“I’m coming with you,” she said, picking herself up without bothering to dust herself off.
Jacqueline, who had been expecting this outcome, nodded and offered her hand to her sister.
“So neither one of us gets lost,” she said.
Jillian nodded, and took her sister’s hand, and together they walked down, down, down into the dark.
The trunk waited until they were too far down to hear before it swung closed, shutting them in, shutting the old world out. Neither of the girls noticed. They just kept on descending.
*
SOME ADVENTURES BEGIN EASILY. It is not hard, after all, to be sucked up by a tornado or pushed through a particularly porous mirror; there is no skill involved in being swept away by a great wave or pulled down a rabbit hole. Some adventures require nothing more than a willing heart and the ability to trip over the cracks in the world.
Other adventures must be committed to before they have even properly begun. How else will they know the worthy from the unworthy, if they do not require a certain amount of effort on the part of the ones who would undertake them? Some adventures are cruel, because it is the only way they know to be kind.
Jacqueline and Jillian descended the stairs until their legs ached and their knees knocked and their mouths were dry as deserts. An adult in their place might have turned around and gone back the way they had come, choosing to retreat to the land of familiar things, of faucets that ran wet with water, of safe, flat surfaces. But they were children, and the logic of children said that it was easier to go down than it was to go up. The logic of children ignored the fact that one day, they would have to climb back up, into the light, if they wanted to go home.
When they were halfway down (although they didn’t know it; each step was like the last), Jillian slipped and fell, her hand wrenched out of Jacqueline’s. She cried out, sharp and wordless, as she tumbled down, and Jacqueline chased after her, until they huddled together, bruised and slightly stunned, on one of the infrequent landings.
“I want to go back,” sniffled Jillian.
“Why?” asked Jacqueline. There was no good answer, and so they resumed their descent, down, down, down, down past earthen walls thick with tree roots and, later, with the great white bones of beasts that had walked the Earth so long ago that it might as well have been a fairy tale.
Down, down, down they went, two little girls who couldn’t have been more different, or more the same. They wore the same face; they viewed the world through the same eyes, blue as the sky after a storm. They had the same hair, white-blonde, pale enough to seem to glow in the dim light of the stairway, although Jacqueline’s hung in long corkscrew curls, while Jillian’s was cut short, exposing her ears and the elegant line of her neck. They both stood, and moved, cautiously, as if expecting correction to come at any moment.
Down, down, down they went, until they stepped off the final stair, into a small, round room with bones and roots embedded in the walls, with dim white lights on strings hanging around the edges of it, like Christmas had been declared early. Jacqueline looked at them and thought of mining lights, of dark places underground. Jillian looked at them and thought of haunted houses, of places that took more than they gave. Both girls shivered, stepping closer together.
There was a door. It was small, and plain, and made of rough, untreated pine. A sign hung at adult eye level. BE SURE, it said, in letters that looked like they had been branded into the wood.
“Be sure of what?” asked Jillian.
“Be sure that we want to see what’s on the other side, I guess,” said Jacqueline. “There isn’t any other way to go.”
“We could go back up.”
Jacqueline looked flatly at her sister. “My legs hurt,” she said. “Besides, I thought you wanted an adventure. ‘We found a door, but we didn’t like it, so we went back without seeing what was on the other side’ isn’t an adventure. It’s … it’s running away.”
“I don’t run away,” said Jillian.
“Good,” said Jacqueline, and reached for the doorknob.
It turned before she could grab it, and the door swung open, revealing the most impossible place either girl had ever seen in their life.
It was a field. A big field, so big that it seemed like it went on just shy of forever—and the only reason it didn’t go on farther was because it ran up against the edge of what looked like an ocean, slate-gray and dashing itself against a rocky, unforgiving shore. Neither girl knew the word for “moor,” but if they had, they would have both agreed in an instant that this was a moor. This was the moor, the single platonic ideal from which all other moors had been derived. The ground was rich with a mixture of low-growing shrubs and bright-petaled flowers, growing blue and orange and purple, a riot of impossible color. Jillian stepped forward with a small sound of amazement and delight. Jacqueline, not wanting to be left behind, followed her.
The door slammed shut behind them. Neither girl noticed, not yet. They were busy running through the flowers, laughing, under the eye of the vast and bloody moon.
Their story had finally begun.
PART II
JILL AND JACK INTO THE BLACK
4
TO MARKET, TO MARKET, TO BUY A FAT HEN
JILLIAN AND JACQUELINE ran through the flowers like wild things—and in that moment, that brief and shining moment, with their parents far away and unaware of what their daughters were doing, with no one who dwelt in the Moors yet aware of their existence, they were wild things, free to do whatever they wanted, and what they wanted to do was run.
Jacqueline ran like she had been saving all her running for this moment, for this place where no one could see her, or scold her, or tell her that ladies didn’t behave that way, sit down, slow down, you’ll rip your dress, you’ll stain your tights, be good. She was getting grass stains on her knees and mud under her fingernails, and she knew she’d regret both those things later, but in the moment, she didn’t care. She was finally running. She was finally free.
Jillian ran more slowly, careful not to trample the flowers, slowing down whenever she felt like it to look around herself in wide-eyed wonder. No one was telling her to go faster, to run harder, to keep her eyes on the ball; no one wanted this to be a competition. For the first time in years, she was running solely for the joy of running, and when she tripped and fell into the flowers, she went down laughing.