Chapter 4 #2
“How are you?” he said. “I don’t believe we’ve met—Yannick Abrams, hello. Were you looking for anything in particular? Do come in—rather blustery, isn’t it? You don’t need to knock, you know; just walk right in.”
This was all said in a single breath, and, thoroughly perplexed, I murmured my thanks and allowed him to usher me into the shop.
I was confronted by a large echoing space with walls of brick and floors of fog-coloured flagstones.
I saw instantly that it was a historic building, the floors nearly medieval in appearance, like those dating to the city’s founding, whilst the windows were arched in the late-eighteenth-century style and the brickwork was perhaps half a century old.
It was a layered sort of antiquity, like an archaeological site, and I wondered how many shops the place had held over the generations.
It was mostly empty, but in a way that suggested it had been ransacked rather than tidily packed away.
A few chairs and delicately carved tables were scattered haphazardly along the walls, one piled with brightly coloured scarves, another with wooden hangers.
The counter by the front windows held an old cash register with the sort of oversized keys that clacked alarmingly when pressed.
The helter-skelter appearance of the place was emphasized by the uneven light—the heavy curtains were drawn, and only an oil lantern burned on one of the tables, which threw strange shadows.
I frowned. What had Yannick been doing before I knocked—sitting alone in the dark?
At the rear of the shop, near a door that must have led to a back room, was a large and inexplicable oven built into the stone wall, which made me wish I had not just been thinking of fairy tales.
Yannick was adjusting the neat suit he wore in a fidgety sort of way, as if he were not much used to wearing one. “What were you hoping to find?” he said.
An oddly phrased question. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Perhaps I was misinformed, but I understood this place was for rent.”
His face went through a remarkable series of transformations at that—startled, then comprehending, then dubious, and then, abruptly, delighted. I almost wanted to laugh, wrong-footed as I felt, for I’d never met a person who better exemplified the phrase like an open book than this Yannick Abrams.
“Ah!” he said. “You have a shop! Yes, we do have a vacancy—we are vacant, I mean. Yes. What sort of things do you sell?”
This was asked with an air of desperation, as if to distract from his odd reaction.
I said, too discomfited to be anything but blunt, “Well—cats, in a sense. I run a charitable organization that rescues and rehabilitates street cats, then offers them up for adoption. Our goal is to eventually put an end to the unhoused population living in the city, if we can drum up the resources. We have a small staff—it’s mostly my sister and me, as well as the odd volunteer. ”
“How lovely,” he said, and I watched as the thoughts churned in his head before my very eyes. Oddly, he’d had no discernible reaction to cats, but charitable organization had elicited a definite spark of excitement. “Have you been in business long?”
I gave him an overview of the history of Les Amis des Chats, making sure to mention my many positive references as well as the docile dispositions of our current wards, all the while waiting for the other shoe to drop.
He listened with a pleasant smile, clearly occupied with some internal conversation.
“You are the landlord, yes?” I enquired when I’d come to my conclusion.
“The landlord?” he repeated. “Oh, no. I’m his—his representative.”
This was said with such transparent delight at having come up with a suitable response that I almost felt sorry for him, even as my unease ballooned. Had no one ever told the man that his thoughts were as obvious as a smudge of food at the corner of his mouth?
“Would you care for a tour?” he said eagerly.
“I—” No, thank you, said a wise little voice, which I ignored. “Might I ask the rent first?”
“Of course!” And he named a sum less than half that of M. Levasseur’s rate.
I blinked at him. “Per week?”
“Per month.” He looked suddenly worried—or, rather, more worried, for there was an ambient anxiety about him.
“It’s on the low side, I know—but you see, we’ve had difficulty keeping tenants.
The last one—an importer of scarves from around the world—left without notice.
The one before that was a baker who couldn’t even be bothered to take his pies with him.
We found them still in the window display one morning, and no trace of the man himself. ”
“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?”