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There was never a time when fear was a stranger, though it truly came into itself anew when it learned how to wrap itself all about from the sodden clothes, leave its stinking trail in time in the clumps of clinging ice that melted slick down the hall, and choke each breath like packed snow.
When the two of them first saw the little creature, Alajos insisted that it must have once been a tame rat, or at least perhaps bred from one.
“Look at the way it creeps along beside and how its eyes look at ours; you can see it was born to be loved.”
Alajos was a kind boy, a little bit older, a Hungarian child that the orphanage had been given charge of after a tragic hostel fire, shuttled from the faded white hospital to the dingy grey brick orphanage, with soft, round, rich features striking contrast to the gaunt beady little faces that peered from the beds and huddled in the corridors, like stained glass ground in with bony shrapnel. The way he had plucked Beni out from among them, paying no mind to his sharp edges and sanding them down with a sweetness in his words he hadn’t heard since the day his sister had gone, delighting in their stumbling attempts at bridging translation together.
The older boys, they tried to drown it; In a rusting pail, bit by bit from a leaking spigot. Brown furred and small, last of its litter, left without guidance, its hunger drew it to them, blind to their intentions, desperate even for crumbs, but such cruelty so young.
On a snowy day sent outdoors to quiet them all down, the pair of them a set of unwanted dawdling tails charged to the little pack of giants. Alajos had grown tired, (he got so tired now), and Beni, still young enough for heroics, made a timid stab at gallantry when they’d laughed at his friend’s slackly lumbering form.
The bucket, by then nearly half full, the horrible tremor of the rats’ overworked legs, and the frenzy of the thing when Alajos pulled it out in defiance, burying its incisors into bones like nails into driftwood, its only thoughts to cling to life, to cling to breath to live to live to live at any cost.
A moment clenched in long bony talons, skyborn, then a powerless headlong descent into the colossal snowdrift below the hill, the sky trying to grind the earth to powder beneath it, turning the water into lungfuls of graveyard dirt.
“Such irresponsibility.”
No praise for his compassion, no justice brought upon the would-be executioners, not even gentle words as the poor boy spasmed in fever and his arm bloated from wrist to shoulder with the pestilence. At first he took some comfort in Beni’s reports detailing the rats’ seemingly recovering, but as the pus and gnawing heat crept from his shoulder and into his eyes, his head began to fill with it as well, and gentle softness shriveled away and left with speech that gurgled up like bubbles from stagnant water; snarling phrases of now-broken Hungarian at his would-be attendant, as deaf to Beni’s Russian as he was blind to the world.
A hat, a mitten, and a boot were perhaps a smaller price to pay, though time would reap its interest and found an overseer’s scolding a mere gloss of paint on shattered framework. He learnt so young to bow to their remorseless power, with his life clutched in that devil’s gloved hand, the poison of terror and despair bleeding into his soul. With each ragged breath clawing its way down his throat he knew all the more that the boy’s whims were all that had plucked him back just as easily as it might have kept him drowning, all the while his once noble companion leant dully stupored against a tree where he’d been left, heedless of his peril.
In spring he’d clamber down that same hill, wincing on the blisters from the new boots, so big they did not keep out much of the melting slush, and dig through the thaw until his fingers went too cold to unfurl. Trudging back up, the thought struck him that there was now no-one else to care that the hat or the young man it had belonged to was gone. Soldiers, ones as young as he had been, don’t come back again. They do not need their father’s hats.
When the mind cannot be what it was again It forgets how, and tries to forget that it ever did, or even should. It drifts in and out of different mischiefs; Fights, spasms, prostrates, begs. It longs for, prays for, weeps for companions But foremost in each breath, as though still drawn forth through freezing rust-bitter water, the piercing message that it must survive. Nevermind if it lives .
A truly desperate thing quick finds itself skulking in the corners, always moving, choking down what little bread could be snuck away and trying to hide from the towering predators that stalk the halls, all sharp in teeth and tongue, ravenous for a bit of fun.
Much too timid really for anything more than scavenging behind their carnage, but sharp eyes could find them an even smaller straggler or notice a bigger threat. The safety it brought was cold as snow, and bitter as poison, but it felt to be the only way to keep clear from the path of those devils’ claws. Most times it even worked.
Sometimes, specialer still, there were even little treats to be had if they’d been enough appeased with weaker prey; a withered bit of fruit or lumpy chunk of hard cheese snuck from the larder.
A trip out to the pastures that neighbored the orphanage to see the soldier’s horses out to the paddock for the day.
Usually he watched them from a stump back in the treeline, so entranced by their prowess that he was happy enough despite the discomfort of the cold and the shards of bark digging into his skin. In spring one of them would even lead him up to the edge of the fence and together they’d pull up clumps of grass from the melting sludge of snow to feed them, the older one lifting it gently up to the long muzzle as if in some repentance, careful not to startle it or stroke its nose to roughly
A silver-blue cat, more sinew and malice than animal, took to prowling in the halls. It might coo sweetly for kitchen scraps or on the colder nights to come to bed with some guileless soul, crying for some warmth and softness, but no mistake the devil’s claws itched for blood and so must have its way in time.
They could tell something was amiss the longer they were all packed in together, the awkward gait, the shaking, the glazed eyes gleaming with long-burning desperation beyond understanding, longing cloaked as avarice.
The others, repulsed by each subtle wrongness, began to crowd it out, leaving it with little choice but to try and sneak a bit from the cat’s bowl. To dodge that ravenous appetite and hide away to devour its small victories or skulk off lick at its wounds for the day, all in hopes of a bite of a too-bony piece of cod or grains of watery porridge scum that had been rinsed clinging from the pot.
Summer melted down the snow’s facade of safety and left him scrubbing away grass and horse shit from his boots and trouser legs, blurily watching Alajos glare with half thoughts at the baseboard with cloudy dead eyes. He must have felt the shuddering sobs, all more breath than tears as he hunkered behind him in a final act of desperation, an appeal to sanctuary long turned tomb.
He did not turn; straining instead to hear the little squeaks and shrieks of the rats below as small pats of blood stained the faded tile in stinking pinkish rivers flowing top and bottom.
Alajos took the little brown rat when he left that place, scars on his hand guiding him to be wiser, but his heart, foolish as it might be at times, couldn’t stand to leave it to its agonizing death by cat or starvation, all alone in those drafty halls. He carried its mangled body, heart somehow still beating, with him onto the train, together off to fates unknown. He’d felt for a very long time that he had to go, and that something very small needed to leave with him. This time it had no strength to bite, the hammering drive to live dulled by the layers of scar tissue (the only thing bought by the years of fear), and appeased somewhat by slivers of wrinkly apple. He’d become too old and too big now to be among them any longer, heard the plans to transfer him. He’d die in the streets before he’d let that hospital take him back again, the chemicals and rot burning all together in his lungs. The train, the woods, the streets, anywhere else was better. Soon enough Beni would follow.
Even when the older boys left there was still no peace to be had. Newer, bigger ones came, and smaller ones grew and found their footing. So much changed, he couldn’t appease them even half the time anymore, and they hit harder now that he was 14. Cursory searches were of course made, both times, but if anyone had truly cared the lopsided bootprints in the snow would surely have been easy enough to track.
Now, as Beni stumbled through those cavernous tunnels, against all odds alive for now, that awful creature's uncountabley numerous legs clicking on the cave ceiling, his trousers sticky with drying blood and veins seeping with Its dizzying toxins, an unbidden thought flitted through his head:
“ Please , Rick, please don't let me drown; I promise I’ll learn not to bite.”