The Ten Thousand Doors of January(88)

No. I wouldn’t let it happen. Not when there was a chance—even the slimmest, wildest chance—that I could prevent it.

“Samuel.” I was hoping to sound brave and resolute, but I just sounded tired. “Will you please go back to the house and get my father’s book for me? And an ink pen.”

He went very still beside me, and I knew he understood what I intended to do. A small, treacherous part of me hoped he would grab my hands and beg me not to do it, like an actor in a moving-picture romance, but he didn’t. I supposed he didn’t much want to die in Arcadia either.

He stood, slowly, and left the square. I sat beneath the half-moon, arm tight around Bad, and waited.

He returned with the leather-bound book and a pen clutched in his hands. I flipped to the last rustle of blank pages in the back and tore them gently away from their binding, not looking at Samuel’s worry-dark eyes, his solemn mouth. “Would you—will you come with me?”

He reached for my hand in answer and I hesitated—I’d never accepted his offer, never told him yes—but then I reflected that we were both trapped in a dying world for the rest of our short lives, and laced my fingers through his.

We walked together out of the city and into the deep blue night, with Bad slipping like an amber-eyed ghost through the grass ahead of us. It was so late the moon was skulking near the horizon and the stars seemed to hang low and close around us.

The tree emerged from the darkness like a gnarled, many-fingered hand reaching toward the sky. Neat planks of wood nestled among its bulbous roots, looking strangely forlorn—a Door, now reduced to a mere door. A heavy stink of smoke and char filtered through it, and I knew the lighthouse was burning on the other side. I imagined that my father’s final Door had the same funeral-pyre reek.

I walked until I was so close I could have stroked my fingers along the dark wood of the door, and stopped. I stood unmoving, palms sweating against the crumpled pages, the pen heavy in my hand.

Samuel let the silence stretch, then asked, “What’s wrong?”

I laughed—a despairing, humorless huff. “I’m afraid,” I told him. “Afraid that I’ll fail, that it won’t work, that I’ll—” I broke off, the iron tang of fear filling my mouth. I remembered the bone-deep bite of exhaustion in my limbs, the sick reeling of the room around me after I’d written my way out of the asylum. How much more would it take to open a way between two worlds?

My father had said Doors existed in places of “particular and indefinable resonance,” thinned-out places where two worlds brushed delicately against one another. Perhaps it is more like drawing aside a veil, or opening a window. A thin supposition on which to bet my life.

Samuel was squinting up at the stars, his expression casual. “Do not do it, then.”

“But Jane—Arcadia—”

“We will find a way to survive, January, trust us that far. Do not risk yourself if it will not work.” His voice was even and calm, as if we were discussing the likelihood of rain or the unreliability of train schedules.

I looked down, uncertain and ashamed by my uncertainty.

But then I felt a hesitant touch beneath my chin, a gentle push as Samuel tipped my face upward with two fingers. His eyes were earnest, his mouth half-curled with a sideways smile. “But if you are willing to try, I believe in you. Strega.”

A heady warmth sizzled over me, as if I were standing in the center of a blazing bonfire. I didn’t recognize it, didn’t know what to call it—but then, no one had ever believed in me before. Or they’d believed in some other, less able version of me. Locke and my father and Jane had each believed in the timid January who had haunted Locke House, who so desperately needed their protection. But Samuel was looking at me now as if he expected me to eat fire or dance on rain clouds. As if he expected me to do something miraculous and brave and impossible.

It felt like donning a suit of armor or sprouting wings, extending past the boundaries of myself; it felt an awful lot like love.

I looked into his face for another greedy second, letting his faith soak into my skin, then turned to the door. I breathed the smoke-and-ocean air into my lungs, felt Samuel’s trust at my back like a warm wind filling a ship’s sail, and touched the pen to the page.

The Door opens, I wrote, and I believed every letter of it.

I believed in the black gleam of the ink in the night, in the strength of my own fingers wrapped around the pen, in the reality of that other world waiting just on the other side of some invisible curtain. I believed in second chances and righted wrongs and rewritten stories. I believed in Samuel’s belief.

A wind blew noiselessly across the plain as I lifted the pen away from the door. The stars pulsed above me and the moon-shadows drew mad patterns in the dirt. I felt myself smiling, distantly, and then everything slid sideways and Samuel’s arms were warm around me.

“Is it—did you—”

I nodded. There was no need to check; I could already hear the rhythmic crash of the Atlantic, could already feel the infinite emptiness of the Threshold stretching beyond the Door. A triumphant laugh rolled in Samuel’s chest, rumbling against my cheek, and then I was laughing with him because it had worked. It had worked, and I wasn’t dead—it had been almost easy, compared to the words I’d carved into my own arm at Brattleboro. Like drawing aside a veil.

We staggered back toward the city, dizzy with relief, leaning drunkenly into one another. I could almost pretend we were two ordinary young people stealing an unchaperoned stroll past their curfew, sure they’d catch hell in the morning but too giddy to care.