The Ten Thousand Doors of January(81)

Solomon leaned his bicycle against the stone and crossed his arms, staring at the feathers as if waiting for something to happen. Bad gave an impatient whine.

“Excuse me, Mr. Ayers,” I began.

“Sol’s fine,” he said absently.

“Right. Um, excuse me, Sol, what are you—” But before I could find a polite way to ask if he was an honest-to-God madman who spent his spare time knitting feathers into curtains, or if he had an actual destination in mind, I heard padding footsteps. They came from the darkness behind the curtain, but there was nothing there except stone and dusty earth—

Until a wide hand swept the feathers aside and a squat woman in a black stovepipe hat stepped out of the empty air and stood before us, arms crossed and eyes narrowed. Jane said a series of words I didn’t recognize, but which I was sure were impolite.

The woman was roundish and brownish, with silver-streaked hair. She wore a collection of clothes just as motley as Solomon’s—including a silver-buttoned tailcoat, pants sewn from burlap, and some sort of bright beaded collar—but somehow contrived to look imposing rather than comical. She glared at each of us in turn with heavy-lidded eyes.

“Guests, Sol?” She said the word guests the way you might say fleas or influenza.

Solomon gave an exaggerated bow. “May I introduce our most esteemed chieftainess—don’t growl at me, darlin’, you know you are—Miss Molly Neptune. Molly, you remember that black fella with the tattoos, name of Julian Scholar? Came through a few years back and mentioned a daughter?” He turned both palms toward me like a fisherman displaying a particularly large catch. “She’s finally come to call.”

Molly Neptune looked only slightly appeased. “I see. And these others?”

Jane lifted her chin. “Are her companions. Charged with keeping her alive and safe.” Companions. See the curve of that C like a pair of outstretched arms? It implied the sort of friends who might slay dragons or go on hopeless quests or swear blood oaths at midnight. I swallowed the urge to fling myself at Jane in gratitude.

Molly ran her tongue over her teeth. “Doesn’t look like you’ve done too good a job, so far,” she observed. “She’s three quarters drowned, half-naked, and banged up all over.” Jane’s jaw tightened, and I tried to pull Samuel’s shirt cuffs lower over the grayish bandaging around my wrist.

The woman sighed. “Well, never let them say Molly Neptune doesn’t keep her word.” And, with a slightly mocking flourish, she drew back the feathered curtain.

The view between the stones—that dull triangular patch of sky and grass—disappeared and was replaced by a confused jumble of shapes. I ducked under Molly’s arm and into the short tunnel, trying to squint the images into focus. Steep stairs rising up hillsides; thatched roofs and clay bricks; a rising murmur of voices.

A city.

I stepped out into a sandstone plaza with my mouth hanging slightly open. The empty hills had been suddenly populated by a messy sprawl of buildings and streets, as if some enormous child had tossed his blocks into the valley and wandered away. Everything—the narrow roads, the walls, the low houses and domed temples—was built of yellow clay and dried grass. It glowed gold in the cooling dusk: a secret El Dorado hidden on the coast of Maine.

Except there was something weirdly dead-looking about it, as if I were standing in the leftover bones of a city rather than the thing itself. Tumbled-down bricks and slumping buildings dotted the hillsides, surrounded by broken statues of winged men and eagle-headed women. In some places gnarled trees had rooted themselves in rotted-thatch roofs, and tufts of grass sprouted in the cracked streets. The fountains were all dry.

A ruin. But not an empty one: children laughed and screeched as they rolled a rubber tire down an alley; laundry zigzagged from window to window on what looked like telegraph wires; greasy cook smoke hung low over the square.

“Welcome to Arcadia, Miss Scholar.” Molly was watching me with a slightly smug expression.

“I—what is this place? Did you build all this?” I gestured a little wildly at the eagle-headed statues, the rows of clay houses. Samuel and Jane had emerged behind us with similar expressions of startled awe.

Molly gave a small shake of her head. “Found it.” A bell clanged twice from somewhere in the city, and she added, “Dinner’s ready. C’mon.”

I trailed after her, feeling like a cross between Alice and Gulliver and a stray cat. Questions buzzed in my skull—if these people didn’t build the city, then who did? And where were they now? And why was everyone dressed like some weird cross between a circus performer and a tramp?—but a heavy, mute exhaustion had fallen over me. It was the weight of a new world pressing against my senses, perhaps, or maybe the half mile of freezing ocean I’d swum across.

We joined a stream of other people who gawked at us curiously. I gawked back; I’d never seen such a wildly disparate group of humans in my life. It reminded me of the London train station when I was a girl—a human zoo, Locke had called it.

There was a freckled, redheaded woman wearing a canary-colored dress and carrying a toddler on one hip; a group of giggling girls with their hair braided in intricate swirls around their heads; an ancient-looking black woman speaking some language that involved periodic clicks and tocks; a pair of older men walking with their fingers interlaced.

Solomon saw me staring and grinned. “Runaways, like I said. Every type of person that ever needed a place to run has ended up in Arcadia at one time or another. We got a few Indians, some Irish girls who didn’t care for the cotton mills, some colored folks whose ancestors jumped overboard on the way to the auction block, even a couple of Chinamen. After a few generations we get all mixed together. Take Miss Molly—her granddaddy was a Indian witch doctor, but her mama was a Georgia slave that run up north.” He sounded rather proud, as if he’d personally invented her.