1 Ten thousand doors of January

When I was seven, I found a door. I suspect I should capitalize that

word, so you understand I'm not talking about your garden- or common-

variety door that leads reliably to a white-tiled kitchen or a bedroom

closet.

When I was seven, I found a Door. There—look how tall and proud

the word stands on the page now, the belly of that D like a black archway

leading into white nothing. When you see that word, I imagine a little

prickle of familiarity makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

You don't know a thing about me; you can't see me sitting at this yellow-

wood desk, the salt-sweet breeze riffling these pages like a reader

looking for her bookmark. You can't see the scars that twist and knot

across my skin. You don't even know my name (it's January Scaller; so

now I suppose you do know a little something about me and I've ruined

my point).

But you know what it means when you see the word Door. Maybe

you've even seen one for yourself, standing half-ajar and rotted in an old

church, or oiled and shining in a brick wall. Maybe, if you're one of those

fanciful persons who find their feet running toward unexpected places,

you've even walked through one and found yourself in a very unexpected

place indeed.

Or maybe you've never so much as glimpsed a Door in your life. There

aren't as many of them as there used to be.

But you still know about Doors, don't you? Because there are ten

thousand stories about ten thousand Doors, and we know them as well

as we know our names. They lead to Faerie, to Valhalla, Atlantis and

Lemuria, Heaven and Hell, to all the directions a compass could never

take you, to elsewhere. My father—who is a true scholar and not just a

young lady with an ink pen and a series of things she has to say—puts it

much better: "If we address stories as archaeological sites, and dust

through their layers with meticulous care, we find at some level there is

always a doorway. A dividing point between here and there, us and them,

mundane and magical. It is at the moments when the doors open, when

things flow between the worlds, that stories happen."

He never capitalized doors. But perhaps scholars don't capitalize

words just because of the shapes they make on the page.

It was the summer of 1901, although the arrangement of four

numbers on a page didn't mean much to me then. I think of it now as a

swaggering, full-of-itself sort of year, shining with the gold-plated

promises of a new century. It had shed all the mess and fuss of the

nineteenth century—all those wars and revolutions and uncertainties, all

those imperial growing pains—and now there was nothing but peace

and prosperity wherever one looked. Mr. J. P. Morgan had recently

become the richest man in the entire history of the world; Queen Victoria

had finally expired and left her vast empire to her kingly-looking son;

those unruly Boxers had been subdued in China; and Cuba had been

tucked neatly beneath America's civilized wing. Reason and rationality

reigned supreme, and there was no room for magic or mystery.

There was no room, it turned out, for little girls who wandered off the

edge of the map and told the truth about the mad, impossible things they

found there.

I found it on the raggedy western edge of Kentucky, right where the state

dips its toe into the Mississippi. It's not the kind of place you'd expect to

find anything mysterious or even mildly interesting: it's flat and scrubby-

looking, populated by flat, scrubby-looking people. The sun hangs twice

as hot and three times as bright as it does in the rest of the country, even

at the very end of August, and everything feels damp and sticky, like the

soap scum left on your skin when you're the last one to use the bath.

But Doors, like murder suspects in cheap mysteries, are often where

you least expect them.

I was only in Kentucky at all because Mr. Locke had taken me along on

one of his business trips. He said it was a "real treat" and a "chance to see

how things are done," but really it was because my nursemaid was

teetering on the edge of hysteria and had threatened to quit at least four

times in the last month. I was a difficult child, back then.

Or maybe it was because Mr. Locke was trying to cheer me up. A

postcard had arrived last week from my father. It had a picture of a

brown girl wearing a pointy gold hat and a resentful expression, with the

words AUTHENTIC BURMESE COSTUME stamped alongside her. On the

back were three lines in tidy brown ink: Extending my stay, back in

October. Thinking of you. JS. Mr. Locke had read it over my shoulder and

patted my arm in a clumsy, keep-your-chin-up sort of way.

A week later I was stuffed in the velvet and wood-paneled coffin of a

Pullman sleeper car reading The Rover Boys in the Jungle while Mr. Locke

read the business section of the Times and Mr. Stirling stared into space

with a valet's professional blankness.

I ought to introduce Mr. Locke properly; he'd hate to wander into the

story in such a casual, slantwise way. Allow me to present Mr. William

Cornelius Locke, self-made not-quite-billionaire, head of W. C. Locke &

Co., owner of no less than three stately homes along the Eastern

Seaboard, proponent of the virtues of Order and Propriety (words that

he certainly would prefer to see capitalized—see that P, like a woman

with her hand on her hip?), and chairman of the New England

Archaeological Society, a sort of social club for rich, powerful men who

were also amateur collectors. I say "amateur" only because it was

fashionable for wealthy men to refer to their passions in this dismissive

way, with a little flick of their fingers, as if admitting to a profession other

than moneymaking might sully their reputations.

In truth, I sometimes suspected that all Locke's moneymaking was

specifically designed to fuel his collecting hobby. His home in Vermont—

the one we actually lived in, as opposed to the two other pristine

structures intended mainly to impress his significance upon the world—

was a vast, private Smithsonian packed so tightly it seemed to be

constructed of artifacts rather than mortar and stones. There was little

organization: limestone figures of wide-hipped women kept company

with Indonesian screens carved like lace, and obsidian arrowheads

shared a glass case with the taxidermied arm of an Edo warrior (I hated

that arm but couldn't stop looking at it, wondering what it had looked

like alive and muscled, how its owner would have felt about a little girl in

America looking at his paper-dry flesh without even knowing his name).

My father was one of Mr. Locke's field agents, hired when I was

nothing but an eggplant-sized bundle wrapped in an old traveling coat.

"Your mother had just died, you know, very sad case," Mr. Locke liked to

recite to me, "and there was your father—this odd-colored, scarecrow-

looking fellow with God-help-him tattoos up and down his arms—in the

absolute middle of nowhere with a baby. I said to myself: Cornelius,

there's a man in need of a little charity!"

Father was hired before dusk. Now he gallivants around the world

collecting objects "of particular unique value" and mailing them to Mr.

Locke so he can put them in glass cases with brass plaques and shout at

me when I touch them or play with them or steal the Aztec coins to re-

create scenes from Treasure Island. And I stay in my little gray room in

Locke House and harass the nursemaids Locke hires to civilize me and

wait for Father to come home.

At seven, I'd spent considerably more time with Mr. Locke than with

my own biological father, and insofar as it was possible to love someone

so naturally comfortable in three-piece suits, I loved him.

As was his custom, Mr. Locke had taken rooms for us in the nicest

establishment available; in Kentucky, that translated to a sprawling

pinewood hotel on the edge of the Mississippi, clearly built by someone

who wanted to open a grand hotel but hadn't ever met one in real life.

There were candy-striped wallpaper and electric chandeliers, but a sour

catfish smell seeped up from the floorboards.

Mr. Locke waved past the manager with a fly-swatting gesture, told

him to "Keep an eye on the girl, that's a good fellow," and swept into the

lobby with Mr. Stirling trailing like a man-shaped dog at his heels. Locke

greeted a bow-tied man waiting on one of the flowery couches.

"Governor Dockery, a pleasure! I read your last missive with greatest

attention, I assure you—and how is your cranium collection coming?"

Ah. So that was why we came: Mr. Locke was meeting one of his

Archaeological Society pals for an evening of drinking, cigar smoking,

and boasting. They had an annual Society meeting every summer at

Locke House—a fancy party followed by a stuffy, members-only affair

that neither I nor my father was permitted to attend—but some of the

real enthusiasts couldn't wait the full year and sought one another out

wherever they could.

The manager smiled at me in that forced, panicky way of childless

adults, and I smiled toothily back. "I'm going out," I told him confidently.

He smiled a little harder, blinking with uncertainty. People are always

uncertain about me: my skin is sort of coppery-red, as if it's covered all

over with cedar sawdust, but my eyes are round and light and my clothes

are expensive. Was I a pampered pet or a serving girl? Should the poormanager serve me tea or toss me in the kitchens with the maids? I was

what Mr. Locke called "an in-between sort of thing."

I tipped over a tall vase of flowers, gasped an insincere "oh dear," and

slunk away while the manager swore and mopped at the mess with his

coat. I escaped outdoors (see how that word slips into even the most

mundane of stories? Sometimes I feel there are doors lurking in the

creases of every sentence, with periods for knobs and verbs for hinges).

The streets were nothing but sunbaked stripes crisscrossing

themselves before they ended in the muddy river, but the people of

Ninley, Kentucky, seemed inclined to stroll along them as if they were

proper city streets. They stared and muttered as I went by.

An idle dockworker pointed and nudged his companion. "That's a

little Chickasaw girl, I'll bet you." His workmate shook his head, citing his

extensive personal experience with Indian girls, and speculated, "West

Indian, maybe. Or a half-breed."

I kept walking. People were always guessing like that, categorizing me

as one thing or another, but Mr. Locke assured me they were all equally

incorrect. "A perfectly unique specimen," he called me. Once after a

comment from one of the maids I'd asked him if I was colored and he'd

snorted. "Odd-colored, perhaps, but hardly colored." I didn't really know

what made a person colored or not, but the way he said it made me glad I

wasn't.

The speculating was worse when my father was with me. His skin is

darker than mine, a lustrous red-black, and his eyes are so black even the

whites are threaded with brown. Once you factor in the tattoos—ink

spirals twisting up both wrists—and the shabby suit and the spectacles

and the muddled-up accent and—well. People stared.

I still wished he were with me.

I was so busy walking and not looking back at all those white faces

that I thudded into someone. "Sorry, ma'am, I—" An old woman, hunched

and seamed like a pale walnut, glared down at me. It was a practiced,

grandmotherly glare, especially made for children who moved too fast

and knocked into her. "Sorry," I said again.

She didn't answer, but something shifted in her eyes like a chasm

cleaving open. Her mouth hung open, and her filmy eyes went wide as

shutters. "Who—just who the hell are you?" she hissed at me. Peopledon't like in-between things, I suppose.

I should have scurried back to the catfish-smelling hotel and huddled

in Mr. Locke's safe, moneyed shadow, where none of these damn people

could reach me; it would have been the proper thing to do. But, as Mr.

Locke so often complained, I could sometimes be quite improper, willful,

and temerarious (a word I assumed was unflattering from the company

it kept).

So I ran away.

I ran until my stick-thin legs shook and my chest heaved against the

fine seams of my dress. I ran until the street turned to a winding lane and

the buildings behind me were swallowed up by wisteria and

honeysuckle. I ran and tried not to think about the old woman's eyes on

my face, or how much trouble I would be in for disappearing.

My feet stopped their churning only once they realized the dirt

beneath them had turned to laid-over grasses. I found myself in a lonely,

overgrown field beneath a sky so blue it reminded me of the tiles my

father brought back from Persia: a majestic, world-swallowing blue you

could fall into. Tall, rust-colored grasses rolled beneath it, and a few

scattered cedars spiraled up toward it.

Something in the shape of the scene—the rich smell of dry cedar in

the sun, the grass swaying against the sky like a tigress in orange and

blue—made me want to curl into the dry stems like a fawn waiting for

her mother. I waded deeper, wandering, letting my hands trail through

the frilled tops of wild grains.

I almost didn't notice the Door at all. All Doors are like that, half-

shadowed and sideways until someone looks at them in just the right

way.

This one was nothing but an old timber frame arranged in a shape like

the start of a house of cards. Rust stains spotted the wood where hinges

and nails had bled into nothing, and only a few brave planks remained of

the door itself. Flaking paint still clung to it, the same royal blue as the

sky.

Now, I didn't know about Doors at the time, and wouldn't have

believed you even if you'd handed me an annotated three-volume

collection of eyewitness reports. But when I saw that raggedy blue door

standing so lonesome in the field, I wanted it to lead someplace else.