by Rich Horton
I forced myself to stop reading. “Why would some underground pamphlet about a discredited theory cost you your tenure?” I asked the professor.
She spread her hands. “Because I wrote it,” she said.
That hung in the air for a few minutes while I studied her expression. She showed neither shame nor pride at the admission, neither fear nor defiance.
“You wrote it when you were a student, you mean,” I finally said. “You were passionate and angry and testing the limits of propriety, taking up with odd people with odd ideas who claimed to be your friends. It doesn’t represent who you are today, or what you believe.”
She listened carefully, but instead of nodding eagerly she shook her head and I took another long hard look at the door.
“I wrote it over the last two years, and it represents decades of disciplined scholarship. It represents what I believe to be true.”
“You believe humans were woken from an animal state by learned mice?”
“She believes it’s a good question to explore.”
The speaker squeezed through the crack beneath the door, a plump gray mouse with a tiny cane grasped in one paw.
“Papa?” asked the professor. “What are you doing here?”
“Keeping an eye on you, dear. As ever.”
There was a rumbling noise in the room that only cut off when I recognized it as my own instinctive growl. I fought down the urge to apologize.
“You’re Coleridge?” I asked.
“He’s Vicar Coleridge,” said Thomasina Swallow. “The Rookery’s chaplain and dean of the divinities school.”
“Sorry, Vicar,” I said. “I thought that you . . . I thought that ‘explorations’ of that particular question were discouraged by your, um, colleagues. They certainly are by the Imperium.”
I’d never spent any time around mice. I hadn’t known they could shrug.
“Learned mice are no more monolithic in opinions than we are in size,” said the Vicar. “There are many of us who believe the government’s strictures on historical inquiry are ill-advised.”
All very interesting. Aloud, I said, “What did you do with the body?”
I hadn’t known mice could smile, either. “What body is that, Mr. Marsh?”
“Papa Coleridge,” said the professor. “I’ve already told him what happened.”
“Have you?” asked the mouse, and I couldn’t help but agree with his arch tone.
“You haven’t,” I said. “I’ve got no sign of a struggle, no evidence of violence, nothing at all to indicate that a crime was committed here.” I laid a paw alongside my nose. “Nothing.”
The professor strode across to her desk and picked up a sizable chunk of marble serving as a paperweight on one of the stacks of loose pages. She tossed it on the floor in front of me, scattering the unbound sheets of the heretical pamphlet.
“Smell that,” she said.
I did. It smelled like blood.
“Well,” I said, “that’s a weapon. Taken with a missing person, that’s enough. We’re going to have to involve the police, Professor Swallow.”
“Ah,” said the vicar. “But no one is missing.”
I’d already fallen for one obvious trap that day while talking to Cool Charles, who—now that I thought about it—kind of reminded me of Coleridge in some indefinable way. I took a chance.
“Nobody’s missing because you’ve just come from talking to Sedgewick in his office and he’s alive and well,” I said.
The mouse spent the time I was talking grooming his little whiskers. “Not exactly. I just came from the infirmary, where Dr. Sedgewick is resting comfortably. He’s recovering from a nasty blow to the head that required a rather large number of stitches, but no, I didn’t speak to him. Because he was asleep.”
A mouse with all the answers, except . . .
“Why is there no blood on the floor?” I asked. “If the professor here beaned her colleague hard enough to spit his skull open, hard enough to put him so far out that she thought he was dead, there should be a scent.”
The Vicar pointed to a corner of the rug with his cane. “He landed there. The blood spilled on several stacks of old, dreadfully written undergraduate essays—I have no idea why you keep those wretched things, Thomasina—which I consigned to the furnace in the subbasement several hours ago, now. So you see, Mr. Marsh, there’s really no further need for your services. Thomasina panicked, is all. Just a misunderstanding. If you’ll send an invoice to my office, you’ll of course be paid in full for the work you’ve done.”
I knew when I was being shown the door, but the mouse wasn’t my client, Professor Swallow was. When I looked to her for direction, though, she was looking at the vicar, her expression nearly unreadable. The part that wasn’t unreadable made my hackles rise. The part that was fear.
“Right,” I said. “Your address is in the book?”
“Just write Vicar Coleridge, care of the Rookery, and it will get to me. No need for a stamp, even.”
I used to know a woman who worked for the city’s small contingent of postal police. The regulations they enforce are even more strict and arcane than those of the civic police. I was pretty certain the vicar had just described some kind of postal fraud. I was equally certain he’d never be called to account for it.
I left the two of them there and took fourteen flights of stairs down to the Rookery’s enormous marble and limestone lobby. I was about to head out into the snowy, late afternoon darkness when I caught sight of the building directory out of the corner of my eye.
I trotted over and read through the list of names. I had more or less begun the process of compartmentalizing the day’s events, filing everything away into a place in my brain never to be consulted again, but something bothered me.
I kept reading the list of faculty and staff. Names, names, names.
How had the mouse known my name?
• • •
In addition to his considerable talents as an information broker, Cool Charles was my go-to when I needed to do some breaking and entering. This time, though, he proved recalcitrant.
“Not the Rookery,” he said. “No way.”
He was playing some kind of game at the diner table that involved moving and re-moving pegs from holes bored in a triangular piece of wood. Show-off. Next he would be using one of the pegs as a makeshift tool of some kind.
“It’s one door,” I said. “The door to a college linguistics department. How hard can it be?” I’d learned that Dr. Sedgewick was a linguistics professor specializing in textual analysis. I was interested in the contents of his office.
“It’s probably so easy you could do it yourself,” said Charles, plucking another peg. “So why don’t you?”
It was just within the realm of possibility that I could spring a standard door lock clutching a pick between my teeth. But that wasn’t the only reason I wanted the bird along.
“I need a lookout, too,” I said.
“What you need is to have your head looked at,” said Charles. “That place is supposed to be positively infested with learned mice. Those guys don’t sleep, Marsh.”
This was one of the more pedestrian urban legends about learned mice. They don’t sleep. Another stated that they had no need to eat. Still another claimed they could hear their names spoken from miles away; the exact distance varied from teller to teller.
I didn’t believe any of that. For all the crazy things I’ve believed in my life—and there have been some doozies—I’ve never believed that there is any great secret about learned mice that can’t be explained by the facts that they are infernally smart and eternally patient.
I fancied myself pretty smart as well. I clambered down from the bench seat and nodded at the cashier, telling her to put everything on my tab.
“Charles,” I said, “if you don’t see me around in the next few days, tell Henson to check the furnaces in the Rookery subbasement.”
The crow squawked. “You’re really doing it? You’re going to try
and prove one of your crazy-ass theories by breaking into the Rookery tonight?”
I shrugged noncommittally and left.
Like I said, I fancied myself pretty smart.
Patient, not so much.
As I started down the street, I heard the diner’s door chime behind me, followed by the flapping of wings above. Cool Charles did a wingover, glared at me, then flew off in the direction of the Rookery.
He was a good friend.
I miss him still.
• • •
After a brief stop at the bookmaker’s shop I use as a bank, I made my way through the frozen streets to the Rookery. The snow was really coming down, and the city was mostly quiet.
Cool Charles fluttered to a landing beside me outside the main entrance.
“What’s in the bag?” he asked.
I set my package down so I could answer him. “A sizable amount of cash,” I said.
“Are we going to the bursar’s office, too?” he asked. “You signing up for classes, need to pay tuition? Finally going to get a real education?”
“Everything’s a real education, Charles,” I said. “You know that, a knowledgeable creature like yourself. No, we have a stop to make before we go up to the office levels. We might need a little fiscal lubrication.”
The night nurse on duty in the Rookery’s infirmary was a human man, but he shared a lot of features with a particularly venal fox. Not that anybody would ever awaken a fox.
Even as we pushed through the doors, he picked up the speaking horn connected to the Rookery’s internal communications system. Cool Charles flapped up onto his desk and put a talon on the man’s hand. “You’ll want to hear this,” he said. “Seriously.”
The man eyed the package I set before him speculatively, and put down the speaking horn. “What can I do for you?” he asked. His voice was more like a weasel’s.
“We’re here to visit Dr. Sedgewick,” I said. “We won’t be long, just a few minutes to check up on his condition.”
“You’re a doctor?” the man asked doubtfully.
“Just visitors,” I said.
He glanced at a log on his desk. “Orders are that he only be visited by relatives.”
I nudged the package toward him. “We’re his cousins,” I said.
When we got to the room, Dr. Sedgewick was awake, and apparently well on the mend—he was grading papers. He wielded a double-ended pencil with sharpened blue and red points, quickly marking passages, underlining and circling, scribbling notes. He flipped the pencil back and forth often, utilizing a color code I couldn’t make any sense of at a glance. His head was bandaged, but his eyes were clear.
“Dr. Sedgewick, my name is Connolly Marsh. This is my colleague, Charles. I’ve been hired by Thomasina Swallow to investigate the circumstances surrounding your injury.”
He looked me up and down. “A dog,” he said. “A lying dog.”
“Excuse me?” I said, genuinely startled.
“I was warned you might show up,” the man said. “I know all about you, dog. I know you were kicked off the police force and I know why. Well, you’ll not involve me in any of that. I’m a reputable scholar, do you hear me? You trot right along. Go home. Go home!”
You run into this kind of talk sometimes. You try not to let it get you down.
“Come on, Connolly,” said Charles. “Nothing to learn here.”
“Just a minute.” I took a deep breath, fighting down a growl. “What did they give you?”
Sedgewick looked down his pitiful little nose at me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, and the lie absolutely reeked.
“Your field is linguistic analysis. Somehow you got hold of an underground pamphlet—maybe somebody paid you to look at it, maybe even somebody I used to work for—and you figured out that the anonymous writer was someone right here in the Rookery, Thomasina Swallow. You went and confronted her and got your head cracked open for your trouble. And, fool that you are, you forgot who she calls ‘Papa.’”
The way these things usually go, the perpetrator or the witness or whoever you’re grilling responds to their misdeeds being laid out for them by blustering or by getting angry or by clamming up. I figured Sedgewick was headed for blustering, but then something odd happened. His eyes clouded over, he picked up his pencil, and he started marking papers again. Then he set the pencil down, looked up, and said, “I was warned you might show up.”
Cool Charles pecked my back right paw hard. “Let’s go,” he said. “Before this gets any weirder.”
On the way out, I threw a glance back at Sedgewick. He circled a passage in blue, twirled his pencil, made a note in red. I wondered if he would remember we’d been there.
• • •
Charles let me try the lock twice before he plucked the paper clip away from me and opened the door in about three seconds. Crows, man.
The Linguistics Department of the Rookery was small. There was a reception area with a secretary’s desk and a fixture consisting of open-fronted cubbies that served as mailboxes for the faculty and staff. Most of these were overflowing.
“You check those mailboxes,” I said. “I’m going back to his office.”
Behind the secretary’s desk was a warren of cubicles that were probably used by adjuncts, and then a corridor housing the more senior faculty’s offices. There was a hand-drawn diagram taped to the wall showing whose office was where, but I ignored it. I had Sedgewick’s scent. I followed my nose.
His office door was unlocked. Superficially, the room resembled Thomasina Swallow’s office, except that there was a large casement window behind the desk and there were no stacks of files and papers. The room, in fact, was preternaturally neat.
“Oh,” I said. “Of course. They’ve been here already.”
Cool Charles burst into the room in full, panicked flight, nothing cool about him at all. He was closely pursued by a running woman dressed for the weather, with a scarf concealing her face. Not much of a disguise—even without the pince-nez I could smell my erstwhile client, Thomasina Swallow, PhD.
Charles was cawing and cawing, loud. He was battering against the window, the ceiling, and the walls, all in turn. I suppressed the urge to bark. “What’s wrong?” I shouted instead. But Charles didn’t answer. “What did you do to him?” I asked the professor.
“Thomasina,” came a voice from down at floor level. “The windows, if you would.”
She rushed past me, sparing me a pitying look, and fumbled with the window latches. Charles fluttered about her hands, banging against the glass. I caught a glimpse of one of his eyes. The intelligence there was strange to me. Frightening. Animalistic.
At last, the professor managed the latches and threw open the windows. As the cold and the snow came in, Cool Charles flew out, disappearing into the night.
I stared after him. Then I turned, sniffing. “You killed him,” I said to Vicar Coleridge. “You as good as murdered him.”
“He couldn’t be counted on to keep quiet,” said the learned mouse. “And he’s far from dead. He will no doubt live a happy life. Even mundane crows know more than they tell.”
Thomasina Swallow drew a revolver out of her satchel. I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me that a professor of military history handled a weapon quite so competently, despite how frightened she seemed.
“You got me involved in this,” I growled at her. “Why did you come to me in the first place if you were just going to help cover everything up?”
I’d always known humans could shrug.
“I didn’t have all the facts,” she said, voice trembling slightly. “Papa Coleridge was quite right. I panicked. I thought Sedgewick was going to expose me so I tried to kill him. I wasn’t aware that Papa knew about my research from the beginning, and that he’s been protecting me.”
I measured the distance between me and the vicar, calculating whether I could cross it and swallow him whole before the professor could fire.
“She’s
quite a proficient shot,” said the mouse, leaning comfortably on his cane. “I wouldn’t try it.”
“So what’s it going to be for me, then?” I asked. “A bullet or . . . ” I nodded toward the still-open window. “Or that?”
I didn’t know which would be worse. I didn’t imagine then that there could be something worse than either.
“Oh, no, nothing of the sort for you, Mr. Marsh,” said the vicar. “You see, unlike the bird, we’re sure you can be quiet.”
• • •
And I have been.
For the last eight years, I’ve never said a word about all that happened that day, not even when Henson came around to question me as part of the missing persons investigation they opened searching for Cool Charles. It’s never seemed worth it.
Once, a long time before Charles went away, I thought I’d stumbled onto something big, something fundamental to the nature of our world. Then I discovered that other people had had similar revelations, that there was a whole subculture dedicated to rooting out what we thought of as the truth.
It consumed me. It defined me. Ultimately, it destroyed me, costing me my career and most of my friendships.
I have an old underground pamphlet here—the only one I have. It’s credited to A. Shrew, but I know its true authorship, penned as it was by Thomasina Swallow, daughter of the learned mouse, Coleridge. It describes, in great detail, all the evidence supporting the contention that the supposed masters of this world and makers of most of us, human beings, are themselves, in their language-developing, tool-using current forms, the creations of an older and more alien race. The evidence is, to say the least, compelling.
There have been many nights over the last eight years when I have almost fed it to the fire, along with all the notes I have accumulated on Professor Swallow’s career, on the sermons of Vicar Coleridge, on the behavior patterns of the common crow.
Sometimes, I will be walking the streets and see a few crows perched high above. I imagine one of them is watching me. I can never tell from down here on the ground—is that one smaller than the others?
I wonder.
I will always wonder.
The Visible Frontier