“Now.” He produced a second glass—a muddy cup quite unlike his own carved-green cup—and filled it with more of the greasy liquor. “You are going to sit up and drink this, and I will pour you another and you’ll drink that as well. Then you are going to tell me the truth. All of it.” On those last words the man caught Yule’s eyes and held them.
Yule sat up. He drank the liquor—a process very much like swallowing lit matches—and told his story.
“I first came to this world in 1881, by your calendar, and met a girl named Adelaide Lee Larson.” His voice absented itself briefly, and returned as a whisper: “I loved her from that day forward.”
Yule spoke slowly at first, in short, bare sentences, but quickly found himself stumbling into paragraphs and pages, until he was speaking in an endless, gasping stream. It didn’t feel particularly good or bad, but merely necessary, as if those pale eyes were twin stones sitting on his chest, forcing the words out of him.
He told the stranger about the closing of the door and his subsequent dedication to the scholarly study of doors. About Adelaide’s own explorations and their reunion on the shores of the City of Plumm. About their daughter, and their journey back to the mountaintop door, and the breaking of the world.
“And now I don’t know—I don’t know what to do, or where to go. I have to find another door home, I have to know if she survived—I’m sure she did, she was always so tough—but my baby girl, my January—”
“Stop blubbering, boy.” Yule hiccuped to a stop, his hands twisting in his lap, rubbing the words on his arm (scholar, husband, father) and wondering if any of them were still true. “I am, as I said before, a collector. As such I employ a handful of field agents to gallivant about the world collecting things—sculptures, vases, exotic birds, et cetera. Now it seems to me these—doors, you call them?—could lead one to objects of particular rarity. Bordering on the mythological, even.” The man leaned forward, radiating hunger. “Is that not so?”
Yule blinked at him, dimly. “I suppose—yes, it is so. In my researches I noted that things that are commonplace in one world may be perceived as miraculous in another, due to the transition in contextual cultural understa—”
“Precisely. Yes.” The man smiled, sat back, and removed a fat stub of cigar from his coat pocket. Then came the sulfur smell of a struck match and the bluish stink of tobacco. “Now, it seems to me we might strike a mutually profitable arrangement, my boy.” He shook the match out and flicked the remains to the floor. “You are in need of shelter, food, employment, and—unless I am much mistaken—funding and opportunity to search for a way back to your dear likely departed wife.”
“She isn’t—”
The man ignored him. “Consider it done. All of it. Room and board, and an unlimited stipend for research and travel. You can look for your door as long as you like anywhere you like, but in exchange—” He smiled, teeth shining ivory through the cigar smoke. “You’ll help me create a collection that makes the Smithsonian look like a pauper’s attic. Find the rare, the strange, the impossible, the otherworldly—the powerful, even. And bring it back to me.”
Yule’s eyes focused on the man more clearly than they previously had, his pulse rocketing with a sudden surge of hope. He swore, softly, in his own language. “And perhaps—a wet nurse, to travel with me? Just for a little while, for my little girl—”
The man whuffled through his substantial mustache. “Well, as to that… This world isn’t a particularly safe place for young girls, you’ll soon find out. I rather thought she could stay with me. My house is quite large and”—he coughed, looking away from Yule for the first time and fixing his gaze instead on the far wall—“I have no children of my own. It would be no trouble.”
He looked back at Yule. “What do you say, sir?”
Yule could not speak for a moment. It was everything he could have hoped for—sufficient time and money to search for a door back to the Written, a safe place for January, a way forward out of the darkness—but he found himself hesitating. Despair, once established, can be quite difficult to uproot.
Yule took a breath and extended his hand in the manner Adelaide had once shown him. The stranger took it, with a smile that revealed a higher-than-necessary number of teeth.
“And what’s your name, dear boy?”
“… Julian. Julian Scaller.”
“Cornelius Locke. Thrilled to have you on board, Mr. Scaller.”
As a young man in the Written, Julian searched for doors with the boundless confidence of a young person in love who assumes the world will contort itself to accommodate his desires. There were times—after fruitless weeks of trawling through the archives of some distant City, eyes aching from twisting themselves around half a dozen languages, or after miles of hiking across jungly hillsides without the slightest sign of a door—when he felt doubt creep in. Treacherous thoughts slunk through his skull as he lay in the unguarded place between sleeping and waking, thoughts like What if I grow old searching for her, and never find her?
But by morning such thoughts had burned away like mist at dawn and left nothing behind them at all. He simply rose, and kept searching.
Now, trapped in Adelaide’s world, I search with the desperation of an old man who understands that time is a precious and finite thing, beating away like a second hand in my chest.
Some of that time I’ve spent simply learning how to navigate this world—a place I find baffling, sometimes cruel, and profoundly unwelcoming. There are rules about wealth and status, borders and passports, guns and public restrooms and the shade of my skin, all of which change according to my precise location and timing. In one place it might be perfectly permissible to visit the university library and borrow a few books; yet the same action in another place might inspire a call to the local police, who dislike my attitude, arrest me, and refuse to release me until Mr. Locke wires an apology and an upsetting amount of money to the Orleans County station. Under certain conditions I might meet with other scholars in my field and hold forth on the archaeological value of mythmaking; at other times I am treated like a rather clever dog that has learned to speak English. I have been feted by Persian princes for my discoveries; I have been spat on in the street for failing to cast my eyes aside. I am invited to dine at Cornelius’s table, but never to join his Archaeological Society.
In fairness, I have also seen the beautiful and admirable in this world: a group of girls flying kites in Gujarat, moving in a pink and turquoise blur; a blue heron fixing me with its golden stare on the banks of the Mississippi; two young soldiers kissing in a dim alley in Sebastopol. It is not a wholly evil world, but it will never be mine.
I’ve wasted more time fulfilling my end of Cornelius’s bargain. And what a devil’s bargain it’s turned out to be: my papers at the border identify my occupation as an exploratory archaeological researcher, but they might more accurately say well-dressed grave robber. I once overheard the Uyghurs of China refer to me by a long and complicated name filled with fricatives and unpronounceable combinations of consonants—it means the story-eater.
This is what I am, what I have become: a scavenger scouring the earth, burrowing into its most secret and beautiful places and harvesting its treasures and myths. Eating its stories. I have chiseled out sections of sacred art from temple walls; I’ve stolen urns and masks and scepters and magic lamps; I’ve unearthed tombs and stolen jewels from the arms of the dead—in this world and a hundred others. All for the sake of a rich man’s collection on the other side of the world.
What a shameful thing, that a Scholar of the City of Nin should become a story-eater. What would your mother say?
I would do worse things to find my way back to her.
But I’m running out of time. Your face is my hourglass: each time I return to Locke House it’s as if I’ve been gone for decades rather than weeks. Entire lifetimes have bloomed and faded for you, months of secret trials and triumphs that have subtly molded your features into someone I hardly recognize. You’ve grown tall and silent, with the mistrustful stillness of a doe just before she bolts.
Sometimes—when I’m either too tired or too drunk to steer my thoughts away from dangerous places—I wonder what your mother would think if she could see you. Your features so plainly and painfully her own, but your spirit tightly laced beneath good manners and the invisible burden of unbelonging. She had dreamed for you a different life, one profoundly and perilously free, unbounded, every door standing open before you.
