The big box fan stood in the door of the den where it was supposed to suck in hot air and blow it out cool in the garage room, but it barely stirred the sludge. It was intolerably hot. Ragtag lay, miserable, under Miss Mary’s bed, panting.

Maybe she would give Miss Mary a cool bath, Mrs. Greene thought. The water would feel nice for both of them. She started to get up when she felt a living gaze on her. She looked to the den door and saw an enormous, wet, black rat sitting motionless beside the fan, staring at her. The air over its patchy, piebald back practically shimmered with disease. Mrs. Greene felt her bowels fill with ice water. She’d seen plenty of rats in her lifetime, but never one as big as this, and certainly not one sitting all cool and collected as if it owned the place.

“Shoo!” Mrs. Greene said, flicking her hands in its direction and stamping her foot. Ragtag lifted his head as if it weighed five hundred pounds and gave her a look, wondering if that “shoo” was directed at him.

“Go on, Ragtag,” Mrs. Greene said, recognizing her natural ally. “Get that mean old rat. Get it!”

Ragtag’s head tracked her gestures and saw the rat and, without moving a muscle, he began to growl from deep inside his throat. The rat oozed its body out long and flowed down onto the first step, and Mrs. Greene saw that it was as big as a man’s shoe. Ragtag’s growls went up in pitch, but they didn’t seem to trouble the rat. Ragtag scrambled out from under the bed and faced the rat square on, his growl escalating, building toward a bark, and then it cut off with a yelp as three other, smaller, equally filthy rats poured down the steps on either side of the fat one and scurried across the carpet, coming for Mrs. Greene.

Ragtag ran at them without hesitation and seized one in his jaws and shook his head twice, once to break its neck, and again to fling its corpse against the wall. The second and third rats vanished beneath Miss Mary’s hospital bed.

Mrs. Greene had pulled her bare feet up onto her chair, but now she realized she had to get involved. There would be a stick or a mop in the utility room behind her, and she needed to chase these rats out of the house before they bit someone.

“We got some rats in here, Miss Mary,” Mrs. Greene said, standing up. “But me and Ragtag are going to get rid of them.”

She went to the utility room door, then stopped when she saw the padlock they’d put on to secure it after that night Mrs. Campbell thought a man tried to get in the house. No one had given her a key.

BANG!

Something crashed behind her and she whirled to see Ragtag skip back in fear from the box fan that slid to a stop facedown at the bottom of the steps. Several new rats had joined the huge one on the steps, and they looked filthy, fur missing in patches, bodies encrusted in scabs, noses twitching. The box fan made a low, muffled moaning sound, unable to suck air from the carpet, and more rats jammed the doorway. Ragtag ran at them, barking, but they didn’t budge.

“Get ’em, Ragtag!” Mrs. Greene said. “Get ’em!”

Mrs. Greene knew what to do. She would shut Miss Mary in the small bathroom across from the utility room, and then she’d get a blanket and she and Ragtag would drive these things back. As long as Ragtag stayed with her she could handle this.

“Miss Mary, I’m going to take you to the powder room for a minute,” she said.

She leaned down and got her hands into Miss Mary’s damp armpits and started to lift her up. Miss Mary gave a miserable groan and then Mrs. Greene smelled something rank. She looked up.

Rats covered the den, spilling from the door and falling clumsily onto the top step: wet and muddy, three-legged and four-legged, long-tailed and no-tailed and vile. Black eyes shone, whiskers twitched, tails squirmed, their seething bodies packed together in the doorway. None of them made a sound. A carpet of rats covered the floor of the den so thick, Mrs. Greene couldn’t see the yellow linoleum, and more piled in from the dining room, from the back door, from the front hall, surging into the den, covering it like a seething pool of matted fur, crawling over each other, forming a packed, squirming mass.

How’d they get in here so fast? Where did they all come from?

Something bumped her leg and she looked down to see Ragtag, body stiff, facing the door, lips curled back to expose bared teeth, mouth open, tongue cramped in a fold, making a deep, nasty sound. The dirty smell of the rats rolled into the room, paralyzing Mrs. Greene with fear. She still remembered that night when she was a little girl, waking up with something squirming beneath the blankets, something bald and fleshy and cold slithering over her shins, and her sister screaming, high, long, and loud, like she’d never stop, until their mother came in running, pulling the covers back to find a hairy rat fixed to her sister’s belly button, chewing its way in.

That childhood nightmare came screaming at her as the huge black rat on the steps went from stone still to a black blur, leaping off the stairs, racing at Miss Mary across the empty carpet, moving so fast she screamed.

And Ragtag was there, snapping the black rat up in his jaws and savagely shaking his head. She heard something snap, and a keening squeak muffled inside a furry throat, and then the enormous rat was on the ground, body contracting, going limp. But as its corpse twitched, the flood of rats bulged in the doorway, then broke and poured bonelessly down the steps, flowing around the box fan, coming for the three of them.

Mrs. Greene ran to Miss Mary’s armchair but froze as the heavy rats skittered across her bare feet, their sharp nails scratching her skin, their hairless tails cold against her flesh. A few of them stopped and sank their claws into her pants leg and began pulling themselves up. She did a frantic, high-stepping dance to shake them free.

Razor blades shredded her toes. She reached down to pluck a gray rat out of her pants leg and it caught one of her fingers in its mouth. Sharp teeth met bone, and cold prickles of nausea flooded Mrs. Greene’s gut.

Ragtag barked and raged, drowning in a living carpet of rats. One clawed its way onto his back, and another three hung from his ears. Mrs. Greene saw his tan fur go dark with blood. She threw the gray rat against the curtains, losing skin from her fingers as it went. Then she turned to Miss Mary.

“Ohuh, ughuh!” Miss Mary screamed, as a hairy river rose up her legs and pooled in her lap.

Rats came over the back of her chair, flowed down over her shoulders, got tangled in her hair. She raised one arm, holding the photograph she’d been pressing to her leg high up in the air, but the rats hauled themselves up her sleeves, went down the open collar of her nightgown, crawled up her neck, and covered her face.

Rats covered the carpet, the sofa, they crawled up the curtains, they darted across the white sheets of Miss Mary’s hospital bed, they dashed along the windowsill, they filled the room. But the bathroom door was still closed. If she could get them both in there she would be safe.

Mrs. Greene felt hot needles pierce her belly button, and she looked down and saw a rat clinging to her waistband, nose beneath her shirt, and something inside her broke. She saw a squirming pile of rats where Miss Mary and Ragtag had been and she ran for the bathroom, grabbing the rat on her stomach with one hand and hurling it away, even as it sank its teeth into her belly button and she felt it tear with a sound she would never forget.

She hit the bathroom door with her body, turned the knob, and fell inside, then slammed the door on the rats behind her and leaned back, holding it closed as claws scrabbled against it from the other side. Covered in rat hair that made her sneeze and gag, she slid to the floor.

Sloshing came from the toilet and she heard the unmistakable sound of something losing purchase on the porcelain, sliding down, and thrashing in the toilet water. Mrs. Greene grabbed the shower head on its flexible hose and turned the knob to full hot. She stepped up onto the closed toilet lid just as dozens of rats began to push at it from below. She turned the steaming, hissing shower head on the scrabbling claws beneath the crack in the door, on the rats flattening their skulls and trying to squirm under, and their high-pitched screeches made her eardrums throb.

She squatted on top of the toilet lid in the tiny, hot bathroom, feeling the water beneath the lid boiling with rats as steam filled the bathroom, and after a while she couldn’t hear Miss Mary’s shrieks through the door anymore.

* * *

—

They sang “Happy Birthday” to Grace around 10:30 p.m., and then the party began to break up. Patricia suggested they stroll down to Alhambra Hall, just to get some fresh air, but Carter said he had to go in early so they went right home.

“What’s that smell?” Carter asked as they opened the front door and stepped inside.