The Ten Thousand Doors of January(102)

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.