The Hundredth Door

There’s one door into life; many hundreds by which to leave it.

Some of which are in this book, where storms rage, seas tower into wave-whipped maelstroms, mountains are tempest-battered and blizzard-driven. Just when you think you’re safe, the Running Wolf comes racing in from sea to land to blind you in its maw.

Enter the Pfiffmaklers, a travelling theatre troupe, who encounter a maker of phantoms; a disgraced archaeologist branded a saboteur; a man so fixated on nationalistic pride in his history he will go to any lengths to protect it.

And so the stage is set. There’s a Wind Museum, there’s a ruined chapel in the hills; there’s chalk cliffs and lighthouses.

What follows is an intricate plot fuelled by sudden dramatic scenes and eruptive violence, with a wide cast of places and people nailed down with economic precision.

It’s 1852, and the storm is about to begin…

The storm swept in, whipped the sea into a boiling fury, forcing the Put Preko Mora between Sweden and Sjaelland towards the smaller Danish isles. Waves smashing into cliff and skerry, swirling about the ship’s skirts, setting its strakes shrieking and shuddering, boards creaking and muttering, passengers panicking as crewmen lashed themselves with shroud-ropes whilst they pulled down the sails. Racing and ricocheting between Malmo and Amager before its captain steered it into calmer waters to wait out the night. Ship anchored, swung in optimal direction, when the storm strengthened, surged down upon them. Captain unworried, lamps of the lighthouses atop the Møns Klint glimpsing and winking to keep them right. Last of the sails secured, passengers commanded to their berths.

Only one disobeying, blessing the storm so fortuitously come. Donning his oil-skins, removing the plugs from the bore-holes he’d fashioned with bit and brace along one of the ship’s sides deep in the cargo hold. Straightaway up top to where he’d secured his barrel. Quick sideways tug of the bowline-knot to free it, spare rope double-wrapped about his waist, and over the side to landward they went, decent length of line between the two. Shock of the cold extreme but barrel buoyant, tossed by the roiling waves towards shore, dragging him with it. And behind him his unplugged holes sucked in the sea, compromising the balance of the ship, fixed by its anchor. Weight of the incoming water pulling the ship onto its side, overwhelmed, inundated, irrevocably capsized by the wall of crashing waves falling like rocks. Ship pulled under within five minutes, subsumed by the storm-ravaged sea. Only external witness being one of the lighthouse keepers, who’d glanced outwards as he refuelled his light.

Went down like a stone, it did, as if God Himself had punched it from one existence into the next. People out there tossed about the surface like waterlilies. Nothing anyone could do to help them.

No hesitation nor remorse for the man who’d caused this disaster, hands crabbed as he pulled himself inch by inch along the rope tethering him to his barrel. Barrel and man cast up on the sands of Nyord Bay a half hour later, the only survivor.

Or so he believed.