Robert Beatty - Serafina and the Black Cloak

Now she could hear the creatures breathing, the scratching of their toenails on the stone and the dragging of their tails. She felt the familiar trembling in her fingers and the tightness in her legs.

She slipped through the half-open door into the storeroom and saw them in the darkness: two huge rats covered in greasy brown fur had slithered one by one up through the drainpipe in the floor. The intruders were obviously newcomers, foolishly scrounging for cockroaches when they could’ve been slurping custard off the fresh-baked pastries just down the hall.

Without making a sound or even disturbing the air, she stalked slowly towards the rats. Her eyes focused on them. Her ears picked up every sound they made. She could even smell their foul sewer stench. All the while, they went about their rotten, ratty business and had no idea she was there.

She stopped just a few feet behind them, hidden in the blackness of a shadow, poised for the leap. This was the moment she loved, the moment just before she lunged. Her body swayed slightly back and forth, tuning her angle of attack. Then she pounced. In one quick, explosive movement, she grabbed the squealing, writhing rats with her bare hands.

‘Gotcha, ya nasty varmints!’ she hissed.

The smaller rat squirmed in terror, desperate to get away, but the larger one twisted round and bit her hand.

‘There’ll be none of that!’ she snarled, clamping the rat’s neck firmly between her finger and thumb.

The rats wriggled wildly, but she kept a good, hard hold on them and wouldn’t let them go. It had taken her a while to learn that lesson when she was younger, that once you had them, you had to squeeze hard and hold on, no matter what, even if their little claws scratched you and their scaly tails curled round your hand like some sort of nasty grey snake.

Finally, after several seconds of vicious struggling, the exhausted rats realised they couldn’t escape her. They went still and stared suspiciously at her with their beady black eyes. Their snivelling little noses and wickedly long whiskers vibrated with fear. The rat who’d bitten her slowly slithered his long, scaly tail round her wrist, wrapping it two times, searching for new advantage to prise himself free.

‘Don’t even try it,’ she warned him. Still bleeding from his bite, she was in no mood for his ratty schemes. She’d been bitten before, but she never did like it much.

Carrying the grisly beasts in her clenched fists, she took them down the passageway. It felt good to get two rats before midnight, and they were particularly ugly characters, the kind that would chew straight through a burlap sack to get at the grain inside, or knock eggs off the shelf so they could lick the mess from the floor.

She climbed the old stone stairs that led outside, then walked across the moonlit grounds of the estate all the way to the edge of the forest. There she hurled the rats into the leaves. ‘Now get on outta here, and don’t come back!’ she shouted at them. ‘I won’t be so nice next time!’

The rats tumbled across the forest floor with the force of her fierce throw, then came to a trembling stop, expecting a killing blow. When it didn’t come, they turned and looked up at her in astonishment.

‘Get goin’ before I change my mind,’ she said.

Hesitating no longer, the rats scurried into the underbrush.

There had been a time when the rats she caught weren’t so lucky, when she’d leave their bodies next to her pa’s bed to show him her night’s work, but she hadn’t done that in a coon’s age.

Ever since she was a young’un, she’d studied the men and women who worked in the basement, so she knew that each one had a particular job. It was her father’s responsibility to fix the elevators, dumbwaiters, window gears, steam heating systems and all the other mechanical contraptions on which the two-hundred-and-fifty-room mansion depended. He even made sure the pipe organ in the Grand Banquet Hall worked properly for Mr and Mrs Vanderbilt’s fancy balls. Besides her pa, there were cooks, kitchen maids, coal shovellers, chimney sweeps, laundry women, pastry makers, housemaids, footmen and countless others.

When she was ten years old, she had asked, ‘Do I have a job like everyone else, Pa?’

‘Of course ya do,’ he said, but she suspected that it wasn’t true. He just didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

‘What is it? What’s my job?’ she pressed him.

‘It’s actually an extremely important position around here, and there ain’t no one who does it better than you, Sera.’

‘Tell me, Pa. What is it?’

‘I reckon you’re Biltmore Estate’s C.R.C.’

‘What’s that mean?’ she asked in excitement.

‘You’re the Chief Rat Catcher,’ he said.

However the words were intended, they emblazoned themselves in her mind. She remembered even now, two years later, how her little chest had swelled and how she had smiled with pride when he’d said those words: Chief Rat Catcher. She had liked the sound of that. Everyone knew that rodents were a big problem in a place like Biltmore, with all its sheds and shelves and barns and whatnot. And it was true that she had shown a natural-born talent for snatching the cunning, food-stealing, dropping-leaving, disease-infected four-legged vermin that so eluded the adult folk with their crude traps and poisons. Mice, which were timid and prone to panic-induced mistakes at key moments, were no trouble at all for her to catch. It was the rats that gave her the scamper each night, and it was on the rats that she had honed her skills. She was twelve years old now. And that was who she was: Serafina, C.R.C.

But as she watched the two rats run into the forest, a strange and powerful feeling took hold of her. She wanted to follow them. She wanted to see what they saw beneath leaf and twig, to explore the rocks and dells, the streams and wonders. But her pa had forbidden her.

‘Never go into the forest,’ he had told her many times. ‘There are dark forces there that no one understands, things that ain’t natural and can do ya wicked harm.’

She stood at the edge of the forest and looked as far as she could into the trees. For years, she’d heard stories of people who got lost in the forest and never returned. She wondered what dangers lurked there. Was it black magic, demons or some sort of heinous beasts? What was her pa so afraid of ?

She might bandy back and forth with her pa about all sorts of things just for the jump of it – like refusing her grits, sleeping all day and hunting all night, and spying on the Vanderbilts and their guests – but she never argued about this. She knew when he said those words he was as serious as her dead momma. For all the spiny talk and all the sneak-about, sometimes you just stayed quiet and did what you were told because you sensed it was a good way to keep breathing.

Feeling strangely lonesome, she turned away from the forest and gazed back at the estate. The moon rose above the steeply pitched slate roofs of the house and reflected in the panes of glass that domed the Winter Garden. The stars sparkled above the mountains. The grass and trees and flowers of the beautiful manicured grounds glowed in the midnight light. She could see every detail, every toad and snail and all the other creatures of the night. A lone mockingbird sang its evening song from a magnolia tree, and the baby hummingbirds, tucked into their tiny nest among the climbing wisteria, rustled in their sleep.

It lifted her chin a bit to think that her pa had helped build all this. He’d been one of the hundreds of stonemasons, woodcarvers and other craftsmen who had come to Asheville from the surrounding mountains to construct Biltmore Estate years before. He had stayed on to maintain the machinery. But when all the other basement workers went home to their families each night, he and Serafina hid among the steaming pipes and metal tools in the workshop like stowaways in the engine room of a great ship. The truth was they had no place else to go, no kin to go home to. Whenever she asked about her momma, her father refused to talk about her. So, there wasn’t anyone else besides her and her pa, and they’d made the basement their home for as long as she could remember.