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She was furious that all of her work had been for nothing. The Book of Joy was out of reach. She had tolerated a transatlantic flight, and now had to tolerate another to return home.
She walked up onto Westminster Bridge, the Palace of Westminster lit up and shining like gold in the evening gloom. The bridge was teeming with busy people, with the comings and goings of humanity. People were chatting as they walked, smiling, or pushing past each other. The woman moved through it all without expression, like a shark gliding through schools of fish.
She wanted to cause pain, she wanted to bring suffering. That was always true, but it was particularly true on this day, given her disappointment. It was not enough to have killed the old woman in the restaurant. That had been an instant, unsatisfying necessity. The woman felt the need to calm herself with some more substantial suffering, to make the world sing out in agony for her to hear.
The day grew darker as night approached, as the woman crossed the bridge, and the people she moved through looked around in the gloom, as if somehow aware of what moved among them, as if suddenly uneasy but unable to place the reason why.
The woman saw a young mother walking toward her and hand in hand with a girl, perhaps eight or nine years old. The girl was bouncing as she walked, and she was dressed in a cream coat and white stockings. She wore earmuffs over her head and her cheeks were reddened by the chill breeze swirling off the Thames. The girl was smiling as her eyes took in the sight of the House of Parliament, of the clock tower piercing the sky. She was bright and healthy and alive, and the mother seemed so happy, so pleased with herself, so smug about what she had brought into the world. The woman hated it all.
The woman let herself move toward the pair as they neared, and as she did so she removed the Book of Despair from her bag and clasped it against her chest, like a woman on her way to church clutching her Bible. She felt the power of the book, the despair, bubbling in the air aroundher. Darkness leaked from the edges of the book as she brought it to life, but nobody looked her way.
The child passed by, and the woman reached down to let her fingers brush the girl’s soft, pink cheek. Despair poured out of her like water from a jug, gushing into the child through that brief moment of contact. The woman was thrilled by it, by the agony that coursed through her and into the vibrant, youthful body.
Immediately there was an anguished wail, and as the woman kept walking, she glanced over her shoulder to see the mother squatting down with concern, holding her child in both hands as worry creased her brow.
The child cried as emptiness filled her up, and the woman thought the girl’s eyes looked darker now, as dark as the night sky behind the Palace of Westminster.
The child’s face was scrunched up and red, tears rolling down her cheeks as she shrieked at the sudden horror she felt, as she sang the woman’s song. She turned her head to look at the woman, as if she knew the source of her agony. The girl watched the woman through her tears even as her mother hugged and fretted over her, as other passersby on the bridge threw glances at the pair and moved around them.
And the woman looked back and smiled at the girl:Yes, child,that smile said.It was me. My gift to you.
The child would never smile again, the woman knew. She would never know happiness or joy. She might not even live to adulthood, so destroyed by the misery and despair that the woman had passed to her.
And that satisfied the woman. She too had been an innocent, happy girl at some point, before the change had come to her. Why should any girl be happy and smiling, when she could instead be singing her pain into the world for the woman to hear?
The woman carried on her way, the shrieks of the despairing child flying up to the sky behind her, a delightful, dreadful song.
A Night of Travel
Evening, and Cassie was alone in the bookstore. She was sitting at the counter with the Book of Doors in her lap, slowly turning the pages and running her eyes over the scribbles and images. Most of it was meaningless to her, but her eyes lingered on the pictures and the doodles. Doorways, open and shut, and corridors. There were faces too, men and women, children and adults, and Cassie wondered who these people were. Had they owned the book before her? Would Cassie’s face one day join them on the pages? What had happened to them?
For the first time Cassie asked herself if Izzy could be right about there being a risk with using the book. But in response Cassie’s mind turned to the previous evening and her last conversation with Mr. Webber. He had been telling her to get out and see the world, telling her stories of his travels.
Surely that had been because he had been planning to gift her the Book of Doors?
Surely it was a message?
Cassie put the book aside and started cleaning up before closing the store. As she cleared mugs and plates from the coffee tables she remembered a dinner with her grandfather, many years before, the two of them at the table eating stew, when her grandfather had admitted to her his dreams of traveling.
“I get so excited just driving one town over,” he had told her, spooning stew onto her plate. “That road, going all the way to anywhere, and I could just keep going. Imagine getting on a plane to a whole other country. Being up there in the sky with the whole world passing below you.”
Her grandfather never got to travel. His life had been work and bills and responsibilities and raising Cassie, and she was sure it was always something that he had planned to do in that middle-distance place called “someday,” but “someday” had never come for him.
For that reason, but mostly because she wanted to, Cassie knew she wouldn’t stop using the book. She wasn’t going to turn her back on magic and impossibility.
That night Cassie locked up the store and then used the door to the back room to transport herself to Europe, to places she had visited years earlier. She traveled first to Venice again, the street she had seen from her apartment the previous evening. She stepped through the doorway and out onto the cobblestones. It was a cold, dry night and Cassie turned for a moment, marveling at the sight of the street, her eyes glistening. She squatted down and placed a hand on the ground at her feet, reassuring herself it was real. The door she had just come through was still ajar and she saw the interior of Kellner Books there, an impossible sight that made her heart race with excitement.
“It’s real,” she said. “It’s all real.”
She closed the door, watching New York all the while through the narrowing gap like someone trying to catch the fridge light going out. Then she stood on the spot and just breathed in the Venice air. It was the hours before dawn and the streets were dark and quiet. Cassie felt tears welling in her eyes, tears of joy, tears of amazement.
She turned to her right and walked for a few moments, her footsteps echoing around her. She came to the end of the street, where it met a narrow stretch of canal that doglegged around a few awkward corners and then under a pedestrian bridge before disappearing through a crack between two tall buildings. The water of the canal was perfectly still, like black glass. On the other side of the canal there was a small square—a campo, Cassie remembered—with an old stone well in the center. In the daytime the restaurants around that square would set uptables and chairs, and in the middle of the day the sun would be directly overhead, and the world would be warm and bright. Cassie had spent many happy hours in that square, drinking cheap wine and reading. Now the square was empty, the surrounding buildings as noiseless as mourners gathered around a grave.
Cassie turned away from the canal and retraced her steps, wiping the tears of happiness from her eyes. She passed the bakery, knowing that soon enough the bakers would be there kneading dough and firing up the ovens, and the small café on the corner and then turned left into a passageway between two buildings.
It was like walking through a geological fault, the sky a zigzag crack high above. Cassie had loved just wandering, the first time she had been to Venice, exploring these secret passageways, and the surprises they led to—unexpected canals halting her progress and forcing her to turn around; or a tiny square surrounded by towering buildings in crumbling red brick, windows shuttered against the midday sunlight and old Italian women in heavy dark clothes talking loudly and gesturing at each other in doorways. This was the city in the daytime as Cassie remembered it, but as she walked now it was a different place. The narrow passageways were almost creepy, claustrophobic, and she started to torment herself with thoughts of strange people appearing at the end of the passage and blocking her exit.
She shook off her overactive imagination as she emerged into a long, wide square. The buildings around the edges of the space were mostly quiet, but there were a couple of lights on, late-night life behind shutters. The buildings were beautiful to Cassie’s eye, shabby with their lumpy bricks and cracked yellow and orange plasterwork, but so evocative of a different time and place, of history and stories and all the people who had lived and continued to live in this amazing city.
