by Duncan Ball
‘I can’t help it, Mr Paintswell. This jug is very heavy. And I’m not good at standing still.’
‘Five more minutes. Then we’ll have a break.’
Emily’s legs were hurting and her shoulder was numb. She had pains in her knees and in her wrists. She began to sweat. Her back felt like it had been stepped on by a hippopotamus. Then, just when she thought she was going to faint, she saw something out of the corner of her eyefinger. Something in the storeroom was moving.
‘Psssst!’ Emily said.
‘Emily will you please be quiet?’ Mr Paintswell said.
‘In the next room.’ Emily didn’t actually say the words. She just moved her lips.
‘Please stop moving your lips, Emily,’ said Mr Paintswell.
With her eyefinger Emily watched two arms reach through the storeroom window. They started to unwrap the painting. Emily turned her eyes toward the storeroom. The arms belonged to a man with a red beard. She could see him now.
‘Emily, you will ruin the painting,’ Mr Paintswell said.
‘In there!’ Emily whispered.
‘What? I can’t hear you.’
Emily couldn’t stand still any longer. The jug fell from her shoulder and crashed to the floor.
‘He’s in there!’ she screamed. ‘The mystery moustache man is the storeroom!’
Mr Paintswell and Gerald dashed into the storeroom. They grabbed the man and pulled him through the window. When they had him on the floor, they pulled off the red beard.
‘So it’s you, Valdo Versmeer!’ cried Mr Paintswell. ‘You are the one who is ruining me! Call the police, Gerald!’
‘All right I admit that I painted the moustaches,’ said Mr Versmeer. ‘I couldn’t stand it. Everyone who wanted a portrait painted always came to you and not to me.’
‘But your portraits are terrible,’ said Mr Paintswell. ‘You just don’t have an eye for painting.’
‘Don’t I know it,’ the man said. ‘But please don’t call the police. Let me go and I promise I won’t do it again.’
Mr Paintswell was a very kindly man.
‘You may go,’ he said. ‘But if you do anything like this again I will tell the police and they will put you in jail.’
‘I promise I won’t,’ Mr Versmeer said. ‘But tell me _ how did the little girl see me? She must have eyes in the back of her head.’
‘Not exactly,’ Emily said, showing him her eyefinger. ‘I thought you must be sneaking into the storeroom. So I stood where I could see with my eyefinger.’
‘Yikes!’ cried Valdo Versmeer. ‘She’s got an eye on the end of her finger! Well what do you know about that?’
‘I know that Emily has a good eye for a painting,’ Mr Paintswell laughed.
‘She certainly does,’ said Gerald.
And when Mr Paintswell finished the painting, he gave it to Emily.
‘Oh thank you,’ said Emily. ‘It looks just like me. You even put in my eyefinger.’
‘But I’m afraid there’s something missing,’ he said.
‘What?’ Emily asked.
‘The moustache, of course!’ he said, and they both laughed.
3.
Emily Up in the Air
‘I’ve got terrible news, Emily.’
The voice on the phone was Malcolm Mousefinder’s. Malcolm was the son of Professor Mousefinder, the famous mouseologist.
‘What’s wrong?’ Emily asked.
‘It’s my father. He wants to go on another mouse-finding expedition.’
There was nothing unusual about the professor going on expeditions to find rare mice. He did it all the time. He had been all over the world and found hundreds of them — even ones that no one had ever seen before.
‘What’s so strange about that?’ Emily asked.
‘I didn’t say it was strange, Emily. I said it was terrible,’ Malcolm said in a small voice. ‘The terrible part is that he wants me to go with him.’
‘But you help him so much,’ Emily said. ‘You crawl down holes in the ground and you set traps in the bushes. He needs you.’
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ Malcolm sighed. ‘I don’t mind so much when we’re on the ground but this time we’ll be up in the air.’
‘Is he looking for a tree-climbing mouse?’ Emily asked.
‘I mean way up in the air.’
‘A flying mouse?’ Emily asked excitedly.
‘Emily, there are lots of flying mice,’ Malcolm said. ‘They’re called bats.’
‘Hmm, I never thought about that,’ said Emily.
‘This time we’re looking for a certain kind of mouse that lives in a desert. But to get there we have to fly in a plane.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’ Emily asked.
‘And jump out of it,’ Malcolm added.
‘You’re going to jump out of a plane? Couldn’t you get … hurt?’
‘Hurt? Are you kidding?’ Malcolm said in a squeaky voice. (Sometimes when Malcolm was frightened, his voice got higher and squeakier until it sounded very mouselike.) ‘Emily, if the parachute doesn’t open —’
‘Parachute? You didn’t tell me you were going to use a parachute. Lots of people jump out of planes with parachutes. It sounds like fun.’
‘Not if you’re scared of heights, it isn’t,’ Malcolm squeaked.
‘Oh, I see,’ said Emily. ‘Then maybe you’d better not go.’
‘But I have to. I don’t want to hurt Dad’s feelings. Will you come, too? Please, Em, I need your company.’
Emily liked mouse-hunting expeditions with Malcolm and his father. And she thought it could be fun to parachute out of a plane. It sounded a little scary but she’d never done it before. She wanted to see what it was like.
‘Emily,’ Malcolm said in his mousiest voice, ‘don’t make me go alone. Dad says it’s okay for you to come along. Ask you parents. Oh, please, Em. Please.’
‘It could be fun,’ said Emily, ‘and my eyefinger might come in handy.’
A week later, Emily and Malcolm and the professor were flying in a rickety old plane over the driest desert in the world. Emily looked out at the tiny white puffs of cloud below. Malcolm had his hands over his eyes and was mumbling something that Emily couldn’t hear.
‘The mice we’re after this time,’ the professor told Emily, ‘are called Little Desert Running Mice. They’re very rare. There may not be any left in the whole world. No one knows. That desert down below us is so hot and dry that nothing can grow in it, not even a cactus. It’s so hot and dry that if you threw a bunch a grapes out of the plane they’d turn to raisins before they the hit the ground.’
‘That’s hot and dry,’ Emily said.
‘It’s so hot and dry that if a bird flew over it would dry out and break into little pieces.’
‘That’s really hot and dry,’ said Emily.
‘An ice cube would turn to water and evaporate just like that,’ the professor said, snapping his fingers.
‘That’s really really hot and dry,’ said Emily.
‘Boy, is that hot and dry,’ said Malcolm without uncovering his eyes.
‘And because it’s so dry,’ the professor went on, ‘people almost never go there. So nobody has seen a Little Desert Running Mouse, Mus desertus runius,’ he said using the scientific name, ‘for many years.’
Emily thought about this.
‘But if it’s so hot and dry,’ she asked, ‘how can mice live there?’
‘Good question, Emily. They live deep underground where it’s cooler and not so dry. At night they come out and run to a waterhole to find water. They gulp down the water and then run back again to their holes. That’s why they’re called “Little Desert Running Mice”.’
‘I knew it,’ Malcolm said, ‘we’re going to turn into raisins.’
‘Nothing to worry about, Malcolm,’ the professor said. ‘We’ll parachute down just after sunset. Then we’ll dig a hole and jump in. It will be safe underground. Oh, my goodness, the sun’s about to set! We’d
better get ready.’
Professor Mousefinder opened a big box and pulled out three wooden chairs. They were tied together in a row. Fastened to them was a canvas bag with a parachute in it.
‘I call this my Mouse-machute,’ the professor said. ‘We’ll all go down sitting together on the chairs. That way, when we hit the ground we can get straight to the digging without wasting time looking for one another. Quickly now, hop on and buckle your seatbelts!’
Malcolm took his hands away from his eyes just long enough to strap himself to a chair at the end of the row. Emily sat in the middle. Then all three waddled over to the door and waited for the pilot to signal to them to jump. The professor pulled the door open. A blast of air hit them in the face.
‘I don’t like this,’ Malcolm said to Emily. ‘In fact I hate it.’
‘It’s okay,’ Emily said. ‘It’ll be so exciting.’
But Emily was getting a little worried, too.
Soon the pilot waved his hand and Professor Mousefinder shouted ‘Watch out, mice! Here we come!’ Then out they went into the dry night air.
After they’d fallen for a few seconds Emily yelled to the professor, ‘Shouldn’t we open the parachute now?’
‘I’m working on it,’ Malcolm’s father said, pulling on a long cord. ‘But don’t worry, it’s a good chute. It should open.’
‘Just our luck if it won’t open,’ Malcolm whimpered in his mousiest voice ever.
‘It’s going to be all right,’ Emily said, grabbing the cord and giving it a mighty pull.
Soon a huge white snake of cloth came twirling out of the canvas bag. But instead of opening, it whipped right around them, covering their faces.
‘Rats! That wasn’t supposed to happen!’ exclaimed the professor, trying to pull the cloth away from his head. ‘Oooops! I think the ropes are tangled. We’ll have to untie them. Can anyone see anything? I can’t.’
‘I can’t either!’ Emily exclaimed, trying to pull the cloth from her face.
‘I told you so!’ Malcolm screamed. ‘I hate mouse-hunting! I hate it!’
‘Malcolm, calm down,’ Emily said. ‘It doesn’t help to panic.’
‘I’m never ever ever going to do it again!’ Malcolm squeaked.
Malcolm’s squeak got higher and higher and suddenly it turned into an ear-blasting scream. When he’d used up all the air in his lungs, he took a deep breath and then screamed again and again and again.
Down from the sky the three of them plummeted, their faces still covered in cloth. Emily could feel the professor beside her struggling to get the parachute loose.
‘I think I’ll have to cut it off us!’ the professor yelled.
‘If you cut it off, it won’t work!’ Emily yelled back. ‘We won’t be able to get down safely!’
‘Oops! I think you’re right. Well then, what’ll we do? Does anyone have any ideas?’
Emily did have an idea but she didn’t say anything. She got straight to work.
First she wiggled her hands free and looked back at the tangled ropes and cloth with her eyefinger. Being very careful that she didn’t get anything in her eye she began untying the knots. Bit by bit, she was getting them loose — but the ground was coming closer and closer.
‘If I cut the cloth,’ the professor sighed, ‘at least we’ll get one last look at the desert before we smash into it.’
‘No, Professor Mousefinder, please don’t!’ Emily yelled. ‘I’m untying the ropes!’
‘You are?’ the professor asked. ‘How?’
‘I have an eyefinger, remember?’
‘Oh, yes, so you do.’
Just as they were about to crash, Emily got the last rope free, and the parachute went streaming up. Then, with one great POP! it opened and in a second the Mouse-machute had landed on the sand with a big bump.
‘You can stop screaming now, Malcolm,’ Emily said. ‘We’re safe.’
Malcolm took his hands from his eyes and looked around him.
‘We’re safe! We’re okay! We’re not dead! We didn’t turn into raisins!’ he shouted. ‘How did that happen?’
Emily pointed her eyefinger at him and winked the eyelid.
‘I told you it might come in handy,’ she said.
But that wasn’t the end of the story …
4.
Emily and the Million Mice
Emily, Malcolm and Professor Mousefinder sat in the middle of the hottest, driest desert in the world. All of them had sore bottoms from landing in the hard wooden chairs of the Mouse-machute.
‘There’s no time to thank you for saving our lives, Emily,’ Professor Mousefinder said. ‘It’s getting dark fast. If there are still any Little Desert Running Mice they will be coming out of their holes and running to get water soon!’
The professor took out three shovels that had been strapped to the bottoms of the chairs. He handed one each to Emily and Malcolm.
‘I guess we’d better start working,’ he said.
Emily began digging but Malcolm was still shaking so much that the sand kept falling off his shovel.
‘It’s a good thing I asked you to come along,’ he whispered to Emily.
‘You didn’t tell me that your dad made his own parachute,’ Emily said. ‘If I’d have known that, I think I would have stayed at home.’
The sunset faded and a full moon came out. In a few minutes, they had dug a big hole and climbed into it.
‘Now we pull this over the top,’ Professor Mousefinder said. He spread the parachute cloth over the hole, propping it up with the chairs. ‘Do you see what we’ve done? It looks just like another sand dune. No one would know we’re here — not even a mouse, ha ha!’
‘And what do we do now?’ Emily asked.
‘We wait till one of the little fellows comes running along. Then we lift the side of the cloth and plop! In it drops. We weigh it, we measure it, and we take its picture and then we let it go.’
‘How do we know if one’s coming?’ Emily asked. ‘Do we poke our heads out?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Professor Mousefinder. ‘The Little Desert Running Mouse is the cleverest little critter in all of mousedom. It can see perfectly even in the dark. Any sign of us would send it scurrying off in another direction — if there’s still one left, that is. So we can’t just poke our heads out and have a look around.’
Emily shrugged and held up her eyefinger.
‘I guess this will be handy again,’ she said.
‘Not on your life!’ said the professor. ‘We can’t rely on such old fashioned things as eyes, even if they are in unusual places like on fingers. No, this is a job for my Super-Spy Nighttime Mousascope. I made it myself.’
With this he pulled a strange metal object out of his pocket. He unfolded it till it looked like the letter S.
‘I just look in here,’ he said, ‘and see out the other end. It’s like a periscope.’
‘But isn’t it too short?’ asked Emily.
‘Aha! Yes, but when I pull it, it stretches out as long as your arm. Then all I have to do is poke it out into the air and I can see all around. Even the most cunning mouse won’t notice it.’
Professor Mousefinder started to stretch the Super-Spy Nighttime Mousascope but it wouldn’t stretch.
‘Rats!’ he said. ‘It’s got sand in it. It’s jammed. I’m afraid it won’t be any good to us tonight. Oh, Emily … ?’
‘Yes, professor?’
‘Do you suppose you could … ?’
‘Of course.’
Emily smiled and poked her finger up beside the canvas. Now she could see around with her eyefinger.
‘Wake me if a mouse comes along,’ the professor said with a yawn. ‘I’ve had a hard day.’
‘What will it look like?’ Emily asked.
‘A little brown thing,’ the professor yawned. ‘Four legs … whiskers … long tail …’ He was asleep by the time he finished the sentence.
Emily looked around outside. There was nothing there but sand, sa
nd and more sand sparkling in the moonlight.
‘I’m sorry I panicked,’ Malcolm said.
‘It’s okay, Malcolm. I got pretty scared too.’
‘I do like mice. I like studying them. I like learning about them. But I don’t think I like the mouse-hunting part. We always get lost or have close calls. Besides, what does it matter if we find a Little Desert Running Mouse?’
‘It’s all part of science,’ Emily said. ‘You’re doing something very important. You’re finding out about the world. Everything you find out helps people to keep the world the way it is. That’s very important work.’
‘Emily, do you know what?’ Malcolm said.
‘No, what?’
‘I’m the one that told you that in the first place.’
‘But it’s true, isn’t it?’ asked Emily.
‘Yes, I guess so. I just wish somebody else did the mouse-hunting and Dad and I could stay at home and be normal.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Emily said. ‘Hey! There’s something moving out there!’
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know. It’s a long way off. It looks like dust or something.’
‘Just our luck — a dust storm,’ said Malcolm. ‘Now we’ll be stuck here for days.’
‘It looks like the ground is moving!’
‘Great — an earthquake.’
‘No, it’s a whole long line of things coming straight towards us,’ Emily said. ‘The things are running along the ground. That’s why there’s so much dust in the air.’
‘But what are they?’ Malcolm said sitting up straight as a pole.
‘I — I — I think they’re some kind of small furry animal.’
‘Good grief,’ Malcolm said. ‘Mice.’
‘You’re right, hundreds of them. No, thousands of them. No, I think it’s millions.’
‘Millions?’
‘You’d better wake your father up,’ Emily said. ‘They’ll be here at any moment.’
Malcolm shook his father. Finally the man sat up and rubbed his eyes.
‘Mice, Dad!’ Malcolm exclaimed. ‘They’re coming this way.’
‘Really! You mean there’s more than one of them.’