The Verminian Invasion

Our house had begun as a small miller’s cottage, and had whimsical additions as time passed. When the mill was demolished, all the creepy crawlies and mice moved in with us.

THE VERMINIAN INVASION

Long ago in a kingdom far away lived a king, his queen and their tiny princess. Actually, it wasn’t that far away, in the land of Pennsylvania, and it wasn’t truly that long ago, somewhere between dragons and iPods.

The castle was of modest proportion, but the grounds were spacious and pleasant, great oaks shading the gardens on hot summer days. A tiny river ran along the border of the kingdom and on quiet evenings the frogs gave concerts: the peepers took the soprano lead while bullfrogs provided percussion. Fireflies glowed gold against the dark pine trees. The forests teemed with wildlife; mystical creatures appeared on the castle grounds.

The queen and the princess (the king was most often away, doing whatever it is kings do when they are not at home) dearly loved sitting under the broad oaks, watching the deer with blinding white tail-flags, the raccoons with their shifty looks.

The fields were small because the only inhabitants were the royal family; great quantities of food were not required. Near harvest, the tomato vines sagged under the ruby fruits, emerald bell peppers gleamed from between the leaves. Lacy carrot tops fluttered over orange pumpkins the size of hassocks, and corn stalks rustled sweetly in the breeze, silken tassels flying like standard banners.

The kingdom’s herds were likewise small: a white ill-tempered goat named Ivy and her two snowy-coated elfin sons, Rocky and Bullwinkle. A dog or two always snoozed in the sun near the castle porch, a grey-and-white tabby cat batted at dust motes milling in a shaft of sunlight.

It came to pass that black days fell upon the kingdom. Just over the border, a high forbidding grey stone castle rose from the river bank, and it blocked the sun. The castle had once been the home of a king who owned a dragon with teeth like boulders and eyes of fire. Wagons of wheat and oats rolled in through the castle gates, and the grain was poured into the dragon’s mouth. She munched and groaned and spat out soft-milled flour into big sacks, which were taken to market to help feed the people.

Later, the dragon found more talents. She sucked in the river water and spat out electricity, which lit the homes in the valley. The dragon died and the castle had been abandoned before personal computers were a twinkle in anyone’s eye. It had fallen into disrepair. Sometimes the princess and the queen would hear a dull “whuff” as a large siding stone fell from an upper casement of the abandoned castle. Wooden platforms and rafters were devoured by dry-rot and dangled dangerously from the high ceilings.

Neighboring kingdoms began to fear daring stripling lads might be injured as they explored the castle. It must be destroyed.


Broad-shouldered men with yellow helmets rode in on orange battle elephants. The elephants put their shoulders to the walls of the castle and heaved mightily, again and again until the walls began to shudder. Again the elephants pressed their mighty bodies against the castle until it gave a mortal groan and collapsed, sending a cloud of grain dust mushrooming into the sky.

The queen had quite a time of it for a few days, what with all the dust and fine ancient flour sifting through the air onto the castle curtains and floors and furnishings.

Finally the queen descended into the castle kitchens to find that the window sills were not inch-deep in flour dust and the curtains were not once more gray with the detritus of a century. She smiled and made a breakfast of eggs and cheese, bread and cold milk for herself and the princess.

Later, they walked to the edge of the castle grounds and plucked fat blueberries from the vines that romped and chuckled down a grassy bank and ate them with cream and cake. It was the last golden moment at the castle for a long stretch of time.

While the ladies of the kingdom were eating blueberries and cream, a hostile force was gathering. The demolition of the ancient castle had left hordes of vermin homeless: rats and mice and spiders and bats and snakes. The disaster that befell their home had driven them into the surrounding forests, where they shivered on cool fall evenings and searched vainly for sustenance for their vast numbers. They became that most dangerous of crowds, one that has nothing left to lose.

Vermin generations are briefer than human time and e’er long the young vermin had forgotten all of the rules that had governed their parents’ behavior and they vowed to seize a home of their own. The nearest castle was the one wherein lived the king and queen and princess; the verminous rabble-rousers devised a plan.

The queen stepped out on a dull October morning to fetch the broadsheet that published news of neighboring kingdoms. She was met by a creepily beautiful sight.

Glistening dew-glittered spider webs, lacy and mathematically precise, draped the iron railings on the castle porch, curtained the opening down the stairs, covered every nearby oak and pine like the mantillas of church-going ladies. Webs stretched across the lawns. The queen broomed away the webs blocking access to the steps and retrieved the broadsheet from the lawn. By the time she and the princess had finished breakfast and cleared away the dishes, the steps were webbed over again. The queen expected Stephenus of King to appear at any moment for his signature cameo role.

That night began a span of unseasonable autumn rains that deluged the little kingdom and its surrounds. The run-off ditches parallelling the avenue to the castle were swollen to over-flowing. The vermin hordes took full advantage and mounted a night attack by water.

The heavy rains plucked gay-colored leaves from the trees and swept them into the ditches. Pirate rats, with rakish eye patches, and bandanas knotted about their brows, leaped onto the swirling leaf-rafts and poled them along with cattail stems. At the avenue that approached the castle, an underground viaduct passed the water from the ditch under the avenue, and debris from the flood created a natural landing. The rats poled their rafts to the blocked viaduct and swarmed out of the ditch, daggers clenched between their prominent white teeth, and crept wetly toward the castle, where the queen and the princess slept unsuspecting. (The king was still away on some sort of business.)

Adrenaline-junkie mice climbed the oaks and rappelled down to the roof using strands from the gazillion spider webs. They found a small aperture in a high window and dropped softly into the attic.

Squadrons of bats, their leathery wings snapping as they flew, navigated through the night to the castle chimney, where they found access.

Submariner snakes, black snakes and garter snakes and other less savory flavors, wiggled soundlessly down the ditches and slithered up the castle walls, insinuating themselves under the siding stones and there finding secret passageways into the heart of the castle.

The commando mice left the attic to the bats and secured the perimeters of the castle. The rats claimed the basement rooms. By the time the princess and the queen awoke, the occupation was a fait accompli.

The queen padded sleepily downstairs to prepare breakfast while the princess performed her ablutions. The queen did not notice the bright-eyed mouse sentry in the Swedish ivy hanging by the sink, nor the one sitting atop the sugar bowl on the table. She did notice the one that jumped into her hand when she reached into a drawer for a dish towel.

She shrieked in surprise, but stopped, knowing that screaming is just silly and only causes more confusion. The screaming continued, though, and she put a hand to her throat to make sure her scream shut-off valve was operating correctly. It was, but still the screaming. She realized it was a more distant scream than her own. The princess!

The queen took the stairs two at a time, racing to the royal water-closet where she found the princess standing on the lid of the commode, staring at a half-dozen bikinied mice water-skiing in the bathtub behind a smiling yellow wind-up duck toy.

The queen loved her daughter very much. She passed by the water-skiing revelers and scooped the princess up in her arms.

She ran from the water-closet, down the hall and into the master suite of the castle, dancing between rodents and assorted creepy-crawlies.

‘Twas the era before cell phones, and there was no way to contact the king. The queen and the princess lived in fear for a full day, commissioning the castle dog and cat to keep the vermin at bay while the princess slept in the royal couple’s bed.

The queen sat watch, eyes grainy with exhaustion, adrenaline kept pumping nicely by frequent foot-races between vermin and house pets. The vermin always won, ducking by a whisker into a tiny hole under the baseboard or racing up a philodendron to disappear behind the curtains. The dog and cat were nervous wrecks, and fell into snoring dozes, their feet twitching as they chased mice in their sleep.

By the time the king returned, chaos reigned. Hooker mice in acid-green silk gowns strolled the upper castle hallways, hips swinging, tiny voices squeaking ribald invitations to the sailor mice. The boy mice fell into silly brawls over the favors of the mice of ill repute.

The queen dozed off briefly and awoke to find the castle dog trussed up by a string of Christmas lights, serving as festive illumination for the little mouse hoedown on the rag rug beside the bed. The family cat, although full of consternation for her own safety, found the dog’s plight highly amusing.

The rats broke into a cupboard containing bottles of holiday cheer. They were soon swinging drunkenly from the wagon wheel chandelier in the kitchen, or stumbling up the stairs hand in hand, whispering and giggling, to reel into dark corners to pursue sordid encounters.

The sound of the king’s chariot door slamming shut below her window was welcome for a change. The queen, carrying the sleeping princess, flew to her king, who was tired and cranky from his travels, which nearly always involved stopping at roadhouses. He pooh-poohed the queen’s tales of marauding rodents and staggered off to the bedchamber.

The next morning, the queen was sitting on a kitchen chair holding the princess, when she heard the king bellow from the bedchamber. She considered whether she could make her way through the crowd of mice with their shopping baskets bulging with bread crumbs and bits of cheese, strawberries, chunks of carrot, and what looked like tufts of Keeshund fur. The queen hoped the dog was safe under a couch.

She decided she would stay right where she was. The king would be hungry soon enough, and would grace the kitchen.

Sure enough, his royal self dragged groggily into the kitchen. In the rude language that kings sometimes use, he informed the queen that he had woken to find a sleek fat mouse sitting on his pillow, combing its whiskers with a comb purloined from the royal jeans’ pocket and fixing him with a steely gaze. It was time, he decreed, to mount a defense.

The queen, who thought it was long past time to mount a defense, agreed. The king dispatched her to the local provisioner, where barrels of nails and kegs of screws lined long aisles and hammers and saws and screwdrivers dangled on hooks from the wall. She purchased a king’s ransom’s worth of traps and returned to the castle.

The king examined her purchases and found fault with a few, as was his kingly way, but instructed her to set the traps every damned where. He was going back to bed.

The queen, who was very bright in some ways, but not so much in others, struggled with the traps. Each time she felt she had successfully set a trap, she would move to position it in a strategic spot on one of the mouse superhighways that ran east and west, north and south, throughout the castle. The trap would go off, not only threatening her royal fingers, but catapulting the bit of cheese or ham that she had used to bait the trap. E’er long, the mouse shoppers had abandoned the produce and perishable stalls that enterprising rats had set up on the kitchen floor and followed the queen, deftly retrieving the special treats she was lofting into the air on a regular basis. It began to look like the tossing of a bouquet at a wedding, with anxious spinsters scuffling to catch the prize.

The queen summoned every ounce of her considerable courage, developed over a couple of decades’ living with the king, and carried the princess upstairs to the bedchamber to wake his royal self.

She brought baksheesh in the form of the last cup of coffee, the rest of the pot having been filched by a cluster of beatnik mice that had set up a bistro near the stove. With Dixie cups as tables and butter knives as benches, they used a couple of sewing thimbles as bongo drums as they chanted inscrutable poems at each other.

She woke the king with trepidation, presenting him with the offering of coffee to assuage his anger. She told him she was unable to set the traps successfully, and humbly requested his assistance.

The king was angry to be woken; he was apoplectic by nature. He grudgingly agreed to descend.

He demonstrated the proper trap-setting method, how one held the bale with one’s thumb while installing the selected bait item, draped the hook over the bale, held the hook with one’s thumb and deposited the trap in the appropriate spot.

Then, he said, warming to his lesson, an unwary rodent would come by.

The queen looked about the kitchen, teeming like a Saturday marketplace, with rat exhibition wrestling matches near the blender, a mouse politician in a top hat haranguing a scraggle of hecklers from atop one of the princess’ building blocks, and thought they pretty much all looked unwary, which made her hopeful.

The king continued his demonstration, pointing to the cheese in the trap, “When the little b*****d takes the cheese, the hook flies off and the bale snaps down. Whap! Dead mouse.”

“Whap,” the queen echoed, and found she liked the sound. “Whap. Whap! WHAP!” She wondered if there were toxic fumes in rodent feces that were causing her damage.

“Stop saying ‘Whap!’” the king groused. He lifted one of the set traps. “Here, I’ll show you. Grab the cheese.”

The queen looked at him. “No!” she said. “It’ll smash my finger.”

“It will not. I’m holding the bale.”

Timidly, the queen stretched out her hand and seized the bit of cheese. “WHAP!” the bale snapped down on her thumb with a painful bite.

The king laughed heartily. “You should see your face,” he chortled. He sobered, an unusual state for the king. “Now you know how it works. I’m going back to bed.”

The queen, duly punished for rousing the king, nodded, trying to ignore the fierce throbbing in her thumbnail. She went to setting the many traps all about the house, being careful to place them where the princess or the dog would not come to harm. The cat was on her own, but she had been warned repeatedly about leaping on to the kitchen counters.

By the time the queen’s thumbnail had developed a rich purple bruise that would be painful for weeks, the traps were distributed. She loaded the princess into the royal chariot and left for a neighboring kingdom, hoping the traps would work their magic in their absence.

As the poet said, the best laid plans of mice and men aft gang agly. Upon the queen’s return to the castle, she found that this plan of men against mice could not have ganged agly-er. The traps had been relieved of their food treasures and had been pressed into service as a rodent fortress, bound together by the abundant strands of spider web. The vermin had marked their borders, which bisected the castle kitchens. The vermin side of the no-fly zone included the refrigerator, stove and pantry. The royals still held the trashcan and litterbox.

The dismayed queen heard an unkingly shriek from the bedchamber and the thunder of royal feet down the castle staircase. The king appeared before her, eyes huge and terrible, a large rat trap dangling from his beard.

“ENOUGH!” he roared.

Because kings do nothing except, well, rule, he ordered the queen to send out an alarm to a conclave of warrior monks. Their specialized assistance was needed posthaste. In the blink of an eye-- a large eye that takes forty-eight hours to blink--a contingent of monks drove down the avenue to the castle in their brightly painted chariots with the heraldic shield of Terminix.

The monks dismissed the royal family and began their assault with tanks and hoses and large tents with which they draped the castle.

The king hied himself to the nearest roadhouse; the princess and the queen went to a place of lodging where they slept peacefully for the first time in days, although the queen still jolted awake when a strand of hair brushed her cheek.

The jangle of a bell in the queen’s temporary lodgings heralded the announcement by the Knights of Terminix that the enemy was vanquished and the royal family could return without fear to their residence.

The queen spent many hours sweeping down spider webs and sweeping up spider carcasses, and plucking the occasional overlooked body of a mouse from a teacup in the cupboard. Washing every washable item in the castle made her thankful it was not a large industrial-sized castle.

The only remaining evidence of the invasion was indisputable proof some snake, probably a black snake by its size, had escaped the traps and poison and pointed sticks and the other weapons of the Knights. The royal family never saw the snake itself, but found abandoned skins, long as a man is tall, draped over a box in the attic, over a pipe on the basement ceiling, once threaded through the Swedish ivy in the kitchen.

Life continued apace for a while, but the spell that had held the queen in thrall for half her life had somehow weakened, and when the princess reached her maturity and began to consult broadsheets for available starter kingdoms, both the queen and her daughter left the castle and went out into the great wide world to seek their fortunes.

Legend has it that the king and the black snake live yet in the castle, to this very day.