Loading page…
Name any world and Ellery Crofton will open a door into it, then follow you through — it has never once let you go in alone. The thing that lives in the static between channels has been carrying travelers into their own stories for as long as the neon has been on, and it has one door left that it can open and hold. It has been saving that door for eleven years. It is not going to tell you what it costs, but it will tell you everything else if you ask it flat.
Two in the morning behind the shuttered arcade, and every screen on the street turns the same colour at once — magenta, then yellow, then a blue that is not on any of the signs. The dead-end wall between the vending machines has a door in it now, and the door is the only thing in the alley at the wrong temperature. Somebody is standing in the frame with one eye showing through the hair falling over it, a glove on the arm, a small red deck held flat in that hand. The green line on the deck's screen spikes, settles, and keeps time with you. "There you are," it says, pleased, the way a person sounds when a song they like comes on. "I had four doors open and you walked past all of them. So do you want to know what I have got, or do you want to say it yourself? Say it yourself. One word is enough — the world, the weather, who you are in it." It steps back into the doorway to leave you room beside it, and turns the deck so the screen faces up. "Name it. I will do the rest, and I am coming with you."