The rat knew exactly where to go. It was almost five o’clock in the afternoon and food would be waiting if he hurried. His shiny black eyes darted back and forth up the alleyway. No cats. No cars, no people, and no horrid barking dogs either. The coast was clear. The bright-eyed rodent shot out from behind the damp paper bag where he had been hiding and hurried through the drizzle, his nose twitching wildly. Cold drops of rain splashed against his sleek gray coat as he plunged in and out of the puddles that dotted the rutty alley. A bitter wind shot between the closely huddled buildings and did its best to try and push the rat back down the road, but finally he reached the end of the alley, and quickly crawled beneath a badly hung door under a dilapidated sign that read: “Petey’s Books.”

The wet little animal scuttled through a small room that, although a bit on the musty and cluttered side, felt much warmer than the bitter alley. He dodged between a couple of old dusty bookshelves and a few tables and chairs scattered about the place, then veered around a rickety counter and bumped into a large, worn, and fairly dirty shoe. Nonplussed, the rat jumped on the shoe and looked up. Two watery blue eyes gazed down on him from a great distance away.

“Afternoon, Mickey,” the mouth below the eyes growled. “Yer late.”

A fat, filthy fist plummeted down to the floor and Mickey eagerly followed the hand with his glittering eyes. The fist opened and a handful of cat food scattered across the floor. The rat began nibbling happily at the cat food as the fist rose back up in the air. The man towering over the rat grunted, turned away, and resumed his previous job of counting the small amount of money in his register.

“I find it highly amusing and just a tad ironic, Petey,” a high-pitched and slightly snobbish voice drawled from one of the tables, “that you feed that rat cat food.”

“Humph,” Petey growled. “Shows what you know, boy. Cat food has all the nutrients he needs to stay healthy. And besides, they don’t sell Rat Chow at the grocery store, as far as I know.”

The boy at the table gave a short, barking laugh and went back to reading his book. Mickey personally didn’t care whether he was eating cat food or not—he didn’t give a lick for irony as long as his belly was full. He cleaned up the food, washed his face with his paws, and scurried into a little box under the counter for a snooze. The box was lined with soft tissue paper and had a small cup of water in it, just in case the tiny rodent got thirsty.

“I can’t believe the health inspector hasn’t cried for your head, you keeping that thing under there,” chided another voice—a girl’s, but barely audible as she was chomping noisily on a wad of chewing gum. The girl sat cross-legged in a deep, puke-yellow armchair. She stared down at an open book while she talked, and her mouth moved vigorously as she chewed.

“Health inspectors don’t visit bookstores, Maggie,” replied a chubby boy who sat at another table and was busy playing with a deck of cards.

“Well, they oughtta,” Maggie replied, not looking up from her book. “‘Specially this one.”

“If you think this place is so disgusting, why do you come here every afternoon?” the boy asked in an amused voice, but the girl just shrugged.

“Less noise, more silence,” Petey growled from behind the counter, pointing at a piece of dirty fabric hanging on the wall. A small, dusty frame surrounded the fabric, which had the words “Quiet Please!” cross-stitched on it.

“Why can’t we talk?” the boy asked. “It’s just the four of us, plus you, and it’s not like we’re in a library here. Who are we bugging?”

“Yer bugging me,” Petey snapped. He tried to cower the boy with an angry glare, but the youngster just grinned at him mischievously.

“Joe, shut up before you get us all kicked out again,” murmured the first boy, a tall, thin older teenager who sat slumped over his book. One of his slender hands scratched a head covered with a short crop of dirty blonde hair. The other hand casually flipped a page of his book. The boy kept his eyes firmly fixed on the page as he spoke.

“Yes Mom,” Joe said, still grinning.

“I don’t know why you bother coming in here Joe,” the girl in the armchair complained grumpily. “You never read anything.”

“I just come here to bug you and Al, ain’t that right Al?” Joe said. The tall, thin boy pretended to ignore him.

Petey looked up from his cash counting and stared in annoyance at the kids. “You know, it’s because of you numbskulls I hardly have any other customers. You scare them away with all your loud obnoxiousness.”

“No we don’t,” Maggie chirped. “People don’t come in here ‘cause it’s a dump.”

“Seems good enough for you four vagabonds though,” Petey growled.

“That’s cuz we have no taste,” the girl responded, grinning cheekily at the large man. Petey scowled at her.

“Petey, if you didn’t have us, you’d have no business at all,” Joe said.

“Hmpf,” Petey muttered. “You four don’t spend a dollar in here between you—you just loiter around, read my books for free and then you leave.”

“If you don’t want us to read the books,” Maggie said reasonably, “you should get rid of the tables and chairs. Then we’d have no place to sit.”

“I just might do that,” Petey said. He dropped the subject and stared morosely around the room. It was void of decoration and didn’t exactly welcome people in. The tables were old and falling apart—the paint had peeled off of them in most places—and the hard, tipsy chairs were incredibly uncomfortable to sit in. Even the puke-yellow armchair had lost most of its stuffing and was missing a spring, which made it sag perceptibly in the middle. Only Maggie seemed to find it comfortable. The old shelves scattered about the room were stocked with an odd assortment of books that no paying customer seemed interested in buying. As a result, the only clientele that regularly frequented his place were the four kids now ensconced contentedly throughout the room. He glared at them in annoyance.

Alistair had been coming in the longest. Petey hadn’t quite figured out why, the boy wasn’t the normal sort of chap you would expect in a run down place like this. He came from a well-educated British family that moved from London when Alistair was about twelve. By all accounts, the boy lived a privileged existence—his parents were both professors at the local college and they hobnobbed with the town’s more elite, educated society. Alistair was captain of the high school debate team, a straight-A student, a member of the Honor’s Society, and he expected to attend Harvard once he graduated high school next year. Anyone would think he would choose a more affluent place to hang out than Petey’s cramped little store, which was certainly not located anywhere near the more ritzy side of town.

Alistair was quite snobbish and thought pretty highly of himself. Too highly for his own good, or so Petey thought. Not only that, but he loved to argue. He wasn’t captain of the debate team for no reason. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than to trap some poor sucker into a usually one-sided verbal fight. And he didn’t care what the topic was; he could find an argument in anything. For instance, you could say, “it’s a nice day,” to him, and he would invariably find a reason to disagree with you, then proceed to pompously tell you exactly why it was really the most rotten day in the history of man, simply for the sake of argument. For some odd reason, whether it was the authoritative tone of his voice or the fact that he had what seemed like an endless supply of retorts, nobody wanted to argue with him for very long, and they’d eventually give up the fight.

Because of this, Alistair glided through his young life assuming he was absolutely right about everything and everybody else was dead wrong. This didn’t make him very popular with his peers, who all regarded him as a big fat know-it-all. Petey guessed that Alistair had very few friends. Most kids of his own age found him extremely irritating and avoided him like the plague.

That changed somewhat when Joe started hanging out at Petey’s bookstore. Joe had no interest in reading whatsoever, but he enjoyed arguing just as much, if not more, than Alistair, although his style and tactics were completely different. While Alistair debated with a cool, pompous logic, Joe based his arguments on youthfully changing ideals, whatever he happened to be passionate about the time. It frustrated Alistair to argue with the younger boy because he could never, no matter how hard he tried, get Joe to understand the absolute lack of common sense of his theories. Joe would just say “yeah, but…” and leap onto another tangent. Joe could always tell when Alistair was getting to what he called the “steam-coming-out-of-his-ears” point, however, and at that time would abruptly concede and move on to another topic. So Alistair still won most of the arguments, although he could never figure out how.

The only girl in the bunch was Maggie. At just over twelve years old, she was the youngest of the kids that hung out at Petey’s. Small and scrawny, with a thick, tangled mop of golden-blond hair, Maggie seemed content to just curl up in her chair and read. Petey tried his best to feel sorry for the small girl—she came from a bad family and didn’t have much adult supervision—but she could be so annoying. She chewed gum constantly and left her used wads stuck under the chair or an unlucky table.

Maggie took great pleasure in provoking Petey. She sassed him quite a bit. This was due to a lack of an authoritative father figure, he supposed. Petey was first cousin to Maggie’s dad—a no-good, part-time thief who divorced the girl’s mother practically right after he found out she was pregnant and then skipped town, never to be heard from again. The poor kid’s mother wasn’t much better. Petey knew for a fact that the horrid woman blamed Maggie for all her troubles, and because of this she rarely paid any attention to the girl. He supposed that he should be glad she found a haven here at the bookstore, and he felt some familial obligation to watch out for her, but she could be extremely trying at times.

Their family ties aside, Petey had a sneaking suspicion that the real reason Maggie frequented his shop was because she had a crush on Alistair. She was a precocious, mouthy kid by nature, but around Alistair she turned uncharacteristically quiet and shy, as though she didn’t quite know what to say to the older teen. Occasionally, if Alistair said something smart or funny she would respond with a nervously high giggle. Alistair didn’t seem to have a clue that Maggie adored him; in fact he barely noticed her existence.

The only other kid who hung out at Petey’s was big, lumbering Clarence, and most of the time everyone forgot he was there. Clarence sat in one corner of the room and normally didn’t make a sound. He didn’t read, he just slouched in his corner and stared dumbly at his large, beefy hands. Once in a while he would mumble something inaudible. Usually he fell asleep, sitting hunched against the wall with his head drooping down onto his chest.

In his former life, Clarence had been a loudmouthed linebacker on the high school football team. He possessed a wonderful heckling ability—he taunted his opponents into defeat as easily as tackling them—but tragedy befell the boy in his junior year. A faulty-fitting helmet and one good tackle from an angry rival caused a massive head injury that left Clarence as dim as a used light bulb and about as slow as a sloth. His lightning quick tongue was silenced, and nowadays the only sound that issued from the once articulate mouth was a grunt or a snore. He wandered into the cramped little bookstore every afternoon promptly at four-thirty and wandered out again a little after six. No one knew why he came, or how he had the wits to find his way there and back home again, but they had long since stopped questioning it.

So on that particular afternoon Petey had one snoozing rat, one dead to the world giant black boy, two arguing teens and a lonely little girl in his store. Oh well, he thought morosely, and stared down at the small wad of cash still clutched in his big, beefy hand. He stuffed the money back in the register drawer, sat down on his stool and began to read the newspaper, dimly hoping that a paying adult customer would miraculously wander in and buy something.

Alistair finished the last page of his book and stood up to find another one in Petey’s meager library. He stretched, yawned, then glanced at Joe, who was absently shuffling his deck of cards and staring at the older boy with a look of extreme smugness plastered across his round face.
“What are you gawking at?” Alistair asked grumpily.

“Nothin’,” Joe said irritatingly, and went back to staring at his cards, wearing an annoying grin.
“Why must you always be so bothersome?” Alistair huffed, putting his book away and scanning the shelves for another that might peak his interest.

“Just ‘cause,” Joe said vaguely. “You wanna play a game of cards?”

“No,” Alistair snapped, “I do not want to play a game of cards. I came here to read, not play silly games with you. Why don’t you ask Clarence?”

“All Clarence knows how to play is war,” Joe whined.

“I’ll play with you,” Maggie offered, glancing up from her book.

“This is a book store, not a poker parlor,” Petey growled from behind his counter. “Joe, why don’t you put those cards away and read something instead?"

“No,” Joe said stubbornly, “I hate reading.”

“It amazes me to no end,” Alistair said pompously, “that someone who hates reading spends all his time in a book store annoying people that don’t. Isn’t there a street corner you could occupy instead of hogging up valuable space here?”

“I have just as much right to be here as you,” Joe stated.

“No you don’t. This is a book store.”

“So what?” Joe countered. “It’s not like you ever buy any of the books. You just use reading as an excuse to hang out here, cause you have no place else to go. At least I’m honest about it. At least I can admit that I don’t have anything better to do than hang out here.”

“You make it a point to come here just to bug me,” Alistair accused. “Why don’t you go get some friends so you can bug them and leave me alone?”

“But you’re my friend Al,” Joe grinned, refusing to rise to the insult. “Why go to the trouble of making new ones when I have you?”

“Joe, you’re an ass,” Maggie stated from her chair. She didn’t like the boy much, she found him highly annoying.

“Watch yer mouth in my store, young lady,” Petey barked from behind his newspaper.

“But he is,” Maggie insisted. “He comes here just to try and provoke Al into a fight. And once they start arguing, I can’t concentrate on my reading. You should tell him to leave.”

“I should tell you all to leave,” Petey said, “but apparently I’m way too softhearted.”

“Why don’t you read at home then, Mags?” Joe shot at her, “If I annoy you so much, maybe you should go.”

“I have more right to be here than you do,” Maggie said hotly. “Petey’s my uncle.”

“Not really,” Petey corrected. “I’m your dad’s cousin, not his brother.”

“At least you got somebody then,” Joe sniggered. “ ‘Cause word has it you don’t have anybody who cares for you at home.”

Petey and Maggie both stared angrily at him. Alistair looked up from the bookshelves and gazed at them vacantly, as if he’d lost the thread of the conversation. An annoyed, awkward silence filled the room. From under the counter, Mickey let out a soft, dreamy squeak.

“Alright, let’s keep our voices down,” Petey suggested. “We’re disturbing Mickey. And Joe, another comment like that and I will kick you out.”

Joe rolled his eyes but shut up and went back to absentmindedly shuffling his cards. Alistair turned his gaze back to the bookshelf, and Maggie sat with her arms crossed angrily, ferociously chewing on her gum.

“Uncle Petey, I think I’ll go home,” she finally said, casting a fuming look at Joe as she rose from her chair. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Petey peered towards the cracked, filmy window at the front of the store. “I dunno,” he said, “this rain looks like the stick-around kind, you shouldn’t go wandering around in it, you might catch a cold. Did you bring an umbrella?”

Maggie shook her head. Petey heaved himself off his stool and tromped off into the back room to search for one. Maggie moved to the counter and surreptitiously stuck her wad of used chewing gum to its underside. She leaned against the counter and stared at Alistair; his nose was buried in another book already. Joe sidled up to the counter next to her and shot her a repentant little smile.

“Sorry about the ribbing, Mags,” he said. “I didn’t really mean it, you know. You don’t have to go.”

“No,” Maggie sighed, shoving another stick of gum into her mouth, “it’s okay. I should go anyway.” She sent another despondent glance towards Alistair.

“Good lord,” Joe said suddenly, comprehension dawning on him. “Don’t tell me you like Al.”
“Shhh!” Maggie whispered frantically. “He’ll hear you!”

“Ew,” Joe said, making a gagging noise. “How could you possibly like that pompous know-it-all? He’s a jerk.”

“He is not,” Maggie hissed, “and shut up.”

“Man, Mags, I thought you’d have a little more taste,” Joe said in mock disappointment.

“Get away from me,” Maggie said grumpily. “Where’s Uncle Petey with that umbrella?”

Joe was about to answer with another smart remark, when he suddenly stopped and cocked his head sideways. “You hear that?” he asked, and Maggie stopped chewing on her gum and strained her ears. A faint scratch-scratch was emanating from under the counter. It sounded as if Mickey was clawing on something. Joe was about to scoot around the counter and see what was up, when suddenly a small gray head poked over the top of it. Mickey had somehow managed to claw his way to the counter’s surface. He heaved his sleek body over the edge, and sat on his back legs, looking extremely pleased with himself.

“Impressive,” Joe whistled, and Maggie shrugged.

“Should we get him off the counter?” she asked.

Joe frowned. “Well, in all fairness, it must have taken a lot of oomph for him to get up this far. It’d be a shame to just throw him right back down on the ground again after all his effort.”

They watched the gray rat with interest, their bickering replaced by unanimous curiosity. Mickey sat up and groomed himself, then suddenly turned towards them and stared. It wasn’t a startled animal stare; it seemed more of a deliberate, intense gaze prepared specifically for their benefit. They stared back.

“What the heck is he doing?” Maggie said out of the corner of her mouth (the side without the gum in it).

“I dunno. Hey Al, take a look at this!” Joe called, not taking his eyes away from the rat. Alistair heaved himself up from his table and strode over to the counter, his book still clasped tightly in one hand. Mickey didn’t budge, even when Alistair slammed his book down on the counter and leaned forward to get a better view.

“Peculiar,” he said, although he didn’t sound that fascinated. Mickey didn’t even acknowledge Alistair’s presence; he just kept staring at Joe and Maggie, who began to fidget.

“Alright, this is getting creepy. Uncle Petey! Get out here and do something about your rat!”

Petey rambled back into the room, his hands empty. “Sorry Mags, couldn’t find an umbrella.” He paused as he noticed the unusual guest sitting on top of his checkout counter. “What’s Mickey doing up there?”

The rat moved his unblinking eyes to Petey. He raised himself up on his back legs and sniffed the air, his little pink nose twitching violently. Then Mickey did something even more unexpected than climbing on top of the counter.

He started to dance.

He began by slowly bobbing his head from side to side, then his shoulders began to move, then his hips, and finally his long gray tail began a rhythmic thrashing. He bounced down onto all four feet, hopped sideways to the left, then moved exactly the same amount of hops to the right. He spun around once, stood up on his back legs, did what looked like a little Irish jig, stood on his front paws, rolled over, and then performed an amazing duplication of the Chicken Dance. All the while he kept his eyes fixed on Petey (except when he was spinning and rolling), and when he finally finished, he executed a magnificent bow before turning around and hopping onto Petey’s rickety stool. He then jumped to the floor and scooted out the front door before any of them had the presence of mind to catch him.

They stared dumbfounded at each other for at least five minutes before Joe finally blurted, “What the hell just happened?”

Alistair looked shocked. At some point he had knocked his book off the counter in his amazement. It lay forgotten on the dusty carpet, its pages splayed and rumpled. His hand still clutched an imaginary book as he stared at the spot the rat had given its performance. He finally put his hand down, cleared his throat, and addressed the others.

“Obviously he’s a trained rat,” he said importantly. “Somebody’s pet. They taught him to dance as a trick.”

“I dunno,” Joe argued. “He’s a common city rat, not the kind you’d buy in a store. How long’s he been coming in here, Petey?”

“A few weeks, I’d reckon,” Petey replied, scratching the stubble on his dirty chin and staring intriguingly at the rat. “Comes in about the same time every afternoon. Usually falls asleep under the counter then leaves right while I’m closing the place. Like clockwork.”

“That’s odd enough,” Maggie said, “although we never really thought about it before.” She pulled out a stick of gum (her last one had joined Alistair’s book on the floor when she had opened her mouth in utter shock), stuffed it between her lips and bit down on it nervously.

“I wonder where he goes when he’s not here,” Joe mused.

“I don’t see how it matters,” Alistair said impatiently, “since he always seems to come back. But he belonged to somebody at one point, I assure you. Maybe a street performer.”

“Yeah, but why did he suddenly do it today?” Joe wondered. “He’s never done anything strange before—well, besides come in here and beg for cat food every afternoon…”

“And sleep in a little box under the counter,” Maggie added.

“And he doesn’t seem afraid of people at all,” Petey chimed in.

“Exactly,” Alistair said, “which just proves my point.”

“So what do we do?” Joe asked.

“What do you mean—what do we do?” Alistair said. “What is there to do?”

“I mean, should we call a newspaper or something? Maybe we have a good story on our hands here.”

“Maybe it was just a fluke,” Petey said reasonably.

“A dancing rat is one heck of a fluke,” Joe argued.

“Look,” Alistair suggested, “why don’t we just see what happens tomorrow? And don’t tell anybody about this. At the least, people will just think we’re all wackos, at the worst, we’ll have a crowd of yahoos in here by tomorrow afternoon trying to catch the poor creature so they can open up its brain to see what makes it tick. Agreed?”

They all agreed. Maggie left and got sopping wet on her way home, but she was so agog with what had just happened she didn’t even notice. Alistair sat back down with his rumpled book, but didn’t even try to read it. He just stared vaguely at one page for about a half an hour before he got up and wandered out, not even bothering to put the book away. Joe shuffled his cards absently for another ten minutes before following Alistair’s lead and leaving,

Petey stared thoughtfully at Mickey’s abandoned box until it was time to close up. He shook Clarence awake, turned the lights out, locked the door, and trudged down the alley with the large, silent ex-linebacker lumbering behind him. The icy rain spluttered off his hat as he glanced this way and that, hoping to catch a glimpse of a swishing tail or two beady black eyes. He finally turned the corner and disappeared from view, and the alley was silent.

The next afternoon at exactly four-thirty the three children filed into the store. Petey stood behind the checkout counter, absently dusting it with a damp cloth. Clarence had already stuffed himself in his corner and was staring at a cockroach slowly climbing up the wall next to his head. No one said a word. Alistair, Joe and Maggie grouped around one table instead of spreading themselves out as they usually did. Alistair, who always dressed fairly dapper, looked clean and neat and incredibly nervous, his long fingers drumming uncontrollably on the table. Joe wore his standard blue jeans, sneakers, flannel shirt and Chicago White Sox baseball hat, but for once his clothes weren’t stained with dirt and dribbled jelly, and he had actually bothered to scrub his round face. He pulled his cards out of his back pocket but didn’t take them out of their package; he just rolled the box around between his palms. Maggie had come in dragging a bright pink umbrella even though the weather had broke that morning and the sun had shone all day. Her hair was less poofy than usual, as if she decided to finally run a comb through it, and she had thrown on jeans and a blue sweater and looked less unkempt than anyone had ever seen her. She picked up a book but just stared at it, and the store was silent except for the occasional cough, clearing of the throat, impatient sigh, or a snore from Clarence who had lost interest in the cockroach and now slumped against the wall in a deep sleep.

“We didn’t dream it, did we?” Joe asked at last, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “That rat actually did get up and dance on the counter, right?”

The others nodded silently.

The clock ticked closer to five and they waited. Finally, they heard a faint scratch and the small gray creature squeezed through the door in his normal fashion. They stared at him. Usually he made a beeline for Petey but tonight he scurried halfway across the room and halted. He crouched and gazed up at the familiar faces sitting in their unfamiliar positions.

“Do you think he knows something’s different?” Maggie whispered. “He never just stops like that. Do you think we’re making him nervous or something?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Alistair snapped, “he couldn’t possibly know—he’s a rat for crying out loud.” But they all kept staring at Mickey and he just stared back.

“This is too freaky,” Maggie whispered. She fumbled in her jeans pockets. “Poo, I’m outta gum. Anybody got some?”

Joe absently handed her a piece from his front pocket, his eyes never leaving the rat. Maggie grabbed it gratefully, stuffed it in her mouth, and chewed on it like her life depended on it. Mickey watched them for what seemed like forever, then finally moved forward. He scooted behind the counter and looked up at Petey expectantly.

“What’s he doin’?” Joe breathed in wonderment.

“He wants his cat food, you numbskull,” Alistair said sharply, “like he does every time he comes in here.”

“Oh yeah,” Joe said. Petey sprinkled some of the cat food on the ground. Mickey gobbled it up greedily then traipsed over to his bed and flung himself down in contentment. The humans all stared at each other.

“Well,” Joe said thoughtfully, “he didn’t really start anything yesterday until he had his nap. Maybe we just have to wait.”

They waited, and Mickey kept sleeping. Finally, at close to six o’clock he stirred, stretched, got up and meandered lazily into the back room. That was nothing unusual, as Mickey usually trundled around the store after he had its nap and until Petey closed the place up, but today everyone (except Clarence) silently followed him. He ignored them and ran about the back room, sniffing at the piles of stacked books, staring hopefully at the small refrigerator where Petey kept his lunch, nibbling on a piece of paper that had fluttered to the floor a few days ago and Petey hadn’t bothered to pick up. Finally, he sat down in the middle of the room and began to groom himself. Normal rat behavior. Or at least, normal Mickey behavior.

“Well,” Joe sighed, as they all trudged back to the musty front room, “I guess we got our hopes up for nothing.”

“If he’s a trained rat, like Al thinks,” Petey suggested, “maybe there’s some cue we could give him. Did any of you kids do anything peculiar yesterday that might have started his dance routine?”

They all thought about this, but none of them could determine anything specific that they had done differently the day before. Maggie sighed, crawled into her armchair, and chewed thoughtfully. Alistair moved back to his table to read the newspaper and Joe woke Clarence up and they played war, which was the only card game Clarence’s limited mind could comprehend. Petey half-heartedly stacked some books on a shelf and then went in the back to tidy up.

Clarence had just beat Joe’s war hand with an ace and was pulling the won cards to himself with a big, greedy smile on his face when they all heard a loud CRASH from the back room, followed by some thunderous swearing from Petey. Already highly on edge (except for Clarence) they all sprung out of their chairs and rushed to the back room where Petey lay sprawled on the floor, rubbing his head. A couple of large books lay next to him, and he looked pretty livid.

“What happened?” Joe yelled, staring crazily around for the rat.

“The god—durn books just flew of that shelf!” Petey yelled, trying desperately to curb his language in front of the kids. “They just flew off and hit me in the head!”

“You didn’t bump into the wall maybe? Shake them loose?” Maggie asked.

“No!” Petey shouted irritably, sitting up. “They just flew off and hit me in the head. I was a freakin’ five feet away from the shelf, and they both came hurtling through the air and smacked me square in the head, I’m telling you. What the blazes is going on around here?!”

“Where’s Mickey?” Joe asked.

“How should I know? I just got hit in the head!! Would it be too much for somebody to get me some ice or something?”

“You don’t have any ice,” Maggie said patiently. “This is a bookstore not a restaurant.”

“Quit smart-mouthing me and get me a cold soda bottle from the fridge then!”

Maggie trotted over to the refrigerator and returned with a soda bottle. She handed it to Petey who smacked it against his head, wincing and cursing as he did so.

“So,” Joe said impatiently, “now that Petey’s received medical attention, where’s the blasted rat?”

They left Petey moaning and cursing on the floor and hunted around for Mickey. “There he is!” Maggie shouted suddenly. The little animal was sitting right in front of a small mouse hole, looking highly pleased with himself for some reason, and making funny faces at them. They stared at him. He stuck out his tongue, danced sideways, turned around and shook his tail at them, then sauntered off towards the mouse hole.

“Don’t let him get away,” Joe said. He didn’t know why, but somehow it was imperative that Mickey didn’t make it to that hole. The children looked at each other, and they could tell that all of them, even Clarence who hadn’t even noticed the dancing antics of the other night, were thinking the same thing. In unison, they lunged towards the rat to grab it and in unison they toppled forward as Mickey ran quickly through the hole and out of sight. They all managed to miss the impertinent tail swishing in front of them, and grabbed each other’s hands instead.

“What the…” Joe began, but he didn’t get the chance to finish his sentence. All four of them were suddenly scooting towards that hole in the wall very quickly across the dusty floor, and the hole was suddenly getting bigger—much bigger—and a hollow roar like a heavy wind blowing through a small space filled their ears. The mouse hole grew larger and larger until the blackness of it encompassed everything and they could see nothing else. They were rushing incomprehensively towards it and seemed to suddenly slide right through it. Then they heard a horrendous BAM!—like a cannon or an extra-spectacular firework display on the Fourth of July, and all went quiet.