The Ten Thousand Doors of January(68)



But Yule found himself far past any of the usual bounds of social convention and reciprocation, and his primary thought was that his path toward the perfect darkness of death would be much faster without this man’s intervention. He kept his eyes closed.

There was a pause. “I am also making weekly payments to a certain Mrs. Cutley. Should I cease to do so, your daughter would be tossed on a train to Denver and stuck in a state orphanage. She’d either grow up lice-ridden and mean, or die young of consumption and loneliness, and no one in this world would care which.”

That pottery-shard feeling stabbed his chest again, accompanied by a kind of silent shout in his skull that sounded very much like Adelaide’s voice saying Over my dead body.

Yule’s eyes opened. The dim setting-sun light felt like several hundred needles inserted into his skull, and at first all he could do was blink and gasp. The room came slowly into focus: small, grubby, furnished in rough-cut pinewood. His bed was a knot of stained sheets. His own limbs, emerging from the tangle at careless, random angles like debris from a flood, looked thin and wasted.

The stranger was watching him, eyes pale as dawn, jade-glass tumbler in one hand. Yule licked his cracked lips. “Why?” he asked. His voice was lower and rougher than it had been before, as if he’d replaced his lungs with rusting iron bellows.

“Why have I acted so magnanimously on your behalf? Because I happened to be in the area considering some mineral investments—the market is saturated, incidentally, and I’d advise against it just now—and heard rumors about a tattooed madman shipwrecked on a mountaintop, raving about doors and different planets and a woman named, unless my informants are mistaken, Adelaide.” The man leaned forward, the fine fabric of his suit shushing a little. “Because I am a collector of the unique and valuable, and I suspect that you are both.

“Now.” He produced a second glass—a muddy cup quite unlike his own carved-green cup—and filled it with more of the greasy liquor. “You are going to sit up and drink this, and I will pour you another and you’ll drink that as well. Then you are going to tell me the truth. All of it.” On those last words the man caught Yule’s eyes and held them.

Yule sat up. He drank the liquor—a process very much like swallowing lit matches—and told his story.

“I first came to this world in 1881, by your calendar, and met a girl named Adelaide Lee Larson.” His voice absented itself briefly, and returned as a whisper: “I loved her from that day forward.”

Yule spoke slowly at first, in short, bare sentences, but quickly found himself stumbling into paragraphs and pages, until he was speaking in an endless, gasping stream. It didn’t feel particularly good or bad, but merely necessary, as if those pale eyes were twin stones sitting on his chest, forcing the words out of him.

He told the stranger about the closing of the door and his subsequent dedication to the scholarly study of doors. About Adelaide’s own explorations and their reunion on the shores of the City of Plumm. About their daughter, and their journey back to the mountaintop door, and the breaking of the world.

“And now I don’t know—I don’t know what to do, or where to go. I have to find another door home, I have to know if she survived—I’m sure she did, she was always so tough—but my baby girl, my January—”

“Stop blubbering, boy.” Yule hiccuped to a stop, his hands twisting in his lap, rubbing the words on his arm (scholar, husband, father) and wondering if any of them were still true. “I am, as I said before, a collector. As such I employ a handful of field agents to gallivant about the world collecting things—sculptures, vases, exotic birds, et cetera. Now it seems to me these—doors, you call them?—could lead one to objects of particular rarity. Bordering on the mythological, even.” The man leaned forward, radiating hunger. “Is that not so?”

Yule blinked at him, dimly. “I suppose—yes, it is so. In my researches I noted that things that are commonplace in one world may be perceived as miraculous in another, due to the transition in contextual cultural understa—”

“Precisely. Yes.” The man smiled, sat back, and removed a fat stub of cigar from his coat pocket. Then came the sulfur smell of a struck match and the bluish stink of tobacco. “Now, it seems to me we might strike a mutually profitable arrangement, my boy.” He shook the match out and flicked the remains to the floor. “You are in need of shelter, food, employment, and—unless I am much mistaken—funding and opportunity to search for a way back to your dear likely departed wife.”

“She isn’t—”

The man ignored him. “Consider it done. All of it. Room and board, and an unlimited stipend for research and travel. You can look for your door as long as you like anywhere you like, but in exchange—” He smiled, teeth shining ivory through the cigar smoke. “You’ll help me create a collection that makes the Smithsonian look like a pauper’s attic. Find the rare, the strange, the impossible, the otherworldly—the powerful, even. And bring it back to me.”

Yule’s eyes focused on the man more clearly than they previously had, his pulse rocketing with a sudden surge of hope. He swore, softly, in his own language. “And perhaps—a wet nurse, to travel with me? Just for a little while, for my little girl—”

The man whuffled through his substantial mustache. “Well, as to that… This world isn’t a particularly safe place for young girls, you’ll soon find out. I rather thought she could stay with me. My house is quite large and”—he coughed, looking away from Yule for the first time and fixing his gaze instead on the far wall—“I have no children of my own. It would be no trouble.”

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