He takes a quill from the table, dips it in an inkwell, and writes a response.
I am not a cat.
He folds the paper and slides it under the door. He waits. He opens the door again.
The note is gone.
Simon closes the door.
He turns his attention to a bookcase.
Behind him, the door swings open. Simon cries out in surprise.
In the doorway there is a young woman with brown hair piled in curls and braids around silver filigree bunny ears. She wears a strange knit shirt and a scandalously short skirt over blue trousers and tall boots. Her eyes are bright and wild.
“Who are you?” this girl who has materialized out of nothingness asks. The note is clutched in her hand.
“Simon,” he says. “Who are you?”
The girl considers this question longer, tilting her head, the bunny ears lilting toward the door with the sword.
“Lenore,” Eleanor answers, which is a touch of a lie. She read it in a poem once and thought it prettier than Eleanor, despite the similarity. Besides, no one ever asks her name so this seems a good opportunity to try out a new one.
“Where did you come from?” Simon asks.
“The burned place,” she says, as though that is sufficient explanation. “Did you write this?” She holds out the note.
Simon nods.
“When?”
“Moments ago. Was that from you, the message on the other side?” he asks, though he thinks the handwriting looks too juvenile for this to be true, he wonders about the rabbit ears.
Eleanor turns over the note and looks at the awkward letters, the loopy rabbit.
“I wrote this eight years ago,” she says.
“Why would you slip such an old note under the door just now?”
“I put it under the door right after I wrote it. I don’t understand.”
She frowns and closes the door with the feather on it. She walks to the other side of the room. Somewhere in the interim Simon notices that she is quite pretty, despite the eccentricities of her wardrobe. Her eyes are dark, almost black, her skin a light brown, and there is a hint of something foreign to her features. She seems as unlike the girls his aunt sometimes parades by him as it is possible to be. He tries to imagine what she would look like in a gown, and then what she would look like without a gown, and then he coughs, flustered.
She looks at each of the doors in turn.
“I don’t understand,” she says to herself. She turns and looks at Simon again. No, stares at him, scrutinizing him from his hair to his boots. “Are there any bees in here?” she asks him. She starts looking behind the bookshelves and under the pillows.
“Not that I have seen,” Simon tells her, reflexively looking under the table. “There was a cat, earlier, but it departed.”
“How did you get here?” she asks him, catching his eyes from beneath the other side of the table. “Down here, I mean, the place not the room.”
“Through a door, in a cottage—”
“You have a door?” Eleanor asks. She sits on the floor amongst the chairs, cross-legged, looking at him expectantly.
“It is not mine, precisely,” Simon clarifies. Though he supposes it is, if the cottage is his. A strange inheritance. He sits as well, pushing a chair out of the way, so they are facing each other in a forest of chair legs with a table canopy.
“I thought most of the doors were gone,” Eleanor confides.
Simon tells her about his mother, about the envelope and the key and the cottage. She listens intently and he adds as much detail as he can think to. The wax seal on the envelope. The ivy on the cottage. She wears a curious expression as he describes the cagelike elevator but does not interrupt.
“Your mother was here?” Eleanor asks when he has brought the story through the door and into the room in which they now sit.
“Apparently.” Simon thinks this might be better than a letter, to have spaces she occupied and books she read.
“What did she look like?” Eleanor asks.
“I don’t remember,” Simon answers, and suddenly wishes to change the subject. “I have never met a girl who wears trousers before,” he says, hoping she does not take offense.
“I can’t climb things in a dress,” Eleanor explains, as though stating a simple fact.
“Climbing is not for girls.”
“Anything is for girls.”
Her expression is so serious it makes him consider the statement. It runs counter to everything his uncle