The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

  Samuel wonders if perhaps this young woman is a bit mad. “Yes. But Mr. Locke has been away for months now—the house is empty, the staff have started to leave—there are rumors about his will, about his return—”

  The woman flaps an unworried hand. “Oh, he won’t be returning. And his will has just recently been, ah, discovered.” Her smile is sly, mischievous, with a little curl of vengeance at its edges. “Once the lawyers get done signing things and siphoning off as much money as they can, the house will be mine. I think it’ll suit my purposes rather well, once I get rid of his ghastly collections.” Samuel tries to picture this wild young woman as the rightful heiress to Locke’s fortune, fails, and wonders if perhaps she is mad and a criminal. He wonders why this possibility doesn’t bother him more. “I’m thinking I ought to return his things to their proper owners, where possible, which will require a great deal of travel to some very strange and surprising places.” Her eyes spark and flare at the thought.

  “We’ll go to East Africa first, of course. We’ll need Jane to show us the precise spot, but I imagine she’ll turn up—have you seen her, by chance?” She continues before Samuel can answer. “I’ll miss her terribly once she goes home, but I might be able to do something about that… There are so many doors in Locke House, after all—who’s to say where they lead?”

  She squints her eyes like a woman redecorating her parlor. “One to Africa, one to Kentucky, maybe even one to a certain cabin on the north end of the lake, if you like. They’ll cost me, but it would be worth the price. And I’m getting stronger, I think.”

  “Ah,” says Samuel.

  That summer-bright smile returns, shining at him like a small sun. “Read fast, Samuel. We have work to do.” She reaches up, quite fearlessly, and touches his cheek. Her fingers are ember-warm against his cold skin, and she is very close to him now and her eyes are alight and the hole in his heart is howling, chattering, aching—

  And he sees her face, just for a moment, peering down at him from the third story of Locke House. January. The word is a door creaking open in his chest, pouring light into that terrible absence.

  She kisses him—a soft heat, so fleeting he isn’t sure whether he imagined it—and turns away. Samuel finds himself entirely unable to speak.

  He watches the woman and her dog walk back down the alley. She stops and draws her finger through the air, as if she were writing something on the sky. The mist swirls and snakes around her like a great pale cat. It draws itself into a shape like an archway or a door.

  She steps through it, and is gone.

  Acknowledgments

  Books, like babies, require villages. Through a combination of luck, privilege, and witchcraft, I happen to have the best village in the history of the world. This, I am afraid, is simple math.

  I am grateful to my agent, Kate McKean, who answered every email with patience and grace, even the ones with bullet points and color coding and extraneous historical statistics. To Nivia Evans, an editor who knows the difference between doors and Doors, and whose chief business is building more of them for readers to walk through. And to Emily Byron, Ellen Wright, Andy Ball, Amy Schneider, and the entire Orbit/Redhook team, who know how to make those Doors shine on the shelf.

  To Jonah Sutton-Morse, Ziv Wities, and Laura Blackwell, the first people to read this book who weren’t contractually bound to be kind through either blood or marriage, but who were kind anyway.

  To the history departments of Berea College and the University of Vermont, who should not be held accountable for my fanciful use of fact, but who should probably be blamed for the footnotes.

  To my mother, for giving us ten thousand worlds for the choosing—Middle Earth and Narnia, Tortall and Hyrule, Barrayar and Jeep and Pern—and my brothers for wandering through them with me. To my father for believing we could build our own, and for standing beside me in that overgrown hayfield in western Kentucky.

  To Finn, who was born in the exact middle of this book, and Felix, who was born at the very end. Neither of them helped in the slightest way, except to trample around in my heart, toppling walls and letting in the light.

  And to Nick, first and last and always. Because you can’t write your heart out until you’ve found it.

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  1. Previous scholars have been quite successful in collecting and documenting such stories, but they have failed to believe them, and so have failed to find the single artifact that unites every myth: doors.

  See James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Second Edition (London: Macmillan and Co. Limited, 1900).

  2. As other scholars have noted (see Klaus Bergnon, “An Essay on Destiny and Blood-right in Medieval Works,” delivered to the American Antiquarian Society, 1872), the significance of blood and parentage is an oft-repeated assumption in many fairy tales, myths, and fables.

  3. This theory—described in the preface as conclusion iii—is based on decades of field research, but it is also indirectly supported by many works in Western scholarship.

  Consider, for example, the Ystoria Mongalorum, a well-respected work of early European exploration detailing the journey of John of Plano Carpini to the Mongol court in the 1240s. In it, Carpini argues that a great change had come among the Tartars several decades previously, which could not be accounted for by reasonable means. He reported a popular Mongol myth that their Great Khan had disappeared for a time as a child, walking through a cursed door in a cave and not returning for seven years. Perhaps, Carpini theorized, he had spent the time in “a world not his own,” and returned with the terrible wisdom necessary to conquer the Asiatic continent.

  Perhaps one cannot walk through a door and back out again without changing the world.

  4. I spent some time in the region researching these phenomena after speaking with the LeBlancs. It seems to me a variation of the usual hag story—old women who prey on younger people, sucking their blood or breath, perhaps even stealing their skin and going “riding” for the night. I’ve encountered them more often on the islands off the coast of Georgia, where the phrase hag-ridden is both dire and common.

  Adelaide Larson was unaware of the universality of the story. She did not find her destinations by scholarly deduction or painstaking labor but by a wanderer’s less certain compass.

  5. She is, perhaps, an unlikely character for a daring explorer—a poor, uneducated girl of no particular distinction. But the literature I’ve collected on the subject seems to indicate that doors do not tend to attract the kinds of explorers and trailblazers we might anticipate—those like Dr. Livingstone or Mr. Boone who have charged bravely into the frontier. More often, I find fellow travelers among the poor and wretched, the unwanted and homeless; those people, in short, who scurry along the margins of the world and look for ways out.

  Consider Thomas Aikenhead, a young man both an orphan and a cripple, who published an ill-advised manifesto suggesting that heaven was an actual place located just on the other side of a small shabby door in an old Scottish church. He allowed for the possibility that the place was actually hell, or perhaps purgatory, but concluded that it was certainly a “warm, sunny place, much preferable to Scotland.” He was hanged within the year for blasphemy.

  Thomas Aikenhead, “A Tract on Magick and the Entrance to Heaven,” 1695.

  6. There is, of course, no such thing as a fallen woman, unless we are speaking of a woman who recently tripped on the stairs. One of the most difficult elements of this world is the way its social rules are simultaneously rigid and arbitrary. It is impermissible to engage in physical love before binding legal marriage, unless one is a young man of means. Men must be bold and assertive, but only if they are light-skinned. Any persons may fall in love regardless of station, but only if one is a woman and the other a man. I urge you not to navigate your own life by such faulty borders, my d
ear. There are, after all, other worlds.

  7. Consider all the stories of missing children, oubliettes, bottomless holes, ships sailing off the edges of oceans and into nothingness. They are not tales of journeys or passings-through; they are tales of sudden, irrevocable ending.

  It is my belief that the traveler’s character plays a role in their ultimate success or failure. Consider Edith Bland’s seemingly innocent The Door to Kyriel: Five English schoolchildren discover a magic door that takes them to a new world. As the children return home, the youngest and most fearful of them falls into a “great darkness” and is never heard from again. Critics considered it too grim and strange for healthy children.

  I consider it an advisement: when one enters a door, one must be brave enough to see the other side.

  Edith Bland, The Door to Kyriel (London: Looking Glass Library, 1900).

  8. Farfey even famously argued that it is sheer stubbornness and nothing else that grants them their power. As evidence he submitted Leyna Wordworker, the talented author of “The Song of Ilgin,” who had once saved her city from a deadly plague. She was also Farfey’s wife, and apparently quite a difficult woman.

  Farfey Scholar, A Treatise on the Nature of Word-Workers (City of Nin, 6609).

  9. Cats, I have found, seem to exist in more or less the same form in every world; it is my belief that they have been slipping in and out of doors for several thousand years. Anyone familiar with house cats will know this is a particular hobby of theirs.

  10. Most cities on the Amarico feature their Founders on their coinage; the City of Nin was founded by Nin Wordworker, many centuries previously, and it was her half-smiling visage that stared back at Yule from the moonlit earth. Coins are also stamped with words of power, which capture some small piece of the City’s soul. A person holding a coin from Nin will smell brine and bookdust, will perhaps find themselves thinking of sun-bleached streets and the joyful chatter of a peaceful city. It was this Yule had wanted to share with the girl in the field: a small silver piece of his home.

  11. I hope you are sufficiently familiar with the nature of doors by this juncture to assume that both magic wands and glass slippers exist in plentitude, in some world or other.

  12. In fact, she did have a choice. Ade had perhaps forgotten that she was in Yule’s world, rather than her own, and Yule’s world had word-workers. Pregnancy is a fragile, uncertain thing, especially at the beginning, and any sufficiently skilled and well-compensated word-worker may usually write away an unwanted child while it is still only a faint glimmer of potential in its mother’s body.