The Ten Thousand Doors of January(71)

His mocking laughter punctured my daring little speech. “Oh, don’t be foolish, Mr. Scaller. Return to that nasty little hut on the shore, buy yourself a steamer ticket in the morning, and forget about this place, eh? You have finished here.”

It was all my most paranoid fantasies come true: he knew my name, knew about the shack I’d rented from a fisherwoman, perhaps knew the true nature of my researches.

“No. I won’t let it happen again—”

The man waved a dismissive hand at me, as if I were a child resisting bedtime. “Yes, you will. You will leave without any fuss. You will not tell another soul. And then you will sniff out the next door for us like a good dog.”

“And why’s that?” My voice had gone high and taut and I wished, piercingly, for Adelaide. She was always the brave one.

He watched me almost pityingly. “Children,” he sighed. “They grow up so fast, yes? Little January will be thirteen in just a few months.”

We stood in silence while I listened to the sound of my own heart beating and thought of you, waiting for me an ocean away.

I left.

I purchased my steamer ticket the following morning and bought a paper from the Foreign Affairs stand in Valencia three days later. On the sixth page, printed in blurred Greek type, was a small column about a sudden and inexplicable rock slide on the coast of Crete. No one had been hurt, but a road had been buried and an old, mostly forgotten church had been reduced to rubble. The local police chief was quoted describing the event as “unfortunate, but inevitable.”


You will find below a partial reproduction of a list recorded in my notes in July 1907. It is such a scholar’s impulse, to cope with a dangerous and murky situation by sitting at his desk and writing a list. What would your mother have done, I wonder. One imagines a great deal more noise and disruption, and perhaps a body count.

I titled the page Various Responses to the Continuing Situation Regarding the Nefarious Closing of Doors and Potential Risks to Immediate Family Members and underlined it several times.

A. Expose the plot. Publish findings thus far (write to the Times? Take out an ad?) and denounce the activities of shadowy organization. Points in favor: could be done quickly; minimal disruption to January’s life. Points against: likelihood of total failure (would papers publish findings without evidence?); loss of Cornelius’s trust and protection; danger of (violent) retribution from unknown parties.

B. Go to Cornelius. Explain my fears more fully and request additional security for January. In favor: Locke’s considerable resources could command a high degree of safety. Against: He hasn’t been sympathetic to my concerns thus far; the terms delusional paranoias and ridiculous flimflammery have been used.

C. Remove January to safe, secondary location. If she were hidden in some other stronghold, very quietly, pursuers might not find her. In favor: J kept safe. Against: difficulty of finding safe location; difficulty of managing Cornelius’s attachment to J; uncertainty of success/risk to J’s safety; maximum disruption of daily life.

I believe she loves Locke House, despite everything. When she was young I would often arrive to find a flustered nursemaid and an absent daughter, and she would be discovered hours later building sand castles on the lakeshore, or playing endless games with the grocer’s son. Now I find her walking the halls with one hand on the dark wood paneling, as if she is stroking the spine of some great sprawling beast, or curled with her dog in a forgotten armchair in the attic. Would it be right to steal the only home she’s ever known, when I have stolen so much else from her already?

D. Run away, take refuge in another world. I could find a door and go through it, taking January with me, and build a new life for the two of us in some safer, brighter world. In favor: ultimate safety from pursuers. Against: see above. And I am far from certain that all worlds connect to one another—were we to flee to another world, could I ever find the Written again? And if Ade should claw her way back home, would she ever find us?

There was no E. Continue on precisely as before, but this is the course I ultimately chose. Life has a kind of momentum to it, I’ve found, an accumulated weight of decisions which becomes impossible to shift. I continued my thieving, chiseling away stories and boxing them up so that a rich man might brag to his rich friends; I continued my desperate search, following stories and unearthing doors; I continued to let them close behind me. I stopped looking over my shoulder.

I made only three changes. The first involved an ivory door in the mountains of British East Africa and an uncomfortably close encounter with a Lee-Metford rifle, and ended in forging a passport and purchasing train tickets for a Miss Jane Irimu. It is not necessary to recount the full story of our meeting here, but only to note that she is one of the most fearless and casually violent persons I have ever met, and that I caused her inadvertent but terrible heartache. She also has a very particular empathy to your situation and it is my belief that she will protect you far more capably than I have. You ought to ask her for the full story one day.

The second change was to find an escape route for the two of you, a bolt-hole which I hope you will never make use of. I will not describe it with any detail here—lest some prying, unfriendly eye come across this book—except to say there is one door I found which has not yet been closed. I traveled under an assumed name to discover it and burned my notes and papers once I had. I blamed my delayed return on stormy seas, and I suppose by then I had been so often absent from Locke House that neither Cornelius nor you asked anything further. I spoke of my true purpose to only one living soul; should you ever need a place to run, a place to hide from whatever it is that pursues me—follow Jane.