AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Cassie drifted through the passageways and piazzas, heading south and east until she came to the Grand Canal and the Rialto Bridge. The tourist shops on the bridge were all closed and silent, but there were a few other people here despite the hour, drunken young tourists lingering at the edge of the bridge and giggling and whispering; a man with a camera on a tripod over his shoulder, seeking the best spot forthe sunrise; and a couple of young Asian men sitting glumly on large suitcases as though they were too early or too late for something. Cassie found a spot by herself between the backs of the tourist shops and the edge of the bridge and gazed out on the broad canal. It was cold here, away from the protection of the buildings, a chill wind moving with the canal waters and brushing against her. But Cassie didn’t care; she stood for a few moments and just absorbed the sight of Venice at night. The water of the Grand Canal was moving silently, gently, and she heard the faint knocking of the nearby boats bumping against each other in their tethered sleep. The sky was clear, dotted with stars, and a gibbous moon splashed ripples of milk into the black water.
She wanted to stay there forever, by herself, enjoying the beautiful, sleeping city. But she started to shiver with the cold, and then the rumbling noise as the two Asian men trundled their suitcases away pulled her out of her reverie. She continued through the streets, following the tired chatter of the men ahead of her until she found herself standing on one corner of St. Mark’s Square, the red-orange campanile directly in front of her like a square pencil standing on end. She saw the two Asian men far ahead, across the other side of the square, wheeling their suitcases onward.
Cassie headed left to walk along the front of St. Mark’s Basilica where it squatted at the eastern end of the square, with its cluster of garlic-bulb domes and crucifix points piercing the sky, the ornate gold in the mosaics above the doorways glinting in the moonlight. She reached the edge of the Grand Canal again, just beyond the basilica, and saw a fleet of gondolas tied up in rows, awaiting the morning and the tourists and the activity. Cassie turned, stretching her hands out by her sides and laughing as she threw her head back to gaze up at the stars spinning above her.
“I’m in Venice!” she called out, not caring that the sound of her voice clattered in the night, galloping off around the square like a horse. “I’m in Venice,” she said again, more quietly.
She wiped her eyes, feeling tears there once again, and walked back across the square. She remembered how busy it got in the daytime, the hordes of tourists disgorged by cruise boats, the waiters and pigeonsflapping about. She was glad to be there by herself, in the silence, but already she was impatient to be somewhere different, to taste a different treat.
She entered a passageway on the far side of the piazza and walked for a few minutes until she found what she was looking for: a small hotel on a crooked little square, the light on above the doorway to the lobby. She pulled out the Book of Doors and held it in one hand, letting its soft rainbow light wash over her face as she remembered another doorway, in another ancient city, and then she opened the door to the hotel to reveal a side street in Prague.
She stepped out onto the cobbles—lumpier, rounder cobbles here than in Venice—and turned back to the doorway to the youth hostel she had stayed in years before.
The streets of Venice now lived inside that youth hostel, it seemed, and Cassie giggled at the thought as she pulled the door shut.
She walked to Prague’s Old Town Square, where elegant old buildings faced each other across an expanse of cobbles, an audience around a dance floor that Cassie skipped across as joy filled her heart. A flock of pigeons, startled by her skipping dance, scattered into the sky with a tattoo of panicked wingbeats.
She walked through the Old Town, along streets just as narrow and crooked as those in Venice. But where the buildings were lower and less crammed together, she could see more of the sky here, and the walls were never as close to her as they had been there. Cassie wandered past darkened cafés and chocolate shops she had visited years ago and emerged onto the Charles Bridge over the wide Vltava River. Just like in Venice, it was colder by the water. The breeze off the river was strong, making Cassie shiver in her coat again, but she ignored it, leaning on the bridge wall between the old lamplights and the cast-iron statues. Prague Castle was slumbering long and low at the top of the hillside, lit up with floodlights in the darkness, and another bridge spanned the river in front of her. Beyond that the hillside rose up where the river curved out of sight. The sky was cloudier here than it had been in Venice, the stars shrouded.
Cassie turned her eyes back the way she had come, toward the Gothic tower at the end of the bridge. It still looked like a face to Cassie,the archway and the windows forming the image of an outraged man, the tall roof resembling a hat upon his head. Cassie smiled at the thought and stamped her feet to warm them.
The sun would rise over the tower, she knew. She had come here for the dawn when she’d been in the city years before, getting up early with a group of three other American tourists. Cassie smiled to herself, remembering that morning, how they had wandered sleepily through the quiet streets, wrapped up in scarves and coats against the cold, their breath white mist in the air. They had gathered together in the middle of the bridge, chatting and waiting until the sun splashed bright light across the world. It had been a fabulous sight, an image burned into Cassie’s memories.
They had waited until the sun was fully up in the bright blue sky before going for coffee and pastries and chat. It had been an easy, casual friendship with those other tourists, requiring nothing of her, and Cassie knew she had been happy then, happy and free like she never had been before or since.
“Until now,” she said to herself, lifting her eyes from the cobbles and staring south along the river. With the Book of Doors she was free. She was able to go wherever she wanted whenever she wanted, like she had her own fairy tale magic carpet. Nobody else had a life like this.
Cassie kept walking, over to the far side of the river and off the Charles Bridge onto the cobbled street that climbed the hill up to Prague Castle. The buildings here were painted in pastel colors, pinks and whites, and they were ornately decorated like wedding cakes. Farther up the hill the street widened and became lined with cars, and then opened out onto a grand square, the towers of a cathedral on the far side. A bus hummed past, a couple of tired faces gazing out at Cassie, and then a few other cars, and Cassie saw more people crossing the square, wrapped against the cold and heading down the hill toward the Old Town. The city was starting to come to life.
She checked her watch. In New York it was just after eleven in the evening, but in Prague it was after five in the morning. She had been walking for over two hours. She felt a rumble somewhere in her stomach and realized that she was hungry. She smiled, remembering thebreakfast she had most loved during her time in Europe. But that was somewhere else, in a different city, in a different country.
She found another hotel on another side street and holding the Book of Doors and splashing colorful light into the dark morning, she opened the door and stepped out of the budget hotel she had stayed in during her weeks in Paris, near Gare du Nord.
The world was suddenly wetter and colder and busier. A mist or drizzle hung in the air like a thin curtain, making everything appear blurry and indistinct. It was still dark, but a few cafés and hotels were open, neon signs buzzing brightly in the gray drizzle. Buses with illuminated interiors, and cars with glowing dashboards and ghostly faces behind the wheel, trundled past. Cassie walked north, retracing steps she had taken years before, and headed for a café directly across the road from the front entrance of the Gare du Nord train station. She had loved going there to eat hot croissants and drink black coffee, and to watch all the Parisians come and go, particularly during rush hour.
When she reached the café, she sat at one of the outside tables, beneath the canopy. She ordered a coffee and a croissant from the jolly old waiter—a man who whistled to himself whenever he walked, it seemed—and then she relaxed in her chair, enjoying the ache in her legs and the chill air on her cheeks. The streets grew busier and noisier as she drank her coffee and ate her croissant, and other people joined her at the tables along the front of the café, filling the air with cigarette smoke and conversation and the yapping of a small dog on a woman’s lap.
Cassie loved it. She loved seeing another, ordinary part of the world going about its business, the sounds, the smells. She realized, as she picked the last crumbs of croissant off her plate, that she loved thestoriesshe was seeing—the many different lives being played out in front of her. Each day, in every place she went, she was bumping up against other lives, a million other people at the center of their own stories, and Cassie loved to touch them all.
As she lingered over her coffee, she removed the Book of Doors from her pocket and flicked through the pages again, her eyes resting on sketches she hadn’t noticed before, fragments of unreadable text. Every time she opened the book it seemed she found a page she hadn’t seenyet. Or maybe, she thought, the book was constantly changing, always something different, just like the places she visited.
When she was done, she paid for her breakfast with a credit card and stepped out from under the awning back into the refreshing morning drizzle. Daylight was closer, she saw, as she retraced her steps back to the hotel, a gloomy, wintry sort of daylight that wouldn’t fully chase the shadows away. She was bustled and bumped as she pushed against the flow of pedestrians, but she was happier and more contented than she had been for many years. She reached the door of the hotel, the Book of Doors in her pocket, and opened the door to her bedroom in New York across an ocean and several time zones. Behind on the street in Paris a young couple glanced toward her, perhaps catching a glimpse of the rainbow light from Cassie’s pocket, perhaps seeing something through the doorway that didn’t make sense, but Cassie closed the door before they could react, before they could be certain about what they had seen. Minutes later she fell into bed exhausted and elated, the Book of Doors held against her chest like a child’s soft toy as she slept.
When she dragged her tired body into work the next afternoon, Mrs. Kellner took one look at her and asked, “Are you coming down with the flu? You look half dead.”
Cassie smiled sleepily. “I’m fine,” she said. “I was up late with a book, that’s all.”
Possibilities and Reservations
When Cassie got home from work the evening after her night in Venice and Prague and Paris, she was ready to travel some more, to return once again to the places she had visited eight years earlier. She shrugged out of her coat and wandered into the kitchen, planning to make a sandwich to fuel her for her travels. As she reached for the fridge her eyes landed on a postcard stuck to the door, the sort of thing that had been there so long it had become invisible. The postcard had been sent by Izzy’s parents several years earlier, from a trip they had taken to Egypt, and it showed an image of a church at the end of a courtyard, an open doorway in the foreground. Cassie studied the image for a few moments, her hand resting on the fridge handle, her mind quiet.
Then there was a realization of possibilities that set off fireworks in her stomach. Her mind asked,Could you...?
Cassie had never been to Egypt. She had never stepped through the doorway in the image on the postcard. But she wondered if she could. She wondered why she had assumed the Book of Doors could only take her to doors she had previously been through, or through doors she could touch in real life.
“‘Any door is every door,’” she murmured to herself.
She forgot all about her sandwich and peeled the postcard off the fridge door. She padded through to her bedroom and closed the doorbehind her. The Book of Doors was still in her pocket. She pulled it out and held it in one hand, the postcard in the other, her eyes on that image and the doorway in a faraway place.
