nine
In the room the mice had poured from Ben and Kim started a search. For what they weren’t dead sure but searching never hurt. Honestly if they each had a list of Rules of conduct or engagement that would be pretty close to the top. Search – You Will Always Find Something. Sure that something could be a sea of mice. Probably forty percent of the time it was that or something equally as squishy, but the other sixty? Gold.
Not literally, most of the time. But information could be golden. Direction could be golden. Lots of things could be golden. So could gold. It’s what kept Ben committed to The Rule.
The room appeared to be an office or maybe a library, the kind wealthy people kept in their homes. Built-in shelves bracketed a wide window under which a long green upholstered couch stretched. The shelves also extended around the other three walls with a cutout for the door that had shelves built above. Every available space had been utilized. Along with books the shelves held various knick-knacks, though that was honestly too low-brow to describe the small sculptures, pieces of pottery, and items held in shadow boxes that were nestled among the books. To the left there was a desk with a swivel chair whose high back was upholstered in green leather.
Kim headed for the desk, kneeling down to pull out and dig through the drawers. Luckily they’d remained closed so the mice hadn’t gotten into them. The same couldn’t be said for the couch which Ben stood in front of as he stared out the window with his legs wide and his hands braced on his hips. Tufts of stuffing bulged from holes that had been clawed or bitten out of the fabric of the couch. Ben kicked the bottom of the couch and several mice came scurrying out. He flinched and kicked vigorously several more times. Once nothing else can flying, he settled back into his wide-legged stance and stared out the window.
Popping her head up from behind the desk which had revealed nothing except business ledgers and correspondences addressed to a man named Bisman, Kim started to ask Ben if he’d found anything.
The words died on her lips as he watched his squared shoulders curl inward and his head drop. There was something vulnerable about the stance, out of line with the image Ben usually projected to the world.
Moving around the desk she approached him slowly from the side. He turned his head away from her. She frowned and stepped to that side, not saying anything, just waiting.
A tear slid down the cheek near her. Just one. Slipping beyond his iron control.
She reached a tentative hand, careful to move slowly, and brushed the tear away. As if her touch had released the flood gates he dropped his head. When she put a hand on his arm he leaned his face into her shoulder and started to cry.
Like ugly tears. Frame jerking, wracking tears. Wrapping his arms around her, something he’d never done before – probably because he wasn’t the type to break down and she wasn’t the type that people latched on to (except for Gwen and Gwen didn’t count) tears. And yet completely silent. That might have been the most awful part. The pain that poured from him, silent.
Awkward and unsure, foreign feelings welling in her, she very slowly and tentatively closed her arms around him. They stood this way for a minute, Ben soundless and suffering and wetting her shirt to the skin, then Kim very carefully maneuvered them to sit on the couch, only to think better of it as she remembered the mice coming out of it. Mice didn’t squig her out but she still didn’t want to sit on one and potentially break its little neck with her big ass. Instead she slowly lowered them to sit on the floor with their backs a solid couple inches from the couch. Its support would have been nice but, again, mice.
She patted his back and bit her tongue and just let Ben control the moment. Finally he let go his octopus grip on her ribs. Sheepish he pulled his hands back and smoothed his hands over his splayed legs. Freed of the grip Kim quickly drew back to give him (and herself, admit it, herself) a little much needed space.
Catching his eye, she pivoted on her butt enough so she could lie back on the carpet and stare at the ceiling. Ceiling staring helped her think. With her focus on the steady and unchanging certainty of a ceiling she didn’t have to struggle to process people’s visual language but could just listen to their voice. Or let her wash over her in a background noise of static if that made her brain happy.
She fought to stay in the moment as Ben did the same as she did, lying down so his shoulder barely touched her. A slanted glance to the side showed his strong profile, his gaze fixed on the ceiling. This gave her tacit permission to fall back to that herself.
They lay that way for a while, only the sounds of Ben’s slowly evening out breathing or an infrequent shift as a tremor juddered through his form stirring the stillness then he started to speak.
“I have a problem with mice.”
That was it. For several long minutes that was it. Eventually Kim felt the compulsion to break the silence or respond or something.
“I don’t.” She shared so he wouldn’t have to. “The house I grew up in was built on former farmland. Field mice were a way of life for us. Our cats loved them.”
Ben continued to stare at the ceiling but another quick glance to the side showed he was listening.
“If it got cold the field mice would come inside. Sometimes it got pretty bad. Like I wasn’t paying attention once and I stepped on one bare foot. I felt its neck break under my heel. You better bet I did the “ick!” dance.”
Ben’s lips quirked the tiniest bit.
“There was this one mouse. It must have eaten just enough poison to make it crazy but not kill it. I’d be reading or drawing and I’d look up and there was Jonathan – I named it Jonathan for Mrs Frisby’s husband – just chilling about ten feet away and watching me, like I was its favorite form of entertainment. Like, wow, what was this giant creature doing with that flat white stuff and the pointy stick thing or why were there a bunch of the flat white things all stuck together and why did the giant creature sometimes smile while looking at them?”
When Ben didn’t stop her, Kim continued to fill the air with her memories of the plucky creature. “Sometimes Jonathan would run straight at you from across the room then screech to a halt, again about ten feet away, and just stare. Like ten feet was his safe zone. My brother killed him with a shoe. I miss the crazy fucker.”
“Your brother?” Ben’s voice was quiet.
“Nah. Jonathan.”
Another tiny, teeny, minute lip quirk. Then more companionable silence as they each contemplated the ceiling and whatever thoughts were flowing through their minds. Eventually Ben drew a juddering breath.
“When I was a kid my mom couldn’t afford a good place for us to live. Bad places probably sneered at the place she could afford.” Quiet as the room was his swallow was very audible. “I had a little brother. Did I ever tell you that?”
Unwilling to respond and stop him, though she was pretty sure she knew where this was going and it put a fist in her gut, Kim just shook her head.
“Yeah. I had a baby brother. One night I got up to give him his bottle. My mom worked a lot and I took care of Chris. That was his name. Chris. Cute kid. The best.” Ben’s words petered off into memory then he picked up again, “I went to give Chris his bottle and there were rats all over. They must have gotten in through the broken window or maybe the heat vents which didn’t really do much to give heat but sure did give a nice cold draft when the wind blew. The rats bit him in so many places. I don’t even know why a rat would bite a baby.”
Milk, Kim thought, he probably smelled of milk.
“Two nights and my mom didn’t come back. She might have been holed up with a trick. I don’t know. But, she didn’t come back and the wounds got septic and Chris got a really high fever.” Ben’s voice broke, “I put him in a bath because I didn’t know what else to do.” He swallowed, hard. “He died. In the bath.”
“How old were you?”
“Eight.”
“And Chris?”
“Two.”
“I…” Kim started only to fumble, “There are…”
Giving up trying she just reached over and took Ben’s hand. They lay there in companionable silence and stared at the ceiling until a loud “Ah! Oh! Ahhhh!” came from somewhere in the house, muffled by distance but not robbed of urgency.
Kim and Ben leaped up and ran into the hall, going left and right in search of the sound.
“This way!” Ben gestured at the stairs leading up just as the sound of a large body crashing into something, then the sound of a piece of furniture collapsing beneath said large body, then a grunt of pain followed by the sound of a large body scrambling out of the wreckage of a piece of collapsed furniture traveled down to them. Somewhere in there came the sound of crossbow bolts releasing and several muffled curse words blending with that.
Then the roaring started. Or maybe it started before that but it got lost in the auditory collage.
Running out of another open door in the hall Prairie and Gwen joined them as they ran up the stairs.
“Well crap!” Gwen exclaimed, “That’s not a mouse!”
Prairie, country girl knowledge coming to the fore, supplied, “That’s a bear.” She cocked her head, reconsidered, and amended with, “That’s two bears!”
Hitting the landing, they Scooby Doo ran on air as they high-tailed it down the hall towards the room at the end from which the messed up blend of sounds came.
What greeted their eyes took a moment to process. The room they ran into looked like it might have once been a bedroom. There was a settee, broken, with Ivan pulling himself out of the wreckage. Tufts of stuffing clung to his beard, giving him a look like a hedgehog who got into a dandelion field. There was more stuffing on the floor, along with a veritable snow storm of down from what looked like four or five ripped up pillows.
The source of the stuffing seemed to be the back of the settee which had several long rents that appeared to have been made by claws. Claws which belonged to the two bears that were rearing back and waving their paws in the air as they roared defiance at Dan who was busily making them into pincushions with his crossbows.
Standing, legs braced, on the ruins of a bed Siobhan was carefully throwing potions at the bears. She must have been ramping up from small impact to large, judging the effectiveness because the bears’ fur was barely smoking while there were several obvious pools of fluid on the ground which the bears were stomping through and smearing around the wood floor.
Gwen hefted her plunger. “How did bears get in here?”
It might have been a rhetorical question but Prairie answered. “Someone probably left a window open. Momma always said don’t leave a window open or a bear will get in.”
Gwen stopped her forward lunge to turn and look at Prairie who shrugged even as she loosed her daggers. “Fact. Someone probably left a window open.”
“Well, that’s nightmare fodder. Thanks!” Gwen exclaimed then turned her mind to how best to get into the fight with the bears.
“Can we just, I don’t know, get them to leave?” Kim, propped in the doorway and making no move to join the fight, asked.
Ben did a comical head jerk/look at her to which she widened her eyes. “I don’t like hurting animals. They are only doing what animals do. They probably thought it was a cave.”
Literally every single person in the room, and potentially the bears too, stopped and stared at her.
“I mean, if they hit you hit back but can’t we maybe lure them out? Or, I don’t know, leave ourselves? Let them have the house.”
Falling back to the wall to avoid the bears, Ivan scoffed. Literally, loudly, scoffed. “Let them have the house?”
His eyeroll was so strong he had to throw his head back to accommodate it. “I fell. Through a couch. I broke something.”
“Yes. The couch.”
“Do you get that we are in the middle of a fight here?” Siobhan shifted on the mattress, watching the bears for any sudden movements.
The bears, for their part, rocked back and roared, swiping the air with their paws, but didn’t advance. Like even they were stupified by Kim’s insane idea.
“There might be things in the house we need.” Dan said.
The room was large, taking up the entirety of the upstairs, so there was, thankfully, plenty of room for humans and bears to distance themselves from each other. A fact the bears took advantage of, dropping to all fours and lumbering into a corner. They shook themselves and crossbow bolts fell free, barely a mark left in their fur to suggest they’d been there. Could have been all their Winter fat acted as natural armor. Could have been they were Magick bears.
Yes, there were Magick bears. And Magick deer. And Magick chickens (no one wants those details). Also very large mice that were, most theories suggested, affected by Magick.
The, sort of placid (in the sense they weren’t actively beating the crap out of the crew) behavior of the bears made a further argument that they could be Magick. Magick animals showed less animalistic behavior. Like, yes stumble on a Magick bear, especially coming out of hibernation which could have been the case as it was Spring, and it was probably going to go into defensive mode. But, give a break in your own aggression and the Magick bear might just consider the odds and decide they didn’t want to engage any longer.
“You think they are Magick bears?” Gwen whispered to Prairie as she dropped her stance and laid her plunger on her shoulder.
“Maybe,” Prairie’s tone was contemplative as she looked at the bears.
“Prairie?”
“Yeah?”
“No Magick bears either.”
“I can’t feed a giant mouse how am I going to feed a bear?” There was something so damned serious and certain about everything Prairie said in that gentle low-down voice so it took Gwen to get she was joking. When she did she poked Prairie in the side which elicited a giggle.
“So,” Siobhan called from the fallen mattress where she was the closest to the bears hunkered down in their corner, licking their wounds.
“So,” Ivan said, very delicately and slowly stepping free of the decimated settee.
“Information!” Dan persisted. “Stuff!”
“Magick bears,” Kim countered. “I’m not killing or attacking or even having a tea party with a Magick bear. I might, maybe, be convinced to drink some Honey Jack with them, but I’d have to be pretty drunk already to handle that.”
“So staying in the hall.” Ben intoned from behind her.
Dan grumbled. “Does anyone see anything in here we might want?”
“Fairly empty,” Ivan said, his gaze doing a visual sweep of the space. “Nice place, actually, except for the bears.”
Dan sidled slowly along the wall, gaze trained on the bears who showed no signs of advancing from their corner like boxers who’d gone way to many rounds, and approached a bank of closet doors.
“If anything is here it could be in the closet. Doors still closed. No,” he called out as he slid a door open and slid inside, “Don’t bother yourself, Ben. Stay in the hall. If there’s a safe I’ll just shoot it.”
“Won’t work,” Ben called from the hall. “Not if its a decent safe.”
Kim snickered.
“Hey,” Siobhan called out as she moved slowly to the edge of the fallen mattress farthest from the bears’ corner. “I think there’s some papers under here.”
She was just bending down and scooping up her find when Dan called from the depths of the closet. As in depths, his voice muffled far more than you’d expect from someone who’d just stepped into a closet, even if it was full of clothes that might change the sonics. “Hey! There’s stairs in here.”
Ivan perked up. “As in secret stairs leading to a secret lair?”
“Maybe!”
“Oooh,” Ivan intoned and very slowly, delicately, carefully, eyes trained on the bears, moved along the wall to the closet. Before he could step in Kim darted past him and through the closet doors.
Dan stepped back as she shoved past him too and headed down the stairs, mumbling, “Secret stairs.”
“Crap,” Ben uttered the curse then entered the closet and started down the stairs too, close behind Dan.
“These things are really long!” Kim’s voice drifted back to Gwen and Prairie who had just started down them. Siobhan and Ivan stayed at the top of the stairs, back to them, watching in case the bears decided to leave their corner and approach.
“Hello! Potentially Magick bears,” Siobhan pitched her voice to carry. “If you are in fact Magick and can understand spoken language we mean you no harm and will be out of your hair pretty soon.”
“Maybe,” Ivan added.
From the room beyond the closet came a snuffle grunt, raised to carry to which Ivan added, “Sounds like agreement to me.”
Siobhan nodded, stuffed the papers she’d found under the mattress into her bag, and they set to quietly guard the exit from the closet.
Ivan slanted a glance in the direction of the stairs, concern firming his jaw. Following the direction of the stare, Siobhan said quietly, “She’ll be fine. Dan and Ben have got her.”
“Kim can handle herself. All the stupid stuff she does she has to be able to.”
“I wasn’t talking about Kim,” Siobhan said with a knowing smile then settled back to wait.
Enter The Woods 