“He’s very busy, pet. Your evaluation is scheduled for tomorrow, or at least before the end of the week.” Then she patted my head, the way no adult would ever pat another adult’s head, and added, “But you’ve been very good, so we can leave these off for tonight.”
The way she said it—like I should be grateful simply to be uncuffed, to have the basic human liberty of moving my arms and touching something other than overstarched sheets—lit like a coal in my belly. If I’d let it burn it would have ignited a conflagration, a ravenous blaze that would have ripped apart my stiff sheets and smashed my oatmeal against the wall and turned my eyes white-hot. No one would have believed I was sane, after that. I smothered the coal.
They left and I stood at my window, pressing my forehead against the summer-warm glass until my feet began to ache. I lay back down.
The hour-dragons stalked me. They grew larger as the sun set, multiplying in the shadows.
I think I might have shattered into pieces that second night, and never quite found all of myself again, had it not been for an irregular, half-familiar pattering against the window. I stopped breathing.
I crept out of bed and struggled against the stiff window latch, feeling the liquid weakness of my arms. It wedged open only a miserly few inches, but it was enough to let in a sweet summer-night smell. Enough for me to hear, far below, a familiar voice say, “January? It’s you?”
It was Samuel. I felt for just a moment like Rapunzel must have when her prince finally showed up to rescue her from the tower, except that I couldn’t have wedged myself out the window even if my hair had been long and golden rather than curled and matted. Still.
“What are you doing here?” I hissed down at him. I couldn’t see much more than a man-shaped shadow several floors below, holding something in its hands.
“Jane sent me, she says to tell you she tried to see you, but could not—”
“But how did you know which window was mine?”
I saw his shadow shrug, one-shouldered. “I waited. I watched. Until I saw you.”
I didn’t say anything. I pictured him hiding in the hedges, staring up at my prison and waiting for hours and hours until he saw my face in the window—and a shiver ran down my breastbone. In my experience, the people you cared most about did not linger. They were always turning away, leaving you behind, never coming back—but Samuel had waited.
He was speaking again. “Listen, Jane says it is important that you have—”
He stopped. Both of us saw the yellow glow of lights flicking on through the first-floor windows, heard the muffled thumps of footsteps coming to investigate. “Catch!”
I caught. It was a stone tied to a length of twine. “Pull it up! Quick!” And he was gone, disappearing into the landscaped grounds just as the hospital doors creaked outward. I yanked the twine up through my window in panicky jerks and jammed the window closed. I slid down my room wall, panting as if it were me sprinting into the night instead of Samuel.
There was something smallish and square tied to the end of the line: a book. The book. Even in the dark I could see the half-worn lettering smiling at me like gold teeth through the gloom: THE TEN THOU OORS. It had been a long time since Samuel had smuggled a story to me; I wondered dizzily if he’d dog-eared his favorite scenes.
Several hundred questions occurred to me—how had Jane recognized the book, and why did she want me to have it? And how long would Samuel keep waiting for me, if I was trapped here forever?—but I ignored them. Books are Doors and I wanted out.
I crawled to the center of the floor, where there was a slanted yellow square of light from the hall, and began to read.
Chapter Three
Much on Doors, Worlds, and Words
Other worlds and the flexibility of natural laws—The City of Nin—A familiar door seen from the other side—A ghost at sea
It is a heartless thing, but it is at this juncture in our narrative that we must abandon Miss Adelaide Larson entirely. We leave her just as she sails The Key into a foreign ocean, with the salted wind blowing the pine sap out of her hair and filling her heart with glowing certainty.
We do not abandon her without good reason: the time has come when we ought to discuss more directly the nature of doors themselves. I must first assure you I did not delay this instruction out of any sly sense of theater, but simply because I hope by now that I have gained your trust. I hope, simply, that you will believe me.
Let us begin with the first conceit of this work: doors are portals between one world and another, which exist only in places of particular and indefinable resonance. By “indefinable resonance,” I refer to the space between worlds—that vast blackness waiting on the threshold of every door, which is hideously dangerous to pass through. It is as though the borders of oneself grow dissolute with nothing pressing against them, and your very essence threatens to spill away into the void. Literature and myth are rife with tales of those who have entered the void and failed to emerge on the other side.7 It seems therefore likely that doors themselves were originally constructed in places where this blackness is at its thinnest and least deadly: convergence points, natural crossroads.
And what is the nature of these other worlds? As we have discovered in previous chapters, they are infinitely varied and ever-changing, and often fail to comply with the conventions of our present world, which we are arrogant enough to call the physical laws of the universe. There are places where men and women are winged and red-skinned, and places where there is no such thing as man and woman but only persons somewhere in between. There are worlds where the continents are carried on the backs of vast turtles swimming through freshwater oceans, where snakes speak riddles, where the lines between the dead and living are blurred to insignificance. I have seen villages where fire itself had been tamed, and followed at men’s heels like an obedient hound, and cities with glass spires so high they gathered clouds around their spiral points. (If you are wondering why other worlds seem so brimful of magic compared to your own dreary Earth, consider how magical this world seems from another perspective. To a world of sea people, your ability to breathe air is stunning; to a world of spear throwers, your machines are demons harnessed to work tirelessly in your service; to a world of glaciers and clouds, summer itself is a miracle.)
My second supposition is this: that doors generate a variable but significant degree of leakage between worlds. But what sorts of things leak through, and what is their fate? Men and women, of course, bringing with them the particular talents and arts of their home worlds. Some of them have come to unfortunate ends, I believe—locked in madhouses, burned at stakes, beheaded, banished, et cetera—but others seem to have employed their uncanny powers or arcane knowledges more profitably. They have gained power, amassed wealth, shaped the fates of peoples and worlds; they have, in short, brought change.
Objects, too, have trickled through the doors between worlds, blown by strange winds, drifting on white-frosted waves, carried and discarded by careless travelers—even stolen, sometimes. Some of them have been lost or ignored or forgotten—books written in foreign tongues, clothes in strange fashions, devices with no use beyond their home worlds—but some of them have left stories in their wakes. Stories of magic lamps and enchanted mirrors, golden fleeces and fountains of youth, dragon-scale armor and moon-streaked broomsticks.