Movement startles him. Two figures have emerged, rather suddenly, from the mist at the end of the cobbled alley. A dog, heavy-jawed and deep gold, and a young woman.
She is tall and brownish, and her hair is braided and coiled in a fashion he has never seen before. She is dressed like some combination of vagabond and debutante—a fine blue skirt fastened with pearl buttons, a leather belt slung low over her hips, a shapeless coat that looks several centuries older than she is. She limps, just slightly; so does the dog.
The dog barks at him, joyfully, and Samuel becomes aware that he is staring. He flicks his eyes sternly back to the flour sacks. But there is something about her, isn’t there, a sort of glow, like light shining around a closed door—
He imagines her wearing a champagne-colored gown, dripping pearls, surrounded by the bustle and swirl of a fancy party. She looks very unhappy in this imagining, like something caged.
She does not look unhappy now; indeed, she is beaming, her smile shining bonfire-bright and a little wild. It takes him a moment to realize she has stopped walking, and the smile is for him.
“Hello, Samuel,” she says, and her voice is like a knock at that closed door.
“Ma’am,” he answers. He knows at once it was the wrong thing to say, because her bonfire-smile dims a little. The dog is unconcerned; he shimmies up to Samuel as if they are old friends.
The woman’s smile is sad, but her voice is steady. “I have something for you, Mr. Zappia.” She produces from her coat a fat bundle of papers tied with what appears to be brown string, a rag, and a strand of fencing wire. “Sorry about the mess—I wasn’t patient enough to get it printed and bound.”
Samuel takes the pile of paper, because there doesn’t seem to be anything else to do. He notices as he does so that her left wrist is a labyrinth of ink and scars.
“I know this must all seem very strange to you, but please just read it. As a sort of favor to me, although I guess that doesn’t mean much anymore.” The woman huffs an almost-laugh. “Read it anyway. And when you’re done, come find me. You know—you still remember where Locke House is, don’t you?”
Samuel wonders if perhaps this young woman is a bit mad. “Yes. But Mr. Locke has been away for months now—the house is empty, the staff have started to leave—there are rumors about his will, about his return—”
The woman flaps an unworried hand. “Oh, he won’t be returning. And his will has just recently been, ah, discovered.” Her smile is sly, mischievous, with a little curl of vengeance at its edges. “Once the lawyers get done signing things and siphoning off as much money as they can, the house will be mine. I think it’ll suit my purposes rather well, once I get rid of his ghastly collections.” Samuel tries to picture this wild young woman as the rightful heiress to Locke’s fortune, fails, and wonders if perhaps she is mad and a criminal. He wonders why this possibility doesn’t bother him more. “I’m thinking I ought to return his things to their proper owners, where possible, which will require a great deal of travel to some very strange and surprising places.” Her eyes spark and flare at the thought.
“We’ll go to East Africa first, of course. We’ll need Jane to show us the precise spot, but I imagine she’ll turn up—have you seen her, by chance?” She continues before Samuel can answer. “I’ll miss her terribly once she goes home, but I might be able to do something about that… There are so many doors in Locke House, after all—who’s to say where they lead?”
She squints her eyes like a woman redecorating her parlor. “One to Africa, one to Kentucky, maybe even one to a certain cabin on the north end of the lake, if you like. They’ll cost me, but it would be worth the price. And I’m getting stronger, I think.”
“Ah,” says Samuel.
That summer-bright smile returns, shining at him like a small sun. “Read fast, Samuel. We have work to do.” She reaches up, quite fearlessly, and touches his cheek. Her fingers are ember-warm against his cold skin, and she is very close to him now and her eyes are alight and the hole in his heart is howling, chattering, aching—
And he sees her face, just for a moment, peering down at him from the third story of Locke House. January. The word is a door creaking open in his chest, pouring light into that terrible absence.
She kisses him—a soft heat, so fleeting he isn’t sure whether he imagined it—and turns away. Samuel finds himself entirely unable to speak.
He watches the woman and her dog walk back down the alley. She stops and draws her finger through the air, as if she were writing something on the sky. The mist swirls and snakes around her like a great pale cat. It draws itself into a shape like an archway or a door.
She steps through it, and is gone.
Acknowledgments
Books, like babies, require villages. Through a combination of luck, privilege, and witchcraft, I happen to have the best village in the history of the world. This, I am afraid, is simple math.
I am grateful to my agent, Kate McKean, who answered every email with patience and grace, even the ones with bullet points and color coding and extraneous historical statistics. To Nivia Evans, an editor who knows the difference between doors and Doors, and whose chief business is building more of them for readers to walk through. And to Emily Byron, Ellen Wright, Andy Ball, Amy Schneider, and the entire Orbit/Redhook team, who know how to make those Doors shine on the shelf.
To Jonah Sutton-Morse, Ziv Wities, and Laura Blackwell, the first people to read this book who weren’t contractually bound to be kind through either blood or marriage, but who were kind anyway.
To the history departments of Berea College and the University of Vermont, who should not be held accountable for my fanciful use of fact, but who should probably be blamed for the footnotes.
To my mother, for giving us ten thousand worlds for the choosing—Middle Earth and Narnia, Tortall and Hyrule, Barrayar and Jeep and Pern—and my brothers for wandering through them with me. To my father for believing we could build our own, and for standing beside me in that overgrown hayfield in western Kentucky.
To Finn, who was born in the exact middle of this book, and Felix, who was born at the very end. Neither of them helped in the slightest way, except to trample around in my heart, toppling walls and letting in the light.
And to Nick, first and last and always. Because you can’t write your heart out until you’ve found it.
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1. Previous scholars have been quite successful in collecting and documenting such stories, but they have failed to believe them, and so have failed to find the single artifact that unites every myth: doors.
See James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Second Edition (London: Macmillan and Co. Limited, 1900).
2. As other scholars have noted (see Klaus Bergnon, “An Essay on Destiny and Blood-right in Medieval Works,” delivered to the American Antiquarian Society, 1872), the significance of blood and parentage is an oft-repeated assumption in many fairy tales, myths, and fables.