The Ten Thousand Doors of January(109)

My grandmother gave me several dozen flat honey cakes she baked herself, and offered to hide my scars beneath tattoos, if I liked. I considered it, tracing the raised white lines of the words in my flesh (SHE WRITES A DOOR OF BLOOD AND SILVER. THE DOOR OPENS JUST FOR HER), and shook my head. Then I asked if she could tattoo around the scars without covering them up, and now there are wandering tendrils of words sliding up my arm, weaving between the white-cut letters like black vines. January Wordworker, daughter of Adelaide Lee Larson and Yule Ian Scholar, born in the City of Nin and bound for the In-Between. May she wander but always return home, may all her words be written true, may every door lie open before her.

My mother gave me The Key and three solid weeks of sailing lessons. Father tried briefly to argue that, as the more experienced sailor, he ought to teach me, but my mother just looked at him in this flat, square-jawed way, and said, “Not anymore, Julian,” and he went very quiet and did not interrupt again.

My father gave me a book titled Tales of the Amarico Sea. It’s written in a language I don’t speak, with an alphabet I don’t recognize, but he seems to think languages are things one just “picks up,” like milk at the store. He also gave me his shapeless, patched coat, which used to be my mother’s, because it’d kept him warm in faraway places and always seen him safely home, and perhaps it would do the same for me. Besides, he said, he was through with wandering now.

“And, January”—his voice was strained and thin, as if it were coming from a long way away—“I’m sorry. For leaving you all those times, and for leaving you the last time. I t-tried to turn back, at the last, I l-love—” He stopped, tear-choked, his eyes closed in shame.

I didn’t say It’s all right, or I forgive you, because I wasn’t sure it was or I did. Instead I said simply, “I know.”

And I fell into him the way I had as a very small girl when he returned from his trips abroad, the way I hadn’t when I was seven. We stayed that way for a while, my face smeared against his chest, his arms tight around me, until I pulled back.

I scrubbed my cheeks. “Anyway, I won’t be gone forever. I’ll visit. It’s your turn to wait.”

The rest of my family (see that scrolled f, like a leaf unfurling in the sunlight?) together gave me food, fresh water in clay casks, charts of the Amarico, a compass that pointed reliably north, a set of new clothes sewn from sailcloth into very rough approximations of pants and shirts by seamstresses who’d never actually seen them in real life. They’re odd, in-between sorts of clothes, a perfect patchwork of two worlds; I think they suit me rather well.

I intend, after all, to spend the rest of my life diving in and out of the wild in-between—finding the thin, overlooked places that connect worlds, following the trail of locked Doors the Society left behind and writing them back open. Letting all the dangerous, beautiful madness flow freely between worlds again. Forging myself into a living key and opening the Doors, just like my father said.

(This is the second reason I couldn’t stay in Nin with my parents, of course.)

You can guess, I bet, which Door I’m opening first: the mountain door my mother sailed through in 1893, that Mr. Locke destroyed in 1895; the Door that shattered my little family into pieces and sent us careening alone into the fearful darkness. It’s an old wrong that ought to be righted, and a far enough journey that I might finish this damn book in time. (Who knew writing a story would be so much work? I have a newfound respect for all those maligned dime novelists and romance writers.)

You’re wondering why I’ve written it at all. Why I’m here, hunched over a sheaf of moonlit papers with my hand cramping and nothing but my dog and the wide silvery shadow of the ocean for company, writing as if my very soul depends on it. Maybe it’s a family compulsion.

Maybe it’s simple fear. Fear that I might fail in my lofty purposes and leave no record behind me. The Society, after all, is an organization of very powerful and very dangerous beings who have crept through the cracks in our world, all of whom very much want the Doors to remain closed. And it would be foolish to suppose that our world has been the only one to attract such creatures or ignite such ideas. In my nightmares I’m in an endless carnival hall filled with Havemeyers, reaching their white hands toward me through a thousand mirrors; in my really bad nightmares the mirrors are filled with pale eyes, and I can feel my will unspooling inside me.

It’s dangerous, is what I’m saying. So I’ve written this story as a sort of extended insurance policy in case I screw up.

If you’re some stranger who stumbled over this book by chance—perhaps rotting in some foreign garbage pile or locked in a dusty traveling trunk or published by some small, misguided press and shelved mistakenly under Fiction—I hope to every god you have the guts to do what needs doing. I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through; I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return.

But that’s not really why I wrote this, of course.

I wrote it for you. So that you might read it and remember the things you were told to forget.

You remember me now, don’t you? And you remember the offer you made me?

Well. Now at least you can look clear-eyed into your own future, and choose: stay safe and sane at home, as any rational man would—I swear I’ll understand—