By Francis Van Ganson
The ratcatcher’s daughter was a squawky baby who grew into an opinionated, serious toddler. In the wrong light, her small hands and shiny eyes made her look a little like a rat. Her name was Lona. Most of their neighbors disapproved of the ratcatcher bringing such a small girl to do such dangerous work, but since the rats nibbled hands down to knuckles and chewed and chewed until entire houses collapsed, they accepted it as a necessary evil. Each night, the ratcatcher scooped up Lona’s squirming body and together they drove around the city in his rumbling van to set the traps and bait. At first, he did this by necessity, as Lona had no mother to speak of.
The circumstances of Lona’s birth were murky and though there were rumors of all kinds, no one was entirely sure she’d ever had a mother in the first place.
The rumors:
The rats carried Lona out of the sewers and left her wriggling on the ratcatcher’s doorstep. When she turns 18, they’ll come collect her and she’ll rule them as their queen.
The rats gobbled up Lona’s human mother and kept Lona for themselves. When she was two, the ratcatcher discovered her secreted in a ramshackle building and took her home.
Lona is a rat in the shape of a human girl and has been the whole time.
When Lona learned to speak, the rats listened. When Lona asked, the rats obeyed. When Lona told the rats to eat the poison, they ate it in quick mouthfuls. When Lona told the rats to step into the traps, the traps snapped shut.
The ratcatcher loved Lona the way you love things you have very few of. In their house there were a number of prized possessions of varying value, namely a particularly nice coffee pot, a small radio, and a quilt. The ratcatcher played the radio while they ate dinner in the small night hours before they slept and the quilt lay across Lona’s bed in a kaleidoscope of red and yellow.
Lona didn’t do the usual things, like bring a feminine charm to the dim house or sing little songs in the kitchen, but she sat solemnly at the table with the ratcatcher for all meals and snuck sips from his coffee mug, grimacing at the bitterness every time. He cooked and she washed the dishes. He swept up and she made her bed neatly every morning, He read yellowed crime novels and she ran through the nearby alleyways conducting elaborate scenarios in which she was a spy, a detective, a fugitive.
The ratcatcher was a rough sort of man and couldn’t easily have been any other way. He had a salt and pepper beard on a jowly face and a long, black coat that he wore like an accomplice. He was careful, methodical, and never cruel, as he had been taught by the ratcatcher before him, as he was once a ratcatcher’s son.
On Sundays, Lona and the ratcatcher wandered their gray neighborhood to run errands, slipping past curious stares and avoiding the murk in the gutters. They’d begin by picking up coffee and eggs and similar things at the little grocery store, their neighbors smiling nervously as they passed. They stopped next at the library, where the steel-haired librarian greeted them by name and asked after the rats. Each week, the ratcatcher told her a version of the same thing, which was that there were fewer and fewer every year, which wasn’t what he told anyone else. Years ago, the librarian’s house had been eaten plank by plank, and now she slept with traps placed around her bed like a moat, a butterfly knife beside her like another body. No one knew this but her late husband; Lona; and the ratcatcher, who’d brought her the traps himself.
Their last stop was the butcher, where the ratcatcher purchased tender, marbled bacon for their breakfasts. Lona was entranced by the butcher, a broad-shouldered woman with soft brown eyes and a laugh that sounded like a yell. If Lona set her chin up on the counter, the butcher would slide over a little piece of salami that Lona held on her tongue like a coin for as long as she could. The butcher’s many children - some older and some younger than Lona - would come screaming through the shop, and Lona thought a few times that if she just started screaming and chasing them, they’d mistake her for one of their own.
Lona was friendless, largely due to the fact that most of the other children were terrified of her. They called her the rat queen and it was never entirely clear whether it was an insult or a compliment. She was pleased with her notoriety and would sometimes mumble, as she was already inclined to do, in the vicinity of others for the way it made them skittish. She’d had a few friends — a filmy eyed soothsayer who was whisked away at age 8 to tell fortunes and a very tall girl who liked to carry Lona around
because she was so bony and light — but Lona did nothing to keep them and they drifted back from whence they came.
The older Lona got, the quieter her steps became, the more silken her tongue. Lona and the ratcatcher drove all night, plugged holes, set traps, and placed bait. Lona sat in the passenger seat with her booted feet on the dashboard, coffee sloshing out of their mugs onto the crusted carpet. Lona crouched in alleymouths crooning to the rats and they scurried out, their small, muscled bodies toiling across the broken pavement until they reached her traps, the snapping even louder than their feet. They circled the city from top to bottom, the van bumping over potholes and gliding across smooth pavement. Lona counted the warm windowpanes and caught glimpses of televisions and open mouths through the thick glass. She felt on those nights that she was in the best part of the world: lukewarm coffee, the ratcatcher, and the constant patter of paws.
Lona, her face over an open bag of donuts in the passenger seat:
What happens when we catch all the rats?
The ratcatcher, his eyes on the road, a half-eaten cruller in his hand:
They always come back. Even when you’re sure they won’t.
Lona grew long, her limbs matching the wiry shadow of the ratcatcher, her sharp nose matching his in the dark. Sometimes, when they slipped past each other in the hall, they would do a double take, catching their own eyes looking in each other’s direction.
By seventeen, Lona knew that the ratcatcher wished she would find a husband and she resisted as long as she could. The ratcatcher didn’t have a husband or anything like one, and Lona had never needed anything he didn’t.
What the ratcatcher said as they drove home one night:
I just think it would be nice.
What Lona said as they drove home one night:
I don’t think it would be nice at all.
What Lona said two mornings later at a diner over pancakes:
I don’t think it’s your business if I marry anyone.
What the ratcatcher said two mornings later at a diner over a skillet:
It’s my business if you’re lonely. It doesn’t have to be a husband. It could be a friend.
What Lona said two mornings later at a diner over pancakes:
Well, I’m not lonely.
What was implied:
I have the quilt, the rats, and you.
But then there were fewer and fewer rats. Lona and the ratcatcher began to run out of neighborhoods, the streets quiet and clean. Weeks passed, they slept earlier; they woke up midmorning and puttered around in the weak sunlight.
The ratcatcher came to Lona’s doorway one evening:
Have you thought about it any more?
Lona looked up from her book and pulled the quilt up to her chin:
I thought it all the way through.
The ratcatcher nodded:
Goodnight, Lona.
After he returned to his room, Lona felt a peculiar thing in the air, like finding yesterday’s half- full cup of coffee or a splint tied very tight. From it’s familiar texture, she thought it might be all the love that the ratcatcher had felt and would ever feel, so she rushed to the kitchen to get a ball jar and bottled it up.
Lona filled and sealed the jar and stuck it under her bed for safekeeping. The next morning, she scrubbed the table and the counters, the baseboards and the floor, under the beds, inside of the cabinets, the bathtub and the sink, and it wasn’t equal but it was the same sentiment.
The next evening, after weeks in and around the house, Lona and the ratcatcher went out on a call. Lona crouched in the alleyway, the ratcatcher lurking behind her, and asked the rats to come out. This night, they took their time. They were big rats, two of them, moseying down the alleyway towards Lona’s waiting traps.
Lona watched their eyes as they came closer, as shiny and dark as hers.
Lona asked one thing — to the rats and to the ratcatcher:
Are you afraid of what will happen when you’re gone?
Lona’s heartbeat pulsed in her hands and her shadow curled long down the alleyway like a slowly unfurling rug. She couldn’t see where the ratcatcher’s shadow stopped and the alleyshadows began. Lona wanted to call the rats off, to tell them that they could go back home for the night and they didn’t have to get to this part yet. She didn’t call them off. If she had, it would have been years and years too late. The traps snapped shut: one, two.
After that, they received no calls for months and then it was Lona’s 18th birthday, a night of a new moon and December wind. It wasn’t really Lona’s 18th birthday, but the 18th anniversary of the day that the ratcatcher had picked her up from an alleymouth for the first time. They’d both agreed that that was the same thing as a birthday. To celebrate, Lona bought a cake with plain yellow frosting and a yellow candle and carried it over the uneven streets.
She came home as the sun was setting and when she opened the door she saw a terrible thing.
Rats.
The ratcatcher’s coat shed on the floor like a skin.
The ratcatcher’s flesh like flesh.
The ratcatcher’s bones like bones.
Rats.
Lona did ask them to stop. She did know it was too late. Besides that, they didn’t stop. By the time they’d all scurried back under the floorboards and into the walls and out into the alleyways, they’d eaten her cake too.
Lona picked up the ratcatcher’s coat and began to clean it, painstakingly, better than she’d ever cleaned anything, and hung it up to dry in her window, a slash of black. She sat alone at the dining table all night, listening to the rats run in the walls. Some time after moonrise, she began to suspect that the ratcatcher had known this would happen and hadn’t told her. Then, she began to suspect that in his own way, he had told her, and she hadn’t known how to listen. She remembered him in her doorway, asking if she had thought about it any more.
She tried to be angry, but it didn’t stick. In the dark, at the table, she thought it all the way through. She remembered that she had never needed anything that he didn’t, that he put his best quilt on her bed, and that he carried her on his back before she knew how to walk. As night continued into morning, Lona made herself a cup of coffee and sank into the cooling pool of loneliness she’d been warned about.
There was nothing to dispose of — the rats had eaten the bones until they gleamed and then they’d gnawed those too, leaving only boots slightly too big for Lona’s feet and that black coat.
The following night, the moon began to wax. Lona put the coat on and began to walk. She’d thought it would drown her, but in the years since she’d tried it on as a child, her shoulders had grown broad, her legs long. Her feet tapped on the pavement and she called again and again for the rats, but none came. When she returned to the house the next morning, she didn’t even hear them in the walls.
What she’d said months ago:
Are you afraid of what will happen when you’re gone?
What the ratcatcher had said months ago:
They always come back. Even when you’re sure they won’t.
She became nocturnal again. Her hands grew cragged. Some nights, she wrapped the quilt over her shoulders and dragged it through the street like a cloak. Some nights, she stood at the mouth of the same alley for hours, calling. She began carrying the ball jar in one of the black coat’s big pockets, tapping on the lid with every step, sometimes subdividing her strides, sometimes every ten steps with methodical rhythm.
It was the tapping that attracted the witch. She was also the butcher, but it’s more important that she was a witch, and that the tapping woke her from a dream, one that was long and sweet. She woke like you might to someone calling your name from another room and crept outdoors into the night with her quilt wrapped around her shoulders, even though she was afraid of the rats that crawled over the streets at night. She’d been hearing that the rats were gone forever, but she knew that rats never left for good. The witch’s name was Rosemary and where her left pinkie should have been, there was a stump gnawed down by little rat teeth.
She heard the voice of the ratcatcher, raspy, almost a mumble and not a voice at all, and opened the door to invite her in.
Rosemary, from her open doorway:
You seem lonely and the moon isn’t very bright tonight. Would you like a cup of something?
The ratcatcher, in the middle of the road, uncurled her fingers, and accepted.
Rosemary, pouring hot water into two chipped cups:
What are you calling for? You can’t just tap a heartbeat in the street all night and expect no one to notice.
The ratcatcher, sitting at the kitchen table:
I don’t know who I’m calling for.
Which meant:
I’d just like an answer.
Rosemary, after the tea had steeped and the ratcatcher let the coat slide from her shoulders:
Do you remember me? You might not. I was so shy as a kid that it was easy to miss me. I did a lot of watching.
Probably why I ended up staying. I was the only one who’d held still long enough to learn anything. The day after mom died there was so much noise, so I took a hog down from the hook and started cutting. Just like magic. You look so much like your father.
Just like the butcher before her, the butcher’s daughter pushed a coin of salami across the table with two fingers. The ratcatcher placed it in her mouth, tasting the salt.
The ratcatcher drank her tea and took out the ball jar with all the ratcatcher’s love in the world in it and asked the witch if she knew what to do with a jar like this. The witch didn’t know, but she said she would check her books and when the ratcatcher walked this way again, she’d pass the information along. She sent the ratcatcher home with a neatly wrapped parcel of bacon just as the first shift of dawn was coming on. When their hands knocked, they both startled.
The ratcatcher tapped her way home again and fell asleep as the sun came up, her fishbelly-white legs bound in the sheets and her hair coming out of its long braid. The van sat in front of the dark basement apartment and accumulated dirt. Poison sat in her closet, unset traps sat in her pantry. She slept through the day and when night came, she brewed herself a cup of coffee and wandered the streets, calling.
She waited for the moon to wane and wax and stood at alleymouths and scared children peering out of their bedroom windows late at night. She thought of the witch like a saint whose name could be uttered as a blessing, but found ways to avoid returning, in turns afraid wanting anything or getting it. She may never have returned to the witch’s house at all, if the witch hadn’t begun to beckon her back.
The witch who was also the butcher had never been warned about loneliness. All six of her siblings moved out of the apartment above the butcher shop and only visited on Sundays to buy meats and bring her fresh fruit and flowers. They all laughed and kissed her on both cheeks, but when they left and she sat by herself in her kitchen, she knew what she’d allowed in.
There are many ways of calling, and the witch knew several. She made sacrifices of tiny birds, she lit candles and blew them out after certain intervals, she took her own empty ball jar and blew inside, then tapped a steady heartbeat on the top. She was tapping it out, even and steady into the small morning hours, when she heard an answering thump, first from the walls of the house, then from the door, and then out in the street, a tandem metallic tapping.
The witch, standing in the open doorway:
Could I get you a cup of something?
In the dim moonlight, the witch looked like a candle flame. The ratcatcher couldn’t refuse.
The witch had an offer and it went something like this:
I’m tired of being alone.
They agreed that they didn’t believe in love potions.
This can be understood to mean:
I’m terrified it won’t work. I’m terrified it will.
But in the end, it was all very orderly. It made sense, even. They shook hands on it and then it began.
The ratcatcher handed over the ball jar.
The witch lit the pot on the hob and added the requisite ingredients.
The witch stirred, and stirred, and stirred.
The process went on for so long that Lona nodded off at the table, her head curling down into her crossed arms until she was fast asleep in her chair. When it was finally ready, the witch woke her up and pushed a little teacup into her hands.
The witch, over her cup of love potion:
You’re sure?
The ratcatcher raised the cup and threw it back. The witch did the same.
The witch knew what would happen. She got her quilt and wrapped it around both of them as the process began. Falling in love is neither easy nor painless.
They were both overtaken by sweat, overheated and slick and shivering through it, their teeth chattering as they held each other for warmth. Eventually, they made it to the witch’s bed, at which point they were engulfed by fever.
The fever lasted for days, pulling them in and out of consciousness as they crawled to get more water and any little bites of food they could manage, equally scalded and freezing, clutching for each other to ensure that they wouldn’t be left alone.
The fever turned into a different kind of fever, and Lona found herself weeping as she never had as a child, curled over in sadness, curled over herself. She cried for all the rats in the traps and she cried for the ratcatcher who had been everything to her, she cried because she was beginning to wonder if she’d ever had a mother at all and hadn’t thought it mattered to wonder until that moment, she cried because she loved the coffee pot and the radio so much, she cried because she was lonely and she should have known it sooner, she cried because with the rats gone there was no need for a rat catcher, and she cried because looking too hard at the place where everything trickles down and gathers is unbearable. Through her tears, she knew that Rosemary was crying too.
When they finally awoke, they were grime-covered and sore, curled around each other in the witch’s tiny bed. They crept out of it and into the shower, shampooing each other’s hair and washing the salt crusted onto each other’s faces. They didn’t speak until the moon rose, and the ratcatcher said that she’d like to go get her things, if that was alright.
The witch, her quilt wrapped around her shoulders like a cape, followed the ratcatcher home. They collected the coffee pot, the radio and the quilt, and drove it all in the ratcatching van back to the butcher shop, which the witch’s apartment perched on top of like a hat. The ratcatcher set the radio on the counter and they lit candles and let their hands touch and cooked eggs and steak in the little kitchen.
Rosemary, over her eggs and steak:
So did it work?
Lona, over her eggs and steak, coffee at her left elbow:
Oh. I suppose. I forgot, somehow.
Which meant:
I don’t feel so lonely anymore, is it the same for you?
That night, they curled up in the witch’s bed under their layered quilts and learned how to kiss. The next, they told each other what they had cried about and why it had been so painful. On the third night, the witch cracked open her favorite grimoire and began reading at the dining table, the radio mumbling next to her. The ratcatcher took a sip of her coffee, put on her long black coat, kissed the top of the witch’s head, and went out into the night.
She circled the block, listening to see if the telltale tapping of little rat feet had returned. She began calling for them, reasoning, cajoling.
The ratcatcher, kneeling at the alleymouth, her fingers tapping against the pavement:
I’m back. Did you miss me too terribly? I missed you.
From the shadows there was a scuffle. The ratcatcher had no poison nor trap, only her hands, and it was towards these that the rat ran. The ratcatcher scooped up its small, squirming body. She looked at its shiny dark eyes and tiny little hands and knew exactly what she would grow into.
Francis Van Ganson is a zinester, bookseller, and writer based in Chicago. They're the former managing editor of the Beloit Fiction Journal and they read fiction for Slice Magazine. Their work appears in Midwestern Gothic and is forthcoming in Winter Tangerine and Foglifter.