The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

  His voice fell to a rumbling whisper. “Help us, dear child. Join us.”

  It was well past noon now, and our shadows had begun to creep cautiously out from under us, shattering into dark spindles in the tall grass. The river and the cicadas made a kind of rushing thrum beneath the soles of my feet, as if the earth were humming to itself.

  Mr. Locke breathed, waiting.

  Words pressed at the roof of my mouth, words like Thank you or Yes, of course, sir or maybe Give me some time. They were pleased, flattered words, oozing with girlish gratitude that he loved me and trusted me and wanted me by his side.

  I wondered if they were my words or Mr. Locke’s, delivered to me through his white-eyed gaze. The thought was sick-making, dizzying—infuriating. “No. Thank you.” I hissed it between locked teeth.

  Locke clucked his tongue. “Don’t be imprudent, girl. Do you think you’d be permitted to wander freely, with your habit of opening things that ought to be left closed? The Society would not suffer such a creature to live.”

  “Mr. Ilvane already indicated as much. As did Mr. Havemeyer.”

  Locke huffed in exasperation. “Yes, I’m terribly sorry about Theodore and Bartholomew. They were both given to extremes, and to violent solutions. No one will miss Theodore much, I assure you. I’ll admit there were some concerns about Miss Whatsit and your little grocer boy, but I’ve dealt with them now.”

  Dealt with—but they were supposed to be safe, supposed to be hidden in Arcadia—a soft wailing sound rang in my ears, as if I were hearing someone crying from a long ways away. I stepped forward, half stumbling on something buried in the ash pile.

  “Jane—S-Samuel—” I could barely speak their names.

  “Are both perfectly fine!” I went weak with relief and found myself kneeling in the ash with Bad propping me up on one side. “We found them creeping down the coast of Maine after you. We hardly caught a glimpse of Miss Whatsit—awfully quick on her feet, the thieving bitch—but we’ll find her eventually, I’m sure. The boy, though, was quite cooperative.”

  A ringing silence. The cicadas hummed and thrilled. “What did you do to him?” It was a whisper.

  “My, my, is this a crush, after a decade of Little Miss Leave Me Alone I’m Reading?”If you’ve killed him, I will write a knife into my hand, I swear I will—“Calm yourself, January. My methods of interrogation are far less, hm, primitive than Havemeyer’s. I simply asked him a few questions about you, realized you’d unwisely told him all about Society business, and told him to forget the entire affair. Which he obligingly did. We sent him trotting off home without a care in the world.”

  Mr. Locke’s smile—comforting, assured—told me he didn’t understand what he’d done.

  He didn’t understand the horror of it, the violation. He didn’t understand that reaching into someone’s mind and sculpting it like living clay is a species of violence far worse than Havemeyer’s.

  Was this what he’d done to me, my whole life? Forced me to become someone else? Someone biddable and demure and good, who didn’t run off into hayfields or play on the lakeshore with the grocer’s son or beg on a weekly basis to go adventuring with her father?

  Be a good girl, and mind your place. Oh, how I’d tried. How I’d worked to fit myself inside the narrow confines of the girl Mr. Locke told me to be, how I’d mourned my failures.

  He didn’t understand how much I hated him then, as I knelt in the ashes and tall grasses, my tears turning to muddy paste on my cheeks.

  “So you see, everything is taken care of. Join the Society and all this nonsense will be forgotten. The invitation is still open, just as I promised.” I could barely hear him over my roaring, keening fury. “Don’t you see you’re meant to do this? I’ve raised you at my side, let you see the world, taught you everything I could. I never felt it would be entirely wise to—ah”—Locke coughed in brief embarrassment—“to have a child of my own—what if he was Birthrighted? What if he came to challenge my rule? But just look at you! My adopted child has turned out to be nearly as willful, nearly as powerful as any true-born son of mine could be.” His eyes on me were lit with pride, like an owner admiring his best horse. “I don’t know precisely what you’re capable of, I admit, but let us find out together! Join us. Help us protect this world.”

  I knew when Mr. Locke protected something he locked it away, stifled it, kept it preserved like an amputated limb in a glass case. He’d been protecting me my entire life, and it’d nearly killed me, or at least my soul.

  I wouldn’t let him continue to do that to the world. I wouldn’t. But how could I not, when he could remake my will with a mere look? I buried my hands in the weedy ashes around me, an unvoiced wail caught in my throat.

  It is at that moment I made two interesting discoveries: The first was a hunk of charcoal lurking beneath the surface layer of rain-leached ash and mud. The second was the burnt, rotting remains of my pocket diary. The diary my father had placed in the blue chest a decade ago, just for me.

  The cover, once softest calfskin, was now stiff and cracked, burnt black around the edges. Only the first three letters of my name were still visible (see the unfurled curve of that J, like a rope dangling out a prison window?). Pieces of it crumbled and flaked away as I opened it; the pages inside were fire-chewed and dirty.

  “What’s that? What—put that down, January. I mean it.” Locke’s feet stumped toward me. I brought the charcoal to the page, made a single sinuous line. God, I hope this works.

  “I’m not joking—” A sweaty hand circled my chin and forced my face upward. I met those pale, cutting eyes. “Stop, January.”

  It was like being submerged in a winter river. An incalculable weight crushed me downward, pressed me, tugged at my clothes and limbs and urged them in a single direction—and wouldn’t it be so much easier if I just let the river take me, instead of gritting my jaw and refusing—I could go back home again, could curl back into my former good-girl place like a loyal hound at her master’s feet—

  It became a question, as I stared into Mr. Locke’s bone-pale eyes, of how thoroughly he’d succeeded in making me be a good girl who knew her place. Had his will entirely eclipsed my own? Had he scrubbed away my natural self and left nothing but a china-doll version behind? Or had he merely stuffed me into a costume and forced me to play a part?

  I thought abruptly of Mr. Stirling—the eerie emptiness of him, as if there were nothing at all lurking beneath his good-valet mask. Was that my future? Was there anything left of that obstinate, temerarious girl-child who found a Door in the field, all those years ago?

  I thought of my desperate escape from Brattleboro; the midnight swim to the abandoned lighthouse, and my wandering, dangerous route southward. I thought of every time I’d disobeyed Wilda or snuck a story paper into Locke’s office rather than read The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; of the hours I’d spent dreaming of adventure and mystery and magic. I thought of myself here, now, kneeling in the dirt of my mother’s home in defiance of Havemeyer and the Society and Mr. Locke himself—and rather suspected there was.

  Could I choose, now, who I wanted to be?

  The river surged and rushed against me, willing me down, down, down—but it was as if I’d turned into something impossibly heavy, a lead statue of a girl and her dog standing together, unbothered by the crushing river.

  I pulled against Locke’s hand on my chin, broke away from his eyes. The charcoal moved on the page. SHE—

  Locke stumbled backward and I heard him scrabbling at his waist. I ignored him. SHE WRITES—

  Then came the soft shush of metal on leather and a syncopated click-click. I knew that click; I’d heard it in the Zappia family cabin just before the thunderclap of sound had killed Havemeyer; I’d heard it in the fields of Arcadia, when I’d fired wildly after Ilvane.

  “January, I don’t quite know what you’re doing, but I can’t allow it.” I noted, distantly, that I’d never heard Mr. Locke’s voice shake before, but
I couldn’t seem to care; I was distracted by the thing in his hands.

  A revolver. Not the old, beloved Enfield that Jane had stolen, but a much sleeker, newer-looking gun. I stared dumbly down the black-tunnel barrel of it.

  “Just put it down, dear.” He sounded so calm and authoritative that he might have been chairing a board meeting, except for the subtle tremor of his voice. He was afraid of something—me? Or Doors, and the ever-present threat that something more powerful than himself was lurking on the other side? Maybe all powerful men are cowards at heart, because in their hearts they know power is temporary.

  He smiled, or attempted to smile; his mouth stretched in a bare-toothed grimace. “These doors of yours are meant to stay closed, I’m afraid.”

  No, they aren’t. Worlds were never meant to be prisons, locked and suffocating and safe. Worlds were supposed to be great rambling houses with all the windows thrown open and the wind and summer rain rushing through them, with magic passages in their closets and secret treasure chests in their attics. Locke and his Society had spent a century rushing madly around that house, boarding up windows and locking doors.

  I was so very tired of locked doors.

  SHE WRITES A DOOR OF—

  I suppose, looking back, that I hadn’t ever been properly afraid of Mr. Locke. My childish heart refused to believe that the man who had sat beside me on a hundred different trains and steamers and ferries, who smelled of cigars and leather and money, who was always there when my own parents weren’t—could ever really hurt me.

  I might even have been right, because Mr. Locke didn’t shoot me. Instead, I saw the black glint of the barrel swing to the right. It paused, pointed at Bad, at the spot where his hairs met in a ridged seam down his chest.

  I moved. My scream was eaten by a booming crack.

  And then Mr. Locke was yelling, swearing at me, and I was running my fingers over Bad’s chest whispering oh God no and Bad was whimpering but there was no wound, no hole, his skin was as smooth and whole as it had been before—

  Then where was all this smeary red coming from?

  Oh.

  “Can’t you ever, just once, mind your damned place—”

  I sat back on my heels, watching blood slide down the dirt-dark skin of my arm in neat runnels, like a street map to a foreign city. Bad’s whiskers trailed through it as he investigated the dark hole in my shoulder, his ears pulled flat in concern. I tried to reach my left hand up to comfort him, but it was like tugging a broken puppet string.

  It didn’t hurt, or maybe it did hurt but the pain didn’t want to be pushy about it. It waited politely at the edges of my vision, like a well-bred houseguest.

  I’d dropped my charcoal. My sentence lay unfinished beside a smallish pool of redness forming at the end of my fingertips.

  Well. It would have to do, because I certainly wasn’t lingering in this vicious, white-toothed world where the people you loved could do such terrible things to you.

  I’ve always been good at running away.

  I extended my finger, almost lazily, and drew it through the muddy puddle of blood. I wrote in the earth itself, in red-mud letters that glistened in the summer afternoon. The cicadas made the bones of my hand buzz.

  SHE WRITES A DOOR OF ASH. IT OPENS.

  I believed in it the way people believe in God or gravity: with such unswerving intensity they hardly notice they’re doing it. I believed I was a word-worker, and that my will could reshape the very warp and weft of reality itself. I believed that Doors existed in rare places of resonance between worlds, where the skies of two planets whispered against one another. I believed I would see my father again.

  An eastward wind blew suddenly up from the riverbank, but it didn’t smell catfishy and damp like it should have. Instead it smelled dry and cool and spice-laden, like cinnamon and cedar.

  The wind scudded over the ash pile. It swirled, like one of those strange dust devils you see sometimes teasing leaves into the air, and ashes and rain-rotted charcoal and dirt flung themselves upward. They hung for a moment between Mr. Locke and me, an arch framed in blue summer sky. I saw Locke’s face slacken, his gun wavering.

  Then the ash began to… spread? Melt? It was as if each speck of dirt or char were actually a drop of ink in water, and now delicate tendrils were spiraling toward one another, connecting, melding, darkening, forming a curved line in the air until—

  An archway stood before me. It looked strangely fragile, as if it might crumble back to ash at the slightest touch, but it was a Door. I could already smell the sea.

  I reached for my discarded pillowcase and climbed unsteadily to my feet, exhaustion blurring my eyes, bits of dirt and grass embedded in my kneecaps. I saw Mr. Locke’s grip seize around the revolver again. “Now, just, just stop. We can still make this right. You can still come back with me, come home—everything can still be fine—”

  That was a lie; I was dangerous and he was a coward, and cowards don’t let dangerous things live in their spare bedrooms. Sometimes they don’t let them live at all.

  I stepped toward the ash door and met Mr. Locke’s eyes for the last time. They were white and barren as a pair of moons. I had a sudden childish urge to ask him a question—Did you ever really love me?—but then the barrel of the gun drifted upward again and I thought, I suppose not.

  I dove through the ash archway with Bad leaping at my heels and my heart thud-thudding in my chest and the crack of a second shot ringing in my ears, following me into the black.

  The Open Doors

  I had entered the Threshold four times before. Perhaps, I thought as I fell into the echoing black, the fifth time won’t be so bad.

  I was, of course, wrong. Just as the sky doesn’t turn less blue the more times you see it, so the atomless, airless nothing of the space between worlds does not grow less terrifying.

  The darkness swallowed me like a living thing. I tilted forward, falling but not falling because in order to fall there has to be an up and a down and in the Threshold there’s only the endless black nothing. I felt Bad brush past me, legs paddling ineffectually against the emptiness, and scooped my arm around him. He kept his eyes fixed on me. It occurred to me that dogs are probably never lost in the in-between, because they always know precisely where they are going.

  And so, this time, did I. I felt my father’s book wedged tight against my ribs, and followed the cedar-and-salt smell of his home world, my home world, toward that white-stone city.

  I could still feel the hungry tugging of the darkness, but it was as if something bright and shining in me had finally unfurled and filled me to my edges. I was weak, riddled with hurts—betrayal, abandonment, the tiny black hole in my shoulder, a new something-very-wrong in my left hip that I didn’t want to think about—but I was entirely myself, and I was not afraid.

  Until I felt a hand close around my ankle.

  I didn’t think he would follow me. I want you to understand that—I didn’t mean for it to happen, any of it. I thought he would stay behind in his safe little world and crush my Door back to ash and char. I thought he would sigh regretfully, cross out my entry in his mental ledger book (In-between girl, magic powers suspected, value unknown) and then go back to his twin passions of amassing wealth and closing Doors. But he didn’t.

  Maybe he loved me, after all.

  I think I even caught a glimpse of love when I turned back to look at his face—or at least a possessive, conditional, desire-to-own—but it was quickly subsumed beneath his towering fury. There is nothing quite like the anger of someone very powerful who has been thwarted by someone who was supposed to be weak.

  His fingers burrowed into my flesh. His other hand still held the shining revolver, and I saw his thumb move. There was no sound in the Threshold, but I imagined I could hear that ominous click-click again. No no no—I could feel myself slowing, floundering in the black, fear blurring my goal—

  But I had forgotten Bad. My first friend, my dearest companion, my terrible dog who ha
d always seen the Please Do Not Ever Bite list as a fundamentally negotiable document. He arched backward, yellow eyes gleaming in the fierce joy of an animal doing what he loves best, and buried his teeth in Locke’s wrist.

  Locke’s mouth opened in a soundless scream. He let go of me. And then he was floating, falling alone in the empty vastness of the Threshold and his eyes had gone white and wide as china plates.

  For all the Doors he’d closed, I wondered how long it had been since he’d stepped through one, since he’d seen the Threshold. He seemed to have forgotten his rage, his direction, the gun in his hand—now there was nothing in his face but wild terror.

  He could still have followed me.

  But he was too afraid. He was afraid of change and uncertainty, of the Threshold itself. Of things outside his power, and things in between.

  I watched the darkness nibble, delicately, at the edges of him. His right hand and his revolver vanished. His entire arm. His eyes—his powerful, pale eyes, which had brought him such wealth and such status, which had subjugated enemies and persuaded allies and even reshaped stubborn young girls, temporarily—could do nothing against the darkness.

  I turned away. It was not an easy turning-away; a part of me still wanted to reach my hand back to him, to save him; another part of me wanted to watch him vanish, piece by piece, to pay for every betrayal and every lie. But I felt my home world still waiting for me, certain and steady as the North Star, and I could not go toward it if I were still looking back.

  My bare foot found solid, warm stone.

  I knew nothing but sunlight, and the smell of the sea.

  It was sunset when I opened my eyes. I could see the sun sinking like a squat red coal into the western ocean. Everything was soft around the edges, lit by a pinkish-gold glow that reminded me for a sleepy moment of the quilt my father had given me when I was a girl. Oh, Father, I miss you.