I purchased my steamer ticket the following morning and bought a paper from the Foreign Affairs stand in Valencia three days later. On the sixth page, printed in blurred Greek type, was a small column about a sudden and inexplicable rock slide on the coast of Crete. No one had been hurt, but a road had been buried and an old, mostly forgotten church had been reduced to rubble. The local police chief was quoted describing the event as “unfortunate, but inevitable.”
You will find below a partial reproduction of a list recorded in my notes in July 1907. It is such a scholar’s impulse, to cope with a dangerous and murky situation by sitting at his desk and writing a list. What would your mother have done, I wonder. One imagines a great deal more noise and disruption, and perhaps a body count.
I titled the page Various Responses to the Continuing Situation Regarding the Nefarious Closing of Doors and Potential Risks to Immediate Family Members and underlined it several times.
A. Expose the plot. Publish findings thus far (write to the Times? Take out an ad?) and denounce the activities of shadowy organization. Points in favor: could be done quickly; minimal disruption to January’s life. Points against: likelihood of total failure (would papers publish findings without evidence?); loss of Cornelius’s trust and protection; danger of (violent) retribution from unknown parties.
B. Go to Cornelius. Explain my fears more fully and request additional security for January. In favor: Locke’s considerable resources could command a high degree of safety. Against: He hasn’t been sympathetic to my concerns thus far; the terms delusional paranoias and ridiculous flimflammery have been used.
C. Remove January to safe, secondary location. If she were hidden in some other stronghold, very quietly, pursuers might not find her. In favor: J kept safe. Against: difficulty of finding safe location; difficulty of managing Cornelius’s attachment to J; uncertainty of success/risk to J’s safety; maximum disruption of daily life.
I believe she loves Locke House, despite everything. When she was young I would often arrive to find a flustered nursemaid and an absent daughter, and she would be discovered hours later building sand castles on the lakeshore, or playing endless games with the grocer’s son. Now I find her walking the halls with one hand on the dark wood paneling, as if she is stroking the spine of some great sprawling beast, or curled with her dog in a forgotten armchair in the attic. Would it be right to steal the only home she’s ever known, when I have stolen so much else from her already?
D. Run away, take refuge in another world. I could find a door and go through it, taking January with me, and build a new life for the two of us in some safer, brighter world. In favor: ultimate safety from pursuers. Against: see above. And I am far from certain that all worlds connect to one another—were we to flee to another world, could I ever find the Written again? And if Ade should claw her way back home, would she ever find us?
There was no E. Continue on precisely as before, but this is the course I ultimately chose. Life has a kind of momentum to it, I’ve found, an accumulated weight of decisions which becomes impossible to shift. I continued my thieving, chiseling away stories and boxing them up so that a rich man might brag to his rich friends; I continued my desperate search, following stories and unearthing doors; I continued to let them close behind me. I stopped looking over my shoulder.
I made only three changes. The first involved an ivory door in the mountains of British East Africa and an uncomfortably close encounter with a Lee-Metford rifle, and ended in forging a passport and purchasing train tickets for a Miss Jane Irimu. It is not necessary to recount the full story of our meeting here, but only to note that she is one of the most fearless and casually violent persons I have ever met, and that I caused her inadvertent but terrible heartache. She also has a very particular empathy to your situation and it is my belief that she will protect you far more capably than I have. You ought to ask her for the full story one day.
The second change was to find an escape route for the two of you, a bolt-hole which I hope you will never make use of. I will not describe it with any detail here—lest some prying, unfriendly eye come across this book—except to say there is one door I found which has not yet been closed. I traveled under an assumed name to discover it and burned my notes and papers once I had. I blamed my delayed return on stormy seas, and I suppose by then I had been so often absent from Locke House that neither Cornelius nor you asked anything further. I spoke of my true purpose to only one living soul; should you ever need a place to run, a place to hide from whatever it is that pursues me—follow Jane.
The third change is this book you now hold in your hands. (Assuming I’ve had it bound. Otherwise I refer to a messy pile of typewritten papers tied together with packing twine and the shed skin of a flying snake, which I found in a viciously unpleasant world through a door in Australia.)
I spend my evenings now gathering the disparate and wandering pieces of my own story—our story, I should call it—shepherding them into a straight line, and recording them as neatly as I can on the page. It is taxing work. Sometimes I am too exhausted from a day’s fruitless tramping through the Amazon or the Ozarks to write more than a sentence before bed. Sometimes I spend the entire day trapped in my camp by poor weather with nothing but a pen and paper for company, but still fail to write a single word because I’ve become trapped in the mirrored halls of my own memory and cannot escape (the nautilus-curve of your mother’s body around yours; the white-gold smear of her smile in the misted dawn of the Amarico).
But I persist in writing, even when it feels like pressing forward through an endless briar patch, even when the ink looks smeary-red in the lamplight.
Perhaps I keep writing because I was raised in a world where words have power, where curves and spirals of ink adorn sails and skin, where a sufficiently talented word-worker might reach out and remake her world. Perhaps I cannot believe words are entirely powerless, even here.
Perhaps I simply need to leave some record, however wandering and unsubstantiated, so that another living soul can learn the truths I have worked so hard to unearth. So that someone else might read it and believe: there are ten thousand doors between ten thousand worlds, and someone is closing them. And I am helping them do it.
Perhaps I write out of an altogether more desperate and naive hope: that someone braver and better than myself might atone for my sins and succeed where I failed. That someone might fight back against the shadowy machinations of those who wish to sever this world from all its cousins and render it barren, rational, profoundly alone.
That someone, somehow, might forge themselves into a living key, and open the doors.
END
Post Script
(Apologies for my penmanship—what would my mother say?—but I am in a great hurry, and don’t have time to get this typed and bound like the rest.)
My dearest January,
I found it. I found it.
I am camped on one of the cold, wind-scoured islands north of Japan. Near the shore there’s an association of bamboo-grass huts and corrugated-tin shanties that might generously be called a village, but up on this mountainside there’s nothing but knotted grass and a few desiccated pines clinging gamely to the ashy soil. Before me stands an interesting formation: some of the tree boughs have twisted themselves into a sort of arch, looking out over the sea.
If seen from the proper angle, it looks almost like a doorway.
I found it by following the stories: Once there was a fisherman who folded the pages of books and turned them into sailing ships. The ships were fleet and light, and their sails were stained with ink. Once there was a little boy who disappeared in midwinter and returned sunburnt and warm. Once there was a priest with prayers written on his skin.
I knew where it led before I stepped through it. Worlds, like houses, have very particular smells, so subtle and complex and varied you barely notice them, and the smell of the Written filtered through the pine boughs like a delicate fog. Sun, sea, the dust of crumbling book spines, the salt and spice of a thousand trade ships. Home.
I am going through it as soon as I can. This very evening. I was careful on my journey here, but I fear I wasn’t careful enough. I fear they will find me—the door-closers, the world-killers. I hesitate even to look away from the doorway and down at this page, lest some spectral figure leap from the shadows and close it forever.
But I will delay long enough to finish this. To tell you where I have gone and why, and send you this book through the Azure Chests of Tuya and Yuha—a rather useful pair of objects I found through a door in Alexandria, and one of the few treasures I declined to surrender entirely to Cornelius. I gave him one, but kept the other for myself.
I’ve sent you trinkets and toys before—did you recognize them for what they were? The insufficient offerings of an absent father? A coward’s attempt to say: I think of you always, I love you, forgive me? I feared your disappointment, your rejection of my paltry, pitiful gifts.
