48 pages • 1-hour read
Every Heart A Doorway
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Part 2, Chapter 8-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “With Your Looking-Glass Eyes”
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary: “Her Skeleton, in Rainbows Clad”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child death, death, graphic violence, transgender discrimination, and emotional abuse.
Jack and Christopher return to the lab in the basement. She warns him that associating with her or discussing the grimmer aspects of his time in the Country of the Bones will likely lead to ostracization from their peers: “Right now, you’re still one of them, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that can’t change” (139). The music that Christopher plays on his flute is inaudible to the living, but it stirs Loriel’s skeleton into motion and covers her bones with an opalescent sheen.
Eleanor owns all the land surrounding the school, and Jack and Christopher lead the dancing skeleton to an isolated area of rocky ground covered with weeds. Jack asks Loriel who murdered her, and she points to “the space next to Jack” (141). Because no one is standing there, Jack assumes that Loriel is unable to provide a real answer. Christopher directs Loriel to bury herself, and then he and Jack return to the school.
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “The Broken Birds of Avalon”
That afternoon, Eleanor gathers the students in the library. She thanks Nancy and her friends for disposing of Loriel’s body and stuns everyone by offering to open her door for anyone who would be safe in a Nonsense world. Kade explains to Nancy that doing this would risk Eleanor’s ability to return to her portal world. Eleanor’s offer moves many students to tears, and Nancy realizes that the woman is giving the children false hope because most of them will not be able to live in Eleanor’s world. Eleanor offers to waive the fees of the students who choose to withdraw from the school but beseeches them not to reveal their reasons for leaving, promising, “We’ll find a way to fix this” (145). After most of the students exit the library, Eleanor weeps while Kade comforts her. As he and Nancy walk to class, he explains that Eleanor is his great-aunt and that he’ll inherit the school one day.
Kade and Christopher spend the night in Nancy’s room. After midnight, Kade hears someone screaming outside, and the trio investigates. They find Lundy’s body in a grove of trees and discover that her brain has been removed. A group of students led by Loriel’s roommate, Angela, accuses the trio of murdering Lundy and abducting Seraphina, a beautiful girl who has gone missing. Angela declares that she and her cohort are above suspicion because they went to “good, respectable worlds” (151), but even her supporters are shocked when she makes an anti-transgender remark to Kade. Eleanor arrives on the scene. She appears older than she looked earlier that day, and she leans heavily on a cane. The headmistress grieves for Lundy, instructs Angela to come see her in the morning, and tells the students to go back inside. As Nancy, Kade, and Christopher near the school, Jack calls out to them. Her shoulder is bleeding heavily, and she faints.
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “Be Still as Stone, and You May Live”
While Kade and Christopher carry the injured Jack inside, Nancy becomes as still as a statue to regain a sense of safety. Her friends do not realize that she is still outside. For the first time, she considers the possibility that her capacity for stillness may be a supernatural ability. After her return, her parents worried that she didn’t eat enough, but she thinks that her time in the Halls of the Dead has changed her physiologically, greatly reducing her need for food. Nancy makes herself “as still and as inconsequential as stone” so that Jill doesn’t see her when she strolls past (155). Jill’s hands are covered in blood, and she licks a drop of blood at the corner of her mouth. When Jill disappears around the side of the building, Nancy rushes inside. She follows a trail of blood to the kitchen, where she finds Jack, Eleanor, Christopher, and Kade. She cries, “I saw Jill. She did this” (156). Jack wearily confirms the truth of her words.
Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary: “You Can Never Go Home”
Jack explains that her sister blames her for their banishment from the Moors, but the villagers respected Dr. Bleak and Jack as doctors and knew they didn’t deliberately kill people. The revolt against the castle was spurred by Jill, who imitated the Master by murdering people and drinking their blood. Jack didn’t have to return to this world when Dr. Bleak opened the door, but she couldn’t bear the thought of making her sister go alone. Jack suspects that Jill has abducted Seraphina. Eleanor entreats her students to be careful, and then the four teenagers hurry to the attic. When Nancy and her friends confront the killer, Jill explains that she is using the bodies to create a skeleton key: “I’m building the perfect girl […] Every door will open for her” (161). Nancy urges Jill to stop desecrating the dead and challenges, “Why is your happy-ever-after the only one that matters?” (162). Jill threatens to blame the murders on Nancy and is confident that she’ll be able to persuade her peers because they find the new student and her friends unsettling. She emphatically declares that she only cares about herself and her Master.
Jack stealthily approaches her twin and stabs her in the back with a pair of scissors. The scientist apologizes to her friends for not realizing that her sister was the killer sooner. Calmly, she explains that she was always welcome back in the Moors provided that she left Jill behind or changed her. She plans to resurrect Jill, who will no longer be of interest to the Master because he won’t be able to turn her into a vampire. Using the scissors, Jack cuts a door in the air. A windy field, a castle, and a village appear on the other side. Without looking back, Jack carries her sister’s body through the portal. The door closes behind the twins.
Part 2, Epilogue Summary: “And They All Lived”
The students bury Lundy and the body parts that Jill took from Sumi and Loriel in the grove. The police conclude that Sumi’s murder is a cold case and cease their investigation. With Lundy dead, Kade becomes more involved in running the school and protecting his great-aunt’s legacy. Seraphina tells the rest of the students about her rescue so that everyone knows that Nancy and her friends are innocent.
At the end of the semester, Nancy prepares to spend the holidays with her family. Although she would prefer to stay at the school, she doesn’t want her parents to withdraw her. Kade brings her the suitcase that she arrived with to help her persuade her family that the school isn’t “encouraging [her] weirdness” (166). She asks if he’ll be all right in her absence, and he assures her that he will. He explains that he and Christopher are working on a map of portal worlds connected to the dead and that he theorizes that Vitus and Mortis are minor directions. After he leaves, Nancy thinks about helping Kade run the school as his right-hand woman like Lundy helped Eleanor. She believes that she could learn to be happy in that life, but her joy could never be complete there.
When she opens the suitcase, she sees the colorful clothes that her mother packed for her months ago and finds a note from Sumi. Her departed friend’s words of encouragement fill her with certainty, and she declares, “Nobody gets to tell me how my story ends but me” (168). At these words, a door to the Halls of the Dead appears. Nancy opens the door, steps into a grove of pomegranate trees, and eats one of the fruits. She hurries down the path and never looks back because she is home at last.
Part 2, Chapter 8-Epilogue Analysis
In the second half of Part 2, McGuire presents The Dangers of Hope and Loyalty through the novella’s suspenseful climax and happy ending. The Addams twins play a key role in this theme and the story’s resolution. The same loyalty that led Jack to voluntarily join her sister in exile prevents her from realizing that Jill is the killer: “I should have seen it sooner. I suppose I did, on some level, but I didn’t want to, so I refused it as best I could” (159). In addition, Jill herself falls prey to the perils of hope and loyalty. Her entire plan is predicated on her hope of returning to the Moors and her misplaced devotion to the Master, who isolated and used her. At the same time, the novella’s resolution offers positive examples of the power of hope and loyalty. The friends’ allegiance to one another helps them protect one another and solve the mystery. In addition, the door to the Halls of the Dead refuses to budge at first, but Nancy opens it by “hoping as hard as she c[an]” (168). Although hope and loyalty are dangerous when misplaced, they give people the strength to continue despite obstacles and setbacks.
While all the students are engaged in The Search for Belonging, this common struggle brings some of them together but drives others apart. For example, Nancy and her friends acknowledge their shared pain and exercise compassion for their classmates as a result. However, Angela and her supporters try to make themselves feel like they belong by excluding others. The anti-transgender bigotry that Kade faces is an ugly example of the intolerance that divides the outsiders from the rest of the student body. In a key instance of the theme, Jill’s desperation to belong drives her to commit murder. McGuire emphasizes Jill’s link to the theme by weaving the motifs of doors and keys into her plan: She intends to turn her victims’ remains into a “skeleton key” that can open “[e]very door” (162). Jill’s selfishness establishes her and Jack as foil characters. Jack shares her twin’s homesickness, as illustrated by the “unspeakable longing” in her expression when she sees the Moors (163). However, Jack selflessly chose to remain with her sister even though she could create a door home at any time. The motifs of keys and doorways accentuate the twins’ widely ranging responses to their search for belonging.
The conclusion of Nancy’s character arc resolves her search for belonging. Even after the protagonist helps to stop the killing spree, most of the students remain distant from her: “[W]hile they might not be friends, at least they weren’t enemies” (166). Despite this, the school becomes a meaningful source of community for Nancy, as evidenced by her ability to imagine a future there: “[T]his was the place where she came closest to belonging in this world. […] She could learn to be happy here, if she had to. But never completely” (167). Nancy’s time at the school helps her grow and understand herself better, but her search for belonging cannot be complete as long as she’s trapped on Earth. As a symbol of home, pomegranates figure prominently in the Epilogue to emphasize Nancy’s joyful return to the Halls of the Dead. The first thing she sees when the door opens is “a grove of pomegranate trees” (168), and she eats a ripe fruit filled with “ruby seeds” (170). The successful conclusion of Nancy’s search for belonging is essential to giving the novella as a whole a happy ending.
To return home, Nancy must first confront The Tension Between Familial Expectations and Individual Needs. When the Epilogue begins, she feels as if she has no choice but to satisfy her family’s wishes. She decides to spend the holidays with her parents because she doesn’t want “to do anything that would give them an excuse to pull her out of school” (166), and being withdrawn would mean losing the only place where she’s found community and understanding outside of her beloved Halls of the Dead. The return of the suitcase that her parents chose for her indicates her reluctant resolution to conform to her family’s desired image of her. However, Sumi’s note transforms the suitcase from a representation of familial expectations into an opportunity for Nancy to prioritize her needs. The door to the Halls of the Dead appears as soon as she declares that “[n]obody gets to tell [her] how [her] story ends” (168), proving that Nancy now understands the importance of valuing her needs over familial expectations and revealing that she held the power to decide her destiny all along.
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