said as he climbed the stairs. At the top he looked down at the big main room, where he had started his book and where—for a little while, anyway—he had believed he would die. “Except I do. I do believe that.”
He undressed and went to bed. The beers sent him off to sleep quickly.
39
Drew awoke in the middle of the night. The bedroom was gilded silver with the light of a full August moon. The rat was sitting on his chest, staring at him with those little black bulging eyes.
“Hello, Drew.” The rat’s mouth didn’t move, but the voice was coming from him, all right. Drew had been feverish and sick the last time they conversed, but he remembered that voice very well.
“Get off me,” Drew whispered. He wanted to strike it away (he wanted to bat the rat, so to speak), but he seemed to have no strength in his arms.
“Now, now, don’t be like that. You called me and I came. Isn’t that the way it works in stories like this? Now just how can I help you?”
“I want to know why you did it.”
The rat sat up, holding his little pink paws to his furry chest. “Because you wanted me to. It was a wish, remember?”
“It was a deal.”
“Oh, you college types with your semantics.”
“The deal was Al,” Drew insisted. “Just him. Since he was going to die of pancreatic cancer anyway.”
“I don’t remember pancreatic cancer ever being specified,” said the rat. “Am I wrong about that?”
“No, but I assumed…”
The rat did a face-washing thing with his paws, turned around twice—the feel of those paws was nauseating, even through the quilt—and then regarded Drew again. “That’s how they get you with magic wishes,” he said. “They’re tricky. Lots of fine print. All the best fairy tales make that clear. I thought we discussed that.”
“Okay, but Nadine Stamper was never a part of it! Never a part of our… our arrangement!”
“She was never not a part of it,” the rat replied, and rather prissily.
It’s a dream, Drew thought. Another dream, got to be. In no version of reality could a man be lawyered at by a rodent.
Drew thought his strength was coming back, but he made no move. Not yet. When he did it would be sudden, and it wouldn’t be to slap the rat or bat the rat. He intended to catch the rat and squeeze the rat. He would writhe, he would squeal, and he would almost certainly bite, but Drew would squeeze until the rat’s belly ruptured and his guts erupted from his mouth and his asshole.
“All right, you might have a point. But I don’t understand. The book was all I wanted, and you spoiled it.”
“Oh boo-hoo,” said the rat, and gave his face another dry wash. Drew almost pounced then, but no. Not quite yet. He had to know.
“Fuck your boo-hoo. I could have killed you with that shovel, but I didn’t. I could have left you out in the storm, but I didn’t. I brought you in and put you by the stove. So why would you repay me by killing two innocent people and stealing the pleasure I felt in finishing the only book I’ll ever write?”
The rat considered. “Well,” he said at last, “if I may slightly change an old punchline, you knew I was a rat when you took me in.”
Drew pounced. He was very fast, but his clutching hands closed on nothing but air. The rat scurried across the floor, but before he reached the wall, he turned back to Drew, seeming to grin in the moonlight.
“Besides, you didn’t finish it. You never could have finished it. I did.”
There was a hole in the baseboard. The rat ran into it. For a moment Drew could see his tail. Then he was gone.
Drew lay looking up at the ceiling. In the morning I will tell myself this was a dream, he thought, and in the morning that was what he did. Rats did not talk and rats did not grant wishes. Al had cheated cancer only to die in a car accident, dreadfully ironic but not unheard-of; it was a shame his wife had died with him, but that was not unheard-of, either.
He drove home. He entered his preternaturally quiet house. He went upstairs to his study. He opened the folder containing the copyedited manuscript of Bitter River and prepared to go to work. Things had happened, some in the real world and some in his head, and those