Judging by the scent-marks he left behind, he was a young male like me. And he was stressed out of his mind. Just like me. But there was an underlayer to his scent—something that I couldn’t quite recognize.
I charged off in the direction of the fresh smell of rat. Maybe Switch would know where the cheese was.
If he was even still alive.
* * *
I picked up Switch's trail a few times. It crisscrossed. It went up and down, and side to side.
Sometimes Switch tried climbing the walls to gnaw at the screen overhead. Sometimes he gnawed on the walls. A few times the scent of his stress spiked. I wasn't sure what happened, but I suspected it had something to do with Hack.
And the whole time Hack kept serenading me with his horrible rhymes.
"Hack is fast and Hack is smart. But Hack just doesn't have the heart to tell the rat he's already dead because today Hack will be well-fed."
He went on like this for over an hour, always a few yards behind me.
"Run rat, run. Run run run. Hack runs fast, and thinks it's fun. Fun, rat, Hack. Hack rat fun. Hack be full when rat is done."
As I listened with one ear to Hack's litany, I realized a few things. Hack was an awful poet. Also, he was very, very hungry. Hack seemed to have a single-minded fixation on eating me. He worked it into every couplet he came up with.
Beyond the fact that the crazy little goblin liked hearing himself talk, I suspected he was trying to curry favor with Black, who loomed somewhere in the darkness overhead.
I caught wind of Switch's trail again. It took some time to untangle it from the different threads of rat scent that roped throughout the entire maze.
I stumbled into a larger room. All the corridors here were a foot high, much larger than necessary for a rat, but large enough to accommodate a goblin's height.
At the center of the room was a small slab of stone, bolted to the floor. I scurried up to it. At the center of the slab there was an indentation in the shape of a key.
I could smell cheese in the indentation. There once was cheese there, and my guess was that the cheese key-shaped.
So that was it! Black was training us to find keys and he was using cheese as a motivator. Well, that and fear of being eaten by awful rhyming goblins.
It occurred to me that maybe Hack had been placed in the Maze as well, for the same purpose. Except that Hack hadn't found the cheese either.
Switch's scent was strong here. Like me, he had found the location of the cheese too late.
But who had found the cheese first?
There was a smell like Hack, only oilier. Another goblin. Well Hack’s song said there were two goblins. Heave?
Great, just what I needed. With two goblins in the maze, no wonder Switch was stressed out.
But the most disturbing part of all was the writing on the wall, writing that the other rat most certainly didn't understand.
Etched into the hard wood by what I could only guess was a goblin's sharp talon was the phrase: SLO RATS TAST GUD.
I clung to the hope that Switch was still alive. But with no cheese left and two hungry goblins on the prowl, it looked more and more like Switch had become the cheese.
* * *
I bumped into Switch entirely by accident.
I was following his scent trail away from the cheese, when I started to notice that Switch's trail was looping back and around again.
"Rat scurries, but what a waste! He gets so lean and loses fat. Hack can't wait until he taste Rat in forty seconds flat."
Fortunately, Hack didn't seem to truly understand that in order to sneak up on someone he’d have to stop rhyming.
"Shut up!" I mentally shouted.
I quickly learned that my ability to project my thoughts extended only as far as my line of sight. If I couldn't see it, I couldn't speak to it and vice versa. It was just as well. Whatever thoughts Hack had in his mind he immediately shouted at the top of his lungs.
I was at a dead end. Switch's scent had gotten so strong that I had lost track of everything else.
A pair of beady eyes glittered back at me from the opposite end of the corridor.
"Cheese?" came the whispered voice in my mind.
"You must be Switch," I thought back.
Switch took a slow, painful step out of the shadows. I was sorry I could see all of him.
Switch was a skeletal husk of a rat. His black form looked like a shrunken piece of wood, his hair coming out in patches.
"Cheese?" he asked again.
I shook my head.
"I was hoping you'd know where it was."
Switch froze and suddenly turned around.
"Cheese!" he mentally shouted with joy.
The starving rat took off at high speed. I followed him.
"Where are we going?"
"Cheese!" he shouted back at me. "Can't you smell it?"
I sniffed the air. The scent was so strong now that it couldn't have been there before.
"Now I can...but why is it here?"
"What?" Switch kept running. "Who cares why? It's cheese!"
We skidded into a room that had a slab, just like the one I encountered before, with a key-shaped indentation in the center.
Switch dove through the air and landed on the cheese key, tearing into it with a ferocity that belied his skeletal form.
I tripped over a slight gap in the ground. There was also an indentation in the floor.
"Cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese! Rats may find it, but not for long! Hack will eat some, feed me please! So Hack will sing more pretty songs!"
"Black," I said. "He must be adding and removing the cheese."
It looked like this room was a removable chamber, made for easy insertion into the Maze.
"Hmm?" asked Switch. But he was too busy eating to say any more.
"Hack's coming," I said. "We can't stay long."
"I'm not leaving," said Switch. "There's cheese here!"
"Didn't it ever occur to you that this cheese comes from somewhere? Black is toying with us!"
"Black?" Switch had eaten half the key. "Who cares? It's cheese!"
"No, you idiot!" I was struggling to not go after the cheese myself. I was hungry. "We're being manipulated. Don't you want to figure out why?"
I caught sight of something on the wall. It read: FEAR IZ FOOD.
"I think we better go, Switch."
A shadow loomed in the corridor that we had come through.
"Cheese, cheese, cheese! Give it to me, give it now! Cheese, cheese, cheese, CHEESE! Hungry, hungry, right now!" Hack was so hungry now his rhyming had actually gotten worse.
I grabbed Switch by the tail and yanked hard. "Let's go!"
Switch whirled on me, baring his teeth.
Then the overwhelming smell of wet leather hit us. "Eh heheheh heh HEH heh!" Hack laughed loudest when he was closing in on his prey.
"Run!" I shouted at Switch.
There was an exit on the other side of the chamber. There were four in total; I guessed that all the cheese rooms were built this way for easy insertion and removal into the maze.
Switch didn't move. He just stared past me.
"Switch?"
I looked over to where he was staring and immediately regretted it. The thing standing in the entryway to the cheese chamber was squat and pot-bellied, with a head like a monstrous toad.
Its whole body was covered with rough fur, giving the vague impression of both bat and sloth. Its sleepy lids were half-lowered over its globular eyes; and the tip of a queer tongue issued from its fat mouth. Hack was somewhere behind us, so this had to be…
"CHEEEEEEESSSSSEEE," Heave groaned.
"You can't take it, I won't leave. Hack won't give up cheese to Heave!" Behind us, the shadow of a gaunt scarecrow with an enormous head withdrew, whining as it went. Hack was retreating.
Heave ambled forward. Switch and I scattered out of his way, but the goblin seemed uninterested in us.
"CHEEEESSSEEE," it bello
wed again.
One oversized claw scooped up what was left of the cheese and dragged it to Heave's mouth. Switch didn't move.
"Let's get out of here, Switch!"
"But the cheese..." wailed Switch.
I grabbed Switch by the tail and dragged him out of the room.
* * *
"This is all your fault!" shouted Switch. "We could have had the cheese!"
I sighed. We'd been over this.
"There's no way a big, stupid slob like Heave could have found the cheese so quickly. So there's a pattern to when it appears."
"A...pattern?"
"Yes. I thought all along it was Hack writing on the walls. But it was Heave. Hack's too stupid to find the cheese, that's why he keeps following us."
For once, Hack was quiet. Heave's presence must have cowed him.
"Things always change," said Switch. "We have to focus on getting more cheese."
"That kind of thinking is what's keeping you here," I said. "It's not about the cheese, Switch. It's about Black's game. And right now he's trying to teach us a lesson. So we have to figure out what it is. It's the only way to get out of here."
Switch sniffed the air.
"We can sniff out the next cheese." He began climbing up one side of the corridor and then another, sniffing as he went.
"We have to stop thinking with our stomachs!" Switch was really getting on my nerves. "Heave's better at the cheese game and he's eating it all. Do you want to end up like Hack? With no cheese?"
Switch looked at me questioningly.
"But if we leave now, we can find the cheese before it moves again."
I decided then and there that I was never a member of the rat species to begin with. Switch couldn't think more than two seconds into his own future. I suspected most rats thought that way.
"Yeah, sure. Let's keep moving."
But I couldn't stop thinking about what Black's game was. What was he trying to teach us? My thoughts kept going back to what Jacko said about breaking into houses.
The cheeses were in the shape of keys. That he wanted us to find keys was obvious. I didn't imagine a single-minded rat like Switch would distinguish between the shape of the key and the fact that it wasn't cheese.
It was about that time, with a suspiciously silent Hack lurking somewhere behind me, and an increasingly frantic Switch in tow, that I stumbled across the skull.
It was a rat's skull. I froze. Switch scurried right past it.
"Doesn't that bother you?"
Switch looked at me questioningly.
"What?'
"The skull you just walked over."
"Oh, that's been there," he said, as if it weren't a rat's skull at all.
I looked closer. The skull had gnaw marks on it. Gnaw marks that looked like they could be from sharp goblin teeth.
"So, this is nothing new?"
"Yes," said Switch. "The skulls are everywhere."
"You're awfully calm about this." We had both stopped in the corridor. Switch managed to face me, but I could tell from the twitching whiskers that he wanted to keep sniffing for cheese. "You do realize these are RAT skulls, right?”
"So?"
"So? That means Hack or Heave have been catching other rats, just like us!"
Switch resumed searching for the cheese, the rat equivalent of a shrug.
"We won't get eaten if we keep moving."
"If we keep moving, we'll starve to death. We're going to need to find a place to sleep soon, anyway."
"I know a place. Follow me."
Switch took off down the corridor, oblivious to the bleach-white symbol of imminent death that was tucked into one of the corridors.
I looked more closely at the wooden wall near the skull. There were rat claw marks all over. The poor bugger had put up a fight. And then lost his head in the end.
Spooked, I ran after Switch.
* * *
"How long have you been in here?" I asked Switch.
"Many shiftings of cheese," he said.
"You define your whole universe by cheese, huh?"
"Is there anything else?"
I tried not to laugh. "I suppose not."
Switch's attitude had improved since he ate. Though he wasn't much of a conversationalist, he was clearly a survivor. A few times he smelled something I didn't and took a detour.
"Why aren't we going that way?"
"Traps," said Switch.
"Traps?" As if this place wasn't bad enough. "What kind of traps?"
"It depends. Blades, mostly."
I squinted. Rat vision was blurry. There was something metallic and oiled on one side of the wall, hidden in the wood. I slowly moved my whiskers up to it to get a sense of what exactly it was.
A vertical blade sprung out of the wall, slashing downwards with a SHING! Just as quickly as it had come, it retracted into the wall. One of my whiskers floated slowly to the ground.
I hopped backwards.
"Told you," said Switch without rancor.
"Wow, you weren't kidding."
I vowed to follow in Switch's footsteps from now on. "Where are we going?"
"To Heave's lair."
I stopped short. "What?"
"Heave's lair," Switch said, twitching his nose. "He moves slow. We can sleep there during a cheese shift."
"By cheese shift, you mean when the cheese gets inserted into the Maze?"
"Yes." Switch resumed his sniffing and walking.
"How much time does that buy us?"
"Enough time to rest," he said.
"Why don't we rest in turns?" I offered. "That way, if one of us smells Heave coming, we can wake the other."
"Fine," said Switch as he turned the corner to the lair. "I will sleep first."
Before I could protest Switch's sudden choice to sleep first, I realized that it didn't matter. I'd be lucky if I would ever sleep again. As we turned the corner, we saw the area where Heave must sleep.
There, piled high, was an enormous hill of rat skulls.
* * *
"I don't know how you can sleep!" I practically shouted at Switch when he finally woke up. "Doesn't this room bother you?"
"Huh?" asked Switch.
"Isn't this room scary? Can't you smell the stink of death in this place?"
Switch twitched his nose. "It's a safe place to rest between cheese runs. That's all that matters."
"For you, maybe. I thought you and I were just being trained to search for cheese. Now I'm not so sure."
"You should sleep now. Heave will be back soon."
"I can't sleep. Not in this morgue, anyway." I tried not to look at the skulls. "You said you've been in here awhile. How many times have you gotten to the cheese before Heave got there?"
"Sometimes," he said, as if that were a legitimate answer.
"Shouldn't you have been removed from the Maze? I mean, isn't that the point?"
"Why must there be a point?" asked Switch. He sniffed the air. "We should leave soon."
"There's got to be a point to all this..." I looked back at the skulls. "Oh gods. I think I figured it out."
"Figured what out?"
"Why we're here." I began pacing. It helped siphon off some of my nervous energy. "I thought we were here to run the maze. To find the key before Hack or Heave do. But now I understand why we're here."
"To find cheese?"
"No, you idiot!" I clapped one of my rat paws to my head in exasperation. "Don't you get it? We're FOOD for the goblins!"
"But the cheese..."
"It's to train the goblins, not us! That's why you're starving! That's why Hack is starving! Black doesn't care about whether we live or die, he's trying to train the goblins to retrieve keys for him."
"Time to go," said Switch. "Heave's back."
The oily, overwhelming smell of cheese and goblin finally reached me. In my exasperation I hadn't noticed. It was indeed time to go.
Switch was already scampering away as the shadow of Heave's bulk appeared
from around the corner.
Frustrated, hungry, and tired, I ran off after my new companion.
* * *
I skidded to a halt. "This is stupid."
Switch slowed down and then turned around.
"What?"
"I'm not going to spend my entire life running from cheese to cheese. There's got to be a way out of here."
"Out of where?" asked Switch. "All the other rats who have tried to escape are dead. I survive. What more could you want?"
"I don't know. Besides not being eaten? How about free will to do whatever I want?"
Switch twitched his whiskers. "You are hungry. You know what you need to eat?"
"If you say cheese I will bite you on the nose."
Switch just twitched his whiskers again.
"Heave's gotten fat by eating all those rats. And he eats the cheese too. There's no way he could be that fast. So that means he knows where the cheese is going to be before it arrives. He's already on his way over there."
Switch sniffed the air. "Heave would eat us if we got too close."
"Maybe, but anything's better than running around in this maze forever until we die of starvation."
Switch reared up on his hind legs. "I will not do this."
"Fine, suit yourself." Truth was, I was terrified of being alone in the maze. But I was convinced that I was right. Or at least, that it would give me a leg up on that awful toad of a goblin.
Switch padded off down the corridor. His thin black form got smaller and smaller.
"You'll end up just like the other rat skulls!" I mentally shouted at him. "You ever wonder why there are only skulls left? It's because they eat your whole body in one gulp!"
Switch turned a corner and then he was gone. I was alone again in the maze.
The silence was awful. I could occasionally hear movement above us on the mesh. Sometimes I heard talking, although I couldn't make out the words. We were being observed.
Suddenly, Switch's black form was visible around the corner. He was coming back!
I tried not to betray the excitement in my thoughts. "You changed your mind?"
Switch wasn't just padding back towards me—he was running full tilt. "Run!"
I turned and started running, but Switch was already flying past me.
Right behind him was Hack, utterly silent and with deadly intent glittering in his wide eyes.
Hack looked like a thinner version of Heave, a scarecrow of a goblin. Where Heave had heavy-lidded eyes, Hack's looked as if they had been peeled back permanently. There was no potbelly on Hack, just a sunken stomach.
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