The Ten Thousand Doors of January(74)

It didn’t make sense, either, that they would harm their prize Door-hunter, but something had certainly prevented my father from coming back. Something had driven him to scrawl those last three lines. And now the Society wanted me. They’ll never stop looking for you, girl.

There was a horrible, meaty crunch behind me.

I turned to find Jane crouched over Havemeyer’s body with a mallet and a clinical expression. A peeled wooden stake now protruded from the white bundle, roughly where his heart would be.

Jane shrugged at me. “Just in case.”

I teetered for a moment between horror and humor, but I couldn’t help it: I laughed. It was an oversized, tiptoeing-toward-hysteria kind of laugh. Jane’s eyebrows rose, but then her head tilted back and she laughed alongside me. I heard a little of the same relief in her voice, too, and it occurred to me that her attitude of cool nerve and confidence might not, in fact, be wholly true.

“You have read entirely too many penny dreadfuls,” I admonished her. She shrugged again, unrepentant, and I went back to my digging. It felt easier, somehow, as if something heavy had been perched on my shoulders and had flapped away at the sound of our laughter.

I worked in silence for another minute or so, and then Jane began to speak. “In my world, it’s wisest to shoot anything strange or unusual you might meet in the forests, and this is why I almost killed your father the first time I saw him. My first shot went wide, though. Give me that, if you aren’t going to dig.”

My shovelfuls had grown scant and random; I scrabbled out of the hole and Jane took my place. Her voice matched the jab-and-toss rhythm of her digging. “He began shouting and waving his arms, switching between a dozen or so languages. One of them was English; it had been a very long time since I’d heard English spoken aloud, and never by a dark-skinned, tattooed man who looked like a professor. So I did not shoot him.”

The hole was now well past Jane’s waist, and every shovelful made a soupy, sucking sound. Gnats hovered like overeager dinner guests at its edges. “I took him back to my camp, fed him, and we traded stories. He asked if I’d ever found another door in this world, or heard any stories about written words coming true. No, I answered, and his shoulders slumped. I felt I should apologize, but did not know for what.

“Then he gave me a warning: The doors are closing behind me, he said. Someone is following me. He begged me to return to my native world with him. He told me he knew what it was like to be trapped in a world not your own, urged me to go back with him. I refused.”

“Why?” I perched at the edge of the hole, arms wrapped around my own knees. My borrowed skirt was already hopelessly muddied and stained, and for a disorienting moment I felt as if I’d been zipped backward to a time when I was young and obstreperous and gleefully unkempt.

Jane climbed out of the hole and perched beside me. “Because the place you are born isn’t necessarily the place you belong. I was born into a world that abandoned me, stole from me, rejected me; is it so surprising I found a better one?” She sighed, long and regretful. “But I wanted to make one last trip through the door, just in case this madman was correct and it was my only chance. Julian stayed camped at the foot of Mount Suswa while I went searching for more ammunition and for—for news of my sister.” Jane’s eyes flickered like lanterns in a gust of winter air, and the question what happened to her? died in my throat. There was a little silence, and when she spoke again her tone was brusque. “I returned to Julian’s camp. He asked me to stay again, and I laughed in his face—I’d seen what my home had become. White women watching me from train windows, poachers wearing foolish hats and posing for pictures beside animal carcasses, potbellied children begging in English, please-sah, please-sah. No. So Julian escorted me back to my ivory door to say good-bye. Except there was something strange waiting in the cave.”

Jane was staring into the grave, face taut. “Piles of gray sticks bundled together, and wires running out, and a faint fizzing sound. Your father yelled and shoved me away, and then everything came apart. An explosion that scorched the backs of my arms and tossed both of us forward like matchsticks. I don’t know if I lost consciousness, but it felt like I blinked and suddenly there was a man standing above me, wearing a tan British uniform. And behind him, where the cave should have been, was nothing but rubble and dust.

“His lips were moving, but something was wrong with my ears. Then he drew his pistol and pointed it at Julian. He should have pointed it at me—I was the one with a weapon—but he didn’t.” Jane’s lip curled. “When I die, I hope at least I don’t look so damn surprised.”

I did not look at Havemeyer’s body, did not think about the neatness of the hole that had appeared in his chest.

“I didn’t even wait for his body to hit the ground: I threw myself at the mountainside, tearing away stones and earth. By the time Julian stopped me my hands looked like bushmeat. He held me back and said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ until I understood: I was trapped here, in this world, forever.”

I’d never seen Jane cry, but I could feel a kind of rhythmic shuddering moving through her, like thunderclouds scudding across the bay. Neither of us spoke for a time but simply sat in the cooling evening and listened to the hollow, mournful hooting of a loon across the lake.

“Well. In this world you cannot be black-skinned and found near a dead white man in uniform. I used a stone to smash the body up and dragged him near the rubble, so there would be no bullet wound to scandalize a search party, and then we ran.