The Ten Thousand Doors of January(67)

It seemed to me she was also saying: Pull it together, kid, and maybe Everything will be all right. I nodded, a little shakily.

It took half an hour to get Samuel settled, even with his dazed cooperation. First I had to wrangle him to the bed and coax him sufficiently awake to crawl into it. Then I had to convince him to relax his feverish grip on my wrist—“It’s all right, you’re safe, Havemeyer’s—well, he’s gone, anyway—that hurts, Sam, Jesus”—and then build up the fire and pile extra blankets over his still-shivery legs.

There was a wood-on-wood scrape as Jane dragged a chair beside mine. She used a handful of skirt to scrub her still-damp hands. The blotches they left behind were stained pale pink.

“When he hired me to look after you,” Jane said softly, “your father told me there were people following him, chasing him. He said one day they might catch him. And then they might come for his daughter, whom he kept as safe as he could.” She paused, and her eyes flicked toward me. “I told him, by the way, that daughters do not want to be kept safe, that they would prefer to be with their parents—but he did not answer.”

I swallowed, quelling the child in me that wanted either to stamp her foot and say How come? or to throw herself into Jane’s arms and wail inconsolably. Too late for either.

Instead, I said, “But what was my father even doing? And if there were mysterious villains following him around the world—and I guess I shouldn’t roll my eyes, because you did just shoot an actual vampire—who are they?”

Jane didn’t answer immediately. She leaned forward and picked my father’s leather-bound book from the floor beside the bed. “I don’t know, January. But I think they may have caught up with your father, and come for you. And I think you ought to finish this book.”

How fitting, that the most terrifying time in my life should require me to do what I do best: escape into a book.

I took The Ten Thousand Doors from her hand, tucked my feet beneath me, and opened the book to the final chapter.





Chapter Six


The Birth of Julian Scaller


A man shipwrecked and saved—A man hunting and hunted—A man hoping


Yule Ian drifted in roiling darkness, unanchored from his body. This was, he felt, for the best, and he determined to remain adrift as long as he could.

It wasn’t easy. The darkness was marred sometimes by strange voices and lantern light, by the inconvenient demands of his body, by dreams that left him gasping and awake in a room he didn’t know. Once or twice he heard the piercing, familiar crying of a baby and felt a stabbing in his chest, like broken pottery shards grinding against one another, before diving back into oblivion.

But—fitfully, reluctantly, slowly—he felt himself healing. There were hours at a time now when he lay fully awake but motionless and silent, as if reality were a tigress who might overlook him if he was sufficiently quiet. He could no longer escape the brusque, morose-looking man with a black leather bag who came to check his temperature and change the bandaging wrapping his skull. He could ignore his questions, though, and lock his jaw against the steaming bowls of broth set on the bedside table. He could also ignore the squat little woman who trundled in sometimes to badger him about his daughter—was he the father? Why had he taken her up that mountain, alone? Where was her mother?—by the crude but effective means of pressing his injured skull into the mattress until the pain and darkness swallowed him up again.

(Among the many things that haunt me about my own cowardice, perhaps the worst is the knowledge of what your mother would’ve said if she’d seen me then. I took a bitter satisfaction in the thought that she was gone, and I could not therefore disappoint her.)

Yule woke some days or weeks later to find a stranger sitting at his bedside—a wealthy-looking man in a black suit, blurred slightly in his squinting vision.

“Good morning, sir,” the man said pleasantly. “Tea? Coffee? Some of this rather vicious bourbon these mountain savages drink?”

He closed his eyes.

“No? Wise choice, my friend, there’s a whiff of rat poison about it.” Yule heard a tinkle and splash as the stranger poured himself a measure. “The proprietor here tells me you were addled in the accident, that you haven’t said two words together since they dragged you in here. He adds that you’re stinking up his best room, though I find the word ‘best’ to be highly flexible in this case.”

Yule did not answer.

“He went through your things, of course, or at least such things as could be fished from the strange wreckage on the mountaintop. Rope, canvas, salted fish, rather odd clothing. And bundles and bundles of pages written in some kind of gibberish, apparently, or code. The town is neatly divided into those who believe you’re a foreign spy sending missives back to the French—except who ever heard of a colored spy?—and those who think you were perfectly mad prior to your head injury. Personally, I suspect neither.”

Yule began pressing his head against the straw-stuffed mattress. Small, fizzing constellations burst against his eyelids.

“Enough, boy.” The man’s voice changed, shedding its unctuous skin as if dropping a fur coat to the floor. “Has it occurred to you to wonder why you are sleeping in a nice warm room, benefiting from the dubious skills of the local doctor, rather than dying slowly in the street? Did you think it was the goodwill of the natives?” He laughed, short and sneering. “Goodwill doesn’t extend to penniless, tattooed Negroes—or whatever you are. I’m afraid it’s entirely my will—and my money—that keeps you so comfortable. So I think”—and Yule felt an ungentle grip turn his chin toward the stranger—“you owe me your fullest attention.”