Emmy and the Rats in the Belfry

by Lynne Jonell

  Emmy cocked an eyebrow. It didn’t exactly seem like Aunt Melly’s sort of book.

  “Look, Sissy!” Raston unsheathed a claw to point. “Ten Easy Steps to a Flab-Free Life!”

  “I can’t read, Rasty,” said Cecilia patiently. “You know I can’t.”

  “Huh? Oh, right.” Raston stared intently at the paragraph beneath him. “Hey, wow! Brussels sprouts have a fat-burning ratio of seventeen to one!”

  Emmy put her hand over the page. “Listen, Ratty. Would you mind showing Aunt Melly how you shrink people, if she promised not to tell anyone?”

  The Rat crouched over a paragraph of small print, his nose almost touching the paper. “Yeah, sure.” He raised his head and gazed at her earnestly. “But listen to this—there’s no ‘fat’ in ‘fitness’!”

  Aunt Melly shook her head severely. “You cannot seriously expect me to believe all this nonsense. You must think I’m senile.”

  “We could show you how the shrinking works,” Emmy said. “You could shrink yourself, if you didn’t mind a little rat bite.”

  Ratty and Sissy poked their heads out of the carrier door and looked at Aunt Melly.

  “Absolutely not!” Aunt Melly pulled her hands off the table. “And furthermore”—she looked sternly at Ana—“it’s one thing for me to keep Gussie out of the hospital when she wants to stay home. It’s another thing entirely for you to run away from people who want you.”

  “They don’t want me,” said Ana, flushing. “And I’d stay home, too, if I had one!”

  “But your social worker must be worried sick!” Aunt Melly’s hands began a nervous patting on the table. “I know I asked you to keep my secret, but what am I going to say if someone calls here for you? I simply can’t lie about something like this—”

  Brrriiinng! Brrrriiinng!

  Aunt Melly looked at the phone on the counter as if it were a poisonous lizard. She picked it up with two fingers. “Hello?”

  Ana and Emmy watched her with concentrated attention.

  “How lovely to hear from you, Jim!” said Aunt Melly, straightening. “And Kathy, too!”

  The rodents climbed out of the pet carrier. “Emmy!” Sissy whispered. “Is your aunt going to make you go back home?”

  “Even if Emmy goes, we still have to stay,” Raston whispered urgently. “We’ve got to find Ratmom!”

  Cecilia nodded, clasping and unclasping her paws.

  “Yes, Emmy’s here, safe and sound. She’s been”—Aunt Melly glanced at the sink full of suds—“doing the dishes for me. Among other things.”

  There was a pause. “Teaching her to be responsible?” Aunt Melly’s thin lips quirked in a half smile as she looked around the kitchen, now much cleaner than before. “I’d say she’s very responsible already. But she does seem to have quite an imagination …”

  Ana bit a fingernail, never taking her eyes off the white-haired woman.

  “What did you say? I must have fixed the phone? I don’t understand.”

  Emmy snatched the letter from her pocket and unfolded it on the kitchen table, pointing to the spidery letters that spelled out

  DON’T CALL! THE PHONE IS OUT OF ORDER.

  Aunt Melly gazed at the letter. Her brows drew together, and her lips tightened. “I see. Well, it’s working now.”

  There was another pause. “Gwenda Squipp? Who’s that? Yes, yes … I see …”

  The squawking sound of a voice came through the earpiece, loud and clear. “… so we were just wondering if she might have gotten off the train with Emmy.”

  Aunt Melly looked almost desperate as the voice of Emmy’s father went on.

  “And of course you’d think Emmy would call, but she’s been acting a little odd lately, and you know how children can be—they love keeping secrets and don’t always realize …”

  Aunt Melly’s hand gripped the phone until the knuckles showed white. “I’m afraid I must tell you, Jim …” She looked at Ana with pleading eyes.

  “Bite my finger, Ratty,” said Ana. “Hurry!”

  Raston obliged at once with a small nip. Ana promptly shrank to rat size.

  Aunt Melly made a strangled sound in the back of her throat.

  “Again!” said Ana, and in three seconds she was a small brown rat.

  Aunt Melly stared at the rat that was Ana with a strange mixture of relief and terror. The phone, forgotten, sank down.

  It squawked in her hand. “You’re afraid you must tell me … what?”

  The elderly woman raised the receiver again. “I’m sorry,” she said faintly, “but the only girl here is Emmy.” And she slid to the floor like a limp noodle.

  Emmy grabbed the phone. “Hi, Dad! Hi, Mom!” She motioned frantically, and the three rats leaped off the table. Sissy and Ana began to fan Aunt Melly with a napkin. Ratty hopped up on the old lady’s shoulder and slapped her cheek briskly with his paw.

  “Yes, I’m fine—what? Aunt Augusta?” Emmy wished she had time to think. Everything was moving too fast. She glanced at the stairway to the second floor and found herself saying, “Aunt Augusta is taking a nap right now.”

  “Really?” Her father’s voice came through the receiver, sounding tinny. “That’s not like her. She was always the most energetic and zippy of us all.”

  “They’re getting older, Dad. They need a little more help now.” Emmy stopped, afraid to go on. She couldn’t tell her father the true state of affairs. But her aunts did need help, and lots of it.

  “Actually,” she said slowly, “the aunts could use someone to do yard work. And I was thinking, maybe Joe?” She glanced at Aunt Melly, still on the floor. Her eyes were fluttering open, and the rats scampered off her chest and up onto the tabletop before she could scream.

  Emmy squatted down, facing her aunt, and spoke more loudly. “I think Aunt Melly would love to have Joe here. She could teach him responsibility, too.”

  There was silence at the other end. Emmy began to think she had overdone it, but then her mother’s voice came on. “That’s a sensible idea, but we’ll have to check with your aunt. Put her on, please.”

  Emmy covered the mouthpiece with her hand. “My parents want to know if you would like to invite my friend Joe here.” She gave her aunt a look full of meaning. “I think it would be a very good idea. He could help us. With the yard work. And other things.” She put the phone into Aunt Melly’s unsteady hand.

  “Yes? Melly here … yes, of course …”

  Aunt Melly still looked a little dazed. But something in her seemed to rise to a challenge. She was holding up well, Emmy thought, considering everything. Better than most grown-ups would have, probably. There was a bit of steel inside the old lady that Emmy admired.

  “Er,” said Aunt Melly, “of course Joe could help with the mowing if he likes. And it might be safer for Emmy to have a friend with her, if she went boating.” She glanced up at Emmy, who nodded encouragingly.

  “Yes … I’ll make up the extra guest room. Perhaps you could ask his parents for me,” Aunt Melly went on. “And do let me know … yes, the sooner the better. He could come on tomorrow’s train.”

  She hung up and struggled to a sitting position. “Now, Emmy,” she said, “I don’t understand any of this, and I’m not entirely sure that I haven’t been working too hard.” She looked at the rats and passed a hand over her eyes.

  “You have been working too hard,” said Emmy, “but it’s all true. Ana, show her again.”

  The brown rat that was Ana pattered across the tabletop, got a kiss from Sissy, and transformed into a girl without any fuss. Three seconds and another kiss later, she was back to full size and climbing down onto the floor.

  Aunt Melly looked at Ana with the wide eyes of shock. “This can’t be happening.”

  “It’s happening, all right.” Emmy picked up the letter that Aunt Melly had written to her parents and fanned her with it. “You’ve seen it with your own eyes.”

  Aunt Melly fastened her gaze on the waving letter. “I suppose I could
be dreaming. But in any case, I must tell you something about that lett—eeeek!” She looked up at the open window, suddenly filled with a brown and furry fluttering.

  “No need for to tell anything! No need for the explaining so tedious!” A large brown bat alighted on the windowsill, folded his umbrella wings, and smiled a wide, fanged grin. “For the evening, she is here, so beautiful—but Cecilia, she is more beautifuller still! And I, Manlio, have come for to take her away!”

  “Oh, no you don’t,” snapped Raston.

  “Am I losing my mind?” cried Aunt Melly. “Why are all these bats here?” She covered her untidy white hair with her hands.

  Manlio waved an expansive wing at the bats who were swooping out of the evening sky to hang from the window sash, the blinds, the curtains, the branches just outside the sill. “Have no fear, postal bats have no interest in the hair of old lady persons! We are arrived on the business official—but,” he added, leering at Cecilia, “in this case the business, it coincides with the pleasure, no?”

  “And why do these creatures keep squeaking at me as if they’re talking?” Aunt Melly’s voice rose to the level of hysteria. Her hair, loosened from its bobby pins, fell halfway to her shoulders.

  “Calm down, Aunt Melly, please!” Emmy glanced at Cecilia, still safe on the tabletop. “If you let Ratty bite your finger, you’ll understand everything they’re saying. It’s just a little nip, Aunt,” she added earnestly.

  “Oh, what does it matter?” said Aunt Melly wildly, holding out her finger. “I’m probably going insane, anyway—OW!”

  “I didn’t bite that hard,” said Raston. “Sheesh.”

  “Hard enough,” Aunt Melly said with spirit and then, shocked—“That rat. He talks.”

  “Really?” said the Rat, peering down at her. “Are you sure?”

  “Don’t be sarcastic, Ratty,” said Emmy. “Sissy! Get off the windowsill!”

  “Hey, you greasy bat!” cried Raston, leaping from the table to his sister’s side. “Get your claws off my sister!”

  “Raston! How rude!” Cecilia ducked out from beneath the bat’s sheltering wing and straightened to her full height. “Manny was just showing me something.”

  “Manny? Manny?” The Rat sneered. “What was he showing you, his bat toys?”

  The bats outside the window stirred restlessly.

  “Of course not, don’t be silly. Here, look.” Cecilia stepped back to reveal a complicated arrangement of straps and buckles, connected to a multitude of long filaments that looked like fishing line.

  “It is—how you say?—a harness!” said Manlio, sweeping his wings wide. “It is for the flying of the rodents through the sky!”

  “And why,” said Raston through his teeth, “would we want to fly with you?”

  Manlio reached into a small satchel and pulled out a folded piece of paper the size of a large postage stamp. “For to see the Rat Mamma, of course! Here is for the letter from her to the most beloved ratlings!”

  “Oh!” cried Cecilia. She clutched the paper in her paws and stared at it with longing. “If only I could read it! Oh, Rasty!”

  Raston snatched the paper and bent over it. “I need a better light,” he muttered, and scrambled from the windowsill to the counter where a lamp burned brightly.

  Emmy and Ana leaned in from either side and peered at the letter, trying to read the tiny printing.

  Behind them, on the windowsill, Manlio moved closer to Cecilia. “Would you like for to try it on?” he murmured. “It is the very latest style, Italian leather of course, and the strap color it is so beautiful with the soft gray fur … there, you see? One little strap to fit over the beautiful shoulder … then another … now we buckle under the sweet fuzzy arms.”

  “Are you sure it will hold me?” Cecilia whispered.

  “Tesora mia, my treasured Cecilia! It is to offend, this!” Manlio clasped his wings together at the thumb joint and raised his eyes heavenward. “Would I trust my oh-so preziosa Cecilia to the straps if they were not one hundred per cento?” He twisted his head to look at the hanging bats behind him and gave a brief nod. A hundred bats roused, unfolded their wings, and began to flutter upward, each trailing a nylon filament attached to Sissy’s harness.

  The agitation of bat wings sent a slight waft of air against Emmy’s cheek. She turned to see Sissy still on the windowsill, now strapped tightly into the harness and beginning to sway as the nylon filaments grew taut.

  “Hey!” cried the Rat. “Not so fast!” He launched himself at the windowsill but fell short, smacking hard against the wall. He scrabbled at the sill and hung by his claws, gasping as he tried to pull himself up over the edge.

  “Ratty, are you all right?” Emmy cried. “Manlio, don’t take her yet. Ratty doesn’t want her to go—”

  “All together we lift the most beautiful rodent, we fly her through the air …” Manlio’s teeth showed white and sharp, and his beaded eyes were bright in his furry face as the filaments pulled at the harness and Sissy was dragged off the sill. The gray rat dropped briefly out of sight and then rose again, swinging in space as the bats beat steadily upward in a flurry of wings.

  Raston grunted with supreme effort and dragged himself onto the windowsill at last, panting.

  “Ladies first!” said Manlio. “Handsome-but-weighty gentleman rats next time!” He fanned his wings and launched himself from the sill, just escaping Raston’s sudden frantic leap.

  “There’s only one harness, Rasty!” cried Sissy, swinging in space outside the window. “I’ll send the bats back for you, I promise! And I’ll tell Ratmommy you’re coming!”

  Emmy rushed to the window, but by the time she got there, all she could see of Sissy were the bottoms of her feet and a curved tail hanging down.

  In a moment the rodent was just a dark blot high above—and then Emmy could see nothing at all but the darkening sky and a pale coin of moon just rising.

  15

  A STREETLIGHT SHONE DOWN on a narrow building in the old part of Schenectady, turning boarded windows pale and edging the crumbling front steps with a rough glow. Beside the steps, in deep shadow, sat a square box wrapped in brown paper. The paper had been chewed—the box, gnawed open at one corner.

  No one watched as a sleek rat backed out of the hole in the box, slung a bag over his shoulder, and hurried up a slender board that led from the ground to a gap in the siding above the foundation.

  Cheswick Vole pushed his way past a hanging flap of tar paper and tossed the bag down three inches to a scarred wooden floor. He paused to catch his breath, looking around.

  The laboratory’s long counters and high stools were thick with dust, but no vandals had broken in during the years Professor Capybara had been away. Everything was as he had left it—the laboratory equipment, the roll-top desk with its manual typewriter, the old-fashioned projector with an educational video still in it from the library, never returned. Professor Capybara used to play videos so the rodents wouldn’t be bored, and even the sheet he had used for a screen was still hanging on a wire.

  A wall of cages, stacked one on the other, showed where the rodents of power had once been kept. Cheswick remembered having to clean the cages, back in the days when he had been the professor’s assistant. It had not been his favorite activity.

  But now that he was a rat, he viewed these things differently. And the cages—extra large, with every convenience: water bottles, scratching posts, exercise wheels, play tubes—looked surprisingly attractive.

  But most attractive of all was his beloved Miss Barmy. Cheswick lifted his muzzle and sniffed. She was here, but he couldn’t see her. He scanned the large room, dimly lit by a single Bunsen burner. Perhaps she was up on the high counter, unpacking the bags of supplies?

  He brightened at the thought. Jane wasn’t usually the sort to pitch in and help. But here in Schenectady, maybe things would be different!

  The black rat hauled the bag over to a leg of the counter where a long string hung looped, its two ends d
angling over a hook high above. He tied the bag to one of the ends and yanked hard on the loose end of the string. The bag rose, swaying in the air, and when it bumped against the lip of the counter, Cheswick wound the bottom string on a protruding nail and stepped back, wiping his forehead with a weary paw.

  It had been a long and exhausting couple of days. It hadn’t been easy, messing up Emmy’s room twice, and stealing the formula and supplies from the Antique Rat had been dangerous as well as exhausting. Then he’d had to drag a whole bag of Squirrel Dust up to the rafters, and after that, he’d had to poke holes in the ceiling tile!

  But it had all been worth it. Miss Barmy, his dearest Jane, had been with him the whole time. He blushed hotly as he recalled how she had lain next to him between the rafters, cheek to fuzzy cheek, as they watched the party going on below. And when he had lifted the bag of Scaly-Tailed Squirrel Dust, and sifted it through the hole precisely above the Addisons—when the dust had swirled, sparkling, landing on their hair, their shoulders, floating lightly in the very air they breathed—oh, at that magical, never-to-be-forgotten moment, Miss Barmy had actually kissed him! Only on his ear, of course, and in her excitement she had unfortunately bitten it a little, but still—it had been wonderful.

  She hadn’t been quite so friendly inside the box, though.

  Mr. B had tucked the two rats in the packing box together with their supplies and given them plenty of air holes, a doll’s bottle of water, and some sesame seed snacks. He had sent the box express delivery, clearly marked FRAGILE and THIS SIDE UP, and they had stayed right side up, mostly.

  But even though it had been cozy in the box, and dark, Miss Barmy had stayed well away from him. She said she had a headache.

  Well, she had to be feeling better now. The express driver had left them at the doorstep of Professor Capybara’s old laboratory, as directed. And the postal bats should be arriving soon, if Guido and Stefano had passed on the message properly.