But she never lingered anywhere for long. Most observers told me she was simply a wanderer, driven to move from place to place by the same unknowable pressures that make swallows fly south, but I believe she was something closer to a knight on a quest. I believe she was looking for one particular door and one particular world.
In 1893, in the high, snowcapped spring of her twenty-seventh birthday, she found it.
The story traveled in the usual way of stories, slithering from mouth to mouth along the railways and roads like a contagion moving along arteries. By February 1893, it had sifted into Taft, Texas, and permeated the walls of the cottonseed mill where Ade Larson was employed. Her fellow workers recall a particular lunch hour: They were gathered with their tin pails behind the mill, breathing the oil-sticky steam and the green rot scent of cottonseed hulls, listening to Dalton Gray’s daily report of barroom gossip. He told them about a pair of trappers up north who came down from the Rockies raving mad, swearing on everything they held dear that they’d found an ocean at the top of Mount Silverheels.
The workers laughed, but Ade’s voice thudded into their laughter like a hatchet into a stump. “How do you mean, they found an ocean?”
Dalton Gray shrugged. “How’m I supposed to know? Had it from Gene they were lost and found an old stone church from the silver-mining days and lived there for a week or two. They said it was a perfectly ordinary little church, except it had an ocean out the back door!” The laughter rallied again but petered away; Ade Larson was gathering up her uneaten lunch and walking northwest, across the mill yard toward the East Texas & Gulf Railway.
I found no trace of Ade from Texas to Colorado. She simply appears in the town of Alma a month later, like a diver surfacing, asking about boots and furs and the sorts of gear a woman would need to survive the bitter arctic spring of the Front Range. The local storekeeper remembers watching her leave with irritable pity, certain they’d find her thawing body on the trails come summer.
But instead, the woman returned down Mount Silverheels ten days later, chap-cheeked and grinning in a fortunate way that reminded the storekeeper of miners who have struck gold. She asked him where she could find a sawmill.
He told her, but added, “Pardon me, ma’am, but why would you need lumber?”
“Oh.” Ade laughed, and the storekeeper would later recall it as a madwoman’s full-moon cackle. “To build a boat.”
The spectacle of a lone young woman with no particular carpentry skill building a sailboat in the thin-aired heights of the Rockies did not, of course, go unnoticed. Ade had cobbled together a sort of camp at the base of Silverheels that looked, as one reporter phrased it, “like a shantytown recently visited by a tornado.” Pine planks lay scattered on the frozen ground, bent into tortured arcs. Borrowed tools were jumbled in the careless piles of a person who does not intend to use them more than once. Ade herself presided over the chaos in a smoke-heavy bearskin, swearing cheerily as she worked.
By April the boat had an identifiable shape; a slim, sap-scented rib cage lay in the middle of her camp like some unfortunate sea creature God had forgotten to grant skin or scales.
The first newspapermen appeared shortly thereafter, and the first printed report was a blurred sidebar in the Leadville Daily, unimaginatively titled WOMAN BUILDS BOAT, PUZZLES LOCALS. It generated enough gossip and hilarity that the story leapfrogged into larger papers, printed and reprinted and eventually trotted out in conjunction with the tale of the trappers who found an ocean. More than a month later, after Ade and her boat were long gone from Alma, it even migrated as far as the New York Times, under the much snappier title LADY NOAH OF THE ROCKIES: COLORADO MADWOMAN PREPARED FOR THE FLOOD.
I would give anything—every word in the Written, every star in every world, my own two hands—to unpublish that damned story.
Ade never read any of the articles about her, as far as I am aware. She simply worked on her sailboat, scabbing planks one over the other to make the hull and consulting with a local roofer who bemusedly gave her the tallow-and-spruce-sap recipe to caulk her joints. The canvas sail was a poorly stitched mess that would have appalled any one of her aunts, and it hung stiff from a stubby mast, but by the end of the month Ade was convinced it was the most glorious and seaworthy vessel in the world, or at least above ten thousand feet. She burned its name into the prow in shaky charcoal lines: The Key.
She walked into town that very evening and spent the last of her hoarded cottonseed wages acquiring cured ham and tinned beans, three large canteens, a compass, and the hired help of two young men who were made to understand in broken Spanish that she’d like a boat carried up a mountain. I found one of these gentlemen years later, a Mr. Lucio Martinez, and he confessed to me with bitter weariness that he wished he’d never agreed to the venture. He’d spent the better part of a decade under a cloud of baseless suspicion because he and his friend were the last living persons to have seen the mad white woman and her boat before she disappeared. The local sheriff even interrogated him a year or two after the event itself, insisting that Mr. Martinez draw him a very precise map of where Adelaide was last seen.
Ade could not have known then what miseries poor Mr. Martinez would endure when they parted ways at the peak of Mount Silverheels, and I am not sure by then she would have cared. She was driven by the pure selfishness of a knight nearing the end of their quest, and could no more turn away from her goal than a compass needle could point south.
She waited for Lucio and his friend to crisscross back down the slope, and for the half-moon to paint the pines in soft silver. Then she dragged her haphazard vessel along a deer trail to a low stone building that might once have served as a miners’ church, or perhaps something older and holier.
The doorway was just as she’d found it weeks previously. It took up almost the entirety of its stacked-stone wall, framed in vast timbers gone age-black. A rough hole in the planking was the only handle, and already Ade could swear a soft breeze whistled through it carrying the smell of salt and cedar and long, sun-gilded days.
It was a smell that shouldn’t have been familiar to her, but it was. It was the smell of the ghost boy’s skin as they’d kissed in a late-summer field. It was the smell of elsewhere.
She opened the door and launched her boat into the strange seas of another world.
The Unlocked Door
My eyes, when I opened them, felt as if they’d been plucked from my head, rolled in coarse sand, and crammed clumsily back into my skull. My mouth was gummed and sour, and my skull seemed to have shrunk several sizes overnight. For a few disoriented seconds I forgot the half-dozen glasses of champagne from the party and wondered dizzily if the book had done this to me. As if a story could ferment in my veins, like wine, and leave me drunk.
If any story could have done it, it would have been that one. I’d certainly read better books with more adventure and kissing and less pontificating, but none of them had left me with this fragile, impossible suspicion that maybe, somehow, it was all true. That there were Doors hidden in every shadowed place, waiting to be opened. That a woman might shed her childhood skin, snakelike, and fling herself into the seething unknown.
It seemed unlikely that Mr. Locke would give me something so fanciful, no matter how sorry he felt for me. How, then, had it found its way into my treasure box in the Pharaoh Room?
But the mystery of it felt thin and distant beneath the weight of the Thing that still sat on my chest. I began to see how it would always be there, how it would cleave to my flesh like a second skin, secretly poisoning everything I touched.
I felt the damp poke of Bad’s nose as he rooted under my arm, the way he had as a puppy. It was far too hot—the July sun was oozing across the floorboards now, baking against the copper roof—but I wrapped my arms around him and buried my face in his fur. We lay sweat-sticky while the sun rose and Locke House creaked and murmured around us.
I was drifting into a forced, heat-dazed sleep when the door opened.
I smelled coffee and heard familiar, decisive steps across the floor. Some secret tenseness in my chest unwound itself, exhaling relief: She’s still here.
Jane was dressed and alert in a way that said she had been awake for a considerable time and refrained from disturbing me for as long as was decent. She balanced a pair of steaming cups on the bookshelf, dragged a spindly chair to my bedside, and sat with her arms neatly crossed.
“Good morning, January.” There was something almost stern in her voice, businesslike. Perhaps a single day was the acceptable mourning period for a mostly absent father. Perhaps she was just irritated at me for sleeping late and monopolizing our room. “I heard from the kitchen girls the party was, ah, eventful.”
