Bewere the Night

can. Ace christened it Smilodon and the cat looked at him wearily. It humored their play—chased their shoe laces, let them rub its belly, barely yelped when Ace accidentally stepped on its tail—it must have been glad just to be on the inside looking out. Only when they heard footsteps in the hall did the cat become feral again.

Retribution was swift. Retribution was loud. Their father threw the marinara sauce, the coffee maker, and a meat cleaver, though he refused to touch the cat with his hands. Smilodon not only dodged these missiles but hissed back, taking bold jumps toward Charlie and clawing at his socks. Every time the cat shrieked like a howling baby, Paige whimpered as if being socked. “This is bad,” she said. “This is bad, Charlie, this is bad … ”

Hazel tried to gather up the skittering cat while Ace held back their father’s arm. Charlie threw another object with his free hand—his green coffee mug—and hit Hazel between her shoulders. She glanced back at him, wounded, and Charlie’s arms dropped.

“Do you have any clue what’s happening out there?” Charlie was biting his lip and letting his eyes droop like almonds, but every time his defenses slipped he would pound his voice against the ceiling and get the grind back into his face. He had to present a strong front. “You know what kind of danger you’re putting us in? This isn’t one of your little fantasies, Hazel!”

Hazel and Ace chased the cat into the hall, through the fire door, and down the metal staircase. It looked back at them with wistful, shelter-me eyes. “You can’t stay here,” the children said, and ushered it out the back door. The cat ran around the corner of the building with its tail to the ground—they tried to follow, to make sure it would be all right, but the alley before garbage day was a miniature city unto itself.

They did not find the cat, but they did find a homeless man in that crack in the great wall of the North Sleeper neighborhood. He was pushing a shopping cart full of rats with gouged eyes and crippled pigeons and squirrels whose tails had been burned to the bone, patients from an animal hospital. Less heavily wounded animals followed the man on foot, circling his bandages, nibbling at debris. The man sang in a voice that was cracked and light as aluminum foil, but the children couldn’t understand him. Something about a preacher and a creature?

“Are you one of ’em?” Ace asked. “One of those pest-people?”

“No!” the man shouted. “And they’re not either! So you just leave us alone!”

“You should turn them in to Pest Control,” said Hazel, reciting what she had heard at an assembly. “Vermin spread disease and consume resources, even the ones that don’t start off as people.”

The man scowled. “You two can go to hell, and take this damn city with you!”

Upstairs, Hazel hesitated before re-entering the apartment. Her back was still sore. She was afraid that she had been cast out of her father’s fortress. Paige and Charlie were shrieking at each other inside—it was almost like old times. “Did you see its teeth? What did she tell you about the cat, Charlie? Is that what she said it would look like?” “Look, you better get a hold of yourself before the kids get back … ” “Or you’re gonna what? You’re gonna what?”

Ace fearlessly opened the door and grabbed Hazel’s hand. He said “come on” and Hazel went in, even though she saw this castle sinking.

In music class, a boy named Abel Farrow shoved Ace so hard that he cut his lip open against a plastic desk. Abel had chosen Ace as a victim back in September—skinny, bug-eyed Ace, out of all the fourth-graders at Independence Elementary. The substitute didn’t know what to do—their regular music teacher, whom no one liked, had not been to school all week. Rumors were running rampant that she had been turned into some kind of pest, probably one of the slick black crows that circled the nearby cathedral.

When Hazel saw his bruised mouth, she tried to teach him tricks to stay invisible. But Ace didn’t want to be invisible. He wanted payback. “Paige knows where to go,” he said.

They got the chance to ask her when their father went out for “supplies”—public health officials were going on about the need for heightened pest control in case of an infestation—and told Paige to put his children to bed.

“Why do you want to know?” asked Paige, leaning against their bookshelf.

“Because I want to curse a kid at school,” said Ace.

Paige tipped her head back against the wall, eyes on the smoke detector. “Can I tell you a story first, about the curse?” They shrugged, so she went on. “My boss, Mr. Robson, was running a race—not a race race, but a popularity race, do they have those yet at your age?—against a man named Mr. Malachi. He asked me to help. So I went to the Rattle and I said to the sorceress, ‘Please turn Mr. Malachi into a rat.’ But just before the sorceress started working her magic bone, she said to me … ” Paige lifted her hands as if to conduct a chamber choir. “‘Magic comes at a price! I hope you’re ready to pay it!’ I didn’t want to believe her. I thought she was just trying to scare me, the way witches do.”

They asked what happened next, but Paige seemed distracted. She was running her finger over her little white teeth. “Even little pests can bite,” she mumbled.

“Did Mr. Malachi turn into a rat?”

“Oh, yes,” said Paige, and then abruptly raised her voice. “Has your daddy ever told you where we met?” No, he hadn’t. He just said, I’d like you to meet someone, and I want you to be nice to her. And then there she was at the zoo, the dead woman in the nice dress—but Hazel didn’t mention that. “He was next to me in line to see the sorceress. She warned us both.”

“You’re lying!” Ace shouted. “My Dad wouldn’t curse anybody!”

Paige turned her glacial smile upon him. “You can hope so, sweetie. You know if you wish for something hard enough, you can start to believe it—until you find something else that proves you wrong, of course. Just like you can hope that ghosts aren’t real until you meet one under your sheets.”

Ace looked at the little blanketed hills—his feet—at the end of his bed.

“Who did Dad curse?” Hazel whispered.

Before Paige could answer, something small darted across the floor of the apartment above theirs. Paige jumped away from the bookshelf and grabbed at her scarf. She was ashen. The children gave her funny looks. “I’m scared of rats,” she whispered.

“Why?”

“A rat ate out the neck of Mr. Robson’s child. They follow me now, the rats do.” She looked from Ace to Hazel. “I shouldn’t have brought them here. You have your own vermin to deal with, and anyway … yours wouldn’t like me being here.”

“You’re scaring Ace,” Hazel said. Indeed, Ace’s thumb was back in his mouth. He looked like a baby again, not the boy who’d said something back to Abel Farrow and called a cut lip no big deal. Hazel’s memories of baby- Ace always included their Mama, holding him tucked in the crook of her arm. “Dad wants us to stay together.”

Paige shuddered as if throwing off a heavy coat. “No,” she said, and the despair in her voice made Hazel stop trying. “But you kids should be all right.”

Their father came home with bags of pesticides and traps from Safeway. He had already arranged them on the kitchen table—spray cans and bottles in the back, repellent paste and traps and poison pellets in a mandala in the center—before he noticed that Paige was gone, and his children were watching coverage of the infestation well past their bedtime.

“Where’s Paige?”

“I don’t know,” said Hazel. “Maybe the rats got her.”

“What rats?” Charlie paused. “Hey, look at me. Something you want to tell me?”

Hazel shook her head. She at last recognized her father’s pink, wide-eyed anger as an expression of his fear.

The Channel 8 reporter stood in a building that was silver-plated like a suit of armor, pointing at a small blue door. Pest Control officers in cardboard-colored jumpsuits passed behind her, yelling into their radios. “Shots were shots fired around six thirty this evening—calls started coming in of … bats, it looks like, several bats the size of dinner plates attacking residents and service personnel starting at three p.m. today.”

Charlie sat down behind his children. “What is this garbage,” he said, but he couldn’t quite turn it off.

“A forty-two-year-old man and a twenty-nine-year-old woman were taken to the hospital with severe facial injuries. At least three other people were also injured. Jim, the residents of the Coldhook claim that the bats are actually pest-people, former tenants who were apparently cursed … if so, tonight’s events certainly confirm reports that these so-called pest-people are unusually aggressive and extremely dangerous, in spite of their size … ”

“So Paige left, huh.” Charlie sank back into the couch, deflated after all his excitement over the