THE DOOR THAT WASN’T THERE
There was once a rich merchant who lived at the edge of the woods, in a tiny town in the Hinterland. Though he spent most of his days traveling, he was at home long enough to give his wife two daughters, the eldest dark and the youngest golden, born one year apart.
Their father was distant and their mother was strange, often shutting herself up in her room for hours. Her daughters could hear her speaking to someone when they pressed their ears to the door, but only the eldest, Anya, ever made out an answer. The voice she heard was so thin and rustling, she could almost believe it was leaves against the window.
On a winter’s day when Anya was sixteen, their mother locked her door and did not open it again. After three days the servants broke it down, and found—an empty room. The windows were shut, winter howled outside, and the woman was gone. But she’d left something behind: on the floor, in a puddle of blood, a bone dagger.
Anya heard the servants whispering about it and crept into the room to see for herself. The stain she found on the floor infected her with a horror of blood so fearsome, she took to washing out her monthly rags in the dark.
The servants sent word to the girls’ father that his wife was dead, or gone, or worse, and for a time heard no reply. Until the first warm day of spring, when he drove up to the house in an unfamiliar carriage.
Inside it was the girls’ new mother. In silken slippers, clinging to their father’s arm, she stepped out onto the cobblestones. She was smaller than Anya, with a heap of pale hair and blue eyes that switched coldly from one stepdaughter to the next.
For half a year their father stayed home, besotted with his new wife and tolerating his children. They ran as wild as they always had, accustomed by then to raising themselves, and thought very little of their new stepmother.
But their father grew bored of the woman in the end, as he’d once grown bored of their mother—as he’d always been bored of his daughters. On that day, he kissed his new wife goodbye, nodded at his daughters, and was gone.
Now their stepmother had the run of the house, and of her stepdaughters. Whether she was bored or whether she was wicked, it came out to the same thing in the end. First she snapped at the girls, demanding they stay close by her. Then she pushed them away, slapping them at the slightest provocation, carrying scissors in her pocket to cut off hanks of their long hair. When she left the house, she locked them up—to keep them from misbehaving, she said. But she kept them in their mother’s room, where the windows were warped shut and the stain on the floor taunted Anya like a vile black mouth. Their mother’s bed had been chopped into firewood after her disappearance, all the pretty objects she’d surrounded herself with sold or locked away. The girls rattled like seeds around the empty room, avoiding the poisonous blot on the floor.
At first their stepmother stayed away for a few hours. Then whole days, then entire nights. The first time she left them locked up from dusk to the next, Anya beat on the door and screamed until her throat and fists were raw, but no one came.
When the stepmother finally opened the door, she wrinkled her nose at the smell and gestured at the chamber pot. “Empty it,” she said. Kohl and rouge melted into candy swirls on her cheeks; she wouldn’t meet her stepdaughters’ eyes.
There came a day when she locked them in with a bowl of apples and a jug of water and did not come back. The sun rose and fell, rose and fell. On the third day Anya looked out the window and saw the servants walking down the lane, their belongings on their backs.
The house was empty. The apples were eaten, the water long gone. The window wouldn’t open and the glass wouldn’t shatter, even when Anya smashed at it with her boot.
That night the sisters lay together in the middle of the floor, trying to keep each other warm. Lisbet was sunk in shallow sleep when Anya heard a sound she’d nearly forgotten. A sound like leaves rustling together outside an unlatched window.
It came from the bloodstain on the floor. Slowly she inched her way toward it, resting her ear just over it and holding her breath. It was deep, deep in the night when the rustling resolved into a voice.
You will die, the voice told her.
Anya rolled away, angry. I know, she replied fiercely, in her mind. We’re half-dead already.
You will die, the voice said again. Unless.
And it told her how she could save herself and her sister. How she could remake the world just enough so that they could live.
It would take blood.
When the sun rose Anya told Lisbet what she’d learned. Their mother wasn’t dead, she was gone. She’d used magic to make a door, and it had taken her far, far away. Their mother’s blood had spoken to Anya, and told her how to make a door of their own.
“It will take blood,” she told Lisbet, “but it can’t be mine.”
This was a lie. Anya wasn’t cruel, she was frightened. The idea of opening her own veins filled her with a terror that felt like falling, forward and forward without end. She swallowed the bitter taste of the lie and took the bone knife from the place the voice told her she’d find it: behind a loose brick inside the fireplace.
“The blood can’t be mine,” she said again, “because I’m the sorcerer. I must make the door, and you must sacrifice the blood for it.”
Lisbet nodded, but something in her eyes told Anya she knew the words were a lie.
This made her angry. When she drew the blade across her sister’s wrist, the anger made her careless, and the blade bit too deep.
Lisbet said nothing as her sister took her wrist and used it to paint a door.
She painted the sides of it first, in two continuous lines, scraping Lisbet’s wrist over the stone. She lifted the girl as high as she could to paint a lintel over the top. When Anya eased her back onto her feet, Lisbet was as white as the flesh of an apple.
Anya turned away from her sister’s drained face and said the words that would make the blood into a door. Words the voice had said into her ear, three times so she’d remember.
All at once the stone wicked up the blood, and the red of it became lines of warm white light. The newly made door swung toward them, letting out a breath of warm air and a scent like clean cotton. They held hands and watched it open.
Then Lisbet moaned, and swayed, and crumpled to the ground. Her arm stretched out, her cold fingertips nearly touching the door.
The door that wasn’t there, and then was. The door that her lifeblood fed.
At the moment she let go her last breath, the white light shuddered and went green. The green of infected wounds, of nightmares, of the rind of mold that crawled over week-old bread. The cotton scent turned dusty and stuck in Anya’s throat. She threw herself against the door, but it was too late. It opened, inch by inch, yawning with dank air like the mouth of a cellar.
Anya didn’t think her mother could be behind that door, but she had nowhere else to go. She lifted Lisbet and carried her through.
The room she stepped into was just like the one they’d left, but reversed. Anya’s eye went to where the stain on the floor should be. In its place was a pool of bright blood, freshly shed. She limped across the room, still holding her sister’s body, and wrenched open the door.
The hall behind it curved left instead of right, and the lanterns on the wall were gone, replaced with paintings of people Anya didn’t recognize. Their eyes were charred holes and their mouths were wet and red. The hall hummed with heavy green light.