The Remnant (10 page)

Finally he had broken from his trance and
slapped the creature away, pressing himself into the corner of his
bed, screaming at the top of his lungs until his parents arrived.
His father ignored Trace’s story and gave him the drubbing of his
life for waking him. The beating did little to endear rats to
Trace. He might have lived out the rest of his childhood in fear in
a house infested with the vermin, but even at that early age it
wasn’t in Trace’s nature to give in to fear. He might never rid
himself of it, but he would not allow it to rule him.

He had been forced to endure an entire month
of sleepless nights-in which his bedroom was visited all-too-often
by more of the stealthy rodents-but by judicial saving of his
meager allowance he had managed to purchase five large traps. The
hardware store owner was sympathetic, but he simply refused to sell
poison to a ten-year-old.

Trace baited the traps with cheese and placed
one under his bed, one atop his bedside table, and the rest inside
the dark, dusty corners of his closet, leaving the door open so
that he could hear them snap. He awakened the next morning to find
the bait gone from all the untripped traps. Most worrisome was the
one atop his beat-up, bedside table. The image of a large rat-maybe
the same one that had been studying him so intently-sitting on its
haunches there, nibbling the cheese thoughtfully while it watched
him sleeping-gave Trace an even worse case of the creeps.

He checked each of the traps closely, testing
the trigger mechanisms with his fingers, bending the wires to make
them easier to trip. Then he rebaited them-with peanut butter this
time. For the rest of his life peanut butter would remain
unpalatable for him, the very odor nauseating.

The gooey bait had proved effective. Within a
week he’d killed ten of the vermin, but none was as large as the
brute that had first bearded him in his own bed. Trace became
convinced that that one was the king rat and that it was still
watching him, planning something sinister. He decided that he had
to find its lair. So, he slowly amassed an arsenal, more traps, a
quarter of a jar of peanut butter, a discarded steak knife with a
broken handle, and one of his father’s old leather work gloves.
Then one night-with his father’s snores lapping along the worn
floorboards like an ebbing tide-by the bleak gray light of the moon
Trace began to stalk his prey.

As he paced silently on bare feet from room
to room he could hear the rats moving throughout the walls of the
old house. Resting his ear against the peeling wallpaper he could
feel the tiny vibrations of their skittering feet through the
crumbling plaster. Occasionally he would catch a fleeting glimpse
of a fast moving furry body or a spot a worm-like tail disappearing
around a corner. Whenever he tracked the beasts to a rathole he
slipped a trap inside, plugged the opening with rags, and moved on.
He continued the hunt for three consecutive nights.

But for all his efforts, after that first
success with the traps he only managed to kill a handful of the
nasty creatures. And yet he had spotted their droppings everywhere,
especially beneath the kitchen cupboards and table-occasionally
even
on
the table, along the baseboard of the living room,
and around the potato bin in the dirt floored cellar.

But it was late one afternoon that he made
the ultimate discovery.

Trace followed a thin trail of spoor to the
second floor landing.

The ramshackle home had been left to the
family by Trace’s grandfather, the oldest of his clan. All the
other Wentworths had long since deserted New England for the wider
spaces out west, and the building had fallen into such disrepair
that by the time Trace was born neither parent ever ventured
upstairs. For as long as Trace had been able to climb, the mostly
empty, dust-filled bedrooms there had been a play area, a refuge on
rainy summer days. On occasion he had hidden in them from either
his father’s anger or his mother’s alcoholic and often smothering
love. The idea that this part of the house might be the rodents’
lair confused and enraged Trace. The rats had no reason to venture
there. There was no food source, no heat in the cold New England
winter when the upstairs was sealed off to save fuel.

And because all but a few pieces of the
ancient furniture that must once have filled the upper house had
long been sold or thrown away, there were few places for the vermin
to hide, nowhere for them to nest. Searching beneath the stained
and dusty sheet draped over a rusted set of box springs, behind a
peeling dresser with no drawers, he found nothing, but intuitively
he knew that he was correct. He could feel the bright red eyes of
the king rat watching, sense the chisel-toothed beast waiting.

But after hours of fruitless searching he was
finally forced to admit defeat, and he carried his remaining string
of traps, his jar, and his knife with the broken handle back to the
landing. Stopping to stare at his feet he drew in a long, slow
breath. Two tiny turds that had not been there when he reached the
second floor, lay beside the door to the attic.

He had never entered the space, having only
opened the door once and finding it to be pitch black even in broad
daylight. It wasn’t a place a small boy would find enticing, and
again there was no reason for rats to hide so far away from any
food source. Or at least that was the excuse Trace had given
himself. He had hoped to pass it by once more, never to have to
open that door. Now that illusion had been shattered. He had
discovered the lair at last, up in that stifling crypt of inky
darkness, up in that dusty domain certain to consist of creaking
floorboards and ghostly shadows.

He knelt and lifted one of the droppings
between trembling thumb and forefinger. It was warm and still
squishy. Rat poops were never soft like human dung, and they got
hard fast. These had only been here less than an hour at the
outside. Staring at the warped panel door he realized that there
was probably enough space between the bottom and the threshold for
rats to slip under. But of course they wouldn’t necessarily need
to. There were always the walls...

Placing his ear against the cracked panel, he
heard first one, then a low chorus of squeaks, as though every rat
in the world were gathered up there, waiting for his arrival. He
could picture them surrounding the stairwell, glaring down toward
the door with their gleaming, beady red eyes, teeth scritching,
tails swooping slowly behind them in anticipation. His courage
deserted him, and he stood only a moment longer there before
turning to hurry down the stairs. When he reached the sunlight
pouring through the open front door he drew a deep breath, rubbing
his sweating hands against his t-shirt.

He hadn’t had the nerve to face the vermin on
that fateful day of discovery. Instead he had run to tell his
mother. But she treated his tale as the rantings of a very
imaginative adolescent, and when his father finally arrived home
he’d simply laughed at Trace.

"Boy, these old houses are full of rats. You
can try killing them till the cows come home. It’s a waste of time.
They’re nothin’ to be afraid of."

With that his father shook his head, grabbed
a beer from the fridge and plopped himself in front of the
television. An hour later he was snoring. Trace fixed himself a
baloney sandwich for supper, watched the television quietly for a
while, then went to bed to huddle in the darkness and ponder.

That he would get no help from either parent
was a given, but he couldn’t imagine spending the rest of his life
knowing that the king rat had an army up there in the attic. A few
traps weren’t going to handle them, but he was going to do
something. There was no way he could live in terror for the rest of
his life. He finally fell asleep with the covers pulled over his
head, clutching the knife against his bare breast, wrapped in the
warm embrace of a fateful conviction.

In the morning he made himself a breakfast of
cold cereal, dressed, then prepared for battle. He slid the glove
on his left hand like a gauntlet, gripped the knife in the other,
then strode-one anxious but determined step after the other-up to
the attic door, placing his ear against it again.

He could hear the scritching noises of the
rats’ tiny claws, and the incessant eeping. He wondered if they
were actually communicating rat thoughts when they did that. The
idea that his prey might be able to talk to each other, might be
able to plan, was terribly disconcerting, but he felt it was better
to accept that possibility than to face them thinking they were
simply stupid animals.

The old brass knob was hard to handle wearing
the thick leather gauntlet, and the click as the striker slid
across the door plate alarmed the colony. The eeping died away as
the door opened wide revealing one narrow shaft of reflected
sunlight and a terrible deep darkness above.

A darkness with bright red eyes.

Why weren’t they running away? At the very
least the pack should be jittering around nervously. Only they
weren’t. They were all holding their ground-hundreds of them by the
looks-waiting for him to advance into their domain. Trace’s hands
began to sweat both in the glove and on the slippery, shattered
handle of the knife. He considered slamming the door shut and
running back down the stairs, giving up the crusade altogether, but
the rats wouldn’t be locked away up there. They came and went at
their pleasure. They roved not only through
his
upstairs,
but throughout the entire house. This was a battle for ultimate
mastery of his home. He didn’t have a chance of killing but a few
of them with the knife, but when they realized his size and his
intent surely they would flee.

He took a step upward, and a few of the
rodents eeped as they hopped from the top steps away into the
attic. There they joined the other eyes, all staring down at him.
His shoulders hunched, and his crotch tensed, as he imagined their
tails twitching in anticipation, the thousands of tiny incisors,
the needle claws. The feeble illumination bleeding through the door
revealed no light switch, no wire, no conduit line. There might be
a bare bulb high overhead, but even if there was the chances were
that he wouldn’t be tall enough to reach the pull chain. This
battle was going to be fought in near total darkness.

"You don’t belong here," he whispered, and
when he heard his own voice, so low, so tenuous, he repeated the
chant louder, like a warding spell. "You don’t belong here."

When he was halfway up the stairs he could
tell by the tiny gleaming orbs that he was rising to the level of
the attic floor. He was shocked to see just how many eyes there
were beyond the stairs. The attic was swarmed. The floor was
carpeted with skittering furry menace. For just an instant he
thought to rush back down the steps, but glancing slowly around he
knew that the pack would land on him like a wave. He would be
drowned beneath an ocean of gnashing teeth. He imagined his clothes
ripped into fragments too small to be recognized, his flesh
shredded to bloody bone.

He swallowed a dusty dryness in his throat
and continued the climb on numb legs, sweeping the knife before him
like a saber. His eyes struggled to adjust to the gloom, but he
could only vaguely make out the eddying forms of the rodents
milling about. Directly ahead was the tenebrous shape of some
abandoned piece of furniture. Or at least Trace prayed there was
furniture there. Otherwise the eyes he saw were set in the skull of
the biggest rat he’d ever seen. When one of the vermin skittered
across his foot he kicked hard, glad to hear the shrieking creature
flying through the air to strike something solid across the room.
The rest of the little beasts eeped malevolently, and Trace became
more and more certain that they could indeed communicate.

"You don’t belong here," he shouted.

The eeping noises increased. He could sense
the swarm tensing. The Rat King’s eyes grew fiery red, and Trace
knew that the battle was about to be joined. He drew a deep breath
and realized that finally his terror had eased. His legs no longer
felt numb. There was strength back within them. He could feel a
growing power in his knife arm as well. This was his house, not
theirs, and the Rat King was the key.

"I’ve come to kill you," he said, in a much
steadier voice.

A creaking noise from behind caused him to
whirl, and he watched in horrified fascination as the attic door
clicked closed.

Suddenly the sedan ahead exited the turnpike
onto Highway 26 North, and Trace shivered, turning on the car
heater even though it was seventy degrees outside. One of his old
wounds sent an errant tinge up his chest, and he absentmindedly
rubbed his fingers across the small keloidal scars around his
throat. When the imagined pain died away his hand automatically
roved to his belly.

You stir up rats, you get bit.

Trace had realized even as a child that his
father’s words rang with a truth that translated into the world far
beyond that old rodent infested home. It wasn’t hard stirring up
rats. All you had to do was be at the wrong place at the wrong time
or ask the wrong question of the wrong person. By the time he was
grown he’d become a master at it, and he had more scars to prove
it. In school his mouth had gotten him into so many fights they
called him the Human Punching Bag. But he’d already learned another
lesson from the rats by then, a much more important one.

Never say die.

The sedan pulled into an all night gas
station in Gray, Maine, and Trace was forced to roll on by. A
quarter mile up the road he parked in a driveway, turned off the
lights and slunk down in the seat, aiming the rearview so that he
could watch the highway. When the sedan rolled by he noticed that
it slowed, and the two passengers gave his car a real close look,
but then they drove on. This time he waited until the lights
disappeared over the hill before backing out onto the road. As he
approached the crest of the rise he was afraid he’d find the sedan
pulled over waiting for him, but the taillights were just
disappearing around the far curve.