The Ten Thousand Doors of January(98)

That was how it felt to see the overgrown field and the black-suited shape waiting for me in the center of it. Like I’d made a mistake somewhere and circled back to the day when I was seven and found the Door.

Except the scene had changed, subtly. When I was seven the grasses had been orange and autumn-dry, and now they were several hundred shades of green and studded with yellow bursts of goldenrod. I’d been neatly dressed in blue cotton, terribly alone except for my pretty little pocket diary, and now I was barefoot and dirt-grimed, with Bad padding beside me.

And I’d been running away from Mr. Locke then, rather than toward him.

“Hello, January. Sindbad, always a pleasure.” Mr. Locke looked a little travel-rumpled but otherwise precisely the same: square, pale-eyed, supremely confident. I remember being surprised, as if I expected him to be wearing a black cape lined with red silk or twirling a long mustache with a sinister smile, but he was just comfortable, familiar Mr. Locke.

“Hello, sir,” I whispered. The will to be polite, to maintain civility and normalcy, is fearfully strong. I wonder sometimes how much evil is permitted to run unchecked simply because it would be rude to interrupt it.

He smiled in what he must have believed was a charming, friendly manner. “I was just starting to suspect I’d missed you, and you were already gallivanting off God-knows-where.”

“No, sir.” The jagged tip of the pen pressed into my palm.

“How lucky. And—good Lord, child, what have you done to your arm?” He squinted. “Tried to copy Daddy’s tattoos using a butcher knife, did you?”

The next No, sir caught in my throat and refused to come out. My eyes had fallen on the weedy, mostly vanished circle of ash that had once been my blue Door, and standing before me was the man who had burned it down, betrayed my father, locked me away—and I didn’t owe him good manners. I didn’t owe him anything at all.

I unbent my shoulders and raised my head. “I trusted you, you know. So did my father.”

The joviality slid from Locke’s face like clown paint washing away in the rain. His gaze on me turned watchful and narrow-eyed. He didn’t answer.

“I thought you were helping us. I thought you cared about us.” About me.

Now he raised a placating hand. “Of course I do—”

“But you betrayed us both, in the end. You used my father, lied to him, had him locked forever in another world. And then you lied to me, told me he was dead—” My voice was rising, boiling up from my chest. “You told me you were protecting me—”

“January, I have protected you since the moment you came into this world!” Locke moved closer to me, hands outstretched as if he intended to place them on my shoulders. I stepped backward and Bad came to his feet, hackles rough, lips peeled back. If Mr. Locke hadn’t been firmly on his Please Do Not Ever Bite list, I think his teeth would’ve found flesh.

Locke retreated. “I thought Theodore had that animal dumped in the lake. Drowning doesn’t seem to have improved his temper much, does it?” Bad and I glared.

Locke sighed. “January, listen to me: when you and your father crashed through that door in Colorado just as we were closing it, my associates were all for smashing your skulls and leaving you for dead on the mountainside.”

“From my father’s account, you gave it a good try,” I said coldly.

Locke made a dismissive, gnat-swatting gesture. “A misunderstanding, I assure you. We were there because your mother had raised quite a fuss in the papers. Everybody made fun of the madwoman and her ship in the mountains, but we suspected there was more to it—and we were right, were we not?” He cleared his throat. “I’ll admit my man was a bit, ah, overexcited about your father, but the poor fellow had been tearing down a doorway when half a damned ship sailed through it! And anyway there was no lasting harm done. I had the two of you well taken care of while I consulted with the others.”

“The Society, you mean.” Locke inclined his head in a genteel bow. “And they all advised you to commit double homicide, did they? And I’m supposed to be—to be grateful, that you didn’t do it?” I wanted to spit at him, scream at him until he understood how it felt to be small and lost and worthless. “Do they hand out medals for not murdering babies? Perhaps just a nice certificate?”

I expected him to shout at me, perhaps even hoped he would. I wanted him to abandon this pretense of goodwill and good intentions, to cackle with glee. That was what villains were supposed to do; that was what gave the heroes permission to hate them.

But Locke merely looked at me with one side of his mouth twisted up. “You’re upset with me. I understand.” I sincerely, deeply doubted it. “But you were exactly what we’d been striving so hard to prevent, you see, exactly what we’d sworn ourselves against: a random, foreign element, with the potential to instigate all sorts of trouble and disruption, which ought to be stamped out.”

“My father was a grieving scholar. I was a half-orphaned baby. What sort of trouble could we cause?”

Locke bowed again, his smile gone a little tight. “So I argued. I brought them all around, eventually—I am very persuasive when I wish to be.” A small, black laugh. “I explained about your father’s notes and papers, and his particular and personal motivation to seek out additional fractures. I suggested I might foster you myself, watch you carefully for any useful, unusual talents, and turn them to our purposes. I saved you, January.”