The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

Maurice's face moved. It tried various expressions one after another. Then he said, “All right! I ate him, OK? All of him! Except for the tail and the green wobbly bit and that nasty purple lump, no-one knows what it is! I was just a cat! I hadn't learned to think yet! I didn't know! I was hungry! Cats eat rats, that's how it goes! It wasn't my fault! And he'd been eating the magic stuff and I ate him so then I got Changed too! Know how that feels, seeing the green wobbly bit like that? It doesn't feel good! Sometimes on dark nights I think I can hear him talking down there! All right? Satisfied? I didn't know he was anyone! I didn't know I was anyone! I ate him! He'd been eating the stuff on the dump and I ate him so that's how I got Changed! I admit it! I ate him! It wasn't my faauulltt!”

And then there was silence. After a while Peaches said, “Yes, but that was a long time ago, wasn't it?”

“What? You mean have I eaten anyone lately? No!”

“Are you sorry for what you did?” said Dangerous Beans.

“Sorry? What do you think? Sometimes I have nightmares where I burp and he—”

“Then that's probably all right,” said the little rat.

“All right?” said Maurice. “How can it be all right? And you know the worst part? I'm a cat! Cats don't go round feeling sorry! Or guilty! We never regret anything! Do you know what it feels like, saying ‘Hello food, can you talk?’ That's not how a cat is supposed to behave!”

“We don't act how rats are supposed to behave,” said Dangerous Beans. And then his face fell again. “Up until now,” he sighed.

“Everyone was frightened,” said Peaches. “Fear spreads.”

“I hoped we could be more than rats,” said Dangerous Beans. “I thought we could be more than things that squeak and widdle, whatever Hamnpork says. And now… where is everyone?”

“Shall I read to you from Mr. Bunnsy?” said Peaches, her voice full of concern. “You know that always cheers you up when you're in one of your… dark times.”

There was a nod from Dangerous Beans.

Peaches pulled the huge book towards her and began to read. “One day Mr. Bunnsy and his friend Ratty Rupert the Rat went to see Old Man Donkey, who lived by the river—”

“Read the bit where they talk to the humans,” said Dangerous Beans.

Peaches obediently turned a page. “‘Hello, Ratty Rupert,’ said Farmer Fred. ‘What a lovely day it is, to be sure—’”

This is mad, thought Maurice, as he listened to a story about wild woods and fresh bubbling streams, being read to one rat by another rat while they sat beside a drain along which ran something that certainly wasn't fresh. Anything but fresh. To be fair, though, it was bubbling a bit, or at least glooping.

Everything's going down the drain and they have this little picture in their heads about how nice things could be…

Look at those little pink sad eyes, said Maurice's own thoughts in Maurice's own head. Look at those little wobbly wrinkly noses. If you ran out on them and left them here, how could you look those little wobbly noses in the face again?

“I wouldn't have to,” said Maurice, out loud. “That's the point!”

“What?” said Peaches, looking up from the book.

“Oh, nothing…” Maurice paused. There was nothing for it. It went against everything a cat stood for. This is what thinking does for you, he thought. It gets you into trouble. Even when you know other people can think for themselves, you start thinking for them too. He groaned.

“We'd better see what's happened to the kid,” he said.

It was completely black in the cellar. All there was, apart from the occasional drip of water, were voices.

“So,” said the voice of Malicia, “let's go over it again, shall we? You don't have a knife of any kind?”

“That's right,” said Keith.

“Or some handy matches that could burn through the rope?”

“No.”

“And no sharp edge near you that you could rub the rope on?”

“No.”

“And you can't sort of pull your legs through your arms so that you can get your hands in front of you?”

“No.”

“And you don't have any secret powers?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? The moment I saw you, I thought: he's got some amazing power that will probably manifest itself when he's in dire trouble. I thought: no-one could really be as useless as that unless it was a disguise.”