I made only three changes. The first involved an ivory door in the mountains of British East Africa and an uncomfortably close encounter with a Lee-Metford rifle, and ended in forging a passport and purchasing train tickets for a Miss Jane Irimu. It is not necessary to recount the full story of our meeting here, but only to note that she is one of the most fearless and casually violent persons I have ever met, and that I caused her inadvertent but terrible heartache. She also has a very particular empathy to your situation and it is my belief that she will protect you far more capably than I have. You ought to ask her for the full story one day.
The second change was to find an escape route for the two of you, a bolt-hole which I hope you will never make use of. I will not describe it with any detail here—lest some prying, unfriendly eye come across this book—except to say there is one door I found which has not yet been closed. I traveled under an assumed name to discover it and burned my notes and papers once I had. I blamed my delayed return on stormy seas, and I suppose by then I had been so often absent from Locke House that neither Cornelius nor you asked anything further. I spoke of my true purpose to only one living soul; should you ever need a place to run, a place to hide from whatever it is that pursues me—follow Jane.
The third change is this book you now hold in your hands. (Assuming I’ve had it bound. Otherwise I refer to a messy pile of typewritten papers tied together with packing twine and the shed skin of a flying snake, which I found in a viciously unpleasant world through a door in Australia.)
I spend my evenings now gathering the disparate and wandering pieces of my own story—our story, I should call it—shepherding them into a straight line, and recording them as neatly as I can on the page. It is taxing work. Sometimes I am too exhausted from a day’s fruitless tramping through the Amazon or the Ozarks to write more than a sentence before bed. Sometimes I spend the entire day trapped in my camp by poor weather with nothing but a pen and paper for company, but still fail to write a single word because I’ve become trapped in the mirrored halls of my own memory and cannot escape (the nautilus-curve of your mother’s body around yours; the white-gold smear of her smile in the misted dawn of the Amarico).
But I persist in writing, even when it feels like pressing forward through an endless briar patch, even when the ink looks smeary-red in the lamplight.
Perhaps I keep writing because I was raised in a world where words have power, where curves and spirals of ink adorn sails and skin, where a sufficiently talented word-worker might reach out and remake her world. Perhaps I cannot believe words are entirely powerless, even here.
Perhaps I simply need to leave some record, however wandering and unsubstantiated, so that another living soul can learn the truths I have worked so hard to unearth. So that someone else might read it and believe: there are ten thousand doors between ten thousand worlds, and someone is closing them. And I am helping them do it.
Perhaps I write out of an altogether more desperate and naive hope: that someone braver and better than myself might atone for my sins and succeed where I failed. That someone might fight back against the shadowy machinations of those who wish to sever this world from all its cousins and render it barren, rational, profoundly alone.
That someone, somehow, might forge themselves into a living key, and open the doors.
END
Post Script
(Apologies for my penmanship—what would my mother say?—but I am in a great hurry, and don’t have time to get this typed and bound like the rest.)
My dearest January,
I found it. I found it.
I am camped on one of the cold, wind-scoured islands north of Japan. Near the shore there’s an association of bamboo-grass huts and corrugated-tin shanties that might generously be called a village, but up on this mountainside there’s nothing but knotted grass and a few desiccated pines clinging gamely to the ashy soil. Before me stands an interesting formation: some of the tree boughs have twisted themselves into a sort of arch, looking out over the sea.
If seen from the proper angle, it looks almost like a doorway.
I found it by following the stories: Once there was a fisherman who folded the pages of books and turned them into sailing ships. The ships were fleet and light, and their sails were stained with ink. Once there was a little boy who disappeared in midwinter and returned sunburnt and warm. Once there was a priest with prayers written on his skin.
I knew where it led before I stepped through it. Worlds, like houses, have very particular smells, so subtle and complex and varied you barely notice them, and the smell of the Written filtered through the pine boughs like a delicate fog. Sun, sea, the dust of crumbling book spines, the salt and spice of a thousand trade ships. Home.
I am going through it as soon as I can. This very evening. I was careful on my journey here, but I fear I wasn’t careful enough. I fear they will find me—the door-closers, the world-killers. I hesitate even to look away from the doorway and down at this page, lest some spectral figure leap from the shadows and close it forever.
But I will delay long enough to finish this. To tell you where I have gone and why, and send you this book through the Azure Chests of Tuya and Yuha—a rather useful pair of objects I found through a door in Alexandria, and one of the few treasures I declined to surrender entirely to Cornelius. I gave him one, but kept the other for myself.
I’ve sent you trinkets and toys before—did you recognize them for what they were? The insufficient offerings of an absent father? A coward’s attempt to say: I think of you always, 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.