Switchers (22 page)

Tess’s concentration was abruptly broken by a loud scratching noise from Algernon’s cage. She turned and saw him trying to burrow into the corner where his wheel had been, throwing sawdust all over the cage and out through the bars.

‘Poor old Algernon,’ said Tess and then, in Rat, ‘Wheel, huh?’

Algernon made no reply, but turned his attention to another corner of the cage and continued to scrabble away desperately. It was uncharacteristic behaviour, and it worried Tess. She picked up the wheel and began again to unravel the wound-up paper from around the axle. She had done most of the work that morning, and it didn’t take long to free it and clear the last few shreds which were draped between the bars.

‘Here you go, Algie. Is this what you want?’ Tess opened the hatch in the top of the cage and reached in with the wheel in her hand. Before she could react, before she could even blink, Algernon had run up the bars of the cage, out through the hatch, and down Tess’s legs to the floor. Tess stared at him in amazement. She had never seen him behave like that before. Something must have happened to him. His timidity was gone, and instead of bumbling round short-sightedly he was scuttling into the corners of the room and scratching at the carpet with his claws.

Quickly, Tess refitted the wheel and checked that it was spinning freely. Then she tidied up the floor of the cage, picked the stray shavings out of the food-bowl, and replaced the dirty water with fresh from the tap.

By this time Algernon was at the door, poking his paws into the narrow gap beneath it and gnawing at the wood with his teeth. When Tess reached down to pick him up, he jumped in fright, as though he had been taken by surprise. He had never done that before, either. He wriggled and squirmed as she pushed him through the small door of the cage, and threw himself against it when she closed it. Tess hoped it was the loss of the wheel that had upset him, and that once he found it back in its place he would settle himself down. His behaviour disturbed her more than she liked to admit, and she wondered if she should take him to the vet.

‘White rat in pain, huh?’ she said to him. ‘White rat afraid of sore head? Sore belly?’

Algernon paused in his restless scurrying and looked at her. ‘White rat go,’ he said, his thought images dim and poorly formed. ‘White rat go under city.’

His pictures of the rats’ underground system were whimsy, like a young child’s drawing of a fairy-tale land. But it was the first time he had used that image, or even given any intimation that he knew such a place existed.

‘Brown rats in tunnels,’ said Tess. ‘Brown rats tough, fierce, biting white rat.’

‘White rat go,’ said Algernon stubbornly, his restlessness returning. ‘White rat go, white rat go, white rat go.’ He began to chew with his yellow teeth at the bars of the cage.

Tess sighed. ‘Teeth worn down,’ she said to him. ‘Sunflower seeds won’t open, white rat hungry.’

Algernon took no notice whatsoever. Tess returned to the window, but it was impossible for her to relax with the sound of Algernon chewing and scratching and rushing around his cage. Eventually she picked up a book and went downstairs, hoping that he would settle down in her absence. If he was still the same way tomorrow she could bring him to the vet.

Her parents were glad to see her coming down, and her father made room for her on the sofa beside him.

‘Everything all right?’ he said.

‘Just Algernon. He’s a bit restless. It’s not like him.’

‘I expect he needs a pal,’ said her mother. ‘What about getting another one?’

‘As long as it’s not female,’ said her father. ‘There’s enough rats in the world as it is without breeding more of them.’

Tess laughed, reassured. The TV programme was humorous, the room was warm, and she had no premonition at all of the dramatic changes that were about to come into her life.

When the evening film was over, Tess brought an apple upstairs to share with Algernon as a bed-time treat. The rat however, had other things on his mind. The room was cold when Tess came into it, and the first thing she did was to go across and close the window. There was no sign of the phoenix beyond it, and she turned her attention to Algernon. He was upside down, hanging by his paws to the wire roof and gnawing on the metal clasp which kept the roof hatch secure. The water bowl had been knocked over again, and almost the entire contents of the cage had been hurled through the bars, littering up the room in a wide circle around the cage. Tess groaned and fought down a desire to punish the white rat. He was already disturbed enough, and scaring him further would not accomplish anything. Far better to try and find out what the problem was.

‘Apple, huh?’ she said.

In reply, Algernon dropped from the top of the cage, twisting in mid-air so that he landed on his feet, then proceeded to perform the most extraordinary feat of rodent gymnastics, leaping up the sides of the cage, across the roof and down to the floor again in a dizzying sequence of somersaults.

‘White rat go, white rat go, white rat go,’ he repeated as he swung wildly around.

Tess began to realise that the situation was much more serious than she had thought. It was clear now that the problem wasn’t just going to disappear and there was no sense in trying to ignore it. Where did Algernon want to go, and why? She turned his repetitive visual statement into a question and, in reply, Algernon sent a most extraordinary image into her mind.

It was a little like the visual name the city rats had given to Kevin, a gruesome mixture of rat and a rat’s conception of a boy. But this new image was vaguer, and tied up with other images as well; wolves perhaps, and bats, all in darkness. Strangest thing of all, and the most disturbing thing to Tess’s human mind, was that this being was calling. It was calling for all the rats in the city to come towards it, and the reason for Algernon’s behaviour was suddenly crystal clear. For Tess could tell without any doubt that if she had been a rat at that moment, she would have had no resistance whatsoever to that call.

T
ESS SAT ON THE
windowsill and stared out into the darkness, longing for the phoenix to come. Behind her, Algernon was still raiding against the sides of his cage, his anxiety growing into a kind of dementia as he found that all his efforts were useless. Tess kept her mind firmly closed to his pathetic babbling. The weird communication that she had tuned into with her rat mind disturbed her a great deal and she knew that she was turning her back on the problem. But the lure of the phoenix was too strong.

Her parents’ door eventually closed, and in a surprisingly short time she heard her father’s regular snores coming through the wall. There was still no sign of the golden creature, but as she looked out into the darkness, Tess realised that this didn’t matter. She could still re-live the experience on her own. The wonder of being a phoenix had nothing to do with companionship. It was beyond companionship; beyond all worldly attachments.

She was just on the point of deciding to Switch when something happened which made her change her mind. In a last, desperate attempt to break free, Algernon hurled himself at the door of the cage with such force that it sprang open and he found himself sliding over the edge of the chest of drawers and falling towards the floor. Tess caught sight of him as he fell, but before she could get to him he had landed, picked himself up, and was racing towards the corner of the room.

Tess followed, irritated by the delay but concerned as well. Despite Algernon’s limitations as a companion, she was fond of him and she would have hated to see him coming to any harm.

There was no fireplace in Tess’s room but there had been one, long ago, and the chimney-breast ran up one wall. Beside it was a redundant corner, about the size of a wardrobe, and Tess had helped her father to put doors across it when they first moved in. She kept her clothes there, hanging from an old broom handle, and beneath them her shoes and boots were arranged on the floor.

Algernon ran straight towards this cupboard as though he knew exactly where he was going. Tess and her father had never got around to fixing bolts on to the doors, and they always stood slightly open. Algernon nosed through the gap and disappeared among the footwear. Tess followed and pulled the doors wide open, just in time to see the rat’s pink tail disappearing down a tiny gap between the floorboards and the wall of the chimney-breast. There was only one way to follow him. Switching had become so much a part of Tess’s nature that she no longer had to think about it. She didn’t even stand still but, in one fluid movement, changed into a brown rat and went slithering down the hole in hot pursuit.

Beneath the floor and behind the walls, a maze of old rat passage-ways ran through the house. Tess hadn’t known they were there, but she might have guessed. All old houses are riddled with rat-runs, even if they aren’t in current use.

Despite Tess’s speed, Algernon had already disappeared behind the first of the joists which ran beneath the floorboards. But to her surprise, Tess realised that she didn’t need to follow him. Her rat mind had picked up on the command from the mysterious stranger, and there was no doubt that she and Algernon were heading in the same direction.

She scuttled down through the walls of the house, between the courses of bricks, until she came into a long, rat-made conduit which connected with the drains. At the end of that, she caught a glimpse of Algernon’s tail as he turned a bend in a pipe. She accelerated, and after a few more twists and turns she found that she was gaining on him. Before long she had caught up, but when she tried to communicate with him, he ignored her, his mind fixed exclusively on the unknown destination ahead.

The most direct way of following the call led the two rats across the city by way of drains and under-floor passages. Tess was surprised by Algernon’s speed and agility, and also by his apparent lack of fear. She realised as she ran beside him that this was what he had been deprived of as he grew up in his artificial environment. It was no surprise that he was dull-witted and inarticulate, since he had missed out on the rats’ basic education in life. But all that was changing now. Who could tell how much his intelligence might increase, provided he could avoid the common pitfalls of city rats and stay alive long enough to learn his way around.

One of these hazards, poison, was very much in evidence in several of the gardens they had to pass through. Tess was on guard, but Algernon was far too preoccupied to be diverted by food, no matter how enticing it smelled. Where cats were concerned, however, his single-mindedness was a considerable handicap and, on two separate occasions, Tess had to rescue him; once by steering him away from the waiting jaws of a large tom, and once by charging a cat that was just about to grab him from behind. The cat was so surprised by Tess’s aggression that she turned tail and fled, and by the time she had recovered herself, the two rats were long gone.

The rest of the journey was safer. When they joined the sewers, Algernon proved to be an excellent swimmer, and his regular exercise on the wheel had made him fit enough to cope with the slippery exertions of climbing back out of them. By the time they surfaced, in order to cross a small open square, he was a lot less white than he had been, but still not as camouflaged as Tess would have liked him to be. Because what she feared most for him had yet to be encountered, and that was the reaction of the other rats. She was not surprised that they hadn’t come across any before now, because she was working on the assumption that all the others within range of the strange call had got a long head start on them. They were stragglers, she and Algernon, bringing up the rear. But she knew that before long they would be getting close to their destination, close to the moment of truth.

They dropped back into the underworld by means of a hole in the ground beneath the cover of bushes in a corner of the tiny park. Tess called to Algernon again, warning him to take his time and watch out for cats, but when she opened her mind for his reply she caught nothing but a babble of rat images. They were close. Above them, they could hear the deep rumble of a car passing along a street. A moment later they were on the other side and, surprisingly, beginning to climb.

Abruptly, Algernon stopped. He was ahead of Tess and blocking the narrow passage which ran higgledy piggledy through a foundation wall between detached houses. She couldn’t see beyond him, but she could hear the restless rustling of a great gathering of rats. Impatiently, Tess squeezed her way in beside Algernon, whose fluid body seemed to elongate as he made room for her in the narrow space. They were looking into the kitchen of a vacant house. Tess held her breath, astonished by what she was seeing. There were rats of all shapes and sizes: rats with grey coats, brown coats, black coats, sleek rats and mangy rats, thin rats and fat ones, all milling around in an aimless fashion. The dim light on their moving backs made Tess think of water, rippling and flowing. The kitchen was flooded with rats.

Her first concern was for Algernon. The hole in the wall where they were standing was about two feet from the ground. It would be easy to slip down the wall on to the floor, but not so easy to climb back up if there was trouble down there. A rat could scale that height in a flash, but not without a run-up. Already a few twitching noses were beginning to turn and look with curiosity at the two newcomers. Tess tried to pick up on the reactions, but the images she received were the visual equivalent of a roar in a football stadium—it was impossible to pick out any individual communication. She scanned the crowd, hoping to find someone she knew, but there was no one she recognised. She hesitated, and beside her Algernon was hesitating too. Whatever certainty had brought him here was severely weakened by the sight of so many rough and street-wise relatives.

Their decision was made for them. Without warning, another group of latecomers arrived in the passage behind them and, in their urgency to obey the call, they crowded forward relentlessly, pushing Tess and Algernon out of the hole in the wall and down into the restless mob below. Tess scrabbled through the crowd, desperate to stay close to Algernon and defend him against attack, but to her relief it proved unnecessary. The other rats grudgingly made space for him on the floor. Those closest to him inspected him curiously, but none had time or energy for aggression. All minds were firmly fixed on the powerful call that had brought them together.