Magnus Powermouse

by Dick King-Smith

  The sleeping baby awoke. His first action was to take a bite from the pill which he held, but, this done, he raised a questing nose.

  ‘Nasty!’ said Magnus loudly.

  ‘Shhh, dear,’ whispered Madeleine, ‘it’s only an old cat. Just you keep still and quiet, there’s a good boy.’

  ‘Nasty cat!’ said Magnus with a shout, and the tip of the cat’s tail, which hung down between a crack in the boards as it sat directly above them, twitched sharply at the sound of the squeak.

  ‘Your mother is right, Magnus,’ said Marcus Aurelius in a low voice. ‘Our best course of action is to preserve silence and to remain unmoving. We are quite safe in our present location. Eventually, if I do not miss my guess, and I may tell you that I have a vast amount of experience in these matters, very vast –’ he paused ‘– very vast indeed – eventually, as I was saying, the creature will fall victim to boredom –’

  ‘So shall us all,’ said Madeleine under her breath.

  ‘– and go away.’

  ‘Bite you!!’ yelled Magnus at the top of his voice.

  ‘No, it won’t bite you, my love,’ said Madeleine soothingly. ‘It can’t get in under here, you see, it’s too –’ But before she could finish Magnus threw aside his pill and rose stiff-legged from the nest, his eyes snapping, his coat-hair standing on end.

  ‘Bite you!!’ he cried again, and leaping forward, he fastened his needle teeth in the dangling tail-tip.

  There was a split second of absolute silence and then an explosion of sound and movement above. Madeleine and Marcus Aurelius stared at one another in horror. Of Magnus there was no sign.

  THREE

  The Ghost

  When the startled cat shot up in the air with a yowl and out of the sty and over the wall, Magnus hung on like grim death. And grim death – for him – it most certainly would have been but for one of those quirks of Fate that rule all lives.

  The cat’s leap caught the eye of the dog from the cottage next door, a small fierce terrier which spent many of its waking hours patrolling the rusty chain-link fence that separated the two properties. Whenever it saw its ancient enemy it bounced furiously against the fence, hoping against hope that one day the wire would disintegrate and let it through. And on this occasion it did.

  Halfway down the garden path the cat had stopped to investigate the cause of the pain in its tail-tip. The paw that scooped Magnus neatly from his hold was midway to its mouth when the terrier appeared at top speed.

  Dropped abruptly by the cat and promptly trampled upon by the charging dog, the unfortunate baby was left breathless and dizzy. His spirit however had not deserted him, for he ground his little teeth in anger and still muttered ‘Bite you! Bite you!’ in a small strangled voice. He picked himself up and made unsteadily for the nearest shelter, which happened to be the greenhouse. Its sliding door was open a few inches and through it Magnus crawled.

  A moment later the dog came rushing back, tail between legs and hotly pursued by the cottagers in defence of their cat. There followed a good deal of noise – the cat owners shouting at the dog owners, the dog owners shouting back, and the dog barking loudly from the safety of his own garden – and then Magnus heard the sound of footsteps coming back down the path, and of grumbly voices. ‘Them and their dratted dog!’ and ‘I’ll shoot him. See if I don’t!’ and then ‘Pull the greenhouse door to, will you?’

  There was a scraping noise and a thud and Magnus was a prisoner.

  For some time he did not realize that he could not get out. As usual, his first thought, once he had caught his breath, was of food, and food to him at present meant anything he could put in his mouth. ‘Nasty! Nasty! Nasty!’ cried Magnus as he spat out in turn mouthfuls of peat, of potting compost and of fertilizer granules. But then he came upon a great pile of dahlia bulbs laid out to dry, and finding the flavour pleasant, settled down to the biggest one.

  Soon it was dark outside, and Madeleine and Marcus Aurelius prepared to make their sorrowing way back indoors.

  ‘Oh, Markie, Markie,’ said Madeleine for the umpteenth time. ‘D’you think he could still be alive, somehow?’

  ‘Try to compose yourself, Maddie dear,’ said Marcus patiently. ‘The chances of his survival are, as I have said, extremely remote. Any mouse, it is painfully clear to me, that is attached to the tail of a cat pursued by a dog, must be, to say the least, and with no attempt to mince words, in dire trouble, very dire.’ He paused. ‘Very dire indeed.’

  ‘And him so little,’ cried Madeleine.

  ‘Hardly so little,’ said Marcus. ‘He was already far larger than either of us.’

  But Madeleine could by no means be comforted by the thought of her son’s stature at the moment of death, and it was some time before she could be persuaded to come out of the pigsty into the night.

  ‘Suppose we finds him!’ she said in sudden terror. ‘Suppose we finds him, led by the path, poor little soul?’

  ‘Highly unlikely,’ said Marcus Aurelius judiciously. ‘He will undoubtedly have already been –’ he was about to say ‘eaten’ but hurriedly changed it to ‘laid to rest’.

  ‘Oh, Markie, I’m feared to go up thik path!’

  ‘Nonsense, my dear, I will go first. There is no reason to be afraid.’

  But Madeleine was, and as she tiptoed up the garden path behind the scuttling Marcus Aurelius her eyes were out on stalks, searching the black night for some unknown horror.

  Inside the greenhouse Magnus was in all sorts of trouble. He had gorged upon the dahlia bulb until he became very thirsty; on the floor was an old metal watering-can, full, and in drinking from this he had lost his balance and fallen in; it was only his unusual strength that allowed him somehow to scramble out again, soaked to the skin, whereupon he promptly blundered into a brown paper bag of garden lime and was plastered in it from head to toe, white as snow. Finally, he had at last discovered that he was shut in, and was raging around in a perfect fury.

  At the very moment that Madeleine was passing the greenhouse, every nerve stretched tight, Magnus was standing in the darkness not a yard from her. He stood up on his hindlegs, his forefeet pressed against the inside of the closed glass door, his mouth wide open in a furious yell of frustration and anger. And at that instant the moon swam out from behind the clouds and shone full upon him.

  Madeleine’s squeal of terror was so loud as to be heard by Marcus Aurelius who was already safely in the family home behind the larder, and not many seconds later she came tumbling in after him.

  ‘Oh, Markie, Markie!’ cried Madeleine breathlessly. ‘I seen him!’

  ‘Seen . . . that is to say, saw whom?’

  ‘Our Magnus! Oh, it was horrible, what I seen!’

  ‘You saw his . . . body?’

  ‘No! No!’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘His ghost! Oh crumbs, Markie, you wouldn’t believe how horrible it was! He was stood up on two legs like a human, and his little hands was spread out, asking for help, and he was calling to me – I could see though I couldn’t hear nothing – and his hair was all spiky like a hedgehog’s. But what was worst of all, he was white, white as a sheet from tip to tail. Oh, Markie, ’twas his ghost all right, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh!!!’ And Madeleine went off into such a fit of screaming hysterics that the cottagers came into the kitchen and opened the larder door.

  ‘Just listen to them,’ said the man to his wife. ‘Dratted mice! You’d think they owned the place, they’re so noisy. It’s time to get the traps out.’

  FOUR

  Too Too Solid Flesh

  Inside his trap Magnus was in quite a state. During the night he had fallen once more into the watering-can, washing off most of the lime but becoming as a result extremely muddy as he rampaged around the earthen floor looking for a way of escape. His tousled coat clogged with soil, he now looked more like a half-grown sewer-rat than a baby mouse. He was also very angry.

  In the middle of the morning the woman came down the garden path to open
the sliding door a little, for the November weather was unusually mild, and the humidity in the greenhouse, she knew, would do her plants no good. No sooner had she put a carpet-slippered foot inside than, to her horror, it was pounced upon by a fierce animal, the like of which she had never seen before, which gave a high-pitched growl and sank its teeth into her ankle.

  ‘Nasty! Nasty!’ cried Magnus indistinctly through clenched jaws, ‘Bite you!’ before a frantic kick sent him flying, and his chatters of rage mingled with the frightened cries of his victim as she hastily limped back up the path to fetch her husband. But when they returned a few moments later, each armed with a stout stick, there was no sign of her attacker. Only the pile of half-eaten dahlia bulbs told its own tale.

  ‘Must have been a rat,’ said the man.

  ‘Not like any rat I ever saw.’

  ‘Fetch the cat. He might follow it.’

  But like all its kind the cat had no desire to do what humans wished it to, and only stalked away again, tail twitching.

  Magnus meantime had found his way back to the pigsty. His anger had been replaced by his other chief emotion, greed. He had also acquired a new word to supplement his meagre vocabulary.

  ‘Nice,’ murmured Magnus, as he laid into a Porker Pill with a noise like splintering bones. ‘Nice. Nice.’

  Inside the cottage Madeleine and Marcus Aurelius were breakfasting, with distinct lack of appetite.

  ‘To think,’ said Madeleine in a broken voice, ‘yesterday he was here with us. And now . . .’

  ‘There, there, Maddie my dear,’ said Marcus. ‘There will be others.’

  ‘But not like him.’

  ‘True,’ said Marcus. ‘Very true.’ He paused reflectively. ‘Very true indeed,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, my poor baby . . .’

  ‘Magnus,’ put in Marcus absently.

  ‘My poor Magnus. There’ll never be another like him, never!’

  ‘Highly improbable.’

  ‘Oh, Markie!’ cried Madeleine. ‘A mouse’s life is not a happy one!’ Marcus Aurelius looked about to dispute this sweeping statement but before he could begin, Madeleine went on, ‘Maybe it’s a good thing, him going from this vale of tears so young. Who knows what he might have been spared. If ’twasn’t the cat, it mighta bin poison. Or traps. And that reminds me, Markie, the trapping season’s started, they put ’em out last night, did you notice?’

  ‘To be honest, my dear, no. I came across a most interesting cutting from the Bristol Evening Post, on the manufacture of Cheddar cheese, and –’

  ‘Marcus Aurelius!’ said Madeleine. ‘You mean you sat there calmly reading? After what happened last night? How could you?’

  ‘The traps, Maddie dear,’ said Marcus hastily. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Usual places,’ said Madeleine. ‘Under the sink. Larder floor. Airing cupboard. And usual bait – bacon rind. Got no imagination, they haven’t.’

  ‘Fortunately, my dear,’ said Marcus, ‘only unusually foolish mice become involved with such contraptions.’

  ‘Or unusually short-sighted ones,’ said Madeleine, and flounced out of the nest.

  What with grief for her lost son and irritation with her insensitive husband she was halfway down the garden path, opposite the greenhouse, before she came to her senses. A shiver of fear ran through her as she forced herself to peer hastily through the glass but no mouthing ghost stood imploringly within. Then the cat-flap in the back door squeaked on its hinges and Madeleine fled for the pigsty and the happiest moment of her little life so far. For there, beneath the staging, stood a very substantial, very dirty, very beloved figure.

  ‘Mummy! Nice Mummy!’ cried Magnus loudly. ‘More! More!’

  Madeleine spent the rest of the day there, dividing her time between fetching down stocks of Porker Pills, cleaning up her muddied child, and simply lying and feasting her eyes upon him in a daze of happiness. She was quite unable to understand how he had escaped what had seemed certain death, since Magnus’s replies to all her questioning consisted only of ‘Nasty!’ ‘Nice,’ or ‘Bite you!’ with an occasional ‘More!’ thrown in, but she did not care. All that mattered was that he was there, twice as large as life.

  Four weeks passed, during which time Magnus doubled not only his age but his size. What a limitless diet of Pennyfeather’s Patent Porker Pills would have done to a pig Heaven only knows, but there was no doubt what it was doing to a mouse. Magnus was by now almost the size of a rat and still going strong. Indeed one day an old yellow-toothed bare-tailed buck-rat had come upon Magnus unexpectedly under the pigsty flooring and had fled from the strange young giant with a squeal of terror.

  As for Madeleine, she needed to look lively whenever she heard the warning cry of ‘Nice Mummy!’ For Magnus was an affectionate and demonstrative child, and nimble footwork was needed if she were not to be crushed beneath the weight of his nuzzling love.

  Fortunately it was a mild winter, as she had firmly decided to stay down at the summer home until he should be fully grown. ‘Whatever that may mean,’ she said to herself with a worried shake of the head. The night cold did not trouble her, since sleeping beside Magnus kept her warm as toast. She slept very lightly, however, fearing to be overlaid.

  Only once had Marcus Aurelius come back down to the pigsty, on the evening of that first day after the episode with the cat. Madeleine had come rushing in to his fireside nest with the news that the supposed ghost was in fact solid flesh. ‘Too too solid!’ Marcus had cried plaintively, recoiling hastily before his son’s caresses.

  Something told Madeleine that her husband’s principal emotion, should he now set eyes upon the two-month-old Magnus, would not be, as hers was, pride, but horror. She left him to his reading.

  Meanwhile she busied herself with Magnus’s education. The day’s supply of Porker Pills prepared, the little mother would sit before her mighty child and teach him the rules that govern the lives of mice, the rules of survival. She had been taught them in the nest by her mother and so back through hundreds of generations, so that they were couched in old-fashioned language.

  Some were in the form of proverbs. ‘Look thou before thou leapest,’ ‘A squeak in time saveth nine,’ or ‘Through whatsoever hole thy whiskers pass, there will thy body also.’ Magnus made little response to such maxims, merely staring stolidly at Madeleine, his jaws champing ceaselessly. He much preferred a series of commandments which his mother would repeat to him each morning, all beginning with the words ‘Beware thou the . . .’

  The list was a long one: ‘Beware thou the trap . . . the poison bait . . . the man . . . the dog . . . the owl . . . the weasel,’ and so on. During this recitation Magnus would become increasingly excited, ears pricked, eyes snapping, until at the last commandment, ‘Beware thou the cat,’ he would give a great shout of ‘Nasty!’

  Madeleine tried hard to teach him to repeat these lessons after her, but, though his vocabulary was certainly increasing, he could still only put two words together at any one time. The commonest two were ‘Pill, Mummy!’ and the day came when Madeleine, rootling at the hole in the bottom of the packet, realized that there were very few of Mr Pennyfeather’s products left.

  That night she made the dangerous trip back to the cottage to consult her learned husband on the matter.

  ‘What shall us do, Markie?’ she cried agitatedly. ‘I shall never manage to find enough food for our Magnus once they pills is gone. You’ll have to come down and help.’

  Marcus Aurelius controlled his immediate reaction, which was to refuse point blank to do any such thing. He had no desire to leave the safety and comfort of his den and face danger and hardship in order to fill the huge belly of this demanding cuckoo-child. Nearly three months old, he thought angrily, and still relying on his mother for everything. Why, at that age I was completely self-sufficient, knew my way about the entire college from buttery to refectory. On the other hand, he did not wish his wife to be exposed to further risk, for he knew she would continue to try to fi
nd food whether he helped or no. He combed his whiskers thoughtfully.

  ‘Well, Maddie my dear,’ he said at last, ‘it appears to me that there is only one answer.’

  ‘What’s that then?’

  ‘Emigration.’

  ‘Emi-what?’

  ‘Emigration, my dear. The boy, er, Magnus, must leave home, seek his fortune, go out into the wide world – possibly to the farm across the road, there should be plenty to eat there.’

  ‘Marcus . . . Aurelius!’

  ‘Yes, dear?’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Serious, dear?’

  ‘Are you seriously telling me that we should kick out our only child –’

  ‘Hardly our only child, dear,’ interrupted Marcus.

  ‘– to be eaten by farm cats, chewed up by farm dogs, hit on the head by farm workers, squashed flat by farm tractors?’

  ‘It is to be hoped that none of these fates will befall him.’

  ‘Marcus . . . Aurelius!’

  ‘Yes, dear?’

  ‘Are you saying he’s got to go?’

  ‘Yes, dear.’

  ‘Over my dead body!’

  ‘That’s what it will be over, Maddie,’ said Marcus earnestly, ‘if he stays. And mine too, if you insist. The boy is obviously too big to get back into the house, the pills are almost finished, just think of the constant dangers to which you . . . to which we shall be exposed while attempting to satisfy his appetite. The only possible way in which he might stay with us, within the confines of the garden, that is, would depend upon the discovery of an alternative source of supply of suitable food near at hand.’

  Madeleine let out a sudden squeak. ‘The rabbit!’ she cried excitedly.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’