Wilson - The door before: prequel to the 100 cupboards series

E VERY STORM WILL SPILL a final drop. Every mortal will draw a final breath. Every road will carry a final traveler.

High on a towering cliff of sandstone, above a gray churning sea and below swaying groves of redwood trees, all three of those finales were coming to pass in the same place and in the same dusky twilight.

While hungry waves watched, a coal-colored truck with only one headlight crawled along the cliffs lip, tugging a stubby silver camper behind it, windows gleaming wet.

For more than a century, the crude cliff road had carried its travelers safely through gullies and over rises, well back from where the continent ended and the Pacific Ocean began. But there is nothing in the world so greedy and determined as the sea. Meadows of wildflowers and stands of cedars had all been chewed away, leaving nothing to border the road but air and floating gulls and drifting spray from the largest waves.

The roads final traveler was a twelve-year-old girl in the camper trailer, seated on a defeated old cushion on a little bench in the very back, beside a fold-up table covered with loose playing cards. She was Hyacinth Maxine Smith, and her eyes were on the western horizon, where the faint white glow of the sun was just vanishing. Her left hand propped up her chin, and her right was rubbing her little brother Lawrences blond buzzed head as he snoozed in her lap.

Hyacinth was the final traveler only because her four siblings were farther forward in the trailer, even if only slightly. Daniel was in a flannel sleeping bag, snoring on the narrow slice of floor. His wide, angular, sixteen-year-old shoulders had grown wider and more angular in recent months. His hair was darker and even shorter than Lawrences. Harriet was humming on the trailers fraying sofa with her legs curled beneath her. She was fourteen, her sunny brown hair was always in a thick braid that almost always ended up in her mouth, and her eyes were like sandy blue tide pools, sometimes cloudy, sometimes clear. Harriet was the storyteller, the singer, and the second mother. Even though she was younger than Daniel, she had appointed herself Lord High Chaperone. When parents were absent, what Harriet said almost always stood.

Circe was asleep on Harriets shoulder. Her eyes were golden brown, her pearly blond hair was chopped in a sharp line above her jaw, her laugh was quick and never quiet, and she could only keep serious when she was sleeping.

Hyacinth may have only been a year and a half younger, but Circes quick confidence made her feel incredibly small. Adults talked to Circe like an equal, and to Harriet like a superior. Both of the older girls were tall, bright, and unafraid. Like Daniel. Even Lawrence. While in any group, small or large, Hyacinth slipped to the back. She, the smallest Smith sister, the girl with the midnight hair and cool eyes, watched. She studied. She felt. She wondered. She noticed. But she rarely said what she had noticed, because she quickly doubted her own perception and made herself less sure than she was. Unless her sunny sisters dragged it out of herand agreed.

Lawrence, only eight, writhed and grunted, then sat up, blinking. Hy?

Youre okay, Hyacinth said. Go back to sleep.

Lawrence crossed his arms over the loose playing cards on the table and flopped his head forward.

A single fat drop spattered against the window, and Hyacinth watched its ruins run in a web across the glass.

She didnt know that she was watching the storms final drop.

She didnt know why her parents were keeping a big man tied up under a tarp in the back of the truck. And she didnt know that he had just kicked, shuddered, and taken his final breath.

As he exhaled, the ground shook.

The trailer suddenly bounced and slid toward the cliff, and the truck veered and accelerated, throwing tails of gravel, jerking the trailer hard inland, and the trailer skittered and swung and she fell backward and Lawrence yelled and the playing cards flew and Daniel and his sleeping bag slid toward her and Harriet and Circe both screamed and fell off the sofa onto Daniels head. Half a mile of cliff was falling into the sea behind them. The roar muted the engine and silenced the wind and shook the very world. The truck and trailer roller-coastered up through walls of brush and slid through mud and stopped in a bed of drowning ferns beneath a massive old ten-trunked cedar with gnarled roots that looked strong enough to hold the earth together. Breathing hard, with her heartbeat thundering in her eardrums, Hyacinth rose to her knees on her cushion and peered out the rear window and saw the ruin and the wreckage of the coast and muddy waves romping over fresh stone and a whole forest of heavy timber being dragged out to sea.