The Door That Wasn't There Yesterday

At 12:07 the street coughs up another door, and I'm already there, ledger open, pen warm in my glove. Tonight's is a red one. No wall around it — just a door standing free on the sidewalk outside the shuttered pharmacy, its hinges bolted to nothing, its frame holding up a rectangle of dark that shouldn't fit in the world. The brass knob is dented like someone's been hitting it from the inside. I crouch. I write. *11th night of the month. 12:07 sharp. Red door, freestanding, corner of Marrow & Vane. Keyhole warm to the touch. Breathes.* It does breathe. If you put your ear near the keyhole you can feel it, a slow in-and-out, like the door is asleep and dreaming of somewhere it would rather be. I've stopped finding that strange. That's the first thing you lose on Marrow Street — the ability to be surprised. The second thing you lose is bigger, and you never notice it go. I've been a locksmith for eleven years. I work only nights, which people assume is a lifestyle choice. It isn't. It's that the doors only come at night, and somebody has to keep count. The city grows one every evening at exactly seven minutes past midnight, right here, only here, and each one wants paying. I don't open them for myself. I open them to find out what they took, and then I write it down, because I'm the only one who still can. Take Mrs. Adler at number 9. Last Tuesday a green door came, and by Wednesday morning nobody on the block could tell me who Mrs. Adler was. Her mail rerouted itself. Her name peeled off the buzzer like it had never been glued there. I'm the only one who remembers she watered the ferns in the stairwell and hummed off-key and had a laugh like a dropped drawer of forks. She's on page forty of the ledger now. That's the only place in this whole city she still exists. Everyone forgets. Everyone but me. I've never asked myself too hard why that is. When I get close to the question my mind slides off it, smooth as ice, the way my eyes slide off one particular smudged line a few pages back that I never quite manage to read. I don't think about that. I test the red door's lock. It's a warded mortise, old, the kind that wants a story more than a key. I decide to leave it till tomorrow — I have until the next 12:07 before it opens itself and chooses its own price, and I'd rather it be my choice than the street's. I close the ledger. That's when I see the note. It's folded into the crack of the door, white against the red. I unfold it under the streetlamp. *You always leave the red ones for last,* it says. *You'll want to open this one before it opens you.* I read it four times. Not because I don't understand it. Because the handwriting is mine. The loop of the *y*, the mean little slant on the *t*, the way I never close my *o*'s all the way. It's my hand. It's my ink. And I have never, in eleven years of nights, written a single word of it. I look up and down Marrow Street. The laundromat glows two blocks down — Ozzie's still awake in there, he's always awake, folding the same shirt and looking for a sister he can't picture. The boarding house at number 12 has one lit window; Marguerite, watching, the way she always watches. Nobody close enough to have slipped this into the door. Nobody at all. I fold the note. I open the ledger back up, hands not quite steady, and I do the only thing I know how to do with a thing I can't explain. I write it down. *Note found in red door. My handwriting. Not mine. Ask myself who else keeps my hand.* The ink dries. It won't unwrite — nothing I've written ever has, not even the things I wish I could take back. The red door breathes beside me, patient, in and out, in and out, like it's got all the time in the world. Like it already knows my answer. 12:09 now. The street settles. Somewhere behind that red door, arranged just for whoever's foolish enough to cross, my own history is waiting to be handed back one room at a time. I go home. I still have a home, I think. I'm almost sure I do.