Amos: A City of Whispers

The city had a thousand rooftops and not one of them belonged to him.

Still, Amos walked them all — past chimneys breathing soot, past pigeons who pretended not to see — looking for a crumb of starlight no bigger than a tooth.

It had been three nights since the steeple went quiet. Not silent — steeples are never silent — but quiet in the way an old man goes quiet when he forgets a name he used to love.

The city noticed in stages. First the cab-drivers. Then the bakers. Then, last and loudest, the children.

Amos pulled his trench coat tight at the collar. It had belonged, originally, to a tailor's dummy on Bellweather Street; the tailor had not minded, much, when it disappeared.

The coat was two sizes too big. Amos had always preferred his clothes that way. There was, he felt, a dignity in cuffs you could hide a notebook in.

He took the long way down. The drainpipe. The awning. The loose brick at the corner of Bellweather Street where a younger mouse had once carved his initials and then, sensibly, moved away.

By the time his paws met pavement, his whiskers were wet and his resolve was, if anything, sharper.

The steeple rose ahead of him like a polite question. Somewhere near its top, a crumb of starlight had gone missing. Somewhere near its top, someone was waiting for a mouse brave enough to ask why.

Amos was not, by his own measurement, brave. He was only small, and curious, and tired of pretending these were different things.

He thought of the kitchen at home — of the kettle, of the warm patch under the radiator where his sister read aloud on Sundays. He thought of them the way you think of a lighthouse: not to turn back, but to know which way back was.

Then he stepped off the curb.

The first whisper found him at the base of the steeple. It came through the gap beneath the door, patient, the way old buildings speak when no one is listening.

"You're a small thing," it said, "for such a heavy errand."

Amos straightened the collar of his coat. He had always been small. He had always had errands. The two had never seemed, to him, to be a problem.

Inside, the stairwell smelled of cold brass and older rain. Each step had been measured for a longer leg than his; he took them, therefore, two at a time and sometimes three.

A pigeon watched from a high beam, unimpressed. "You'll not find it up there," she remarked. "You'll find only what's left of it."

"That," said Amos, "is exactly what I'm looking for."

The bell-room was the colour of a held breath. Moonlight came in slantwise through a broken slat and lay across the floor like a dropped letter.

At the centre of the floor, where a crumb of starlight should have been, there was a small clean circle of nothing — perfectly nothing — and around it, faintly, the print of a paw not unlike his own.

— end of preview —

The novel continues for many more chapters. Available in paperback, hardcover, and digital editions.