Little Doors Read Online Free Page B

you may carry me away.”
“That I cannot do,” said the Crow, “for I can support only myself in the air. However, I can bring you sustenance that will enable you to make it out of the desert under your own power.”
“Oh, please do then.”
The Crow flew away with mighty beats of his wings. Princess Ordinary found herself disbelieving his professed inability to carry her, but what could she do about it? Soon he returned, bearing a bright red berry in his beak.
“Eat this,” Crow said, speaking around the fruit.
“It won’t do anything bad to me, will it?”
“Of course not!” replied Crow indignantly.
The Princess took the berry then and swallowed it. It was the sweetest food she had ever tasted. But as soon as it hit her belly, she knew she had done wrong. She was revitalized, but another thing had also happened. Placing a hand on her belly, the Princess cried out:
“Now I shall have a baby! You lied to me, Crow! You lied!”
But the Crow just laughed and flew away.
     
    Crawleigh felt sick. He threw the book across the room, hoping it would hit the wall and fall to pieces. But it landed safely atop a pile of shirts.
    Audrey came back around midnight. She crawled naked into bed beside the sleeping Crawleigh and woke him up by straddling him and rocking against him until he was erect. Then she made love to him as if possessed.
     
    * * *
     
    The semester was over. Normally Crawleigh would have felt an immense relief and excitement at the prospect of a summer’s worth of free time stretching ahead of him. But at the close of this semester he felt nothing but trepidation and unease. Nothing was going right, in either his personal or his professional life.
    Regarding the former, Audrey had refused to see him since they got back from San Francisco and their aborted vacation. He missed her more than he had ever imagined he would.
    And for his current project—he was impossibly stumped by that damnable Little Doors .
    He had finished reading the book. But he still didn’t know what to make of it. That it was important—perhaps pivotal—to his thesis was no longer in doubt. He simultaneously blessed and cursed the day he had learned of it. But exactly what it meant was not clear.
    The central nugget of mystery was contained in a single speech, at the very end of the book, by the one constant character in both Crawleigh’s and Mitchell’s versions of the story.
    Professor Mouse.
    With late May breezes blowing into his office, Crawleigh took the irritating book down from its shelf. It was long overdue, but he ignored the notices mailed to him. He couldn’t give it up till he understood it.
    Opening to a well-thumbed page, Crawleigh studied the central passage for the hundredth time.
     
“You claim,” said Princess Ordinary, rubbing her swollen belly, “that I can leave this world only through a little door. Well, I would be glad to follow your advice—for this world has not treated me well of late, and I am anxious to reach another—but I am at a loss as to what a little door is. Do you mean something like the tiny door by which I entered your burrow? Am I in another world already?”
Professor Mouse curried his snout with his paws before answering. “No, my dear. I am afraid you have misunderstood me. A little door is not a physical thing, although it may very well manifest itself as one to your senses. A little door is more a twist in the universe that results from a state of mind occasioned by certain special everyday things which most people have come to take for granted, but which are really quite special.”
“Such as what?” asked the Princess.
“Oh my, there are so many I could hardly name them all. But I’ll tell you a few. February 29th is a little door, of course, just like New Year’s Eve and the First of May. So are the four hinges of the day: midnight, six a.m., noon, and six p.m. Certain books are little doors. Special smells and tastes that reach back to your childhood are little doors.