The Ten Thousand Doors of January

Before leaving home to hunt for Doors, Ade rebuilds the door in the hayfield out of scraps as a monument to her ghost boy. She finds her first Door in the St. Ours mansion in New Orleans, and disappears for 16 days. The author, Yule Ian, later retraces her steps and finds the mansion, but when he returns later in the day to enter the Door, someone has burned the mansion and the Door to the ground. Ade continues to wander the world, searching for Doors. She follows myths and stories to find dozens of Doors, and eventually, finds the Door she’s looking for at the top of Mount Silverheels in the Colorado Rockies. She builds a boat at the top of the mountain amidst strange looks from locals and a newspaper article about her curious project. After completing the boat, she opens the Door and launches her boat “into the strange seas of another world” (108). 

January feels sorrow for her father as a dark and heavy “Thing” (110) that weighs on her. Jane reminds her that Julian has only purportedly missing, and may not necessarily be dead. Jane then notices January’s book, The Ten Thousand Doors, and seems to recognize it; she rifles through it as if it may contain a message for her. Before she has a chance to talk to January about the book, Locke summons her to his office, fires her, and sends her away from the property.

January decides to run away from home to try to find her father, but Locke and Havemeyer block her way out. She tells them she plans to look for her father because he may have fallen through a Door and ended up in another world, and the men freeze in their tracks. They lock January in her room and she can hear them beating Bad. In desperation, January decides to believe that her book is telling the truth even though she realizes the insanity of believing in magic Doors. She writes, “The Door opens” (121), and just as when she was seven years old, the world shifts and swirls around her, and the locked door magically opens.

January leaves the room and first sees Bad’s blood smeared in the foyer, then Locke. He forces her to sit down and asks her how she found out about “the aberrations” (122) in a menacing tone. January sees a different, cruel side of Locke, and realizes he did not give her The Ten Thousand Doors. Locke sends her to Battleboro asylum, and after only two days, January feels the empty, endless dragging of time will drive her mad. Her second night there, Samuel smuggles the book to her through the window, and she continues to read.

Ade sails into the Written in 1893, and in this world, “words themselves have power” (134). Special people in this world, called word-workers, have the ability to shape reality through words. Tattoos are a common cultural expression of identity, and travelers stitch words of safety and prosperity onto boat sails to protect themselves. Yule Ian, the story’s author and a boy from the Written, lives in the City of Nin and although not gifted as a word-worker, has a deep hunger for words. He loves reading and learning languages, and as a young scholar, discovers a Door: an archway that leads to Adelaide Larson in the hayfield. When he returns three days later and finds the Door gone, he waits all day just as Ade did on the other side. In his disappointment, he throws down a silver coin he had brought to show Ade as proof of his world.

After his Door discovery, Yule feels he has found his life’s purpose, and devotes himself to the study of stories, myths, and forgotten languages in pursuit of finding other Doors. One day he hears a rumor in the City of Plumm about a woman white as a ghost with straw colored hair sailing on the Amarico Sea. He knows it must be Ade, and as she reaches land, she finds Yule searching the horizon on an eastern beach, waiting for her.