A branch, he told himself. Blown there by the wind and caught somehow, maybe on the welcome mat. It’s nothing. Go to bed.

The scratching came again, so soft he never would have heard it if the wind hadn’t chosen those few moments to lull. It didn’t sound like a branch; it sounded like a person. Like some orphan of the storm too weak or badly hurt to even knock and could only scratch. Only no one had been out there… or had there been? Could he be absolutely sure? It had been so dark. Black as the devil’s riding boots.

Drew went to the door, freed the deadbolt, and opened it. He held up the Coleman lamp. No one there. Then, as he was about to shut the door again, he looked down and saw a rat. Probably a Norway, not huge but pretty big. It was lying on the threadbare welcome mat, one of its paws—pink, strangely human, like a baby’s hand—outstretched and still scratching at the air. Its brown-black fur was littered with tiny bits of leaf, twig, and beads of blood. Its bulging black eyes were looking up at him. Its side heaved. That pink paw continued to scratch at the air, just as it had scratched at the door. A miniscule sound.

Lucy hated rodents, screeched her head off if she saw so much as a fieldmouse scuttering along the baseboard, and it did no good to tell her the wee sleekit cowerin beastie was undoubtedly a lot more terrified of her than she was of it. Drew didn’t care much for rodents himself, and understood they carried diseases—hantavirus, rat bite fever, and those were only the two most common—but he’d never had Lucy’s almost instinctive loathing of them. What he mostly felt for this one was pity. Probably it was that tiny pink paw, which continued scratching at nothing. Or maybe the pinpricks of white light from the Coleman lantern he saw in its dark eyes. It lay there panting and looking up at him with blood on its fur and in its whiskers. Broken up inside and probably dying.

Drew bent, one hand on his upper thigh, the other holding down the lantern for a better look. “You were in the equipment shed, weren’t you?”

Almost surely. Then the tree had come down, smashing through the roof, destroying Mr. Rat’s happy home. Had he been hit by a tree branch or a piece of the roof as he scuttled for safety? Maybe by a bucket of congealed paint? Had Pop’s useless old McCulloch chainsaw tumbled off the table and fallen on him? It didn’t matter. Whatever it was had squashed him and maybe broken his back. He’d had just enough gas left in his ratty little tank to crawl here.

The wind picked up again, throwing sleet into Drew’s hot face. Spicules of ice struck the globe of the lantern, hissed, melted, and ran down the glass. The rat panted. The rat on the mat needs help stat, Drew thought. Except the rat on the mat was beyond help. You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist.

Except, of course, he could help.

Drew walked to the dead socket of the fireplace, pausing once for a coughing fit, and bent over the stand containing the little collection of fireplace tools. He considered the poker, but the idea of skewering the rat with it made him wince. He took the ash shovel instead. One hard hit ought to be enough to put it out of its misery. Then he could use the shovel to sweep it off the side of the porch. If he lived through tonight, he had no wish to start tomorrow by stepping on the corpse of a dead rodent.

Here is something interesting, he thought. When I first saw it, I thought “he.” Now that I’ve decided to kill the damn thing, it’s “it.”

The rat was still on the mat. Sleet had begun crusting on its fur. That one pink paw (so human, so human) continued to paw at the air, although now it was slowing down.

“I’m going to make it better,” Drew said. He raised the shovel… held it at shoulder height for the strike… then lowered it. And why? The slowly groping paw? The beady black eyes?

A tree had crashed the rat’s home and crushed him (back to him now), he had somehow dragged himself to the cabin, God knew how much effort it had taken, and was this to be his reward? Another crushing, this one final? Drew was feeling rather crushed himself these days and, ridiculous or not (probably it was), he felt a degree of empathy.

Meanwhile, the wind was chilling him, sleet was smacking him in the face, and he was shivering again. He had to close the door and he wasn’t going to leave the rat to die slowly in the dark. And on a fucking welcome mat, to boot.

Drew set down the lantern and used the shovel to scoop it up (funny how liquid that pronoun was). He went to the stove and tilted the shovel so the rat slid onto the floor. That one pink paw kept scratching. Drew put his hands on his knees and coughed until he dry-retched and spots danced in front of his eyes. When the fit passed, he took the lantern back to his reading chair and sat down.

“Go ahead and die now,” he said. “At least you’re out of the weather and can do it where you’re warm.”

He turned off the lantern. Now there was just the faint red glow of the dying embers. The way they waxed and waned reminded him of the way that tiny pink paw had scratched… and scratched… and scratched. It was doing it still, he saw.

I should build up the fire before I go up to bed, he thought. If I don’t, this place is going to be as cold as Grant’s Tomb in the morning.

But the coughing, which had temporarily subsided, would no doubt begin again if he got up and started moving the phlegm around. And he was tired.

Also, you put the rat down pretty close to the stove. I think you brought it in to die a natural death, didn’t you? Not to broil it alive Build the fire up in the morning.

The wind droned around the cabin, occasionally rising to a womanish screech, then subsiding to that drone again. The sleet slatted against the windows. As he listened to these sounds, they seemed to merge. He closed his eyes, then opened them again. Had the rat died? At first he thought it had, but then that tiny paw made another short slow stroke. So not quite yet.

Drew closed his eyes.

And slept.

22

He awoke with a start when another branch thudded down on the roof. He had no idea how long he had been out. It could have been fifteen minutes, it could have been two hours, but one thing was sure: there was no rat in front of the stove. Apparently Monsieur Rat hadn’t been as badly hurt as Drew had thought; it had come around and was now somewhere in the house with him. He didn’t much care for that idea, but it was his own fault. He had invited it in, after all.

You have to invite them in, Drew thought. Vampires. Wargs. The devil in his black riding boots. You have to invite—

“Drew.”

He started so strongly at the sound of that voice that he almost kicked over the lantern. He looked around and by the light of the dying fire in the stove, saw the rat. He was on Pop’s desk under the stairs, sitting on his back paws between the laptop and the portable printer. Sitting, in fact, on the manuscript of Bitter River.

Drew tried to speak, but at first could only manage a croak. He cleared his throat—which was painful—and tried again. “I thought you just said something.”

“I did.” The rat’s mouth didn’t move, but the voice was coming from him, all right; it wasn’t in Drew’s head.

“This is a dream,” Drew said. “Or delirium. Maybe both.”

“No, it’s real enough,” the rat said. “You’re awake and you’re not delirious. Your fever’s going down. Check for yourself.”