The Ten Thousand Doors of January(79)
“Jane, what are you—where’s the Door?”
She did not answer but merely pointed out to sea.
I followed her finger and saw a lumpy gray smudge on the horizon, with patches of bare rock gleaming silver in the starlight. “An island? But surely we can’t—you’re not swimming to it?”
“Inaccessible. Inhospitable. Just as advertised, I believe.” Her tone was dry. She was already splashing into the sea, her underthings shining white, her limbs vanishing into the dark. Bad dove joyfully after her.
I turned to Samuel in search of an ally and found him unbuttoning his shirt. “Bet you the last loaf of bread I can beat you,” he murmured, as if we were children playing in the lake rather than weary, desperate adults standing on the coast of a cold sea, running away from God-knew-what. I laughed, helplessly.
I caught the bright curve of his answering smile, glimpsed the paleness of his chest, and then he was wading after Jane and Bad. There was nothing to do but follow him.
I shouldn’t have been surprised at the cold—it was summer, but summer in Maine is a fleeting, cautious creature that disappears as soon as the sun sets—but I don’t think it’s possible to step into water that cold without being surprised. Swimming through it was like swimming through a cloud of stinging insects. We clung to the rotten raft-planks with frozen fingers, tugging our belongings alongside us, our breath coming in thin gasps. Even Bad was lifting his head high out of the water as if trying to levitate rather than swim. The salt seeped through my bandages, burrowing into the words carved on my arm. If I could have turned back, if I could have given up and crawled back home to the rosy fireplaces of Locke House, I would have. But I couldn’t. So I kept reaching my stinging arms out into the chill black sea, kept inching closer to the gray blur of the island.
And then somehow my knees were scraping stone and Jane was heaving the raft up the shore and Samuel’s breath was a harsh wheeze beside me. He crawled a few feet farther and collapsed in a goose-fleshed heap, face pressed into the pebbled shore. “I do not,” he gasped, “like the cold. Anymore.”
I remembered the piercing chill of Havemeyer’s touch, Samuel’s sickly face as he fell, and fear sent me scrabbling to his side. I touched his back, numb-fingered. “Are you all right?”
He propped himself on one elbow and craned his head wearily upward. He blinked at me, clearing the salt water from his eyes, and his face went curiously blank. I became aware that the ocean had transformed my underthings from shapeless cotton sacks into something more like a second skin, clinging and nearly translucent. Neither of us moved. I felt frozen, snared by his oil-and-ember eyes—until Bad positioned himself several inches away and shook, spraying us in freezing salt water.
Samuel closed his eyes very deliberately and returned his forehead to the pebbles. “Yes. I am,” he sighed. Then he staggered upright and limped to the raft. He returned with his own mostly dry shirt and draped it over my shoulders without letting his fingers brush my skin. It smelled of flour and sweat.
“Almost there. We’ll go through, I think, before we make camp.” Even Jane sounded weary now.
We stumbled after her, winding up the shore and climbing a low bluff on shaking legs. The wind whipped us dry, leaving a white rime of salt on my skin.
On the far side of the island, perched like the skeleton of some long-dead guardian, stood the abandoned bones of a lighthouse. Its tower sagged and leaned and its paint, which might once have been cheery white-and-red, had weathered to the same grayish-brown as the rock beneath it. Where there should have been a doorway there was only a gaping mouth. Jane ducked through it first, picking her way over tumbled rafters and missing floorboards, and Bad and I followed.
Standing inside was like standing in the rotted rib cage of a sea creature, dark and strewn with seaweed. A single bright moonbeam shone through the broken window and illuminated a door on the western wall, where there had been no door on the outside. My heart shivered in my chest.
The Door was old-looking, even older than the lighthouse decomposing around it, built of lashed-together driftwood and strips of curving ivory. A faint breeze whistled through the gaps, carrying a hot, dry smell like hayfields in the August sun.
Jane tugged the whalebone handle and it flowed smoothly toward her, oiled and silent. She looked back at us, flashed her gap-toothed grin, and stepped into the black.
I rested one hand on Bad’s skull and reached the other toward Samuel, impulsively. “Don’t be afraid, and don’t let go.”
He met my eyes. “I won’t,” he said, and his fingers wrapped tight around mine.
We stepped across the Threshold together. The nothingness was just as terrifying, just as empty, just as suffocating as it had been before—but somehow it felt less vast with Samuel and Bad beside me. We sailed through the dark like a trio of comets, like a many-legged constellation spinning through the night, and then our feet crunched on dry grass.
We stood in the orange, alien dusk of another world. I had a single reeling second to see the endless golden plain, the sky so wide open it felt like an ocean suspended above me—before a rough voice spoke.
“Jesus, it’s a goddamned parade. All right, folks, you’re going to stop where you are and turn around real slow. And then you’re going to tell me what your business is, and how in the name of sweet Christ you found our door.”