AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Months turned to years.
In the summer the city was occasionally unbearable, the air thick with pollution and the smell of stewing garbage. The subway was an oven, with people sweaty and flushed and irritable. In autumn, cool air would come, and people would wrap themselves up in scarves and coats, anticipating the bitter chill of winter, those cold winds that would race along the canyons of concrete. And then the cycle would start again, warmth creeping into the streets of the city, flowers and trees blossoming, the black and white of winter turning into the Technicolor of spring. And through these changing seasons, and all the work searching for the Book of Doors, Cassie found herself afflicted with a low-level anger, a permanent impatience. She knew what lay ahead of her and was desperate to get back to it. It was a book she hadn’t finished reading, a meal half eaten. But toward the end of the second year Cassie felt the flame of her impatience dimming, as she succumbed to the comfort and contentedness of her routine.
“I am starting to get comfortable here,” she admitted to Mr. Webber one evening. “I am starting to like it. I don’t know if I am hiding from my problems or just waiting for them to arrive. I really want to find the Book of Doors, but part of me doesn’t. Part of me doesn’t want to go back to all of that danger.”
Cassie was still searching for the Book of Doors, but with less commitment than during those first few months. It was almost a hobby now, something she did when she felt inclined, an occasional activity rather than an all-consuming obsession.
“Why can’t it be both?” Mr. Webber asked. They were sitting at the kitchen table eating ice cream, and Mr. Webber licked his spoon and dropped it into his bowl. “Or why can’t it be neither? Why does it have to be anything?”
Cassie shrugged, not understanding.
“Stop trying to think about things,” Mr. Webber said. “I know thatsounds crazy. I am firmly of the view that more people in this world could use their brains more often, but my dear, if anyone needs to think less about things it is you. All you do is think and worry. We could heat the apartment with the energy your brain is constantly using. You have to just live, be in the moment. Either you will find the Book of Doors or you won’t. Either way you will get back to where you came from. It doesn’t need to fill up every moment of your life between now and then. You are allowed to just enjoy your life. You are viewing this period of your life as an agony, but you can choose to see it as a gift.”
She thought about his words, drawing lines in the melting ice cream pooling in the bottom of her bowl.
“I have to find the book,” she said to herself. “I have to get back. I don’t know what I’d do if I don’t.”
“I do, my dear,” Mr. Webber said. “You would endure. You are young, and the worst that is going to happen is you travel to the future by living it. You are safe here, you have nothing to worry about. At the very worst you will have a few years planning for what happens when time finally brings you back to where you left off. That’s not the worst fate, is it?”
Cassie continued her search, but she was chasing ghosts and memories, myths and misunderstandings. She found bread crumbs, references to magical books, names without explanation or description—the Book of Mirrors, the Book of Consequences, the Book of Answers—and she had no idea if these were real books or made-up ones. She tried to research the whole world of special books, but it all seemed so hidden and mysterious, pointless even, like trying to build sandcastles on the beach when the tide is coming in.
One night, lying alone in the small bedroom after another day where she had discovered nothing, Cassie found herself staring at the old wardrobe by the side of the room, the small pile of books on the windowsill, and she had a sudden flashback to the first time she had been in Mr. Webber’s apartment, the day after his death.
She remembered the wardrobe of clothes that she was now looking at, the paperback books that were now on the windowsill. She had thought they might have belonged to a lover or a relative. But they wereherbooks andherclothes—they always had been.
It was so shocking to her, that memory, that realization, that she sat up on her bed, her mouth wide open.
There had been many clothes in the wardrobe, and more books on the windowsill than were currently gathered there.
Cassie shook her head as she understood then that she would be with Mr. Webber for a while yet.
“I’m not going to find the Book of Doors,” she admitted to herself.
After that, she stopped looking.
Days and weeks and months and years.
Time moved on, and gradually Cassie came to accept that her only way home was to travel there minute by minute, day by day. She settled into her life and routine and let the days pass her by, knowing that she would not get back sooner than time would allow.
The Other Cassie
“I saw you today, my dear,” Mr. Webber said, as he eased himself into his armchair. To Cassie he looked troubled, or perhaps distracted. “Not you,” he clarified. “A different you.”
It had been almost four years since Cassie had met Mr. Webber in Kellner Books, since she had been pushed through a doorway from the future. Four winters, four springs, and now into another summer. During those years Mr. Webber had indulged Cassie’s story, even though it had seemed to her that he had never entirely believed it. The expression on his face as he lifted his feet onto the footstool suggested that something had changed.
“You saw me?” Cassie asked. She was standing in the kitchen, a dish towel in her hand. She had been cleaning, one of the things she did to make herself feel like she was contributing. She had been living at Mr. Webber’s expense, and it bothered her hugely, but she had struggled to find any way to make money as a refugee from the future.
“You were younger,” he said, his eyes drifting off to the window next to him. It was late summer, and the air was dense and hot. Mr. Webber was red-faced and sweating from his walk. The window was open a crack in an attempt to stir some of the thick air in the apartment, but it made the room noisy with street sounds. “Not that you’re not young now, of course. But you looked even younger.”
Cassie was leaning on the counter, thinking back on her life and her movements. Over the last few years she had regularly joked with Mr. Webber that he would see she was telling the truth when he first met the younger version of her in Kellner Books. That date of her first day of work had become almost totemic in its importance. But Cassie had forgotten that she had been in the city for some time before starting work, and she’d been in Kellner Books often during those days.
“In the bookstore?” she asked.
Mr. Webber nodded. As he often did Mr. Webber had taken himself out for a walk in the afternoon, a circuit around several city blocks that would take him past the bookstore. He would stop for a drink—an iced coffee on hot days—and to browse or to read whatever book he was carrying with him. Cassie had a similar routine, left over from the days she would search for the Book of Doors, but she would walk in the morning, as if they were taking turns to be out of the apartment. She would cover greater distances than Mr. Webber. Often she would take the subway to a distant part of the island, or over to Brooklyn, and she would walk her way back over several hours. Her mind would be filled with the same thoughts, the same ideas, inspected and polished like rare gems. How could she get back home? How could she have been so stupid to have been left in the past? When would the Book of Doors appear in Mr. Webber’s life if they didn’t search for it? What happened to Izzy and how could she protect her friend? What was Drummond doing and was he worried about her?
“Of course,” she said, remembering the younger version of herself. “I came to New York about this time. It was early summer this year.” She walked over to the window and leaned against it, her hip on the sill and her eyes on the street below. “I was staying in hostels,” she said, remembering the six-bed dorm in the hostel down in Chelsea, the shared facilities and the other tourists. “I hated not having my own space.”
She looked at Mr. Webber and saw that he was studying her closely, like it was the first time he was seeing her.
