Short story · 3 min read · Set in Vallis Reach ·
The Number of Doors in Vallis Reach
A walker is given soup, a bed and a name. In the morning, he counts the doors on the way down.
He knocked at the first house out of courtesy, the way you do when the light is going and the map in your head has begun to fray at the edges.
It opened before his knuckles left the wood. A woman stood in the lit hall with her sleeves rolled and an expression of enormous, practical welcome, as though he were a cousin who had been expected since noon. “You'll be wanting soup,” she said, and he found that he did.
It was the best soup he had ever eaten. It was thick with barley and something smoked. She sat opposite him and did not eat, and watched him, and he found that this did not trouble him at all. Down the valley, he noticed through the window, the lamps were coming on one by one, house after house along the high road, each a hand's breadth ajar.
“You've a long way to go in the morning,” she said.
“I'd thought to walk to the pass.”
“Of course.” She smiled. “But you'll want a name first.”
He thought he had misheard. “A name?”
“For the morning. It's the custom. Bread, a bed, a name.” She took his bowl. “Something to be called while you're with us.”
He gave her his own. She nodded as if he had given her something very small and very dear, and put the bowl on the shelf, and he saw then that the shelf was lined with other bowls, dozens of them, each with a thumbprint of ash on the rim.
The bed was warm in a way that no bed should be. He slept as he had not slept since childhood, and in the night, at some hour he could not afterwards fix, he woke to the sound of a knock at a door a long way off. It was followed by a second, nearer, and then by the unmistakable small sigh of a door opening in welcome. Then another. And another. The sound came up the valley house by house in the dark, a patient procession of hinges, and he lay with his eyes open and listened to it pass beneath his window and go on.
He left at dawn. The woman had gone; the hall was swept and cold. On the table was a fresh loaf and, beside it, a slip of paper with his name on it in a hand that was not hers.
He ate on the road, walking down. He did not know why he began to count the doors.
There were thirty-one on the high road. Every one of them was closed.
Not shut: closed. They had each been drawn to, a hand's breadth from the frame, with a little space left at the edge; and in the gap of every one, as he passed, there was a sense of someone standing very still on the far side, who had been waiting all night, and had been perfectly polite.
At the last house he stopped, and the door was open a little wider than the rest. He did not look in. He put the loaf on the step, and the slip of paper beside it, and went on down the hill with his hands empty, and did not look back, and did not use his name again until he was a long way into the next country.
He has never told anyone what the slip of paper said. He says that it was a very ordinary name, and that it was not his.