The three mice in front of Melanie stared for a moment. The one closest to her, covered in light gray fur like hers, narrowed its beady eyes and then spoke gruffly. "You're new."
A wave of relief washed over Melanie as she realized she'd successfully made contact, mixed with the anxiety of what she might learn from this other mouse. "Yes!" she gasped, and then launched into a breathless explanation of everything that had just happened to her. "I don't know if you could see what was going on," she recounted as she approached the end of her story, "but that cat was about to eat me!"
"He wasn't going to eat you," the mouse interrupted. "He just wanted to 'play' with you."
"Really?" Melanie asked. She started to think that maybe she shouldn't have let her instinctual, animal fear get the better of her. "Oh. Maybe if I go back out there and apologize, I can still-"
"No!" the other mouse said forcefully, reaching out a paw to grab Melanie's forearm (or rather, "front leg") and stop her from turning around. "He was going to 'play' with you by chasing you across the floor back and forth until you couldn't take any more. Then, once you were too exhausted to move, he would grab you up in the air and snap your neck, and then drop you somewhere as a 'present' for 'Mistress Beth'" - he spat that name out with a sense of hatred - "to find. And then maybe if he was hungry later, he would eat your corpse. You wouldn't be the first."
"O-oh." Melanie shuddered. "Well, do you have any idea how I can get out of here and get back to normal?" Just as she said that, she remembered she was speaking to a mouse that was in exactly the same boat that she was, and more than that, she was *speaking* to a mouse. "I mean, you used to be human too, right?"
"Not exactly," said the mouse. "I was born in here. My grandmother used to be a human, though, until she got cursed by that witch like you."
"My mom used to be human," said one of the other mice, the one with all-white fur standing just behind the one Melanie had been talking with. "Same deal."
"And I'm his brother," added the third mouse, whose fur was mostly brown with some splotches of white poking out from around its underside, as it gestured with a paw to the white mouse next to it. From its higher-pitched voice, Melanie figured this one must be a female, and with that it occurred to her that the other two were male. She realized that she could smell the difference between their sexes from the moment she first encountered the other mice - she had just been ignoring that detail until now because she didn't know what it meant.
"Oh my god," Melanie replied. "Beth has been doing this to people for... decades? Is she, like, immortal or something?!"
"No," said the white mouse in a tone of voice that suggested Melanie had just said something profoundly stupid. "We're mice. We only live for about a year - maybe two, if we're lucky."
"And that's only if we can manage to stay out of harm's way for that long," said the gray mouse, who Melanie was beginning to think of as the leader of the group - and not just because he was literally in front of the other two. He seemed to be older and perhaps a little more mature. "Running out into the pantry on food missions, trying to avoid the cat and all of those traps - it's not easy."
"I think the witch has been living here for four or five years," added the brown mouse. "From what I've heard passed down to me across the generations, that's about how long this has been going on. You can ask my mom when we go upstairs, she's been around the longest of any of us still alive. She's getting old now, but she can remember the first people who ended up in here."
"Speaking of upstairs, we need to be going now," the gray mouse said. "The cat can probably smell us from in here. You can come with us back to our safehouse in the attic, and we can answer all your questions when we get there."
The three other mice started effortlessly climbing straight up on a thin wooden slat that ran the length of the interior wall, and Melanie had no idea how to follow them. The wall seemed to stretch up hundreds of feet in the air, although Melanie remembered with dread that the distant summit was really only about ten feet away. Still, before she even had time to process any of what she had just learned, Melanie was about to be left behind!
"Wait!" she called up to them. "How do I get up there?"
The white mouse, who was bringing up the rear, turned back to Melanie. "Oh, right, you're new here. It's really not as hard as you're probably thinking. You've got claws, and you're not big enough to drag your own weight down. Just don't look down and try to imagine you're walking straight forward."
He resumed his climb, leaving Melanie to try it for herself. She would have thought that climbing up a sheer cliff face without opposable thumbs to grab onto something was impossible, but it really was easy. In fact, it barely even felt like she was going upward. She might as well have been scurrying across the floor again.
Since it was so easy to ignore the threat of gravity and the ground that was getting further and further away, Melanie's mind wandered. She thought about what these mice had been explaining to her about their situation, and then reality sank in with a shock so sudden and disturbing that she nearly lost her grip. Her claws instinctively dug hard into the soft wooden surface, leaving deep gouges and keeping her from falling. She looked up again, or forward, and saw that the other mice were out of sight now. No longer thinking about the threat of falling at all, she ran upward as fast as her four legs could carry her.
When she got to the top of the wall, she was out of breath. "Hey!" she shouted in between her panting. The white mouse ahead of her, who was just about to start climbing up another set of slats to the top of the building, looked back in confusion. "Wait! So I only have a year to live?!"
The mouse sighed. "At your age, I'd say you probably have closer to nine months left. Come on. I promise we'll explain everything you need to know as soon as we get back to safety."
Melanie had no choice but to accept that. She followed the other mice up into a tiny crevice in the ceiling. Inside, she found a patchwork of discarded food wrappers and shreds of newspaper that had been fashioned into crude furniture. In one corner, two baby mice were lying on a pile of packets labeled "SILICA GEL - DO NOT EAT". On another side of the small "room", a large white mouse was resting, and Melanie could see that its eyes were clouded like an old dog.
"Mom," said the brown mouse, "we've got a new one. She says she was cursed by the witch just today."
"Oh, I'm so sorry, dear," the old mouse said as it turned toward Melanie, its weak and tired voice sounding as pained and ravaged by age as any 90-year-old she had ever seen. "I hate to welcome anybody new into the fold, but you're perfectly welcome to stay with us."
The sight of "Mom" was horrifying to Melanie. She felt as if she was looking into her own future, a future that was apparently only months away. Was she doomed to spend the rest of a very short life scrambling through these walls, just like this fellow former human woman? The implications came to her one after another, each one as unsettling as the last. Would she, too, be having sex with mice? Giving birth to mice? Raising mouse children that would soon need to start caring for her?
There had to be a way out of all this. Right? She couldn't give up hope so quickly. But just as soon as she started trying to brainstorm ideas, she was interrupted.
"So," said the gray mouse, "you want to become human again, right?" Melanie immediately nodded, although she wasn't sure what it looked like to see a mouse bobbing its head up and down. He seemed to understand the gesture, though. "Us, too. We've been working on this for our entire lives, those of us who were born into it. Let me explain the plan."
"Wait," Melanie interrupted. "But you were never human in the first place."
"That's true," he replied, "but we've heard a lot of stories about what it's like to be human. We've heard all about cars and airplanes and televisions. And supermarkets, where you can take all the food you want without having to run around and steal it. And most importantly, being big enough that you don't have to worry about predators all the time. We still have human minds up here, you know," he said, tapping at the side of his head with a claw. "We want all of it just as much as you do."
"Okay," Melanie said, "I get the idea. So what's the plan? I'm willing to do whatever you need me to do if it means I - we - can get back to normal."
The gray mouse smiled. "I like to hear that. Well, every couple of nights, we have to run out to get food. And then, if the coast is clear, we look through the witch's books, trying to find the spell that would turn us into humans. I'll admit, we haven't had much success with this idea. But we have a big advantage now: you."
"Me? What can I do?"
"You just got the curse. The whole thing is still fresh in your mind. You can probably help us figure out which one is the right book, maybe even direct us to the right page. Plus, unlike us, you can actually read the books. I assume."
"Okay," Melanie said, not entirely convinced that this was a good strategy. "But didn't your mom and your grandmother have those same advantages, too?"
"I didn't say it would be easy," he admitted. "And it probably won't happen tonight. This search has been going on for years now, after all. But with your help, it just might be possible."
And there was the difficult choice laid out in front of Melanie. She could stay with these mice - temporarily embarrassed humans, really - try to help them with their plan, and hope that it would work before she became the next elderly mother mouse. Or she could strike out on her own, in the hopes of coming up with some sort of better plan, which wouldn't be remotely guaranteed to work either. What should she do?