The air in his lungs is crisp and bright and difficult to breathe. Everything feels too much. Too wide and too open. Too cold and too strange.
There are numerous doors in varying locations. In bustling cities and remote forests. On islands and on mountaintops and in meadows.
Thank you for seeing me when other people looked through me like I was a ghost.
Some are used with hinge-loosening frequency and others remain undiscovered and unopened and more have simply been forgotten, but all of them lead to the same location.
If all endings are beginnings, are all beginnings also endings?
She carved her dreams and her desires and her fears and her nightmares and let them mingle.
A book is an interpretation,” she says. “You want a place to be like it was in the book but it’s not a place in a book it’s just words. The place in your imagination is where you want to go and that place is imaginary. This is real,” she places her hand on the wall in front of them.
They go deeper than any resident, any acolyte. They light their own candles. They see what no one else sees. They see what has come before. They may not ask questions. They may simply observe.
Did you have a nightmare?’ Eleanor asks from across the room. She is adjusting her maps. ‘I used to have nightmares and I would write them down and fold them up into stars and throw them away to be rid of them. Sometimes it worked.
There are people without faces standing around me feeding me pieces of paper that have all the things I am supposed to be written on them but they never ask me what I am.
When they depart, they shake hands and embrace like old friends, even if they have only just met, and as they go their separate ways they feel less alone than they had before.
He considered asking the woman what manner of key she sought so he might help her look but he knew how difficult it was to describe a key. To find a key you had to understand the lock.
They say that every hundred years – some versions say every five hundred, or every thousand – the sun disappears from the daytime sky at the same time the moon vanishes from the night. They say their absence is coordinated so that they may meet in a secret location, unseen by the stars, to discuss the state of the world and compare what each has seen over the past hundred or five hundred or thousand years.
Many more have had their lives taken by time before they could lose them in other fashions.
Others when faced with a door will leave it undisturbed, even if their curiosity is piqued. They think they need permission. They believe the door awaits someone else, even if it is in fact waiting for them.
He gasps for a breath his lungs do not require and around him the world breaks.
He wonders if he has stumbled upon a place where girls do not play games, where there are not unspoken rules to follow. No expectations. No chaperones. He wonders if his mother was like that. Wonders what makes a woman a witch.
Once her tongue has been taken and burned and turned to ash, once the ceremony is complete and her servitude as an acolyte officially begins, once her voice has been muted, then her ears awaken. Then the stories begin to come.
I suppose in a way, I made the Wishing Tree for you. I had thought you might like it.′ ‘I do like it.
There is a pirate in the basement.