The Lighthouse Door
The brass key slides into the lock like it is coming home. It turns with one soft, enormous clunk — a sound you feel in your teeth, as if something much larger than a lock has been persuaded.
The door swings inward on silence. No creak. Hinges this old should creak; someone has been oiling them for two hundred and eighty years.
Inside: a round stone room, a coiled rope, a pair of boots by the wall (dry, dusted, unworn for decades), and a spiral stair winding up into the dark. From somewhere far above, faint and impossible, comes the homely sound of a kettle.
A thin grey cat sits on the third step, tail wrapped around his feet, waiting with the patience of an animal who has personally arranged all of this.
He turns and trots upward.