Extracts

Mitzie

The mouseways were in a pitiful state. Ever since the Northern Line War, each station had gradually closed itself off from its neighbour and the mice no longer travelled along the ancient ways which crumbled, fell and were all but forgotten. Stations became closed worlds to the mice who lived in each of them. Nothing was known or cared about what might lie beyond.

One such station was Manor House. It was an ordinary station in Tubeworld and its occupants were ordinary mice. Its Wasteway was the same as every other Wasteway, with its daily selection of food scraps that the mice carefully collected, took to their homes and ate. It had its own network of holes and its own frontiers beyond which the Manor House mice never ventured nor cast a thought. It had its own laws and the mice lived comfortably within them, missing less and less the distant memories of life before the war and before the Great Book of Ways was stolen.

The Journey Begins

The Unimog came by at its usual hour, trundling along quite slowly. Mitzie had thought about what to do and how to do it. Making sure that no one was looking, she jumped from the platform onto part of the beast’s great belly and held onto it with tight, nervous paws. When the Unimog began to speed up, she gripped even harder and said a little prayer as the vibrations tipped her sideways. She felt distinctly scared but also distinctly excited. How fast is fast, she thought, remembering the trains that hurtled through Manor House many times faster than the Unimog. Would it be possible to ride one of those, she wondered? Would it?

Mitzie held on for her life. She watched the metal lines speed past, barely six inches from her wet, shivering nose. Hold on, she told herself, hold on!
The Unimog made mad, screeching, scraping, scarifying noises, but Mitzie held fast, closing her ears to the booming and banging.

The Book of Ways

“The Northern Liners are a wicked race,” he told her, “set upon the destruction of all micefolk. They rarely make themselves known in the open but strike out in the dark, quiet and unseen. Rumour has it that they are as vicious as rats, some say even more so.”

There was another opinion that the Northern Liners were just poor folk whose lives had gone wrong and in the Northern Line War all they’d done was fight back against the luckier lines, but this was only rumour and a long, long time ago. They had retreated into the darkness and decay of their crumbling tunnels and taken with them – stolen, it was said – the great Book of Ways which, said Shadrake, had remained lost ever since. Mitzie had heard the same rumours at Manor House, but a new idea popped into her head and, rather too quickly, out of her mouth.

“Why don’t we go and get it?” she asked in the most innocent, simple and disarming way.

The Hole in the World

They got to their paws and looked around for the nearest dark corner. Once there, they peered into the Tunnellers’ Heaven, known to Tunnellers themselves as the ticket hall.

There was something in the air which made their little noses twitch. Some way beyond them, fascinating and mysterious, loomed a blackness that was neither tunnel nor mouseway. It was a hole in the world through which they felt rather than saw the shadows of the Tunnellers’ Realm. From it there blew a cold, damp air the like of which they had never breathed. Both were awestruck.

“Is that their heaven?” asked Turnip.
“Maybe,” said Boswell, “and if it is, then maybe that’s an angel!”
He pointed to a Tunneller sweeping the floor of the ticket hall looking rather more grumpy than angelic.
“Come on,” said Boswell. “We must go down.”
“Down!” said Turnip. “Aren’t we here forever?” He’d given up on the idea of a return journey.

Poggo’s Story

There was a mouse in my station named Scarab. Scarab was a mean mouse. I like to think good things of mice in general, that our nastier sides are balanced by our better sides, but Scarab was vicious through and through. I can’t make excuses for him, whether he had a hard life or bad parents, it doesn’t matter, he was just bad and he decided to take his badness out on me.

“It would have done him no harm to let me be but he wouldn’t. He didn’t like a mouse to be aloof and alone and seemed to take it personally that I should avoid him and his friends. Oh, he had friends, but not loyal friends, you understand, just mice who had to act friendly or he would scratch and bite them. He was the boss and you either followed him or got hurt.

South Kensington

The station was South Kensington, the mouse was Bertrand. They’d bumped into him along a dilapidated mouseway. Bumped was the word, for Bertrand had been scampering along intently, nose to ground. He was an elderly mouse with greying whiskers and an air of wisdom.
“Travellers?” he said. “Most unusual!” And then, as if they hadn’t heard him first time, repeated, “Yes, most unusual!” adding, “Would you care to see the museum?”
“What’s a museum?” asked Boswell.
“Why, it’s a kind of exhibition,” said Bertrand. “But I suppose you don’t know what that is either.” He sighed. “What dark ages we live in. Come. I’ll show you.”
He led them to a large open area chock full of wonderful things which Bertrand called ‘exhibits’.
“It’s our history,” said Bertrand. “The History of the Tubemice. through the first Tunnel so very many mouse generations earlier.

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