Jaci Dawn

The Attic.
Gran led the way. Deacon was in the middle, and Aric brought up the back. They creeped along caves that followed the feed of electrical and cable wires, always moving upward. Deke had wanted to follow the plumbing, but Aric said that ended on the third floor. Only the electrical went to the attic. Deke kept a wary eye on the cords they often straddled. He felt a lot like they were walking blindly in a subway tunnel, and one of those wires would be hot, and they’d all be fried. Any second now.
“Ouch!” Gran stopped and looked back. “Step on my tail again, and you’re dead meat, Twerp.”
Great. Now he had to watch out for the tail, too. Deke glance to his right and looked into the eight eyes of a large house spider. It retreated quickly, but not before hissing at him.
“W-was that Shelob?” Aric whispered from the back.
“No.” Deke concentrated on looking straight forward. Did mice eat spiders? Maybe they were the threat, not the spiders. He couldn’t remember anything from science class about mouse diets. He remembered plenty from fantasy novels he’d read as a kid, and it seemed like mice ate things like dandelions, acorns, and puddings.
“Shit.” Gran stopped suddenly. “Mouse trap.”
The other two crawled up behind him and peered over his shoulder. It looked like a tube set on top of the wires, with a piece of aromatic cheese at the end of it. Deke’s nose twitched and his stomach growled.
“Oh. My dad and I set these. There’s a rubber band thing that shoots when the mouse takes the bait. It goes over the mouse’s head and, like, strangles it instantly.”
“Nice, Aric. How do we get around it?” Gran looked back, and Deke thought he was looking into the face of Splinter, the anti-hero of Teenage Mutant Turtles. Gran even drew out his “s”.
“I suppose we throw something up in there until we set off the trigger?”
“Oh, brilliant. And when we set off the trigger and the little rubber band flies out harmlessly, how do we get through this?”
“Uh.”
“There was a junction back there by Shelob. We could go back and take the junction and hope this is the only such trap Aric set.”
“Shelob?” Splinter – er, Gran, stared down his long nose at Deke. “No, don’t tell me, Twerp. Just lead the way. Aric, you take up the rear.”
“What? Why?”
There was much grumbling as the mice changed positions, mostly from Aric as he squashed himself up along the walls of the tunnel. “You’d think I put that trap down here just to catch us!” he complained.
Deke took the lead happily. He felt like he should have been given it in the first place, because he was the one who had thought of escaping as mice and hiding in the crawl space. It wasn’t hard to find the spider again: it had moved forward of its web after they passed, and it hissed again, as it made a hasty retreat.
The junction was to the left, and Deke turned to follow it. It went vertical shortly after they were into the tunnel, with only a single electrical wire running up the middle of it. A very old electrical cord, way out of code. Deke paused as he looked upward. “This is not up to code,” he muttered. “We could be electrocuted. Fried, even.”
“It’s an old house,” Aric called from behind him.
“If the house hasn’t burned down yet, I’d say we’re fairly safe. Climb. Now.”
Deke swallowed hard. Do or die, right? All that? He wrapped his paws around the rubber-coated wire and began to pull himself upward, using his feet to walk along the wall. He heard, and felt, the others follow. They passed through dusty old spider webs. A silverfish scurried upward ahead of them. The tunnel they were in got wider, until there was no place to place his feet as he climbed, but a hole in a floor above beckoned.
“Gotta freestyle it here, guys,” Deke called over his shoulder. He didn’t feel the confidence. He breathed out before taking in a deep breath and grasping the electrical cord with all the strength his paws possessed. Left over right. Right over left.
He reached the small hole where the cord went through what he thought was the floor boards. One paw grasped the upper surface, and then the other, and he hoisted himself half way up into the space between attic floor and third floor ceiling.
He sank in defeat on the attic sub-flooring. “Really?”
Gran surfaced next and crawled further into the space, keeping his head down. Finally, Aric hefted himself through the hole. He looked upward where he expected the cord to go. “It follows the ceiling?” He sounded as disappointed as Deke felt.
“Explore,” Gran’s mellow voice floated back toward them. “The cord probably goes up the wall somewhere, but there may be a way into the attic from here without acrobatics.”
The friends looked at each other. If Aric could have shrugged, he would have. Instead, he slapped Deke on the shoulder. “We stay together.”
Deke felt weird, crawling with his paws on the floor and the toes of his sandals behind him, but it was all the space allowed for. Mouse sized, he reminded himself a dozen times. Mouse sized.
They heard Gran shout. “I found it! A knot hole. Follow my voice!”
Deke didn’t understand how his body knew where to go, but his ears had swiveled, and he’d turned toward the voice and scurried – yes, scurried, like a mouse – in the exact direct the voice had come from. He was soon underneath a perfect knothole in the pine flooring of the attic. He could hear Gran scurrying around above.
“Coming, Aric?”
“Right behind you.”
Up they went.

The attic was much brighter than the spaces they had been confined in. A single small window to the west let in the early afternoon light. It wasn’t direct sunlight, but it was a lot more light than they’d been used to for the past few hours. The stood, side by side, looking around what seemed to be a huge cavernous room. The attic.
There was a human form for sewing in one corner, and a child’s rocking chair. Five trunks. A number of plastic boxes marked in large lettering: XMAS or EASTER. A stack of cardboard boxes were marked HALLOWEEN. Near the dusty window stood an old easel with a dust-covered painting on it. An old mirror was propped against the slanted ceiling near the body form. The wand collection was in a glass covered box on top of one of the trunks. Latched.
“Now what?” mused Gran.
“We shrink what we need so we can carry it?”
“How are we going to carry it back down those tunnels?”
“We shrink it so we can carry it,” Deke repeated.
“What do we know we need?” asked Aric. He was atop one of the trucks, “I don’t even know what is in these trunks. Hallowe’en costumes? Photo albums? Family diaries?”
“Magic wands. We need those.” Gran was studying the latch on the display case. “Probably don’t need anything else.”
“The mirror, I would think,” Deke replied.
Gran reared back. “We can’t carry everything, Twerp. Concentrate. Can we hide the things we may need later? Do you have that super power, too?”
Deke felt four eyes on him. “Well… Um. I could try. I never tried to hide something before…”
“Except us,” Aric replied.
“Well, yeah, but I did shrink myself into a mouse once, so I was pretty sure I could do that.”
“Pretty sure?” Gran stared hard at him. “You mean, you didn’t know if you could make us all mice?”
“Well, that was easy, I was sure. But getting us all into the crawl space… I didn’t have an exact destination, so, no. I had to just hope there was a crawl space and the magic would know…” Deke felt his voice trail off.
“But you could, like, send the mirror and trunks to the crawl space, right>“ Aric looked hopeful.
“I might squash anyone down there. I can’t place it all exact-like.”
Gran scratched his chin. Deke was certain he was irritated and would take it out on him, but when he spoke, he seemed to have a plac. “How familiar are you with Dish’s family’s cabin?”
“Um, not at all. I didn’t even know they went camping.”
“If I send you a photo on my cell phone, can you send the items there?”
Aric and Deke looked at each other, then checked their pockets. Sure enough, they had their cell phones with them, and the phones had service. “We might want to ditch these,” Deke said. “They have GPS in them.”
“Crap.”

Word Count: 5172 out of 50,000