Outside and in Read online

  Outside and In

  by Tim Pratt

  When I opened the door to my room, there was a woman inside, sitting cross-legged on the big blue-and-green patterned rug I got in Cairo. She glanced up from the phone in her lap and smiled. “Hi. You must be Nallah.” She was pretty but tired-looking, a little older than me, skin a few shades lighter than my own, and wearing a dark blue dress dotted with little moons and stars over thick knee-high black socks and chunky black boots.

  I thought of a million things to say, but for some reason what came out was, “Phones don’t work in here.”

  She looked down, then back up, and laughed. “No wireless or cell data way down here, sure, but I was just reading a book while I waited.”

  I closed the heavy oak door behind me, the faceted glass knob cool in my hand. On this side of the door everything was dark wood and crystal; from the other side, the door was just a plywood plank on hinges with a sliding bolt. For anyone else, going through that door would have taken them inside a garden shed behind an abandoned house in Peoria. But doors don’t work the same way for me that they do for everyone else, and that flimsy passageway took me to my room instead. My private room. My inviolate room.

  “How did you get in here?” My left hand was still on the doorknob. If I opened it, I could go anywhere—for me, every door is a portal—but would this stranger follow me? In general, I think it’s better to settle trouble right away than leave it looming.

  “I got in here with magic.” She stood up, a smooth and graceful unfolding; she had an inch or two on me in height. “It wasn’t easy. I’m not sure there’s anyone else alive who could track this place down. There was a sorcerer called the Doorman who could have done it, a nasty piece of work, but he died years ago, lucky for all of us.” She gazed around my room, looking thoughtful. “This place is protected, Nallah. Fortunately, most of the protections are against people with malign intent, and I don’t mean you any harm.”

  I laughed and kept my hand on the doorknob. “I’ve heard that before.”

  She spread her arms wide. “Look into my mind. If that doesn’t reassure you, look into my heart. You’ll see I’m telling the truth.”

  I frowned. “How am I supposed to do that? I open doors, I don’t read minds.”

  She cocked her head, and I could see I’d taken her off balance. “Oh. You mean... you don’t know what you can do. I guess you never had anyone to show you. I know how that is.” She ran a hand through her kinky black hair, took a deep breath, and smiled again. “That’s fine. I’ll just have to teach you.”

  “What you’ll just have to do is get the hell out of my room and never come back.” I stood tall and crossed my arms and gave her my best hard look. I’d been on the streets since I was sixteen, and in a string of foster homes before that, and though I don’t like fighting, I certainly know how. “Or I can throw you out.”

  “I’ll go, absolutely. But don’t you want to know who I am first?”

  “I don’t care—”

  “My name is Bekah Grace,” she said. “I’m your auntie.”

  I actually took a step away, my back pressing into the solid length of my door. “I don’t—I don’t have any family, my mother abandoned me at the hospital when I was just a baby, they left me with nothing—”

  “Not nothing.” She took a step toward me, as cautious as someone approaching a strange stray dog, and held out her left hand, palm up. “They left you a key.”

  I let go of the doorknob and turned over my own left hand. My key was there, on my skin, birthmark or a strange tattoo, I’d never been sure: the clear shape of a skeleton key, the shaft extending from my wrist through the center of my palm, straight up to the base of my middle finger, with three rectangular teeth pointed away from my thumb. When I opened a door with that hand, it took me to my room, a place hidden away deep somewhere unknown. When I opened the door in my room, it took me through any door in the world that I chose.

  “You know my parents?” I said.

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Nallah. I didn’t know them.” I heard the past tense, and something inside me I hadn’t realized still lived withered and died. “Our family is... sprawling. Your grandfather—my father—had a lot of children with a lot of different mothers, and while I think I’ve tracked down all my siblings, I’ve just gotten started seeking out their children. There aren’t many of you, as far as I can tell. Something about having my dad for a father makes one disinclined to have children.”

  “At least you had a father.” I didn’t bother to disguise my bitterness.

  “He was a literal monster, and I never met him until after he was dead anyway.” Before I could ask how that made any sense, she said, “But I did have loving adoptive parents, so no, I don’t pretend to know what you’ve been through. I just want you to know, your father did love you. He was one of my oldest siblings, and I never met him, either, but I found one of his journals. Would you like to see it?”

  I went to my desk and sat down in my nice chair (both salvaged from the offices of a bankrupt tech company in San Francisco). If this was a scam, or a trick, what was the goal? What could she want from me? I’d been used before, to steal and to smuggle, but if she could come here she was already powerful enough to do those things herself. If she was telling the truth... “Let me see it.”

  She didn’t have a bag or a purse or anything. She just put her hands together, palm against palm, almost like she was praying, and when she opened them again, there was a battered brown leather-covered journal in her hands.

  Bekah put the book down on the desk and then stepped back away from me as far as she could. My room isn’t small—it’s fifteen feet by twenty—but I had a refrigerator, a generator, a couch, a bed, a wardrobe, a curtained-off corner with a chemical toilet, and various other pieces of furniture crammed in there, so it was hard for her to give me much space. She tried, though. I cautiously appreciated that.

  The journal was warm in my hands. I opened it to the beginning, and the first thing I saw was a drawing of a woman, her head thrown back in a laugh, her hair a soft cloud of tight curls.

  “Pretty, isn’t she?” Bekah said.

  “Who is she?”

  “Your mother. Her name was Esodie.” There was that past-tense again. “Your father was Damien. They used the last name Zeller, but really, for better or worse, he was a Grace. Like me. Like you.”

  I touched my fingertip gently to the drawing of my mother’s curls. I imagined I could feel them soft against my hand, so much like my own, though I kept mine cut short and practical. And then—they moved, the curls swaying, like her hair was being gently ruffled by a breeze. I put the journal down and stared. “What—how is it moving?”

  “That was your father’s gift,” my supposed auntie said. “Our father gave all his children gifts, before walking out and leaving them to their own devices. Your father could draw, and if he used ink that was mixed with a little of his blood, the drawings had special properties. They could move, sometimes. They could change and shift to reveal secret messages. Sometimes they could do... other things.”

  I turned the pages, and found sketches of keys, all different kinds, including the design I had on my hand. “He gave me my key?”

  “That was his greatest work of magic,” Bekah said. “He had one just like it on his own hand, and he replicated it for you. He wanted to keep you safe. He gave a few other people tattoos, with various properties—I met a man with a shield tattooed on his chest who’s bulletproof, and someone else with a little umbrella on the small of her back who can’t drown, and who fell off a cliff once and floated safely to the ground. But he seldom marked people, and never wi
th anything as good as that key.”

  I kept turning pages, and found a few scrawled lines of text, almost illegible. Having a baby girl was there, and drawings of little imaginary baby-mes, but these pictures were still and unmoving. A few pages later, past drawings of castles and towers and vaults, I saw, They’re getting closer. I’m afraid for my wife. I’m afraid for our daughter.

  “Someone was after them. Who?”

  Bekah sighed. “I’m honestly not sure. Your grandfather wasn’t a very nice man. He made a lot of enemies, and some of them tried to strike at him through his children. Your mother and father... they wanted to come back for you, Nallah. They never intended to leave you behind forever. You were born in a hospital in Oakland. Your father erased the memory of your arrival from the minds of every nurse and doctor there, so when the staff found you in the maternity ward, your presence was a mystery. But your parents planned to come back, once they were safe. Except....”

  “They never got safe.” I gazed down at the drawings of the baby they imagined they’d have. Would they have liked the real me? “What happened to them?”

  “I traced their remains to the bottom of Crater Lake. I brought them up and gave them a proper burial. You can visit their graves, if you like. There’s a little family plot on the property near my house.”

  I shut the journal. “Okay. I guess... thank you. Why did you track me down?”

  She shrugged. “Some people get interested in genealogy and doing their family trees, you know?”

  I remembered crying at the feet of one of my better foster parents, Miss Jeannie (she had to give us up when her cancer got bad) because my second-grade teacher wanted us to draw a family tree, and I didn’t have a family, did I? “I’ll talk to her about it,” Miss Jeannie said. “Don’t you worry. Even if you weren’t an orphan, genealogy is white people sh—stuff, Nallah. Black folks in America know if we go digging into the past that way, we won’t like everything we find.”

  I sat back. “So that’s your thing? You go around tracking down your long-lost relatives?”

  “It’s part of my thing,” Bekah said. “None of us had easy lives. The gifts my father gave us always had strings attached, or caused more trouble than they saved, or made us targets. Archibald Grace was a selfish man who used his power to get more power. I try to use the power I inherited from him to help others. You know what that’s like, I think?”

  When you can disappear through any door in the world, and reappear through any other door in the world, you can get away with a lot of things. I’d committed crimes, from necessity and out of greed or fear, but in the past couple of years, I’ve focused on using my powers to give instead of take. I rescue people from disaster areas. I bring relief supplies to war-torn villages. I’m only one person, but I do what I can. I said that last part out loud: “I do what I can. So, what, I’m your special project now?”

  “I’ll give you any help you need, but you seem to be doing all right for yourself. The truth is, I don’t just try to help our family. I was going to find you, anyway—to bring you your father’s journal, to offer to introduce you to your other aunts and cousins and all that, to invite you to Thanksgiving... to let you know you aren’t alone. But when I found out your father had given you a key like his own, I realized you could help me with a problem too.”

  So she wanted something from me after all. That was familiar. My old business partner Dwayne was very nice and kind when we first met, when he wanted me to help him smuggle drugs, but that didn’t stop him from selling me and my power to racist militia terrorists when he got a good enough offer. Dwayne always said he was a pragmatist. I wasn’t interesting in working with another one of those. Give me idealists any day. “I’m not for sale. My power isn’t for sale. Besides, you made it to my room on your own. Anything I can do, you can clearly do better.”

  She shook her head. “You have gifts I don’t, Nallah. You can do things easily that I would have a lot more trouble with. Imagine if we each had to open identical locked vaults. I could get into mine, eventually, with drills, with explosives, with crowbars—or the magical equivalent. But you could just reach out your hand. All locks open for you.”

  “I am not a tool for you to use, ‘auntie.’”

  “I’m not trying to use you like one.” She was getting frustrated. That made me happy. She’d seemed entirely too unflappable. “I need you to help me save a kid’s life, Nallah.”

  That made me pause. “What do you mean?”

  “You took a bunch of fresh water to that village in South Sudan with the guinea worm infestation, right?”

  I nodded. I’d taken them a lot of food, too, but the water was the main thing. Theirs was tainted.

  “Parasites,” Bekah said. “There are other kinds of parasites, too. There’s a little boy in Washington DC named Hudson Dylan Raisfeld. He’s got a nasty infection, and you can help cure it.”

  “I’m not a doctor.”

  “It’s not a medical problem. It’s more of a metaphysical one. And you’re actually the only person who can help him, without hurting him in the process. If I try to get his parasite out, I could do a lot of damage long the way. And if I don’t get it all the way out.... You know how it is with guinea worms. This is similar.”

  Guinea worms are nasty things—there’s no vaccine, and no drug treatment. To treat them, you have to wait for the worms to grow large enough to emerge from the wound, and then you slowly wind the worms around a stick, a few centimeters a day, over the course of weeks, until the worms are fully removed. If you break them and leave part of a dead worm in the wound, the victim might get an infection and die. “I don’t understand what I can do. Do you need me to transport him somewhere? Bekah, I just move stuff.”

  “That’s not all you do,” she said. “You open doors. I bet you had to expand your idea of what a door is, didn’t you, as you grew into your powers?”

  “Yes?” At first, my key only worked on typical doors, ones with knobs that swung in and out on hinges, but eventually I could use my power on anything that separated one place from another, including cat flaps and sliding doors and shower curtains.

  “You can even go through windows now, right?”

  “I can.”

  Bekah smiled. “You know what they call eyes? The windows of the soul. You have powers beyond what you realize. How do you think your father erased all those memories? He walked into the minds of those doctors and nurses and just took them out.”

  My auntie showed me a picture on her phone of the front porch of a big old ramshackle house out in the country someplace. “Can you take us there?”

  “Is this where you live?”

  “With my husband Trey and our daughter Clara, yeah. The ancestral manse.”

  I went to the door and turned the knob. Warm, honeysuckle-scented air wafted in, and we stepped out onto her porch. “Where are we?”

  “The mountains of North Carolina,” she said.

  I frowned. “It’s November. Shouldn’t it be colder?”

  Bekah shrugged. “It is, mostly, but Clara likes playing outside, so we keep it nice right around here.”

  “You can change the weather?”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Bekah said. “I can end drought, I can save lives! I wish. I can adjust things a little on a local level, but I can’t do much more, and even if I did, weather is a chaotic system, and making the Sahara bloom could accidentally spawn hurricanes and wipe out whole cities. We can’t do everything. We’re not gods. But... like you said. We do what we can.”

  We turned around and went right back through the door we’d come out of, though this time it just led into her house. The living room was cluttered, full of shelves and crowded with too much furniture, a riot of overstuffed cushions and books and bric-a-brac, all lit by the mellow light of a brass chandelier. “I’m sorry, it’s a mess, your room was so neat.”

>   “When you only have three hundred square feet, you have to be careful about how you allocate space.”

  “We could expand your room, if you want. It’s in a geologically stable layer of the strata, and the spells that keep air flowing in there should be able to cope with a larger space. You could have a set of rooms.”

  I had no idea where my room was, though my attempts to dig beyond the walls had suggested it was deep underground. I’d made a point of opening the door a couple of times a day to let in fresh air because I was afraid I’d run out—who knew there was magical ventilation? Bekah knew more about the nature of my room than I did after living most of my life there. “I... that might be nice.”

  “Trey! Clara!” she called, and a man walked in from the other room, a dishtowel thrown over his shoulder. He had sandy blonde hair and an open, smiling face.

  “You must be Nallah.” He came toward me, hand extended, and with just a moment’s hesitation, I shook. “We’ve been so excited to meet you.”

  “We?”

  He looked around, and sighed. “Clara, come on, be nice.”

  A little girl, maybe ten years old, flickered into sight beside him. She was, improbably, holding onto what looked like the gearshift from an old truck, the knob clutched in her hand. Her hair was so blonde it was almost white, and she wore a lacy dress like she was late for her own christening. That girl is adopted, I thought. “Hello cousin Nallah,” she said solemnly. “I was being invisible”

  Trey plucked the gearshift from her grasp. Bekah opened her mouth to say something, but Trey held up his hand. “She was just using it to get up close to look at the bunny rabbits in the back yard, nothing nefarious, I promise.”

  “Hmph,” Bekah said. “Nallah, are you thirsty? Hungry?”

  I shook my head. It was nearly dinner time in North Carolina, but I was (more or less) on California time still, and wasn’t hungry yet.

  “You sure? Trey makes a mean.... whatever it is he’s making.”

  “Jambalaya,” he said. “It’ll be a while. I’m using the instant pot, but it takes a while to come to pressure, and I used brown rice, and that takes longer too, so—”