“And, January”—his voice was strained and thin, as if it were coming from a long way away—“I’m sorry. For leaving you all those times, and for leaving you the last time. I t-tried to turn back, at the last, I l-love—” He stopped, tear-choked, his eyes closed in shame.
I didn’t say It’s all right, or I forgive you, because I wasn’t sure it was or I did. Instead I said simply, “I know.”
And I fell into him the way I had as a very small girl when he returned from his trips abroad, the way I hadn’t when I was seven. We stayed that way for a while, my face smeared against his chest, his arms tight around me, until I pulled back.
I scrubbed my cheeks. “Anyway, I won’t be gone forever. I’ll visit. It’s your turn to wait.”
The rest of my family (see that scrolled f, like a leaf unfurling in the sunlight?) together gave me food, fresh water in clay casks, charts of the Amarico, a compass that pointed reliably north, a set of new clothes sewn from sailcloth into very rough approximations of pants and shirts by seamstresses who’d never actually seen them in real life. They’re odd, in-between sorts of clothes, a perfect patchwork of two worlds; I think they suit me rather well.
I intend, after all, to spend the rest of my life diving in and out of the wild in-between—finding the thin, overlooked places that connect worlds, following the trail of locked Doors the Society left behind and writing them back open. Letting all the dangerous, beautiful madness flow freely between worlds again. Forging myself into a living key and opening the Doors, just like my father said.
(This is the second reason I couldn’t stay in Nin with my parents, of course.)
You can guess, I bet, which Door I’m opening first: the mountain door my mother sailed through in 1893, that Mr. Locke destroyed in 1895; the Door that shattered my little family into pieces and sent us careening alone into the fearful darkness. It’s an old wrong that ought to be righted, and a far enough journey that I might finish this damn book in time. (Who knew writing a story would be so much work? I have a newfound respect for all those maligned dime novelists and romance writers.)
You’re wondering why I’ve written it at all. Why I’m here, hunched over a sheaf of moonlit papers with my hand cramping and nothing but my dog and the wide silvery shadow of the ocean for company, writing as if my very soul depends on it. Maybe it’s a family compulsion.
Maybe it’s simple fear. Fear that I might fail in my lofty purposes and leave no record behind me. The Society, after all, is an organization of very powerful and very dangerous beings who have crept through the cracks in our world, all of whom very much want the Doors to remain closed. And it would be foolish to suppose that our world has been the only one to attract such creatures or ignite such ideas. In my nightmares I’m in an endless carnival hall filled with Havemeyers, reaching their white hands toward me through a thousand mirrors; in my really bad nightmares the mirrors are filled with pale eyes, and I can feel my will unspooling inside me.
It’s dangerous, is what I’m saying. So I’ve written this story as a sort of extended insurance policy in case I screw up.
If you’re some stranger who stumbled over this book by chance—perhaps rotting in some foreign garbage pile or locked in a dusty traveling trunk or published by some small, misguided press and shelved mistakenly under Fiction—I hope to every god you have the guts to do what needs doing. I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through; I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return.
But that’s not really why I wrote this, of course.
I wrote it for you. So that you might read it and remember the things you were told to forget.
You remember me now, don’t you? And you remember the offer you made me?
Well. Now at least you can look clear-eyed into your own future, and choose: stay safe and sane at home, as any rational man would—I swear I’ll understand—
Or run away with me toward the glimmering, mad horizon. Dance through this eternal green orchard, where ten thousand worlds hang ripe and red for the plucking; wander with me between the trees, tending them, clearing away the weeds, letting in the air.
Opening the Doors.
Epilogue
The Door in the Mist
It is late October. Jagged lines of frost creep and bloom in every windowpane, and steam wisps from the lake; winter in Vermont is an impatient thing.
It is dawn, and a young man is loading sacks of Washington Mills Peerless White Flour into a truck. The truck is glossy black, with curlicued golden lettering painted on the side. The young man is dark and solemn-eyed. He pulls his cap low against the chill, mist pearling against the back of his neck.
He works in the comfortable rhythm of someone familiar with hard work, but there are faint, unhappy lines gathered around his mouth. The lines are fresh-seeming, as if they’ve only recently arrived and aren’t certain how to behave. They age him.
His family attributes the lines to a slow recovery from his illness over the summer. One night at the end of July he simply vanished—after some very odd behavior and an urgent conversation with that African woman from Locke House—and staggered back home nearly two weeks later, disoriented and senseless. He didn’t seem to recall where he’d been or why, and the doctor (actually the horse doctor, who prescribed more stringent tonics at half the price) speculated that a bad fever might have boiled his brain, and recommended purgatives and time.
Time has helped, some. The dizzy confusion of July dissipated into a vague uncertainty, a slight cloudiness in his eyes, and a tendency to stare out at the horizon as if he were hoping something or someone might appear there. Even his beloved story papers can’t hold his attention for long. His family supposes it will fade, eventually, and Samuel himself hopes the ache in his chest will fade, too, and the nagging sense that he’s lost something very dear to him but can’t recall what it was.
Three weeks previously something happened that made it worse: A woman had approached him as he made his delivery to Shelburne Inn. She was obviously foreign, black as oil, and far too familiar for someone so strange. She said a lot of things that made no sense to him—or rather, they did but then didn’t, as if the words were sagging and sloughing away in his mind, and he could almost hear a voice saying Forget it all, boy—and eventually she grew irritated with him.
She had pressed a slip of paper into his hand with an address scrawled in red ink, and whispered, “Just in case.”
“In case what, ma’am?” he’d asked.
“In case you remember.” She had sighed, and something in the sigh made him wonder if she had a hole in her heart, too. “Or in case you see her again.” And she was gone.
Since then he has felt the ache in his chest like an open window in winter.
It is worse on mornings like this one, when he is alone and the crows’ cries are brittle and cold. He thinks, for no reason at all, of the gray ponies he drove as a boy, of rattling down the drive to Locke House and looking up at the third-story window hoping to see—he does not recall what he hoped to see. He tries to think only about delivery routes and flour, and how best to position the busted sack so it won’t spill.