Haggis The Rent-A-Cat the Black Cathedral - Extract

CHAPTER ONE

‘Neater!’ shouted Nan McCrabbit. ‘Much neater! Put your tail up, and don’t smudge!’ She picked up a single spicy prawn and dangled it between finger and thumb. ‘Come on. Don’t be lazy!’

Haggis looked at the prawn and walked slowly towards it. Laid out on the floor were several black ink-pads and, beyond them, a pile of photographs. All the photos were of himself. Each picture showed him with his claws extended and his teeth bared, looking down very fiercely at a group of small, terrified mice all clustered together in a group. Some of the mice were waving white flags, and others had their front paws raised high in surrender. A few had turned and were obviously about to run for their lives. At the top of the photograph was written, HAGGIS THE RENT-A-CAT, DARK ENFORCER (Reasonable hourly rate, all jobs considered, please call for details). The photographs were part of Haggis’s regular marketing campaign, and his owner Nan McCrabbit always insisted that he should individually sign every single one.

When the photographs had first been taken, Haggis had been proud of his manly, ferocious image and his lovely white teeth. Now, he dreaded the sight of them. He didn’t like autographs. He didn’t like paperwork. And, most of all, he didn’t like Nan.

He walked slowly across the black ink-pads onto the pile of photographs. They were slippery, and he could feel them sliding beneath him.

‘No!’ said Nan, pushing him roughly off the pile. ‘Too high. Too smudgy. Do it again!’ She placed a new photograph at the top of the pile and lifted the prawn.

This time, Haggis walked very carefully through the inkpad. He stamped one perfect paw-print onto the photograph and stepped off, pleased with himself.

‘No, no, no!’ shouted Nan. ‘Not the left-hand side! You’ve got to leave space for the prices! Go back and do it again!’

Haggis waited until the next clean photograph was at the top of the pile and then stamped firmly on the right-hand side.

‘N-n-n-o-o-o-oh!’ Nan yelled, shoving him away roughly. ‘Too hard! Not clear enough! It makes you look like a thug, not a sensitive hard-working celebrity rodent expert!’

Haggis sat down and closed his eyes. He breathed deeply, rebalancing his energies and reconnecting with his inner feline. Then he opened his eyes, walked slowly to the inkpads, rubbed both sets of whiskers through the ink, twitched his tail, and leapt up onto Nan’s very expensive new white sofa. He lay down, rolled about a bit, waved his tail up and down the cushions and pressed a few large signature paw-prints into the arm-rest. Despite himself, he was impressed to see how much mess one small inky cat could generate.

Nan was less impressed. ‘MONSTER!’ she shrieked, rising to her feet. ‘MENACE! OUT! Get out! Out of my sight!’

Haggis was very very happy to obey. As he trotted out of the front door and down the path, his tail sticking straight up like a radio mast, he could hear Nan behind him. ‘VANDAL!’ she yelled. ‘THIEF! CRIMINAL! ASBO!’ Half an apple whizzed past him and squelched on the stones. Haggis increased his speed. An over-ripe banana wheeled slowly above his head and hit a rose-bush nearby. And on only the fifth attempt, Haggis made it triumphant over the garden wall, out of Nan’s way.

McSodden village was a small, neat place by the side of a great loch in the Highlands of Scotland. A long main street with houses and shops looking over the water curved round towards the mouth of the river Crannachan with sidestreets running away up the hill at right angles and the war memorial in the middle. On the loch itself two big boats were moored, rocking slightly in the swell. There weren’t many people out today; it was Sunday and only the garage and the bar of the McSodden Arms Hotel were open.

Away in the distance at the edge of the village, Haggis could still see the little house he’d lived in so happily with his first owner, Nan McCrabbit’s sister Fat Hen. It was now rented out to strangers and Haggis could never look at it without a sense of regret and a teasing memory of old fish suppers. He passed the recycling centre, the primary school and the chippy, checked out the big wheelie bins at the back of the Crannachan Arms, and trotted up the hill away from the village.

His goal was a great shapeless building just visible through the surrounding trees. From almost any angle, it was a very strange-looking place. The closer he got, the weirder it appeared. One side had an old mill chimney sticking out of a bedroom window, and the other had the top of the local church spire. At the back, the rooftop had been arranged to look like a Second World War battleship and at the front like a section of the Great Wall of China. One tower had a full-sized lighthouse, one had a statue of a fat man in knickerbockers, and over the front door was a full-grown shrub springing out of the stonework.

Left for a hundred years to go the colour of a rainy day, the house might just have begun to blend into its surroundings. But recently, an enormous red banner had been strung over the front door. INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR THE STUDY AND RESEARCH OF RARE, EXOTIC, AQUATIC AND NATIVE CALEDONIAN RODENTS IN NATURAL FREE-RANGE BIO-DIVERSE SETTINGS AND HABITATS, (ICFTSAROREAANCRINFRBDSAH), it announced. A few - a very few - of the people in the house called it by the name on the banner. The rest just called the house by the name it had always had: Porridge McSodden.

Haggis, of course, could not read, though he understood the meaning of the banner well enough. It was a disgrace and an insult to his professional pride. For he knew, as did the rest of the world, that Porridge McSodden was absolutely stuffed with mice.

There were mice in the fridge and mice in the piano. There were mice in the attic, mice in the greenhouse and mice in the washing machine. There were Lowland mice, Highland mice and mice from the Islands. There were field mice, dormice, acquatic mice and the miniature black descendants of London Undermice. There were mice in drawers, mice in freezers and mice in boots. There were garage mice and bathroom mice, guest mice, family mice and computer mice. And Haggis was utterly banned from touching a single one of them.

For many years, the five members of the McSodden family had struggled along, trying to make enough money to keep Porridge McSodden going. Donald McSodden, the father of the family, made beautiful wooden furniture, but not enough people bought it. Big Mac McSodden, the oldest son, worked on the loch, taking tourists out for trips during the summer season and fishing during the winter. Eilidh McSodden, the eldest daughter, was at college with a part-time job in a restaurant, and Daniel, the younger son, worked shifts putting up fencing and working for the council. The youngest McSodden, Anna, was now nine years old, and Haggis’s most particular friend.

A few months previously, matters at Porridge McSodden had reached crisis point. The McSodden family had all tried as hard as they possibly could for many years to keep Porridge McSodden going. But no matter how long each of them worked, there was never enough money to pay for the house. It had gradually become obvious that they would either have to think of a new source of income, or Porridge McSodden would have to be sold. And so Anna’s father Donald McSodden had come up with the idea of starting a B&B.

It would have been a great idea. Sadly, the arrival of his first three guests (an American film couple called Lincoln Slim Furburglar and Edison G Rumple, and a zoologist named Eleanor Idlewild) coincided with Porridge McSodden’s rodent problem veering completely out of control.

Up until a few days previously, the many mice of Clan McSodden had lived quite contentedly in the unwashed corners of the house. But when a group of London Undermice had found their way to the attic and begun raiding the neighbourhood, Haggis the Rent-A-Cat had been called in to perform an urgent mouse-clearance operation. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen technical issues, Haggis had failed. The mice, realising that strength lay in numbers, put out an urgent clan summons, gathering every mouse in the western Highlands. And so, when Lincoln Slim and Edison G had arrived at Porridge McSodden, looking forward to a hot bath and a peaceful night’s sleep, they were greeted by the whole of the Clan McSodden mouse population, aunts, grannies, and fourth cousins twice removed. Lincoln Slim in particular was unimpressed.

Eleanor Idlewild, on the other hand, was delighted. As a specialist in rare mammals, she had, she declared, never seen such an exotic and precious collection of endangered Caledonian rodents. They were a scientific marvel, a sight to rival the six-month courting ritual of the long-toed sloth or the annual transmigration of the African gnu. From now on, she said, Porridge McSodden should be conserved as a specialist native wildlife habitat where international scientists would come to study and admire a place where the local fauna lived in harmony with the human population, sharing everything from breakfast to beds.

So most of the house now belonged to mice, and the few bits of it which didn’t belong to mice now belonged to scientists instead. As Eleanor Idlewild had predicted, zoologists from all over the world now queued up to come and stay. As she had also predicted, they brought money with them. In fact, Donald McSodden was now so rich he had recently been able to buy a tiny mug-sized electric fan heater for each bedroom. For the first time in ten generations, the temperature in some parts of the house had now risen from -20 degrees to -15. Those lucky scientists who did secure a place could now spend several sleepless nights watching their own breath whilst being entertained by the massed mice of the Clan McSodden pipe-band. After a few weeks, they would return home bug-eyed with tiredness but thrilled by the opportunity to see rare long-haired acquatic mice playing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ off-key thirty-five times in a row.

Haggis looked at the banner and then looked away again. He could barely stand the sight of it. But still he came here every day to stand in exactly this spot and stare at the house. This was part of his routine now, a daily pilgrimage of fury and thwarted hunger. One day, he vowed - as he vowed every day - he would get even. The mice he had known in the past had all been shy, mousey types. But now, the mice of Porridge McSodden were not mousey at all. They were bold, outgoing mice who never crept or squeaked or hid, but strolled through the house as if they owned the place.

Mice were pests. They had always been pests, and they would always remain pests. The thought of mice being treated so well, whether they were long-haired, short-haired, wet, dry, musical or tone-deaf, outraged him. And he, as Haggis the Rent-A-Cat, Evil Rodent Overlord and Sumo-Cat of Doom, was going to do something about it. It was his destiny, his training, his one-and-only single-minded mission. He was going to restore things to their natural balance, where mice were frightened and cats were kings. Most of all, he was going to get even with those horrible little black mice who had started it all.

He got up and began trotting purposefully towards the house. He had been warned off the premises five times in the past week alone by various members of the McSodden family, who had all been polite and a little apologetic, and by the scientists, who had been neither polite nor apologetic. Even so, persistence was obviously the key.

He was just heading for the open kitchen window when he heard a sound. It was the one sound in the world guaranteed to stop Haggis in his tracks: the sound of a barking dog.

•

CHAPTER TWO

Five hundred miles away, two of the little black mice Haggis had been thinking of were fast asleep. A third mouse, brown, female, middle-aged and a little smaller than the other two, lay in a corner beside them, her eyes closed and her whiskers twitching. Most of the time, each mouse slept curled up into a tight little ball, but once in a while, they relaxed, rolled round and lay for a few moments with their mouths a little open and their front teeth nibbling dreamily at the dark air.

Outside, a few metres above them in the streets of London, it was daylight. The city was going about its business, moving from meeting to meeting, standing in the post office, going for a lunchtime sandwich. But far down deep in the hidden corners of the Black Cathedral, it was night-time. In fact, it was always night-time in the Black Cathedral. Apart from a few faraway overground stations, and the deep stations dug like pits down into the ground, there was rarely much change in the light. Only the sound of the trains, the clank of workmen and the low meaningless boom of the station announcements gave any indication of time. Not that the Undermice needed it; they knew instinctively what the time was without ever needing clocks or daylight tell them.

Their nest was deep between the walls at Firstfound. Many years ago, a gap had been hollowed out between the brickwork right down low, invisible from the tracks and hidden by a stack of discarded clinker. Later generations of Undermice had expanded the gap, refined it and disguised it. Now, despite being almost invisible from outside, it concealed a short slim passageway and a rectangular space exactly the same size as one of the missing bricks. The nest still bore several obvious marks of neglect - the walls were full of lumps and holes, and little rockfalls of brickdust fell from the ceiling every time a train went by - but there were also signs of recent housework. The floor had been swept clean, carpeted with cardboard and overlaid with a small nibbled section of a prayer mat. Three corners of the room had little beds made from the remains of a Japanese-English phrasebook. There had even been some attempts to build a larder. Two old nails, a wood chip and an unidentified object which might once have been a smoky bacon crisp had been arranged in a neat pile close to the brown mouse’s bed. Directly outside, Bloodline trains thundered past, the cold beams from their lights momentarily whitening the tunnel walls. But the three mice slept on, oblivious.

It was now three months since the three mice had made the journey all the way back from Porridge McSodden to the Black Cathedral, and three months is a very long time in any mouse’s life. There were times, in fact, when even Bridie - born and bred in the Highlands, a Clan Chief by birth, and the only one of the three who was not a native Undermouse - felt that her life in the north was no more than a dream now, an unlikely adventure she’d simply imagined. In the dream, there was always an enormous house with an enormous nest with enormous stockpiles and enormous quantities of children, and it always ended in a maelstrom of cats and attics. Generally, she woke from the dream rather hungry.

Two months ago, Tox, Fume and Bridie had left Scotland in a hurry. After Lincoln Slim Furburglar and Edison G Rumple had met Porridge McSodden’s very unwelcome welcoming party - 8,464 Clan McSodden mice, plus three London Undermice - they had barricaded themselves into the kitchen and refused to come out. At dawn they had emerged. They had run very fast for the safety of their car whilst yelling all sorts of terrible threats over their shoulders. But unknown to them, they were travelling with three extra stowaway passengers. Tox, Fume and Bridie had made themselves very comfortable among the couple’s bags, gnawing several holes in Lincoln Slim’s cashmere jerseys. Over the next few hours they had experimented with several exciting new flavour combinations including smoked salmon on a bed of car-hire documents, and oatcakes drizzled with antifreeze. The rest of the time, they had slept.

It was the smell of London which had woken them, and the sounds of the evening city. The old beloved scents of pollution, food, drains and vegetation came sidling through the car windows to greet them and the Undermice looked up with shining eyes. Somewhere mingled in with all those smells, they could scent the Black Cathedral. Bridie looked at the two of them, unspeaking. She had never been further than McSodden Kirk vestry before. For the first time, she began to feel nervous.

After a long while, the car stopped and the bag they were in was lifted out. There was an exchange of shrill human voices, footsteps, and - to the Undermice - the infinitely lovely, infinitely familiar sound of the Black Cathedral’s ticket barriers slamming behind them. All three mice set to work nibbling a hole in the leather at the side of the bag, careful not to make it too large or too noticeable.

Tox sneaked a glimpse out. ‘Brilliant!’ he said, turning back, ‘We’re in Dunsinane!’ As Lincoln Slim clattered down the stairs towards the platform, he crouched low. ‘Wait,’ he said, as the other two crowded behind him. He could see the platform now with its familiar line of waiting passengers and hear the vibration of the rails as the next train approached.

‘Now!’ he shouted, as the passengers turned away. All three mice leapt out of the bag and fell towards the darkness at the far western end of the platform. They landed safely and stood for an instant, feeling the familiar stones beneath their paws and the soft muffling layer of grime. Then they ran, pelting out ahead of the waiting train and down onto the safety of the track pit.

It wasn’t until he was back down in the concealing darkness that Fume realised how much he had missed the Black Cathedral. He’d missed its warmth, its darkness, its enormous astonishing history. And he’d missed his old home, a refurbished burger box near Bindweed. It wasn’t much - nothing like Bridie’s great ancestral nest - but it was his and he loved it. And, though Bridie’s opinion of anything English was usually very low, he was looking forward to showing it to her. He hoped very much she would consider it urban and stylish, rather than cramped and polystyrene.

In theory, it should not have taken them long to get from Dunsinane to Bindweed and back to the nest. But in practice, it seemed to take forever. Bridie, it turned out, was not the most co-operative tourist. Almost as soon as they reached the tracks, she sat down.

‘It’s not a tube,’ she said, looking up.

‘It is a tube,’ said Fume. ‘Humans call it the tube.’

Bridie sniffed. ‘But there’s no toothpaste.’

Fume rolled his eyes. They had been through this before. ‘It’s not a tube for toothpaste,’ he said patiently, ‘It’s a tube for trains.’

Bridie looked up again. The great brick archway of the tunnel loomed above them. From here, it looked noble and secretive all at the same time, almost as if it were the great ceremonial entrance to London itself. Away into the distance, the tracks gleamed, two thin lines of reflected light in a darkness so thick Bridie felt almost as if she could touch it. ‘It’s a mousehole, not a tube,’ she said, ‘A great big enormous mousehole with burrows attached. Why didn’t you say?’

‘I suppose it is,’ said Fume, looking up. He’d never really thought about it like that. ‘But it’s a shared mousehole. We share it with humans and Deadliners and the Great Power.’

‘What’s the Great Power?’ said Bridie.

Tox didn’t like standing around here, talking. They ought to move. ‘It’s difficult to explain,’ he said reluctantly. ‘It’s ... humans call it electricity. It exists, but you can’t see it. It makes the trains run. It will kill you if you touch it, but it never attacks.’

‘What’s electricity?’ asked Bridie.

Tox looked at Fume, unsure how to explain. Like all Undermice, he understood electricity instinctively, but - apart from a dim memory of having once eaten his way through half a guide to circuit-breakers - he didn’t know how to put that understanding into words. ‘Um,’ he said, ‘It’s a force, a sort of very big invisible thing. It’s a bit like fire or water, but it lives in these metal things.’ He looked down at the tracks. ‘Remember the wires at Porridge McSodden?’

Bridie had been very proud of her electrical stockpile. At various times, she had collected 17 lamp flexes, the remains of an old fuse-box and all of Big Mac McSodden’s computer cables. ‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Well, it lives in that. It lives there during the daytime, and at night it disappears. Without it, nothing works - no lights, no trains, no sound. Only us, and humans. Once in a while, you can see it leap - see it sparking like cold fire.’

‘I thought you said it was invisible?’

‘It is,’ said Tox. He was trying to be patient. ‘It is usually. But sometimes ...’

‘And,’ said Fume, interrupting, ‘It makes pigeons explode.’

‘Pigeons?’ Bridie looked bewildered.

‘When Undermice are young,’ Fume said, ‘Just a few weeks old, their parents take them on a special trip. They catch the slow train or the bullet, and they go all the way to one of the overground stations - the Lost World, or the Arctic Circle, or somewhere like that. They find somewhere hidden to sit, and then they wait. They aren’t very quiet when they wait, because they know it’s a special trip and they know this trip only happens once in a lifetime. Anyway, they wait and they wait, and sooner or later, a pigeon comes along. Most of the time, the pigeons stay safe. They land on the platform or the canopy and they peck around and they do all the things that pigeons usually do. But once in a while, one of the pigeons lands on the metal itself.’

Beside him, Tox was shifting anxiously from paw to paw.

Fume paused, and said in a dramatic whisper, ‘And then it explodes.’

Bridie’s eyes widened.

‘There’s a huge bang,’ continued Fume, ‘Really huge. A bang as big as the end of the world. And there’s a flash and a crash and an ear-splitting splatter. And when all the little mice open their eyes again, lots of little bits of feather and gore come floating back down through the air and onto the tracks. But that’s it. The pigeon itself has completely gone. Gone forever. Kepow!’

Bridie was genuinely impressed. ‘Really?’ she said eventually. ‘Really?’

‘Yes,’ said Fume. ‘I’ve seen it.’

‘Ww-o-o-o-o-w-w,’ said Bridie. And then, wistfully, ‘Can I see it too?’

‘Maybe.’ Tox was finding it difficult to control his impatience. ‘One day. Not now. We’ve got to keep moving.’

But they had only gone a few steps further when Bridie stopped again. She was examining a small round white object which had fallen between the tracks. It was definitely food, but it was not any kind of food she knew. She turned it over between her paws a couple of times and sniffed it. Then she popped it into her mouth.

‘Ha!’ she snorted, rising up suddenly on her hind legs. ‘Ho! Hoh! Hoooo! Heee! Ooooh!’ She began to move strangely, prancing up and down around the two Undermice, dancing in silent circles. Her eyes had begun to water.

It took several minutes before she could speak again. ‘AAaaahhhhhh,’ she said, enveloping Tox and Fume in a hot blast of peppermint fumes, ‘Hhhhaaaaaaaaahhhh. Very clever. Attack-food.’

‘It’s a mint,’ said Fume.

Bridie narrowed her eyes. ‘It tried to blow my mouth off. It assaulted me.’

‘It isn’t a weapon,’ said Fume patiently, ‘It’s a sweetie.’

‘Killer confectionary,’ said Bridie. She let out another minty breath and peered out into the darkness. ‘Who knows where it might lead? You start with vicious mints, and you end with angry chocolate or pillaging biscuits. Very ingenious. Very underhand. Very English.’

Tox lost his temper. ‘IT’S A SWEET, YOU WEEVIL-BRAINED NUTTER!’ he shouted. ‘NOW MOVE!’

Bridie looked at Tox, offended.

‘I think,’ said Fume gently, ‘He means it isn’t safe to stay here.’ He set off down the tracks, and waited as Bridie began to follow a few paces behind. After three or four yards, she sat down again.

‘I’m not going in there,’ she said, looking at the tunnel entrance.

‘That’s where we live,’ said Tox. ‘We live in the tunnels. The darkness keeps us safe.’

Bridie sniffed. ‘It’s unhygienic,’ she said. ‘It’s ...’

She was about to continue when something stopped her. As the three mice crouched in the darkness, the air went still and the temperature dropped a little. Very faintly, the metal strips began to sound, as if something was striking them from a long way away. Far away in the distance, it began to grow light. The air around them began to move again, gently at first and then with real force, pushing at their fur and forcing them down against the ground. The light got brighter and brighter, separated out into two vast white suns bearing down on them, and began to roar. The metal strips were clattering now, vibrating with an energy of their own. The roaring got louder and the lights got whiter and, before Bridie had time to move or think or run, something huge - a long bright metal monster - came shattering down the tunnel towards the Undermice. Bridie felt the monster’s great hot breath on her fur and the earth shake beneath its pounding feet. She felt it slash at the metal strips as it ran rending and shrieking towards them. And then it was directly above. Light seeped from its great metal stomach and eerie blue sparks came flashing from it, illuminating the tunnel walls with a white cold light.

And then it passed on. It did not touch them, it simply hurtled onwards as if it had not noticed them at all.

Bridie opened one eye very cautiously and looked around, expecting to see the world in ruins at her feet. But the world was not in ruins. The world was just as it had been, except that the two Undermice were now standing above her, looking down.

‘That,’ said Fume, ‘was the Tube.’

‘Oh,’ said Bridie in a small voice. ‘Really?’ She got up unsteadily and tottered towards Tox. ‘I want to go home,’ she said, and passed out at his feet.

•

It took a lot of patience to revive Bridie, and a lot of persuasion to get her to continue. Finally, when she had stopped for the fourteenth time to worry about another giant metal monster running them down and then to disapprove of a small patch of chewing gum she had found, Tox and Fume realised there was only going to be one way to get her home. The bullet train was dangerous, since it was often used by Deadliners, but there was no choice. They stood on either side of her, marched her towards the coloured cables attached to the sides of the platform, bundled her through the little doorway in the side of the yellow cable, and pressed the THERE button hard. There was a high-pitched sucking sound, and Bridie vanished. Tox and Fume looked at each other, and then climbed in through the little yellow doorway themselves.

When Tox and Fume emerged at Bindweed, they found Bridie sitting beside the tracks, her mouth wide open in a great big O of astonishment. She was so upset by the disturbance to her fur that she had stopped speaking altogether.

As both the Undermice silently agreed, this was a relief. With Bridie between them, Fume leading and Tox pushing from the back, they bundled her up the tracks as fast as they could. It took a while, but finally they rounded a corner and there in the distance Fume saw the familiar wonky-box shape of his nest. He felt a great warm surge of pleasure. Sometimes, he thought, going away and having adventures was worth it just for the joy of returning home.

But as he approached, he had a feeling - no more than a feeling, but a deep and ominous one - that something was wrong. As soon as he stepped inside, any joy vanished. The place had been wrecked. His small larder had been ramsacked, his early art collection (three bits of wood inscribed with the word ‘FUM’) had vanished and everything else had been destroyed. The two comfortable spare nests in the corner made from shredded Tube Maps had been broken up. His small store piles of useful equipment - a length of wool, a collection of buttons with nibble-marks round the edges and a small piece of airline serviette - had either been trampled into the mess at the bottom of the box, or were missing.

Tox stepped in behind him and stood for a moment without speaking.

Bridie looked at Fume. She saw him shrink almost visibly as the happiness vanished out of him. She watched as his pride turned to fear, and his hope became sadness. Seeing the change in him made her angry. It seemed so unfair that Fume - so gentle and easy-going - should have his beloved refuge overturned with such violence.

‘Who did this?’ she said eventually.

Tox glanced at Fume. He was crouched with his whiskers drooping and his eyes downcast, unable even to look at the other two. Tox moved forwards and ran one set of whiskers carefully along the wall.

‘It’s Deadliners,’ he said bleakly. ‘They’ve left a warning. It says, ‘Concealing food is forbidden. When we catch you, you will be punished.’ The music’s fresh - only a couple of days old.’

‘Deadliners,’ said Bridie. ‘You keep talking about them. Who are they?’

Tox sighed. ‘They’re Undermice, the same as us. Or they were at the beginning.’

‘So why have they done this?’

Tox thought for a minute. ‘The Black Cathedral has ten or more different lines,’ he said finally, ‘And every line is colonised by different groups of Undermice. Lifeliners live on the Lifeline, Deadliners live on the Deadline, Borderliners on the Borderline and so on. If you’re born on the Lifeline, then that’s the line you belong to for the rest of your life, though all Undermice used to be able to hunt on any line they chose. It’s a bit like Clan McSodden mice; each mouse is independent, but each mouse also belongs to a bigger clan, and that clan has a calling on you.’

Bridie looked quickly at Fume, and saw he was also listening.

‘In the past,’ Tox continued, ‘Each lineage had a particular identity. Like, Lifeline Undermice were supposed to be stubborn and Hardliners always argued and Deadliners were late - that sort of thing. All Undermice had their quirks and their characteristics but they all evened out in the end, more or less. But Deadline Undermice always made a big thing about being different. They always considered themselves separate to other Undermice because the Deadline is such a big line and because it goes so far north and south. They’re a funny lot. A lot of them were great, but some of them took offence very easily. Somehow, trouble always seemed to follow them around. If there was a fight or a dispute somewhere in the system, you knew there would probably be a Deadliner behind it.’

Bridie waited.

‘Anyway,’ said Tox. ‘Sometimes, the Black Cathedral goes through times when there’s less food around. It never lasts long. The humans all decide it’s too untidy, so they have a bit of a clear-up and then within two weeks it’s straight back to how it always was. But this time when the clear-up lasted longer than usual, the Deadliners panicked. They convinced themselves that they were going to starve unless they cornered all the food on every line, so they started setting up patrols and gangs to collect food and beat up other Undermice who got in their way. And they started training as if they were preparing for some sort of big war. They have sentries called Sneakers who they post everywhere. The Sneakers never fight, they just watch you with little mean eyes and report back on everything you’ve been doing. Gradually they’ve got bigger and stronger and more and more vicious. You can tell a Deadliner from miles away now - they look totally different to other Undermice. Big, well-fed, muscular. They’ve got the Sneakers too - sentries who they post all over the Black Cathedral. The Sneakers never fight, they just watch you with little mean eyes and report back on everything you’ve been doing. ’

He turned and looked at Fume, who twitched in acknowledgement. ‘The sad thing is,’ he said, ‘It’s all so unnecessary. When it’s shared equally between everyone, there’s plenty of food here. There always has been and there always will be. You just need to know where to look. And how.’

He turned and, without looking round the nest again, walked slowly out. The other two followed behind, unspeaking. They stood on the tracks for a moment, feeling the breeze tug softly at their fur.

‘Where do we go? asked Bridie. ‘Is there anywhere safe to stay?’

‘My nest is on the Waterline, near Crow Road,’ said Tox, ‘It’s miles away. And there’s no guarantee it will be any better. In fact, they’ve probably destroyed it as well.’

He looked so sad that Bridie touched her snout to his. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said kindly. ‘It’s a terrible thing to happen.’

Fume was thinking. ‘There is one possible place,’ he said eventually. ‘There’s an old deserted nest behind the brickwork near Firstfound, not that far from the Vaults. It’s well hidden, and it might take a bit of effort to find. If the Deadliners haven’t got there yet, it should be safe.’

‘Right,’ said Tox. ‘That’s the plan, then. Now all we need to do is get the train.’

It was late now, and the Black Cathedral was emptying. A few late travellers stood waiting or walked slowly up and down the length of the platform. Women on their way back from evenings out stood, caught somewhere between wariness and reverie. The mice scuttled over the tracks, heading for the far end of the eastbound platform.

‘Can you jump?’ asked Tox.

‘Jump where?’

‘Onto the train.’

‘With all those humans watching?’ squeaked Bridie.

‘They won’t see,’ said Fume. ‘They never look, I promise.’

As he spoke, the lines began to sing, as if struck by something far away. Bridie looked down the track and saw the two great white suns bearing down on her again. She trembled, made as if to bolt, thought better of it, sat down with her back to the approaching train and began washing her whiskers.

The train came to a halt directly above them. A thin gap between the lip of the platform and the carriage floor let in a little light.

‘Now,’ said Fume. ‘Jump now!’ As he spoke, he leapt. Up and away out of sight, Bridie saw him vanish.

‘Come on!’ shouted Tox, gathering himself. ‘You can do it!’

Bridie looked upwards. From the ground, the train looked very big and very frightening, and the jump seemed impossibly high. But if she did not jump, then she might end up being caught by a Deadline gang or (almost worse) having to ride the bullet train again. She jumped.

All mice can leap distances many times their own height. A distance which would seem impossible to many animals wouldn’t give a mouse a second thought, and the leap from the ground to platform level (which would give a human some difficulty) can often be achieved by an Undermouse on the first attempt. When Bridie leapt at last, she overshot. She catapulted herself all the way from the darkness of the track right into the bright deserted centre of the carriage. She rolled over and over, and if the doors on the opposite side had not been closed, she would probably have rolled out the other side.

She came to rest in a pile of discarded newspaper and lay there for a second or two, winded. As the train began to move again, she rustled her way through the folds of the paper and peered out. Underneath the seats opposite, she could see Tox and Fume looking at her. And directly above her, a man, a mountain-sized man, was looking at her too.

Bridie froze. The train rattled on, oblivious. The man kept watching. A long, long few seconds passed. And then, very very slowly, the man picked up his book and settled back to read again.

For the next two stations, Bridie remained exactly where she was, too terrified even to change position. No-one entered or left from the doors beside her. When they reached the Canyon, the man rose from his seat. He waited until the doors had opened, and then he turned to look back at Bridie. ‘Fare dodger,’ he muttered, and stepped out.

When at last the three mice reached Firstfound, Tox and Fume bundled Bridie out of the doors and back down into the pit.

‘A man!’ whispered Bridie, still shivering. ‘An enormous horrible live man!’

‘Yes,’ said Fume. ‘I thought you dealt with him very well.’

They scurried off into the darkness. From time to time, Tox ran his whiskers carefully along the wall, paused and thought for a second or two. ‘The Deadliners have been here,’ he said, ‘But only passing through. This place isn’t particularly good for supplies.’

It took them a while to find the old nest. After trailing up and down the same section of tunnel several times, Fume gave a squeak of delight, beckoning the others over with his tail. Bridie had to admit it was very well disguised. From outside, the nest’s entrance looked exactly the same as the rest of the wall. Even the missing mortar between the bricks had been disguised with insulating material of roughly the same colour, and only the very faint signs of wear to the brickwork revealed the nest’s existence at all. In front of it was a clutter of old oil tins and a barricade of punctured cement bags. Fume glanced back at them, burrowed under the insulation, and vanished.

When Fume and Bridie followed, they felt the great echoing sounds of the Black Cathedral recede immediately. The nest had a fusty, aged smell as if it had not been used for many years, and the only things left in it were a few dried leaves and the spidery remains of a tiny paper parasol. Best of all, there was no sign at all that any Deadliner had ever been near the place.

For once in her life, Bridie was too tired to care about housekeeping details. She looked round once, lay down on the leaves, and slept.

•

CHAPTER THREE

Far, far away, back in the Highlands of Scotland, Haggis the Rent-A-Cat was taking a short break from work. His owner Nan McCrabbit had organised twenty-six jobs for him that week, and Haggis was bored.

In part, the problem was his job. He had been working for Nan McCrabbit for so long now he could barely remember his old life of idleness. Fat Hen, his first owner, had become no more than a warm memory, and Haggis had grown used to catching mice for money.

Recently, however, he had begun to feel his working life lacked much of the variety and excitement he craved from a professional career. Every day, he was out from dawn till dusk (and often beyond), earning Nan McCrabbit enough to keep her in white sofas and dry-cleaning bills. Every day, he marched into a new house, tail up and teeth gleaming. Every day, he spread panic and dismay among Scotland’s domestic wildlife population. Every day, he laid out a neat line of tails. Every day, he listened to the same cries of gratitude and delight from the owners. And every day, he ate plain, ordinary, brown, catch-your-own mouse. No fun, no spice, no change - not even on Sundays.

Haggis didn’t care that his diet was entirely healthy, free-range and organic. He didn’t give a stuff about the owners’ undying gratitude. He wanted more, and he wanted it now. He wanted fun. He wanted interest. He wanted international travel and the envy of his peers. He wanted thrilling new flavours to tempt his jaded palate: braised mouse with a drizzled cheese dressing, perhaps, or lightly buttered mouse cutlets in a rendezvous of old fish suppers. And what he wanted most of all was to round off his meal with the piece de resistance: whole black London Undermouse.

Unfortunately, the only known source of genuine London Undermice in the Scottish Highlands was Porridge McSodden. And if access to the house had been difficult before, it had now become almost impossible.

It was a month since Eilidh McSodden had adopted a small but fearsome guard-dog from some friends in the village.

‘He’s very nice,’ they had said hesitantly, handing over the lead and and a section of pre-devoured dog-basket, ‘He’s just a bit ... keen for us.’

For Eilidh, it was love at first sight. She loved Growl, and Growl loved her. She didn’t care if he had fur like burnt heather and a face like a hagfish. She didn’t care if he slobbered or dribbled or smelled a bit odd sometimes. She thought Growl was lovely, delightful, a treasure, a god among dogs. Growl - when he thought about it, which wasn’t often - considered Eilidh the shining centre of his personal universe.

Unfortunately, everyone else thought Growl was a complete pain. When he had first arrived at Porridge McSodden, he had celebrated by running round the garden three times, barking non-stop for an hour and then vanishing into the bushes at the end of the garden. When he emerged a few minutes later, he was coated all over in a soothing ultra-fragrant face-pack of fresh fox-poo. Then he galloped into the house, exfoliated joyfully on Donald McSodden’s bed, rubbed his whiskers all over the pillow, and collapsed on the armchair for a victory nap.

When Donald McSodden complained to Eilidh about Growl’s challenging fur-care routine, Eilidh’s eyes filled with tears. ‘But he’s so lovely,’ she said. ‘And he only smells a little bit.’

Within a few days, Growl had settled in, and it had become evident to everyone at Porridge McSodden that he intended to take his duties as watch-dog and security technician very seriously indeed. Grateful to Eilidh for rescuing him, he realised that the best way to repay her was to make sure the exotic mice of Porridge McSodden were guarded at all times.

And so Growl established a strict daily routine. First thing in the morning, he would make a check of every room in the house, ensuring that every single mouse was there and behaving in an appropriately exotic sort of way - performing high-level gymnastics from the curtain-poles, for instance, or organising themselves into deep-water bath-diving teams - before rounding up all the humans and shouting at them. Then, ignoring breakfast, he would make the checks again with added growl, just in case there might be any lurking predators (marauding bluebottles, say, or belligerent earwigs). Then he did the rounds of the village and the loch, squinting at the village’s inhabitants through suspicious narrowed eyes and barking if they made any sudden movements. Then, for a bit of variety, he went round each corner of the garden and shouted at imaginary squirrels for an hour or so. Then he would take a very brief rest, dribbling contentedly onto Eilidh’s bed. Finally, in the evening, he would do all his checks all over again before retiring to the darkest and most obscure spot in the house, setting up in position, and howling at the moon for three or four hours at a stretch.

Since Growl’s arrival, all movement around the house had become very restricted. If, for instance, Donald McSodden got up from his desk, Growl would escort him back by one trouser-leg and then place him under narrow-eyed surveillance for the next three hours. If any of the scientists moved from their observation posts, he gave them a lengthy and intimate stop-and-search. If Anna wanted to have a bath or make herself some toast, she either had to distract Growl with some toast of his own, starve, or put up with him climbing onto the edge of the bath and staring hard at her until she’d finished.

For the McSoddens, Growl’s regime was almost the final straw. Having had their house overrun by mice and then scientists, they were now unable to move freely at all. Reduced to the state of mere refugees within their own home, they were forced to apologise for walking or talking too loudly, made to work as servants to the mouse experts, and then shouted at by Growl when they stepped out of line. Their rooms had been taken over as observation posts and their food was eaten before they could get to it. Worst of all, there was nothing they could do about it. They couldn’t get rid of the mice because the mice brought the scientists, and they couldn’t get rid of the scientists because the scientists brought the money, and they couldn’t get rid of Growl because Eilidh would burst into tears again.

Haggis knew all this. He knew because of his regular daily lurks, and he knew because Anna McSodden sometimes came down to the village to stroke him sadly and to tell him so. He knew that the McSoddens were unhappy with things as they were, and he knew that everyone in the village thoroughly disliked Growl. He also knew that Growl was doing his job extremely well, and had so far prevented him or any of the other neighbourhood cats from getting within ten yards of Porridge McSodden.

And so, inevitably, Haggis had taken matters into his own paws. Recently, when Nan dropped him off at a new work assignment, he had taken to slipping out of an open window almost as soon as she had departed. He would then walk round to a nearby park bench, and there he would wait.

Sooner or later, Growl would appear, trotting bossily down the pavement on the way to his morning stares. This was Haggis’s cue. He knew that Growl had been trained to bark but never to bite. He also knew that Growl wasn’t very clever, and that no dog, however well trained, ever quite stopped being a dog. So as soon as Growl appeared, Haggis would rush down the pavement, yowling and howling and rolling his eyes. He would moon, he would waul, he would trail his tail temptingly through the railings. He would hide under parked cars and make witchy-sounding hissy noises. He would scamper up trees and sit on a branch flinging down twigs. If Growl looked up, he would swat his ears. If Growl looked at the pavement, he ran between his legs. If Growl sat down, he tweaked his tail. If Growl ignored him, he pinged his whiskers. If Growl went on ignoring him, he played dead on the pavement before leaping up and punching him on the nose.

It would not take long before Haggis had provoked Growl beyond reason. One hissy-fit or whisker-ping too many and he would go crazy. After a couple of minutes of frenzied barking, everyone in the village would stand on the steps of their shops and yell at Growl to shut up. Growl would go on barking. Haggis, who would have retired to a wall nearby to admire the chaos in comfort, would dangle his tail down and close his eyes in a slow unconcerned sort of way, just to annoy Growl. Growl would bark louder. The village would shout louder. Finally, when he was quite sure that everything was in a state of fabulous uproar, Haggis would jump down from the wall and return unseen to work.

But in Haggis’s quieter moments, he realised that annoying Growl was never quite going to be enough. What he wanted - apart from three heaped platefuls of mouse-tail souffle - was a longer, deeper, more satisfying revenge.

•

Perhaps surprisingly, there was a third group who were unhappy with things as they were. The McSodden mice - the very same mice who the scientists had come to see and Growl had been hired to protect - were not pleased with recent developments at all. They didn’t like being protected, and they didn’t like being dribbled on. They didn’t like Growl’s endless patrols, his weird starey moments, and his insistence they should behave themselves.

They were also getting tired of being watched. Since Eleanor Idlewild’s discovery of Bridie’s great ancestral nest, the scientists had done their best (under very difficult conditions) to turn Porridge McSodden from a beloved family lump into an international centre of scientific excellence. They had started by setting up their headquarters in the attic with a kettle, a coffee machine and a microscope, and - after several attempts at converting Bridie’s nest - had given up, and moved all the mice to a new, improved, architecturally-designed nest instead. Now, instead of the old warm blob made of gnawed books and school jerseys, the mice lived in an ultra-modern glass and steel box with lots of angles and no privacy. Each section of the new nest was divided into compartments with names written on them. FOOD, said one compartment. SLEEP, said another. ARGUING, said the one beside it, and COMPLAINTS, said a tiny little compartment with no door. All the scientists agreed the new nest was very stylish, and all the mice agreed it was very uncomfortable.

Even worse, despite all this intrusion, the mice knew the scientists were still getting things wrong. Despite watching them all day long, none of the scientists could actually speak or read Weezic, the secret language of Highland mice. All they knew was that there were a lot of very exotic, very special mice all living together. The rest, they had to guess.

And the results of those guesses were not impressive. Angel (who was, despite Haggis’s fevered imaginings, the only true-bred London Undermouse in the nest) had taught many of her companions to read English. One of her most successful students, Bru, had escaped from the nest one night and had gone to examine the scientists’ notes. He was appalled to discover that they didn’t have a clue what was really going on. His father Buckfast’s particularly affecting version of ‘The Skye Mouse Song’ had been labelled as ‘dissonant repetitive squeaking’ and a fierce dispute about pizza toppings between Great-Uncle Anchovy and sixteen angry field-mice was described as ‘grooming.’ Crowdie, a gaelic water-mouse who had given an impressive talk on the gnawable properties of different roof timbers, was labelled an ‘highly-sexed adolescent,’ and Angel’s explanation of the origins of London Undermusic was apparently ‘non-specific courtship ritualisation.’ Bru made his feelings clear by shredding and then eating the scientist’s notes, but it was evidently a situation which could not continue.

And so, night after night, while the scientists shone bright lights and cameras down on the glass nest, the mice of Porridge McSodden plotted. All of them - the acquatic dormice, the long-haired field-mice, the Highland piping mice, and Angel’s 27 half-black, half ginger descendants - gathered in the room marked ARGUING, and - after a lot of complaints about funny-coloured food and interrupted sleep - got down to the real business of conspiracy.

Different plans were suggested, debated and rejected. Some mice wanted to deal with Growl first, others wanted rid of the scientists. Some thought they should try passive resistance, and others thought pawed action was the way forward. A couple of mice even suggested moving out of Porridge McSodden altogether, though this was unanimously rejected. For Growl, there were plots involving runaway cows, or vans carrying many hundreds of tins of dogmeat which spontaneously shed their loads directly outside Porridge McSodden’s front door. To deal with the scientists, there were plots involving attractive zoological research assistants, or random meteorite strikes. Crowdie even suggested trying to persuade Growl into including all the scientists’ research material in his daily fur-care routine, though unfortunately no-one was keen on suggesting this.

Finally, it was decided that any plan had to deal with both Growl and the scientists at the same time. For a long time, things went very quiet. And then finally, they came up with a plan. It wasn’t very sophisticated or complex. It didn’t require props or expert knowledge. But it did require a bit of acting and quite a lot of courage. And, though he did not yet know it, the plan also required Haggis.

•

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