by Michael Ende
At that very moment there was a knock on the door.
The sorcerer sat bolt upright.
Then came a second knock, loud and clear.
Mauricio had stopped stirring and remarked dimwittedly, “Maestro, I think there was a knock at the door.”
“Shush!” hissed the sorcerer. “Quiet!”
The wind shook the shutters.
“Not already!” gnashed Preposteror. “By all that stinks and sizzles, that’s not fair!”
There was a third knock-knock, now quite impatient.
The sorcerer covered his ears with both hands. “I want to be left in peace. I’m not at home.”
The knocking turned into hammering, and through the wind and wuthering outside one could vaguely hear a croaking voice which sounded rather angry.
“Mauricio,” whispered the sorcerer, “dear kitty, would you be so kind as to open the door and say that I went on a trip unexpectedly. Simply say I went to visit my old aunt Tyrannia Vampirella and celebrate New Year’s Eve with her.”
“But, Maestro,” said the cat in surprise, “that would be an out-and-out lie. Do you really ask that of me?”
The sorcerer rolled his eyes heavenward and groaned. “I can’t very well say it myself, can I?”
“All right, Maestro, all right. I’d do anything for you.”
Mauricio scurried to the front door and, summoning all his waning strength, pushed a stool under the door handle, climbed up, and turned the gigantic key until the lock opened, all the while hanging on to the handle. A gust of wind tore open the door and raged through the rooms, so that the papers swirled about in the laboratory and the green flames in the fireplace lay back horizontally.
But no one was there.
The cat took a few cautious steps outside the door, peered to all sides in the darkness, came back in, and shook the snow from his fur.
“Nothing,” he said. “It must have been a mistake. But where are you, Maestro?”
Preposteror appeared from behind the armchair. “No one is there? Really?” he asked.
“Definitely not,” Mauricio confirmed.
The sorcerer rushed out into the hallway, slammed the front door shut, and locked it several times. Then he came back in, threw himself in his chair, and lamented, “They can’t wait. They want to drive me insane already.”
“Who?” asked Mauricio in surprise.
There was another knock, and this time it sounded furious.
Preposteror’s face was distorted in a grimace expressing fear and loathing at the same time. It was not a pretty sight.
“Not with me!” he gasped. “Oh no, not with me! We’ll see about that.”
He pussyfooted out into the hallway, with the little cat pussyfooting eagerly in tow.
On his left hand the sorcerer wore a ring sporting a large ruby. Naturally this was a magic stone; it could swallow and store enormous quantities of light. When properly loaded, it was a devastating weapon.
Preposteror slowly lifted his hand, shut one eye, aimed—and a threadlike red laser beam sizzled through the corridor, leaving a smoking pinprick of a mark in the massive front door. The sorcerer fired a second shot and a third, and again and again, until the massive wooden planks looked like a sieve and the ruby’s energy had been exhausted.
“Well, that should do it,” he said, and took a deep breath. “Peace and quiet at last.”
He went back to the laboratory and sat down at his desk to continue writing.
“But, Maestro,” stammered the little cat in horror, “what if you hit someone out there . . . ?”
“It would serve them right,” growled Preposteror. “What are they sneaking around in front of my house for?”
“But you have no idea who it was! Perhaps it was one of your friends.”
“I have no friends.”
“Or someone who needs your help.”
The sorcerer uttered a short, mirthless laugh. “You don’t know life, my little one. He who shoots first shoots best. Remember that.”
At which point there was another knock at the door.
Preposteror just sat there grinding his jaws.
“The window!” cried Mauricio. “I think it is at the window, Maestro.”
He sprang onto the sill, opened the window, and peeked out through a slit in the shutter.
“There’s someone sitting there,” he whispered. “It looks like a bird, a kind of raven, I think.”
Preposteror still did not speak. He merely raised his hands defensively.
“Perhaps it’s an emergency,” suggested the little cat. And without waiting for an order from the sorcerer, he pushed open the shutter.
Accompanied by a cloud of snow there fluttered into the laboratory a bird so ragged that it looked a lot like a large, shapeless potato stuck haphazardly with a few feathers here and there.
It landed in the middle of the floor, slid a ways on its skinny legs before coming to a standstill, fluffed up its skimpy feathers, and opened its substantial beak wide. “Well! Well! Well!” it croaked at an impressive volume. “You sure take your time letting someone in. A creature could catch its death out there. And you get shot at to boot. There, you see—my last tail feather has had it. What kind of manners is that? Have we become barbarians?”
Suddenly he realized that there was a cat staring at him with great glowing eyes. He tucked his head between his feathers, which made him look kind of hunchbacked, and managed no more than a feeble croak: “Uh-oh, a bird-eater! That’s just what I needed. Thanks a lot. This will come to no good end.”
Mauricio, who had never in his short life caught a single bird—and certainly not such a big, scary one—did not have the faintest idea at first that the bird was referring to him.
“Hello!” he meowed with dignity. “Welcome, stranger.”
The sorcerer was still staring silently and suspiciously at the odd feathered creature.
The raven felt increasingly uncomfortable. He gazed with tilted head back and forth between the cat and the sorcerer and at last rasped, “If you gentlemen don’t mind, I suggest somebody shut the window, because there’s nobody coming after behind me but it’s pretty durned drafty and I’ve got rawmatism, or whatever you call it, in my left wing anyway.”
The cat closed the window, sprang down from the sill, and started circling stealthily around the intruder. He only wanted to see whether the raven was all right. But the latter seemed to misinterpret Mauricio’s concern.
Meanwhile, Preposteror had regained his power of speech.
“Mauricio,” he commanded, “ask this jailbird who he is and what he wants of us.”
“My good Maestro wishes to inquire as to your appellation and the purpose of your visit,” said the cat in a distinguished purr, circling closer all the while.
The bird turned his head to follow the cat, never letting Mauricio out of his sight.
“My best greetings to your Maestro”—he desperately winked at the cat with one eye—“and my worthy name is Jacob Scribble, if you please, and I am, so to speak, the airy errand boy of Madam Tyrannia Vampirella, his honored aunt”—now winking with the other eye—“and apart from that, I am definitely not no jailbird, if you please, but an old raven to whom life has put many a hard test; you might well say a sad sack of feathers, you might say.”
“Well, what do you know, a raven!” sneered Preposteror. “Of course, you have to say so, or no one’s going to guess.”
“Ha ha, very funny,” rasped Jacob Scribble to himself in a subdued voice.
“Sad sack?” inquired Mauricio sympathetically. “What manner of sadness do you mean? Speak without fear, my good Maestro will help you.”
“I mean the bad luck what I always have,” Jacob explained gloomily. “For example, now I’ve got to run into a killer bird-eater, of all things, and I lost my feathers back when I strayed into a poison cloud. There’s more and more of them lately; nobody knows why.” He winked at the cat again. “And you can tell your good Maestro from me that he
doesn’t need to look at me if my ragged wardrobe bothers him. I don’t have nothing better anymore.”
Mauricio looked up at Preposteror. “You see, Maestro, it was an emergency, after all.”
“Why don’t you ask this raven why he keeps winking at you secretly?” said the sorcerer.
Jacob Scribble was quicker than the cat. “That is un-voluntary, Sorcery Minister, it doesn’t mean a thing. It’s just my nerves.”
“Is that so,” drawled Preposteror, “and why might we be so nervous?”
“Because I’ve got something against such bumptious guys who talk so fancy and have such sharp claws and two taillights in their face like him.”
It finally dawned on Mauricio that he had just been insulted. Naturally he couldn’t sit still for that. He drew himself up to as impressive a stature as he could, bristled, laid his ears back, and spat, “Maestro, would you allow me to pluck this impudent blabberbeak?”
The sorcerer took the cat on his lap and petted him. “Not yet, my little hero. Calm down. After all, he says he was sent by my most highly esteemed aunt. Let’s hear what he has to say. I only wonder whether one can believe a word he says. What do you think?”
“He certainly has no manners,” purred Mauricio. The raven’s wings drooped and he said, “Oh, peck my tail-feathers, the both of you!”
“It is surprising,” said Preposteror, while he continued stroking the cat’s fur, “it is truly surprising what common help my heretofore so distinguished auntie has taken to surrounding herself with.”
“What?!” screeched the raven. “Now, that pops my cork! Who’s common here? It’s not no fun when someone in my condition flaps through night and storm to announce his boss and he arrives just in time for supper, not the kind where he gets something between his beak, but where he’s on the menu himself. I’d like to ask out loud just who is common here.”
“What are you saying, Raven?” asked Preposteror in alarm. “Aunt Tyrannia is coming here? When?”
Jacob Scribble was still livid and hopping around on the floor. “Now! At once! Right away! In the blink of an eye! Any second! She’s almost here!”
Preposteror sank back in his armchair and moaned, “Oh, warts! That’s all I needed!”
The raven observed him with tilted head and rasped contentedly, “Aha, sad news, so it seems. That’s typical for me.”
“I haven’t seen Aunt Tye face to face for half a century,” the sorcerer whined. “What does she want here all of a sudden? Today of all days is a very bad day.”
The raven shrugged his wings. “She says she absolutely must come today and spend New Year’s Eve with her beloved nephew, she says, because her nephew, so she says, has some kind of a special recipe for some kind of punch, she says, what she herself desperately needs, she said.”
Preposteror shoved the cat off his lap and jumped up. “She knows everything,” he exclaimed. “She only wants to take advantage of my situation, by all the devil’s tumors. She wants to get on my good side under the pretext of family ties, only to perpetrate intellectual thievery. I know her, you bet I know her!”
Then he uttered an interminable Babylonian or ancient Egyptian curse, at which point all the glass receptacles in the room started humming and clinking and a dozen balls of lightning hissed in a zigzag across the floor.
Mauricio, who had never experienced this side of his Maestro, was so frightened that he fled with an enormous leap onto the head of a stuffed shark, which hung on the wall among other stuffed trophies.
There he discovered, to his renewed horror, that the raven had done the same and that they were holding each other tight without noticing it. They immediately let go in embarrassment.
The Shadow Sorcery Minister searched among the mountains of paper on his desk with trembling hands, got everything mixed up, and bellowed, “By all the acid rains, she shall not see so much as a decimal point of my precious equations! That insidious hyena seems to think she can get all the results of my research for free now. But she’s barking up the wrong tree! She’s not going to inherit a thing, not a thing! I’m going to store the files with the most important formulas in my secret super-sorcery-proof cellar without any further ado. She’ll never get in there. Neither she nor anyone else.”
He was about to run off, but stopped in his tracks and searched the laboratory with wild eyes. “Mauricio, holy pesticide, where are you?”
“Here I am, Maestro,” answered Mauricio from up on the shark’s head.
“Listen,” the sorcerer called up to him, “you keep an eye on that son of a raven while I’m gone, understand! But don’t go to sleep again. Watch out that he doesn’t stick his beak into things that are none of his business. It would be best if you took him to your chamber and guarded the door. By no means trust him, and don’t get drawn in by any conversation or attempts at familiarity. I’m holding you responsible.”
He hastened away with his bilious green dressing gown fluttering behind.
The two animals sat facing each other.
The raven stared at the cat and the cat stared at the raven.
“Well?” asked Jacob after a while.
“Well what?” spat Mauricio.
The raven winked once again. “You still don’t know what’s going on, comrade?”
Mauricio was confused, but on no account did he want to show it, which is why he said, “Shut your big beak! My Maestro said no talking.”
“But he’s gone now,” croaked Jacob, “and we can speak openly, comrade.”
“No attempts at familiarity!” retorted Mauricio sternly. “Save yourself the trouble. You are brazen and common and I don’t like you.”
“Nobody likes me anyway, so I’m used to it,” answered Jacob. “But the two of us still have to work together now. That’s our mission, after all.”
“Be quiet!” growled the little cat from deep in his throat, trying to look as dangerous as possible. “We’re going to my room now. Jump down—and don’t you try to escape! March!”
Jacob Scribble looked at Mauricio and shook his head in disbelief. “Are you really that stupid or are you just pretending?”
Mauricio didn’t know how to react. Ever since he had been alone with Jacob, the raven had suddenly seemed much bigger and his beak much sharper and more dangerous. Mauricio arched his back involuntarily and his whiskers bristled. Poor Jacob’s heart skipped a beat, as he took this to be a serious threat. He fluttered obediently down to the floor. The little cat, who was himself quite taken aback by his effect on the raven, followed.
“Let me be and I’ll let you be,” Jacob clucked and ducked.
Mauricio felt grand. “Forward march, stranger!” he commanded.
“Well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles,” croaked Jacob in defeat. “I wish I had stayed in the nest with Clara.”
“Who is Clara?”
“Just my poor wife,” said Jacob.
And he stalked off on his skinny legs, with the cat close behind.
When they reached the long, dark corridor with its many jars, Mauricio, who had done some thinking, asked, “Why do you keep calling me comrade, anyway?”
“Holy hangman!—because that’s what we are,” answered Jacob, “or at least we used to be, I thought.”
“A cat and a bird can never be comrades,” declared Mauricio proudly. “Don’t put on airs, raven. Cats and birds are natural enemies.”
“Naturally,” confirmed Jacob. “I mean, naturally that would be only natural. But naturally only when the situation is natural. Natural enemies are sometimes comrades in unnatural situations.”
“Slow down!” said Mauricio. “I don’t understand. Express yourself more clearly.”
Jacob stopped and turned around. “You also came here as a secret agent to observe your Maestro, or didn’t you?”
“What do you mean?” asked Mauricio, now totally confused. “You, too? But why has the High Council sent yet another agent here?”
“No, not here,” said Jacob. “I mean, not me.
I mean, you get me all confizzled in the head with your slow-pokey brain. Now listen: I spy on my Madam Witch, same as you spy on your Monsewer Sorcerer. Have you finally swallowed the worm?”
Mauricio sat down in astonishment. “Is that honestly so?”
“As honest as I am a sad sack of a raven,” sighed Jacob. “By the way, would you mind if I scratched myself? I’ve had this itch ever since I got here.”
“But I beg of you!” responded Mauricio with a magnanimous wave of his paw. “After all, we are comrades.”
He wound his tail elegantly around himself and watched while Jacob scratched his head thoroughly with one claw.
All of a sudden Mauricio felt a deep affection for the old raven. “Why didn’t you identify yourself right from the beginning?”
“I did,” croaked Jacob. “I kept winking at you the whole time.”
“Aha!” cried Mauricio. “But couldn’t you have come right out and said it?”
Now it was Jacob’s turn to be confounded. “Said it?” he cawed. “So that your boss could hear everything? You’re a riot.”
“My Maestro knows everything, anyway.”
“What?” snapped the raven. “Did he find out?”
“No,” said Mauricio. “I let him in on it.”
The raven’s beak hung open in disbelief.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” he exclaimed finally. “That knocks me right off my branch! Say that again!”
“I just had to,” Mauricio explained with a self-important mien. “It would not have been chivalrous to deceive him any longer. I have observed and tested him for a long time and have come to the conclusion that he is a noble human being and a true genius and worthy of our confidence. Although he is acting a little odd today, I must admit. In any case, he has treated me like a prince the whole time. And that shows what a kindly man and benefactor of all animals he is.”
Jacob stared at Mauricio in consternation. “I don’t believe it! How can just one cat be so stupid? Maybe two or three together, but just one? Now you’ve blown it, my boy, now you’ve blown everything; now the whole plan of the animals is bound to fail, to fail miserably, in fact. I saw it coming, I saw it coming from the very start!”