The stepladder gave a final, fatal crunch. The door pressed inward against the tumble of cleaning supplies and broken wood. But I didn’t care, because at the same moment I felt the swirling, shifting madness of the world reshaping itself, followed by the most unlikely thing in the world: a fresh breeze against my back. It smelled of pine needles and cool earth and warm July lake water.
I turned and saw a strange, gaping wound in the wall behind me, a hole that glinted with rust and silver. It was an ugly, crudely drawn thing, like a child’s chalk sketch made real, but I recognized it for what it was: a Door.
The closet door was wedged halfway open and a white-fingered hand was reaching around its edges. I scuttled backward, sliding through my own blood and realizing from the queer ache in my jaw that I was grinning a fierce, flesh-rending grin, like Bad when he was a few seconds away from biting somebody. I felt the Door at my back—a blessed absence, a pine-scented promise—and crammed myself through it, shoulders scraping raw against the rough-hewn edges.
I fell backward into the swallowing darkness and watched as faces and hands swarmed into the closet, a many-armed monster reaching after me. Then the nothingness of the Threshold ate me.
I’d forgotten how empty it was. Empty isn’t even the right word, because something that’s empty might once have been full, and it was impossible that anything had ever existed in the Threshold. I wasn’t entirely sure I existed, and for a terrible moment I felt the edges of myself dissipating, unraveling.
That moment scares me even now, with solid wood beneath me and warm sun on my face.
But I felt the worn leather of The Ten Thousand Doors beneath my blood-sticky fingers and thought of my mother and father diving from world to world like rocks skipping across some vast black lake, unafraid of falling. Then I thought of Jane and Samuel and Bad, and then, as if their faces were a map unfurling in the void, I remembered where I was going.
Rough edges pressed against me again, and a darkness formed that was infinitely less dark than the Threshold. Musty wooden floorboards appeared beneath me. I fell forward and curled my fingernails against the floor as if I were clinging to a cliff face, the edges of my book pressing painfully, wonderfully against my ribs. My heart, which seemed to have disappeared in the Threshold, thundered into existence again.
“Who’s there?” A shape moved across the floor, casting moon-edged shadows over me. Then, “January?” The voice was low and female, rolling through the vowels of my name in a fashion both foreign and familiar. The word impossible sprang to mind, but the past few days had fatally weakened my entire concept of what was and wasn’t possible, and it slunk furtively away again.
Oily golden light flared. And there she was: short hair limned with lamplight, dress disheveled, mouth slightly open as she knelt beside me.
“Jane.” My head felt far too heavy. I laid it down and spoke to the floor. “Thank God you’re here. Wherever here is. I know where I was aiming, but you never know, with Doors, do you.” My words were soupy and slurred-sounding in my ears, as if I were shouting underwater. The lamplight seemed to be dimming. “But how did you get here?”
“I think the more interesting question is how you got here. ‘Here’ being the Zappia family cabin, by the way.” The dryness of her tone felt brittle, forced. “And what happened to you—there’s blood everywhere—”
But I was no longer listening. I’d heard a sound from the shadowy edges of the room—a lurching, dragging sound, followed by the click of claws on wood—and ceased to breathe. The footsteps padded closer, moving with an uneven hesitancy. Impossible. I raised my head.
Bad limped into the light. One eye was swollen, his back leg was hovering and shaking above the ground, and his head hung low and haggard. For a stretched half second he blinked at me, as if unsure it was really me, and then we dove toward one another. We collided, a desperate mess of dark limbs and yellow fur. He rooted around my neck and armpits as if trying to find a place he could crawl into, making a hoarse, puppyish whine I’d never heard from him before. I wrapped my arms around him, resting my forehead against his shivering shoulder and saying all the stupid, inane things you say when your dog is hurt (I know, love, it’s all right, I’m here, I’m sorry, I’m sorry). Some jagged, broken thing in my chest began to mend.
Jane cleared her throat. “I hate to interrupt, but should there be anything… else, coming out of this hole?”
I went still. Bad’s tail ceased its thumping against the floor. Scuffling, creeping sounds echoed behind me, like something crawling closer. I looked back over my shoulder at my Door—a ragged black tear, as if reality had been careless and caught itself on a loose nail—and saw, or thought I saw, a malevolent gleaming in its depths, like a pair of hungry eyes.
“He’s coming for me.” My voice was calm, almost detached, while my thoughts ran in terrified circles. Havemeyer would emerge, white and wicked, and take whatever it was he wanted from me. Others would follow once they gathered their courage. They’d lock me up forever, if there was anything left of me to lock up, and probably Jane too. Certainly nothing good would happen to an African woman found in the company of a clinically insane fugitive at midnight. And who would take care of poor, battered Bad?
“I think I have to—I have to close it.” Anything open can be closed. Hadn’t my father discovered that when the Door closed between the City of Nin and my mother’s field? He’d never known why or how it happened, but then, my father was a scholar: his tools were careful study and rational evidence and years and years of documentation.
My tools were words and will, and I was out of time. I found my coin-knife, so blood-crusted it no longer gleamed silver. I pulled my knees under my belly and laid my poor, aching arm before me. I pressed the coin to my skin a final time, blinking a little against the weird blurring and unblurring of the room.
“No! January, what are you—” Jane tugged my hand away.
“Please.” I swallowed, swaying a little. “Please trust me. Believe me.” There was no reason in the world she should. Anyone else would have happily dragged me back to the doctors with a note pinned to my chest suggesting they lock me in a small room without any sharp objects for the next century or so.
(This was the true violence Mr. Locke had done to me. You don’t really know how fragile and fleeting your own voice is until you watch a rich man take it away as easily as signing a bank loan.)
The scuffling sounds grew louder.
Her eyes flicked to the hole in the wall behind me, and to the congealed lettering on my arm. A strange expression moved across her face—shrewdness, perhaps? A wary understanding?—and she let go of my hand.
I chose a bare, unbloodied patch of skin, and began to carve a single word: JU
Movement in the blackness, the harsh sound of breathing, a white-spider hand reaching out of the darkness toward me—
JUST.
The Door opens just for her.
I felt the world pull itself back together, like skin pulling tight around a scar. The blackness receded, the white hand spasmed—there was a terrible, inhuman screech—and then I was staring at nothing but a patch of unremarkable cabin wall.
The Door was closed.
Then my cheek was pressed to the floor and Jane’s cool hand was on my forehead. Bad limped closer and lay down with his spine pressed against me.