The Ten Thousand Doors of January(55)

“No.”

She took the biscuit, sucking the dampness out of it. “I’m Abby,” she offered. “That’s Miss Margaret.” The older woman didn’t look at me, but her face pinched further inward.

“January Scaller,” I said politely, but I thought: January Scholar. Like my father before me. The thought was a lantern glow in my chest, a brightness so real I thought it must be leaking from me like light around a closed door.

Miss Margaret gave a faint, high-bred snort, perfectly calibrated to be mistaken for a sniff. I wondered what she’d been before she was a madwoman—an heiress? A banker’s wife? “And what kind of a name is that, exactly?” She still wasn’t looking at me but addressed her question to the air.

The lantern in my chest glowed brighter. “Mine.” All mine. Given to me by my own true parents, who loved one another, who loved me—who had abandoned me, somehow. The lantern glow dimmed a little, flickering in a sudden draft.

What happened to that little stone house on the hillside, to The Key, to my mother and father?

I almost didn’t want to know. I wanted to linger as long as I could in the fragile, fleeting past, in that brief happily-ever-after when I’d had a home and a family. Last night I’d stuffed The Ten Thousand Doors beneath my mattress rather than read another page and risk losing it all.

Abby was blinking her damp eyes into the sudden silence. “I got a telegram from my brother this morning. I’m going home on Tuesday, or maybe Wednesday, he said.” Margaret snorted again. Abby ignored her. “Do you think you’ll stay long?” she asked me.

No. There was too much to do—finish my damn book, find Jane, find my father, write it all right again—to stay locked up here like some tragic orphan girl in a Gothic novel. Plus, if I stayed past dark I was three quarters certain a vampire would climb through my window and eat me.

I had to find a way out. And wasn’t I the daughter of Yule and Ade, born beneath the sun of another world? Wasn’t I named after the god of in-betweens and passageways, the god of Doors? How could I be locked away, really? My very blood seemed a sort of key, an ink with which I could write myself a new story.

Ah. Blood.

A slow smile peeled my lips back over my teeth. “No, I don’t think so,” I answered breezily. “I’ve just got so much to do.” Abby nodded contentedly and launched into a long and unlikely story about the picnic she would have when she arrived back home, and how her brother really missed her very much, and it wasn’t his fault she was such a trying sister.

We left the hall in the same gray lines. I tried to make my shoulders curve inward and my back stoop, like everyone else’s, and when Mrs. Reynolds and another nurse escorted me into my room I said “Thank you” in a soft, docile voice. Mrs. Reynolds’s eyes flicked up to mine, then away. They did not cuff me to the bed when they left.

I waited until their steps had clicked down the hall to the next locked door, then dove for my mattress. I ran my fingertips along the spine of my father’s book, lightly, but left it where it lay. Instead, I found the cool silver of the coin from the City of Nin.

It sat heavy in my palm, wider than a half-dollar and twice as thick. The queen smiled up at me.

Slowly, I scrubbed the edge of the coin against the rough cement stucco of the wall beside my bed. I held it back up to the light and saw that the smooth curve of the coin had been worn away, ever so slightly.

I smiled—the desperate smile of a prisoner as she digs her escape tunnel—and pressed the coin back against the wall.


By dinner, my arm muscles were wrung-out rags and my finger joints ached where they curled around the coin. Except that it wasn’t a coin anymore. There were two angled sides leading to a single point, with nothing left of the queen’s face except one wise eye in the center. I kept scraping after dinner, because I wanted to be sure it was sharp enough and also because I was scared.

But night was coming—I watched the light on my bare walls turn from rose to palest yellow to dim ash—and Havemeyer would return soon. Creeping like a penny-dreadful monster along the halls, reaching his cold fingers out for me, drinking the warmth from my flesh…

I rolled back my blankets, pressed bare feet to the floor, and crept to the locked door.

The coin lay gleaming and thin in my palm, transformed into a tiny blade or a sharp silver pen nib. I touched it lightly to my fingertip, thought of Havemeyer’s hungry eyes, and pressed down.

By moonlight, blood looks like ink. I knelt and drew my finger across the floor in a shaky line, but the blood beaded and pearled on the slick-polished tile. I squeezed my hand, forced the reluctant drops into a puddled, smeary T, but I already knew it wouldn’t work: it would take too much blood, and too much time.

I swallowed. I laid my left arm across my knees and tried to think of it as paper or clay or slate, something not-alive. I touched the silver knife to my skin, right where the stringy muscle of my forearm joined up to my elbow.

I thought Hold On January, and began to write.

It hurt less than I’d thought it would. No, that’s a lie—it hurt precisely as much as you’d think to carve letters into your own flesh, deep enough for blood to boil up like red oil wells; it’s just that sometimes pain is too unavoidable, too necessary to feel.

THE DOOR

I was careful to cut my lines away from the ropy veins in the middle of my forearm, out of a dim sense that I might exsanguinate myself on the hospital floor and cut my whole escape attempt tragically short. But I was equally afraid of cutting too lightly, as if it might signal some secret hesitancy or unbelief. It’s believing that matters, remember.