A Nest for Celeste (4 page)

C
eleste swallowed the lump in her throat and took a deep breath, as deep as a little mouse could take. She turned, her eyes following the railing up, up, up into the shadows, and started to climb. Her little claws clinging, she scaled the slope higher and higher until the hallway below her looked distant and foreign. Never in her life had Celeste been so high or felt so dizzy, or so exhilarated. She had to pause about halfway up, a bit out of breath. She glanced down. A flashing sense of vertigo filled her, and her ears blazed pink with a rush of blood. She felt enormously tiny in the cavernous hallway.

But she began to notice things that she had not seen before. There was the top of the tall, looming hallway clock. She had never known there was a
painting of the sun and moon on its face. The hanging ceiling fixture, seen up close, had tiny figures and wrought-iron vines on it that she had not been able to spot before. And the carpet runner, viewed from such a distance, now revealed a pattern of lines and flowers.

“What a palace I’ve lived in!” whispered Celeste.

She spent a moment looking at the world from this new perspective. The railing sloped up, beckoning her on. She kept climbing.

She climbed until the handrail dead-ended abruptly at a wall. By now it was nearly dawn, and the basket sagged heavily, and her shoulder ached. There was no sign of the cat.

She partly slid, partly climbed down to the floor.

Where to now? She had never been directionless
before. It was a strange and uncomfortable feeling to have nowhere to go.

The soft light of early morning
crept from beneath a door. Celeste scurried cautiously down the hallway and, sniffing anxiously, peered under the door.

She was looking into a small room. It had one window. The window sash was raised, and Celeste could hear birds singing as dawn awakened the garden outside. Under the window stood a small desk, which was covered with stacks of paper. Several jars of water lined the desk, each holding the stalks of a variety of plants.

An old shirt hung on a nail in the door. On top of a tall armoire was an empty cage. Tacked on the wall Celeste saw a series of small paintings, each one of a plant or an insect.

A small, low cot faced the window.
The dark recesses under the cot looked quiet and undisturbed, covered with a layer of dust. A leather boot lay on its side.

Celeste was completely exhausted; the night had been a long one.

The old boot looked inviting enough, although as
Celeste crawled into the toe, she saw it was a little dark and stuffy, and it smelled of human perspiration. But the space fit her perfectly; she even imagined herself inside one of her baskets, in the domed darkness. And she felt protected; should the cat ever roam the upstairs rooms, its claws couldn’t reach deep enough into the boot.

But it needed sprucing up, and Celeste needed a bed. Cautiously exploring the room, she found several dried leaves that had fallen to the floor from the plants on the desk. She stuffed them into the toe of the boot. To these she added chewed bits of paper from several sheets she had nibbled through. Her prize find was an old woolen sock; she dragged the whole thing across the room with her teeth, then nibbled and unraveled it until she had made a satisfactory nest.

She liked her new home. “Well, I guess ‘cozy’ is a word for it,” Celeste told herself. She closed her eyes and fell asleep.

H
er basket, unfortunately, held but one lima bean. The next night she decided that as much as she dreaded the search, she needed to find food.

She slung the basket over her shoulder and started out. It was a full night’s journey down the flight of stairs and back up again. Hopefully, the return trip would be laden with spoils from the dining room.

She reached the main hallway and then lightly
scampered to the dining room. She scanned the carpet, ears flicking in all directions, straining in the still air for any unusual sounds. The hallway clock chimed. Twelve gongs.

Celeste’s nose detected a piece of fatback over by a chair leg, and her basket began to fill. A minuscule scrap of sausage lay hidden under the folds of a linen napkin, along with several nut meats hidden among some cracked pecan shells. Seven watermelon seeds were scattered across the carpet. She gathered them all, stuffing them into her basket.

She raced back to the shadow of the sideboard to catch her breath. She hesitated, then darted to the hole; one of the baskets she had left behind would be useful now.

She raced down the tunnel to her old home.

The matchbox bed sat undisturbed. Her baskets lay around the room just as before. She grabbed one of the large, sturdier ones and stuffed it quickly with
dried grasses, strands of horsehair, and a few feathers from her collection. She glanced once more around the little room. It looked crowded, dark, dusty, musty. Memories of life here seemed stale and backward now. She was excited about her new home in the toe of the boot. After a moment she headed out.

Back in the dining room, the umber underside of the table loomed above her like a starless night sky. She quickly covered the area at the head of the table, usually the more bountiful end. Here she found several more morsels: a crusty fragment of a baguette, complete with a tiny dab of butter; a slice of pickled okra; a bit of cheese.
The master of the house is a messy eater,
Celeste thought as she gathered a dozen bread crumbs, a burned crust of spoon bread, a greasy scrap of goose skin, and a raisin. She nibbled at a fallen dab of plum marmalade for energy. She raced to the hall doorway.

The baskets were full, and heavy. She paused to
catch her breath, scan the scene, and listen. A shadowy figure silently drifted into the room. The cat.

It moved intently to the spot where the marmalade had been sticking to the carpet. It sniffed the area, its nose dipping and rising slowly several times while its pupils widened.

Celeste took a deep, deep breath, then raced toward the stairs.

The cat saw movement and tore across the carpet. Celeste heard the cat’s breath right behind her and squealed in terror.

Suddenly there was the sound of the front door opening and human footsteps walking into the house. The sound of more claws spattered across the floorboards as a brown dog, as big as a dining-room chair, came tearing around the corner from the parlor. Barking and braying, it headed straight for the cat.

The cat stopped dead in its tracks. Then, turning blindly in panic, it ran straight into a corner by the clock, the dog following closely behind.

Celeste never stopped. She reached the newel post in less than a second and scurried up it as fast as she could. The baskets slowed her down; but with the cat distracted by the giant dog, she made it safely to the top.

Several doors opened upstairs, and heads peered over the stair rail into the darkness.

A gruff voice yelled from the top of the stairs: “Audubon! Blast it, can’t you keep that dog of yours quiet?”

“Dash!” reprimanded a voice from the parlor. “Quiet,
you! You’ll wake the dead! Dash! Quiet, I say!”

“What’s going on down there, anyway?”

“
Pardonnez-moi
, Monsieur Pirrie. It won’t happen again. Monsieur Joseph and I have just returned from our hunting trip. My apologies. Dash! Come!”

The dog obediently sauntered back into the parlor, with a backward glance at the glaring cat. Footsteps moved across the floor above, followed by bedroom doors slamming. A moment later Celeste watched as Audubon and Joseph retreated upstairs to their rooms, passing quietly by in the darkness. Then, silence.

Celeste waited for the house to settle down again before continuing her journey up. She slipped beneath the door and scurried to her boot. It had been a grueling night, but she had food that would last for days, if not weeks. Only when she had tucked away her baskets and was burrowing into her nest to go to sleep did she notice something strange: the sound of snoring coming from the cot above her head.