The Ten Thousand Doors of January(110)

Or run away with me toward the glimmering, mad horizon. Dance through this eternal green orchard, where ten thousand worlds hang ripe and red for the plucking; wander with me between the trees, tending them, clearing away the weeds, letting in the air.

Opening the Doors.





Epilogue


The Door in the Mist


It is late October. Jagged lines of frost creep and bloom in every windowpane, and steam wisps from the lake; winter in Vermont is an impatient thing.

It is dawn, and a young man is loading sacks of Washington Mills Peerless White Flour into a truck. The truck is glossy black, with curlicued golden lettering painted on the side. The young man is dark and solemn-eyed. He pulls his cap low against the chill, mist pearling against the back of his neck.

He works in the comfortable rhythm of someone familiar with hard work, but there are faint, unhappy lines gathered around his mouth. The lines are fresh-seeming, as if they’ve only recently arrived and aren’t certain how to behave. They age him.

His family attributes the lines to a slow recovery from his illness over the summer. One night at the end of July he simply vanished—after some very odd behavior and an urgent conversation with that African woman from Locke House—and staggered back home nearly two weeks later, disoriented and senseless. He didn’t seem to recall where he’d been or why, and the doctor (actually the horse doctor, who prescribed more stringent tonics at half the price) speculated that a bad fever might have boiled his brain, and recommended purgatives and time.

Time has helped, some. The dizzy confusion of July dissipated into a vague uncertainty, a slight cloudiness in his eyes, and a tendency to stare out at the horizon as if he were hoping something or someone might appear there. Even his beloved story papers can’t hold his attention for long. His family supposes it will fade, eventually, and Samuel himself hopes the ache in his chest will fade, too, and the nagging sense that he’s lost something very dear to him but can’t recall what it was.

Three weeks previously something happened that made it worse: A woman had approached him as he made his delivery to Shelburne Inn. She was obviously foreign, black as oil, and far too familiar for someone so strange. She said a lot of things that made no sense to him—or rather, they did but then didn’t, as if the words were sagging and sloughing away in his mind, and he could almost hear a voice saying Forget it all, boy—and eventually she grew irritated with him.

She had pressed a slip of paper into his hand with an address scrawled in red ink, and whispered, “Just in case.”

“In case what, ma’am?” he’d asked.

“In case you remember.” She had sighed, and something in the sigh made him wonder if she had a hole in her heart, too. “Or in case you see her again.” And she was gone.

Since then he has felt the ache in his chest like an open window in winter.

It is worse on mornings like this one, when he is alone and the crows’ cries are brittle and cold. He thinks, for no reason at all, of the gray ponies he drove as a boy, of rattling down the drive to Locke House and looking up at the third-story window hoping to see—he does not recall what he hoped to see. He tries to think only about delivery routes and flour, and how best to position the busted sack so it won’t spill.

Movement startles him. Two figures have emerged, rather suddenly, from the mist at the end of the cobbled alley. A dog, heavy-jawed and deep gold, and a young woman.

She is tall and brownish, and her hair is braided and coiled in a fashion he has never seen before. She is dressed like some combination of vagabond and debutante—a fine blue skirt fastened with pearl buttons, a leather belt slung low over her hips, a shapeless coat that looks several centuries older than she is. She limps, just slightly; so does the dog.

The dog barks at him, joyfully, and Samuel becomes aware that he is staring. He flicks his eyes sternly back to the flour sacks. But there is something about her, isn’t there, a sort of glow, like light shining around a closed door—

He imagines her wearing a champagne-colored gown, dripping pearls, surrounded by the bustle and swirl of a fancy party. She looks very unhappy in this imagining, like something caged.

She does not look unhappy now; indeed, she is beaming, her smile shining bonfire-bright and a little wild. It takes him a moment to realize she has stopped walking, and the smile is for him.

“Hello, Samuel,” she says, and her voice is like a knock at that closed door.

“Ma’am,” he answers. He knows at once it was the wrong thing to say, because her bonfire-smile dims a little. The dog is unconcerned; he shimmies up to Samuel as if they are old friends.

The woman’s smile is sad, but her voice is steady. “I have something for you, Mr. Zappia.” She produces from her coat a fat bundle of papers tied with what appears to be brown string, a rag, and a strand of fencing wire. “Sorry about the mess—I wasn’t patient enough to get it printed and bound.”

Samuel takes the pile of paper, because there doesn’t seem to be anything else to do. He notices as he does so that her left wrist is a labyrinth of ink and scars.

“I know this must all seem very strange to you, but please just read it. As a sort of favor to me, although I guess that doesn’t mean much anymore.” The woman huffs an almost-laugh. “Read it anyway. And when you’re done, come find me. You know—you still remember where Locke House is, don’t you?”