The Ten Thousand Doors of January(48)

I hissed and cried and screamed down the halls, shaking with hate and need. Faces peered out at me through the narrow door windows, pale and blank as moons. It’s funny how quickly you descend from civilized young lady to madwoman; it was as if this beastly, boundaryless creature had been living just beneath my skin for years, lashing her tail.

But there are places built for holding beastly women. They hauled me into bed, fastened the cuffs around my ankles and wrists, and pressed something cold and stickily damp over my mouth. I held my breath until I couldn’t and then I drifted into tarry blackness.


I don’t want to talk much about the next few days, so I won’t.

They were dull and gray and long. I woke at odd, arrhythmic times of the day with the sick tang of drugs on my breath; at night I dreamed I was suffocating but couldn’t move. I spoke to other people, I think—nurses, other inmates—but the only real company I had was the silver queen on her coin. And the hateful, stalking hours.

I tried to hide from the hours by sleeping. I lay very still and closed my eyes against the dull sameness of the room and made my muscles go slack and soft. Sometimes it worked, or at least I achieved a stretch of time that was even grayer and duller than the rest, but mostly it didn’t. Mostly I just lay there, staring at the pink veins of my eyelids and listening to the shush-shush of my blood.

Nurses and orderlies appeared every few hours, slate schedules clutched in their hands, to unfasten me from bed and prod me into motion. There were meals to be eaten under close supervision, starched white gowns to be worn, baths to be taken in rows of tin tubs. I shivered beside the fish-pale nakedness of two dozen other women, all of us made ugly and unsecret, like snails pulled from their shells. I watched them furtively—twitching or weeping or silent as tombstones—and wanted to scream: I’m not like them, I’m not mad, I don’t belong here. And then I thought: Maybe they didn’t belong here, either, at first.

Time went strange. The hour-dragons stalked and circled. I heard their belly scales susurrating against the tile in my sleep. Sometimes they crept into bed and stretched out beside me the way Bad used to, and I woke wet-cheeked and terribly alone.

At other times I would be engulfed instead by righteous rage—How could Locke betray me into this hell? How could I let them hurt Bad? How could my father leave me here, alone?—but eventually rage burns out and leaves nothing but ash, a muted landscape drawn in charcoal gray.

And then on the fifth or sixth (or seventh?) day of my imprisonment, a voice said, “You have a visitor, Miss Scaller. Your uncle came to see you.”

I had my eyes screwed shut, hoping that if I feigned sleep long enough my body would give up and play along. I heard the click of the door, the scrape of a chair. And then a voice drawled, “Good lord, it’s half past ten in the morning. I would make a Sleeping Beauty joke, but it’s only half-true, isn’t it?”

My eyes snapped open and there he was: alabaster-white, cruel-eyed, hands like white-gloved spiders resting on his cane. Havemeyer.

The last time I’d heard his voice, he’d been ordering his men to get rid of the mess that was my dearest friend.

I lunged for him. I’d forgotten that I was despairing, weak, cuffed to my bed; I only knew I wanted to hurt him, bite him, rake my nails down his face—“Now, now, let’s not get excited. I’ll have to call the nurses in, and you’re no good to me drugged and drooling.”

I snarled and twisted against my restraints. He chuckled. “You were always so biddable, so civilized at Locke House. I told Cornelius not to believe it.”

I spat at him. I hadn’t intentionally spit on anyone since Samuel and I were kids holding contests on the lakeshore; it was comforting to see I hadn’t entirely lost my aim.

Havemeyer wiped his cheek with one gloved finger, his amusement turning brittle. “I have some questions for you, Miss Scaller. Cornelius would have us believe this is all blown out of proportion, that you simply eavesdropped on your betters, that you’re distraught over your father, that you’re no threat, really, et cetera, et cetera. I think otherwise.” He leaned forward. “How did you find out about the fractures? Who have you been talking to?”

I bared my teeth at him.

“I see. And how did you get out of your room? Evans was sure he locked you in, and he’s not foolish enough to lie to me.”

My lips curved into a not-smile. It was the kind of expression that makes you think That person is unhinged and Someone should lock them up; I found I didn’t care. “Maybe I cast a magic spell, Mr. Havemeyer. Maybe I’m a ghost.” The smile turned into a lopsided snarl. “I’m mad now, didn’t you hear?”

He tilted his head at me, considering. “That vile dog of yours is dead, in case you were wondering. Evans tossed it in the lake. I would apologize, but someone ought to have done it years ago, if you ask me.”

My body recoiled like a kicked animal. My ribs were shattered shards, pressing into the soft meat of my insides. Bad, Bad, oh Bad—

“It seems I have your full attention. Good. Now, tell me, have you ever heard of upyr? Vampir? Shrtriga?” The words rolled and hissed in his mouth. They reminded me, for no clear reason, of the trip I’d taken with Mr. Locke to Vienna when I was twelve. It’d been February and the city was shadowed, wind-scoured, old. “Well, the name hardly matters. I’m sure you’ve heard of them in general outline: things that creep out of the black forests of the north and feast on the lifeblood of the living.”