The Ten Thousand Doors of January(75)

“We were on the train to Khartoum when your father asked where I would go next. I told him I wanted to find another way in, a back door, and he smiled sadly at me. ‘I’ve been looking my whole life for another door to my home world,’ he told me. ‘But I’ll look for yours, too, if you do something for me.’ And he asked me to come to a rich man’s house in Vermont and protect his daughter.”

Another silent wave shook her. Her voice remained perfectly even. “I kept my end of the bargain. But Julian… didn’t.”

I cleared my throat. “He’s not dead.” I felt her go very still beside me, tense with hope. “I finished his book. He found a Door in Japan that led back to his own world but he didn’t go through it—he tried to come back for me”—that small sun blazed again, briefly, then faltered—“but he never made it, I guess. He says to tell you”—I swallowed, tasting the shame of it on my tongue—“he’s sorry.”

Air hissed through the gap in Jane’s teeth. “He promised me. He promised.” Her voice was strangled, almost swallowed by emotion: bitterest betrayal, jealousy, and the sort of rage that leaves bodies in its wake.

I flinched and her eyes flicked toward me, then widened. “Wait. January, you made a passage between the asylum and this cabin. Could you do it for me? Could you write me home?” Her face shone with desperate hope, as if she expected me to produce a pen from my pocket and draw her Door in the air between us, as if she were about to see her husbands and wife again. She looked younger than I’d ever seen her.

I found I couldn’t look at her as I answered. “No. I—my father’s book says there are places where worlds rub against one another, like the branches of two trees, and that’s where Doors are. I don’t think a Door here, in Vermont, could ever reach all the way to your world.”

She made an impatient, dismissive sound. “Fine, but if you went with me to Kenya, to my ivory door—”

Mutely, I lifted my bandaged left arm and held it level with her eyes. It shook and shivered after only a few seconds, and after a few more I dropped it back to my side. “Opening the way from the asylum to here almost killed me, I think,” I told her softly. “And that was a Door within the same world. I don’t know what it might take to reopen a Door between two worlds, but I doubt I have it.”

Jane exhaled very slowly, staring at my hand where it lay against the earth. She didn’t say anything.

She stood abruptly, dusting her skirt and reaching for the shovel again. “I’ll finish here. Go see to Samuel.”

I fled, rather than see Jane cry.


Both Bad and Samuel looked like they’d died and been reanimated by a sorcerer of questionable skill. Bad—dotted with dried blood, patchworked with bandages and stitches—had crammed himself in bed between Samuel and the wall, and now slept with his chin propped adoringly on Samuel’s shoulder. Samuel’s skin was an unhealthy mushroomy color between white and yellow, and his breathing beneath the quilt stuttered and shivered.

His eyes opened to gummy slits when I perched on the bedside. Improbably, he smiled. “Hello, January.”

“Hello, Samuel.” My return smile was a timid, tremulous thing.

He extricated an arm and patted Bad’s side. “What did I tell you, eh? Bad is on your side.”

My smile sturdied. “Yes.”

“And,” he said more softly, “so am I.”

His eyes were steady, glowing with some sourceless warmth; looking into them was like holding my hands above a banked fireplace in February. I looked away before I said or did something stupid. “I’m sorry. For what happened. For what Havemeyer did to you.” Was my voice always that high-pitched?

Samuel shrugged, as if being tortured and kidnapped were a tiresome inconvenience. “But you will explain exactly what he was, of course, and what these doors are that so upset him, and how you got here without my daring rescue.” He was sliding out from beneath the quilt as he spoke, arranging himself against the pillows as though every inch of him were bruised.

“Daring rescue?”

“It was going to be spectacular,” he sighed mournfully. “A midnight raid—a rope through the window—a getaway on white horses—well, gray ponies—it would’ve been just like one of our story papers. All wasted.”

I laughed for the second time that evening. And then—haltingly, messily, fearing that Samuel would either laugh at me or pity me—I told him everything. I told him about the blue Door in the overgrown field; about my father and mother and how neither of them was dead or perhaps both of them were; about the New England Archaeological Society and the closing Doors and the dying world. Mr. Locke, keeping my father like a leashed hound and me like a caged bird. The Written, and the way certain willful persons are able to rewrite existence. And then I told him about the silver coin that became a knife, and showed him the words I’d written in my own flesh.

The skin beneath my bandages was pale and puckered with fresh scabs, like some injured lake creature that had washed ashore. Samuel touched the jagged curve of the J carved into my skin.

“You did not need rescuing, then, it seems,” he said, a wry twist in his smile. “Stregas rescue themselves in all the stories.”

“Stregas?”

“Witches,” he clarified.