The Corpse-Rat King

placed the bottle carefully upon the floor and stood. He nodded, as if reaching a decision after long debate.

“Gerd,” he said, and that one syllable contained all the fury and violence of an avenging army.

The noise was coming closer. The village men, courage fortified by whatever hooch they kept in their houses, and the logic that comes to any man when trying to explain the unbelievable to a sceptical wife. Marius had seen this kind of anger before – shameful anger; from men persuading themselves that it was not they who had cowered earlier, that they were protectors and fighters. They would be carrying mattocks and hammers, pitchforks and sickles. Deadly weapons, in the hands of the scared. Marius made for the door and risked a peek out into the street. The villagers were no more than a dozen feet away. Were he to make his exit that way, they would be on him before he could reach the corner of the building. Despite his appearance, Marius felt very much alive. He was in no mood to decide on which side of the divide his life force rested. He closed the door, and surveyed his surroundings.

Apart from the sad wreckage of furniture, bar and shelves, the room was bare. Not even a wall hanging livened up the shit-and-mud decor. The fireplace was no more than a foot wide and constituted a shallow depression in the wall with a flue leading up and out. Marius leaned in, risking a burned face to see whether the flue might be wide enough to wriggle up, but it was no use. As far as he could tell, it was no wider than his doubled fists. For a moment he considered using a lit branch to set fire to the walls, but no more than a few flames licked the blackened coals. By the time it caught on, he’d be on the end of a pitchfork. A doorway on the other side of the room held more promise. Marius pushed through the simple bead curtain and stepped into the living quarters of the proprietress.

“Business was booming,” he muttered, surveying the few items within the room. A bundle of cloths lay over a bed of hay in one corner, and next to it, side by side, two earthen pots saw duty as washbasin and piss pot. Another block of wood, fashioned in much the same way as the bar, served as table, strewn with the minutiae of a village woman: combs, daubs and pins abounded. Marius scanned them but found nothing useful.

By now he could hear the crowd just outside the front door, shouting and rattling their weapons. It would not be long before they felt brave enough to open the door and confront him. Marius sighed in defeat. There was no escape. He collapsed onto the crude bed.

“Fucking hell!”

He sprang to his feet, hands clutching the base of his spine. There was something hard in that bed, and sharp as well. He squeezed his eyes shut, and shook his head to banish the pain. When he could trust himself to open his eyes without tearing up, he ventured more slowly onto the pile of cloth and lifted it to reveal the hay below. A thick wooden pole lay underneath, a knotted dowel sticking out at an odd angle. Marius swept aside the hay to get a closer look at it. When he saw what it was, he could not help but laugh out loud in relief.

“Of course,” he shouted to the walls, smiling when his outburst caused the crowd outside to fall into momentary silence.

The end of a pipe lay exposed, the dowel proving to be a spigot. It was that, Marius realised, upon which he had sat. The pipe disappeared under the hay towards the wall.

“Of course, she would,” Marius muttered this time, grabbing handfuls of straw and flinging them aside to reveal more of the pipe. Alcohol was this woman’s trade, but nowhere, in his panic, had he seen the source of it. A village such as this would be too poor to trade with merchants, not for the finished product. A smart woman, a crafty woman, would have a still secreted, away from the prying eyes of the populace. And where better to hide it than in a place no man would seek to invite himself? He cleared the last of the straw and tracked the pipe up to the base of the wall.

“Well, well.”

He knocked against the wall, and was rewarded with the sound of a hollow space beyond. Marius smiled. No tired farmer would stop to measure the outer walls of a hovel against its inner dimensions. Nobody would come into this room and wonder why it seemed smaller than it should. If Marius had money to lay a bet, and someone to accept it, he would wager that the outer wall beyond this one held a door to freedom. All he had to do was find a way through.

Outside, he heard the front door creak open. Marius turned quickly, and grasped the end of the pipe. He heaved, and two feet of hefty wood tore free. Alcohol poured out of the broken end, soaking the straw beneath and spreading out onto the dirt floor. Marius hefted his makeshift weapon.

“Right,” he muttered, then ran through the beaded curtain, screaming and whirling the pipe around his head.

Three villagers peeked through the open doorway. At Marius’ approach they departed, and he heard the sound of bodies falling over each other in panicked retreat. He laughed and dealt the door a massive blow, yelling gibberish at the top of his voice. The crowd outside withdrew in consternation. Marius smiled, and snuck back into the bedroom. His manic act would buy him some time – enough, perhaps, to break through the wall and into the space beyond. His foot came down upon the straw, and he grimaced as the wet grass squelched beneath his feet. Then his expression cleared, and he began to gather up great handfuls of it, dragging most of the bed into the main room and against the front door. When he was finished he rolled up one of the cloth blankets and dipped a corner into the pool of alcohol. He carried it into the main room and held it over the fire. Within moments the flame had caught the cloth and was racing up toward his arm. Marius flung the cloth towards the door. It hit the straw, and before he could track the movement, the entire pile was engulfed in flame.

“That should do it,” he said, before racing back into the bedroom. The fire would hold off the villagers, but unless he could get through the wall before the flames ran round the room and found the pool of alcohol at his feet, it would only serve as his funeral pyre.

He lunged at the wall, pipe raised above his head like an axe. He swung, and the pipe broke through with such ease that Marius fell forward, balance destroyed by the lack of resistance, and slammed his face into the wall. A piece the size of his head broke away, and smashed on the other side of the wall.

“God damn it!”

He sat backwards, losing his grip on his makeshift club. It fell the wrong side of the wall. Marius heard it clang against something in the darkened room. He rubbed his head and frowned.

“What the hell?”

Now that he was looking at it more closely, he realised that this wall was different in construction to the other three sides of the room. Whilst the others had the typical brushed look of traditional wattle and daub structures, and each wall was a single sheet of the stuff, this one was made up of more than a dozen sections, a criss-cross framework with only the lumpy runnels of thickened mud dried between them. The hole his head had made was smack-bang in the middle of one of these smaller frames, and Marius could see that the edges were thin and brittle, as if there was no internal structure holding the mud together. He gripped the edge of the hole and pulled. A sheet of daub the length of his forearm came away, shattering against the floor. Marius looked at it in amazement.

“No wattle,” he said to himself. “No damn wattle! But how…?”

He pulled another sheet from out of its frame, then another, kicking at the flimsy structure until his original hole was big enough to admit him. The flames from the other room grew louder, and smoke poured into the bedroom. Marius glanced towards them and covered his mouth and nose with his hand. He needed to get out of here now, otherwise the villagers would not need to find him to see his dead body. He pictured them, standing down the street, watching their only entertainment go to the flames. They would be angry, devastated. They would be looking for a corpse after all this was over. He had no intention of making it easy for them. There was enough flickering light from the conflagration for him to make out the dim outline of the room beyond, and in the middle, a vague, humped shape. He stepped through. He could make out almost nothing in the uncertain light – a broad lessening in the darkness signified the opposite wall, but he could see nothing to show the location of a door to the outside. He took a step forward and reached out, satisfying himself that the opposite wall was there. His fingers found the rough surface, and he followed it round to the right until he came back towards his entrance hole. The room was little more than a closet, a couple of steps in either direction.

There had to be an exit here. He just hoped it wasn’t out into the street. He could not recall seeing a door as he walked along the frontage of the building, but then, this room was proof of how well things could be hidden. He turned away, and stepped towards the back of the house. His shin struck something hard. Marius yelped. The still! He had forgotten it. He grimaced, then his eyes widened in sudden understanding.