Gene Wolfe - There Are Doors

“Great!” he said. (But where was Overwood, and why had the shopkeeper called Lara “the goddess”?)

“ … to the station. Marea’s right there at the foot of the mountains, and from there somebody may be able to direct you.”

“Fine.”

The red-faced man pointed. “Also, if you’ll look right across the street, you’ll see a little cartography store. You can probably get a map from them.”

Though the store was small, it had a high ceiling. The owner had taken advantage of it to display several very large maps. One was a city map, and as he had expected, there were several five-way intersections; he crossed the store to study it, hoping to trace his route from the apartment to Capini’s, and from there to the Downtown Mental Health Center.

But he could not locate his own neighborhood, or even find the address of the department store in which he worked. Though the store had only display windows, he felt certain it was near the river. Several rivers snaked across the map, and at one point two appeared to cross. None seemed quite as large as the river he recalled, or as straight.

A clerk said, “Can I help you?” and he turned to face her. She was a short, cheerful-looking girl with chestnut hair.

“A map to Overwood,” he said.

She smiled. “Not many people want to go there.”

There was something questionable in her look, he decided. It was the look of a clerk who remains perfectly pleasant while signaling frantically for the department manager. “I didn’t say I wanted to go there,” he told her. “But I’d like a map showing the location.”

“They’re pretty expensive, you know, and we don’t guarantee them.”

“That’s all right,” he said.

She nodded. “As long as you understand. Step this way, please.”

A manic gaiety seized him. “Madame, if I could step that way I wouldn’t need the lotion.” It was the ancient wheeze at which he himself had dutifully snickered a hundred times.

She ignored it, or more probably did not hear it. “Here we are, sir. Slumberland, Disneyland, Cleveland, and Heaven, Hell, and Limbo—all three on this one map.” She shot him a quizzical glance. “Quite a saving.”

“No,” he said. “Overwood.”

“Overwood.” She had to stand on tiptoe to pull it out of the highest pigeonhole in the rack. “Last one, too. They’re on backorder, I think. That will be twenty-nine ninety-eight, plus tax.”

“I want to make sure it’s what I’m looking for first.” He unfolded part of the map, which was thick and folded with great complexity.

“There’s the Overwood area.” She pointed. “Crystal Gorge, the Metal Forest, and so forth.”

He nodded, bending over the map.

“That’s twenty-nine ninety-eight, plus tax.”

There were no paths, no roads, no buildings that showed on the map. He got out his wallet, a twenty, a ten, and a five.

The clerk glanced at them and shook her head. “That isn’t real money. Not here, anyway. Where are you from?”

He said, “What do you mean? I just bought a doll down the street.” Then he recalled that he had written a check for the doll.

The clerk walked hurriedly to her cash register and pressed a button. “Mrs. Peters, I think you’d better get in here.”

He began to refold the map. In a moment he would have lost it forever.

“Wait a minute!” the clerk shrieked at him. “Hey!”

He was out the door and sprinting down the street. He had not thought she would chase him, but she did, knees pumping, one black high-heeled shoe in each hand, flying along with her skirt at her thighs. “Stop him!”

A woman tried to trip him with her umbrella; he staggered but ran on. A big, rough-looking man shouted, “Go it, Neddy!” Horns blew as a mounted policeman spurred his skittish horse through traffic.

An alley gapped ahead; on TV, fleeing criminals always ran down alleys; he was well down this one before it occurred to him that they were probably pretty familiar already with the alleys they chose to run down.

This one became narrower and stranger with each stride he took, turning and turning again, as though it would never reach another street.

The clatter of hooves behind him sounded like a cavalry charge in a movie. He heard their rhythm break as the horse jumped the same overturned garbage can he himself had leaped only a moment before, then the animal’s awful scream, and a sickening thud as its steel shoes slipped on the icy bricks.

He ran on, the map flapping in one hand, the doll thumping his heaving chest with each gasp for breath. A witch’s black cat hissed him from the summit of a ramshackle board fence, and a Chinese lounging upon an old divan and smoking what appeared to be an opium pipe smiled benignly.

He turned a corner and confronted a dead end.

“You want leave?” the Chinese asked.

He looked over his shoulder. “Yes. I—got—get—out—ahere.”

The Chinese rose, smoothing a drooping mustache. “Okay! You come.”

A slanting door opened into a cellar. When the Chinese had shut it behind them, it was pitch dark save for the tiny crimson glow from the bowl of the pipe.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“Now noplace,” the Chinese told him. “In dark, who say?”

The sweet smoke of the pipe battled the mildewed air. He could imagine it curling around him like a white snake, a pale Chinese dragon. He tried to refold the map, conscious that he was doing it wrong; after a moment he shoved the clumsy packet into a side pocket.

“Paradise maybe. Hell maybe. Who say?”

He said, “I could, if I had a match.”

The Chinese chuckled like the rattling of nine ivory balls in the mouths of nine ivory lions, and he felt a hard square box pushed into his hand. “There match. Strike. You say.”

He had shaken his head before he realized the Chinese could not see him. “I might start a fire.”

“Then Hell. Strike match.”

“No,” he said.

“I strike,” the Chinese told him. There was a dry rasp and a flare of light. They were standing near a pile of mattresses. Barrels, bins, bags, boxes, and tall stacks of books crammed the cellar. There were floor joists an inch or less above his head. “Paradise? Hell?” the Chinese asked. “Now you say.”

“Paradise.”

“Ah! You wise! Come upstair, drink tea. Police man look outside, no find.”

He followed the Chinese up a flight of steep steps, through a hatch in the floor above, and into a cluttered shop. Scarlet paper lanterns daubed with black Chinese characters dangled from the ceiling, and long scrolls hung on nails in the walls showed tigers as sinuous as serpents.

“You want sell? Sheng buy. You want buy, Sheng sell,” the Chinese told him. “Not tea. Tea for nothing, make friend.”

Again a match flared, and gas blossomed violet above an iron ring in a tiny room behind a bead curtain.

“You’ve made a friend already,” he said.

“What you want, come Sheng. Good! You want, Sheng got. No got, Sheng get. Sit down?”

He sat in a flimsy bamboo chair that appeared to have been intended for a child. Though it had been cold outside, he found that he was perspiring.

“Tea, grocery, firework, medicine. Many, many things, very cheap.”

He nodded, wondering how old the Chinese was. He had never met a Chinese before who had not spoken idiomatic American. If anyone had asked (though no one ever had) he would have answered readily that there were hundreds of millions who did not, who in fact knew no language but their own; now he learned that knowing and understanding are vastly different things.

The Chinese knocked out his pipe, refilled it, and lit it again on the violet gas tongues. After a token puff or two, he set a dented copper teakettle on the gas ring. “Sheng say Paradise, Hell? You say Paradise. Why you—what wrong?”