“No!” he said happily.
“And the name of this city?”
“I never knew it had a name. I thought it just was, like a rat.”
“What is the name of the King?”
“Ah, I know that,” said Roger. “He’s called King Henry.”
“And the Queen?”
“No. She’s not Henry. She’s Queen Margaret.”
“And the Prince?”
“No, he’s not Henry nor Margaret. He’s Richard.”
“Good. You know all their names. Well done.”
“And I know the name of who the Prince is going to marry. She’s called Mary Jane.”
“Mary Jane?” said the Philosopher Royal. “No, no. She’s called Aurelia.”
Roger looked doubtful. “She might be called Aurelia as well,” he admitted, “but in the kitchen, they calls her Mary Jane. I do know that.”
The Philosopher Royal wrote down: Fantasy-identification with figures of glamour. Common among lower classes. Indicates humble origin for boy.
“What’s that mean,” said Roger, “what you just wrote?”
“I’m making notes,” said the Philosopher Royal. “To remind me of our conversation.”
“Ah,” said Roger. “You’re probably a bit forgetful, then. Once you’ve learned to remember things, you won’t need to do that. You can keep ’em all folded up in your head. They don’t take up much room,” he went on. “As long as you fold ’em flat. I seen Joan do that with the sheets, and I thought, There’s a good idea. So now I folds and irons all the things in my head and I stack ’em neat. I know where they all are.”
“Remarkable,” said the Philosopher Royal, and wrote: Insane. Sensory-intellectual delusions, paranoid in nature.
Roger was eyeing the bellpull in the corner.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but you know that rope? Well, there’s a loose bit of thread at the bottom. That could be dangerous, someone could trip over that and hurt themselves. So maybe I ought to chew it off, just that little bit of thread. If it would help,” he added.
“Well…” said the Philosopher Royal, and then, “Yes. Why not?”
He turned a page and wrote: Gross and unnatural appetite.
Roger nibbled off the bit of thread, which was almost as long as his fingernail, and then found that he’d accidentally pulled loose a longer piece, so he had to chew that too; and that brought with it a very tasty knot, flavored with a length of gold thread from the tassel, and before a minute had gone by, Roger was blissfully eating his way up the bellpull itself.
Seeing him eating so well, the Philosopher Royal turned his mind to thoughts of food and nourishment, and what rats eat, and then by a logical process to the question of what eats rats.
“Aha!” he said. “Wait here, my boy. Don’t go away.”
And he left the study and hurried to his sitting room, where he scooped up his cat, Bluebottle, and hurried back. Bluebottle was not a philosophical cat; she was lazy and greedy and exceptionally stupid. She had no objection to being picked up and carried somewhere else, because there was very little in her head to object with. So, tucked under the Philosopher Royal’s arm, she just dangled her back legs and stuck out her front ones and half opened her eyes…
Until they went into the study.
As soon as Roger saw the cat, he shrieked and leapt away. The window was open, and he dived out and into a flower bed and then scrambled to his feet and ran, and Bluebottle chased after him, automatically.
But she was a lazy cat, and when she saw she’d have to run further than the edge of the lawn, she slowed down and gave up. She forgot about him almost at once and sat down to groom herself, while the Philosopher Royal stared out of the window, amazed, and Roger vanished out of the Palace gates.
Mr. Tapscrew
In the market that day, there happened to be a man from a fair. The fair was in the next town at the time, and it moved around, as fairs do, but this man had come to Roger’s town because he’d heard a rumor that he wanted to investigate. He was the proprietor of one of the shows in the fair, and his name was Oliver Tapscrew.
Early that evening, Mr. Tapscrew was standing at the bar of the Black Horse, a pint of beer in his hand and a fat cigar in his mouth, talking to the owner of the jellied-eel stall from the market.
“I heard tell of something odd recently,” said Mr. Tapscrew. “I dunno if I heard it right—something about a boy who was really a rat. You ever heard of anything like that?”
“Rats?” said the jellied-eel man. “No. Used to be a plague of ’em. But the Mayor and Corporation got a first-class firm of exterminators in. They exterminated everything in sight—rats, mice, cockroaches, fleas, lice, you name it. Wiped ’em out. Clean as a whistle. Place is so clean now I don’t even have to wipe my stall down. Thanks, I’ll have another.”
Mr. Tapscrew reminded himself not to eat any jellied eels while he was here.
“They ain’t really been exterminated,” said a horse dealer. “Rats and mice. You couldn’t. They’re cunning, they are, they got cunning blood. They take samples of the poison and they learn how to digest it. I shouldn’t wonder if there’s a race of super-rats down the sewers. With fangs like that. And a hatred for the whole human race. The rats’ time is coming, you mark my words.”
Mr. Tapscrew listened and bought more pints of beer and noticed with satisfaction that although nobody knew anything about rats, or boys who’d been rats, they all enjoyed a good shiver when they thought about them. Good shivers were good business.
He sipped his beer while his fertile brain played with the notion of rats—super-rats, rat-boys, a whole freak show of rat-humans, owned and trained and exhibited by Oliver Tapscrew—no, Professor Tapscrew: that would look good on the sign. He’d have it painted as soon as he got back.
Then he felt a hand on his arm and turned to see a small greengrocer with a dapper little mustache.
“Excuse me,” said the greengrocer, “that rat-boy you was talking about—I just seen him.”
“My dear fellow!” said Mr. Tapscrew. “D’you know him, then? Where is he?”
“If he’s who I think he is,” said the small man, “he’s been took in by neighbors of mine. You wouldn’t think he was a rat, really, he looks just like a boy. But he’s got an unnatural appetite. There’s something uncanny about it, mark my words.”
“Did you say you’d seen him?” said Mr. Tapscrew.
“Yes. Just going down that alley over there, looking furtive.”
“Thanks,” said Mr. Tapscrew. “Have a drink, old man!”
He thrust some money into the greengrocer’s hand and hurried off down the alley.
It was a grubby little place between the municipal workhouse and the Hotel Salmagundi. At first Mr. Tapscrew couldn’t see a living creature there, but hearing a soft clatter, he stopped to look behind a mound of empty cardboard boxes, wine bottles, and soggy vegetable crates.
There he saw a small boy, crouching by a tipped-over dustbin, scooping something creamy out of a carton. The boy looked up, and Mr. Tapscrew noted with pleasure his quick-moving jaws, the appalling stink from the dustbin, and the bright black eyes that looked back at him.
“Tell me,” said Mr. Tapscrew, “I wonder if, by any chance, you might happen to be the boy who used to be a rat?”
“Yes,” said Roger. “Only now I’m—”
“Good! Excellent!”
“I didn’t mean to knock the dustbin over, only I—”
“Don’t worry about it, dear boy. Come with me!”
Reluctantly abandoning the last of the smoked salmon mousse that had been in the dustbin for six days, Roger took Mr. Tapscrew’s hand and walked away with him because he thought he ought to be a good boy.
Where’s He Gone?
When Roger didn’t come back, Bob and Joan weren’t sure when they should start to worry. On the one hand, he was with the Philosopher Royal, who was sure to be looking after him properly, but on the other hand, the man had said he??
?d bring Roger back, and he hadn’t.
And on the third hand, there was the fact that Bob and Joan had never had a child to look after before, and didn’t know what to expect or whether they ought to worry. And on the fourth hand, there was the fact that they were worrying about him already because they were very fond of him, strange as he was.
It was a good thing they only had four hands between them, or they’d have been even more worried. Joan even snapped at Bob, a thing she hardly ever did.
“What are you wasting your time with them silly slippers for?” she said. “No one’s got feet that small, and what that leather must have cost I can’t imagine.”
Bob was putting the last stitches in the scarlet slippers he’d been making. He looked up over his glasses and said, “If a cobbler can’t do something for the pure craftsmanship of it, it’s a poor thing. They’ll come in useful one day, don’t you fret.”
He wasn’t cross; he knew she was worried. When the old cuckoo clock struck nine, Bob put the slippers away and took off his glasses.
“Well, that’s late enough,” he said. “I’m not going to wait anymore. I’m going down to the Palace to see what that man’s been up to.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Joan. “I can’t bear sitting waiting.”
“Funny, innit,” said Bob, “we been sitting by this fire for thirty-two years, but it never seemed like waiting before.”
They put on their hats and coats and went to the tradesmen’s entrance of the Palace. Some soldiers were playing soccer in the courtyard, and another was smoking and reading the paper in the sentry box and took no notice of them. Bob and Joan could hear giggling from somewhere inside and the sound of glasses clinking.
“Yeah?” said the maid who opened the door, and hic-cuped. “Oops!”
“We come for the little boy,” said Bob firmly. “It’s his bedtime. The gentleman who wanted to investigate him must be finished by now.”
The maid vanished, shutting them outside. After a few minutes, during which Bob and Joan had to blow on their hands and stamp up and down to keep warm, she came back.
“Dr. Prosser says he ran home,” she said, and was about to close the door when Bob put his foot in it.
“No he didn’t,” said Bob. “I want a word with Dr. Prosser.”
The maid reluctantly opened the door. There was a party going on in the servants’ hall, and she hurried them past and along to the door of the Philosopher Royal’s apartment.
“Oh, dear oh dear,” said the Philosopher Royal when he opened the door.
“Where’s our Roger?” said Joan.
“He ran away. Couldn’t concentrate. Just leapt out of the window and ran home.”
“Ah, but he didn’t,” said Bob. “He never turned up.”
“And what did you do to him?” said Joan.
“A number of tests. They showed quite clearly that the boy is deranged. A psychotic personality disorder, with paranoid delusions combined with fantasy-identification with figures of glamour. Marked retardation of intellectual development. In short, he has a hopeless future, though he might find a useful occupation in some humble manual activity.”
“Never mind that,” said Bob, who was getting red in the face. “We didn’t send him to you to be tested because we wanted it. You wanted it. You come and took him, and now you’ve lost him, and we want him back. What are you going to do about it?”
“Ah,” said the Philosopher Royal cleverly, smiling and shaking his head, “no, no, no. I think you’re making an elementary error about the nature of language. When you say you’ve lost him, that seems to imply the notion of fault, of blame, of the whole discredited apparatus of causality. We don’t talk in those terms anymore. As a matter of fact, meaning itself is a problematic concept when nothing is final and everything is a matter of interpretation into terms which themselves—”
“I don’t understand a word of that,” said Bob, “but I tell you what, it makes me feel sick. You lost that little boy, and there’s an end of it. When did he go? You can say that, I suppose?”
The Philosopher Royal gulped.
“About three o’clock,” he said.
Bob turned and walked away, but Joan hadn’t finished.
“Someone oughter smacked you when you still did believe in things,” she said. “It’s too late now, else I’d do it myself.”
And she took Bob’s arm and they went down the silent stairs, past the laughter in the servants’ hall, past the soldiers playing soccer in the moonlight, and out of the Palace grounds.
“Where to now?” said Bob as they looked down over the chilly rooftops in the frosty air.
“Don’t know,” she said. “We ain’t going to give up, though, are we, Bob?”
“You’re a silly old woman,” he said. “We’ll find him, never mind how long it takes. We just need a clue, that’s all. But I’m blessed if I know where to start.”
You Want ’Em Nauseated
“That’s it! Professor Tapscrew’s Amazing Rat-Boy! The Wonder of the Age! See this subhuman monster wallow in abominable filth! That’s it, paint him as ferocious as you can. You got all those words written down? Get on with it, then,” said Mr. Tapscrew, slapping the sign painter on the back. “Now, Martha, how’s that costume coming on? Let’s have a look at that tail. Dear, dear, dear, that’s not nearly scabby enough. Make it six foot long and all covered with pustules. We could stick a few pustules on his face, come to think of it. Oh, and whiskers.”
In Mr. Tapscrew’s caravan, Roger sat peaceably chewing a leather belt and watching all this activity. These people didn’t mind him eating anything.
“Here! Charlie! Make that cage a bit smaller. We can get more customers in the tent then, and the rat-boy’ll look all the bigger. Rig up a sort of sewer-looking thing—big round pipe kind of effect for him to squat in—yeah, like that. Do they have nests? Do rats have nests? Here, you,” he said, nudging Roger with his foot, “do rats have nests?”
“Yeah,” said Roger. These questions were much easier than the philosophical ones. “Nice and cozy,” he added.
“You heard him,” said Mr. Tapscrew. “Get some rotten old bones off the lion tamer and toss ’em in. Now—lights. We want to go for a ghastly look. We want him to sort of emerge from the shadows. A pool of light near the crowd, so he can come up front and do a bit of snarling when it gets quiet. Here,” he went on, struck by a sudden thought, “d’you think he ought to have a name?”
“I got a name,” said Roger. “It’s new, I ain’t hardly ever used it. It’s Roger.”
“No, no, no. A wild sort of name. Like…Rorano, the Rat-Boy. What d’you think?”
“That’s daft,” said his wife, Martha, sewing on a pustule. “If he’s got a name, they’ll only sympathize. You don’t want that. You want ’em nauseated.”
“You know,” said Mr. Tapscrew with admiration, “that’s why I married you. What a brain! Rat-Boy he is, then.”
“And he mustn’t speak, neither,” she said. “Just snarl and grunt. Here, you, Rat-Boy, come here and try this on.”
Since Roger hadn’t been listening, he didn’t know whom she meant and went on chewing his belt.
“Give him a clout, Ollie,” she said. “He’s got to learn.”
Mr. Tapscrew bent very close and said, “Now you listen careful, else you’ll be sorry. You ain’t Roger anymore. You’re Rat-Boy, understand? Don’t forget it. Now try this costume on.”
Roger was puzzled, but he did as he was told. It was fun wriggling into the rat suit and then squirming on the floor as Mr. Tapscrew instructed. Martha watched critically.
“It’s a bit on the loose side,” she said. “I’ll have to take it in. And he ought to swing that tail around. Here, Rat-Boy, swing your backside, get that tail swishing.”
Roger tried, but it just trailed limply on the floor. Martha shook her head.
“He’ll have to practice,” she said. “Can’t go in front of the public like that. He looks too tame altogether. We??
?ll have to do something about that.”
THE DAILY SCOURGE
THE WEDDING OF THE YEAR
His Royal Highness Prince Richard and the Lady Aurelia were married yesterday in the magnificent surroundings of the Cathedral.
The bride was radiant in her white lace and satin wedding dress.
“She looks like a fairy princess!” was the verdict of the crowd, who had stood all night long to see the ceremony.
As the coach rolled back bearing the Prince and Princess, thousands of happy well-wishers waved flags and cheered.
A kiss on the balcony
Outside the Palace, the crowd had something else to cheer about when the royal couple appeared on the balcony to wave to their loyal subjects.
Princess Aurelia won everyone’s heart by turning to her Prince and giving him a long kiss.
“You can tell they’re really in love,” said Dorothy Plunkett, the SCOURGE’s royal expert. “It’s the real thing this time for the playboy Prince.”
Getting married? WIN…
• A replica of the royal wedding dress
• A fortnight’s honeymoon at the Hotel Splendifico
• A right royal make-over for your dream house! See page 5.
A Load of Old Cod
Bob and Joan decided that after their experiences with the police, they’d be better off not going to them again, and they weren’t very impressed with the other officials they’d spoken to on Roger’s account, either. As they wandered home through the market square, they felt sorely puzzled.
“You don’t think he’s run right away, do you?” said Joan. “I think he was feeling that we were his home. I think he was.”
Just then, the door of the Black Horse opened, and out came their neighbor Charlie, the dapper little greengrocer, staggering slightly.
“Evening, Bob,” he said. “Hello, Joan. Here—you know that little boy…Where’s that sleeve gone?”