THE MICE IN THE WALLS

by Vladicoff

It had been fifteen years since the wedding had been arranged. Marital life wasn't quite bliss, but it was manageable. Even though the wedding had been arranged, and she'd never even met him until the altar, despite it all, she could say that she loved her husband. He provided for the family as best he could, was a shoulder she could cry on, didn't cheat much, and always made sure the neighbours' nosey noses were kept out of their private lives.

Today though, as with not a few occasions in the past, he was taxing her patience a little bit. He was not the most punctual of husbands (routinely showing up late to dinners, visits with relatives, their anniversary), which wasn't a big deal as far as she was concerned - but when it interfered with his duties not just as a husband, but as a father, then it really got on her nerves. Today was one such day.

Their son, recently turned twelve, was up to bat, in the biggest game in his young baseball career. Their daughter, a year or so younger, was cheering from the front row. But what of their proud father, her husband? It was getting late. The stands were full (well, as full as one could expect them to be for a middle school match); the other suburban fathers, clad in white and khaki shorts, were cheering on their kids and tossing forth advice, much to the annoyance of their coach. The mothers were there also, cheering and shouting louder than the men, some of them red in the face. The game was well underway. Where was he?

All of a sudden, she caught out of the corner of her eye the familiar red car. It skidded to a halt in the lot next door - haphazardly wedged across three parking spaces - and out of the door popped her husband. It was Stuart Little.

Stuart Little rushed up the stands to his adoring wife and kissed her cheek.

'Sorry I'm late,' said Stuart Little. 'Things were busy back at the office.' He grinned to himself.

Buoyed by his dad's cheers, the boy batted swimmingly, and over the course of the next half hour his team clinched the game. The two coaches shook hands agreeably and parted ways - one to celebrate at a nearby pizza joint, the other to console itself with ice cream. Stuart Little patted his son affectionately and dropped him off at the pizzeria. The sun was dazzling overhead, not a cloud in sight, and the day's prospects were as bright as the day itself.

Stuart Little got down to business.

First things first. Lunch break at the office was coming to a close; he had to hurry. He sped along the road downtown, and was delighted to find the parking lot near-deserted. Only one car, Lindsay-the-secretary's, was there. Perfect.

He slipped into the office and greeted her. She'd long had a crush on him, and it was time to put that fact to use. With a few whispered words, he had her writing out a note addressed to his wife:

'Don't stay up. He's going to come home tonight'

The finishing touch was provided by a lipstick kiss at the bottom-right.

Stuart Little then took out a tie (a bright-red, silky tie) he had brought with him, and wrapped it around Lindsay's neck, and strangled her to death. Doubling back, he took the note and dropped it off at his mailbox, before speeding off out of the suburbs. He stopped at a hardware store along the way.

His objective was the house of Billy-Thornton Folsom, coach of the baseball team Stuart Little's son had faced against. The coach lived off a bit beyond the suburb, in a large house with his wife and two daughters. Stuart Little parked in the shade of some trees at the edge of the property, and snaked his way through the immaculately cut field of homogenous grass that surrounded the house on all sides. It was starting to get dark; clouds, absent for most of the day, had since rolled in and slowly blanketed the region in a greying dull. He snuck in through one of the house's two chimneys, and set up a little base of operations.

Folsom sat down to dinner. There was an odd scratching sound somewhere in the house, or so he thought - whenever he tried pointing it out to his family, it would inevitably cease. The scratching died down by the time the dishes were washed, so he shrugged it off. Perhaps his brain was playing tricks on him after having sustained a baseball to the head during the match.

But at night, the noises resumed. They seemed to come now from behind the headboard, right behind him - just noisome enough to wake him up, just quiet enough to keep his wife in slumber. It was driving Folsom crazy. Slowly, imperceptibly, the sounds shifted, from a scratching to to a scurrying. The scurrying would go from up to down, from ceiling to floor, before - after a short pause - repeating this ad nauseam. Mice in the walls, he thought. Mice in the walls, leading downwards. Perhaps the attic was infested? Neither him nor his wife had been there in years; it was very possible that breeding mice had made it their home. But why were they, seemingly one at a time and with a rhythmic regularity, heading towards the ground - towards the cellar? Try as he might to ignore it, his curiosity won out, and he soon had on his slippers and was carefully shuffling out the door.

As he made his way down the flights of steps, the scurrying kept shifting; first this room, then that one, the the hallway: it was as if every wall in the house was no more than a network of mouse tunnels hidden away behind a thin facade of wallpaper. The thought terrified him. How long had his house, the house his family lived and slept in, been infested? Could it be that when his daughters played, mere inches from them lay tunnel after tunnel full of rodents? He hesitated before the basement door, but, with thoughts of his family, steeled himself and entered.

Like the rest of the house, their cellar was vast: while the flight down the stairs was illuminable from the hallway lights above, the rest was shrouded in a cavernous darkness. Folsom reached the bottom and felt for the light-switch, only to find it was missing; someone, or something, had ripped it from the wall. Had his foot not them knocked into a flashlight on the bottom step, he would have turned and fled. Picking up the flashlight in trembling hands, he turned it on.

Nothing seemed amiss (though, with the flashlight's feeble rays, how could one be sure?), and Folsom made his way past old sports equipment and forgotten tools. He was following the scurrying, which had now grown intense and frantic. The mouse-feet were pattering in circles, just beyond his flashlight's reach. Whenever he stepped forward, the circle tightened, the sounds keeping themselves just beyond his sight. Perhaps he could catch them if he ran, but the clutter of strewn objects at his feet precluded anything more than a slow and hesitant tread, and so the mice were always just out of eye's reach. In this manner the sounds congregated closer and closer to one particular corner of the basement.

It was then, as he neared that corner, moments away from tearing off its shrouding darkness, that the door at the top of the stairs gently closed shut.

In a panic, Folsom shone his light around as he reeled and tried to make sense of the situation. For the first time he noticed what was dangling from the walls, just a foot or two above his head. Meat hooks. The scurrying sound came to a halt, the silence coming so suddenly it was as a thunderclap. He edged the next few feet forward and shone the light upon where the last mouse-foot sound came. There, in the corner, standing atop a pile of old newspapers, was Stuart Little.

The screams that ensued were enough to wake the rest of the household. By the time the mother, ushering away her frightened kids, was able to force open the basement door, they had ended, and silence reigned. Picking up a flashlight propped against the bottom step, she ventured in.

The corpses of the Folsom family would not be found for another week.

By dawn's break, Stuart Little had reached through the suburbs to the inner city. His wife, a few miles away, was still crying. He stashed his car at an abandoned warehouse, and took out his tools.

Two days later, the city mayor received at his office door an oddly wrapped gift. Peeling back the layers of scrap paper, he uncovered a necklace of strung-together human toes, which investigators would later determine belonged to the now-infected feet of the detainees of the town juvenile detention centre. On each toe was carved a letter; a puzzled - and horrified - quarter-hour ensued before the mayoral staff tried arranging them in order of size. The toes spelt out: 'Pellman Heights'. A tenement building, in the poorest ghetto. Police were summoned to the scene.

They found nothing amiss about the site, until it dawned on them that not a sound had greeted their forceful entry into the building. No angry shouts, no frightened screams. Only silence. A few of the officers felt faint and light-headed, and the force retreated. This was repeated several times, until after an hour or so it was possible to venture in without consequence. The tenement residents, all one hundred and eighty-seven souls, had perished of monoxide poisoning.

Explosions followed in the night. A stove here, a car there - until the crack of morning, when all the city's gas stations went up in flames. A dozens had perished in the night; in the subsequent fires that spread from these, the toll rose to thousands by midday. Trampling each other as they tried to flee, hundreds were incinerated mere feet away from safety.

Though no nearby explosions had occurred, another fire broke out by the late morning. The city library, with all its books and preserved manuscripts and troves of scholarship, slowly burned. There was no-one inside, on account of the panic that was rapidly spreading through town, and by the time twilight came, and the spreading flames were visible from the street, all within it was lost.

A state of emergency was called - the mayor's last act before he somehow disappeared - and police, augmented by outside reinforcements, patrolled every street. Conflicting orders were given; in one district, evacuations were organised, while in another, officers swore they'd been ordered to enforce a curfew. The night passed tensely.

Stuart Little was alone with the mayor now. The latter did not know where he was being held; it appeared to be a hospital room of sorts. Stuart Little had his back to him, flipping casually through television channels. He flicked through them with a bored air, until he got to the international news. Dominating the airwaves was the nascent ethnic cleansing of the Disnians in France. Subtitled footage of Prime Minister Alfredo Linguini, responsible for the expulsions, took up most of the screen [see "Remy and the Little Chef"]. Stuart Little stared intently at the television, and scowl slowly forming on his face.

'Remy…' he hissed. 'Up to your old tricks. I thought I'd seen the end of you. This time, I won't be as careless…'

He straightened up in his seat and turned to the frightened mayor.

'I had planned to be in town for a week at least, but this changes things. I guess we'll have to make do with a matinee of my finale. There's no time to waste.'

At first light, the tense and sleepless residents of the city witnessed a single point of flame - a torch - rise above City Hall. As crowds, shepherded along by nervous police, stopped to stare despite their fears, a gruesome sight ensued. The living, breathing body of the mayor was strung up on a cross that rose slowly out of the roof. After a moment's hesitation, the torch above it fell, and the cross burned. The mayor's death-agonies were drowned in the tide of screams, as the sounds of renewed explosions buffeted the city.

The explosions were minor: a few bombs in dilapidated, abandoned old buildings; a collapsing beam or two showering the nearby neighbourhood in dust. Nobody died from these bombs; as a matter of fact, nobody was meant to. Their aim was to tip this frightened populace, high-strung and flinching after a day and night of terrors, over the edge. A panic soon formed; a stampede followed. Residents from one district ran one way, headlong into the fleeing denizens from another. Parents trampled children, children trampled each other; cars ran over pedestrians until the glut of bodies stopped them in their tracks. Hundreds of bodies littered every street, thousands clogged the highways. Of those that did manage to flee the city, few families had not lost a loved one in the panic. It was a deathtrap.

By the time the mayor burned, Stuart Little was long gone. He drove his little red car along the highway for miles and miles, never stopping, never slowing down. Alas, there was one flaw in his plan: after a hundred miles, a short bit before his destination, he ran out of gas.

Stuart Little trudged on foot for an hour, steadily losing hope that he'd be able to catch his flight. Luckily for him, he chanced upon a bus station just as the bus was passing by.

'The airport?' asked the elderly driver.

'That's right,' replied Stuart Little.

'I'll drop ya right off, buddy - shouldn't be more than an hour till we get there. Where ya flying to?'

'Montreuil-sur-Mer, France.'

The rest of the journey passed in silence. There were three other passengers aboard, two of which had the same destination. After forty-five minutes, the bus arrived at the airport and the doors opened.

Stuart Little went on his way, without thanking the bus driver.