The Ten Thousand Doors of January(99)

How many times had he told me that, growing up? How many times had he retold the story of finding my poor father and taking him under his wing, of giving us fine clothes and spacious rooms, and how dare I talk to him like that? And every time I would wilt with guilt and gratitude, like a pet whose leash has been tugged.

But now I was free. Free to hate him, free to run from him, free to write my own story. I turned the pen in my hand.

“Listen, January, it’s getting hot.” Locke mopped the pearled sweat from his forehead theatrically. “Let’s you and I head back into town and discuss everything in a more civilized setting, hm? This has all been nothing but a series of misund—”

“No.” I had a suspicion he wanted to get me away from here, away from the susurrating green field and the black remains of the Door. Or maybe he just wanted to get me back to town where he could call the police or the Society. “No. I think we’re through talking, actually. You should leave.”

My voice had been so emotionless it could have been a conductor’s announcement on a train, but Mr. Locke threw up his hands in defense. “You don’t understand—you’ve suffered some personal misfortunes, I admit, but try not to be so selfish. Think about the good of the world, January! Think about what these ‘doors’—fractures, we call them, or aberrations—promote: disruption, madness, magic… they overturn order. I’ve seen a world without order, defined by constant competition for power and wealth, by the cruelties of change.”

Now he did reach for me, resting his hand clumsily on my shoulder and ignoring Bad’s snarl. His eyes—colorless, glacial—stared into mine. “I wasted my youth in a world like that.”

What? My fingers around the pen went slack.

He spoke slowly, almost gently. “I was born into a cold, vicious world, but I escaped and found a better one. A softer world, full of potential. I have dedicated my life, and the better part of two centuries, to its betterment.”

“But—you—two centuries?”

Now there was pity in his voice, syrup-sweet and rancid. “I traveled in my youth, you see. Happened to find a fracture in the middle of Old China, and a very special jade cup—you’ve seen it, I’m sure. It has the property of extending one’s life span. Perhaps indefinitely. We shall see.” I thought of Lizzie saying he hadn’t aged a day; thought of my father’s silvering hair, the lines framing his mouth.

Locke sighed, and said softly, “I first came into this world in 1764, in the northern mountains of Scotland.”

In England or Scotland, I don’t recall.

I thought I’d circled back to the beginning of my own labyrinth. I thought I knew where I was. But now everything warped strangely in my vision and I realized I was still wandering in the heart of the maze, entirely lost.

“You’re the Founder,” I whispered.

And Mr. Locke smiled.


I stumbled backward, clutching at Bad’s fur. “But how could—no. It doesn’t matter, I don’t care. I’m leaving.”

I fumbled for the newsprint pages, held the pen tight in shaking fingers. Run away, run away. I was through with this world and its cruelties, its monsters and betrayals and stupid colored sections on its stupid trains—

“Is that how you do it? Some sort of magic ink? Written words? I should have suspected as much.” Locke’s voice was genial, quite calm. “I don’t think so, my dear.” I glanced up at him, the split nib already touching the page—

—and his eyes caught me like two silver fishhooks. “Drop that, January, and be still.” The pen and paper fell from my hands.

Locke retrieved them, tucked the pen in his coat pocket, shredded the newsprint, and tossed the remains behind him. They fluttered like yellow-white moths into the grass.

“You are going to listen to me now.” My pulse beat turgid and reluctant in my skull. I felt suspended, like some unlucky prehistoric girl preserved forever in a glacier. “When you’re done listening, you’re going to understand the work to which I’ve dedicated my life. And, I hope, how you might help me.”

And so I listened, because I had to listen, because his eyes were hooks or knives or claws fastened tight in my flesh.

“How is it your stories always start? Once upon a time there was a very unlucky little boy. He was born into a nasty, brutal, bitter world, a world too absorbed in killing and being killed even to name itself. The locals in your world called it Ifrinn, I later learned, and that’s what it was: hell. If hell were dark and frigid.”

He wavered oddly between accents, his tone swerving between dry narration and bitter anger. It was as if the Mr. Locke I’d grown up with—his voice, his mannerisms, his posture—was just a sort of party mask, behind which lurked someone much older and stranger.

“This unlucky boy fought in four battles before he was fourteen. Can you imagine? Boys and girls dressed in mangy animal skins, half-feral, running among the soldiers like hungry scavengers… Of course you can’t.

“We fought for such meager rewards. A few snow-covered acres of good hunting ground, the rumor of treasure, pride. Sometimes we didn’t even know why we fought, except that our chieftainess willed it. How we loved her. How we hated her.” My expression must’ve changed, because Locke laughed. It was a perfectly normal-sounding laugh, the same jovial boom I’d heard how many hundreds of times, but it made the fine hairs on my arms stand upright.