The Hum Beneath the Tenements

About this book

Maren Aulcie was going to be somebody at the keyboard until, at twenty-eight, her body staged a mutiny in front of two thousand people at the Usher Hall. Eight years on, she is thirty-six, living in a damp basement flat in Gorgie, transcribing other people's recorded voices on the night shift at the city archives while her left hand shakes whenever she reaches above middle C. She has not spoken to her mother in four years. She has not finished a piece of music since the seizure. On a rain-hammered October night she follows the sound of a child singing into a storm drain off Wardlaw Place, climbs down into a Victorian maintenance tunnel under the tenements, and hears something in the stone: a low harmonic vibration, neither chord nor voice but leaning toward both. When she sets her trembling hands against the wet wall, her fingers come back to her. For eleven minutes she is the pianist she used to be. Afterwards, climbing out into the rain, she finds she cannot picture her mother's face. Half a century earlier, in 1973, her grandmother is standing in the same water with a tuning fork. Dr. Elspeth Aulcie — structural engineer, polio survivor, designer of three of Edinburgh's postwar tower blocks — has learned that the city's oldest drainage networks resonate at frequencies that reach into human cognition, and that her employers at the Scottish Office would very much like the phenomenon mapped, then buried. Her notebooks survive in a sealed box in the archive's restricted stacks, where her granddaughter will eventually find them, along with a last entry that reads only: The hum gives back what it takes, but it chooses what it takes. As Maren goes down night after night, buying minutes of grace with pieces of herself, the towers her grandmother built are being emptied for demolition — and their cracks run in patterns no surveyor can explain. A piano technician in Leith keeps looking at Maren as though they have unfinished business. A tenant liaison officer with the same surname keeps signing off on decant notices for flats she grew up inside. And in 1973, the cracks are only beginning to spread. A literary urban fantasy about restoration and its price — about what we are willing to trade to be ourselves again, and whether the self that comes back is ever the one that went under.

Book details

Genres:

Literary fiction, Urban fantasy, Dual-timeline historical fiction, Quiet horror

Language:

en

Published:

2026-07-24

Content rating:

PG-13