Mouse Mission

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Mouse Mission Page 6

by Prudence Breitrose


  After they picked up their rental car, Jake drove around to a loading bay behind the terminal—the spot where Talking Mouse Ten would be waiting for them. Right on cue, a mouse ran out toward them. Then another. Then another.

  “Look!” said Susie. “They’ve sent us a whole welcoming committee!”

  Megan made a quick count. Four. One must be Trey. But who else? She couldn’t see from here, and sank down in her seat, hoping to be invisible enough to avoid what was coming.

  Susie opened her window, which was about level with the loading bay, and mice streamed over the back of her seat and down into the two cupholders between the front seats.

  “Mornin’, all,” said one, sticking out his head. “How you doin’? Me name’s Ken, and I hope you don’t mind but I’ve brought along some of me China plates.”

  “China plates?” asked Susie weakly.

  “China plates meaning mates, right?” said Jake, who’d once worked in London for six months. “Friends. That Cockney rhyming slang—I thought it had died out.”

  “Well, maybe it has for humans, yeah?” said Ken. “Up to us mice to keep up the old ways, innit.”

  “Indeed,” came a lugubrious voice from the bottom of a cupholder. “Kenneth chooses to perpetuate an outmoded dialect that originated, if I may say so without causing offense, in the working classes.”

  Susie grinned.

  “Forgive me,” she said, “but you sound just like a friend of ours, an American talking mouse.”

  “Interesting,” said the mouse. “And I had thought myself to be unique in the murine world.” Then his voice sank into a sort of “flumph” as if (to Megan’s relief) someone, some mouse, was holding his mouth shut. And she hoped it would stay shut at least until Jake was used to driving on the left and could find a quiet spot to pull over. Because surely he’d freak out when he learned the truth. And her mom…

  Megan pretended to be asleep, hoping the situation would go away. Except that it couldn’t, could it, especially when one part of the problem was wriggling out of its cupholder and making its way to the back of Susie’s seat.

  When Susie came out with an “EEEEK,” because her mouse tolerance must have been weakened by jet lag or something, the mouse in question said, “Forgive me, madam, but as one who has waited his whole life for the opportunity to visit this country, I was overwhelmed by an inexorable craving for my first view of this blessed isle.”

  Now there was no way. No way anyone could have had any doubts. Jake nearly put the car under a bus as he drove through a roundabout, one of the traffic circles that English drivers roar around with great confidence, but Americans fresh off the plane—not so much. Jake totally missed his exit and was trapped on the inside of the roundabout for two more circuits until he managed to get off into the quietest available exit. He pulled over and put his head down on the steering wheel.

  “Bit of a shock, innit,” said Ken. “That’s why I told you these geezers was locals, like from my clan. Just until you was more settled. But that wasn’t going to work, was it? Not with Sir Talkative here.”

  No, it wasn’t going to work. Not when Sir Quentin hadn’t been able to overcome his need for a clear view of what he called his spiritual home. Not when the other two mice who now emerged were so distinctive: Trey with a piece missing from his right ear where a rat had chomped it long ago, and Julia with the two marker dots on her left.

  Susie turned to the back seat.

  “Who was it?” she asked icily. “Which of you did this? You knew the risk. You knew the mice would probably be killed if anyone found them in your luggage. And we’d have been in deep trouble. Maybe our whole mission. How could you?…”

  “We were in Megan’s backpack, but please don’t blame her!” said Trey. “It was our idea. And Mr. Fred’s. He dropped us off at the airport and told Megan where to find us.”

  Susie put her head in her hands, and Trey kept talking to fill the silence. Burbling, really, about how Savannah and Larry wanted to stay home to work on the show, and Curly too. How Sir Quentin had recorded his ode yesterday, so he was free to come. And yes, it was a risk. But missing an adventure like this? Not going to happen.

  More silence, then it was Ken who spoke. “The more the merrier, yeah?”

  Jake reached over and patted his wife’s knee.

  “Hey, now that they’re all here, I think we should take advantage. Like get someone to interpret Ken.”

  “Now then, what are you talkin’ about?” said Ken. “Are you sayin’ I don’t talk proper? It’s not like I’ll be rhymin’ all the time. Just for a bit of a laugh, yeah?”

  “A laugh,” said Sir Quentin. “Hilarious.”

  To Megan’s huge relief, her mom smiled as she reached out to tickle him behind the ears.

  he plan called for the four humans to spend a couple of days in London before they joined the rain forest experts. British mice had booked them into an apartment on the south bank of the River Thames.

  And what an apartment! It blew everybody’s mind. The living room seemed to dangle right over the river, with a perfect view of the Houses of Parliament on the other bank. If it was too much for the humans, it was way, way, way too much for Sir Quentin, tripping a circuit in his brain that brought on an explosion of poetry.

  He ran to the windowsill and gazed across the river as he intoned:

  This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,

  This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars…

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Ken, climbing out of Jake’s pocket, where he’d been riding. “Lovely stuff. ‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.’ We all had to learn it. Shakespeare, innit? Richard the Second. But now we got a job to do. Right? Take a message to that Sir Brian about where them experts should be delivered, from the airport.”

  “And his place is near here, isn’t it?” said Jake.

  “That’s right, governor, so no worries. We can be there in a tick. It’s an easy walk. Piece of chalk. I’ll show you.”

  Using Jake’s Thumbtop, Ken pulled up the satellite view of their building, then panned over to an apartment building only three blocks away.

  “That’s why we picked this flat,” he said. “That and the view, for his lordship there.”

  He pointed at Sir Quentin, still rapturously glued to his view of the Thames and the Houses of Parliament.

  “I’ll go over to Sir Brian’s now,” said Susie.

  “I’m comin’ with you, if I may be so bold,” said Ken. “I’ll talk to that there clan at Sir Brian’s. Get our strategy straight.”

  “I’m coming too,” said Jake. “Just in case. You kids can hang here, okay? Check out the TV, or take a nap.”

  It was so quiet after the adults had gone. Dead quiet, except for the whispered poetry from the windowsill where Sir Quentin had switched from Shakespeare to Wordsworth, and in particular the poem he wrote on Westminster Bridge:

  Earth has not anything to show more fair

  Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

  A sight so touching in its majesty…

  “If I sit down,” announced Megan, flopping on the couch, “I may never get up.”

  It was, after all, six in the morning in Cleveland, which meant that the midday sunlight out there looked fake. Had it been like this the last time she’d flown to Europe? When her mom took her to the Atlantic island where they spent two years doing research on wild sheep?

  Yes, she remembered something of this feeling, when nothing seems quite real, as if you’ve fallen through a gap in the universe into a different dimension of time and space. Yes, a nap would be good.

  For Joey there was something more urgent than sleep.

  “Let’s see if there’s anything here to eat,” he said. Megan hauled herself off the couch to follow him into the spotless kitchen, with Trey and Julia on her shoulders. It did not look promising. Nothing in the little refrigerator. And in the cabinets, nothing but a small jar labeled “Marmite” and a cont
ainer of something called Fru-Grains.

  “Looks like mouse food but bigger,” said Trey when Joey opened it up. “Maybe rat food.”

  Joey held out a handful of chunks and Trey took an experimental nibble. “It’s sweet,” he said. “Won’t kill you. Humans probably put milk on it. Or that stuff.”

  He pointed to the jar of Marmite. Megan found a teaspoon and dug some out for Trey, who took a small lick of it and then rushed to the paper towel dispenser to wipe it off his tongue.

  “Barf,” he said. “That stuff is bad. It’s just wrong.”

  So the choice was simple. Either dry Fru-Grains/rat food with or without Marmite, or wait until the adults came back. Or?

  “We passed a McDonald’s, remember?” said Joey. “About a block from here.”

  “You think it’s okay to go out?” asked Megan.

  “Well, either that or we starve to death,” said Joey. “And look.” He burrowed into his backpack and brought out an envelope full of money. “Dad kept these pounds from the last time he was here.”

  They looked at each other. No one had told them they had to stay here and starve. And in a few minutes they’d found the way to cope with jet lag. You go to a McDonald’s and your body can believe it is still in Cleveland as you eat the familiar burgers and fries and pass bits of familiar bun to pockets carrying very familiar mice.

  Only Sir Quentin remained in the apartment, riveted by his view.

  When Joey was finally full, after two of everything, they sauntered back toward the flat. They decided to take the long way round along a busy riverside walkway so they could feel fully abroad. It had rained while they were eating, but now the sun was lighting up the Houses of Parliament on the other bank of the river and the clock tower of Big Ben.

  They stopped for a while to watch the boats on the river, and it was a lucky choice, to dawdle a bit, because if they’d hurried straight back to the flat, it could have been disastrous.

  The first thing they noticed was the kitchen floor, which was covered with Fru-Grains.

  “What the…” began Joey. Then he saw Sir Quentin on the coffee table, a paw to his lips. Hush.

  For the first time since they’d known him, Sir Quentin spoke in a rapid burst of MSL, ending with signs simple enough for the humans to understand. Pointing to a watercolor painting labeled St. Paul’s Cathedral at Dawn. Pointing at an ear. Paw to lips. Hush. St. Paul’s Cathedral at Dawn is listening.

  Now Sir Quentin was making the unmistakable signs for “Follow me!” and he headed for the bathroom. With one last sign. Bring the Thumbtop that Jake had left on the coffee table. Megan and Joey followed him into the bathroom, but not before Megan had said clearly in the direction of St. Paul’s Cathedral at Dawn, “I’m going to take a shower.”

  Inside the bathroom they closed the door, and Megan started the shower running, the way she’d seen it done in movies to cover up whispered conversations. Then she sat with Joey on the edge of the bathtub while Sir Quentin stood on the counter to tell them what had happened.

  “I was at the window,” he said, “contemplating the Mother of Parliaments and trying to remember the fourth and fifth lines of the poem that William Wordsworth penned when observing this view. It had just come to me:

  The city now doth like a garment wear

  The beauty of the morning: silent, bare

  Suddenly, he said, his view of the Houses of Parliament was blocked by a hand—a human hand on the windowpane. Sir Quentin ran to hide under the couch and watched as a whole human appeared on the balcony. Watched as that human prized open the window. Watched as he took down St. Paul’s Cathedral at Dawn, and started doing something to the back of it.

  “As you may well imagine,” he said, “my poor heart was all aflutter.”

  “And then?” prompted Megan.

  And then? Deep down, of course, Sir Quentin was a mouse, and the modern mouse is hardwired at times of danger to apply the full force of his, or her, intelligence to any threatening situation.

  And what popped into Sir Quentin’s brain was the need to get a record of what was happening. Or as he put it, “I was felicitously placed to record the phenomena that I beheld, even though such an activity might result in danger to my person.”

  Jake’s Thumbtop was still on the coffee table, so while the man was busy with the picture, Sir Quentin crept out from under the couch, activated the Thumbtop’s camera function, and pushed the button to take three or four pictures before sprinting back under the couch to hide.

  Joey clicked his way to the recent photos on the Thumbtop. They were tiny, of course, but when Megan pulled out her magnifying glass she could see the round head of a man who was bald on top, his face framed in a beard.

  And a ripple of fear started at her toes, ran up her body, and exploded in her brain—almost like the fear she’d felt last summer when someone seemed to be stalking her clear across the continent. Who was that bald guy? Who knew they were in this apartment? Did Faceless now have a face?

  “Do you think he bugged anything else?” she asked. “Anything except that picture?”

  “That might indeed have been his intention, were I not present,” said Sir Quentin. “He had several pens in his pocket, which struck me as suspicious.”

  “Could be spy pens,” said Joey. “A kid in my English class has one. Did he spread them around?”

  “He was denied that opportunity,” said Sir Quentin, “for I was not about to permit further infelicitous intrusions.”

  “So you bit him?” asked Megan.

  Sir Quentin shuddered. “Biting is not in my nature,” he said. “Indeed, I trust that I will go to my grave without having inflicted upon myself the taste of human flesh. No, I chose instead to play upon fears to which I believe the British are prone—fears of ‘ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggity beasties and things that go bump in the night.’”

  “Huh?” said Joey.

  Sir Quentin was enjoying himself. “It is I believe a saying that originated in Cornwall.” He pointed upriver. “The narrow peninsula at the southwestern corner of this blessed isle, where beasties abound. To implement my scheme, I made my way to the kitchen, where a container was fortuitously placed adjacent to the edge of the counter. I crept toward it.” He demonstrated by crouching down and ooching along for a few steps. “Then I pushed it off the counter. Nearby was a glass jar that I caused to slide until it gathered sufficient momentum to fly into a rack of utensils, with resulting reverberations.”

  “And?” Megan prompted.

  “Peering into the living room,” continued Sir Quentin, “I espied the human casting a look of profound anxiety in the direction of those sounds as if he indeed suspected the presence of beasties. Then he removed himself from the premises. In other words, he skedaddled.”

  Julia, who normally found Sir Quentin tiresome in the extreme, rushed over to him and looked as if she was about to give him the hip-to-hip bump that mice use to congratulate each other—until at the last moment she held out a paw for him to shake instead.

  “That was so cool, dude,” said Joey.

  “We’d better get rid of whatever’s behind that picture,” said Megan. “Before Mom and Jake get back.”

  Trey cleared his throat, which usually meant he had a better idea than any human but didn’t want to seem too pushy.

  “Presumably, it’s a voice-activated microphone,” he said. “And your parents may want to leave it there, so they can give it wrong information. Like a red herring.”

  Which made sense, as Trey’s suggestions usually did.

  “I’ll wait for them downstairs,” said Joey. “I’ll tell them what’s happened.”

  “Let’s both go,” said Megan. There was no way she was going to be left alone in this apartment. Not now.

  As they came out of the bathroom Megan sang out, “Now for that nap.”

  “Me too,” said Joey. “Man, I’m so tired.”

  Then he opened the front door as silently as he could, and they both sli
pped out. When Susie and Jake walked back from Sir Brian’s apartment ten minutes later they found Megan and Joey on a bench, with a Thumbtop between them in case the mice who were on watch in their apartment sounded the alarm.

  he four Humans Who Knew had to act normal, of course—in body language at least—in case someone was watching.

  For Megan and Joey, this meant that while their words told their parents of burglars and bugs and spies and the bravery of mice, their bodies had to pretend they’d been waiting to drag the adults off to the riverside walk, pointing excitedly at the London Eye, the massive Ferris wheel that dominates that part of the city.

  And the parents had to confine themselves to hugs for Megan and Joey that were no bigger than normal, even though they were both shattered by the thought that the kids could have been in the apartment when a stranger came through the window.

  “Loggocorp!” wailed Susie. “How did they know we were there?”

  “Followed us, I guess,” said Jake, giving her shoulders a squeeze. “Followed you. So now we have to shake them off. Find somewhere safe.”

  “But where can we go?” asked Megan, remembering to grin for whoever might be watching. “What’s safe anymore?”

  “Mice will find a place,” said Jake. “Right, Ken?”

  “You got it, mate,” came a muffled voice from his pocket. “But first you’d better think of what you’re gonna say to that there recording device, yeah?”

  As they walked back along the river, trying to look casual, they concocted a dialogue for the benefit of St. Paul’s Cathedral at Dawn. It went like this:

  Susie [entering apartment]: Hi, guys! Good to be home! (sound of bedroom door opening.)

  Joey: Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad! (loud yawn). Been taking a nap.

 

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