The Tale of Despereaux (6 page)

And then Furlough stood up on his hind legs and placed his right paw over his heart. “For the good of the castle mice,” he announced to the darkness, “we deliver this day to the dungeon, a mouse in need of punishment. He is, according to the laws we have established, wearing the red thread of death.”

“The red thread of death?” repeated Despereaux in a small voice. “Wearing the red thread of death” was a terrible phrase, but the mouse didn’t have long to consider its implications, because he was suddenly pushed from behind by the hooded mice.

The push was a strong one, and it sent Despereaux flying down the stairs into the dungeon. As he tumbled, whisker over tail, through the darkness, there were only two words in his mind. One was “perfidy.” And the other word that he clung to was “Pea.”

Perfidy. Pea. Perfidy. Pea. These were the words that pinwheeled through Despereaux’s mind as his body descended into the darkness.

DESPEREAUX LAY ON HIS BACK at the bottom of the steps and touched the bones in his body one by one. They were all there. And, amazingly, they were unbroken. He got to his feet and became aware of a terrible, foul, extremely insulting smell.

The dungeon, reader, stank. It stank of despair and suffering and hopelessness. Which is to say that the dungeon smelled of rats.

And it was so dark. Despereaux had never before encountered darkness so awful, so all-encompassing. The darkness had a physical presence as if it were a being all its own. The mouse held one small paw up in front of his whiskers. He could not see it, and he had the truly alarming thought that perhaps he, Despereaux Tilling, did not even exist.

“Oh my!” he said out loud.

His voice echoed in the smelly darkness.

“Perfidy,” said Despereaux, just to hear his voice again, just to assure himself that he did exist.

“Pea,” said Despereaux, and the name of his beloved was immediately swallowed up by the darkness.

He shivered. He shook. He sneezed. His teeth chattered. He longed for his handkerchief. He grabbed hold of his tail (it took him a long, frightening moment to even locate his tail, so absolute was the darkness) to have something, anything, to hold on to. He considered fainting. He deemed it the only reasonable response to the situation in which he found himself, but then he remembered the words of the threadmaster: honor, courtesy, devotion, and bravery.

“I will be brave,” thought Despereaux. “I will try to be brave like a knight in shining armor. I will be brave for the Princess Pea.”

How best for him to be brave?

He cleared his throat. He let go of his tail. He stood up straighter. “Once upon a time,” he said out loud to the darkness. He said these words because they were the best, the most powerful words that he knew and just the saying of them comforted him.

“Once upon a time,” he said again, feeling a tiny bit braver. “There was a knight and he wore, always, an armor of shining silver.”

“Once upon a time?” boomed a voice from the darkness. “A knight in shining armor? What does a mouse know of such things?”

That voice, the loudest voice that Despereaux had ever heard, could only, he assumed, belong to the world’s largest rat.

Despereaux’s small, overworked heart stopped beating.

And for the second time that day, the mouse fainted.

WHEN DESPEREAUX AWOKE, he was cupped in the large, callused hand of a human and he was staring into the fire of one match and beyond the match there was a large, dark eye looking directly at him.

“A mouse with red thread,” boomed the voice. “Oh, yes, Gregory knows the way of mice and rats. Gregory knows. And Gregory has his own thread, marking him. See here, mouse.” And the match was held to a candle and the candle sputtered to life and Despereaux saw that there was a rope tied around the man’s ankle. “Here is the difference between us: Gregory’s rope saves him. And your thread will be the death of you.” The man blew the candle out and the darkness descended and the man’s hand closed more tightly around Despereaux and Despereaux felt his beleaguered heart start up a crazy rhythm of fear.

“Who are you?” he whispered.

“The answer to that question, mouse, is Gregory. You are talking to Gregory the jailer, who has been buried here, keeping watch over this dungeon for decades, for centuries, for eons. For eternities. You are talking to Gregory the jailer, who, in the richest of ironies, is nothing but a prisoner here himself.”

“Oh,” said Despereaux. “Um, may I get down, Gregory?”

“The mouse wants to know if Gregory the jailer will let him go. Listen to Gregory, mouse. You do not
want
to be let go. Here, in this dungeon, you are in the treacherous dark heart of the world. And if Gregory was to release you, the twistings and turnings and dead ends and false doorways of this place would swallow you for all eternity.

“Only Gregory and the rats can find their way through this maze. The rats because they know, because the way of it mirrors their own dark hearts. And Gregory because the rope is forever tied to his ankle to guide him back to the beginning. Gregory would let you go, but you would only beg him to take you up again. The rats are coming for you, you see.”

“They are?”

“Listen,” said Gregory. “You can hear their tails dragging through the muck and filth. You can hear them filing their nails and teeth. They are coming for you. They are coming to take you apart piece by piece.”

Despereaux listened and he was quite certain that he heard the nails and teeth of the rats, the sound of sharp things being made sharper still.

“They will strip all the fur from your flesh and all the flesh from your bones. When they are done with you, there will be nothing left except red thread. Red thread and bones. Gregory has seen it many times, the tragic end of a mouse.”

“But I need to live,” said Despereaux. “I can’t die.”

“You cannot die. Ah, that is lovely. He says he cannot die!” Gregory closed his hand more tightly around Despereaux. “And why would that be, mouse? Why is it that you cannot die?”

“Because I’m in love. I love somebody and it is my duty to serve her.”

“Love,” said Gregory. “Love. Hark you, I will show you the twisted results of love.” Another match was struck; the candle was lit again, and Gregory held it up so that its flame illuminated a massive, towering, teetering pile of spoons and kettles and soup bowls.

“Look on that, mouse,” said Gregory. “That is a monument to the foolishness of love.”

“What is it?” asked Despereaux. He stared at the great tower that reached up, up, up into the blackness.

“What it looks like. Spoons. Bowls. Kettles. All of them gathered here as hard evidence of the pain of loving a living thing. The king loved the queen and the queen died; this monstrosity, this junk heap is the result of love.”

“I don’t understand,” said Despereaux.

“And you will not understand until you lose what you love. But enough about love,” said Gregory. He blew out the candle. “We will talk instead about your life. And how Gregory will save it, if you so desire.”

“Why would you save me?” Despereaux asked. “Have you saved any of the other mice?”

“Never,” said Gregory, “not one.”

“Why would you save me, then?”

“Because you, mouse, can tell Gregory a story. Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell Gregory a story. Make some light.”

And because Despereaux wanted very much to live, he said, “Once upon a time . . .”

“Yes,” said Gregory happily. He raised his hand higher and then higher still until Despereaux’s whiskers brushed against his leathery, timeworn ear. “Go on, mouse,” said Gregory. “Tell Gregory a story.”

And it was in this way that Despereaux became the only mouse sent to the dungeon whom the rats did not reduce to a pile of bones and a piece of red thread.

It was in this way that Despereaux was saved.

Reader, if you don’t mind, that is where we will leave our small mouse for now: in the dark of the dungeon, in the hand of an old jailer, telling a story to save himself.

It is time for us to turn our attention elsewhere, time for us, reader, to speak of rats, and of one rat in particular.

End of the First Book

AS OUR STORY CONTINUES, reader, we must go backward in time to the birth of a rat, a rat named Chiaroscuro and called Roscuro, a rat born into the filth and darkness of the dungeon, several years before the mouse Despereaux was born upstairs, in the light.