The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,19

the revolver, at the oiled darkness of it, the dull square snout. Bad’s breath was hot on my feet.

“January, are you paying attention? There hasn’t been word from your father in nearly three months. I got a telegram from another man on the expedition: no one has seen or heard from him. They found his camp scattered and abandoned on a mountainside.”

The bird in my chest was scrabbling, beating its wings in frenzied terror. I sat perfectly still.

“January. He’s gone missing. It seems—well.” Mr. Locke drew a short, sharp breath. “It seems very likely that your father is dead.”

I sat on my thin mattress, watching the sun creep butter-soft across my pink-and-gold bedspread. Frayed threads and cotton stuffing made shadows and spires across it, like the architecture of some foreign city. Bad curled around my back even though it was too hot for cuddling, making soft, puppyish sounds deep in his chest. He smelled of summer and fresh-clipped grass.

I hadn’t wanted to believe it. I’d howled, screamed, demanded Mr. Locke take it back or prove it. I’d dug bloody pink crescents in my palms with the effort of not lashing out, not smashing his little glass cases into a thousand shimmering shards.

Eventually I’d felt hands like paving stones on my shoulders, weighing me down. “Enough, child.” And I’d looked into his eyes, pale and implacable. I’d felt myself flaking and crumbling beneath them. “Julian is dead. Accept it.”

And I had. I’d collapsed into Locke’s arms and soaked his shirt with tears. His gruff murmur had rumbled against my ear. “S’all right, girl. You’ve still got me.”

Now I sat in my room, face swollen and eyes dry, teetering on the edge of a pain so vast I couldn’t see its edges. It would swallow me whole, if I let it.

I thought about the last postcard I’d received from my father, featuring a beach and several tough-looking women labeled FISHERWOMEN OF SUGASHIMA. I thought about Father himself, but could only picture him walking away from me, hunched and tired, disappearing through some terrible, final doorway.

You promised you would take me with you.

I wanted to scream again, felt the sound clawing and writhing in my throat. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to run away and keep running until I fell into some other, better world.

And then I remembered the book. Wondered if Mr. Locke had given it to me just for this moment, knowing how badly I would need it.

I pulled it from my skirts and traced my thumb over the stamped title. It opened for me like a tiny leather-bound Door with hinges made of glue and wax thread.

I ran through it.

The Ten Thousand Doors: Being a Comparative Study of Passages, Portals, and Entryways in World Mythology

This text was produced by Yule Ian Scholar for the University of the City of Nin, in the years between 6908 and—, in partial satisfaction of his attainment of Mastery.

The following monograph concerns the permutations of a repeated motif in world mythologies: passages, portals, and entryways. Such a study might at first seem to suffer from those two cardinal sins of academia—frivolity and triviality—but it is the author’s intention to demonstrate the significance of doorways as phenomenological realities. The potential contributions to other fields of study—grammalogie, glottologie, anthropology—are innumerable, but if the author may be so presumptive, this study intends to go far beyond the limitations of our present knowledge. Indeed, this research might reshape our collective understanding of the physical laws of the universe.

The central contention is simply this: the passages, portals, and entryways common to all mythologies are rooted in physical anomalies that permit users to travel from one world to another. Or, to put it even more simply: these doors actually exist.

The following pages will offer extensive evidence to defend this conclusion and will provide a set of theories concerning the nature, origins, and function of doors. The most significant proposals include:

i) that doors are portals between one world and another, which exist only in places of particular and indefinable resonance (what physical-philosophers call “weak coupling” between two universes). While human construction—frames, arches, curtains, et cetera—may surround a door, the natural phenomenon itself preexists its decoration in every case. It also seems to be the case that these portals are, by some quirk of physics or of humanity, damnably difficult to find.

ii) that such portals generate a certain degree of leakage. Matter and energy flow freely through them, and so too do people, foreign species, music, inventions, ideas—all the sorts of things