House of Tribes

by Garry Kilworth

  ‘What’s extinct?’

  ‘Died out. You know, the species disappeared, like wolves have become extinct.’

  ‘Wolves?’

  ‘Great big wild canines. They used to be around, so the legends go, but not any more. You come from the Outside. Did you see any huge canines?’

  Pedlar thought very hard. ‘Not as such. Cows and horses. They’re pretty big.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Gwladys, ‘but they’re not canines. Canines are the dog family.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Pedlar, getting huffy.

  Pedlar went back to his new nest which he had made in the spine of a huge book with a leather jacket which lay on its side at the end of the highest shelf. He had chosen the height for safety reasons, but the spinal tunnel between the cover and the pages of the great book had been picked because it vaguely reminded him of his old nest below the Hedgerow.

  He had lined the dark tunnel with soft chewed bits of paper and some cotton wool he had found under the nudniks’ chair. These were unnecessary comforts in the warmth of the library, but they were extra reminders of his old nest. He entered the spinal tunnel from the wall side, squeezing between the plaster and the entrance, so that he was facing the opening which looked on to the library. All he could see were the far bookshelves, but he felt easier in his mind, looking in the direction from which danger, if it came, would surely appear. It would be difficult to attack him from behind, because he would hear any intruder scrabbling to get into the narrow entrance.

  He would lie in this nice, comfortable passage, with a little to spare either side of his whiskers, and dream of the summer with its golden chaff and cornseed, its fields of ripe vegetables, its nuts and nibbles. Oh, yes, there was comfort in the House, but there was also comfort in the wild. There was moss and lichen. Nothing was softer than a bed of star moss on a sunny day. Nothing was scratchier than lichen baked under a hot sun.

  Oh yes, he still missed his old home. Strangely enough he also missed the ancestral voices which had spoken to him in his Hedgerow nights. It was those voices which had led him here, and now they seemed to be leaving the next step to Pedlar himself. Well, here he was. He was the one. Where were the many who he imagined would be waiting for him? With this thought, Pedlar shuffled out of his nest.

  The last straw was when he passed two mice who were having a discussion which neither of them understood, since they were in an after-book-meal trance, and just letting the words flow.

  ‘Accelerator cable, shoe-brake linings, gear stick, differential, spark plugs, distributor cap, exhaust manifold and piston rings with cam-rod alternator,’ said one.

  ‘Add a pinch of salt, some thyme and rosemary,’ said the other, ‘after letting it boil for two minutes. Then strain through a colander and use the liquid for stock. This will help retain the flavour of the vegetables.’

  After staring at the two mice, who had obviously been gorging on quite separate and entirely different books, Pedlar decided it was time to go off again, into other parts of the House, with all its inherent dangers.

  He left the library by going into the hearth and climbing up the chimney. There was no fire in the fireplace of course, it being summer, but the flue was full of soot. The other mice had told him that the fire was only lit in the coldest weather because of the hot iron radiators and pipes all round the House in the winter. The big boiler in the boiler-room at the back of the kitchen was lit late into the season and after that the radiators and pipes became almost too hot to walk on.

  Pedlar found nothing at all in the chimney and emerged, a dusty black, on another level of the House. Sure enough, he found himself trailing soot under a bed and across a room which sported a pink carpet. He found a hole in the skirting board, which he went through and then discovered a cold and chilling place which he recognized from descriptions. It was one of the two toilets and bathrooms. There didn’t seem to be anything at all worth investigating, so he slipped under the door and out on to the landing. There he struck lucky.

  In one of the darkest corners of the landing he found food. It was cheese again – that delicious aroma – but this time it wasn’t on one of those snap-trap boards. It was inside a sort of wire box.

  Pedlar went all round the outside of the wire box, sniffing at this and that, making absolutely sure there were no tightly wound springs, or guillotines made of stiff wire. He could see nothing that resembled the neck-breaking wire on the trap in the attic. This box looked perfectly innocent.

  He had been in boxes before and nothing untoward had happened to him. In the library there was a cardboard box in which young mice played. Mothers sometimes went there, out of the way, to give birth. There’d also been a wooden box in the cellar, when Pedlar had first arrived, which Phart and Flegm had used as a place in which to sleep off their binges. Boxes seemed to be quite harmless objects, which the nudniks left lying around the house.

  Still, Pedlar was not sure of this particular box, and he wanted to check everything before going inside it. The smell of the cheese was making him salivate profusely, but still he was not going to be caught off guard. That had happened once, and he was determined it should not happen again. He was not going to let the redolence of the deliciously pungent cheese lure him into difficulties. He wanted to be sure he could escape from the box if a cat or nudnik appeared on the landing.

  The door to the wire box was wide open. If he could march in and take the cheese, then presumably he could march right out again, without any trouble whatsoever? It would be absolute madness to let that aromatic food go to some other mouth.

  Finally he took his courage in his paws and entered the wire box.

  A step inside. Nothing happened. A further step. Still there were no spikes threatening to impale him, no nooses waiting to strangle him, no expectant steel jaws ready to spring shut. Only the open box and the cheese in the middle.

  He reached the cheese, licked it, and dashed backwards.

  Everything remained as it was.

  The taste of the cheese was wonderful! He went back to it and nibbled it a bit, glancing round nervously, looking for the deadly guillotine.

  Nothing. All was well.

  The best thing to do was pull the cheese off its stand and run with it back to his nest in the library.

  Pedlar snatched at the cheese.

  There was a loud thwack which made him jump so high he hit his head on the top of the box. Startled though he was, he was still alive. He ran towards the opening of the box, hit something, and bounced backwards.

  Panic-stricken, he tried again, only to do the same thing.

  After he had done this twice more, he realized what was happening. A wire door had closed the exit. Pedlar was trapped inside the box. Frantically he gnawed at the door, at the hinges, at the little catch. It failed to open. He found he was getting nowhere.

  The next thing he did was try all the other corners of the box, to see if there was a second way out. There was not. The whole creation was a tight little world from which there was no escape, except through the doorway, which had now been closed off by the wire door.

  Disaster.

  Pedlar crouched low-nose in the middle of the box, wondering what his fate was to be. How could he even begin to perform the will of his ancestors now? He was terrified. What if Spitz or Eyeball should come along? Would they be able to get to him? He wasn’t sure of anything now. What was the box here for anyway? It was a strange place to leave such a thing, where mice could accidentally become locked inside.

  While he was thus engaged in thought, a creature came cautiously out of the shadows and approached the box. It was another mouse! Pedlar recognized him before he even saw him, by his body odour. It was Phart.

  The chief of the Stinkhorns sat high-nose, scratched his fleas and picked at his scabs, while he contemplated Pedlar’s position.

  ‘That’s some fix you’ve got yerself into there, yer honour,’ said Phart. ‘How’d you get stuck in that cage?’

  ‘Cage?’ cried
Pedlar gripping the wire mesh. ‘Is this a cage?’

  ‘Course it’s a cage, dumbo,’ sneered the cellar mouse, throwing politeness to the landing draughts. ‘Where’ve you bin? My grandfather, the Great and Honourable Snott got trapped in one of them. Nat’rully, he should have known better, but then he was tipsy on wine at the time. Mice do a lot of things when they’re under the affluence of incohol. You got no excuse.’

  Pedlar gripped the wire and rattled it, hoping for something to give. When nothing looked like happening, he began to gnaw at it frantically. Phart just shook his head in disgust.

  ‘You won’t get out that way, mate. What do you think it’s made of? Paper? Bloody tensile steel wire, that is pal. You couldn’t bite through it if you was Eyeball. If I was you I’d just give it up.’

  ‘Phart, I have to escape, otherwise I’ll be here for ever. I – I have things to do—’ He stopped helplessly – how could he hope to make this cellar mouse understand that he, Pedlar, was a mouse of destiny?

  ‘Not for ever, yer honour,’ smirked Phart. ‘The Headhunter lays these things. He’ll be along any moment to see if he’s caught anything.’

  Pedlar went berserk at these words and began running round and round the cage, throwing himself at the wire, scrabbling, biting, pulling and pushing. All he did was wear himself out and fall exhausted on the floor. Phart watched this great burst of wasted energy with interest.

  ‘Cheez, you country mice are really fit, ain’t you? I never seen such a display of acrobatics. I often wisht I was an athlete sometimes. Don’t do you no good in there though, does it?’

  Pedlar lay panting, ‘You really are a rotten swine, Phart,’ he said. ‘One of these days you’re going to get your comeuppance. It’s just a pity I shan’t be around to see it happen.’

  Phart came right up to the wire and pressed his nose against it, breathing foul breath into Pedlar’s gulping lungs.

  ‘Ah, but you could be, yer honour,’ said Phart, returning to his former sycophantic civility. ‘You could live handsomely to see me boiled in bacon fat. You could live long enough to see your beautiful little ’uns grow to fat round yellow-necks, and maybe even long enough to watch Eyeball carried out of the house as stiff as a bleedin’ log of wood one mornin’. If you was very clever, that is, which I know you can be, yer honour – otherwise I wouldn’t be teasin’ you, would I?’

  Hope sprang into Pedlar’s chest. He pulled himself to his feet and crouched low-nose opposite the foul Stinkhorn, ignoring the halitosis and the stench of damp fur.

  ‘What do I have to do, Phart? Just tell me. I’ll forgive you for leading me into that snap-trap. Just tell me how I can be clever. Tell me, Phart.’

  ‘The first thing you have to do, yer honour, is fetch me a piece of that there cheese…

  Pedlar glanced behind him and for the first time since the door had closed on him he remembered the cheese. The bait. It was why he was in the cage. He had let his eyes, nose and stomach rule his head. The cheese.

  ‘What do you want to do with it?’ Pedlar asked.

  ‘Do with it? Eat the bleedin’ stuff, what else?’

  ‘Phart,’ snarled Pedlar, ‘you get me out of here or…’

  ‘Now, now, yer honour,’ clucked Phart infuriatingly. ‘You get me the cheese first, push it in bits through the mesh, and then I’ll get you out. That’s fair, ain’t it? I mean, I’ve got to put a lot of brain power to this. I needs the cheese to feed me head.’

  Pedlar saw that he was not going to get anywhere with the other mouse until he did as he was told.

  ‘How do I know you’ll get me out?’ he said.

  ‘You don’t. You got to trust me, yer honour. That’s all it takes. After all, I let out me grandfather—’

  ‘…the Great and Honourable Snott,’ finished Pedlar.

  ‘ ’Xactly!’ smirked Phart.

  Pedlar realized that time was running out. Whoever laid the cage – heaven forbid it was the Headhunter, for the thought made him swoon – would be along soon. Yes, he had to trust Phart.

  Crossing the cage, Pedlar began to ferry little crumbs of cheese to the mesh walls and push them through to Phart on the other side. Phart ate greedily, his eyes on the landing behind. Pedlar had never seen food disappear so quickly. When the feverish fetching and carrying reached its pitch, there was a sound further down the landing, a shuffling noise of scraping feet.

  Phart almost choked as he tried to swallow a huge lump of cheese in one go.

  ‘Quick,’ hissed Pedlar. ‘Let me out now!’

  ‘Can’t,’ coughed Phart, spraying Pedlar in the face with fragments of cheese. ‘Dunno how to.’

  Pedlar’s hopes went screaming down the landing.

  ‘But you said you let your grandfather out—’

  A door to a bedroom opened and there was the clump of nudnik boots on the floor.

  ‘I lied,’ Phart said simply. And then the Stinkhorn was gone, melting back into the shadows around the edge of the landing, down one of the holes to the gap between the ground-floor ceiling and the floorboards of the landing.

  ‘You – you – you – rotten…’ gasped Pedlar, too late.

  A great shadow fell over the cage. Pedlar looked up to see a chunky nudnik leaning over, looking down on him. There was an evil row of teeth visible across the nudnik’s face. A clumpy shock of dark hair stuck up from the top of its head. Its eyes were like burning ice. Its nostrils were like twin deep mouse-holes in a bank of mud. While it stared down at Pedlar, it scratched its nose with a fat finger and let out a horrible grunt of what sounded like joyous satisfaction.

  Then it folded in the middle and reached out with an arm to grab the cage. Pedlar felt himself lifted up swiftly, his stomach turning inside out with the motion. Then he was but a length away from that horrible mouth. He could see the fat tongue inside, sort of lolling redly in the huge cavity of a mouth, like some monster worm. Sweetly smelling breath, carrying jam and beef broth, engulfed Pedlar, making him gag. He rushed over to the far side of the cage.

  From there he could see the whole horrible head of the nudnik who had him in captivity. It was the Headhunter! There was no reason to doubt Phart’s words now. He was in the hands of the most notorious mouse-killer, mouse-torturer, in the House. These were his last moments, he was sure. And the role for which he had been marked out would now fall to some other mouse from Outside, some other mouse who had yet to hear the ancestral call.

  The nudnik, who wore the mouse-skull badge that Flegm had once mentioned, made a roaring sound. Then Pedlar was carried, swinging, along the landing and into the bedroom. The cage was plonked heavily on to a table, shaking Pedlar off his feet. When he looked up he wished he hadn’t. A macabre sight was before him. On a shelf not far away, almost level with Pedlar’s eyes, was a row of grisly skulls and bones, all neatly arranged.

  They were the skeletal remains of dead mice.

  Pedlar almost swallowed his teeth in fear. Not only was he looking at the skulls of mice, but of birds too. Wing bones were spread like pictures and pinned to the wall, beetles were impaled on pins on a board of cork. A rabbit’s skull, a squirrel’s tail, a weasel’s ribcage… The shelves and boards were a graveyard of bleached bones. Pieces of fur and individual feathers were in evidence here and there.

  On another shelf, above the skulls and bones, was a cluster of sealed jars with liquids in them. There were objects floating in the liquids. Some of these objects were unidentifiable, being greyish-red nebulous lumps, but one or two were definitely recognizable as whole mice. To Pedlar, they looked peaceful floating inside the jars, with their eyes closed tight. Peaceful – and very dead.

  ‘Pretty, pretty mouse. Nice fleshy mouse. Let me see your plump little body…’

  Pedlar spun round to see himself being studied by a pair of glittering eyes rimmed with pink. A fat white mouse in a silver cage shared the table-top with him. It had a short pink tail and a pink nose. It sat high-nose and regarded him with a strange expression on its face.
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  ‘Did you get captured too?’ asked Pedlar, in an attempt to shatter that peculiar stare.

  The mouse simpered. ‘Haven’t you heard of Little Prince?’

  A vague memory of a conversation passed through Pedlar’s mind. The trouble with being in a new place, learning a new geography, new faces, was that the things you were told went in one ear and out of the other. There was so much to learn that your brain became saturated and no more would go in. You discarded what you felt was unimportant.

  ‘Yes, I have heard of you,’ said Pedlar, ‘but I’m not sure in what connection.’

  ‘Let me refresh your memory,’ said Little Prince in his sing-song voice. ‘How about – cannibalism? That ring a bell my lowly little yellow-neck? Did they tell you I like eating other mice?’

  A shiver rippled along Pedlar’s fur. ‘You’re – you’re joking of course.’

  A sickening tinkly sound came from between the teeth of the Little Prince.

  ‘I do like to joke of course, you sweetmeat you, but not about eating. I never joke about eating.’

  Pedlar swallowed hard and stared around wildly.

  The nudnik was busy fiddling with something on one of his shelves. Then he turned to stare once at Pedlar in his cage, before turning and leaving the room, slamming the door behind him. Pedlar was left in the dubious company of the creature who liked the flesh of his fellow mice.

  ‘Where do you come from?’ asked Pedlar. ‘Why are you that funny colour?’

  ‘Funny colour?’ sang Little Prince. ‘You’re the one that’s a funny colour. I’m a perfect tame mouse, perfectly bred for my perfect coat. I am well beloved of nudniks. My master likes to stroke me with his finger. He croons to me in the accents of nightingales. I am his pet, his beautiful Little Prince, and he treats me with great tenderness and understanding.’

  ‘But not other mice?’

  ‘Not dirty, mean little house mice and yellow-necks, with their grubby coats and sordid ways…’

  ‘We’re not grubby or sordid,’ gasped Pedlar.

  ‘Slovenly and shabby, grimy and unkempt – nasty little creatures you are, but with candied flesh – oh, yes – honeyed meat. I love your loins, your lungs, your liver, mouse. I adore your abdomen. I cherish your cheeks. I thrill to your throat. I hold your heart holy. Your spleen is special to me. Your brain is beautiful. Your—’