The Ten Thousand Doors of January(15)

“Sit down, January.” I sat in my usual chair, and Bad stuffed himself half-successfully beneath it.

“Sorry about Bad, sir, it’s just Stirling seemed to be in a hurry and I didn’t take him back to my room first—”

“That’s quite all right.” The fluttery, panicky feeling in my chest grew stronger. Bad had been banned from Mr. Locke’s office (as well as all motorcars, trains, and dining rooms) since the Society party two years ago. Just the sight of him usually provoked Locke into a speech about poorly behaved pets and lax owners, or at least a grumbling snort through his mustache.

Mr. Locke’s jaw worked backward and forward, as if his next words required chewing to soften them. “It’s about your father.” I found it difficult to look directly at Mr. Locke; I studied the display case on his desk instead, its brass-plate label gleaming: Enfield revolver, Mark I, 1879.

“He’s been in the Far East these past few weeks, as I’m sure you know.”

Father was beginning in the Port of Manila, then island-hopping his way northward to Japan, he’d told me. He’d promised to write often; I hadn’t heard from him in weeks.

Mr. Locke chewed his next sentence even more thoroughly. “His reports on this expedition have been spotty. Spottier than usual, I mean. But lately they’ve… stopped coming altogether. His last report was in April.”

Mr. Locke was looking at me now, expectant and intent, as if he’d been humming a tune and paused for me to finish it. As if I ought to know what he would say next.

I kept staring at the revolver, at the oiled darkness of it, the dull square snout. Bad’s breath was hot on my feet.

“January, are you paying attention? There hasn’t been word from your father in nearly three months. I got a telegram from another man on the expedition: no one has seen or heard from him. They found his camp scattered and abandoned on a mountainside.”

The bird in my chest was scrabbling, beating its wings in frenzied terror. I sat perfectly still.

“January. He’s gone missing. It seems—well.” Mr. Locke drew a short, sharp breath. “It seems very likely that your father is dead.”


I sat on my thin mattress, watching the sun creep butter-soft across my pink-and-gold bedspread. Frayed threads and cotton stuffing made shadows and spires across it, like the architecture of some foreign city. Bad curled around my back even though it was too hot for cuddling, making soft, puppyish sounds deep in his chest. He smelled of summer and fresh-clipped grass.

I hadn’t wanted to believe it. I’d howled, screamed, demanded Mr. Locke take it back or prove it. I’d dug bloody pink crescents in my palms with the effort of not lashing out, not smashing his little glass cases into a thousand shimmering shards.

Eventually I’d felt hands like paving stones on my shoulders, weighing me down. “Enough, child.” And I’d looked into his eyes, pale and implacable. I’d felt myself flaking and crumbling beneath them. “Julian is dead. Accept it.”

And I had. I’d collapsed into Locke’s arms and soaked his shirt with tears. His gruff murmur had rumbled against my ear. “S’all right, girl. You’ve still got me.”

Now I sat in my room, face swollen and eyes dry, teetering on the edge of a pain so vast I couldn’t see its edges. It would swallow me whole, if I let it.

I thought about the last postcard I’d received from my father, featuring a beach and several tough-looking women labeled FISHERWOMEN OF SUGASHIMA. I thought about Father himself, but could only picture him walking away from me, hunched and tired, disappearing through some terrible, final doorway.

You promised you would take me with you.

I wanted to scream again, felt the sound clawing and writhing in my throat. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to run away and keep running until I fell into some other, better world.

And then I remembered the book. Wondered if Mr. Locke had given it to me just for this moment, knowing how badly I would need it.

I pulled it from my skirts and traced my thumb over the stamped title. It opened for me like a tiny leather-bound Door with hinges made of glue and wax thread.

I ran through it.





The Ten Thousand Doors: Being a Comparative Study of Passages, Portals, and Entryways in World Mythology

This text was produced by Yule Ian Scholar for the University of the City of Nin, in the years between 6908 and—, in partial satisfaction of his attainment of Mastery.


The following monograph concerns the permutations of a repeated motif in world mythologies: passages, portals, and entryways. Such a study might at first seem to suffer from those two cardinal sins of academia—frivolity and triviality—but it is the author’s intention to demonstrate the significance of doorways as phenomenological realities. The potential contributions to other fields of study—grammalogie, glottologie, anthropology—are innumerable, but if the author may be so presumptive, this study intends to go far beyond the limitations of our present knowledge. Indeed, this research might reshape our collective understanding of the physical laws of the universe.

The central contention is simply this: the passages, portals, and entryways common to all mythologies are rooted in physical anomalies that permit users to travel from one world to another. Or, to put it even more simply: these doors actually exist.

The following pages will offer extensive evidence to defend this conclusion and will provide a set of theories concerning the nature, origins, and function of doors. The most significant proposals include: