I turned to the final chapter, the part where Mr. Locke miraculously shows up to rescue my grieving father. And there it was: 1881. A girl named Adelaide Lee Larson. Surely Locke had recognized the name and date. A trapped, panicky feeling rose in my throat, like a small child who has run out of excuses.
He knew. Locke knew.
When he met my father in 1895 he already knew all about the Larsons and their back acres and the Door in the field. He’d been the one to close it, after all. But he hadn’t said a word to my poor, foolish father. Not even—and this time I felt myself actually gasp, and heard Lizzie’s tongue cluck in irritation—not even when he found the Door open again in 1901.
If Mr. Locke had loved my father and me at all, he would have left my blue Door standing and sent him a telegram within the hour: Come home Julian STOP Found your damn door. My father would’ve skimmed across the Atlantic like a skipped stone. He would’ve burst into Locke House and I would’ve run into his arms and he would’ve whispered into my hair, January, my love, we’re going home.
But Mr. Locke hadn’t done any of those things. Instead, he’d burned the blue Door to ash, locked me in my room, and left my father stranded for ten more years.
Oh, Father. You thought of yourself as a knight under the generous patronage of some wealthy baron or prince, didn’t you? When really you were a bridled horse running beneath the whip.
The book was still in my hands. My thumbs were pressed bloodless-white against the pages. A suffocating heat gathered in my throat—a final, terrible betrayal, a swelling rage—and some distant part of me was almost frightened by the sheer immensity of it.
But I didn’t have time for rage, because I’d just remembered the letter I mailed to Mr. Locke. I’m going home, I’d told him. I had imagined, when I wrote it, that Mr. Locke would assume I was headed for the Door Ilvane had destroyed in Japan, or even the Door the Society had closed in Colorado. I’d thought he didn’t know about this first Door, except as a passing reference in my father’s story, closed decades before.
Oh, hell.
“I have to go. Right now.” I was already standing, already reeling toward the door with Bad scrabbling to catch up. “Which way to that old hayfield? Never mind, I’ll find it—it was on the river, wasn’t it?” I rummaged freely through Lizzie’s things as I spoke, tugging out drawers wedged tight in the summer heat, looking for—yes. A few faded pages of newsprint. I jammed them back into my pillowcase with everything else: Ilvane’s greenish compass, my silver coin-knife, my father’s book, Samuel’s pen. It would have to be enough.
“Hold up, girl, you’re half-dressed—” I was three quarters dressed, at least—I just wasn’t wearing shoes and my blouse was buttoned sideways. “What do you want with that place, anyhow?”
I turned back to face her. She looked so shrunken and fragile in her rocking chair, like something plucked from its shell and slowly fossilizing. Her eyes on me were red-rimmed and anxious.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. I knew what it felt like to be always alone, always waiting for someone to come home. “But I have to go. I might already be too late. I’ll come back to visit, though, I swear.”
The lines around her mouth twisted into a bitter, hurting sort of smile. It was the smile of someone who has heard promises before, and knows better than to believe them. I knew what that was like, too.
Without thinking I crossed back to the rocking chair and kissed my aunt Lizzie on the forehead. It was like kissing a page in an ancient book, musty-smelling and dry.
She huffed a half laugh. “Lord, but you are just like your mother.” Then she sniffed. “I’ll be here when you come back.”
And I left my mother’s house with the pillowcase clutched tight in my hand and Bad flying like a sleek bronze spear at my side.
The Ash Door
He was already waiting for me, of course.
You know that feeling when you’re in a maze and you think you’ve almost made it out, but then you turn the corner and bam, you’re back at the entrance? That warped, eerie feeling of having fallen backward in time?
That was how it felt to see the overgrown field and the black-suited shape waiting for me in the center of it. Like I’d made a mistake somewhere and circled back to the day when I was seven and found the Door.
Except the scene had changed, subtly. When I was seven the grasses had been orange and autumn-dry, and now they were several hundred shades of green and studded with yellow bursts of goldenrod. I’d been neatly dressed in blue cotton, terribly alone except for my pretty little pocket diary, and now I was barefoot and dirt-grimed, with Bad padding beside me.
And I’d been running away from Mr. Locke then, rather than toward him.
“Hello, January. Sindbad, always a pleasure.” Mr. Locke looked a little travel-rumpled but otherwise precisely the same: square, pale-eyed, supremely confident. I remember being surprised, as if I expected him to be wearing a black cape lined with red silk or twirling a long mustache with a sinister smile, but he was just comfortable, familiar Mr. Locke.
“Hello, sir,” I whispered. The will to be polite, to maintain civility and normalcy, is fearfully strong. I wonder sometimes how much evil is permitted to run unchecked simply because it would be rude to interrupt it.
He smiled in what he must have believed was a charming, friendly manner. “I was just starting to suspect I’d missed you, and you were already gallivanting off God-knows-where.”
“No, sir.” The jagged tip of the pen pressed into my palm.
“How lucky. And—good Lord, child, what have you done to your arm?” He squinted. “Tried to copy Daddy’s tattoos using a butcher knife, did you?”
The next No, sir caught in my throat and refused to come out. My eyes had fallen on the weedy, mostly vanished circle of ash that had once been my blue Door, and standing before me was the man who had burned it down, betrayed my father, locked me away—and I didn’t owe him good manners. I didn’t owe him anything at all.
I unbent my shoulders and raised my head. “I trusted you, you know. So did my father.”
The joviality slid from Locke’s face like clown paint washing away in the rain. His gaze on me turned watchful and narrow-eyed. He didn’t answer.
“I thought you were helping us. I thought you cared about us.” About me.
Now he raised a placating hand. “Of course I do—”
“But you betrayed us both, in the end. You used my father, lied to him, had him locked forever in another world. And then you lied to me, told me he was dead—” My voice was rising, boiling up from my chest. “You told me you were protecting me—”
“January, I have protected you since the moment you came into this world!” Locke moved closer to me, hands outstretched as if he intended to place them on my shoulders. I stepped backward and Bad came to his feet, hackles rough, lips peeled back. If Mr. Locke hadn’t been firmly on his Please Do Not Ever Bite list, I think his teeth would’ve found flesh.
Locke retreated. “I thought Theodore had that animal dumped in the lake. Drowning doesn’t seem to have improved his temper much, does it?” Bad and I glared.
Locke sighed. “January, listen to me: when you and your father crashed through that door in Colorado just as we were closing it, my associates were all for smashing your skulls and leaving you for dead on the mountainside.”