The Hat-Wight of Cobble Lane

The hat had been on the railing for nine days, and on the tenth a Hat-Wight named Phen decided this was simply too long to be polite about.

Hats, as everyone knew (or at least as Hat-Wights knew, which was the same thing in Phen's view), were not meant to sit on railings. Hats were meant for heads. A hat without a head was a small unanswered question, and Phen had been living inside this particular unanswered question since the night its owner had run, weeping, out of Number Seventeen and forgotten to come back.

Phen kept count. That was what Hat-Wights did. They counted the things their humans were too sad to count: the days since the cat had eaten, the days since the post was opened, the days since the curtains were drawn back. They tallied small unravelings.

On the tenth day, Phen climbed down from the railing and walked, very slowly on his very small legs, to the door of Number Seventeen. He knocked, in the way Hat-Wights knock, which is to say with all of himself at once.

The door opened. The woman inside had eyes like a long winter. She looked down. She did not see Phen — humans almost never did — but she saw the hat. She saw the hat she had run from. She knelt and picked it up and held it to her face, and Phen, inside the brim, made himself very small and very still and very warm, the way a Hat-Wight does when their human needs warming.

She wore the hat back inside. She closed the door. She did not, that night, count the days.

Phen did. Phen always would.

But he counted them, now, from one.