The Forbidden Door

It was a night so deep not a single scrap of moonlight reached the ground.

A woman gathered her slipping shawl and adjusted her grip on a battered lantern. The thin beam was barely enough to light the darkened corridor, but that hardly mattered.

Her destination was not far.

She stopped before a door that had always been kept firmly locked — the one right beside the man’s bedroom — and pressed a hand to her hammering chest.

Calm down.

She had already confirmed he was deeply asleep. She had even gone out of her way to prepare strong liquor for the occasion.

All of it so she could finally learn the “secret” her lover had been so determined to hide.

And yet, standing on the threshold of the truth, why did a half-remembered fairy tale from childhood float up in her mind?

The wife of Bluebeard, who could not master her curiosity and came face-to-face with a terrible truth.

She was certain she had once clicked her tongue at that woman’s foolishness. Only now, finding herself in the same position, did she think she understood why that wife had had no choice but to open the forbidden door.

The faint bitterness that always followed the sweetness he gave her had, at some point, coated her entire mouth. It stung her tongue so badly she could no longer look away and simply swallow it down…

Even knowing that what lay behind the door was neither heaven nor utopia, she still had to open it.

And so, like Bluebeard’s foolish, honest wife, she took hold of the doorknob and finally stepped into the forbidden place.

Creeeak.

Beyond the door that opened with that eerie sound, the space was completely empty. Not a single piece of furniture — and yet the walls were packed solid with something no larger than a palm. A very strange room.

She moved farther inside, and the lantern’s light reached the wall.

In that instant, the woman stopped breathing.

Once, when she had taken hold of the doorknob of that firmly shut room, he had stopped her in a perfectly casual voice. But she remembered, with perfect clarity, the eyes that had failed to hide his discomfort.

At the time she had dismissed it lightly — a room full of dirty books, maybe, or traces of an ex — but…

Forgetting even to blink, she stared blankly at the wall.

A photograph of Cecilia taken during a visit to the temple. Childhood Cecilia from the estate newspaper. Biased articles praising Cecilia as the Saintess of the age. And drawings of everyday Cecilia that she could not begin to explain — why they even existed.

What on earth is this…

The moment her eyes met those of “herself,” dressed in white and smiling brightly, Cecilia stumbled a step backward.

Thud.

Her back struck something solid. Her amber eyes, trembling like a candle in the wind, stiffened as they turned upward.

“……What are you doing here.”

Gloomy, sunken eyes looked quietly down at her.

“……Rien.”

Sweat soaked the palm of her clenched fist.

Was it shock, anger, betrayal — or fear?

The voice she finally managed to force out shook wretchedly.

“What… what is all of this?”

She did not shout or curse, because she still wanted to believe that this man — whose mind might be questionable, but whose nature was kind — had at least some scrap of a reason she could accept.

The man whose eyes reddened almost at once — as if he were the one who wanted to cry — parted his lips with difficulty.

“I-I told you not to go in here……”

At that single sentence, Cecilia’s brow finally twisted hard.

You should have said not to go in because the room is full of my pictures, you bastard. Because it’s a stalker’s shrine.

The woman had, on the whole, been rather unlucky.

From bombing the college entrance exam and settling for an unfamiliar major she had never wanted, to somehow becoming a graduate student simply because she had attended classes diligently to make up for it — and then, right before graduation, being possessed into another world.

When she first opened her eyes in this world, she thought she might have time-traveled to the past of Europe.

Then, realizing that was impossible by modern science, she decided she must finally have gone insane.

She was a graduate student, after all.

It was a disturbingly plausible theory.

But no matter how long she waited, she neither snapped out of a drug-induced haze nor woke from a long, elaborate dream. If anything, the sense of reality only grew thicker.

Only then did she manage to form a third hypothesis.

Don’t tell me this is one of those book-possession things.

She had read plenty of web novels in which the protagonist was possessed into a strange world. Watching those protagonists leave reality behind and run wild somewhere else had given her, a woman crushed under graduate-school life, a deep catharsis.

But still…

I never once thought I wanted to be the protagonist of a possession story!

And it wasn’t even early in her graduate program. She had finally clawed her way through every hardship, finished her thesis, her exams, her defense — and then she got possessed?

Fuck! Give me back my diploma!

She hadn’t been hit by a reincarnation truck. She had never obsessed over a particular character in a book, never left a comment like “I could do better than the protagonist!”

It was truly, deeply unfair.

For three months she clung to the academic ladder that had stretched a mere five centimeters only to snap clean off, trying every desperate measure she could think of.

Then the woman — no, Cecilia Weberdin — finally declared surrender.

It’ll work out somehow.

In the middle of a garden thick with the scent of flowers, Cecilia crumpled the paper covered in her failed Plans A, B, and C and tossed it aside, then collapsed bonelessly into an iron chair.

She was staring blankly up at a sky so clear it hurt her eyes — without any sense of her own situation — when a cautious voice cut in from across from her.

“Um, my lady. Shall I bring you some tea?”

Melanie, the maid with her curly hair tied high, was watching her mistress’s face carefully.

“Ame— no, peppermint tea would be nice.”

What a shitty world without even iced americanos.

A surge of resentment rose at this garbage world that already failed at the beverage stage, but Cecilia still tried to think as positively as she could.

Fine. At least it wasn’t some SF novel crawling with monsters. There was one sun, a day was twenty-four hours long, and humans sat at the top of the food chain as the apex predators.

Whether these people were the same Homo sapiens as her, or merely bipedal aliens who looked identical, she had no way of knowing…

But you never knew. If she just muddled along like this, maybe one day some higher-dimensional being roughly equivalent to a god would go, “Whoops, my bad!” and send her back to her original world. Or a doctor would say, “You’ve finally woken from your coma!” and welcome her back to twenty-first-century society.

And more than anything — whether it’s graduation or possession — the fact is I escaped graduate school!

Goodbye, shitty graduate-school life. Goodbye, even shittier professors. Forget the endless experiments and hand-processed data — she was leaving the secular world and its chains behind.

Cecilia let out a laugh like someone who had lost her mind, and decided to shake off every lingering worry and care.

From now on, we go with Plan D.

On the remaining blank paper, Cecilia pressed down hard as she wrote Plan D.

For example: romance. Or romance. Or, you know — romance.

If this really was a book possession, then whatever her original role had been, she had effectively become a protagonist-tier character the moment someone possessed her.

Even if Cecilia was just Passerby Extra A, the second someone possessed her she became a lead.

And looking at the background of a marquis’s daughter, the genre was almost certainly romance fantasy. In that case, didn’t the plot only start moving once you began a romance?

Therefore, I will date!

It was absolutely not because she was lonely, or to satisfy selfish desires, or to work out the grudge of having gone through all of graduate school without meeting a single man.

Even so, this final plan had one major obstacle.

You need a partner to date.

“As if any decent meeting is going to happen in this backwater……”

She was just about to crumple up Plan D and throw it away as well.

A ticklish sensation at her ankle made Cecilia flinch and look down.

“A cat?”

A white fluffball — no, a cat — was swaying its plush tail at her feet.

I never heard they kept a cat in the garden.

And the marquisate’s garden was not built for strays to wander in easily. Judging by the well-groomed fur and the gold collar around its neck, it didn’t look like a stray in the first place.

“Where on earth did you come from?”

Cecilia, who had always preferred cats to dogs, carefully reached out a hand.

But before her fingers could even touch the collar, the cat lowered its stance slightly, sprang onto her arm as if hunting, and landed again.

“Wh— what?!”

By the time she realized what had happened, it was already over.

Cecilia stared blankly down at the tiny robber who had just stolen her sapphire bracelet.

Pupils narrowed to slits, the cat held the glittering bracelet in its mouth.

I’d heard the word “thief cat,” but I never thought I’d meet a cat that actually steals.

What a terrifying other world this was.

Whether or not the cat understood her bitter feelings, it turned around, tail swaying lightly.

“Wait!”

Cecilia half-stood and lurched after the cat as it leisurely left the spot.

She followed blindly behind the animal as it moved at a pace that was neither particularly fast nor particularly slow.

Leaving the stone path, cutting straight across the garden, and passing a large broadleaf tree, she found herself facing the wall that surrounded the estate.

The cat paused for a moment, as if glancing back at the woman trailing it — then slipped neatly into a round hole at the base of the wall.

There was a gap like this here?

The hole looked deliberately made, large enough for a small-framed person to squeeze through.

I feel exactly like that someone from Wonderland chasing the rabbit with the pocket watch.

Even if she went through that hole, she probably wouldn’t fall endlessly downward or find a cake that made her grow — but still.

Idly daydreaming, Cecilia willingly lowered herself. Adventure was secondary; the bracelet that had been stolen was expensive enough that she couldn’t just give up and go back.

Well — it wasn’t as if that was the only costly piece of jewelry “Cecilia” owned.

But the woman who had never fully shed the memories and habits of a commoner swayed by capital forced herself through the hole with difficulty.

“Whew. Good thing I stopped eating so many macarons.”

She brushed the dirt and grass from her dress hem and straightened her back — and in that same moment, she came face-to-face with someone large, draped in a pitch-black robe.

Not a rabbit with a pocket watch.