I Was a Rat! Read online

  He was having trouble with his coat.

  “Go on,” said Joan at once, helping him into the sleeve, “what about a little boy?”

  “Aha,” said Charlie solemnly. “I’m getting to that. Lot of talk about rats in the pub today. There was a flashy-looking feller with a big cigar asking about ’em. Seems there’s a monster about,” he added, stepping very carefully, as if he wasn’t sure the ground was there.

  “Get away,” said Bob. “What sort of monster?”

  “Half child,” said Charlie solemnly, “and half rat.”

  Joan’s hand tightened on Bob’s arm. Charlie was having trouble finding the end of his scarf because it was inside his coat at the back. Bob pulled it out for him.

  “Thank you,” Charlie said, bowing to him and stumbling a little.

  “Well, what about the little boy?” Joan said.

  “Ah,” said Charlie, trying to lay a finger alongside his nose and nearly poking his eye out. “Coming to that. This man Stewtap—Plumbscrew—summing—he was looking for this rat–monster because he was going to put him in a show, Eric reckoned. Eric seen the man before, in a fair, exhibiting a mermaid in a tank. And Eric—he paid his money and went in to see the mermaid, and you know what he says? He says—ooh, Lor, listen to this—he says the top half was prime but the bottom half was a load of old cod! Lor! What d’you think of that, eh?”

  He was nearly doubled up, choking with laughter.

  “On account of her tail,” he wheezed. “A load of old cod!”

  “Very funny,” said Bob. “Yeah, that’s a good ’un. What was the feller called again?”

  “And what about the little boy?” said Joan, stamping her foot. “I swear, Charlie Hoskins, you’re driving me mad. What about the little boy?”

  “I seen him,” said Charlie, “and I told the man about him.”

  “What? Where? When?”

  “This afternoon. Down the alley. Wossisname again—Tapstew—Thumbscrap—can’t remember—he was looking for him, and I showed him where he’d gone. Ooh, I feel ill. Ooh, I feel awful…”

  “Well, there’s one consolation,” said Joan. “You’ll feel worse in the morning.”

  “Oh, good…Oh, Lor…Here,” said Charlie, clinging to Bob’s sleeve, “I’ll get his name in a minute. Tap—Snap—Screwfish—’s no good, ’s gone. Goo’night.”

  “Well,” said Bob to Joan once they’d helped Charlie to his front door and seen it safely shut. “I suppose that’s a start.”

  “The Wonder of the Age”

  Two days later, and many miles down the road, St. Matthew’s Fair opened for business. It was always the same fair, but in this town it opened on St. Matthew’s Day, so it was St. Matthew’s Fair; in that town it opened over Michaelmas, so it was Michaelmas Fair; and it reached another town on May Day, so it was the May Fair. The stall owners and merry-go-round proprietors and the man who ran the Ghost Train and the owner of the Death-Defying Wall of Doom all knew what time of year it was by what town they happened to be in.

  They arrived late at night, and by the light of many lamps and lanterns they set up their stalls and assembled their merry-go-rounds and bolted together their rides in the cattle market, under the old town castle.

  Mr. Tapscrew was putting the final touches to his stall as the sun rose over the market cross.

  “No,” he said, “we still need a bit more filth and squalor. It looks almost respectable in there. We need mud and rotten vegetables. We need dung, really, but there’s a limit to what the public will stand, more’s the pity. A good show ought to be a little ahead of the public, but not too far, and I think they’d draw the line at dung.”

  “So would I,” said his wife. “We’ve got to live with him, remember. Here—what about charging ’em extra to feed him? We’ll have a feeding time, every hour on the hour, special price. And the beauty of it is,” she went on, “we don’t have to supply the food! They bring it themselves!”

  Mr. Tapscrew looked at his wife fondly. “Genius,” he murmured.

  “Rig up a sign,” she said. “Make it fancy, with all toothsome words. You’re good at that.”

  Less than an hour later, everything was ready.

  “Smashing,” said Mrs. Tapscrew.

  The first visitors came soon afterward. Seven people, grownups and children, crowded into the little booth and stared down into a pit lined with crumbling plaster and rotten planks. The floor was covered in dirty straw, cabbage stumps, and bits of vegetable too decayed to recognize.

  “Eurgghh,” said a girl.

  “Look!” said a boy. “He’s coming out! Yuck!”

  As the little boy pointed, something stirred at the back of the pit, and first there appeared a hand, then skinny arms, then a face—

  “Eeeeuuurrgghh!”

  “Yuchh!”

  “Eurghhhh!”

  Roger had been thoroughly decorated with scabs and pustules and a couple of great red boils for good measure. His rat suit had been taken in to fit him tightly, and as he scrambled out, he swung his horrible leathery tail in the way he’d practiced.

  Cries of revulsion and disgust greeted him. He was delighted. He smiled up happily, showing the blacked-out teeth Mrs. Tapscrew had painted.

  “Here, Rat-Boy! Eat this!” someone called, and threw in a rotten potato.

  Roger hadn’t eaten anything that day. The Tapscrews had kept him hungry on purpose, and although he’d chewed a bit of weed and swallowed some straw, there was no nourishment in that, so he seized the potato at once and, remembering what Bob and Joan had told him, said, “Thank you.”

  The audience goggled. They looked more closely.

  Then someone said, “That’s a boy.”

  “He’s got a costume on!” said someone else.

  “He ain’t a rat-monster at all!” came the voice of a third person, and with cries of disappointment and anger, they called for their money back.

  Mr. Tapscrew, who was busy outside drumming up another crowd, came in hastily.

  “Hush—yes—all right—understood—money back, certainly—just keep your voices down, ladies and gentlemen—here, Mrs. Tapscrew’ll give you the money out the back here—hush now—”

  He ushered them grumbling and muttering out of the booth and then went back in to find Roger munching his rotten potato.

  Mr. Tapscrew bent down and hit him so hard the potato flew out of his hands and he fell full-length to the floor.

  “What’d you do that for? Ain’t you got no sense? You keep your bloody trap shut, you little fool! How can a rat say thank you?”

  Roger, his head ringing, didn’t know what Mr. Tapscrew meant about the trap. He had a vague idea that traps were bad for rats, but he couldn’t make any sense of it. One thing he was sure about, though.

  “I’m not a rat anymore,” he said, struggling to sit up. “I’m a boy now. Old Bob told me that good boys say thank you, so—”

  “Damn your Bob, and damn your thank-yous! You’ll do as I tell you, you ungrateful scoundrel! After all I done for you—I pick you out the gutter—I give you a home and a useful occupation—you go and spoil it with your niminy-piminy thank you! You ain’t supposed to thank ’em! You’re supposed to snarl and snatch and threaten! You’re supposed to be a rat-boy, not a choirboy!”

  “Oh,” said Roger, his head beginning to hurt now, “if I’d knowed that, I’d’ve done it. When I got changed into a boy, that’s when I found out about being good, so I was doing that. When I was a rat, I never knew about being good. So now I got to be a good rat-boy, only that’s hard.”

  “Oh, shut up, you sanctimonious little beggar! Just remember—snarl and snatch and threaten. Else I’ll pull your bloody nose off. Now the next lot of customers’ll be in any minute, and I want ’em horrified and disgusted. See?”

  He kicked Roger for good measure and went out. Roger felt a choking sensation in his throat, almost like a hiccup, and it might have turned into a sob except that he thought Mr. Tapscrew wouldn’t approve. And he
did want to be a good rat-boy, so he gathered up the biggest bit of the potato and crawled back into the sewer pipe to wait for the next audience to come in.

  All that day and all through the evening, he snarled and snatched and threatened, and the people threw him bits of moldy bread and chicken heads and scraps of rancid pork and banana skins and potato peelings and rotten fish, and exclaimed with revulsion when he ate them.

  Goose Weather

  After being St. Matthew’s, the fair moved on to a town fifty miles away to become the Goose Fair. At this time of year, there were a lot of geese being fattened for Christmas, and autumn was getting on, so the evenings were longer and darker.

  Mr. Tapscrew was looking forward to good business, because people were more willing to come in out of the cold and look at an exhibition of curiosities than they were in the long summer evenings, when the rides and merry-go-rounds did their best business. He paid for a new sign showing the rat-boy, wearing an expression of savage malevolence, green venom dripping from hideous fangs. He even had special leaflets printed, and traveled ahead and distributed them in all the pubs.

  As for Roger, he took to being a rat-boy quickly enough, once he realized what he had to do; and he didn’t mind what he ate, so the fish heads and rotten carrots went down easily enough; but there wasn’t any goodness in them, and presently he began to feel a little listless. He didn’t enjoy swishing his tail anymore, and the rat suit was getting loose.

  Mrs. Tapscrew cursed and took it in half an inch.

  “He ain’t eating his scraps,” she said to her husband as they sat in their caravan. The lamplight was golden, the stove was warm, the kettle was singing. Outside, the rain was lashing at the windows, and the autumn wind was howling.

  “Mmm,” said Mr. Tapscrew, applying a match to his cigar and puffing luxuriously. “Think we ought to feed him proper, then?” he said once it was nicely lit. “Bit of soup of an evening?”

  “Don’t be daft. You know how the takings go up at feeding time. If he’s full of soup and stuff, he won’t be worth watching. No, I think you ought to hit him.”

  “Well,” said Mr. Tapscrew reluctantly, “I could. The thing is,” he went on, examining the glowing tobacco, “I don’t think he’s normal. I don’t think he understands the meaning of things.”

  “You’re too soft,” she said, snapping off a thread between her teeth. “You’re getting attached to him. That’s your problem. Like that blooming mermaid. You were too interested in her by a long way—”

  “All right, all right,” said Mr. Tapscrew hastily. “I’ll do as you say, dear. I’m sure he’ll settle down.”

  Roger was trying to settle down at that very moment. He slept in his pit, curled up in the sewer pipe, and it was cold and drafty, and Mrs. Tapscrew was sewing up his rat suit, so he had only his tattered old page boy uniform to guard against the cold. But he piled up some straw to keep out the worst of the wind and nibbled a twig that someone had thrown in and whispered the words he always whispered each night before he went to sleep: “Bob and Joan—bread and milk—nightshirt—privy—patients.”

  And soon afterward he fell asleep.

  But he hadn’t been asleep for long before a knocking sound woke him up. It was coming from the wooden wall of the wagon, at the back of his sewer pipe. He turned round and pressed his ear to the wall, and there it was: knock-knock-knock—knock-knock-knock.

  And then there came a whisper through the cracks in the planks.

  “Psst! Rat-Boy!”

  Roger woke up properly.

  “Yes?” he whispered back.

  “Listen,” said the voice, “I’m going to help you escape. In a minute, I’m going to heave this plank out the way, and you can wriggle through.”

  “Oh,” said Roger. “Does Mr. Tapscrew know?”

  “No, and it’s better if he don’t,” said the voice. “Keep it quiet now, Rat-Boy. Here goes.”

  There was a crack and a splintering noise, and all of a sudden a cold wind blew in on Roger from a plank-wide gap in the wall. Amazed, he peered out and saw by the flickering light of a hurricane lantern a boy a little bigger than himself, with very pale hair that hung like a curtain over his forehead. Roger admired him enormously at once.

  “Come on,” said the boy. “Wriggle through. I bet you can.”

  Roger was naturally a good wriggler, and his diet had left him so thin that he had no trouble at all in squirming through the gap. He fell on the muddy ground and got up at once.

  “Come on,” said the boy. “Let’s run. We got to get away!”

  “Yeah!” said Roger, joining him at once.

  They ran along between the stalls, and then the other boy turned and crouched in the shadows beside the Ghost Train, waiting to be sure the way was clear.

  “Are you helping us all escape?” said Roger.

  “Why, who else is there?” said the boy. “I thought you was the only freak.”

  “There’s them,” said Roger, pointing up at the painted ghosts and skeletons of the Ghost Train. “They’re all locked in there like I was. We could let them out too.”

  “You’re a downy card, ain’tcher?” said the boy, looking both ways carefully. “Right, come on!”

  And he set off. Roger followed, looking back reluctantly at the still-imprisoned phantoms. Once they were safely in the darkness of the alleys under the castle, the boy stopped.

  “Now,” he said. “You call me Billy, understand?”

  “Oh, yes, I understand,” said Roger. “That’s your name, Billy.”

  “Yeah. Now I been watching you, Rat-Boy. I been in to look at your pit three times today, watching you wriggle. You probably didn’t see me, but I was there. I’m on the lookout for a good wriggler, see, and I admired your style. I thought you wriggled like a champion. I got a job for you, Rat-Boy. So now you got to do as I tell you. Because I rescued you, and it’s like you belong to me; you got to do everything I say.”

  “Oh,” said Roger, nodding. “I’ll remember that.”

  “Yes, you better. You’re the lowest of the low, you are.”

  “The lowest of the low,” said Roger proudly.

  “That’s right. Now listen, and I’ll tell you something you never heard about. You listening?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Roger, eager to learn.

  “Look over there, then,” said Billy, and pointed across the alley. Opposite them was a rusty iron gate with some broken spikes at the top, and through the gate, the dismal gleam of a feeble gas lamp cast a glow over some weed-covered graves and broken tombstones.

  “See that in there?” Billy whispered.

  “Yeah. Looks nice. I bet there’s—”

  “Shut up. It don’t look nice. It looks horrible. Scary, that’s what it looks. That’s where they bury all the dead people. Now real people, like me, we die natural. But rats, like you—”

  “Oh,” said Roger, “I ain’t a rat anymore. I’m a proper boy.”

  “Once a rat, always a rat,” said Billy, and he said it with such simple certainty that it impressed Roger profoundly. He struggled with it, but the words wouldn’t go away. He said them to himself to make sure they were right, and Billy nodded.

  “That’s it,” he said. “Now, you interrupted me, and I don’t like that. Don’t do it again. I was going to say that rats like you never die natural.”

  “Don’t we?”

  “No. You got to be sterminated. If people think there’s rats about, they send for the Sterminator. And if they even so much as suspect you’re a rat underneath, watch out. The Sterminator’ll be on his way.”

  It sounded horrible. Roger gulped and remembered the police sergeant: he had mentioned the Sterminator too. He trembled and managed to say, “What’s it like?”

  “It’s not an it. It’s a him. No one’s ever seen what he’s like. He comes along with his apparatus and—”

  The word apparatus filled Roger with a deep and horrible dread. Terrifying pictures of a faceless man armed with some shadowy eng
ine kept thrusting themselves into his mind, and he couldn’t keep them out.

  “No! Don’t tell me!” he begged.

  “Oh, I’ve got to, Roger,” Billy said gently. “It wouldn’t be right if I didn’t tell you about the Sterminator. What he does with his apparatus”—Roger shivered and moaned—“no one knows, but when he’s been sterminating, there ain’t a single rat left to tell the tale. They find ’em with blood on their whiskers and their faces twisted with a nameless horror.”

  “I ain’t got no whiskers,” said Roger, in faint hope.

  “Wouldn’t make no difference. The Sterminator, he can tell if someone’s a rat underneath, even if they look like a boy in every particular.”

  “Has there been other rats turned into boys, then?”

  “Yeah. Doesn’t happen often, but it has been known. The Sterminator’s very hard on those cases. They’re the ones he wants to sterminate most of all.”

  “Like me,” whispered Roger, clutching himself with both arms.

  “Just like you. It’s a good thing you got me to look after you, innit? You do as I say and I’ll keep the Sterminator off you. But you disobey me and I’ll be so upset I’ll forget. And the Sterminator’ll have you while my back’s turned, he’s that quick.”

  “Oh, no, don’t forget,” Roger begged.

  “Don’t upset me and I won’t. Now you come along o’ me and we’ll find something to eat. You hungry?”

  Roger was shaking so hard he felt his teeth chatter and his knees knock. He clenched his jaw and nodded, and gripped his knees to stop them from knocking, in case the sound attracted the Sterminator. There was a loose and swimmy sensation all around him.

  “Follow me, then,” said Billy.

  He led Roger down another alley, into a courtyard lit only by the gleam on the wet cobbles, and lifted the lid of a coal chute. A faint glow came up, accompanied by the smell of frying.

  “Down you go,” said Billy, shoving hard, and before he knew what was happening, Roger had slid and tumbled onto the dusty floor of a cellar, where a ring of glittering eyes surrounded him.