The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,39

in St. Ours. And that’s where he met the boo hag,4 miss.”

A Cheshire smile, all teeth and want, crept over the girl’s face. “You don’t say. My name’s Ade Larson. Could I trouble you with another few questions, miss?”

She asked them to tell the whole story as they knew it, about the handsome young John who found himself tired and gray every morning, with tangled dreams of starlit skies and wild rides. She asked them if anybody ever went into St. Ours (sometimes, young boys, daring each other). She asked them if they came back out again (of course! Except—well, there were rumors. Boys who spent the night in there and didn’t come out again for a year and a day. Boys who hid in closets and found themselves dreaming of faraway countries).

“Now, just one last crumb, my friends: How did this boo hag character get into the house in the first place? How’d she find poor John?”

The LeBlancs looked at one another, and even Mary’s softheartedness was beginning to be troubled by the intensity of the young woman. It wasn’t merely the oddness of her situation, dressed for labor and wandering around at night; it was the way her face seemed lit with a gaslamp glow of its own making, the way she seemed simultaneously to be the hunter and the hunted, running away from something and toward something else.

But few people can leave a story unfinished, with a raveled end left trailing. “Same way a hag gets into anybody’s house, miss. They find a crack, or a hole, or a unlocked door.”

The girl gave the couple a beatific smile, swept them a bow, and headed west.

She wasn’t seen again for sixteen days, when a group of young boys rolling hoops down the street saw a white woman emerge from St. Ours. They described her appearance as “witchy”: her practical clothing hung in ragged tatters around her, supplemented by a strange cloak of oiled black feathers; her eyes were wind-whipped and her smile at the night sky was sly, as if she and the stars were on familiar terms.

When the boys questioned her about her activities, the girl failed to provide any clear explanation beyond a few senseless descriptions of high mountain peaks and black pine boughs and lights in the sky like pink silk pinned to the stars.

When I asked her myself what she’d seen through the door—for there must have been a door—she only laughed. “Why, the boo hags, of course!” And when I frowned at her she shushed me: “Listen, not every story is made for telling. Sometimes just by telling a story you’re stealing it, stealing a little of the mystery away from it. Let those witch women be, I say.”

I did not know what she meant at the time. I had a scholar’s hunger to reveal and explain, to make the unknown known—but in the case of the St. Ours door I was foiled. I traced her footsteps up Elmira Avenue and found a whitewashed mansion sinking into the sweet rot of magnolia blooms, simultaneously grand and half-forgotten. I made plans to return in the evening to conduct further explorations, but that was the night of the Great Algiers Fire of 1895. By midnight the sky was golden orange and by dawn the entire block, including the St. Ours mansion, was nothing but a sooty skeleton of itself.

Remember this fire. Remember that it raged from no clear origin and paid no heed to hoses or buckets of water until every grand, sagging inch of St. Ours was burned to ash.

But still, I record these recollections because St. Ours was the first door I found in this world, and the second door Miss Larson found. With the finding of a door comes change.

Later, Ade would refer to the period between roughly 1885 and 1892 as her “hungry years.” When asked what she was hungry for, she laughed and said, “Same thing as you, I bet. Ways-between. Nowheres. Somewheres.” She scoured the Earth, wandering and ravenous, looking for doors.

And she found them.5 She found them in abandoned churches and the salt-rimed walls of caves, in graveyards and behind fluttering curtains in foreign markets. She found so many her imagining of the world grew lacy and tattered with holes, like a mouse-chewed map. I followed her in my own time and rediscovered as many as I could. But doors by their natures are openings, passings-through, missing-places—and it has proved difficult to record the precise geometry of absence.