The Ten Thousand Doors of January(58)

“I think I have to—I have to close it.” Anything open can be closed. Hadn’t my father discovered that when the Door closed between the City of Nin and my mother’s field? He’d never known why or how it happened, but then, my father was a scholar: his tools were careful study and rational evidence and years and years of documentation.

My tools were words and will, and I was out of time. I found my coin-knife, so blood-crusted it no longer gleamed silver. I pulled my knees under my belly and laid my poor, aching arm before me. I pressed the coin to my skin a final time, blinking a little against the weird blurring and unblurring of the room.

“No! January, what are you—” Jane tugged my hand away.

“Please.” I swallowed, swaying a little. “Please trust me. Believe me.” There was no reason in the world she should. Anyone else would have happily dragged me back to the doctors with a note pinned to my chest suggesting they lock me in a small room without any sharp objects for the next century or so.

(This was the true violence Mr. Locke had done to me. You don’t really know how fragile and fleeting your own voice is until you watch a rich man take it away as easily as signing a bank loan.)

The scuffling sounds grew louder.

Her eyes flicked to the hole in the wall behind me, and to the congealed lettering on my arm. A strange expression moved across her face—shrewdness, perhaps? A wary understanding?—and she let go of my hand.

I chose a bare, unbloodied patch of skin, and began to carve a single word: JU

Movement in the blackness, the harsh sound of breathing, a white-spider hand reaching out of the darkness toward me—

JUST.

The Door opens just for her.

I felt the world pull itself back together, like skin pulling tight around a scar. The blackness receded, the white hand spasmed—there was a terrible, inhuman screech—and then I was staring at nothing but a patch of unremarkable cabin wall.

The Door was closed.

Then my cheek was pressed to the floor and Jane’s cool hand was on my forehead. Bad limped closer and lay down with his spine pressed against me.

My last, wavering sight was of three odd, pale objects lying in a row on the floorboards. They looked like the white ends of some unusual mushroom, or maybe candle stubs. I’d already closed my eyes and begun to drift into a pain-hazed sleep when I recognized them for what they were: three white fingertips.


I was somewhere else for a while. I don’t know where, exactly, but it felt like another kind of Threshold: lightless and endless, a silent galaxy without stars or planets or moons. Except I wasn’t passing through; I was just—suspended. Waiting. I remember a vague sense that it was a nice place, free of monsters and blood and pain, and I’d quite like to stay.

But something kept intruding. A warm, breathing something that nestled against my side and rooted in my hair, making small, whimpering sounds.

Bad. Bad was alive, and he needed me.

So I rose up out of the black and opened my eyes.

“Hello, you.” My tongue was cottony and thick, but Bad’s ears pricked. He made that whining sound in his chest again, somehow inching closer to me despite the absence of spare inches, and I laid my cheek on the warm slab of his shoulder. I made a motion to throw my arms around him but desisted with a small yelp.

It hurt. Everything hurt: my bones felt bruised and aching, as if they’d been forced to bear some impossible load; my left arm was too hot and throbbing, wrapped tightly in strips of sheet; even my blood beat sluggishly in my ears. In all, it seemed a fair price to pay for rewriting the very nature of space and time and crafting a Door of my own making. I blinked away an urge to laugh or possibly cry, and looked around.

It was a small cabin, like Samuel had said, and a little forlorn: the stacks of blankets were musty, the cookstove was rusting in orange flakes, the windows were cobweb-clogged. But the smell—oh, the smell. Sunshine and pine, lake water and wind—it was as if all the smells of summertime had soaked into the walls. It was the perfect, scientific opposite to Brattleboro.

It was only then that I noticed Jane, sitting at the foot of my bed with a steaming tin mug in her hands, watching Bad and me with a quirk at the corner of her mouth. Something about her had changed in the week we’d been apart. Maybe it was her clothes—her usual stodgy gray dress had been replaced by a calf-length skirt and loose cotton blouse—or maybe it was the sharp glitter of her eyes, as if she’d dispensed with a mask I hadn’t known she was wearing.

I found myself suddenly uncertain. I looked at Bad’s back as I spoke. “Where did you find him?”

“On the beach, in that little cove past the house. He was…” She hesitated, and I glanced up to see that the quirk in her mouth had flattened out. “Not in very good shape. Half-drowned, beaten bloody… It looked to me like someone dropped him over the bluff and hoped he’d drown.” She lifted one shoulder. “I did the best I could for him. I don’t know if that leg will ever be right.” My fingers found clipped patches of fur and stubbly lines of stitches. His back leg had been splinted and wrapped.

I opened my mouth, but no words emerged. There are times when thank you is so inadequate, so dwarfed by the magnitude of the debt, that the words wilt in your throat.

Jane, in case you ever read this: Thank you.

I swallowed. “And how did… how are you here?”