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“I see,” I said again. Well, at least the bakery explained the oven. I hoped.

“Come, come,” he said, all smiles again. I trailed after him as he led the way to the back of the shop, waving his hand at the scarves and informing me that they would all be packed away before I moved in. The flagstones were so uneven that I felt as if I were attempting to keep my balance on a ship at sea. I could not help goggling at the amount of floor space—we could comfortably house at least ten more cages and still have space enough for volunteers and visitors to circulate without tripping over one another.

I paused by the witch-like oven, starting as a waft of some buttery scent reached my nose. Croissants, perhaps, or shortbread? Hadn’t Yannick said the baker had been before the scarf merchant?

“Do you still use that?” I enquired.

Yannick blinked at the oven, then gave it an odd, irritable frown. “No. We should have it bricked up, actually. It’s just in the way.”

Through the door at the back was a little sitting room with a couch, writing desk, and bookcase. The windows overlooked a narrow alley, beyond which was Parc Saint-Aimé, a square of gardens and trees, its single path lined with lanterns. A large portion of the room was taken up by a gaudy Persian rug.

“The trapdoor is under there,” Yannick informed me, smoothing the edge of the rug, which was folded over, with his foot. “I wouldn’t try it—the basement hasn’t been maintained, and it’s quite unsafe. Mould everywhere—rats too. Massive rats! You know how these old buildings can be.”

From this I immediately understood that if indeed the place was haunted by ghosts or worse, the basement was their domain.

“Don’t worry,” I said with absolute sincerity, for I was not quite so foolish as a fairy-tale heroine. “I have no interest in exploring.”

He beamed at me.

We went up the spiral staircase, another relic of a bygone era, but not of the charming variety: it had no railing and was so narrow as to create a forbidding darkness. The upstairs apartment, however, was cozy and welcoming. The floor was a scuffed parquet and the place smelled of must and cobwebs, but there was nothing wrong with it that a good airing wouldn’t fix. A narrow hall divided two bedrooms—both spacious and clean—from a large reception room with intimidating ceilings and elegant wainscot, casement windows so tall I counted at least two dozen panes in each before I stopped counting, and a little balcony overlooking the park. The crimson armchairs looked ancient, but in an expensive way, the sort I could picture long-dead aristocrats lounging upon.

“It’s rather dusty,” Yannick said, frowning critically. “I’ll ensure it’s cleaned before you move in.”

He showed me the kitchen, which was small, and the bathroom, which contained exposed pipes that clanked and shuddered alarmingly when I turned on the water, and there was no electricity up here, only oil heaters and candlesticks, but it was otherwise night and day compared to M. Levasseur’s property—as well as thoroughly, ridiculously opulent. I could not help gaping at everything.

“I apologize for that,” Yannick said as the pipes continued to clank. He grasped one and gave it a slight shake. “I may have an en—I mean, I may be able to fix this. Or, rather, a plumber will. Yes, I’ll have a plumber take a look before you move in.”

I made no reply. I’d grown quiet as we moved from room to room, my unease deepening to something closer to panic. I’d been hoping all along that I would find an explanation—any explanation, even a terrible one. Perhaps the shop had been inhabited by a successful murderer, one who made furniture out of his victims’ bones. Perhaps it was infested with foot-long cockroaches immune to all traps and poisons devised by mankind. But as the moments passed, and neither repurposed skeletons nor monstrous insects showed signs of materializing, my anxiety grew and grew.

“There you have it!” Yannick said when we returned to the main floor, where the fall sunlight streamed invitingly through the antique windows, and outside, a cart laden with flowers for the florist’s trundled over the cobblestones like something out of a postcard. I remembered quite clearly that the curtains had been closed when we’d gone upstairs, and also that I’d heard no one come in the door.

“What do you think?” he said.

He watched me, his gaze full of suppressed but perfectly transparent eagerness, and I gazed back, at a loss. The place was perfect, yes—terribly, ominously perfect, and my every instinct told me to thank Yannick politely, walk out of the shop, and never return. I felt as if I were being drawn towards something dark and inexorable, like a leaf nearing a cataract. I could do it, of course—simply turn and walk out the door. Return to the shelter in Rue Sainte-Roseline and attend to the cats and my checklists. Resolve to pick up the search again tomorrow, to find another shop where the landlord would close the door in my face, or apologize with a regretful sigh. And then repeat the process the following day, and the day after that, until winter arrived and there were no doors left to try.

I turned back to Yannick. “When can I move in?”

It took perhaps ten minutes for me to decide I’d made a calamitous error.

No, that isn’t quite correct—I’d known all along I’d made a calamitous error, but had chosen to see this as a lesser calamity than homelessness. But was it? As I made my way through the gathering twilight, I stopped a half-dozen times, on the threshold of going back to tell Yannick that, in fact, the place would not do for a cat shelter.

My main concern was magic.

It was the curtains that had made me think of it, as well as Yannick’s clear desperation to find someone—anyone—to rent the place. I strongly suspected that the shop had been home to a magical tenant before—perhaps it had even been the baker, who had pressed his spells into his tarts and loaves. I didn’t know if this was possible—like most, I understood little of magic, as magicians were not exactly forthcoming about their trade—but everyone knew that spells were attached to physical objects. Magicians did not wield magic so much as summon it from some mysterious otherworld and bind it to our own, via vessels they called Artefacts. Anyone could cast a spell, which merely involved speaking a word to release the magic from its vessel, be that a pendant or ring, book or decanter. Doing so was dangerous, though, because spells cast by mere mortals were far more likely to go awry than those cast by magicians, sometimes even causing the death of the spellcaster.

That didn’t stop people from wanting Artefacts, of course. And it was for this reason that the trade of such Artefacts was illegal in Montréal and most other civilized places. It was said that a small number of shops still operated in secret, though no doubt some were run by charlatans eager to prey upon the foolish or desperate.

I found myself increasingly convinced that I’d hit upon the most likely explanation. The place had been a magic shop at some time or other, and the magician had left behind some curse, or curses perhaps, so terrible that nobody would remain there long. Perhaps the banister transformed into a hungry snake at the stroke of midnight. Perhaps the cash register put warts on your fingers. It was also possible that nothing was actually wrong with the place, but that its reputation alone was enough to keep most sensible tenants away.

I had come to a stop for probably the tenth time, just outside a restaurant, its windows steamed and glowing as the lilt of a violin drifted through the door, certain that I would turn around. Naturally, that was when I saw him.

He was only an insignificant shape to my eye at first, small and pale, a discarded sheaf of paper, possibly, crumpled by the wind. But then the shape moved, and the light caught in his eyes.

He was three months old, I guessed, not yet full-grown but lacking the bumbling locomotion of early kittenhood. He was slender as a shadow, and quite afraid of me, but despite his fear he came to me immediately when I crouched down, which told me all I needed to know.

I looked around, wondering if there would be siblings, and eventually I found one—black, in contrast to her grey-and-white brother, tucked into a crevice in the back stairs of the restaurant. Someone had been feeding them, but sporadically. I waited for maybe an hour by the steps to see if the mother would return, though I already knew she would not. These two were not the first cats I’d found in such a situation.

Finally, my hands thoroughly chilled and my stomach rumbling insistently—the smells emanating from the restaurant were torturous—I gathered up the pair as best I could, tucking them into the large pockets I’d sewn inside my coat for this very purpose—pockets that, when occupied, led all those who crossed my path to assume I was at least slightly mad, or perhaps a magician myself, the storybook kind who used familiars to do their bidding. She struggled a little, but he did not, curling himself into a warm lump against my chest.