u/Cools80

CHAPTER ONE
Auld Reekie
Friday 4th October

The thing nobody tells you about living on the Royal Mile is the smell.

Not the smell it has now — coffee shops and tourist fudge and the occasional aggressive waft from the whisky experience on the corner — but the smell it used to have, which Edinburgh had decided to preserve in the stonework and the cobbles as a public service to anyone paying attention. On certain mornings, when the wind came down from the castle and moved through the closes like it was looking for something it had lost, Ailsa Duff could smell centuries. Woodsmoke and animal fat and something underneath both of those that she had never been able to identify and had eventually decided was the smell of a very large number of people living very close together without adequate sanitation for approximately four hundred years.

Her history teacher, Mr Galbraith, called this the rich tapestry of urban development.

Ailsa called it Auld Reekie doing what it was named for.

She lived with her dad in a tenement flat on Canongate. Three floors up in the kind of building that had been old when the New Town was being built across the valley and had watched the whole business with the faint scepticism of something that had already survived several plagues and wasn't particularly impressed. The walls were three feet thick. The windows were deep-set and small. In winter the flat was cold. The cold of centuries of Edinburgh winters pressed into the stone, patient and permanent.

Ailsa loved it, which she understood was not a normal response.

Her dad was Gordon Duff, and he worked nights.

To be exact, he worked nights for Network Rail, doing maintenance on the infrastructure beneath Edinburgh Waverley station — the tunnels and conduits and Victorian brickwork that held the whole rattling enterprise together underneath the city. He was good at it: not flashily, just reliably and completely, the kind of good that means problems get solved before anyone above ground notices they existed.

He left at eleven every night and came back at seven every morning smelling of tunnels.
Ailsa knew the smell intimately. It was the smell of his jacket on the hook by the door and his boots drying on the mat and the kind of tired he was when he came in, the deep-down tired of a man who had spent eight hours in the dark underneath a city. It was old stone and something mineral she couldn't name and underneath both of those, on certain mornings more than others, something else entirely — ancient and specific and oddly familiar.

She'd mentioned the smell once. Her dad had looked at her with an expression she couldn't quite read and then said, ‘it's just the rock’ and put the kettle on.

She had not entirely believed him. There had been something in his expression when he said it — there and gone before she could name it, the expression she could never quite read — that suggested he hadn't entirely believed it either.

In the hours between his leaving and his returning, when Ailsa wasn’t sleeping, she drew.

She drew with whatever was to hand: pencil usually, biro when she couldn't find a pencil, felt-tip in emergencies. She filled sketchbooks at a rate that had begun to alarm her art teacher, who kept asking what her inspiration was in the slightly worried tone of someone who suspected the answer might require a phone call to a parent.
She had been told she was serious for her age. She had never understood what age had to do with it.

She was slight, with dark hair cut short. Her hands were always slightly smudged with pencil. And she had the kind of eyes that made people feel, on occasion, that they had been observed more carefully than they intended to be.

She drew buildings.

Not real buildings — or not buildings she'd ever seen, though sometimes she'd turn a corner in the Old Town and feel a jolt of recognition at a roofline or a staircase, a sensation of yes, that, before the moment passed and the building was just a building again. The ones she drew were taller than anything in Edinburgh, crammed into narrow vertical spaces, connected by external staircases and covered bridges and passageways that bored straight through the rock. They had windows at angles that didn't make structural sense and doors in places that doors had no business being. They were lit by lights she couldn't identify — not electric, not gas, not candle, just light, amber and low and sourceless.

She'd been drawing them since she was small enough that her hands made the pencil look enormous. She had never once decided to start. She just picked up a pencil and they came out.

She'd been drawing one evening before she left for Priya's — a courtyard she'd never seen, three floors below street level, with a staircase that went down further than the page allowed. She'd left it open on the kitchen table. Something about it had made her not want to close the book.

She was twelve years and four months old on the night she first smelled the other smell.
She knew her age precisely because she always did — she was the kind of person who noted the number of panes in a window and the height of a ceiling and the exact date, the way other people noted whether it was raining.

She walked home from Priya’s, east along the Cowgate the way she always did, later than she’d meant to be, the October dark full down. The Cowgate ran below two bridges — South Bridge and George IV Bridge, two stone arches — and at this hour, with the bars not yet loud and the tourists long gone, the street had a darkness that the Royal Mile never quite managed. Old-building dark. The kind that had been practising for centuries.
She was halfway home when she stopped.
Not because of anything she heard. Because of what she didn't.

She had walked this street a hundred times. It always had a sound — traffic on the bridges above, the low resonance of a street running between stone walls under other streets, the ambient murmur of the city going about its business.

It wasn't there now.

She stood very still and the street was silent. A complete absence of noise. Then she looked down.

It had been raining since the afternoon. Edinburgh rain doesn’t typically announce itself, it just arrives and stays, and the shadow of South Bridge’s arch had collected it into a puddle on the cobbles.

Her reflection wasn't there.

The puddle reflected the buildings above it, the narrow strip of cloud-lit sky, the lamplight from the street above. It reflected everything except her. She crouched down slowly, the way you approach something you don't want to startle, and looked into it directly.

Not her face. Not the October sky.

A street. Different cobblestones, rounder and more worn, lit by lights she couldn't identify — not electric, not gas — amber and low and sourceless. Buildings rising on both sides, impossibly tall, the upper storeys projecting out over the street in timber-framed overhangs. And a smell coming up through the water, through the surface of the puddle as if the puddle were a window held horizontally and left slightly open.

The smell of old stone and something mineral and cold and underneath both of those the other thing, the thing she'd smelled on her dad's jacket her entire life and never been able to identify.

She knew what it was now.

It was down there.

Whatever it was — city, place, thing — it was down there, and it smelled like that, and it had been smelling like that for long enough that it had seeped up through the rock and into the tunnels and onto her dad's jacket on thousands of ordinary mornings, and she had been breathing it her whole life without knowing what she was breathing.

She leaned closer.

A hand came up through the puddle and grabbed her wrist.

It was not a frightening hand, exactly — it was about her size, cold, with bitten nails and ink on the first two fingers — but it was absolutely, unambiguously, a hand coming up through four centimetres of standing water on the Cowgate at ten forty-five on a Friday night in October, which was not a category of event Ailsa had previously prepared for.

She said something her dad would have been disappointed to hear.

The hand pulled.

And Ailsa Duff fell through the ground and Edinburgh swallowed her whole.