The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,26

on the evening of the third day.

On Monday she was supplied with a basket of fresh laundry to fold and a few stacks of ripped underclothes to mend, because Aunt Lizzie insisted that lying in bed all day was more reward than punishment, and said she might run off tomorrow evening herself and they could lock her upstairs next for some bed rest. At lunch the loft grew greasy with the smell of frying bacon and beans. Ade dropped a Bible on the floor to remind them to bring her up something to eat.

But none of her aunts appeared. There was an authoritative thumping on the front door, followed by the astonished silence of five women so unaccustomed to visitors they weren’t quite sure what action ought to follow a knock at the door. Then a timid chair-scraping and shuffling, and the door creaking inward. Ade lay flat on the floor and pressed her ear to the pine boards.

She heard nothing but the low, foreign rumblings of a strange man in their kitchen, and five women’s voices rising and falling around it like a flock of startled river birds. Once a hearty laugh boomed upward, drum-hollow and well practiced. Ade thought of the big-city man at the church service and felt a strange darkening, a fear of something nameless hanging on her horizon.

The man left, the door closed, and the twittering of the aunts crescendoed into something like cackling.

It was an hour or more before Aunt Lizzie brought up a plate of cold beans. “And who was that at the door?” Ade asked. She was still lying on the floor, having found herself paralyzed by a combination of lassitude and dread.

“Never you mind, nosy. Just a bit of good news is all.” Lizzie looked quite smug as she said it, like a woman hiding a grand surprise. Had it been one of her other aunts Ade might have bullied her for more information, but bullying Aunt Lizzie was like bullying a mountain, except mountains didn’t switch you for impertinence. Ade rolled onto her back and watched the sunbeams stretch across the loft ceiling, pooling in the gullies between rafters. She wondered what the sun might look like elsewhere, in some other world, and if there were really any other worlds to see. Already the things the ghost boy told her were fading and fraying.

On the morning of the third day Ade woke with a foreboding heaviness in her limbs. Her aunts and grandmother still snored and snuffled around her in a sea of quilts and woman-flesh. Sunrise was reluctant and gray, too slow in coming.

Ade sat tense among her aunts as they dressed, wishing herself out the window and in the hayfield already. Her bones hummed and strained; her feet tap-tapped on the floorboards. The loft was close and humid from their sleeping breath.

“We’re going to town today,” Mama Larson announced, and gestured for her town hat—an enormous white bonnet she’d purchased sometime in the 1850s, which looked and smelled increasingly like a stuffed rabbit. “But you’re staying put, Ade, on account of the heart attack you gave us.”

Ade blinked. Then she nodded meekly, because it seemed polite to maintain the fiction that she would obey.

By the time all the Larson women were truly gone—and it took an eternity of fussing with dresses and stockings, followed by another small eternity in the barn convincing the mules they ought to wear a harness and pull a cart before this was accomplished—Ade was almost shuddering with the urge to be elsewhere. She took a September apple and her aunt Lizzie’s work coat and left at a scurrying almost-run.

There was no one waiting at the old cabin. There was, in fact, no old cabin at which to wait: the field was blank, featureless, empty but for a few sulky-looking crows and a line of fresh iron stakes driven into the earth.

Ade closed her eyes against a sudden disorienting dizziness, stumbling forward. Where the cabin used to stand she found a raw tumble of broken lumber, as if a giant’s hand had reached casually from the sky to topple it.

There was nothing left of the door but a few lichen-splotched splinters.

The lamps were lit in the windows by the time she arrived home. The mules were back in the pasture looking ruffled and sweat-stained, and Ade could hear the self-satisfied cackling of her aunts in the kitchen. The laughter stopped when she opened the door.

The five of them stood gathered around the kitchen table