in pursuit of something she called “silky stories,” which were probably selkies. The farmer told her about a long-dead neighbor who found a young woman down by the sea caves. The woman’s eyes were set oddly far apart, oily black, and she didn’t speak a word of any human language. Ade spent the following days exploring the coastal caves herself, until one afternoon she failed to return. The poor potato farmer was convinced she’d drowned, until she reappeared eight days later smelling of cool, secret oceans.
In 1890 Ade was working on a steamer weaving its way through the Bahamas like a drunken seagull, when she apparently heard stories about Toussaint Louverture’s rebellion and the way his troops simply melted into the highlands and disappeared, almost like magic. The shipping routes at that time curved around Haiti as if it had the plague, so Ade abandoned her post on the steamer and bribed a fisherman to take her from Matthew Town to the wrinkled green coast of Haiti.
She found Toussaint’s door after weeks of stumbling along the mud-slicked logging trails of the highlands. It was a long tunnel, tangled in the roots of a gnarled acacia tree. She never described what she found on the other side, and we may never know now: the acreage was purchased, logged, and converted to sugar production several years later.
In the same year she followed stories of ice-eyed monsters whose gaze could turn unwary persons to stone and ended up in a tiny, forgotten church in Greece. There she found a door (black, frost-limned) and went through it. She discovered a wind-torn, brutally cold world on the other side, which she would have happily abandoned except that she was immediately set upon by a band of wild, pale folk dressed in animal skins. As she later reported, they stole everything she owned “down to her underthings,” shouted at her for a while, then dragged her before their chieftainess, who did not shout but merely fixed her gaze on Ade and whispered to her.
“And I could almost understand her, my hand to God. She was telling me how I ought to join their tribe, fight their enemies, add wealth to their coffers, et cetera. I swear I almost did. Something about those eyes—light-colored, powerful cold. But in the end I declined.” Ade did not elaborate on the consequences of her refusal, but Greek locals report seeing a wild-eyed American woman wandering the streets with nothing but a fur cloak, mild frostbite, and a rather vicious-looking spear. (My own experience with this particular door will be recounted at a later date.)
In 1891 Ade discovered a tiled archway in the shadows of the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, and returned with great golden disks she claimed were dragon scales. She visited Santiago and the Falklands, contracted malaria in Léopoldville, and disappeared for several months in the northeast corner of Maine. She accumulated the dust of other worlds on her skin like ten thousand perfumes, and left constellations of wistful men and impossible tales in her wake.
But she never lingered anywhere for long. Most observers told me she was simply a wanderer, driven to move from place to place by the same unknowable pressures that make swallows fly south, but I believe she was something closer to a knight on a quest. I believe she was looking for one particular door and one particular world.
In 1893, in the high, snowcapped spring of her twenty-seventh birthday, she found it.
The story traveled in the usual way of stories, slithering from mouth to mouth along the railways and roads like a contagion moving along arteries. By February 1893, it had sifted into Taft, Texas, and permeated the walls of the cottonseed mill where Ade Larson was employed. Her fellow workers recall a particular lunch hour: They were gathered with their tin pails behind the mill, breathing the oil-sticky steam and the green rot scent of cottonseed hulls, listening to Dalton Gray’s daily report of barroom gossip. He told them about a pair of trappers up north who came down from the Rockies raving mad, swearing on everything they held dear that they’d found an ocean at the top of Mount Silverheels.
The workers laughed, but Ade’s voice thudded into their laughter like a hatchet into a stump. “How do you mean, they found an ocean?”
Dalton Gray shrugged. “How’m I supposed to know? Had it from Gene they were lost and found an old stone church from the silver-mining days and lived there for a