I am leaving you again, more profoundly than I have ever done before.
I can give you nothing but this book, and a prayer that this door will not be closed. That you will find a way to follow me one day. That your mother is alive and waiting, and one day she will hold you again and what is shattered will be made whole.
Trust Jane. Tell her—tell her I am sorry.
The door calls me in your mother’s voice. I must go.
Forgive me. Follow me.
YS
I can’t do it.
I tried, January. I tried to leave you. But I merely stood on the threshold of my door, frozen, smelling the sweetness of my home world and willing myself to take that last, final step forward.
I cannot. I cannot leave you. Not again. I am packing my things, returning to Locke House. I will bring you back here with me, and we will go through together or not at all. I am so sorry, gods, so sorry—I am coming.
Wait for me.
RUN JANUARY
ARCADIA
DO NOT TRUST
The Driftwood Door
I found Jane by following the rhythmic grind and thunk of a shovel in rocky earth. She worked steadily, digging in a low-lying spot in the center of the island, alone except for a fetid, marshy smell and the whining drone of several million mosquitoes.
And, of course, Mr. Theodore Havemeyer.
He was nothing but a stained bundle of sheets, muddy-white and vaguely larval. His hand—a colorless claw, dotted with oozing punctures roughly the size of Bad’s teeth—protruded from the wrapping. It cast a too-large shadow in the late-afternoon light.
“Couldn’t we just, I don’t know, toss him in the lake? Or leave him?”
The crunch of the shovel biting into the ground; the shush of dirt sliding off it. Jane did not look up at me, but a humorless smile appeared on her face. “You think the Havemeyers of the world just disappear? You think no one comes looking?” She shook her head and added comfortingly, “It’s good and wet here; he won’t last long.”
This, I found, made me feel slightly ill, so I perched on a moss-eaten boulder and watched the crows gather along the pine boughs above us like poorly behaved funeral attendees, cawing and gossiping.
The splintery handle of the shovel appeared in my vision. I took it, and made several subsequent discoveries: first, that digging is very hard and I was still weak and sick-feeling from escaping Brattleboro. Second, that human bodies are fairly large and require substantial holes. And third, that digging leaves plenty of room in your skull for thinking, even when sweat pricks your eyes and the skin of your palms stings in a raw, you-already-have-blisters kind of way.
My father didn’t abandon me. He turned back for me. The thought was a small sun burning behind my eyes, too bright to look at safely. How long had I longed for some small proof of his love for me? But his love for my mother, his selfish sadness, had always been stronger—until the last. Until it hadn’t, and he’d turned away from the Door he’d wanted for seventeen years.
So where is he? I wavered a little on that thought, pictured the mad scrawl of those final words—RUN JANUARY, ARCADIA, DO NOT TRUST—and retreated.
What did this final chapter tell me, really, that I hadn’t already suspected? Well, first: that Mr. Locke had known full well that my father was Door-hunting, and had even hired him specifically to do so. I pictured the basement rooms of Locke House with their endless aisles of crates and cases, the rooms bristling with glass cases and neat labels—how many of those treasures were stolen from other worlds? How many of them were imbued with strange powers or uncanny magics?
And how many had he sold or bartered away? I remembered the meeting I’d seen in London as a girl, the secret auction of valuable objects. There’d been Society members present, I was sure—that ferrety red-haired man, at least—so I supposed the Society, too, knew about my father and the Doors and the things he stole. And it must be the Society who stalked after him, haunting him, closing his Doors. But why, if they wanted the treasures he stole for them? Or perhaps they wanted to hoard the treasures for themselves, then seal the Doors against any further leakage. They’d like that; I’d spent enough time around rich and powerful men to know their affection for phrases like maintaining exclusivity and manufacturing demand through rarity.
It made sense, almost. But who had closed my mother’s Door, that first Door in the field, all those years ago? And the mountaintop Door? My father hadn’t even been employed by Mr. Locke then. Had it been random misfortune, or had the Society been closing Doors for far longer than my father’s personal quest? They’d mentioned a Founder, once or twice, in reverent tones—perhaps the Society was far older than it seemed.
It didn’t make sense, either, that they would harm their prize Door-hunter, but something had certainly prevented my father from coming back. Something had driven him to scrawl those last three lines. And now the Society wanted me. They’ll never stop looking for you, girl.
There was a horrible, meaty crunch behind me.
I turned to find Jane crouched over Havemeyer’s body with a mallet and a clinical expression. A peeled wooden stake now protruded from the white bundle, roughly where his heart would be.
Jane shrugged at me. “Just in case.”
I teetered for a moment between horror and humor, but I couldn’t help it: I laughed. It was an oversized, tiptoeing-toward-hysteria kind of laugh. Jane’s eyebrows rose, but then her head tilted back and she laughed alongside me. I heard a little of the same relief in her voice, too, and it occurred to me that her attitude of cool nerve and confidence might not, in fact, be wholly true.
“You have read entirely too many penny dreadfuls,” I admonished her. She shrugged again, unrepentant, and I went back to my digging. It felt easier, somehow, as if something heavy had been perched on my shoulders and had flapped away at the sound of our laughter.
I worked in silence for another minute or so, and then Jane began to speak. “In my world, it’s wisest to shoot anything strange or unusual you might meet in the forests, and this is why I almost killed your father the first time I saw him. My first shot went wide, though. Give me that, if you aren’t going to dig.”
My shovelfuls had grown scant and random; I scrabbled out of the hole and Jane took my place. Her voice matched the jab-and-toss rhythm of her digging. “He began shouting and waving his arms, switching between a dozen or so languages. One of them was English; it had been a very long time since I’d heard English spoken aloud, and never by a dark-skinned, tattooed man who looked like a professor. So I did not shoot him.”
The hole was now well past Jane’s waist, and every shovelful made a soupy, sucking sound. Gnats hovered like overeager dinner guests at its edges. “I took him back to my camp, fed him, and we traded stories. He asked if I’d ever found another door in this world, or heard any stories about written words coming true. No, I answered, and his shoulders slumped. I felt I should apologize, but did not know for what.
“Then he gave me a warning: The doors are closing behind me, he said. Someone is following me. He begged me to return to my native world with him. He told me he knew what it was like to be trapped in a world not your own, urged me to go back with him. I refused.”
“Why?” I perched at the edge of the hole, arms wrapped around my own knees. My borrowed skirt was already hopelessly muddied and stained, and for a disorienting moment I felt as if I’d been zipped backward to a time when I was young and obstreperous and gleefully unkempt.