kept going, because the week’s travel had taught me that much: how to keep going even when your hips ache and your dog’s limp has become a three-legged hop; even when all you found for dinner were three unripe apples; even when every stranger and every gust of wind might be your enemy, finally catching up with you.

  And yet—here I was. Sweating and aching in the bowels of the Buffalo Laundry Co., but alive, unbound, entirely myself for the first time in my life. And entirely alone. I had a brief vision of olive hands flashing in the night, dark eyes lit with a cigarette glow—and felt a sudden hollowness in my chest, a rawness like the space left behind by a pulled tooth.

  No one spoke to me that entire shift except a dark-skinned woman with a half-moon smile and a southern drawl. The smile vanished when she saw me. She raised her chin at me.

  “And just what exactly happened to you?” I shrugged. She looked down at my dust-caked skirt, my scarecrow frame. “Been walking a while on an empty stomach, I’d say.”

  I nodded.

  “Got more walking to do?” I nodded again. She sucked her teeth pensively, dumped another load of clothes into my cart, and left shaking her head.

  Big Linda told me I could sleep in the rag pile—“But only for tonight, mind, this isn’t a damn hotel”—and Bad and I slept curled around one another like a pair of birds in a lye-scented nest. We woke to the first-shift bell ringing in the predawn black, and I discovered two things waiting beside our nest: a greasy ham hock with all the fat and gristle still hanging off it for Bad, and an entire pan of corn bread for me.

  I worked another half shift, doing rough multiplication in my head, then marched to the front office and told the proprietress that I was very sorry but I had to leave now, and could I please have my payment in the form of a check. She pursed her lips and offered her thoughts on vagrants, layabouts, and girls who didn’t know a good thing when it came to them—but she wrote the check.

  In the alley outside I dug the ink pen out of my pillowcase and pressed the check against the brick wall. I added a wobbly zero and a few extra letters, biting my lip. The check fluttered in a sudden wind that wasn’t there, the lettering blurring and curling, and I rested my head against the steam-warmed brick, dizzied. It shouldn’t have worked—the ink was a different color and crammed rather obviously into the blank space, and whoever heard of a laundress with a $40 check rather than a $4 one—but I’d believed it as I wrote it, and so did the bank teller.

  By midafternoon I was boarding the New York Central Line, a precious train ticket clutched in my hand with the letters LOUISVILLE, KY. printed in neat red ink.

  My pillowcase looked especially stained and grubby beside the gleaming leather suitcases in the luggage rack, like an underdressed party guest hoping to go unnoticed. I felt sort of stained and grubby myself; every other passenger was wearing pressed linen and high-necked gowns, their hats perched at fashionable angles and their shoes gleaming with fresh polish.

  A rumbling shudder rolled through the carriage, like a dragon shaking itself from sleep, and the train pulled out of the shade of Buffalo Central and into the lazy sunlight of a summer afternoon. I pressed my forehead against the warming glass and slept.

  I dreamed, or maybe just remembered: a different train heading in the same direction, ten years previously. A scrubby town on the Mississippi; a blue Door standing alone in a field; a city that smelled of salt and cedar.

  My father’s city. My mother’s city, if she was somehow alive. Could it ever be my city? Assuming I could open the Door again, even though it was nothing now but a pile of ash. Assuming the Society didn’t get me first.

  I dozed and woke, interrupted by the roll-and-stop of the train at every station, the porter’s shouted announcements and periodic demands to see my ticket, the thud and shuffle of passengers departing and arriving. None of them sat next to me, but I felt their eyes on me. Or thought I did; several times I flicked my head sideways, trying to catch them staring, but their faces were all politely averted. Bad lay tense over my feet, ears pricked.

  I slipped a hand into my pillowcase and held the silver coin-knife tight in my fist.

  The train sat unmoving for a full half hour in Cincinnati while the carriage grew stuffy and crowded with new passengers. Eventually a porter came shoving through the aisle. He strung a chain across the back of the car and hung a neat white placard on it: COLORED SEATING.

  There was no Mr. Locke to protect me now. No private compartment with meals delivered by smiling porters, no comfortable veil of money between me and the rest of the world.

  The porter strode back down the aisle prodding people with a stubby baton: a brown-skinned woman and her three children, an old man with a poof of white hair, a pair of young men with broad shoulders and mutinous expressions. The porter rapped his baton against the luggage rack. “This train abides by state law, boys, and the next stop’s in Kentucky. You can either move back or get off and walk, doesn’t bother me which.” They slunk to the back.

  The porter hesitated at my seat, squinting at my red-glazed skin as if consulting a mental color chart. But then he looked at my grimy hem and scarred arm and entirely disreputable dog and jerked his head to the back.

  Apparently, without money I wasn’t perfectly unique or in-between or odd-colored; I was simply colored. I felt something cold settle over me at the thought, a weight of rules and laws and dangers that hung on my limbs, pressed on my lungs.

  I shuffled to the back without protest. I didn’t plan to be stuck in this stupid world with these stupid rules for much longer, anyhow.

  I clung to the end of an overcrowded bench in the very back, the coin damp in my fist. It was only once the train was moving again that I noticed Bad staring fixedly into the aisle beside me, the faintest burr of a growl in his throat. There was no one there, but I thought I could hear a soft, steady rustling, almost like breathing.

  I thought of Solomon’s missing golden feather and clutched my pillowcase tighter, feeling the corner of my father’s book press into my stomach. I kept my eyes carefully on the blue-green roll of the countryside.

  Forty minutes later the porter shouted, “Turners Station, last stop till Louisville,” from the front of the carriage. The train slowed. The door rolled open. I hesitated, barely breathing, and then dove for the exit with Bad scrabbling behind me. I felt my shoulder slam into something solid in midair, heard a muttered curse—

  And then there was something sharp and cold pressed against my throat. I stood very still.

  “Not this time,” hissed a voice in my ear. “Let’s get out of this crowd, shall we?” Something prodded me forward and I stumbled onto the wood-planked platform. I was marched into the station, his breath hot against my ear and the knife tip biting into my neck. Bad watched me with worried, glaring eyes. Not yet, I thought to him.

  The bodiless voice turned me through a peeling white door labeled LADIES and into a dim, green-tiled room. “Now, turn around slowly, there’s a good girl—”

  Except I wasn’t a good girl anymore.

  I drove my fist up and back over my shoulder, the coin-knife wedged between my knuckles. There was a terrible, wet pop beneath my hand and a shattering scream. The blade dragged away from my throat in a hot line and went skittering across the tile. “Damn you—”

  Bad, seeming to decide that even invisible creatures could be bitten with sufficient effort, snarled and snapped at the air. His teeth closed around a mouthful of something and he growled in satisfaction. I dove for the knife
, held it tight in blood-slick hands, and called Bad. He trotted to my side, licking red from his lips and glaring at his invisible prey.

  Except he wasn’t quite invisible anymore. If I squinted I could almost see a racked shimmer in the air, a heaving chest and a thin face oozing with dark wetness. A single, hateful eye was fixed on me.

  “Your compass, Mr. Ilvane. Give it to me.”

  He hissed, low and vicious, but I raised the knife toward him and he dug something copper-colored out of his pocket. He slid it resentfully across the floor.

  I grabbed for it without taking my eyes away from him. “I’m leaving now. I’d advise you not to follow me again.” My voice hardly shook at all.

  He gave a dark crack of laughter. “And where will you run to, little girl? You’ve no money, no friends left to protect you, no father—”

  “The trouble with you people,” I observed, “is that you believe in permanence. An orderly world will remain so; a closed door will stay closed.” I shook my head, reaching for the door. “It’s very… limiting.”

  I left.

  Out in the genteel bustle of the station I pressed my shoulder faux-casually against the bathroom door and fished Samuel’s pen out of my pillowcase-sack. I held it tight for a moment, feeling an echo of remembered warmth, then dug the tip into the peeling paint of the door.

  The door locks, and there is no key.

  The words were scratched deeply into the paint, jittering along the wood grain. The dull scrape of metal on metal sounded through the door, a permanent sort of clunk, and I gave a little gasp at the sudden weight of exhaustion pulling at my limbs. I leaned my forehead against the wood, eyes closed, and raised the pen again.

  The door is forgotten, I wrote.

  And then I was blinking up from the floor, knees aching where I’d fallen. I lay there for a while, unmoving, wondering if the stationmaster would come investigate the poor vagrant girl collapsed on his floor, or if I might just sleep for an hour or so. My eyes ached; my throat was stiff with dried blood.

  But—it had worked. The bathroom door had become vague and blurred, something too mundane for my eyes to linger on. No one else in the little station seemed to see the door at all.

  I vented a small, tired ha, and wondered how long it would last. Long enough to run, I supposed. Providing I could stand up.

  I dragged myself to a bench on the platform and waited with my red-inked ticket clutched in one hand. I boarded the next train south.

  I sat, watching the country turn rich and wet, the hills rising and diving like great emerald whales, and thought: I’m coming, Father.

  My Mother’s Door

  The last three hundred miles reeled past as if I were wearing a pair of those magical boots that take you seven leagues forward with every step. I remember them only as a series of jarring thuds.

  Thud. I am stepping off the train into the sweating sprawl of Union Train Station in Louisville. Even the sky is busy, a crisscrossed mess of electric lines and church spires and shimmery waves of heat. Bad presses close to my knees, hating it.

  Thud. I’m standing in a dusty lot outside the station begging for a ride from a truck with BLUE GRASS BREWING printed on the side in black block letters. The driver tells me to go back where I came from; his friend makes obscene kissing sounds.

  Thud. Bad and I are swaying westward in a creaking wagon piled head-high with earthy, green-smelling hemp stalks. A solemn black man and his solemn young daughter sit on the bench up front. Their clothes have that calicoed, mismatched look that only happens when fabric has been patched and repatched until almost nothing original remains, and they look at me with worried, warning eyes.

  Thud. Ninley, finally.

  It had both changed and not changed in the last decade. So had the world, I supposed.

  It was still scrubby and reluctant-looking, and the townsfolk still glared in aggrieved half squints, but the streets had been paved. Automobiles putted up and down them, alongside newly rich men in three-piece suits with embarrassingly large pocket watches. The river was crowded with chugging steamers and flatboats. Some sort of mill—a hulking, ugly thing—now brooded on the shore. Steam and smoke hung above us, transformed into oily pink clouds by the setting sun. Progress and Prosperity, as Mr. Locke would say.

  I’d been driven and hunted on the journey here, but now that I’d arrived I found myself strangely reluctant to take the last few steps. I bought myself a sack of peanuts at Junior’s River Supply with the last of my laundry money and found a tobacco-slimed bench to sit on. Bad perched like a bronze sentinel at my feet.

  A shift bell rang, and I watched thin-faced women scurrying in and out of the mill, their fingers curled into callused claws at their sides. I watched the bent black backs of men loading coal onto docked steamers, and the rainbow sheen of oil on the river’s surface.

  Eventually a sweaty little man in a stained apron emerged from the cookhouse to tell me the bench was for paying customers, and to imply heavily that I should leave Ninley before nightfall if I knew what was good for me. It would never have happened if Mr. Locke had been with me.

  But then, if Mr. Locke had been with me, I probably wouldn’t have lingered insolently on the bench, staring at the man with my hand on the back of Bad’s buzzing skull. I wouldn’t have stood and stepped slightly too close to him, and savored the way he shriveled like something left on the windowsill too long. I certainly wouldn’t have curled my lip and said, “I was leaving anyway. Sir.”

  The little man scurried back to his kitchen and I sauntered back toward the center of town. I caught a wavery glimpse of myself in a plate-glass window—mud-caked, oversized boots, sweat drawing damp lines through road dust at my temples, pinkish-white scars scrolling haphazardly from wrist to shoulder—and it occurred to me that my seven-year-old self—that dear temerarious girl—would’ve been rather taken with my seventeen-year-old self.

  Perhaps the manager at the Grand Riverfront Hotel recognized me, too, because he didn’t immediately order my vagabondish self thrown out of his establishment. Or maybe Bad made people hesitate to throw me anywhere.

  “Good evening. I’m trying to find the, uh, Larson family farm. South of here, I think?”

  His eyes widened at the name, but he hesitated, as if debating the morality of directing a creature like me toward an innocent family. “What’s your business?” he compromised.

  “They’re… family. On my mother’s side.”

  He gave me a you’re-not-a-very-good-liar look, but apparently the Larson women hadn’t inspired sufficient loyalty in the townsfolk to keep him from directing me south, past the mill, two miles down. He shrugged. “Doesn’t look like much, these days. But she’s still in there, last we heard.”

  Those final two miles were longer than regular miles. They felt stretched and fragile beneath my feet, as if a too-heavy footfall might shatter them and leave me stranded in the nowheresville of the Threshold. Maybe I was just tired of walking. Maybe I was afraid. It’s one thing to read a storybook version of your mother’s life and choose to believe it; it’s quite another to knock on a stranger’s door and say, Hello, I have it on good authority that you’re my great (great?) aunts.

  I let my fingers graze Bad’s spine as we walked. Dusk settled over our shoulders like a damp purple blanket. The river—the churn and clank of boat traffic, the shush of water, and the tangy smell of catfish and mud—was slowly beaten back by honeysuckle and cicadas and some bird that cooed the same three syllables in a lilting circle.

  It was all so familiar and so foreign. I pictured a young girl in a blue cotton dress running down this same road on cinnamon-stick legs. Then I pictured another girl, white and square-jawed, running before her. Adelaide. Mother.

  I would’ve missed it if I hadn’t been looking: a narrow dirt drive crowded on either side by briars and untrimmed boughs. Even once I’d followed the track to its end I was uncertain—who would live in such a huddled, bent-backed cabin, half-eaten by ivy and some sort of fe
ral climbing rose? The wooden-shake shingles were green with moss; the barn had collapsed entirely.

  But a single ancient mule still stood in the yard in a three-legged doze, and a few chickens roosted in the remains of the barn, clucking sleepily to themselves. A light—dim, mostly obscured by dingy white curtains—still flickered in the kitchen window.

  I climbed the sagging front steps and stood unmoving before the front door. Bad sat beside me and leaned against my leg.

  It was an old door, nothing but a series of gray planks so time-worn the grain of the wood had weathered into ridges like the whorls of fingerprints. The handle was a strip of oil-dark leather; candlelight peered through the cracks and knotholes like an inquisitive housewife.

  It was my mother’s door, and her mother’s door.

  I exhaled, raised my hand to knock, and hesitated at the last moment because what if it was all a beautiful lie, a fairy-tale spell that would be broken the moment my hand touched the unyielding reality of that door—what if an old man answered and said “Adelaide who?” Or what if Adelaide herself opened the door and it turned out she’d found her way back into this world after all but never come looking for me?

  The door opened before I brought myself to touch it.

  A very old, very querulous-looking woman stood on the threshold, glaring up at me with an expression that was (impossibly, dizzyingly) familiar. It was a grandmotherly, young-people-these-days sort of look, as seamed and wrinkled as walnut meat. I had a disorienting sense of having seen it from a much lower vantage point, perhaps as a child—

  And then I remembered: the old woman I’d bumped into when I was seven. The woman who’d stared at me with an expression like a lightning-struck tree and asked me just who the hell I was.

  I’d run from her then. I did not run now.

  Her eyes—red-rimmed, weepy, blurred with blue-white clouds—found mine and widened. Her mouth untwisted. “Adelaide, child, what’d you do to your hair?”