Glassbreaker Alice

Chapter the Twenty-First, In Which a Wish is Granted

The light that Alice had seen as she walked down the corridor from the banquet hall turned out to be coming from a small open-air patio. The courtyard was round and had a stone floor. In the center was a fountain, and circling it along the walls were five doors. The patio itself looked like it hadn't been used since King Henry was chopping off his wives' heads. Weeds were rampant, uprooting the stones, and the fountain was crumbling to pieces. But it still had the kind of charm Alice associated with old Europe, and she stopped for a bit to soak up the atmosphere.

After she'd spent a minute pretending she was walking in Paris, she took a closer look at the five doors surrounding the patio. Four were plain and wooden and looked like they'd been bullied pretty severely by the weather, but the fifth one looked brand new. It was as red as a bloody nose, but the strangest thing about it was that the doorknob was located in the very middle. She thought it might be worth checking out and took little turtle steps toward it. 

The knob seemed to have been shined recently, and some jokester had carved two eyes above it.
She turned the knob, and something odd happened. The keyhole twisted and stretched, and the carved eyes jerked back and forth. Then, the keyhole began to speak

"May I help you?" it asked snootily.

Coming across a talking door was pretty surprising, but she wasn't very shocked after all her other crazy adventures. So she was able to answer without peeing her pants or doing anything else embarrassing.

"Um, yeah," she said. "Can you open sesame or something?"

"What?" cried the keyhole. "My name is not Sesame. It's Theo Door. Now, what do you want?"

"Well, excuse me," she answered. "Can I come in?"

"I suppose you probably can come in. Perhaps what you meant to say is, 'May I come in?'" said the door.

She rolled her eyes and sighed. "May I come in?" She mocked.

"Why, certainly you may," said the knob.

She twisted the doorknob again, but the door stayed shut.  

"Wh-what are you doing?" the door sputtered angrily.

"What do you mean? You said I could come in," she said.

"Of course, you can," spat the door. "But only if you use the key."

"Key?" she asked. "You didn't say anything about a key."

"Obviously you need a key," said the door. "Otherwise, why would there be a keyhole?"

"Well, where is the key?"

"I certainly have no idea. I'm a door, not an encyclopedia. Now if you don't have the key, you cannot come inside. And if you are not going to come inside, I'm going back to sleep. So I wish you a good day." The carved eyes began to glaze over, and the mouth shrank back to its original size.

"Hey!" cried Alice, but the door ignored her.

She groaned and started shuffling around the courtyard in search of the key, muttering about her skirt and the obnoxious door. She gave up after just a few minutes and weighed her options. She could go back to the banquet hall and risk being barbecued by the queen's pet bird or pecked to death by the crazy roosters, or she could try one of the other doors. She decided to try the other doors.