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 ever be dismantled, like a deity or an engine, which swallows men and women whole and belches black smoke into the sky. Its name is Modernity, I am told, and it carries Progress and Prosperity in its coal-fired belly—but I see only rigidity, repression, a chilling resistance to change.
I believe I already know what happens to a world without doors.
But to stop looking for doors would be to stop looking for your mother, and I cannot. I cannot.
I began retracing Ade’s decade-old footsteps, on the theory that the door to the Written might be hidden in some other world. It was not always easy, piecing together the stories she told me with stories overheard in busy streets or dingy bars, gin-soaked and garbled, but I was persistent. I found the St. Ours door, the Haitian door, the selkie door, a dozen others—all of them are gone now. Burnt, collapsed, destroyed, forgotten.
It wasn’t until 1907 that I caught a glimpse of my pursuers. I’d finally found the Greek door—a cold stone slab in an abandoned church—which led to a world Ade had once described as a “black pit of hell.” I had no interest in repeating her experiences (she was, by her testimony, nearly shanghaied by an ice-eyed chieftainess), and so did not linger long inside it. I wandered for less than a day, creeping fearfully through the snow, but found nothing alive and nothing worth stealing. There were only endless rows of black pines and a distant horizon the color of gunmetal, and the wracked remains of some sort of fort or village. If there were any other doors in that place, I did not linger to find them.
I crawled back through the stone door into the mold-splotched interior of St. Peter’s Church. It was only after I’d emerged—shivering in heaving spasms, inhaling the salt and lime smell of a Mediterranean evening—that I noticed something standing on the tile floor that hadn’t previously been there: a pair of black-booted feet.
They belonged to a tall, heavy-browed man wearing the brass-buttoned uniform and round cap of a Greek police officer. He did not look particularly surprised to see a snow-dusted foreigner crawling out of the wall, but merely a little inconvenienced.
I scrambled to my feet. “Who—what are you doing here?”
He shrugged and spread his hands. “Exactly as I please.” He spoke guttural, accented English. “Although I am I think a little early.” He sighed and made a show of brushing off a pew and sitting down to wait.
I swallowed. “I know what you’re here for. Don’t try to pretend. And I won’t let you, not this time—”
His mocking laughter punctured my daring little speech. “Oh, don’t be foolish, Mr. Scaller. Return to that nasty little hut on the shore, buy yourself a steamer ticket in the morning, and forget about this place, eh? You have finished here.”
It was all my most paranoid fantasies come true: he knew my name, knew about the shack I’d rented from a fisherwoman, perhaps knew the true nature of my researches.
“No. I won’t let it happen again—”
The man waved a dismissive hand at me, as if I were a child resisting bedtime. “Yes, you will. You will leave without any fuss. You will not tell another soul. And then you will sniff out the next door for us like a good dog.”
“And why’s that?” My voice had gone high and taut and I wished, piercingly, for Adelaide. She was always the brave one.
He watched me almost pityingly. “Children,” he sighed. “They grow up so fast, yes? Little January will be thirteen in just a few months.”
We stood in silence while I listened to the sound of my own heart beating and thought of you, waiting for me an ocean away.
I left.
I purchased my steamer ticket the following morning and bought a paper from the Foreign Affairs stand in Valencia three days later. On the sixth page, printed in blurred Greek type, was a small column about a sudden and inexplicable rock slide on the coast of Crete. No one had been hurt, but a road had been buried and an old, mostly forgotten church had been reduced to rubble. The local police chief was quoted describing the event as “unfortunate, but inevitable.”
You will find below a partial reproduction of a list recorded in my notes in July 1907. It is such a scholar’s impulse, to cope with a dangerous and murky situation by sitting at his desk and writing a list. What would your mother have done, I wonder. One imagines a great deal more noise and disruption, and perhaps a body count.
I titled the page Various Responses to the Continuing Situation Regarding the Nefarious Closing of Doors and Potential Risks to Immediate Family Members and underlined it several times.
A. Expose the plot. Publish findings thus far (write to the Times? Take out an ad?) and denounce the activities of shadowy organization. Points in favor: could be done quickly; minimal disruption to January’s life. Points against: likelihood of total failure (would papers publish findings without evidence?); loss of Cornelius’s trust and protection; danger of (violent) retribution from unknown parties.
B. Go to Cornelius. Explain my fears more fully and request additional security for January. In favor: Locke’s considerable resources could command a high degree of safety. Against: He hasn’t been sympathetic to my concerns thus far; the terms delusional paranoias and ridiculous flimflammery have been used.
C. Remove January to safe, secondary location. If she were hidden in some other stronghold, very quietly, pursuers might not find her. In favor: J kept safe. Against: difficulty of finding safe location; difficulty of managing Cornelius’s attachment to J; uncertainty of success/risk to J’s safety; maximum disruption of daily life.
I believe she loves Locke House, despite everything. When she was young I would often arrive to find a flustered nursemaid and an absent daughter, and she would be discovered hours later building sand castles on the lakeshore, or playing endless games with the grocer’s son. Now I find her walking the halls with one hand on the dark wood paneling, as if she is stroking the spine of some great sprawling beast, or curled with her dog in a forgotten armchair in the attic. Would it be right to steal the only home she’s ever known, when I have stolen so much else from her already?
D. Run away, take refuge in another world. I could find a door and go through it, taking January with me, and build a new life for the two of us in some safer, brighter world. In favor: ultimate safety from pursuers. Against: see above. And I am far from certain that all worlds connect to one another—were we to flee to another world, could I ever find the Written again? And if Ade should claw her way back home, would she ever find us?
There was no E. Continue on precisely as before, but this is the course I ultimately chose. Life has a kind of momentum to it, I’ve found, an accumulated weight of decisions which becomes impossible to shift. I continued my thieving, chiseling away stories and boxing them up so that a rich man might brag to his rich friends; I continued my desperate search, following stories and unearthing doors; I continued to let them close behind me. I stopped looking over my shoulder.