The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,103

Jane reemerged tugging a jangled pile of planks and rotten twine behind her. She sighed heavily. “Well, it was too much to hope it would last in this weather, I suppose. We might be able to float the supplies alongside us with whatever’s left.” And then she began—methodically and quite unself-consciously—to undress.

“Jane, what are you—where’s the Door?”

She did not answer but merely pointed out to sea.

I followed her finger and saw a lumpy gray smudge on the horizon, with patches of bare rock gleaming silver in the starlight. “An island? But surely we can’t—you’re not swimming to it?”

“Inaccessible. Inhospitable. Just as advertised, I believe.” Her tone was dry. She was already splashing into the sea, her underthings shining white, her limbs vanishing into the dark. Bad dove joyfully after her.

I turned to Samuel in search of an ally and found him unbuttoning his shirt. “Bet you the last loaf of bread I can beat you,” he murmured, as if we were children playing in the lake rather than weary, desperate adults standing on the coast of a cold sea, running away from God-knew-what. I laughed, helplessly.

I caught the bright curve of his answering smile, glimpsed the paleness of his chest, and then he was wading after Jane and Bad. There was nothing to do but follow him.

I shouldn’t have been surprised at the cold—it was summer, but summer in Maine is a fleeting, cautious creature that disappears as soon as the sun sets—but I don’t think it’s possible to step into water that cold without being surprised. Swimming through it was like swimming through a cloud of stinging insects. We clung to the rotten raft-planks with frozen fingers, tugging our belongings alongside us, our breath coming in thin gasps. Even Bad was lifting his head high out of the water as if trying to levitate rather than swim. The salt seeped through my bandages, burrowing into the words carved on my arm. If I could have turned back, if I could have given up and crawled back home to the rosy fireplaces of Locke House, I would have. But I couldn’t. So I kept reaching my stinging arms out into the chill black sea, kept inching closer to the gray blur of the island.

And then somehow my knees were scraping stone and Jane was heaving the raft up the shore and Samuel’s breath was a harsh wheeze beside me. He crawled a few feet farther and collapsed in a goose-fleshed heap, face pressed into the pebbled shore. “I do not,” he gasped, “like the cold. Anymore.”

I remembered the piercing chill of Havemeyer’s touch, Samuel’s sickly face as he fell, and fear sent me scrabbling to his side. I touched his back, numb-fingered. “Are you all right?”

He propped himself on one elbow and craned his head wearily upward. He blinked at me, clearing the salt water from his eyes, and his face went curiously blank. I became aware that the ocean had transformed my underthings from shapeless cotton sacks into something more like a second skin, clinging and nearly translucent. Neither of us moved. I felt frozen, snared by his oil-and-ember eyes—until Bad positioned himself several inches away and shook, spraying us in freezing salt water.

Samuel closed his eyes very deliberately and returned his forehead to the pebbles. “Yes. I am,” he sighed. Then he staggered upright and limped to the raft. He returned with his own mostly dry shirt and draped it over my shoulders without letting his fingers brush my skin. It smelled of flour and sweat.

“Almost there. We’ll go through, I think, before we make camp.” Even Jane sounded weary now.

We stumbled after her, winding up the shore and climbing a low bluff on shaking legs. The wind whipped us dry, leaving a white rime of salt on my skin.

On the far side of the island, perched like the skeleton of some long-dead guardian, stood the abandoned bones of a lighthouse. Its tower sagged and leaned and its paint, which might once have been cheery white-and-red, had weathered to the same grayish-brown as the rock beneath it. Where there should have been a doorway there was only a gaping mouth. Jane ducked through it first, picking her way over tumbled rafters and missing floorboards, and Bad and I followed.

Standing inside was like standing in the rotted rib cage of a sea creature, dark and strewn with seaweed. A single bright moonbeam shone through the broken window and illuminated a door on the western wall, where there had been