Wayward Children 01 - Every Heart a Doorway Read online

  “Oh, Jill wasn’t the pretty one. Jill got to be the smart one, with expectations and standards she was supposed to live up to. I was the pretty one.” Jack’s smile was quick, lopsided, and wry. “If we both asked for Lego, she got scientists and dinosaurs, and I got a flower shop. If we both asked for shoes, she got sneakers, and I got ballet flats. They never asked us, naturally. My hair was easier to brush one day when we were toddlers—probably because she had jam in hers—and bam, the roles were set. We couldn’t get away from them. Until one day we opened an old trunk and found a set of stairs inside.”

  Jack’s voice had gone distant. Nancy held herself in perfect stillness, not speaking, barely daring to breathe. If she wanted to hear this story, she couldn’t interrupt it. Something about the way Jack was glaring at the wall told her she was only going to get one chance.

  “We went down the mysterious stairs that couldn’t possibly be there, of course. Who wouldn’t go down an impossible staircase in the bottom of a trunk? We were twelve. We were curious, and angry with our parents, and angry with each other.” Jack tied her bow tie with quick, furious jerks. “We went down, and at the bottom there was a door, and on the door there was a sign. Two words. BE SURE. Sure of what? We were twelve, we weren’t sure of anything. So we went through. We came out on this moor that seemed to go on forever, between the mountains and the angry sea. And that sky! I’d never seen so many stars before, or such a red, red moon. The door slammed shut behind us. We couldn’t have gone back if we’d wanted to—and we didn’t want to. We were twelve. We were going to have an adventure if it killed us.”

  “Did you?” asked Nancy. “Have an adventure, I mean?”

  “Sure,” said Jack bleakly. “It didn’t even kill us. Not permanently, anyway. But it changed everything. I finally got to be the smart one. Dr. Bleak taught me everything he knew about the human body, the ways of recombining and reanimating tissue. He said I was the best pupil he’d ever had. That I had incredibly talented hands.” She looked at her fingers like she was seeing them for the first time. “Jill went in a different direction. The world we went to, it was…feudal, almost, divided into villages and moors and protectorates, with a master or mistress holding sway over each of them. Our Master was a bloodsucker, centuries old, with a fondness for little girls—not like that! Not in any sort of inappropriate way. Even Dr. Bleak was a child to him, and the Master wasn’t the sort of man who thought about children like that. But he did need blood to live. He made Jill a lot of promises. He told her she could be his daughter one day and rule alongside him. I guess that’s why it was so important we be taken care of. When the villagers marched on the castle, he sent my sister to hide with me in the laboratory. Dr. Bleak said…he, uh, said it was too dangerous for us to stay, and he opened a doorway. Neither of us wanted to go, but I understood the necessity. I promised I would stay a scientist, no matter what else happened, and that one day, I’d find a way back to him. Jill—he had to sedate her before she would go through. We found ourselves back in that old trunk, the lid half closed and the stairway gone. I’ve been looking for the formula to unlock the way back for the both of us ever since.”

  “Oh,” said Nancy, in a hushed voice.

  Jack smiled that wry smile again. “Spending five years apprenticed to a mad scientist sort of changes your outlook on the world. I know Kade hates the fact that he had to go through puberty twice—he thinks it was unfair, and I guess for him, it was. Gender dysphoria is a form of torture. But I wish we’d gotten the same deal. We were twelve when we went into that trunk. We were seventeen when we came out. Maybe we would have been able to adapt to this stupid, colorful, narrow-minded world if we’d woken from a shared dream and been thrown straight into middle school. Instead, we staggered down the stairs and found our parents having dinner with our four-year-old brother, who’d been told for his entire life that we were dead. Not missing. That would have been messy. God forbid that we should ever make a mess.”

  “How long have you been here?” asked Nancy.

  “Almost a year,” said Jack. “Dearest Mommy and Daddy had us on the bus to boarding school within a month of our coming home. They couldn’t stand to have us under the same roof as their precious boy, who didn’t tell crazy stories about watching lightning snake down from the heavens and shock a beautiful corpse back into the land of the living.” Her eyes went soft and dreamy. “I think the rules were different there. It was all about science, but the science was magical. It didn’t care about whether something could be done. It was about whether it should be done, and the answer was always, always yes.”

  There was a knock at the door. Nancy and Jack both turned to see Kade stick his head inside.

  “The crowd has mostly dissipated, but I have to ask: Jack, did you kill Sumi?”

  “I’m not offended that you’d suspect me, but I’m offended that you think I’d kill for a pair of hands,” said Jack. She sniffed, squaring her shoulders. She looked suddenly imperious, and Nancy realized how much of Jack’s superior attitude was just a put-on, something to keep the world a little more removed. “If I had killed Sumi, there would have been no body to find. I would have put every scrap of her to good use, and people would be wondering for years whether she’d finally managed to pry open the door that would take her back to Candyland. Alas, I didn’t kill her.”

  “She called it Confection, not Candyland, but point taken.” Kade stepped into the room. “Seraphina and Loriel have taken Jill someplace quiet while we wait for everyone to calm down. We’re supposed to stay in our rooms and out of sight while Eleanor summons the city coroner.”

  Nancy stiffened. “What’s going to happen to us now?” she asked. “They’re not going to send us away, are they?” She couldn’t go back. Her parents loved her, there was no question of that, but their love was the sort that filled her suitcase with colors and kept trying to set her up on dates with local boys. Their love wanted to fix her, and refused to see that she wasn’t broken.

  “Eleanor’s been here for a long time,” said Kade. He shut the door. “Sumi was her ward, so there are no parents to involve, and the local authorities know what’s what. They’ll do their best to make sure this doesn’t shut us down.”

  “It would have been better had she not called at all,” sniffed Jack. “An unreported death is just a disappearance in its Sunday clothes.”

  “See, it’s things like that that explain why you don’t have many friends,” said Kade.

  “But Sumi was among them,” said Jack. She turned to look at Sumi’s side of the room. “If she has no family, what are we supposed to do about her things?”

  “There’s storage space in the attic,” said Kade.

  “So we box them up,” said Nancy firmly. “Where can we get some boxes?”

  “The basement,” said Jack.

  “I’ll go with you,” said Kade. “Nancy, you stay here. If anyone asks, we’ll be right back.”

  “All right,” said Nancy, and held herself perfectly still as the others walked away. There was nothing left to do but wait. There was peace in stillness, a serenity that couldn’t be found anywhere else in this hot, fast, often terrible world. Nancy closed her eyes and breathed down into her toes, letting her stillness become the only thing that mattered. Flashes of Sumi kept breaking her concentration, making it difficult to keep her knees from shaking or her fingers from twitching. She forced the images away and kept breathing, looking for serenity.

  She still hadn’t managed to find it when the others returned, the door banging open to Kade’s declaration of “We are ready to box the world!”

  Nancy opened her eyes and turned toward him, somehow mustering a smile. “All right,” she said. “Let’s get to work.”

  Sumi’s things were as tangled and chaotic as Sumi had been. There was neither rhyme nor reason to the way they were piled around her bed and dresser. A pile of books on candy making was tied together with a pair of training bras. A bouquet of roses folded out of playing cards was shoved
under the bed, next to a frilly blue dress that didn’t look like something Sumi would ever have worn and a roast beef sandwich about a month past its “best by” date. Jack, who had put on gloves before they got to work, disposed of all the soiled or biologically questionable material without complaint: apparently, her squeamishness extended only as far as her bare skin. Kade sorted through Sumi’s clothing, folding it neatly before boxing it up. Nancy was fairly sure it would all wind up back in the big group wardrobe. She was okay with that. Sumi wouldn’t mind other people wearing her clothes. She probably wouldn’t have minded while she was alive; she certainly wasn’t going to object now that she was dead.

  Nancy found herself tasked with handling the rest, the things that were neither trash nor fabric. She dug boxes of origami paper and embroidery floss from under the bed—Sumi had apparently always been good with her hands—and pushed them to one side, still digging. Her questing hands found a shoebox. She pulled it out and sat, removing the lid. Photos spilled onto the floor. Some showed Sumi as she’d been during their too-short acquaintance, mismatched clothing and tousled pigtails. Others showed a solemn, sad-eyed girl in a school uniform, sometimes holding a violin, other times empty-handed. It was plain, just from the still images, that this had been a girl who understood the virtue of being overlooked, of being a statue, but not because she had chosen stillness as Nancy had; it had been thrust upon her, until one day she’d discovered a door that could lead her to a world where she had a prayer of being happy.

  Nancy realized that Sumi’s granddaughter was never going to visit the candy corn farmer’s grave, and it took everything she had not to weep for what had been irrevocably lost. Sumi might go to the Halls of the Dead, might even be happy there, but all the things she would have done among the living were gone now, rendered impossible when her heart stopped beating. Death was precious. That didn’t change the fact that life was limited.

  “Poor kid.” Kade leaned over and took the picture from Nancy’s motionless fingers, looking at it for a moment before he tucked it into his shirt. “Let’s get this stuff out of here. You shouldn’t have to look at it, not with her gone.”

  “Thank you,” said Nancy, more earnestly than she would have believed before she’d seen that picture. Sumi was over, and it wasn’t fair.

  Working together, it took the three of them less than an hour to transfer all of Sumi’s possessions to the attic, tucking the boxes away on unused shelves and in dusty corners, of which there seemed to be more than the usual number. When they were done, Jack removed her gloves and began meticulously wiping her fingers on a fresh handkerchief. Kade pulled the picture out of his shirt and tacked it up on a bulletin board, next to a picture of Sumi as Nancy had known her, all bright eyes and brighter smile, hands slightly blurred, as if she’d been photographed in motion.

  “I’ll stay with you tonight, if you don’t mind,” said Kade. “It doesn’t seem safe for you to sleep in there alone.”

  “I won’t stay with you tonight, whether you mind or not,” said Jack. “That room gets too much sun, and Jill has a tendency to sleepwalk when I’m not with her.”

  “You shouldn’t leave her alone,” said Kade. “Watch yourself, okay? A lot of people are looking for someone to blame, and you’re the best scapegoat in the school.”

  “I always wanted to be best at something,” said Jack philosophically.

  “Great,” said Kade. “Now let’s be best at getting to class before we get a lecture from Lundy on punctuality.”

  They filed out of the attic. Nancy looked back at Sumi’s pictures on the bulletin board, so quiet, so still. Then she turned off the light and closed the door.

  5

  SURVIVORS, FOR A TIME

  MORNING CLASSES HAD BEEN canceled; they resumed after lunch. Maybe it was rushing things, but there was nothing else to do with an entire school’s worth of anxious, uneasy students: routine would keep them from wandering off and frightening themselves to death in the aftermath of Sumi’s murder. Even so, it was a strained routine. Homework was forgotten, questions written on chalkboards went unanswered, and even the teachers clearly wanted to be elsewhere. Going back to normal after someone had died was never easy. When that someone had been brutally killed, all bets were off.

  Dinner was worse. Nancy was sitting across from Jack and Jill when the girl with the brown braids walked up to the table and dumped her soup over Jack’s head. “Oops,” she said, flatly. “I slipped.”

  Jack sat rigidly unmoving, soup dripping down her forehead and running down her nose. Jill gasped, leaping to her feet. “Loriel!” she shrieked, the sound of her voice bringing all other conversation in the dining hall grinding to a halt. “How could you?”

  “It was an accident,” said Loriel. “Just like your sister there ‘accidentally’ took apart Angela’s guinea pig, and ‘accidentally’ murdered Sumi. She’s going to get caught, you know. This would all go a lot faster if she’d confess.”

  “Loriel sneezed in that before she poured it on you,” said the girl’s companion to Jack, a look of fake concern on her face. “Just thought you’d want to know.”

  Jack began to tremble. Then, still dripping soup, she jerked away from the table and bolted for the door, leaving Jill to run after her. Half the students burst out laughing. The other half stared after her in mute satisfaction, clearly condoning anything that made Jack miserable. She had already been tried and found guilty by a jury of her peers. All that remained was for the law to catch up.

  “You’re horrible,” said a voice. Nancy was only a little surprised to realize that it was hers. She pushed back her chair, leaving her own dinner of grapes and cottage cheese relatively untouched, and glared at the two. “You’re horrible people. I’m glad we didn’t go through the same door, because I would hate to have traveled to a world that didn’t teach its tourists any manners.” She turned and stalked away, head held high, following the trail of soup out of the dining room and down the hall to the basement stairs.

  “You walk slow, but you move fast. How do you do that?” said Kade, catching up with her at the top of the stairs. He followed her gaze down into the darkness. “That’s where the Addams twins live. They were in your room for a while, until the kid who had the basement before them graduated.”

  “Had he been to the same world?”

  “No, he visited a race of mole people. I think he realized he enjoyed sunshine and bathing, and sort of gave up on the idea of going back.”

  “Oh.” Nancy took a tentative step down. “Is she going to be all right?”

  “Jack doesn’t like being messy. They have their own bathroom. She’ll be all cleaned up and back in tip-top faintly morbid shape before group is over.” Kade shook his head. “I just hope this is as bad as it gets. Jack can handle a little soup, and she worked for a mad scientist; for her, the wrath of the locals is all part of a day’s work. But if people want to get violent, she’ll fight back, and that’ll just prove that they were in the right to accuse her.”

  “This is awful,” said Nancy. “I let my parents send me here because Miss West said she understood what had happened to me and could help me learn how to live with it.”

  “And because you were hoping that if you understood it, you’d be able to do it again,” said Kade. Nancy didn’t say anything. He laughed ruefully. “Hey, it’s okay. I understand. Most of us are here because we want to be able to open our doors at will, at least at first. Sometimes the desire goes away. Sometimes the door comes back. Sometimes we just have to learn to deal with being exiles in our home countries.”

  “What if we can’t?” asked Nancy. “What happens to us then?”

  Kade was silent for a long moment. Then he shrugged, and said, “I guess we open schools for people who still have what we want most in the world. Hope.”

  “Sumi said ‘hope’ was a bad word.”

  “Sumi wasn’t wrong. Now come on. Let’s get to group before we get in trouble.”

  They walked silently through th
e halls, and they saw no one moving in the rooms around them. The idea that sticking together was the only way to be safe seemed to have taken root with preternatural speed. Nancy found herself matching her steps to Kade’s, hurrying to keep up with his longer stride. She didn’t like hurrying. It was indecorous and would have resulted in a scolding back ho—back in the Underworld. Here, however, it was necessary, even encouraged, and there was no reason to feel guilty about it. She tried to hold to that thought as she and Kade stepped into the room where group was being held.

  Everyone turned to look at them. Loriel actually sneered. “Couldn’t get the little killer out of her basement?”

  “That’s quite enough, Miss Youngers,” said Lundy sharply. “We have already agreed to stop speculating about who may have harmed Sumi.”

  She gets a name now, not a title and surname, thought Nancy. That’s not right. The dead deserve more dignity, not less. Dignity is all the dead possess. Aloud, she said nothing, only made her way to an open chair and sat. She was gratified when Kade took the seat next to her. Loriel’s glare intensified. Apparently Nancy wasn’t the only one who found Kade beautiful, although she would have been willing to bet she was the only one who found his beauty more aesthetic than romantic.

  “You agreed,” said Loriel. “The rest of us are scared. Who would kill her like that? And mutilating the body afterward? That’s just sick. We have a right to want to know what’s going on, and how to keep ourselves safe!”

  “I’m reasonably sure she bled out from her injuries, given the mess; corpses don’t bleed as much,” said Jack. Everyone in the room turned to see the twins, freshly scrubbed and wearing clean clothes, as they made their entrance. Jack looked more the old-fashioned professor than ever, wearing a tweed vest over a long-sleeved white shirt that buttoned at the wrists. Jill was wearing a cream-colored gown that Nancy would have considered sleepwear, not something to wear to group therapy. “Whoever killed her was no scientist.”