I hadn’t wanted to believe it. I’d howled, screamed, demanded Mr. Locke take it back or prove it. I’d dug bloody pink crescents in my palms with the effort of not lashing out, not smashing his little glass cases into a thousand shimmering shards.
Eventually I’d felt hands like paving stones on my shoulders, weighing me down. “Enough, child.” And I’d looked into his eyes, pale and implacable. I’d felt myself flaking and crumbling beneath them. “Julian is dead. Accept it.”
And I had. I’d collapsed into Locke’s arms and soaked his shirt with tears. His gruff murmur had rumbled against my ear. “S’all right, girl. You’ve still got me.”
Now I sat in my room, face swollen and eyes dry, teetering on the edge of a pain so vast I couldn’t see its edges. It would swallow me whole, if I let it.
I thought about the last postcard I’d received from my father, featuring a beach and several tough-looking women labeled FISHERWOMEN OF SUGASHIMA. I thought about Father himself, but could only picture him walking away from me, hunched and tired, disappearing through some terrible, final doorway.
You promised you would take me with you.
I wanted to scream again, felt the sound clawing and writhing in my throat. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to run away and keep running until I fell into some other, better world.
And then I remembered the book. Wondered if Mr. Locke had given it to me just for this moment, knowing how badly I would need it.
I pulled it from my skirts and traced my thumb over the stamped title. It opened for me like a tiny leather-bound Door with hinges made of glue and wax thread.
I ran through it.
The Ten Thousand Doors: Being a Comparative Study of Passages, Portals, and Entryways in World Mythology
This text was produced by Yule Ian Scholar for the University of the City of Nin, in the years between 6908 and—, in partial satisfaction of his attainment of Mastery.
The following monograph concerns the permutations of a repeated motif in world mythologies: passages, portals, and entryways. Such a study might at first seem to suffer from those two cardinal sins of academia—frivolity and triviality—but it is the author’s intention to demonstrate the significance of doorways as phenomenological realities. The potential contributions to other fields of study—grammalogie, glottologie, anthropology—are innumerable, but if the author may be so presumptive, this study intends to go far beyond the limitations of our present knowledge. Indeed, this research might reshape our collective understanding of the physical laws of the universe.
The central contention is simply this: the passages, portals, and entryways common to all mythologies are rooted in physical anomalies that permit users to travel from one world to another. Or, to put it even more simply: these doors actually exist.
The following pages will offer extensive evidence to defend this conclusion and will provide a set of theories concerning the nature, origins, and function of doors. The most significant proposals include:
i) that doors are portals between one world and another, which exist only in places of particular and indefinable resonance (what physical-philosophers call “weak coupling” between two universes). While human construction—frames, arches, curtains, et cetera—may surround a door, the natural phenomenon itself preexists its decoration in every case. It also seems to be the case that these portals are, by some quirk of physics or of humanity, damnably difficult to find.
ii) that such portals generate a certain degree of leakage. Matter and energy flow freely through them, and so too do people, foreign species, music, inventions, ideas—all the sorts of things that generate mythologies, in short. If one follows the stories, one will nearly always find a doorway buried at their roots.1
iii) that this leakage and resultant storytelling have been and remain crucial to humanity’s cultural, intellectual, political, and economic development, in every world. In biology, it is the interplay between random genetic mutation and environmental change that results in evolution. Doors introduce change. And from change come all things: revolution, resistance, empowerment, upheaval, invention, collapse, reformation—all the most vital components of human history, in short.
iv) that doors are, like most precious things, fragile. Once closed, they cannot be reopened by any means this author has discovered.
The evidence supporting theories i–iv has been divided into eighteen subcategories, presented below as
At least, that is the book I intended to write, when I was young and arrogant.
I dreamed of insurmountable evidence, scholarly respectability, publications, and lectures. I have boxes and boxes of neatly indexed note cards, each describing some small brick in a vast wall of research: an Indonesian story about a golden tree whose boughs made a shimmering archway; a reference in a Gaelic hymn to the angels who fly through heaven’s gate; the memory of a carven wood doorway in Mali, sand-weathered and blackened by centuries of secrets.
This is not the book I have written.
Instead, I’ve written something strange, deeply personal, highly subjective. I am a scientist studying his own soul, a snake swallowing its own tail.
But even if I could tame my own impulses and write something scholarly, I fear it would not matter, because who would take seriously my claims without solid proof? Proof that I cannot provide, because it disappears almost as soon as I discover it. There is a fog creeping along at my heels, swallowing my footsteps and erasing my evidence. Closing the doors.
The book you have in your hands is not, therefore, a respectable work of scholarship. It has not benefited from editorial oversight and contains little verifiable fact. It is just a story.
I have written it anyway, for two reasons:
First, because what is written is what is true. Words and their meanings have weight in the world of matter, shaping and reshaping realities through a most ancient alchemy. Even my own writings—so damnably powerless—may have just enough power to reach the right person and to tell the right truth, and change the nature of things.
Second, my long years of research have taught me that all stories, even the meanest folktales, matter. They are artifacts and palimpsests, riddles and histories. They are the red threads that we may follow out of the labyrinth.
It is my hope that this story is your thread, and at the end of it you find a door.
