The Door

by Andy Marino

  As the smoke thinned out, dark stains appeared on the walls of the buildings to either side of the street. It was as if the stucco and stone had soaked up the ash like a sponge. Hannah followed Stefan down a deserted alley. The walls were rotten with the same creeping fungus she’d seen on the roof. She watched Stefan’s oversized jacket bounce as he jogged a few steps ahead of her. Somewhere stashed away in one of those pockets was the brush that had made smoke erupt from a single line on the ground. In one of the buildings behind her, people were using computers to jump-start a great mountain of glass. Back across the rooftops, a character she’d made up as a little girl had called forth a storm to break her out of prison.

  Finding her mother in such a confounding place was going to be difficult. Reluctantly, she admitted that it was a good thing she’d run into Stefan — how was she supposed to navigate this city without help?

  Hannah allowed herself this moment of relief before letting it curdle into doubt. Hadn’t the same exact thing happened with Kyle? She had let him get his friendly, confident hooks into her so quickly that even now, after what he had done, it was still easy to remember him helping with the dishes, that effortlessly perfect hair shuffling in and out of place above his eyes.

  Hannah didn’t know if she could trust the boy in the paint-spattered army jacket. But as long as she ditched him as soon as they exited the alley — if she made it impossible for him to help her — then she also made it impossible for him to hurt her.

  Hannah resolved to go it alone. Then the alley spit them out and her courage became a fleeting thing, darting away like a quick little fish.

  * * *

  The town square in Nusle Kruselskaya was a garden of statues planted in a field of cobblestones. The ground was choppy and treacherous — it reminded Hannah of a stormy sea, frozen and paved. Snub-nosed trains rode the stony waves, shuttling passengers across the square beneath the statues’ outstretched hands, from which clusters of lanterns dangled.

  The crowd that passed in front of Hannah was made up of long-haired hippies in bell-bottoms, dapper businessmen in three-piece suits, pilgrims in bonnets and checked gingham dresses. There were furtive children in soiled rags, gaunt old women with walkers, and men in robes and turbans. Boys in cutoff shorts flirted with girls in skinny jeans; boys in trousers courted girls in demure dresses; boys who belonged to some colonial militia walked alongside girls in hoop skirts. Squat men wearing furry animal skins glared at tall men with painted faces. Camouflaged soldiers posed for a group of excited tourists with cameras and fanny packs. Hannah saw brides and grooms, waiters and waitresses, mechanics stained with grease. Knights clanked about in full armor, samurai strutted with flags on their backs, skateboarders ollied and collapsed.

  Overwhelmed, Hannah focused on the nearest statue, a man carved from a giant piece of wood. One hand gripped a bundle of hanging lanterns, each as big as the lighthouse keeper’s cottage. The other stretched out to clasp the hand of a neighboring statue, hundreds of feet away. In the shadow of this connected limb was a marketplace teeming with booths and tents. A train stopped and Hannah sorted the passengers by hairstyle as they shuffled out: buzz cuts, ponytails, Afros, Mohawks, cornrows, flattops, French braids, beehives.

  Hannah sat on the uneven ground. The town square was giving her speck-of-dust anxiety, like when she looked up at the stars and thought about how big the universe must be. Stefan’s pant legs were right in front of her face. They tapered at the ankles, where an elastic band held them tight against his skin. Hannah studied the parakeet pattern. Each bird had a great big yellow bill.

  “You don’t want to sit there,” Stefan said. “Who knows what’s crawling between the stones.”

  She jumped up and brushed herself off. “Is something on me?”

  “Nah,” he said. “But you gotta watch out for failure bugs around here. Clingy little things.”

  “What’s a failure bug?”

  “Ah,” he said. They walked along the edge of the square. Here, the ground was torn up because the statues’ gnarled roots had forced the cobblestones apart and reshaped the pathways. “Now that we’re on what I think might be speaking terms, would you mind telling me your name?”

  Hannah remembered her mother’s words on their final night together: The city of the dead has no beginning and no end. Beyond the square, the city just kept sprawling. Billions of souls. No center and no edges.

  There was no way she could do this alone.

  “It’s Hannah,” she said.

  “Not possible.”

  “Well, it is.”

  He scrunched up his face, lost in thought. “I’m never wrong,” he said. “At least I haven’t been in a long time. You have to be a Cynthia.”

  “Does your magic brush help you guess people’s names, too?”

  “Whoa, stop right there.” He crossed his arms, straightened his posture. “First of all, I do not have a ‘magic brush.’ There’s no such thing as magic, so you might as well put that word out of your mind.”

  “But —”

  “Second of all, I don’t guess names like a carnival worker. And since I’m pretty sure I used to be a gypsy, I’m offended. Twice.”

  “You’re not sure what you used to be?”

  A small army of bald-headed monks streamed past them, singing and keeping time with toy drums. Stefan rolled his eyes. Hannah couldn’t tell if he was annoyed by the monks or by her question. “I’ll explain it when we get there. This place is making my head hurt.”

  A giggling young couple in flashy snowsuits brought up the rear of the procession, imitating the monks’ song.

  “Get where?” Hannah asked.

  “You know what they say, Cynthia. Home is where the art is.”

  Hannah had always thought of castles as drab monstrosities. Pictures she’d seen online were visions of decay: crumbling battlements, towers with their tops sheared off by wind and rain, high-ceilinged halls where knights kicked off their metal boots and put their feet up by the giant fireplace.

  Stefan’s home wasn’t that kind of castle.

  Instead of lording over a hill in the countryside, it was plopped down in the middle of a parking lot in Nusle Kruselskaya. The lot was full of the little two-seaters that seemed to be the trendiest car in the neighborhood. The castle, on the other hand, was massive: a mountain range of gables and domes and towers connected by a head-spinning collection of rooftops.

  Hannah followed Stefan between parked cars. They encountered other people coming and going, some of whom seemed to know him. He nodded at a girl wearing two different knee socks — one striped, one plaid — pulled up over her jeans. The girl’s orange cap-sleeved shirt said KRUMLOY STREET CAFÉ.

  A vehicle pulled up next to them. Hannah jumped — she hadn’t heard it approach. These cars ran completely silent. A man in a tunic that looked like it was made from a potato sack leaned out the window and raised a dyed blond eyebrow.

  “The boss is looking for you.”

  He handed Stefan a piece of paper and sped away noiselessly (the tires didn’t even screech). Hannah was beginning to think everyone’s mismatched outfit was some kind of uniform. Stefan muttered something under his breath and shoved the crumpled paper into his pocket.

  Hannah glanced at the oppressive sky above — the same color it had been since her prison escape — and wondered how anybody could tell what time it was when afternoon seemed to last for days. Stefan had tried to answer her questions, but their journey from the town square to the castle had involved evasive action: sprinting down alleys, making last-minute loops in cul-de-sacs, retracing their steps, doubling back, bouncing around the city streets like a couple of rogue pinballs. She struggled just to keep up, much less carry on a conversation. And yet, after all that, Hannah still didn’t think she was thirsty.

  “Behold,” Stefan announced. “The cramped hut of the Painters Guild.”

  He gestured toward the castle’s facade. Domes like painted onions looked especially bright against the du
ll sky — creamy pastels, candy stripes, solid gold to cap the highest tower. Intricate designs crawled across the bricks, disappearing beneath archways and into windows. As Hannah approached, the artwork seemed to burst out to cover the walls and towers like a seamless tapestry. If she let her eyes go slack and stopped trying to grasp it all at once, it resolved into a painting of a castle on top of a castle. It was as if two buildings were occupying the same space.

  “It’s beautiful,” Hannah said. Twin fountains flanked the arch of the main entrance, each one burbling with cheerful primary colors. For the first time since she’d arrived in the city, Hannah felt a sense of peace. She didn’t know if she was doing the right thing by letting Stefan take her here. She stopped questioning herself. She just wanted to dip a finger into one of the fountains and swirl the colors.

  “You think so?” Stefan squinted up at the domes. “It always looks kind of silly to me. The tourists seem to like it, though.”

  He tugged on her sleeve to steer her away from the fountains. She shrugged him off. He put his hands up in mock surrender. “Sorry, no touching, I get it. This way.”

  Hannah let him walk on without her. High in one of the towers, the window was false — part of the painting — and yet inside, a girl very clearly walked past. Hannah gazed intently at the painted-on window, trying to make it flip to the background, to see if it coexisted with a genuine window. After crossing her eyes with effort, she gave up and hurried after Stefan.

  They walked along a curb where the castle met the edge of the parking lot, putting the entrance behind them. The domes became less frequent, then disappeared, replaced by tarnished copper spires. Families of stone gargoyles camped along ledges. This section was closer in spirit to the buildings of Nusle Kruselskaya, lonely things that seemed to draw inspiration from the flat, unhappy sky.

  Hannah and Stefan walked in the shadow of the outer wall for what felt like several miles. At times Hannah was convinced it was actually a canvas painted to look perfectly three-dimensional. Then she would blink and it would be a brick-and-mortar wall.

  Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. “Is this a real castle or not?”

  “Of course it’s real. I live inside.”

  “So what is it, then, if it’s not magic?”

  “It’s part of the Guild’s journey to Ascension. You saw what the glassworkers are doing. There are other kinds of artists in Nusle Kruselskaya, too. But the Guild’s thing is paint.”

  “You have to paint your way to Ascension?”

  “We hope. Didn’t you get a handbook?”

  “No.”

  “Well, did you go to orientation?”

  “No.”

  “How did you manage to skip that? They explain all this stuff to the new souls. Anyway, it’s your lucky noonday, because I have some extra stuff you can look at.” He thrust his hands into his pockets. “If you give it time, things’ll make sense. You’ll be a professional dead girl by the next lightday.” He placed a hand over his heart. “Painter’s honor.”

  “I’m not dead,” she reminded him.

  “Ah, right,” he said, checking off invisible boxes. “Cynthia, female, not dead.”

  “It’s Hannah. What’s a lightday?”

  Stefan pointed at the sky. “We’re in the middle of noonday. Next we’ll have darkday, then lightday. That’s the cycle.”

  “How long does noonday last?”

  He laughed. “As long as it wants. Look” — he sounded apologetic — “this is me, here.”

  The gatehouse in this part of the castle blended into the wall so naturally that Hannah almost missed it. But there it was: a plain old wooden door with iron hinges.

  Stefan rummaged in his pocket and produced a silver key. He jiggled it in the lock, stopped, and leaned his ear against the door, listening. Then he sighed.

  “Get ready,” he said.

  “For what?”

  He pushed open the door. “My stupid afterlife.”

  * * *

  The hallway was aflutter with moths. Hannah had seen them before, reflected underneath the workbench in the glassworkers’ room. There, the moths had been perched out of sight, hanging upside down like miniature bats at rest. Here, they flapped around in a frenzy, sending tiny puffs of air across Hannah’s face. They were all around her, hundreds of them, and yet she had only the vaguest impressions of their forms. Her natural instinct was to swat.

  “Chalkdust,” she said, failing to hit anything no matter how wildly she swung. “They’re everywhere.”

  “Yeah.” Stefan sounded dejected. He plucked one out of the air, pinched its wing between his thumb and forefinger, studied it a moment, and let it go. “They sure are.”

  An irate voice came screaming down the corridor. “That had better be Stefan Weisz, and he’d better have an explanation for this mess!”

  Stefan winced. “I’m sorry in advance for what’s about to happen,” he said to Hannah in a low voice.

  An older boy turned the corner, carrying a briefcase and bearing down on them with a smirk. He was dressed in a cheap gorilla costume, except he wasn’t wearing the mask. His human head looked shrunken compared to the burly, leathery muscles of the suit. He marched straight up to Stefan and folded his meaty ape-arms over his chest. The briefcase swung awkwardly from his hairy paw.

  “You’d better have about seventeen different but equally good explanations for all the things you left undone before you went out for half a noonday.”

  The gorilla turned to a shelf and cleared a space by sweeping a few books onto the floor with his paw. Hannah jumped out of the way just before a heavy volume crashed down on her toes.

  This is Stefan’s boss?

  The boy slammed the briefcase down onto the shelf and popped the locks with his big rubbery fingers. Inside the briefcase was a single piece of paper, which the boy held up and looked over before turning to Stefan with a look of malevolent glee. Then he cleared his throat and began to read aloud.

  “Paintbrushes unrenewed, ninety-six. Paint formulas unmixed, one-hundred seventy-eight. Beds unmade, fifty-one. Floors unswept, nineteen. Shelves unorganized, thirty-eight. Leftovers uncaught, including but not limited to failure moths” — he gestured at the air around their heads — “chameleon slugs, memory shards, grekks … here!” The boy thrust the paper into Stefan’s hands. “A terrible mess. See for yourself.”

  Stefan frowned at the paper. “Yes, sir. Sorry. I’ll clean everything up.”

  With a huge clawed foot, the boy nudged the encyclopedia-sized volumes he’d thrown to the floor. “Also add to the list four books, unshelved. Somebody could trip over those.” He looked Hannah up and down for the first time. “Get your new girlfriend to help you.”

  “She’s not —”

  “I’m not —”

  But the gorilla just closed the briefcase and walked away, swatting at moths. Stefan crumpled the paper and shoved it into his pocket. “Well,” he said, producing a brush and holding it out for Hannah to take. “The sooner we get started, the sooner we’ll be done.”

  Hannah didn’t move. “Is that why you brought me here?” She could feel her confusion boiling over into anger. “To help with your chores? And be your new girlfriend? That’s …”

  She searched for the proper word.

  “Gross, that you think I would just …” She shook her head. “Eww.”

  Hannah wished she could go back to the town square for a do-over. She’d melt into the crowd, all alone.

  “No, Hannah, wait a minute.” Stefan’s eyes darted back and forth, like he’d rather be anywhere else and was searching for an escape hatch. A moth fluttered across the bridge of his nose and was gone. He put the brush back into his pocket.

  “It’s not like that at all. I don’t even have an old girlfriend, I swear.” He thrust his head forward an inch or two, inviting her to examine his face. “I mean, look at me.”

  Hannah simply turned her back, shooing moths from her hair, and stalked off.

 
; For once, Stefan didn’t try to follow. Hannah fought the urge to look back at him. She imagined him standing there, palms up, watching her go, silently pleading to the back of her head. It didn’t make her feel very good.

  She turned the corner. The hallway was identical: bookshelves, floor-to-ceiling. At the end she took a left, then a right, and finally came to the door.

  She pushed it open, preparing herself for the dreary shock of the noonday sky — and discovered a large supply closet. Puzzled, she looked behind her. Had she taken a wrong turn? All the hallways looked the same. Well, she needed a moment to think.

  She stepped inside.

  “They really ought to do something about the fungus in this horrible city,” Belinda said as soon as Hannah found the switch and turned on the overhead light. The old woman was eyeing a wet-looking blob that had spread like a map along the back wall of the closet.

  “Come on.” Nancy stepped out from behind a cabinet stocked with bundles of paintbrushes sorted by size. “It’s not so bad.”

  “It’s thoroughly disgusting.” Belinda shuddered. “I don’t know what’s worse: having to look at it, or turning my back to it. I believe I’ll stand in the center of the room.”

  “Where have you been?” Hannah looked from Nancy to Belinda, incredulous. “I really could’ve used some help back there. And where’s Albert?”

  Nancy sat down on a paint can and scratched the skin of her knee through the hole in her jeans. “You wanna take this one, Belinda?”

  “Mm,” Belinda said, tapping her foot, examining the floor. When she looked up, she was trying to smile. “Hannah, dear, why don’t you sit down?”

  Hannah looked around. The closet was as big as her bedroom at Cliff House, and it was stuffed with antique dressers full of tiny drawers with dainty handles, like the dusty old card catalog at the library. There were no chairs.

  “Too good for a paint can?” Nancy asked.

  Hannah remained standing. Belinda looked like she didn’t know what to do with her hands, clasping and unclasping them.

  “I suppose I’ll just get to the point,” Belinda said. “No use beating around the bush. Albert is gone.”