Ignore the rat. Rats cannot talk. He is a metaphysical representation of your mental instability. Rats cannot talk. Ignore the rat.

“So there we were, fighting on the shoulders of a jotunn when Sarah-”

I continued my mantra as I dragged the limp woman, doing my best to focus on saving her life, ignoring the insane ramblings of my hallucination, and the deluge of negative emotions pounding away inside of me.

I wasn’t sure if it was mental and emotional stress, but the woman felt real. Real enough that her blood stained my fingers, that her hair tickled my hands, real enough I can smell her sweat.

I needed to find someone to take her to the hospital.

“-And his head exploded all over the place! Which happens a lot now that I think about it.” The rat shrugged, “So it goes.”

“Who knew rats read,” I said.

“Hm? Whatcha mean, hooman?”

I was about to push on through the bar’s door when the ball of fur leapt on my hand. I nearly dropped the woman, Sarah, as the rat had called her, if that was even her real name.

Then I noticed the weight of the animal on my hand, and his hair brushing against my skin. “Holy shit! You’re real?”
“Ergo sum cogito taco estas, dude.”

My eye itched, but my hands and arms were effectively coated in blood and some other fluids coating Sarah. They weren’t hers, but it rose questions.

“You’re real. You’re a real talking rat.” I said.

The rat scurried up my arm to my shoulder, “Yeah? And? You got a problem with that, gov’ner?”

I could feel the weight of the rat sitting on my shoulder, staring at me. Behind its eyes I saw an unnatural sapience. It was disturbing to see a creature thought of as filthy to suddenly talking to you as if it thought it too was a human.

“What’s happening?” I asked, my mind was abuzz with a creeping opaque fog of confusion.

“You’re going to take my friend with you to that inn next door.” His snout was centimeters away from my nose. I had to admit that the rat’s attempt to intimidate was working, but only because I was having a fever dream of sorts. Perhaps a part of me believed in it, but the logical, intelligent, and frankly, adult part of me was thinking along the lines of, ‘I am now a Disney Princess.’

Was there a place to purchase a frilly dress and learn to sing in this cesspit?

I winced when her legs bumped into the street curb. The rat chuckled darkly.

A car’s lights lit up the circular hang-out, the beams piercing through the sparse branches and leaves. Several seconds later a door slammed shut.

“Go!” The rat hissed.

I launched into motion, hauling the woman into the alley beside the city inn, gently leaning her against the cleanest section of wall.I didn’t understand why we didn’t just get the help of whoever had stopped by.

It felt like my brain fluids were dripping down a sink and if I didn’t get sleep soon I’d collapse and die.

I left the alley and did my best to clean the ichor on my clothes. It was going to stain, wasn’t it?

I pressed down on the half-rusted door-handle of the inn. The door’s bell jingled as I entered. Inside was a musty reception area. It was a tiny room, a couch covered in a slab of dust. faced a tall empty desk, hanging from the wall were tasteless paintings, and a wooden staircase leading to the second floor was all that the “lobby” offered.

Basically a piece of shit. Hardly any tourists came by, which meant that the local inns were used by the university students to have a place to fuck each other’s brains out. Private and affordable, if you managed to sneak in unseen with your friend.

I walked over to the desk and leaned over it. Sitting with his back turned towards me was a guy with a pair of headphones over his ears. He was completely engrossed in what looked like a horror movie. A grey monster was prowling the outskirts of a mansion.

I didn’t blame him, the inn would have closed if not for the students, and there wasn’t much to do, except maybe to clean the asthma-inducing slabs of dust.

It took a weird minute to get his attention, I called out a few hellos, knocked on the wood of the desk, and finally I walked around the desk and tapped him on the shoulder.

He jumped from his seat, clutching his chest.

I bit down on a chuckle.

From there I had to deal out twenty-five pounds from my wallet. I sighed internally, this was going to leave me with only a hundred pounds. My Mom always said to always carry a hundred dollars, you never knew what kind of emergency you might have. But I guess her advice remained the same since we moved. Keep a hundred on you, and maybe an extra twenty.

The man gave me the key and went back to viewing his show.

I went outside, she was still there thankfully. She hadn’t decided to crawl away and make me try and track her in the dark. She had gained a modicum of consciousness however, her eyes were half-lidded and unfocused.

“Hello?” I said, peering over her.

“Ben?” She murmured.

The rat was curled up in her lap.

“I got a room,” I said.

“Did you get the contiental breakfast package?” the rodent spoke.

“No, but I did get you a block of cheese with extra vitamin k,” I deadpanned.

“I didn’t realize you had it in for me.”

I was making jokes with a talking rat. Fucking hell.

With a grunt, I lifted her once more and began the journey to bring her to the room.

At least humans don’t bleed like they do in movies, otherwise we would be leaving a river for the entire city to follow.

The rat, who I was suspecting to be less of a figment of my imagination and more of a revelation, was holding the door open for me, he stood on his hind-legs while propping the door open with his back.

If rats could open doors.

That sounded like a variation of ‘if pigs could fly’ sorta schtick.

I made sure to hold her higher up so that her legs didn’t stain the carpets. Her boots scuffed the sulfur-yellow carpet of the reception room with a faint track of dirt. It was hardly noticeable, it looked like the carpet hadn’t been vacuumed in a decade.

The man had re-entrenched himself into the show, not taking any notice of us as I dragged the woman to the flight of stairs, or the rat sitting on the desk’s counter, watching over the man’s shoulder with cat-like curiosity.

Every stair-step I ascended was another time her legs dragged against the stairs' edges. Her groaning was a low growl, it reminded me of a old-timey furnace.

The inn only had two floors, the reception room, and the second floor. I took a breather, catching my breath. I hadn’t eaten all day and hardly anything the entire week since Iva had passed.

I fought through the ensuing wave of grief. The sooner I forgot about her the sooner I could start functioning normally.

It was almost like destiny, really, all of this happening. I had completely forgotten about all the shit in my life and had become focused on this...whatever this was. But I was scared, I was absolutely scared shitless.

It wasn’t my fault that Iva had died...but I could have changed things.

Now it was entirely in my power to save somebody else. Like the universe had decided that my role was to serve as a savior. Had Iva not died, I would have never dragged this woman into an inn with only a talking rat as a witness.

It was at this moment when I made it to the top. My arms and legs were shaking. I dreaded how I was going to feel tomorrow, all this carrying was about to end my whole career. The rat ran up the stairs to me, he looked down the hall. Several rooms were occupied with the music of the horizontal tango at maximum volume.

The rat and I shared a look of mutual revulsion.

We found the room and I dug the key out of my pocket. It took half-a-minute to wedge the key into the lock with one hand. I turned the polished brass knob and was assaulted by the stench of sex and sweat. The room was humid, as if it had never been aired out.

I coughed, “Fuck me, dude.”

“That an offer?” The rat responded without missing a beat.

“Only if you buy me dinner first.” I took her in the room, aware of how creepy it looked, a wild-haired guy in a suit dragging an unconscious woman into a room.

It made me uncomfortable and paranoid.

The rat climbed up my legs and used my shoulder as a jump pad to flip the light switch. I blinked.

There was a queen-sized bed, a window on the opposite side of the door, a wooden table and chair, and a tiny tv facing the bed.

Ignoring the stains on the cover, I dropped her on the bed and made her as comfortable as I could. Placing a pillow under her head, I went to examine her legs.

Whatever had crushed her legs had caused a fuck-ton of damage. The blood seemed to be coming from where her bones had erupted from her skin. I didn’t have a fucking clue on what to do. Things like this required professionals, not a depressed twenty-one-year-old. She was never going to walk again unless the bone were replaced.

It had been difficult to tell because of the dark, but now under the warm yellow light the sight was palpable. She was coated in gore, as if somebody had been gibbed in the same room as her.

And then I realized a second thing.

She reeked of blood and what I suspected was the absence of deodorant.

I scrunched my nose, guess I was sleeping on that chair.

I watched the rat in the corner of my eye rotate the lever that opened the window. There was enough space on the windowsill for somebody to sit on it and let their legs hang out. A breeze came to whisk away a sliver of the human miasma, it felt like the equivalent to drinking water with mint gum in my mouth.

I needed to go out and get help. She was going to die. Blood loss was going to be the least of her problems. An infection was sure to sprout. Turning to leave, I heard a metallic click.

“Dearest apologies my friend, but you’re staying here.” The rat had a revolver aimed at me, the grip was planted on the bed. The rat held the barrel in one hand and the trigger in the other.

“She’s going to die if we don’t get help.” I said, there was no tone in my voice. My words sounded like those echoed from a soulless robot. It wasn't that far from how I’d felt this past week.

“She’ll be fine. Take a seat,” the rat gestured towards the chair with his head.

“You’re not even real. I don’t have a clue what’s going on, but I’m pretty sure I’m having some sort of mental break.”

“Would you like me to really prove that I’m real?” A sadistic grin rendered on the rat’s face.

Was it real? Was any of this real? How much of the world did I really know? Is the rat the rule or the exception? How can it be real? I did not need an existential crisis right now, brain.

“I’m not sure about that.” I said.

“Then take a seat.”

I shuffled over and planted myself on the chair.

Had I been in mint-condition, I would’ve been chuckling my head off. The sight of the rat holding a gun half its size was inherently hilarious. What was he going to do? Shoot me? I could easily side-step the gun and rip it from his hands, and I doubted he had the strength to pull the trigger.

The rat let the gun fall on its side. He sat across from me on the edge of the bed with his rodent arms crossed. “Magic’s real.”

“I didn’t notice, I thought you were a mere figment of my imagination.”

“What?” The rat scoffed. “How dare you! I am very much real and alive, Sir. In fact, I am so alive I can hardly feel death!”

I put my head in my hands and massaged my temples. In the corner of the room a line of ants marched to a dead cockroach, taking it apart. Above the ants was a messy cobweb, a spider was curled up in the center of it, dead.

I took a deep breath. In, out, in, out.

“Magic’s real? I’m not dreaming or anything then?” I asked, serious this time.

“Yes and no.”

“Right...” I said.

“Left!”

I let out an amused snort.

“Magic is real. Talking animals are real. Is there anything else?” I asked.

The rat scratched his head and laughed with a nervous energy, “Oh, just a thing or three…”

Magic was real. Seeing the rat talking to me had been...now that I look in retrospect, utterly terrifying. It was like watching the world I knew fall into a precipice of revelation. Thus leading me to the next question, if magic is real why is that nobody knows about it? It was a common trope in books and movies how magic can’t be perceived by regular humans, it was hidden away in secret societies, or better yet, people that did see it had their minds wiped of the memory. The mist and obliviators came to the forefront of my mind.

Which one was it then? Magic hiding magic or Mind wipe?

What were the implications of magic existing? Were certain moments in history completely false? Did mythical monsters and gods exist? How did magic exist.

What did it mean that magic was real?

I regarded the rat. He was watching me with an amused smile.

The window reflected a car’s high-beams into the room. I blinked spots out of my eyes and peeked my head out, there were two cars parked at the fountain. The front doors of the new car opened up. It was too dark to see who was coming out, but the driver was wearing a skirt and had long hair. Nobody emerged from the shotgun seat despite it being open. At the angle of where I sat, the trees blocked my sight of the fountain.

“Something’s going on outside,” I said.

“Get out of the window you moron!”

Too tired to put an effort into getting away quickly, I lumbered from the rustic chair.
“Close the curtains too.”

I really just wanted to die on the bed now in the oblivion of sleep. I reversed, and shut the curtains.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“They’re looking for us,” The rat made a steeple with his hands and began walking in a circle, his tiny rat paws leaving imprints on the bed’s cover.

“The Keeper knows someone came through. The Keeper tells the court.” He scratched his head. “They’re going to send out letters to all the Keepers. Ahh, uhhh. “Can they find us? Where are we? Which state are we in?”

“State? We’re in England, Wyrich.” I said. Keepers and courts were now on the forefront of my mind, what were they?

“You’re English?” The rat tilted his head, “But you sound American.”

“I am.”

“What are you doing here then?”

I shrugged, too fatigued to explain.

“Ben,” Sarah rasped. The rat’s tail twitched.

Who was Ben? I recalled the rat’s name being Peter.

“Hello?” I said.

An eye opened, then the other fluttered opened. She stared at me with blooming bewilderment.

Thump thump thump, three heavy knocks came from the door.