Read Every Heart a Doorway Online Free

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FOR THE WICKED

Function I

THE GOLDEN AFTERNOONS

There WAS A LITTLE GIRL

THE GIRLS WERE NEVER
nowadays for the entrance interviews. Only their parents, their guardians, their dislocated siblings, who wanted so much to help them just didn't know how. It would accept been too hard on the prospective students to sit down there and listen as the people they loved virtually in all the world—all this globe, at least—dismissed their memories as delusions, their experiences equally fantasy, their lives as some intractable illness.

What'south more, it would have damaged their ability to trust the school if their outset experience of Eleanor had been seeing her dressed in respectable grays and lilacs, with her pilus styled just then, like the kind of stolid elderly aunt who just really existed in children's stories. The real Eleanor was nothing like that. Hearing the things she said would accept just made it worse, as she sabbatum there and explained, so earnestly, so sincerely, that her schoolhouse would help to cure the things that had gone wrong in the minds of all those little lost lambs. She could accept the cleaved children and make them whole again.

She was lying, of course, but there was no mode for her potential students to know that. So she demanded that she run across with their legal guardians in individual, and she sold her nib of goods with the focus and skill of a born con artist. If those guardians had ever come together to compare notes, they would accept found that her script was well-practiced and honed like the weapon that it was.

"This is a rare but non unique disorder that manifests in immature girls merely stepping across the border into womanhood," she would say, making careful eye contact with the desperate, overwhelmed guardians of her latest wandering girl. On the rare occasion when she had to speak to the parents of a boy, she would vary her speech, just only as much as the situation demanded. She had been working on this routine for a long time, and she knew how to play upon the fears and desires of adults. They wanted what was best for their charges, as did she. It was simply that they had very unlike ideas of what "best" meant.

To the parents, she said, "This is a delusion, and some time away may assistance to cure it."

To the aunts and uncles, she said, "This is not your error, and I can exist the solution."

To the grandparents, she said, "Let me help. Delight, let me aid y'all."

Not every family unit agreed on boarding schoolhouse as the best solution. About one out of every three potential students slipped through her fingers, and she mourned for them, those whose lives would be so much harder than they needed to exist, when they could have been saved. Only she rejoiced for those who were given to her care. At least while they were with her, they would be with someone who understood. Fifty-fifty if they would never have the opportunity to go back dwelling house, they would have someone who understood, and the company of their peers, which was a treasure across reckoning.

Eleanor West spent her days giving them what she had never had, and hoped that someday, it would be enough to pay her passage back to the place where she belonged.

1

COMING Habitation, LEAVING HOME

THE HABIT OF NARRATION,
of crafting something miraculous out of the commonplace, was hard to break. Narration came naturally subsequently a time spent in the company of talking scarecrows or disappearing cats; it was, in its own way, a method of keeping oneself grounded, connected to the thin thread of continuity that ran through all lives, no matter how foreign they might become. Characterize the impossible things, turn them into a story, and they could be controlled. So:

The manor sat in the heart of what would accept been considered a field, had it not been used to frame a individual home. The grass was perfectly green, the trees clustered around the structure perfectly pruned, and the garden grew in a profusion of colors that usually existed together but in a rainbow, or in a kid's toy box. The thin black ribbon of the driveway curved from the distant gate to course a loop in front of the manor itself, feeding elegantly into a slightly wider waiting area at the base of the porch. A single automobile pulled upwardly, tawdry yellow and seeming somehow shabby against the carefully curated scene. The rear passenger door slammed, and the car pulled away again, leaving a teenage girl behind.

She was tall and willowy and couldn't have been more than than seventeen; there was still something of the unformed around her eyes and mouth, leaving her a work in progress, meant to be finished by fourth dimension. She wore black—black jeans, black ankle boots with tiny black buttons marching like soldiers from toe to calf—and she wore white—a loose tank pinnacle, the false pearl bands around her wrists—and she had a ribbon the color of pomegranate seeds tied around the base of her ponytail. Her hair was bone-white streaked with runnels of black, like oil spilled on a marble floor, and her eyes were pale every bit ice. She squinted in the daylight. From the expect of her, information technology had been quite some time since she had seen the dominicus. Her small wheeled suitcase was brilliant pink, covered with drawing daisies. She had not, in all likelihood, purchased it herself.

Raising her hand to shield her eyes, the daughter looked toward the manor, pausing when she saw the sign that hung from the porch eaves. ELEANOR WEST'S HOME FOR WAYWARD CHILDREN it read, in big letters. Beneath, in smaller letters, it continued
NO SOLICITATION, NO VISITORS, NO QUESTS.

The girl blinked. The girl lowered her hand. And slowly, the girl made her way toward the steps.

On the third floor of the estate, Eleanor West let go of the curtain and turned toward the door while the fabric was still fluttering back into its original position. She appeared to be a well-preserved woman in her late sixties, although her truthful historic period was closer to a hundred: travel through the lands she had one time frequented had a tendency to scramble the internal clock, making it difficult for time to get a proper grip upon the body. Some days she was grateful for her longevity, which had allowed her to help so many more children than she would ever have lived to meet if she hadn't opened the doors she had, if she had never called to stray from her proper path. Other days, she wondered whether this world would ever discover that she existed—that she was piddling Ely West the Wayward Girl, somehow alive later all these years—and what would happen to her when that happened.

Yet, for the fourth dimension being, her back was stiff and her eyes were as articulate every bit they had been on the twenty-four hour period when, equally a girl of 7, she had seen the opening between the roots of a tree on her father'south estate. If her hair was white now, and her pare was soft with wrinkles and memories, well, that was no matter at all. There was still something unfinished effectually her optics; she wasn't done yet. She was a story, not an epilogue. And if she chose to narrate her ain life one word at a time as she descended the stairs to come across her newest arrival, that wasn't pain anyone. Narration was a hard habit to break, after all.

Sometimes it was all a body had.

*   *   *

NANCY STOOD FROZEN
in the middle of the foyer, her mitt locked on the handle of her suitcase as she looked around, trying to find her bearings. She wasn't certain what she'd been expecting from the "special school" her parents were sending her to, but information technology certainly hadn't been this … this elegant land dwelling house. The walls were papered in an sometime-fashioned floral print of roses and twining clematis vines, and the furnishings—such as they were in this intentionally nether-furnished entryway—were all antiques, skillful, well-polished wood with brass fittings that matched the curving sweep of the banister. The floor was cherrywood, and when she glanced upward, trying to move her eyes without lifting her chin, she found herself looking at an elaborate chandelier shaped like a blooming flower.

"That was made by i of our alumni, actually," said a vox. Nancy wrenched her gaze from the chandelier and turned it toward the stairs.

The adult female who was descending was thin, as elderly women sometimes were, just her back was straight, and the hand resting on the banister seemed to be using information technology just as a guide, not as any form of support. Her pilus was as white as Nancy'due south own, without the streaks of defiant black, and styled in a puffbull of a perm, similar a dandelion that had gone to seed. She would have looked perfectly respectable, if not for her electrical orange trousers, paired with a hand-knit sweater knit of rainbow wool and a necklace of semiprecious stones in a dozen colors, all of them clashing. Nancy felt her optics widen despite her all-time efforts, and hated herself for it. She was losing hold of her stillness ane day at a fourth dimension. Soon, she would be equally jittery and unstable as whatever of the living, and then she would never detect her way back abode.

"It's virtually all drinking glass, of course, except for the bits that aren't," continued the woman, seemingly untroubled by Nancy's blatant staring. "I'chiliad not at all sure how you lot make that sort of thing. Probably by melting sand, I assume. I contributed those large teardrop-shaped prisms at the center, still. All twelve of them were of my making. I'm rather proud of that." The woman paused, apparently expecting Nancy to say something.

Nancy swallowed. Her throat was so
dry
these days, and nil seemed to chase the dust away. "If you don't know how to make glass, how did yous make the prisms?" she asked.

The adult female smiled. "Out of my tears, of form. Always assume the simplest reply is the true one, hither, considering near of the time, it volition be. I'm Eleanor West. Welcome to my home. You must exist Nancy."

"Yes," Nancy said slowly. "How did you…?"

"Well, you're the only pupil we were expecting to receive today. There aren't as many of yous equally in that location once were. Either the doors are getting rarer, or you're all getting amend almost not coming back. Now, be tranquillity a moment, and let me expect at you." Eleanor descended the last 3 steps and stopped in front of Nancy, studying her attentively for a moment before she walked a tedious circumvolve around her. "Hmm. Tall, thin, and very pale. You must have been someplace with no sun—but no vampires either, I think, given the skin on your neck. Jack and Jill volition be clumsily pleased to meet you. They get tired of all the sunlight and sugariness people bring through here."

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