A Curious Moon

By Buddy Ray Deering

The mice are learning.

They have four, maybe as many as five thousand little rodent minds working in tandem, and they are using all of them to learn the princess’s habits. She is very aware of it. She’s terrified, and trying hard not to let it show, least of all to herself.

Of course, the princess is learning too. Learning her way around this pitch black labyrinthian excuse for a basement by feeling the walls, learning where the best ceiling drips to drink from are, learning how many mice she can kill with a big rock— ideally by only squishing the head, so they’re still more or less edible — before they get wise to where she is and bring reinforcements.

It’s generally only one or two, and even then she needs to be quick about it.

Princesses get kidnapped. It’s a simple fact of the world she grew up in. She’s been learning to use a sword for self-defence since she was old enough to hold one. She’s quite good — but there aren’t any swords down here. And even if there were, mice don’t swordfight.

She wonders, often, if she’s the only princess to ever get kidnapped by a twisting horde of mice. Most get dragons or evil witches, but no, she gets taken by teeny-tiny rodents. If nothing else, it’s embarrassing. At first, she counted her lucky stars that they weren’t rats instead, but in such large numbers, and in the cold and the dark of these cellars, it’s difficult to find much difference. The mice bite too, when they get a chance. Sometimes she wishes they were rats; at least there’s more eating on a rat, and she’s very hungry. Maybe there are rats among them, who knows? There’s no light down here for her to tell.

She’s being held in the locked, forgotten depths of a castle, that much she knows. She knows what siege-proof stone walls feel like, cold and unforgiving against her hand. The only question is which castle. Is it still her own? Or has she been taken somewhere else? The princess just woke up here one day, she doesn’t know for sure. She’s not even certain of how long it’s been — there’s no day or night down here in the dark. It’s been thirty-seven sleeps, but that isn’t necessarily a regular method of timekeeping.

She tries not to sleep for long, anyway. The mice would find her if she stayed still for too long. They have been learning her sleeping patterns. That being said, they don’t know everything.

They don’t know she found the torch, for example.

It was affixed to the wall in a high alcove — the highest part of the misshapen cellars she’s been able to find. She left it where it was; if they hadn’t already found it, then they probably wouldn’t at all. It was an ace of trumps, surely, it could help find an exit, or allow her to see the mice she was fighting … or maybe she could even set fire to them if they come in large numbers.

The princess doesn’t know how they communicate. Do mice have a language? Do they have mice poetry, mice plays? Mice trials? Judging by the way these ones act, they definitely have mice armies. File and rank and all that. She hates armies. Half of the courtly studies that had been foisted upon her in her youth had been about how to lead an army in battle. Aside from getting kidnapped at a formative age and slaying the occasional dragon, it was the only thing royalty was really expected to do. She preferred the lessons about infrastructure. Aqueducts, proper sewage management — the sort of things a peacetime ruler would be concerned with day to day. If she survived that long.

She sometimes wonders if she’s already dead, and this is just some form of purgatory. It’s morbid, but it seems apt. If it’s true, it doesn’t make any difference. It’s just a different sort of puzzle to solve.

She blinks herself out of her scheming. The mice are oddly quiet today. In fact, she hasn’t come across a single one, even in the distance; no tiny sudden fur, no muffled skittering. It’s tempting to hope that they’ve forgotten about her, but she knows better.

They must be scheming too.

She never runs in this darkness; it’d be too easy to go headfirst into a wall, even with a guiding hand on stone. Corners can be painful when unexpected. Nevertheless, she moves swiftly through the labyrinth, pausing every so often to listen, once the echoing of her footsteps dies down, for the telltale sounds of scuttling. She hears none.

The princess searches for hours before she finds any kind of a clue. Some areas in her prison are damp and almost feel mossy, with the silence interrupted by the occasional drip. Others are wide and empty, like great halls, even with pillars. The stone floors in those spaces are always cold and flat as a becalmed sea — almost sharp in their flatness. It is in such a place that she finally hears something. And it isn’t mouselike.

When she was very little, she used to play hide and seek in her chambers with the candles blown out, so that every hiding spot became a hundred times more potent in the dark, and when you were hidden the only way you could tell where the seeker was was by the minuscule shuffling of their feet.

She hears such a noise now. Only a thousand times … more. Just more.

Not louder. Broader. Like an army of seekers shuffling their feet at once, but all as quiet as can be. As quiet as, well, mice. What else could it be? There’s nothing else down here.

Princesses are good at standing still. They practice it for portraits. She freezes like a statue, trying not to breathe, focusing on that noise, trying to discern what direction it’s coming from. Has she found the mice’s colony, at last? Their centre — where they sleep? They have to sleep, surely they have to. The noise is growing in volume, not all at once; like how the rustling of leaves grow when the trees are bombarded by a gust of wind.

As sudden as a thought, she knows where the noise is. Involuntarily, the hairs on her skin stand on end. She cranes her neck upwards, even though she doesn’t want to. She should’ve gone back for the torch.

The noise is coming from the ceiling. The mice are up there, somehow, she’s sure of it, though she wishes she wasn’t. All of them, in one big twisting shape. Ratkings, when rats get their tails tangled together, have got nothing on this. Now she knows what she’s listening for, she can tell — they’re all moving as one. Thousands of them. A sentient wave of rodents in the roof above her head.

And the princess whimpers. She doesn’t mean to; it’s the first noise she’s made whilst down here, but suddenly the fear all became too much, and a drop of it leaked out.

She’s rewarded with instantaneous silence. 

She doesn’t dare to breathe.

Then the noise returns, but different — moving. Moving downwards, all around her. The mice are crawling down the pillars. She stumbles backwards, out of the epicentre of the scuffling, but not to the exit just yet. They are faster than her when they want to be. She needs to distract them first. The princess is just trying to think of a plan when the impossible happens.

Someone speaks.

‘Hello, chi—ild.’

It’s awful. It’s stilted. It’s a thousand tiny squeaks at once all unnaturally contorted so that when they’re combined, it almost almost sounds like human speech. It doesn’t at all, really. But it’s legible. Intelligible.

‘I— Um—’ says the princess automatically, but she can’t talk. She can’t think.

‘Found usss at last, ha—ave you?’ 

The words echo throughout the pillars, but it’s less stilted than even the last sentence was. Her hands start to shake. The mice are learning.

She turns and runs.

The mice are learning how to speak.

Buddy Ray Deering is a Writer, Actor, Director and General Nuisance from London. Aside from A Curious Moon, they have also been published in anthologies by Wingless Dreamer Publishers, Scribbled, and have written and directed two plays for the Rostra Theatre Society. In their spare time, they enjoy watching pretentious old films.