Mike Nelson's Death Rat!

by Michael J. Nelson

  “Yeah, yeah. That’s right, that’s right,” Bromstad encouraged, seeing the shocked and saddened faces of the faithful. He brushed Ponty aside and stepped up to the microphone. “So you can stop lining the pockets of these frauds,’cause your little Minnesota fantasy is over! Six-foot-long rat. You idiots. You deserve your disappointment! Now,” he said, pointing his pistol out at the crowd, “break it up, everyone. Nothing to see here. Let’s go. Get in your cars and let’s head home.”

  The crowd, many of whom did not want to get shot, started to break up.

  “No! Stop! All of you!” shouted King Leo. “He’s wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. There is something to see here,” he continued, taking the microphone from Bromstad, who was too shocked to stop him. “History is about more than just what happened. Isn’t that right, Ponty?”

  “Well, ‘what happened’ is certainly part of it, but you’re right, it’s—” Ponty began.

  “That’s right, see? Well, that goes for faith as well. What did you come out here to see? A six-foot rat? No. You came to get yourself funked, is what you came here for. And the source of that funk is the Rat of Dee-vine Power, whether he was invented by Earl or Ponty or Jack or whoever. He is real! Brother Ralph, he saw him. And since that time dozens of people have seen him. Now, that’s what I call faith.” King Leo started to ramp it up. “Faith in the rat. Can you feel it? Can you feel it, people? Are you ready for a revival? Wooooooo!”

  The people let King Leo and the rest of them know that, yes, they were ready for a revival.

  “That’s right! You have to believe! Now, I don’t know what motivates Mr. Bromstad and his naked friend here to try to bust up our faith like they have, but I would guess it’s because they don’t have anything of value in their lives. Nothing to believe in. But I’d like to thank Jack and Ponty for giving us all something to believe in. The Rat of Dee-vine Power. Thank you, Jack,” said King Leo, and he dispensed a hug.

  “Oh, you know. I’ve been only too happy to help.”

  “And, Mr. Earl—Ponty. My thanks to you for your fine work,” said King Leo.

  “I, um . . . I’m not much of a hugger. Okay, okay. Thanks,” he said, and Ponty finally received one of King Leo’s muchtalked-about hugs.

  “As for you, Mr. Bromstad, let go of that bitterness. Can you feel the power melting it right out of your heart?” King Leo asked, and though the expression on Bromstad’s face was somewhat enigmatic, it was clear that there had been no dissipation of bitterness quite yet. “Take my rat cloak, Mr. Bromstad. Here, give me that ridiculous gun,” he said, taking it from Bromstad. “Give me that ridiculous towel, too,” he said, snatching it away from a seemingly passive Bromstad. There were only a few snickers from the crowd. “Now, take this cloak, cover your nakedness, and find a place in your hard, hard heart for the Rat of Dee-vine Power.” He covered the immobile Bromstad with his rat cloak and fastened it around his arms. “There, there,” he added as the crowd applauded, moved by emotion and by the apparent addition of another proselyte.

  King Leo stepped back, looked at his new church member, and joined the crowd as they applauded. Bromstad appeared to be looking back at King Leo, so King Leo threw wide his arms for a hug. But Bromstad was not looking at King Leo. He was looking past him into the eyes of Pontius Feeb, who in turn was looking back at him. Ponty was looking back at him because for the first time in his life he saw murder in the eyes of another human being, and he found it oddly fascinating.

  A feral cry of rage tore forth out of Bromstad’s body, and he ran at King Leo, went under his outstretched arms, and slammed himself into Ponty, who stumbled backward but did not lose his footing. His wrestling instincts took over again as he widened his stance, grasped Bromstad around his chest, and executed a nice takedown throw. Unfortunately, instead of a mat upon which to land, they had only the stage’s railing, which promptly broke, sending the two hurtling down toward the boarded-up entrance to the mine. The boards themselves had not been properly maintained, and years of weather had worn them to the point that they would easily break if landed on by two grown men.

  When Bromstad and Ponty plunged into the boards, the boards gave way, and the pair plummeted down into the Holey Mine.

  CHAPTER 25

  Most mines of the era were constructed with something called an adit, a horizontal opening through which to enter the mine without falling tens of feet and hurting oneself. The Holey Mine had been constructed hurriedly in the race to find the richest lode, so sacrifices were made. It was given only a vertical shaft, out from which levels, or horizontal tunnels, were cut, and it was entered by standing in a kibble, or Cornish bucket, and being lowered by winch. Months after his fall Ponty would curse the Holey Mine’s lack of a good, quality, horizontal adit, but at this point he did not know it lacked one. He fell into the mine painfully, without even giving the shoddy mine construction a thought.

  “Oof!” was the sound he made when he landed, for Bromstad had fallen on top of him. Once he’d pushed Bromstad off, he felt a strong desire to lie there on his back, moaning for at least a minute or two, but there was no time. Bromstad almost immediately began choking him.

  “You rotten usurper! You ruined my life!” Bromstad said as he squeezed Ponty’s neck. That it was Bromstad choking him Ponty established by deductive reasoning only, for he could see nothing but utter blackness. He arched his body, pushed Bromstad off his chest, stood up, and ran, smashing his head into the low ceiling of the level running off the main shaft. Feeling in front of him, he discovered just how low the level was and, crouching, made his way down it, his pace understandably slow.

  “Where are you? Usurper! Lying, thieving usurper! Did I make it clear that I wanted to kill you? Where are you, usurper?” Bromstad yelled.

  Ponty chose not to tell him. Because he heard Bromstad’s rat cloak rustling, a growling noise issuing from his mouth, and also an indiscreet drinking burp, he knew that the author was in pursuit. He widened the distance from Bromstad, which was not difficult given Ponty’s sobriety and his motivation not to be choked to death. He had no idea how far down into the level he had traveled when he finally stopped and, hearing nothing, sat on the cold, damp ground.

  Though he was shivering, fatigued, and hurt in places he could not immediately identify, and despite the fact that he was being pursued through a deserted mine by a drunken rival author intent on his death, and setting aside the detail that he might just have implicated his friend—a woman he quite liked—and an entire town in what could turn out to be criminal charges and countless lawsuits, Ponty felt pretty good for the first time in a long time.

  IF THE CROWD of people that had gathered at the Holey Mine for King Leo’s revival were shocked by the sudden and oftchanging rush of events, they were not calmed by the appearance overhead of a Bell 206L-4 helicopter training its powerful spotlight on the stage. Nor did the voice that issued from its loudspeaker soothe their jangled nerves:

  “All right, you monstrous perversions of nature, break it up down there, or I’ll have no choice but to open fire on your freaky love-in!”

  Screams and panic were the result as the crowd did indeed disperse. After all that had transpired, they were inclined to believe only those who threatened them with violence.

  Once he saw an appropriate amount of fear and running, Governor Herzog rappelled from out of the hovering chopper and dropped down onto the stage. He then signaled for the chopper to land, making those next to him wonder why he didn’t just land with the chopper.

  “All right,” he asked of a group made up of King Leo, Jack, Sandi, King Leo’s band, and a naked Stig Stou-Thorup, “just what in the double-jointed Jack Dempsey is going on here?” Then, noticing Stig and his lack of appropriate attire, he added, “A pasty Dane in a towel! Can you think of any reason at all that I shouldn’t pop you on the button and drop you like a plumb bob?”

  “It’s Gus Bromstad. He and Ponty Feeb have fallen down into the mine,” said Stig, either misinterpreting or ignori
ng the governor’s question.

  “All right, well stand back, give ’em some air. Everyone spread out,” said the governor, even though they were ten feet up on the stage looking down at the mine entrance and couldn’t possibly be crowding either Bromstad or Ponty. The governor leaped off the stage, taking reasonable care not to land in the mine, and surveyed things.

  “Hm. I’d say they fell through here, is that right?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Stig.

  A television camera pressed in on the governor.

  “All right, all right, all right, people,” he shouted to unseen people around him. “Here are the problems as I see them, and the events that are going to transpire in an attempt to right these problems: Number one, we’ve got Gus Bromstad trapped down in that mine. Number two, we’ve got . . . some other guy down there with him, doing who-knows-what to our beloved author.”

  “Governor,” said Jack, “it’s another author, a Mr. Pontius Feeb. Bromstad attacked him, and they fell into the mine. Bromstad was trying to murder him.”

  Herzog considered this new information. “All right, all right, all right, people. Here’s what’s going to transpire: I’m going to rappel down into that mine and try to stop our beloved Minnesota author from killing this . . . this—”

  “Pontius Feeb, sir,” the naked Stig offered.

  “Ponshius Feeb, yes, thank you, Mr. Stou-Thorup,” said the now-irritated governor.

  “Um, I would be remiss in not pointing out that Mr. Bromstad is naked save for King Leo’s rat cloak, so a speedy rescue is essential,” added Stig.

  “Noted,” said the governor. He yelled for some materials from the chopper, and after his pilot brought them over, he attached a fair amount of hardware to his beefy body and prepared for his descent. “All right,” he said, giving the thumbs-up to the television camera and flicking on his headlamp, “let’s go rescue some authors.”

  Probably because he was playing somewhat to the camera and not paying full military-style attention to the task at hand, the governor failed to attach some critical carabiner clips to his rope, so that when he let go of solid ground, he, too, plunged tens of feet straight down and hurt himself at the bottom.

  Pontius had not been huddling in his corner for long when he heard a crash and then, inexplicably, the very gruff and recognizable voice of his governor.

  “Uh-oh, son of a butter bean! I busted my darn fool leg!” his state’s leader complained. “Bromstad? What in the name of Jim Kelly are you doin’ down here? Bromstad? Help me!”

  Ponty got on his hands and knees and, feeling ahead of him in the blackness, tried to find his way toward Herzog’s voice, which continued steadily, complaining and chastising. After crawling for ten minutes or so, he came to a spot in the level where it seemed to continue straight ahead but also fed off to the right. He tried to concentrate as much as his strained and fading faculties would allow, but he simply could not remember which path he’d taken as he ran from the foaming Bromstad, nor could he determine with any certainty from which direction the yelling was originating.

  “Hey, up there!” Herzog shrieked. “Tell that moron Adam to send out the National Guard. You hear that? Tell him I can do that—I have the authority!”

  “Hey!” Ponty yelled. “Mr. Governor, sir?”

  “Who’s that? Is that Feeb?”

  “Yes, sir, sir.”

  “Feeb, you’ve got us in a mell of a hess, you know that, man?”

  “I’m very sorry, sir,” said Ponty, who was near to tears. “But right now I’m very lost, and it’s very dark, and I don’t know how to get to where you are.”

  “That’s what happens when you join up with a freak like King Leo,” Herzog admonished.

  “Yes. Yes, I know that now, Governor. It was a huge mistake.”

  “That ain’t no bean dip, for sure, Feeb. Now, listen, we’ll get you out of here. Follow my voice, man.”

  “I’m trying, but it’s very hard. Do you think you could just keep talking, and I’ll try again to make my way to you?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Heck, I’ll go you one better. I’ll just keep singing. You’ll find me. And if you stumble across Bromstad, drag his carcass along, too, will you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay. Here goes, Feeb. Let’s see. This is one from Billy Ray Cyrus’s album It Won’t Be the Last. It’s called ‘Ain’t Your Dog No More.’”

  Ponty crawled wearily and blindly through the tunnel while the governor shouted out a few by Billy Ray Cyrus, half of a song by Styx that he couldn’t remember all of, “Beth,” by Kiss, and two songs from Paint Your Wagon. But there was a maze of levels spreading out from the one down which he had initially traveled, and Herzog’s voice was so diffuse that it was of little help. While Herzog was belting out “Hand Me Down That Can o’ Beans,” Ponty blacked out and collapsed facedown on the cold stone floor of the Holey Mine.

  CHAPTER 26

  Ponty regained consciousness three days later in the logy funk of the recently medicated. The room seemed unnaturally bright, the lights above him ringed with hazy coronas. He could not have been blamed if he had misidentified his room as heaven, and indeed he might have if Jack’s large and very mortal body hadn’t appeared suddenly above him.

  “Hey, Ponty!” Jack said cheerfully.

  “Jack?” Ponty croaked. “Am I in jail?”

  “Jail? No, no. Food’s the same, though. No, you’re in the Fishville hospital. Took them a while to get you out of the mine, Ponty. You had us worried.”

  “What happened? I remember Herzog singing from Paint Your Wagon, and then everything went black.”

  “Well, that’s probably for the best,” said Jack. “Let me ring for the nurse.”

  “Wait,” said Ponty, shifting himself up in his bed.

  “Careful,” said Jack, helping Ponty with his pillow.

  “What happened after that?”

  “Well, the rescue was not the smoothest ever. Herzog’s a big man. He got wedged sideways in the main shaft as they were pulling him up. As you know, because of the rock there, it was impractical to get in behind him, so basically they had to give him a good yank and he came free. Sad, though. He came up blubbering like a baby right in front of the TV cameras. Didn’t do his image much good, in my opinion,” Jack poured a cup of water for Ponty, stabbed a straw into it, and held it up for him. “Here.”

  “What about Bromstad?”

  “Well, the trouble with him is, he didn’t want to come up, apparently. Finally, though, they dragged his naked body out for the world to see. Ewww.” Jack shivered. “He got checked out medically and then went right to jail, along with Stig. I imagine they’re sprung on bail now. But you— they had a tough time finding you. It was the next afternoon before they got you out. You were pretty dehydrated, and your core temperature was not where it needed to be.”

  “See? I mess everything up. Can’t even keep a decent body temperature going.”

  “Enough now. I’m calling the nurse,” Jack said, thumbing the call button. “Then I want to give Sandi a call. She’s been here all she could, but she had to go tend bar today.”

  “No! No,” said Ponty. “Keep her away from me, will you, Jack?”

  “What? Why?”

  “Just do whatever it takes. I can’t see her, okay?”

  Jack shook his head. “All right, Ponty. Anything you say.”

  Though pressure from the media was intense, Jack ably handled it, taking a lot of the scrutiny off the recovering Ponty. Consequently, Ponty’s convalescence at the Fishville Community Hospital did not last more than a week. His brother flew in from Tucson and helped him get back to his home in Minneapolis.

  “Come on, bro,” Thad pleaded. “What’s here for you? Fly back with me to Tucson.”

  But Ponty would not go, and Thad, shaking his head, left him in the charge of his roommates.

  Two weeks later Sags, Phil, Beater, and Scotty found a new place, nearer to the university, and Ponty was not invited to join
them.

  “You probably want to be with your own kind anyway,” Sags had helpfully suggested.

  Ponty had already packed his scant belongings and moved into a dingy walk-up with a shared bathroom when the subpoenas, forwarded from his old address, started showing up. He rang Jack.

  “Yeah, it’s raining lawsuits, isn’t it?” said Jack with wonder in his voice. “Fetters is suing us, there’s a class-action suit from the readers, and P. Dingman is hopping mad. They’re bringing the big guns. I never saw it, but apparently it was right in the contract that the book was supposed to be true. Looks like the ride is over, Ponty. It’s too bad, ’cause Death Rat is still selling like hotcakes—morbid curiosity, I guess—but I don’t think we’ll be seeing much of that moola.”

  “Jack, I’m really sorry I dragged you into this.”

  “Hey, enough of that. It was a good time. Ponty, I got to go. I’ll see you in court.”

  As the year wore on, Ponty would spend a fair amount of time in court. He appeared at the arraignment of Bromstad, Stig, and the others from Den Institut, but neither he nor Sandi, who only sent a deposition, wanted to press any charges against them. Bromstad was ordered to undergo therapy. While Stig’s henchmen got off scot-free, he was not quite so lucky: He got three months, but after pressure from the Danish consulate, he was shown leniency and allowed to serve it out in Copenhagen. Bromstad, who was responding well to therapy, was publicly contrite. At a press conference, tears in his eyes, he apologized and told his readers that his recovery process had made him realize how important it was to keep a promise. Because of that, his next book would not be a Dogwood after all.

  “What’s it going to be about?” a reporter asked.

  “Beauty, truth, nobility . . .” he said with a faraway look, and then he trailed off, mumbling something that had the reporters looking at one another for help.

  “‘Herring,’ did he say?” they asked each other.

  Bromstad went to work immediately on his thorny and impenetrable Danish historical epic Gesta Danorum, which would sell only eight thousand copies. Of those, more than 83 percent would be returned for a full refund. It sold far less even than Bart Herzog’s disappointing account of the Holey incident, Ain’t Nowhere I Won’t Go.