for all those maligned dime novelists and romance writers.)
You’re wondering why I’ve written it at all. Why I’m here, hunched over a sheaf of moonlit papers with my hand cramping and nothing but my dog and the wide silvery shadow of the ocean for company, writing as if my very soul depends on it. Maybe it’s a family compulsion.
Maybe it’s simple fear. Fear that I might fail in my lofty purposes and leave no record behind me. The Society, after all, is an organization of very powerful and very dangerous beings who have crept through the cracks in our world, all of whom very much want the Doors to remain closed. And it would be foolish to suppose that our world has been the only one to attract such creatures or ignite such ideas. In my nightmares I’m in an endless carnival hall filled with Havemeyers, reaching their white hands toward me through a thousand mirrors; in my really bad nightmares the mirrors are filled with pale eyes, and I can feel my will unspooling inside me.
It’s dangerous, is what I’m saying. So I’ve written this story as a sort of extended insurance policy in case I screw up.
If you’re some stranger who stumbled over this book by chance—perhaps rotting in some foreign garbage pile or locked in a dusty traveling trunk or published by some small, misguided press and shelved mistakenly under Fiction—I hope to every god you have the guts to do what needs doing. I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through; I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return.
But that’s not really why I wrote this, of course.
I wrote it for you. So that you might read it and remember the things you were told to forget.
You remember me now, don’t you? And you remember the offer you made me?
Well. Now at least you can look clear-eyed into your own future, and choose: stay safe and sane at home, as any rational man would—I swear I’ll understand—
Or run away with me toward the glimmering, mad horizon. Dance through this eternal green orchard, where ten thousand worlds hang ripe and red for the plucking; wander with me between the trees, tending them, clearing away the weeds, letting in the air.
Opening the Doors.
Epilogue
The Door in the Mist
It is late October. Jagged lines of frost creep and bloom in every windowpane, and steam wisps from the lake; winter in Vermont is an impatient thing.
It is dawn, and a young man is loading sacks of Washington Mills Peerless White Flour into a truck. The truck is glossy black, with curlicued golden lettering painted on the side. The young man is dark and solemn-eyed. He pulls his cap low against the chill, mist pearling against the back of his neck.
He works in the comfortable rhythm of someone familiar with hard work, but there are faint, unhappy lines gathered around his mouth. The lines are fresh-seeming, as if they’ve only recently arrived and aren’t certain how to behave. They age him.
His family attributes the lines to a slow recovery from his illness over the summer. One night at the end of July he simply vanished—after some very odd behavior and an urgent conversation with that African woman from Locke House—and staggered back home nearly two weeks later, disoriented and senseless. He didn’t seem to recall where he’d been or why, and the doctor (actually the horse doctor, who prescribed more stringent tonics at half the price) speculated that a bad fever might have boiled his brain, and recommended purgatives and time.
Time has helped, some. The dizzy confusion of July dissipated into a vague uncertainty, a slight cloudiness in his eyes, and a tendency to stare out at the horizon as if he were hoping something or someone might appear there. Even his beloved story papers can’t hold his attention for long. His family supposes it will fade, eventually, and Samuel himself hopes the ache in his chest will fade, too, and the nagging sense that he’s lost something very dear to him but can’t recall what it was.
Three weeks previously something happened that made it worse: A woman had approached him as he made his delivery to Shelburne Inn. She was obviously foreign, black as oil, and far too familiar for someone so strange. She said a lot