Emma went through, paying no mind whatsoever. After a moment, the closest pair of eyes came forward to greet her, sauntering into the circle of lamplight in the form of a small grey-and-white cat. Alice let out her breath.

‘Cats,’ she said to herself. They’d had a cat, back in New York, a brown-and-white mouser that kept mostly to the storerooms. Alice had always left her alone, and she had returned the favour.

Emma bent down on one knee and held out her free hand. The little cat sniffed it for a moment, then permitted itself to be scratched behind the ears.

‘I like cats,’ Emma said. There was a note in her voice that Alice hadn’t heard before, something that, if she hadn’t known better, she might have called human feeling.

The grey-and-white cat, having concluded that Emma had not brought it anything to eat, padded over to Alice. It met her gaze with unblinking eyes, yawned for a long moment, then wandered off. As though this were a signal, eyes disappeared from the bookcases all around them, and there was the faint susurrus of two dozen cats returning to their interrupted business.

Now that she’d recovered from her surprise and her eyes had adjusted to the semi-darkness, Alice got a better sense of the space around her. The library seemed to be a single vast room, cluttered with bookcases that rose almost to the low stone ceiling. They were arranged in rough rows, but irregularly, with gaps at random intervals. Each shelf was stacked high with books, some so heavily that they were bowing in the centre.

The books themselves were of every possible description, from ancient leather-bound tomes to cheap cardboard-covered novels. The majority looked like they dated from the previous century or even earlier. Most of the titles were in foreign languages Alice didn’t understand, and some were even in letters she didn’t recognize.

There was no organization whatsoever that she could see, and a dense layer of dust covered everything. The air was absolutely still, and on the nearer shelves she could see where the cats had left trails of neat, feline footprints through the grime.

It’s so . . . big. Alice had been to the Carnegie Library in the city, which was much larger, but that had been bustling with busy people. This place had the same dead, silent feeling as the house. It felt less like a library than a tomb, or a dragon’s hoard. What would drive someone to collect so many books and stash them here, miles from anywhere, where they could do no good for anyone?

As they started to walk, the sliding shadows gave the unsettling impression that the bookcases were shifting behind them. It was comforting to spy a distant glow, vanishing and reappearing, like the pilot light of a distant ship on a stormy night. Alice kept looking over her shoulder at their dusty footprints disappearing into the darkness behind them.