The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,91

recognize. You’ve grown tall and silent, with the mistrustful stillness of a doe just before she bolts.

Sometimes—when I’m either too tired or too drunk to steer my thoughts away from dangerous places—I wonder what your mother would think if she could see you. Your features so plainly and painfully her own, but your spirit tightly laced beneath good manners and the invisible burden of unbelonging. She had dreamed for you a different life, one profoundly and perilously free, unbounded, every door standing open before you.

Instead, I’ve given you Locke House and Cornelius and that awful German woman who looks at me as if I am unwashed laundry. I’ve left you alone, orphaned, ignorant of the wondrous and terrible things seething just beneath the surface of reality. Cornelius says it’s for the best; he says it isn’t healthy for young girls to grow up with their heads full of doors and other worlds, that the time isn’t right. And after all he’s done—rescuing us, employing me, raising you as he might his own daughter—who am I to object?

And yet: If I ever find your mother again, will she forgive me?

This is something I do not let myself think. I will begin again on a fresh sheet of paper so I do not see the words glaring up at me from the page.

Men like myself cannot see anything beyond our own pain; our eyes are inward-facing, mesmerized by the sight of our own broken hearts.

This is why I didn’t notice for so long: the doors are closing. Or, perhaps more accurately, the doors are being closed.

I should have seen it sooner, but I was even more obsessed in the earliest years, convinced that the very next door would open onto the cerulean seas of my homeland. I followed myths and stories and rumors, I looked for upheavals and revolutions, and at their twisted roots I often found doorways. None of them led me back to her, and so I abandoned them all as quickly as I could, taking time only to scavenge and plunder. Then I packed their stolen treasures in sawdust, scrawled 1611 CHAMPLAIN DRIVE, SHELBURNE, VERMONT on the crate, and departed for the next steamer, the next story, the next door.

I did not linger long enough to see what came next: unexplained forest fires, unscheduled demolitions of historic buildings, floods, property development, cave-ins, gas leaks, and explosions. Sourceless, blameless disasters that turned the doors to rubble and ash and broke the secret links between the worlds.

When I finally recognized the pattern—sitting on a hotel balcony reading an article in the Vancouver Sun about a mine-shaft collapse where I’d found a door only the week before—I did not at first blame human agency. I blamed time. I blamed the twentieth century, which seemed hell-bent on Ouroboran self-destruction. I thought doors might not belong in the modern world, that all doors were destined to close eventually.

I should have known: destiny is a pretty story we tell ourselves. Lurking beneath it there are only people, and the terrible choices we make.

Perhaps I knew the truth, even before I had proof. I felt myself growing suspicious, worrying that strangers were watching me in Bangalore restaurants, hearing footsteps behind me in the alleys of Rio. Around that time I began writing my missives back to Cornelius in a code of my own invention, convinced that some unknown entity was intercepting my reports. It made no difference; the doors kept closing.

I reasoned with myself: What did it matter that these particular doors were destroyed? They were all the wrong doors. None of them would take me back to Ade, to our stone house above the City of Nin, to that moment when I climbed the hillside and saw the two of you curled on the quilt: golden, whole, perfect.

But even in the depths of my self-pity, another thought occurred to me: What happens to a world without doors? Hadn’t I concluded that doors introduce change, back when I was a Scholar rather than a grave robber? I’d hypothesized that doors were vital avenues, allowing the mysterious and miraculous to flow freely between worlds.

Already I imagine I see the effects of their absence in this world: a subtle stagnation, a staleness, like a house that has been left shut up all summer. There are empires upon which the sun will never set, railways that cross continents, rivers of wealth that will never run dry, machines that never grow tired. It’s a system too vast and ravenous to