What did this final chapter tell me, really, that I hadn’t already suspected? Well, first: that Mr. Locke had known full well that my father was Door-hunting, and had even hired him specifically to do so. I pictured the basement rooms of Locke House with their endless aisles of crates and cases, the rooms bristling with glass cases and neat labels—how many of those treasures were stolen from other worlds? How many of them were imbued with strange powers or uncanny magics?
And how many had he sold or bartered away? I remembered the meeting I’d seen in London as a girl, the secret auction of valuable objects. There’d been Society members present, I was sure—that ferrety red-haired man, at least—so I supposed the Society, too, knew about my father and the Doors and the things he stole. And it must be the Society who stalked after him, haunting him, closing his Doors. But why, if they wanted the treasures he stole for them? Or perhaps they wanted to hoard the treasures for themselves, then seal the Doors against any further leakage. They’d like that; I’d spent enough time around rich and powerful men to know their affection for phrases like maintaining exclusivity and manufacturing demand through rarity.
It made sense, almost. But who had closed my mother’s Door, that first Door in the field, all those years ago? And the mountaintop Door? My father hadn’t even been employed by Mr. Locke then. Had it been random misfortune, or had the Society been closing Doors for far longer than my father’s personal quest? They’d mentioned a Founder, once or twice, in reverent tones—perhaps the Society was far older than it seemed.
It didn’t make sense, either, that they would harm their prize Door-hunter, but something had certainly prevented my father from coming back. Something had driven him to scrawl those last three lines. And now the Society wanted me. They’ll never stop looking for you, girl.
There was a horrible, meaty crunch behind me.
I turned to find Jane crouched over Havemeyer’s body with a mallet and a clinical expression. A peeled wooden stake now protruded from the white bundle, roughly where his heart would be.
Jane shrugged at me. “Just in case.”
I teetered for a moment between horror and humor, but I couldn’t help it: I laughed. It was an oversized, tiptoeing-toward-hysteria kind of laugh. Jane’s eyebrows rose, but then her head tilted back and she laughed alongside me. I heard a little of the same relief in her voice, too, and it occurred to me that her attitude of cool nerve and confidence might not, in fact, be wholly true.
“You have read entirely too many penny dreadfuls,” I admonished her. She shrugged again, unrepentant, and I went back to my digging. It felt easier, somehow, as if something heavy had been perched on my shoulders and had flapped away at the sound of our laughter.
I worked in silence for another minute or so, and then Jane began to speak. “In my world, it’s wisest to shoot anything strange or unusual you might meet in the forests, and this is why I almost killed your father the first time I saw him. My first shot went wide, though. Give me that, if you aren’t going to dig.”
My shovelfuls had grown scant and random; I scrabbled out of the hole and Jane took my place. Her voice matched the jab-and-toss rhythm of her digging. “He began shouting and waving his arms, switching between a dozen or so languages. One of them was English; it had been a very long time since I’d heard English spoken aloud, and never by a dark-skinned, tattooed man who looked like a professor. So I did not shoot him.”
The hole was now well past Jane’s waist, and every shovelful made a soupy, sucking sound. Gnats hovered like overeager dinner guests at its edges. “I took him back to my camp, fed him, and we traded stories. He asked if I’d ever found another door in this world, or heard any stories about written words coming true. No, I answered, and his shoulders slumped. I felt I should apologize, but did not know for what.
“Then he gave me a warning: The doors are closing behind me, he said. Someone is following me. He begged me to return to my native world with him. He told me he knew what it was like to be trapped in a world not your own, urged me to go back with him. I refused.”
“Why?” I perched at the edge of the hole, arms wrapped around my own knees. My borrowed skirt was already hopelessly muddied and stained, and for a disorienting moment I felt as if I’d been zipped backward to a time when I was young and obstreperous and gleefully unkempt.
Jane climbed out of the hole and perched beside me. “Because the place you are born isn’t necessarily the place you belong. I was born into a world that abandoned me, stole from me, rejected me; is it so surprising I found a better one?” She sighed, long and regretful. “But I wanted to make one last trip through the door, just in case this madman was correct and it was my only chance. Julian stayed camped at the foot of Mount Suswa while I went searching for more ammunition and for—for news of my sister.” Jane’s eyes flickered like lanterns in a gust of winter air, and the question what happened to her? died in my throat. There was a little silence, and when she spoke again her tone was brusque. “I returned to Julian’s camp. He asked me to stay again, and I laughed in his face—I’d seen what my home had become. White women watching me from train windows, poachers wearing foolish hats and posing for pictures beside animal carcasses, potbellied children begging in English, please-sah, please-sah. No. So Julian escorted me back to my ivory door to say good-bye. Except there was something strange waiting in the cave.”
Jane was staring into the grave, face taut. “Piles of gray sticks bundled together, and wires running out, and a faint fizzing sound. Your father yelled and shoved me away, and then everything came apart. An explosion that scorched the backs of my arms and tossed both of us forward like matchsticks. I don’t know if I lost consciousness, but it felt like I blinked and suddenly there was a man standing above me, wearing a tan British uniform. And behind him, where the cave should have been, was nothing but rubble and dust.
“His lips were moving, but something was wrong with my ears. Then he drew his pistol and pointed it at Julian. He should have pointed it at me—I was the one with a weapon—but he didn’t.” Jane’s lip curled. “When I die, I hope at least I don’t look so damn surprised.”
I did not look at Havemeyer’s body, did not think about the neatness of the hole that had appeared in his chest.
“I didn’t even wait for his body to hit the ground: I threw myself at the mountainside, tearing away stones and earth. By the time Julian stopped me my hands looked like bushmeat. He held me back and said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ until I understood: I was trapped here, in this world, forever.”
I’d never seen Jane cry, but I could feel a kind of rhythmic shuddering moving through her, like thunderclouds scudding across the bay. Neither of us spoke for a time but simply sat in the cooling evening and listened to the hollow, mournful hooting of a loon across the lake.
“Well. In this world you cannot be black-skinned and found near a dead white man in uniform. I used a stone to smash the body up and dragged him near the rubble, so there would be no bullet wound to scandalize a search party, and then we ran.
“We were on the train to Khartoum when your father asked where I would go next. I told him I wanted to find another way in, a back door, and he smiled sadly at me. ‘I’ve been looking my whole life for another door to my home world,’ he told me. ‘But I’ll look for yours, too, if you do something for me.’ And he asked me to come to a rich man’s house in Vermont and protect his daughter.”
Another silent wave shook her. Her voice remained perfectly even. “I kept my end of the bargain. But Julian… didn’t.”
I cleared my throat. “He’s not dead.” I felt her go very still beside me, tense with hope. “I finished his book. He found a Door in Japan that led back to his own world but he didn’t go through it—he tried to come back for me”—that small sun blazed again, briefly, then faltered—“but he never made it, I guess. He says to tell you”—I swallowed, tasting the shame of it on my tongue—“he’s sorry.”
Air hissed through the gap in Jane’s teeth. “He promised me. He promised.” Her voice was strangled, almost swallowed by emotion: bitterest betrayal, jealousy, and the sort of rage that leaves bodies in its wake.
I flinched and her eyes flicked toward me, then widened. “Wait. January, you made a passage between the asylum and this cabin. Could you do it for me? Could you write me home?” Her face shone with desperate hope, as if she expected me to produce a pen from my pocket and draw her Door in the air between us, as if she were about to see her husbands and wife again. She looked younger than I’d ever seen her.
I found I couldn’t look at her as I answered. “No. I—my father’s book says there are places where worlds rub against one another, like the branches of two trees, and that’s where Doors are. I don’t think a Door here, in Vermont, could ever reach all the way to your world.”
She made an impatient, dismissive sound. “Fine, but if you went with me to Kenya, to my ivory door—”
Mutely, I lifted my bandaged left arm and held it level with her eyes. It shook and shivered after only a few seconds, and after a few more I dropped it back to my side. “Opening the way from the asylum to here almost killed me, I think,” I told her softly. “And that was a Door within the same world. I don’t know what it might take to reopen a Door between two worlds, but I doubt I have it.”
Jane exhaled very slowly, staring at my hand where it lay against the earth. She didn’t say anything.
