The Ten Thousand Doors of January(18)

As she approached she saw a dark figure standing next to the ruined house. She stopped walking. There was no doubt that her aunts would advise her to turn around immediately and return home. The figure was either a stranger, who ought to be avoided at all costs, or a ghost from the house itself, which ought to be treated similarly.

But Ade found herself drawn on like a compass arrow. “Hello?” she called.

The figure twitched. It was long and lanky, boyish even from a distance. He shouted something back at her, but the words sounded jumbled in his jaw. “’Scuse me?” she called again, because good manners were advisable when dealing with either strangers or ghosts. He answered with another string of nonsense words.

Now Ade was close enough to see him clearly, and she wondered if she ought to have turned around after all: his skin was a lightless reddish-black that Ade had no name for.

The Larson household didn’t subscribe to the paper on the grounds that they got all the news they needed in church, but Ade sometimes scrounged copies secondhand. She was therefore familiar with the dangers of strange black men—she’d seen the columns describing their offenses, the cartoons depicting their appetites for innocent white women. In the cartoons the men were monstrous and hairy-armed, with tattered clothes and buffoonish expressions. But the boy in the field didn’t look much like the drawings in the papers.

He was young—her own age or perhaps a little less—and his body was smooth and long-limbed. He wore a strange arrangement of rough woolen cloth, draped and folded around him in an intricate swooping pattern, as if he’d stolen a ship’s sail and wrapped it around his body. His features were narrow and delicate-looking, his eyes clear and dark.

He spoke again, a series of many-syllabled words arranged almost like questions. She supposed it might have been a dialect of hell, known by ghosts and demons alone. The words switched suddenly in his mouth and familiar vowels fell into place. “Pardon, lady? Can you hear me?” His accent was utterly strange but his voice was mild, mindfully gentle, as if he feared startling her.

Ade decided in that moment that her aunt Lizzie was right: newspapers weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. The boy in front of her, with his startled eyes and bedsheet clothes and gentle voice, was hardly a menace to her person.

“I can understand you,” she answered.

He stepped closer, bemused disbelief in his face. He stroked the heavy heads of the grass, seeming surprised to feel the bristles against his palm. Then his hand drifted upward and came to rest, pale-palmed, on Ade’s cheekbone. Both of them flinched away, as if neither had believed the other might be solid.

Something about the gentleness of him, the innocence of his surprise, the delicacy of his long-fingered hands, made Ade suddenly less cautious. “Who are you? And where exactly do you come from?” If he was a ghost, he was a lost, hesitant member of the species.

He seemed to be searching in some disused closet of his memory for the right words. “I come from… elsewhere. Not here. Through a door in the wall.” He pointed back toward the dilapidated house, at the sagging front door, which had been stuck in its frame since before Ade was born, obliging her to climb through the window instead. Now the door was wedged open the width of a thin boy’s chest.

Ade was a rational enough girl to know that strange boys who wandered onto your property dressed in sheets claiming to be from elsewhere ought to be treated with suspicion. He was either mad or lying, and neither one was worth her time. But she felt something shudder in her breast as he spoke, something dangerously like hope. That it might be true.

“Here.” She stepped back and unrolled her flannel blanket in a red-and-white circus tent over the stiff grasses. She stomped it flat and sat, gesturing beside herself.

He looked at her with that charming surprise again, rubbing his bare arms in the autumn chill.

“Looks like the weather is warmer in elsewhere, huh? Take this.” She took off her rough canvas coat, a garment handed down so many times it had lost all color and shape, and handed it to him.

He pulled the sleeves over his arms the way an animal might if he were asked to wear a second skin. Ade was certain he had never worn a coat in his life, and equally certain this was impossible.

“Well, c’mon, sit down and tell me all about it, ghost boy. About elsewhere.” He stared.

If you will permit the indulgence, allow me to pause here and reintroduce the scene from the boy’s perspective: he had stepped out of someplace very different from the old hayfield and, while still blinking beneath the foreign sun, seen a young woman unlike anything he had ever seen before. She came toward him in wide strides, dark-buttoned dress shushing against the grasses, winter-wheat hair snarled beneath a wide hat. Now she sat below him, her upturned face clear-eyed and perhaps a little fey, and if she had asked him for anything in the world he would have given it to her.

So the boy sat, and told her about elsewhere.

Elsewhere was a place of sea salt and wind. It was a city, or perhaps a country, or perhaps a world (his nouns were imprecise on this point) where people lived in stone houses and wore long white robes. It was a peaceful city, made prosperous by trade up the coast and made famous by their skillful study of words.

“You got lots of authors, in your town?” He was unfamiliar with the word. “People who write books. You know—long, boring things, all about people who don’t exist.”