The Ten Thousand Doors of January(37)

My legs bent beneath me and I slid down the door, thinking: This is what alone feels like. I only thought I knew, before, but now Jane was gone and Bad was taken, and I might rot away to cotton and dust in this shabby gray room and no one on Earth would care.

That black Thing descended again and settled its coal-smoke wings around my shoulders. Motherless, fatherless. Friendless.

It was my own fault. My fault, for thinking I could just run away, just gather my nerve and walk out into the wide unknown like a hero beginning a quest. For thinking I could bend the rules, just a little, and write myself into some better, grander story.

But the rules were made by Lockes and Havemeyers, by wealthy men in private smoking rooms who pulled the world’s riches to themselves like well-dressed spiders in the center of a golden web. People of significance; people who could never be locked away in small rooms and forgotten. The best I could hope for was a life spent creeping in their generous shadows—an in-between creature neither loved nor reviled, but permitted to scurry freely so long as I didn’t cause trouble.

I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes. I wanted to cast a spell and unspool the last three days, to find myself standing innocent and bemused in the Pharaoh Room, reaching for the blue chest. I wanted to disappear back into The Ten Thousand Doors, to lose myself in Ade’s impossible adventures—but Jane had taken the book, and Jane was gone.

I wanted to find a Door and write my way through it.

But that was madness.

Except—there was the book, which echoed my own memory. And Jane’s urgent, black-eyed expression when she held it. And Havemeyer and Locke, freezing at the barest mention of Doors. What if—?

I teetered on that invisible cliff’s edge, holding myself back from the seething, teeming ocean below. I stood up, slowly, and crossed to the dresser. My jewelry box was an old sewing box I’d stood on end and stuffed with the accumulated treasures of seventeen years—feathers and stones, trinkets from the Pharaoh Room, letters from my father folded and refolded so many times the creases were translucent. I ran a finger along the lining until I felt the cool edge of a coin.

The silver queen smiled her foreign smile at me, just as she had when I was seven. The coin was heavy in my palm; quite real. I felt a dizzy rushing, as if some great-winged seabird had swooped through the center of me, trailing salt and cedar and the familiar-but-not-familiar sun of another world.

I took a breath, and then another. Madness. But my father was dead and my door was locked and Bad needed me, and there was no way out except through madness.

I dove over that unseen edge and plunged into the dark waters below, where the unreal became real, where the impossible swam by on glimmering fins, where I could believe it all.

And in believing came a sudden calm. I tucked the coin into my skirt and crossed to the writing desk beneath the window. I found a scrap of half-used paper and smoothed it against the desktop. I paused for a moment, gathering every speck of my dizzy, drunken belief, then took up the pen and wrote:

The Door opens.

It happened just as it had when I was seven and still young enough to believe in magic. The pen nib swirled around the period and the universe seemed to exhale around me, to shrug its invisible shoulders. The light streaming through my windows, gone dim and watery with afternoon clouds, seemed suddenly more golden.

Behind me, the hinges creaked open.

A heady, giggling sense of madness threatened to swallow me up, followed by aching tiredness—a gluey, dizzying darkness that pulsed behind my eyes—but I didn’t have time for it. Bad.

I ran on shaking legs, flashing past a few startled guests, past display cases with their neat brass labels, and flung myself down the staircase.

The scene in the foyer had changed: Havemeyer was gone, the front door still standing open behind him, and Mr. Locke was speaking to one of his hulking manservants in a terse, low voice. The man was nodding, wiping his hands on a white towel and leaving behind rust-colored smears. Blood.

“Bad!” I’d meant to scream it, but my chest had gone airless and tight.

Their faces swung toward me. “What have you done?” Now I was almost whispering.

Neither of them answered me. Havemeyer’s man was looking at me with an unnerved, blinking expression, like a man who doubted the evidence of his own eyes. “I locked her in, sir, I swear I did, just like Mr. Havemeyer said—how’d she—”

“Be quiet,” Locke hissed, and the man’s jaw snapped shut. “Get out, now.” The man scurried out the door after his master, looking over his shoulder at me with fearful suspicion.

Locke turned back to me, his hands rising in either placation or frustration, I didn’t care which. “Where’s Bad?” There still wasn’t enough air in my lungs, as if my rib cage were caught in a giant fist. “What did they do to him? How could you let them?”

“Sit down, child.”

“The hell I will.” I’d never spoken to anyone that way in my life, but now my limbs were shivering with something hot and towering. “Where is he? And Jane, I need Jane—let go of me!—”

Mr. Locke had crossed to the stairs and grabbed my chin roughly, fingers pressing into my jaw. He tilted my face upward, eyes on mine. “Sit. Down.”

My legs shuddered and folded beneath me. He caught one arm and half carried me into the nearest side room—the Safari Room, a parlor filled with taxidermied antelope heads and masks made of dark, tropical wood—and slung me into an armchair. I clung to it, reeling and dizzied and still racked with that sick exhaustion.