The Ten Thousand Doors of January(97)

Are you really surprised? The voice in my head was tart and grown-up sounding. It made, I supposed, a fair point: I’d already known Mr. Locke was a liar and a thief and a villain. I knew he was a Society member and therefore dedicated to the destruction of Doors; I knew he had recruited my father with all the callous self-interest of a rich man purchasing a racehorse, and had profited from his torment for seventeen years; I knew his love for me was conditional and fragile, abandoned as easily as selling an artifact at auction.

But I hadn’t known, or permitted myself to know, that he was so cruel. Cruel enough to knowingly close my father’s Door not once but twice—

Or maybe he didn’t know the blue Door was anything special. Perhaps he never connected it to the strange, tattooed fellow he found years later. (This, I recognize now, was a desperate, absurd hope, as if I could somehow discover a clue that would redeem Mr. Locke and make him again the distant-but-beloved almost-father-figure of my childhood.)

I dumped out the contents of my reeking, stained pillowcase, ignoring Lizzie’s squawked “Not on my kitchen table, child!” I seized the leather-bound book, my father’s book, the book that had sent me on this mad, wandering trail back to my own beginnings. It shook slightly in my hands.

I turned to the final chapter, the part where Mr. Locke miraculously shows up to rescue my grieving father. And there it was: 1881. A girl named Adelaide Lee Larson. Surely Locke had recognized the name and date. A trapped, panicky feeling rose in my throat, like a small child who has run out of excuses.

He knew. Locke knew.

When he met my father in 1895 he already knew all about the Larsons and their back acres and the Door in the field. He’d been the one to close it, after all. But he hadn’t said a word to my poor, foolish father. Not even—and this time I felt myself actually gasp, and heard Lizzie’s tongue cluck in irritation—not even when he found the Door open again in 1901.

If Mr. Locke had loved my father and me at all, he would have left my blue Door standing and sent him a telegram within the hour: Come home Julian STOP Found your damn door. My father would’ve skimmed across the Atlantic like a skipped stone. He would’ve burst into Locke House and I would’ve run into his arms and he would’ve whispered into my hair, January, my love, we’re going home.

But Mr. Locke hadn’t done any of those things. Instead, he’d burned the blue Door to ash, locked me in my room, and left my father stranded for ten more years.

Oh, Father. You thought of yourself as a knight under the generous patronage of some wealthy baron or prince, didn’t you? When really you were a bridled horse running beneath the whip.

The book was still in my hands. My thumbs were pressed bloodless-white against the pages. A suffocating heat gathered in my throat—a final, terrible betrayal, a swelling rage—and some distant part of me was almost frightened by the sheer immensity of it.

But I didn’t have time for rage, because I’d just remembered the letter I mailed to Mr. Locke. I’m going home, I’d told him. I had imagined, when I wrote it, that Mr. Locke would assume I was headed for the Door Ilvane had destroyed in Japan, or even the Door the Society had closed in Colorado. I’d thought he didn’t know about this first Door, except as a passing reference in my father’s story, closed decades before.

Oh, hell.

“I have to go. Right now.” I was already standing, already reeling toward the door with Bad scrabbling to catch up. “Which way to that old hayfield? Never mind, I’ll find it—it was on the river, wasn’t it?” I rummaged freely through Lizzie’s things as I spoke, tugging out drawers wedged tight in the summer heat, looking for—yes. A few faded pages of newsprint. I jammed them back into my pillowcase with everything else: Ilvane’s greenish compass, my silver coin-knife, my father’s book, Samuel’s pen. It would have to be enough.

“Hold up, girl, you’re half-dressed—” I was three quarters dressed, at least—I just wasn’t wearing shoes and my blouse was buttoned sideways. “What do you want with that place, anyhow?”

I turned back to face her. She looked so shrunken and fragile in her rocking chair, like something plucked from its shell and slowly fossilizing. Her eyes on me were red-rimmed and anxious.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. I knew what it felt like to be always alone, always waiting for someone to come home. “But I have to go. I might already be too late. I’ll come back to visit, though, I swear.”

The lines around her mouth twisted into a bitter, hurting sort of smile. It was the smile of someone who has heard promises before, and knows better than to believe them. I knew what that was like, too.

Without thinking I crossed back to the rocking chair and kissed my aunt Lizzie on the forehead. It was like kissing a page in an ancient book, musty-smelling and dry.

She huffed a half laugh. “Lord, but you are just like your mother.” Then she sniffed. “I’ll be here when you come back.”

And I left my mother’s house with the pillowcase clutched tight in my hand and Bad flying like a sleek bronze spear at my side.





The Ash Door


He was already waiting for me, of course.

You know that feeling when you’re in a maze and you think you’ve almost made it out, but then you turn the corner and bam, you’re back at the entrance? That warped, eerie feeling of having fallen backward in time?