Rat was lost.
A minute ago she had been at home, half asleep in her nest, in a disused cellar down near the canals. Now, she was still in her cellar, but her cellar wasn't where it was meant to be.
Something had changed, something that had been changing for a very, very long time.
She pulled her blankets tighter around herself, sinking deeper into the familiar. From her name and location, you would have expected the blankets to be filthy, or stained with grease and grime, but Rat kept her den very clean, almost obsessively so.
Once a week she collected together her saved-up coins, her spoils of begging and scrimping, and took everything she owned to the local launderette.
It wasn't cheap, but by the end of it she always had clean clothes, and blankets which kept the heat in, and that was worth going hungry for.
She was hungry right now, and had been hungry for a long time, but her blankets smelt of washing powder, which made it all worth it.
When she had started going there had been a few strange looks, and a little questioning at somebody as young as her hanging around the machines, but people were used to her now, and nobody bothered her. It was her weekly treat, those two hours spent in the warm, surrounded by the smell of clean washing and the chatter of people with nothing to do.
There were magazines and newspapers she could read, and once somebody had bought her some potato scallops from the chip shop across the road, she hardly ever had those!
-
She took a deep breath in, before sticking her nose out of the blanket mound and listening as hard as she could.
Something had definitely changed. Something was wrong.
The takeaway above, normally bustling at this hour of the day, was silent, and there was no thunder of footsteps in the streets. There were no passing shadows over the glass bricks, no calls of children on their way home. There wasn't even the scurrying of rats from inside the walls, trying to squeeze their way through gaps long filled in.
Instead, it was grave silent.
The air was different, too. A sterile, ozone scent like an incoming storm, like the aftermath of an electrical fire, without all the burning…
She squeezed her eyes shut and retreated for a moment, holding back a pounding headache, the part of her which could still think terrified at this sudden onset of pain.
What if she had a brain tumour, and this was all some sort of psychosis? Did she have a brain tumour? Had she drunk enough? Had somebody spiked her drink? No, she never went to...
Another spike of pain, and she groaned aloud, holding her head and trying to think of anything else, anything to make it stop.
She spent a lot of time during the week in the library, and she had once read a book written for people who wanted to be their own doctors. It said that a major cause for headaches was brain tumours, and that they could also make you see things that didn't exist. You should always get unexplained headaches checked out by a real doctor, even if you decided to ignore their advice afterwards.
She squinted at her hands for a moment, eyes wet, still huddled in her blanket cocoon. She still had five whole fingers, so she was truly awake, not dreaming-awake, and they weren't morphing into demons or anything. There weren't any monsters coming out of the walls, everything looked normal, it was just…
Silent.
She stuck her nose out again, squinting in the early evening light, using all her willpower to listen, yearning for anything, any noise at all.
Nothing. Complete and utter silence.
-
She sat frozen for another half hour, waiting for the rumble of the bus, the passing of the... She didn't remember what a 'bus' was, but she knew it went past every fifteen minutes until late at night, and would cause the whole building to shudder and groan as it did.
Outside the light started to fade, late afternoon sinking into evening.
The Bus sounded like some kind of monster, but it was a friendly creature, she knew, she rode it sometimes, out into the country, or she had before…
The headache came back with a vengeance, and when she finally pulled herself together enough to look outside again, it was fully dark.
There should have been lights on by now, shining in through the window above, filtering in through the gaps, but there was nothing. All was dark and quiet and still.
Shuddering, she retreated back into her blanket fort, pulling the cloth tight around herself, like a suit of armour again the world.
Maybe things would be normal again in the morning.
-
Things were not normal in the morning.
Throughout the night she had listened, half-dozing, straining her ears for the sounds of the other rats, the rumbles from above, the noise of people, but as dawn broke, she knew that something important was gone.
Never before had she, even here, deep in the heart of the city, never before had she heard a silent dawn. Where was the birdsong, the dawn chorus, the-
Her stomach growled at her, and she winced, reaching up to rub her tired eyes.
Today was laundry day, so she would take her blankets and her spare clothes on over there, and hopefully, somebody would know what was going on.
-
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
This wasn't her city. She didn't remember what the name of her city was, or in which parts of it she lived, but this was not her city. It was, instead, a facsimile of one, a painting, meant to be admired but never scrutinised. It was the distant romantic skyline, the illusion falling apart up close.
Still, the laundromat was roughly where she would have expected it to be if she had been home, roughly a half a mile west of her den, but the location was as close as it got to being right.
Okay, the machines were still there, sort of, but instead of the big metal boxes she expected, they had been replaced by gigantic wooden toys. As she touched them in confusion, she thought that they looked like the sort of thing fancy shops sold for babies, but scaled up to massive size.
They were all painted in bright, primary colours, and as she peered inside one of the big wooden drums, it was quite obviously non-functional.
Where the detergent drawer should have there was a carving, bearing the word SOUP, and the paint flaked off when she touched it.
She stared around, flummoxed, before dumping her washing into the machine anyway. Maybe the library would be more normal, if she could find it.
-
She did not find the library.
That night she slept in the laundromat, in a fort built of toy washing machines and hung blankets, her stomach tight.
The next day, it started to snow.
-
She wrapped herself up as best she could against the cold. She had found a coat in the back of her new home, and that combined with every piece of clothing she owned was enough to keep her warm as she explored.
She wished she had better shoes, but that was by the by. Shoes were expensive.
She would have stayed inside and waited it out, but her stomach kept growling at her, and there was no food in the laundromat, that she could find anyway. There was normally a vending machine in the corner, selling sachets of detergent and packets of crisps, but it was absent, only a watermark on the floor to show it had even existed at all.
She couldn't remember when she'd last eaten, but she was doing her best not to think about it. She was learning now what triggered the headaches, and how to work around them.
Brain tumours were the worst.
If she could find a doctor, maybe they could save her, but she was probably too far gone already. It was tragic really. They might even write an obituary for her in the local paper.
-
The library, when she worked out where it should be, was gone, not even a grey tower in its place, instead there was just… Nothing.
She thought later that there might have been a park there, grass and trees and screaming children, but thinking back too hard caused the headaches again, so she didn't.
Instead, she copied her namesakes, scurrying from building to building, trying to avoid the worst of the snow. It was up past her ankles now, and the constant fall was interspersed with little bouts of hail.
She passed through those buildings which weren't locked, and those which had floors, and walked around those which weren't.
Her blankets left a trail behind her in the loose snow and the cold soaked through her trainers and into her soul. Still, it didn't bother her like it should. It was there, but it was distant, appearing only if she looked for it, and she did her best not to look.
The whole experience was more like walking through chilled soap suds, or asbestos.
She didn't know what asbestos was, but it might have been a sort of snow which only damaged you later? The gaps in her knowledge annoyed her almost as much as her ending up in this strange world. She had spent as much time in the library as she could, reading anything and everything, and she had been proud of the knowledge she had gained, all of it hard-won.
The loss of the library rankled almost as much as the missing memories. It had been a warm place, a place of quiet knowledge, where they hadn't minded that she turned up at opening and left at closing, as long as she kept to herself.
Nobody had bothered her, and sometimes there had even been free drinks and food, sample tables, and sandwiches left over after the cafe closed.
To be fair, it was a big library, in the heart of the city, and she was only a small rat. There wasn't much of her to bother.
-
A flash of neon light caught her eye, reflecting off the crisp snow, and she broke into a jog, skidding around the corner and enjoying the streaks her feet made as she came to a stop.
Lights meant people! People meant food, and freedom from this purgatory!
Except, as she rounded the corner, there were no people.
There were no lights.
Instead, in front of her was another big grey building, almost identical to all the others, except that in the centre, where the doors should have been, was the front of a shop.
The shop would have looked almost normal, if you went back in time a century, and if it was in the bottom of a small two-story brick building instead of a hundred-story concrete tower block. Instead, the huge grey building encased it, seeming to swallow the splintered wooden frames and ancient-looking door like a snail eating a pea.
She peered in through the grubby window, trying to see through the dust and snow. She had been past shops like this sometimes, seeing them out of the corner of her eye. You were never sure if they were still in use, an ancient being behind the counter spending eternity mending people's appliances and selling tools, or if they had been abandoned and forgotten about a hundred years before, left to rot.
She had always wanted to investigate, but that was more of a romantic notion than any real desire. Trespassing was bad enough, she didn't need to be arrested for breaking and entering.
-
A little bell rang above the door as she entered, the shop assaulting her with the smell of dust and boiled potatoes, and she looked around with curiosity, shrugging off the last of the snow. It was like a museum set!
She felt as if she'd stepped into a picture in a history book. It was all somehow flat, as if looking around at the wrong angle would cause everything to slide into 2d, but she tried not to think about that. It was probably just the brain tumour talking.
It wasn't a large place, with only three small aisles, but it was packed with stuff. Next to the door was a deep rattan basket filled with bread, and her stomach grumbled at the sight. The leftmost wall was stocked with odds and ends, small statuettes and tools she only vaguely recognised.
Along the near wall was a display, which her heart told her should have contained sweets and newspapers, but the papers were blank, replaced with half-wrapped reams of A4, and instead of sweets, there were marbles, beans, small shiny stones, and tiny statues that fit in the palm of her hand.
In the old days, she would have found this fascinating, and could have rummaged through the shelves for hours, searching for the perfect toys, but the brain tumour and the snow were making her tired, and all she wanted was food and shelter.
There was no shopkeeper, although she shouted.
While shoplifting wasn't beyond her, she had always stuck to the big supermarkets, places such as this were too overlooked, and it was too personal, too damaging. Still, there was a first time for everything.
She picked up one of the loaves of bread, an old-fashioned round loaf, and found it still warm from the oven. Odd, as the building was damp and cold, but she held it briefly to her forehead in thanks, before stuffing it under her shirt. She would eat it later, behind the washing machines, when she was safe.
For now, she was an explorer!
She headed towards the middle aisle, eyeing up the display at the end.
Where she would normally have expected gift cards, there were instead index cards, corners rounded off, each bearing a unique name.
Upon turning a few over, she discovered that somebody had drawn on black stripes in Sharpie, and they all contained identical names and numbers. Strange.
She frowned and pinned it back to the board, heading towards where the till should be. If there was food here, and the place was truly abandoned, maybe she could stay, and make this her home base.
-
She could smell the bread under her shirt, and her stomach clenched as she peered at the shelves, nagging at her to not wait, to eat it now!
She was hoping for something better, though. Rats cannot live on bread alone.
Instead of the junk food she was hoping for, she found boxes, baskets, pots and pans. Steamers and ladles and little bowls, all jumbled together in a chaotic mess.
At the end of the aisle though, piled up against the checkout desk, she found gold.
Not literally, although by now she wouldn't have been surprised, but metaphorical gold. Tins and tins, all stacked upon each other, all missing their labels, but polished to a bright shine. Her mouth watered as she looked at them, and then at the tools around her, surely she could get these open somehow, and inside, would be what she craved so much.
Beans.