The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,121

the floor.

I grabbed for it without taking my eyes away from him. “I’m leaving now. I’d advise you not to follow me again.” My voice hardly shook at all.

He gave a dark crack of laughter. “And where will you run to, little girl? You’ve no money, no friends left to protect you, no father—”

“The trouble with you people,” I observed, “is that you believe in permanence. An orderly world will remain so; a closed door will stay closed.” I shook my head, reaching for the door. “It’s very… limiting.”

I left.

Out in the genteel bustle of the station I pressed my shoulder faux-casually against the bathroom door and fished Samuel’s pen out of my pillowcase-sack. I held it tight for a moment, feeling an echo of remembered warmth, then dug the tip into the peeling paint of the door.

The door locks, and there is no key.

The words were scratched deeply into the paint, jittering along the wood grain. The dull scrape of metal on metal sounded through the door, a permanent sort of clunk, and I gave a little gasp at the sudden weight of exhaustion pulling at my limbs. I leaned my forehead against the wood, eyes closed, and raised the pen again.

The door is forgotten, I wrote.

And then I was blinking up from the floor, knees aching where I’d fallen. I lay there for a while, unmoving, wondering if the stationmaster would come investigate the poor vagrant girl collapsed on his floor, or if I might just sleep for an hour or so. My eyes ached; my throat was stiff with dried blood.

But—it had worked. The bathroom door had become vague and blurred, something too mundane for my eyes to linger on. No one else in the little station seemed to see the door at all.

I vented a small, tired ha, and wondered how long it would last. Long enough to run, I supposed. Providing I could stand up.

I dragged myself to a bench on the platform and waited with my red-inked ticket clutched in one hand. I boarded the next train south.

I sat, watching the country turn rich and wet, the hills rising and diving like great emerald whales, and thought: I’m coming, Father.

My Mother’s Door

The last three hundred miles reeled past as if I were wearing a pair of those magical boots that take you seven leagues forward with every step. I remember them only as a series of jarring thuds.

Thud. I am stepping off the train into the sweating sprawl of Union Train Station in Louisville. Even the sky is busy, a crisscrossed mess of electric lines and church spires and shimmery waves of heat. Bad presses close to my knees, hating it.

Thud. I’m standing in a dusty lot outside the station begging for a ride from a truck with BLUE GRASS BREWING printed on the side in black block letters. The driver tells me to go back where I came from; his friend makes obscene kissing sounds.

Thud. Bad and I are swaying westward in a creaking wagon piled head-high with earthy, green-smelling hemp stalks. A solemn black man and his solemn young daughter sit on the bench up front. Their clothes have that calicoed, mismatched look that only happens when fabric has been patched and repatched until almost nothing original remains, and they look at me with worried, warning eyes.

Thud. Ninley, finally.

It had both changed and not changed in the last decade. So had the world, I supposed.

It was still scrubby and reluctant-looking, and the townsfolk still glared in aggrieved half squints, but the streets had been paved. Automobiles putted up and down them, alongside newly rich men in three-piece suits with embarrassingly large pocket watches. The river was crowded with chugging steamers and flatboats. Some sort of mill—a hulking, ugly thing—now brooded on the shore. Steam and smoke hung above us, transformed into oily pink clouds by the setting sun. Progress and Prosperity, as Mr. Locke would say.

I’d been driven and hunted on the journey here, but now that I’d arrived I found myself strangely reluctant to take the last few steps. I bought myself a sack of peanuts at Junior’s River Supply with the last of my laundry money and found a tobacco-slimed bench to sit on. Bad perched like a bronze sentinel at my feet.

A shift bell rang, and I watched thin-faced women scurrying in and out of the mill, their fingers curled into callused claws at their sides. I watched the bent black backs of men loading coal onto docked steamers,