Midnight's Choice Read Free Page B

phoenix had nothing to do with companionship. It was beyond companionship; beyond all worldly attachments.
    She was just on the point of deciding to Switch when something happened which made her change her mind. In a last, desperate attempt to break free, Algernon hurled himself at the door of the cage with such force that it sprang open and he found himself sliding over the edge of the chest of drawers and falling towards the floor. Tess caught sight of him as he fell, but before she could get to him he had landed, picked himself up, and was racing towards the corner of the room.
    Tess followed, irritated by the delay but concerned as well. Despite Algernon’s limitations as a companion, she was fond of him and she would have hated to see him coming to any harm.
    There was no fireplace in Tess’s room but there had been one, long ago, and the chimney-breast ran up one wall. Beside it was a redundant corner, about the size of a wardrobe, and Tess had helped her father to put doors across it when they first moved in. She kept her clothes there, hanging from an old broom handle, and beneath them her shoes and boots were arranged on the floor.
    Algernon ran straight towards this cupboard as though he knew exactly where he was going. Tess and her father had never got around to fixing bolts on to the doors, and they always stood slightly open. Algernon nosed through the gap and disappeared among the footwear. Tess followed and pulled the doors wide open, just in time to see the rat’s pink tail disappearing down a tiny gap between the floorboards and the wall of the chimney-breast. There was only one way to follow him. Switching had become so much a part of Tess’s nature that she no longer had to think about it. She didn’t even stand still but, in one fluid movement, changed into a brown rat and went slithering down the hole in hot pursuit.
    Beneath the floor and behind the walls, a maze of old rat passage-ways ran through the house. Tess hadn’t known they were there, but she might have guessed. All old houses are riddled with rat-runs, even if they aren’t in current use.
    Despite Tess’s speed, Algernon had already disappeared behind the first of the joists which ran beneath the floorboards. But to her surprise, Tess realised that she didn’t need to follow him. Her rat mind had picked up on the command from the mysterious stranger, and there was no doubt that she and Algernon were heading in the same direction.
    She scuttled down through the walls of the house, between the courses of bricks, until she came into a long, rat-made conduit which connected with the drains. At the end of that, she caught a glimpse of Algernon’s tail as he turned a bend in a pipe. She accelerated, and after a few more twists and turns she found that she was gaining on him. Before long she had caught up, but when she tried to communicate with him, he ignored her, his mind fixed exclusively on the unknown destination ahead.
    The most direct way of following the call led the two rats across the city by way of drains and under-floor passages. Tess was surprised by Algernon’s speed and agility, and also by his apparent lack of fear. She realised as she ran beside him that this was what he had been deprived of as he grew up in his artificial environment. It was no surprise that he was dull-witted and inarticulate, since he had missed out on the rats’ basic education in life. But all that was changing now. Who could tell how much his intelligence might increase, provided he could avoid the common pitfalls of city rats and stay alive long enough to learn his way around.
    One of these hazards, poison, was very much in evidence in several of the gardens they had to pass through. Tess was on guard, but Algernon was far too preoccupied to be diverted by food, no matter how enticing it smelled. Where cats were concerned, however, his single-mindedness was a considerable handicap and, on two separate occasions,