Of Mice and Magic Page 7

  Ben startled awake in a sweat. The voles and Amber all lay about the burrow, dead asleep. They’d worn themselves out with their singing and acrobatics.

  Ben felt ravenous. He looked down at his tiny mouse’s tummy. He couldn’t quite figure out how so much hunger could squeeze into such a small space.

  There was still food left from the night before, so Ben scrunched and nibbled a dried blueberry.

  He felt utterly forlorn and wondered why. Then he remembered. He felt bad because Amber didn’t trust him. She’d called him a “poopy human.” He didn’t deserve that. Ben fully intended to keep his part of the bargain and help her free the pet shop mice.

  More than anything in the world, he wanted to help her, if only to win back his humanity.

  He wondered how Amber would react if he shook her awake and urged her to follow him right now. Better yet, he imagined how surprised she’d be if she woke to discover that he’d already rescued the pet shop mice by himself.

  But that sounded too dangerous, so he thought of another plan. He’d go and get his weapons and be all ready by the time that Amber woke.

  Without another thought, Ben hopped to the magic rock, which still glowed brightly, picked it up, and tiptoed to the mouth of the burrow.

  He peered out from beneath the pine needles, sniffing. The air smelled heavy with water, as if it would leave morning dew. Ben smelled pine, mold, grass, and not much more. The sun wouldn’t rise for an hour.

  Everything was dead quiet. No wind whispered in the morning leaves. No cars could be heard rumbling on the road.

  Domino was nowhere in sight, so he scampered from the burrow toward his house. As he ran, he realized that the light that he held would show him up to any cat within a hundred yards. But he wouldn’t be able to find a weapon in the dark, so he just had to tough it out.

  Ben reached his property, climbed under the fence, stopped at the tree line, and checked the sky for owls. His house was on the far side of the yard. The grass hadn’t been mowed all winter, and he thought about creeping through it with the light but realized it would be faster to run for it.

  “Better yet, just leap over it, silly,” Ben told himself. “You’re a jumping mouse. Jump with your back feet and land on your front, like Amber does.”

  Ben held the rock in his mouth, gave a hard kick with his rear legs and hurtled what felt like a hundred feet in the air and four hundred feet into the distance. It was like jumping over a football field in a single bound!

  As soon as he hit the grass, which bent beneath his weight like a trampoline, he bounded in the air again, kicking harder. This time he leaped what felt like two football fields.

  Wow! he thought. I really am a jumping mouse!

  Ben vaulted into the air again. Look at me! he thought, stretching his paws out before him. I’m Super-vermin!

  It was the most glorious feeling that he’d ever had. It was like flying without the hassle of flapping your arms. He leaped again, doing a forward flip, and managed to get whacked in the face with the head of a wheat stalk.

  He leaped again, this time doing a triple spin in the air. Thus he bounced through the yard, dodging dried weed stalks. The light showed the way. Even in the shadows, he could see the sprinkler lying in the grass and the hose coiled like a green snake. He spotted an old boot far below. As he neared the porch, he startled a sparrow hiding in the laurel bush.

  He scampered to the back garage door. It was an old, weathered, wooden thing and looked as if someone had bumped it with the car. The bottom panel bent up just a bit. Ben squeezed into the garage.

  It was a typical garage, big enough for two cars and with a pair of windows to let in the light. His dad’s workbench filled the right wall, with lots of heavy power tools and hammers and wrenches resting on pegs above it. Shelves full of camping gear and brown boxes filled the left wall.

  Next to the tent were lots of things that he couldn’t use—lanterns, flashlights, a big cooler, camping stove, fishing gear, binoculars. All useless to a mouse.

  A gray pill bug was crawling on the floor in front of him, tramping about on fourteen pale feet. Compared to Ben’s small size, the bug looked as big as a poodle. It was giggling to itself, walking in zigzag, and muttering, “Poo-poo. Te he he. Poo-poo.”

  “Hello,” Ben said.

  “Poo-poo,” it screamed and rolled itself into a ball like an armadillo, so that nothing showed but its gray armor. It looked just about the size of a soccer ball.

  Ben imagined a net in the corner and kicked the bug.

  “And Benjamin Ravenspell wins the World Soccer Cup again,” he shouted, imagining the cheering of a billion fans around the world.

  The pill bug rose high into the air, dropped toward a corner, and just stopped—in midair.

  “Hey, thanks!” a deep voice called.

  Ben peered into the shadows and saw a dismal web spanning from corner to corner. A dry bug, maybe a cricket, hung like a bizarre piñata at the lower end. The pill bug had hit the web. A spider was running along the strings toward the pill bug. It quickly began wrapping it into a ball.

  “Hello, spider,” Ben said.

  “Cob. Call me Cob,” the spider said.

  “Are you going to eat that bug?” Ben felt guilty. He hadn’t meant to kill the thing. It felt like he’d fed Amber to the lizard all over again.

  “Yep,” Cob said, still wrapping it tighter and tighter. “First good meal I’ve had all winter.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt it,” Ben said. “I wasn’t trying to feed it to you.”

  The spider leaped down from its web, came close, and stared at Ben with all eight eyes. It was a small spider, so tiny that Ben could almost see through its carapace.

  Cob said, “It’s just a bug. There’s not many bugs smart enough to count their own feet. That one was an intellectual giant. He could appreciate potty jokes. Yes, quite the scholar—for a pill bug.”

  Ben objected, “Just because it’s a stupid bug doesn’t mean it should be put to death.”

  “Too late now,” the spider said, “I done injected him with my venom. He’s already walked through the tunnel of light. Probably whooping it up with his pill bug ancestors. He didn’t suffer none.”

  “Oh,” Ben said. He still felt terrible. But there was nothing he could do for the bug now.

  Ben held up his light and began looking for a weapon. There wasn’t much here. He jumped up on the tool bench and found his dad’s container of nails. The spider kept talking while Ben searched for a weapon.

  “Besides,” Cob hollered. “A fellow has got to eat. Been a tough winter. I sat out under the lilac bush for months. Didn’t catch a danged thing in my web but a couple of snowflakes. Had some big hail last winter too—slashed my nets to shreds.”

  Most of the nails felt too big and heavy for Ben to carry, and the nails were really too dull to use as weapons. Ben began digging through the tin.

  The spider kept talking, ignoring the fact that Ben felt uncomfortable talking to him. “Most cobs would’ve starved. But not me. I went on a safari. Last week, I bagged me an assassin bug. He put up quite a battle.”

  Ben glanced over. Cob stood a little taller. He was proud of catching that bug. Ben wasn’t sure what an assassin bug was, but it sounded dangerous. “You caught one all by yourself?” Ben asked. “Where is it?”

  Cob squatted a little, deflating. “Well, uh, I tried dragging him home, but some ants caught the scent. Big old Mako fire ants, following the smell of fresh meat up from the hayfields. They kept coming at me, and I fought them off. And while I was fighting some of them off, others snuck in and grabbed pieces of my assassin bug.

  “By the time I got home, all I had left was pretty much an empty shell . . .” He nodded to the piñata hanging in his web. “Yep, he was a biggun.”

  “I’m sorry you lost your dinner,” Ben said. He glanced down. Bingo! He found a large needle, the one that his dad had bought to mend their canvas tent. “Don’t be sorry for me,” Cob said. “
I got a little something to eat, and I had a grand adventure! You want to be sorry for someone, be sorry for the starving spiders that don’t eat. I hear there’s like a hundred quadrillion of ’em over in China. Hardly a fly over there to eat. Them human kung fu masters just sit around all day catching flies with their chopsticks. Don’t give no never mind to other folks’ needs.”

  Ben stood on the counter for a moment, studying his needle. A round brass doorknob nearby formed an almost perfect mirror.

  Ben held the needle like a spear, as if he would jab it, and peered at his reflection. “You looking at me, cat? You looking at me? Smile when you say that!”

  The spider studied Ben, then hopped a little closer. “Hey,” he said, “You must be that boy who got hisself turned into a mouse.”

  “Y—yeah,” Ben stammered. “How did you know?”

  “Heard about it on the web,” the spider said, as he reached out with one languid leg and plucked a silk line running across the ground. “You see, my trunk line here goes outside and connects with the widow’s web under the mulberry bush. Whenever she wants to talk, she speaks into her web, and it causes the line to vibrate. Then I hear her on my side of the web. Her web connects to a burrow spider’s line out back, and on and on. I can keep in touch with spiders all over town, all over the country.”

  “Wow,” Ben said. “Us people do the same thing with computers. It’s called the World Wide Web.”

  “Humph,” the spider scoffed. “Us spiders were big on webs long before you humans figured out how to wipe your own noses.”

  Ben practiced a couple of thrusts with the needle. Cob moved closer to take a better look.

  “So, you gonna find out what happened to all the other mice around here?” Cob asked.

  “What do you mean?” Ben asked, giving the spider a sharp look.

  “’Bout six months ago, they all started to disappear . . .”

  Ben wondered at that. “Some voles warned me about lots of predators in the neighborhood. Maybe the cats ate them.”

  “That’s not what I hear,” Cob said. “I hear they just got up and went east, in ones or twos, wandering into the mountains. With all of the snow up there, the web was down all winter, but there’s many an eye that seen ’em go.”

  Ben grunted. “I’ll ask around.”

  “I like your spunk, kid,” the spider said. “Word on the web is that you’re out to free some mice. We spiders are taking bets. Odds are a million to one against you making it out of the pet shop alive.”

  “Never tell me the odds,” Ben said, angrily. But he was curious. “Why so low?”

  “You got enemies, kid,” Cob said. “But I tell you what, I’ll bet a greenbottle fly on you.”

  Ben took his needle in hand and hopped down from the workbench. There was a bag of walnuts in a corner, so he went to it, dug through the shells, and found one to use as a helmet. He put it on, but it kept popping off. He finally got it to stick in place, sort of, by scrunching his ears just right, then went to his dad’s fishing pole, lying on the floor. It had a size 14 egg hook on it—three little golden hooks really, welded together into a triangle. It kind of looked like a grappling hook. Ben bit off six feet of leader, coiled it like a rope, and clutched it in one paw.

  “Now any cat that tries to eat me will get a hook caught in its mouth,” Ben said. It was hard to carry everything—the light, the grappling hook, the spear.

  “Hey, looks like you could use a couple of extra legs,” Cob said. “I’d gladly give you a pair of mine. Never could figure out what to do with all of ’em.”

  “Thanks for the offer,” Ben said. “Good-bye, Cob.”

  “Bye,” Cob said.

  Ben dove through the hole under the door, and as he did, he became aware of a huge fuzzy shadow overhead. Something pounced, then grasped him cruelly, knocking the spear from his hand, along with his grappling hook and light.

  There, in the garish green glow thrown by the magic stone, Ben saw an enormous raccoon, its evil eyes glinting behind its black mask, its gray grizzled fur sticking out everywhere. It hunched over him, larger than the Sphinx. Its claws were longer than the blade of a scythe, and its cruel teeth were each sharper than spears.

  “Gotcha!” the raccoon said.

  Ben’s heart pounded a thousand times a minute, and he felt sick all over. A moment ago, he’d felt so safe, and now all of his weapons were gone, useless. His mind went blank as he tried to consider what to do.

  Buy time, he thought. The raccoon pulled Ben up toward its mouth, using a finger to flick Ben’s walnut shell helmet from his head. The helmet went plunking to the ground.

  “Aren’t you going to wash before you eat me?” Ben asked. “I thought raccoons always washed first.”

  “Not if we’re hungry enough,” the coon said, shoving Ben eagerly toward his mouth.

  “Oh,” Ben said. “Then I’m dreadfully sorry.”

  The raccoon stopped, eyeing him curiously. “Sorry for what?”

  “I think . . . I think . . . I think I just pooped in your paw.”

  The raccoon screamed, hurling Ben to the ground. The beast held up its paws as if they had been burned.

  Ben hit the pavement rolling. He grabbed his needle, somersaulted, and came up with it at the ready. With one free paw, he grabbed up his helmet and jammed it onto his head, then held it in place.

  The raccoon was staring at its paws in horror. “Hey,” it said, “you didn’t poop!”

  Ben menaced the giant with his spear. “You want a piece of me? Go ahead, make my day!”

  The raccoon backed up an inch, then seemed to find his courage. “Hey, I ain’t afraid of no mouse!”

  “Hay is for horses,” Ben shouted, leaping three feet into the air. “Hyaaah!” He plunged his spear deep into the raccoon’s snout,

  The raccoon let out a startled cry, blinked, and stepped back a pace.

  Ben suddenly remembered something his neighbor, Mrs. Pumpernickle, had said last winter. She’d said that she’d gone out on the porch one night, and a big raccoon had been in the garbage. She tried to drive it away, but it had merely growled and snapped at her.

  As the raccoon squared off, Ben realized that this was probably the same monster.

  The raccoon laughed. “A spunky one, eh? You don’t scare me. I eat live scorpions as treats and wash ’em down with glue!”

  He was stalking toward Ben when a dark shadow dropped from the top of the pine tree.

  “Owl,” Ben shouted, imagining that he’d have to fight two predators at once. Things couldn’t get worse.

  But what twisted through the air was no owl. Ben could sense something powerful and malevolent rushing toward him. It came with the force of a bullet, but wriggled like a bat.

  Time seemed to stop, and Ben watched it draw near in slow motion. Its thick orange fur glowed sullenly by Ben’s magic light, as if revealing some inner fire. Its enormous ears, so translucent that one could see the veins, were each fully six times as long as its pug-nosed head. Its yellow teeth were as sharp as nails. The ear studs and magical symbols tattooed onto its ears lent the creature a terrifying sense of power. It was, by far, the most hideous creature that Ben had ever seen.

  He couldn’t have been more frightened if he saw the devil himself winging his way out of the underworld.

  The bat landed next to Ben and stood with the tiny claws of its wings hooked to the ground, then twisted its head around to look at the raccoon. It bared its teeth and hissed.

  “Your Mage-esty,” the raccoon cried. It dropped its head low, bowing and backing off a step. “I didn’t mean to—is he a friend of yours?—I mean forgive me, I, uh—”

  “Get out of here,” the bat said, “before I make you beg me to chew your own tail off.”

  The raccoon shouted and bolted around the side of the house so fast that the only thing left of him was his stink and a couple of hairs that floated in the wind.

  The bat chuckled, low and dangerously.

  Ben was horrifi
ed. His hands felt weak. It took all of his effort to grip his spear. He suspected that normal weapons were worthless against this monster.

  “Well done,” the creature hissed. “You showed courage and initiative.”

  Ben’s eyes grew wide. “What are you? Some kind of weird bat?”

  “Some might call me a bat, but I prefer to think of myself as a Dusky Seraph,” the bat said.

  “Oh,” Ben said. “Do you have a name?”

  “My friends call me Nightwing.”

  Ben heard a sucking sound and noticed a horrible fat tick with its head buried in the bat’s armpit. The tick pulled its head out. “I didn’t know you had friends. I thought you said that the world was divided into accomplices and victims.”

  “Quiet,” Nightwing said, and the tick’s proboscis suddenly cinched tight, as if an invisible string were wrapped around it. Muffled screams came from the now-closed proboscis.

  The bat hobbled around Ben, stalking on tiny paws, using his wings to balance. “Impressive,” Nightwing said. “Very impressive. A jumping mouse, but strangely dressed. Or are you more than you seem?”

  “I’m a human,” Ben said proudly. “Or I was. Until I got turned into a mouse.”

  Quick as thought, Nightwing reached out and put a claw around Ben’s shoulder. “Well, then, you and I have something in common!”

  Ben eyed the bat distrustfully.

  The bat peered hard at Ben, and then squinted skyward as if he longed to seek the shelter of the shadowed pines. The rising sun seemed a threat. The bat smiled and drooped his ears. Suddenly he seemed smaller and not so menacing as he squinted at Ben like a kindly, half-blind old man. “For you see, I too was once a human. A man of some importance. A celebrity. I was, how do you young ones say it, ‘the cat’s slumber-wear.’”

  “Really?” Ben said. “Who?”

  The bat looked away sadly. “It’s not important. It was so long ago. I remember so little now. I . . . I was a man of great intellect, a lighthouse at the end of the world. Crowds came out of the shadows to peer at me and wonder at my brilliance. I would speak syllables into the air, filling auditoriums with the music of my voice. I was the man who put the Poe in poetry. Ah, how women would look upon me in ardor and swoon!” Nightwing paused and let out a sigh. “But I remember so little. That’s how it is when you have been transmogrified. The longer you stay in your new form, the harder it becomes to remember what it was to be human . . .”