Just before I stepped back through the arch, a glint of silver shimmered at my feet: a round coin lay half-buried in the soil, stamped with several words in a foreign language and the profile of a crowned woman. It felt warm in my palm. I slipped it into my dress pocket.
This time the threshold passed over me like the brief shadow of a bird’s wing. The dry smell of grass and sun returned.
“Janua—oh, there you are.” Mr. Locke stood in his shirtsleeves and vest, huffing a little, his mustache bristling like the tail of a recently offended cat. “Where were you? Been out here shouting myself hoarse, had to interrupt my meeting with Alexander—what’s this?” He was staring at the blue-flecked Door, his face gone slack.
“Nothing, sir.”
His eyes snapped away from the Door and onto me, ice-sharp. “January. Tell me what you’ve been doing.”
I should’ve lied. It would have saved so much heartache. But you have to understand: when Mr. Locke looks at you in this particular way of his, with his moon-pale eyes, you mostly end up doing what he wants you to. I suspect it’s the reason W. C. Locke & Co. is so profitable.
I swallowed. “I—I was just playing and I went through this door, see, and it leads to someplace else. There was a white city by the sea.” If I’d been older, I might’ve said: It smelled of salt and age and adventure. It smelled like another world, and I want to return right this minute and walk those strange streets. Instead, I added articulately, “I liked it.”
“Tell the truth.” His eyes pressed me flat.
“I am, I swear!”
He stared for another long moment. I watched the muscles of his jaw roll and unroll. “And where did this door come from? Did you—did you build it? Stick it together out of this rubbish?” He gestured and I noticed the overgrown pile of rotted lumber behind the Door, the scattered bones of a house.
“No, sir. I just found it. And wrote a story about it.”
“A story?” I could see him stumbling over each unlikely twist in our conversation and hating it; he liked to be in control of any given exchange.
I fumbled for my pocket diary and pressed it into his hands. “Look right there, see? I wrote a little story, and then the door was, was sort of open. It’s true, I swear it’s true.”
His eyes flicked over the page many more times than was necessary to read a three-sentence story. Then he removed a cigar stub from his coat pocket and struck a match, puffing until the end glowed at me like the hot orange eye of a dragon.
He sighed, the way he sighed when he was forced to deliver some bad news to his investors, and closed my diary. “What fanciful nonsense, January. How often have I tried to cure you of it?”
He ran his thumb across the cover of my diary and then deliberately, almost mournfully, tossed it into the messy heap of lumber behind him.
“No! You can’t—”
“I’m sorry, January. Truly.” He met my eyes and made an abortive movement with his hand, as if he wanted to reach toward me. “But this is simply what must be done, for your sake. I’ll expect you at dinner.”
I wanted to fight him. To argue, to snatch my diary out of the dirt—but I couldn’t.
I ran away instead. Back across the field, back up winding dirt roads, back into the sour-smelling hotel lobby.
And so the very beginning of my story features a skinny-legged girl on the run twice in the space of a few hours. It’s not a very heroic introduction, is it? But—if you’re an in-between sort of creature with no family and no money, with nothing but your own two legs and a silver coin—sometimes running away is the only thing you can do.
And anyway, if I hadn’t been the kind of girl who ran away, I wouldn’t have found the blue Door. And there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell.
The fear of God and Mr. Locke kept me quiet that evening and the following day. I was well watched by Mr. Stirling and the nervous hotel manager, who herded me the way you might handle a valuable but dangerous zoo animal. I amused myself for a while by slamming the keys on the grand piano and watching him flinch, but eventually I was shepherded back into my room and advised to go to sleep.
I was out the low window and dodging through the alley before the sun had fully set. The road was scattered with shadows like shallow black pools, and by the time I reached the field, stars were shimmering through the hot haze of smoke and tobacco that hung over Ninley. I stumbled through the grass, squinting into the gloom for that house-of-cards shape.
The blue Door wasn’t there.
Instead, I found a ragged black circle in the grass. Ash and char were all that remained of my Door. My pocket diary lay among the coals, curled and blackened. I left it there.
When I stumbled back into the sagging, not-very-grand hotel, the sky was tar-black and my knee socks were stained. Mr. Locke was sitting in an oily blue cloud of smoke in the lobby with his ledgers and papers spread before him and his favorite jade tumbler full of evening scotch.
“And where have you been this evening? Did you walk back through that door and find yourself on Mars? Or the moon, perhaps?” But his tone was gentle. The thing about Mr. Locke is that he really was kind to me. Even during the worst of it, he was always kind.
“No,” I admitted. “But I bet there are more Doors just like it. I bet I could find them and write about them and they’d all open. And I don’t care if you don’t believe me.” Why didn’t I just keep my stupid mouth closed? Why didn’t I shake my head and apologize with a hint of tears in my voice, and slink off to bed with the memory of the blue Door like a secret talisman in my pocket? Because I was seven and stubborn, and didn’t yet understand the cost of true stories.
“Is that so,” was all Mr. Locke said, and I marched to my room under the impression that I’d evaded more severe punishment.
