The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,95

I love you, forgive me? I feared your disappointment, your rejection of my paltry, pitiful gifts.

This book is my last such gift. My final insufficiency. It is a profoundly imperfect work, as you know very well by now, but it is the truth—a thing you deserved long before now, but which I could not give you. (I tried, once or twice. I came into your room, opened my mouth to tell you everything—and found myself voiceless. I fled from you and lay gasping in my own bed, almost choking on the weight of unsaid words in my throat. I suppose I am truly that much of a coward.)

Well, no more silences. No more lies. I don’t know how often you visit the Azure Chest, so I’ve found a way to ensure that you find the book in a timely fashion—the birds here are trusting creatures, unfamiliar with the dangers of humankind.

It contains only one falsehood of which I am aware: the claim that I wrote it for the sake of Scholarship or Knowledge or Moral Necessity. That I was trying to “leave a record behind me” or “document my findings” for some murky future reader, who might bravely take up my mantle.

The truth is that I wrote it for you. I was always writing for you, every moment.

Do you remember when you were six or seven and I returned from the Burmese expedition? It was the first time you didn’t run into my arms when I arrived (and how I longed for and dreaded those arrivals, when your dear hourglass face would tell me how much time I’d wasted). Instead you simply stood in your starched little dress, looking up at me as if I were a stranger on a crowded train car.

Too many times, your eyes said. You left me too many times, and now something precious and fragile has broken between us.

I wrote this book in the desperate, pitiable hope that I could repair it. As if I could atone for each missed holiday and absent hour, for all the years I spent wrapped in the selfishness of grief. But here, at the end, I know I cannot.

I am leaving you again, more profoundly than I have ever done before.

I can give you nothing but this book, and a prayer that this door will not be closed. That you will find a way to follow me one day. That your mother is alive and waiting, and one day she will hold you again and what is shattered will be made whole.

Trust Jane. Tell her—tell her I am sorry.

The door calls me in your mother’s voice. I must go.

Forgive me. Follow me.

YS

I can’t do it.

I tried, January. I tried to leave you. But I merely stood on the threshold of my door, frozen, smelling the sweetness of my home world and willing myself to take that last, final step forward.

I cannot. I cannot leave you. Not again. I am packing my things, returning to Locke House. I will bring you back here with me, and we will go through together or not at all. I am so sorry, gods, so sorry—I am coming.

Wait for me.

RUN JANUARY

ARCADIA

DO NOT TRUST

The Driftwood Door

I found Jane by following the rhythmic grind and thunk of a shovel in rocky earth. She worked steadily, digging in a low-lying spot in the center of the island, alone except for a fetid, marshy smell and the whining drone of several million mosquitoes.

And, of course, Mr. Theodore Havemeyer.

He was nothing but a stained bundle of sheets, muddy-white and vaguely larval. His hand—a colorless claw, dotted with oozing punctures roughly the size of Bad’s teeth—protruded from the wrapping. It cast a too-large shadow in the late-afternoon light.

“Couldn’t we just, I don’t know, toss him in the lake? Or leave him?”

The crunch of the shovel biting into the ground; the shush of dirt sliding off it. Jane did not look up at me, but a humorless smile appeared on her face. “You think the Havemeyers of the world just disappear? You think no one comes looking?” She shook her head and added comfortingly, “It’s good and wet here; he won’t last long.”

This, I found, made me feel slightly ill, so I perched on a moss-eaten boulder and watched the crows gather along the pine boughs above us like poorly behaved funeral attendees, cawing and gossiping.

The splintery handle of the shovel appeared in my vision. I took it, and made several subsequent discoveries: first, that digging is very hard and I