3. This theory—described in the preface as conclusion iii—is based on decades of field research, but it is also indirectly supported by many works in Western scholarship.
Consider, for example, the Ystoria Mongalorum, a well-respected work of early European exploration detailing the journey of John of Plano Carpini to the Mongol court in the 1240s. In it, Carpini argues that a great change had come among the Tartars several decades previously, which could not be accounted for by reasonable means. He reported a popular Mongol myth that their Great Khan had disappeared for a time as a child, walking through a cursed door in a cave and not returning for seven years. Perhaps, Carpini theorized, he had spent the time in “a world not his own,” and returned with the terrible wisdom necessary to conquer the Asiatic continent.
Perhaps one cannot walk through a door and back out again without changing the world.
4. I spent some time in the region researching these phenomena after speaking with the LeBlancs. It seems to me a variation of the usual hag story—old women who prey on younger people, sucking their blood or breath, perhaps even stealing their skin and going “riding” for the night. I’ve encountered them more often on the islands off the coast of Georgia, where the phrase hag-ridden is both dire and common.
Adelaide Larson was unaware of the universality of the story. She did not find her destinations by scholarly deduction or painstaking labor but by a wanderer’s less certain compass.
5. She is, perhaps, an unlikely character for a daring explorer—a poor, uneducated girl of no particular distinction. But the literature I’ve collected on the subject seems to indicate that doors do not tend to attract the kinds of explorers and trailblazers we might anticipate—those like Dr. Livingstone or Mr. Boone who have charged bravely into the frontier. More often, I find fellow travelers among the poor and wretched, the unwanted and homeless; those people, in short, who scurry along the margins of the world and look for ways out.
Consider Thomas Aikenhead, a young man both an orphan and a cripple, who published an ill-advised manifesto suggesting that heaven was an actual place located just on the other side of a small shabby door in an old Scottish church. He allowed for the possibility that the place was actually hell, or perhaps purgatory, but concluded that it was certainly a “warm, sunny place, much preferable to Scotland.” He was hanged within the year for blasphemy.
Thomas Aikenhead, “A Tract on Magick and the Entrance to Heaven,” 1695.
6. There is, of course, no such thing as a fallen woman, unless we are speaking of a woman who recently tripped on the stairs. One of the most difficult elements of this world is the way its social rules are simultaneously rigid and arbitrary. It is impermissible to engage in physical love before binding legal marriage, unless one is a young man of means. Men must be bold and assertive, but only if they are light-skinned. Any persons may fall in love regardless of station, but only if one is a woman and the other a man. I urge you not to navigate your own life by such faulty borders, my dear. There are, after all, other worlds.
7. Consider all the stories of missing children, oubliettes, bottomless holes, ships sailing off the edges of oceans and into nothingness. They are not tales of journeys or passings-through; they are tales of sudden, irrevocable ending.
It is my belief that the traveler’s character plays a role in their ultimate success or failure. Consider Edith Bland’s seemingly innocent The Door to Kyriel: Five English schoolchildren discover a magic door that takes them to a new world. As the children return home, the youngest and most fearful of them falls into a “great darkness” and is never heard from again. Critics considered it too grim and strange for healthy children.
I consider it an advisement: when one enters a door, one must be brave enough to see the other side.
Edith Bland, The Door to Kyriel (London: Looking Glass Library, 1900).
8. Farfey even famously argued that it is sheer stubbornness and nothing else that grants them their power. As evidence he submitted Leyna Wordworker, the talented author of “The Song of Ilgin,” who had once saved her city from a deadly plague. She was also Farfey’s wife, and apparently quite a difficult woman.
Farfey Scholar, A Treatise on the Nature of Word-Workers (City of Nin, 6609).
9. Cats, I have found, seem to exist in more or less the same form in every world; it is my belief that they have been slipping in and out of doors for several thousand years. Anyone familiar with house cats will know this is a particular hobby of theirs.
10. Most cities on the Amarico feature their Founders on their coinage; the City of Nin was founded by Nin Wordworker, many centuries previously, and it was her half-smiling visage that stared back at Yule from the moonlit earth. Coins are also stamped with words of power, which capture some small piece of the City’s soul. A person holding a coin from Nin will smell brine and bookdust, will perhaps find themselves thinking of sun-bleached streets and the joyful chatter of a peaceful city. It was this Yule had wanted to share with the girl in the field: a small silver piece of his home.
11. I hope you are sufficiently familiar with the nature of doors by this juncture to assume that both magic wands and glass slippers exist in plentitude, in some world or other.
12. In fact, she did have a choice. Ade had perhaps forgotten that she was in Yule’s world, rather than her own, and Yule’s world had word-workers. Pregnancy is a fragile, uncertain thing, especially at the beginning, and any sufficiently skilled and well-compensated word-worker may usually write away an unwanted child while it is still only a faint glimmer of potential in its mother’s body.