The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder by Patricia Highsmith

between him and the steps.
    “Sissi!” Carlo shrieked with glee and waded towards a floating stick.
    Luigi snatched the stick from him and came down with it on the rat’s body—an unsatisfactory blow, rather sliding off the rat’s back. Luigi struck again.
    “Grab him by the tail!” giggled Carlo.
    “Get a knife, we’ll kill it!” Luigi spoke with bared teeth, excited by the fact the rat might dive and nip one of his feet with a fatal bite.
    Carlo was already splashing up the stairs. His mother was not in the kitchen, and he at once seized a meat knife with a triangular blade, and ran back with it to Luigi.
    Luigi had battered the rat twice more, and now with the knife in his right hand, he was bold enough to grab the rat’s tail and whirl him up on to a marble ledge as high as Luigi’s hips.
    “Ah-i-i! Kill ’im!” Carlo said.
    Rupert whined, lifting his head, thought of going up the steps, since his lead dangled, and could not come to any decision, because he had no purpose in going up.
    Luigi made a clumsy stab at the rat’s neck, while still holding its tail, missed the neck and struck an eye. The rat writhed and squealed, showing long front teeth, and Luigi was on the brink of releasing its tail out of fear, but came down once more with a blow he intended to be decapitating, but he cut off a front foot instead.
    “Ha-ha-ha!” Carlo clapped his hands, and wildly splashed water, more on Luigi than the rat.
    “ Bastard rat! ” cried Luigi.
    For a few seconds the rat was motionless, with open mouth. Blood flowed from its right eye, and Luigi came down with the blade on the rat’s right hind foot which was extended with splayed toes, vulnerable against the stone. The rat bit, caught Luigi in the wrist.
    Luigi screamed and shook his arm. The rat fell off into the water, and began to swim wildly away.
    “Oooh!” said Carlo.
    “Ow!” Luigi swished his arm back and forth in the water and examined his wrist. It was merely a pink dot, like a pinprick. He’d been wanting to exaggerate his prowess to his mother, have her nurse his wound, but he’d have to make do with this. “It hurts !” he assured Carlo, and made his way through the water towards the steps. Tears had already come to his eyes, though he felt no pain at all. “ Mama! ”
    The rat scrabbled with one stump of a forepaw and his other good paw against a mossy stone wall, keeping his nose above water as best he could. Around him the water was pinkening with blood. He was a young rat, five months old and not fully grown. He had never been in this house before, and had come in at the street side via a dry alley or slit along one side of the wall. He had smelled food, or thought he had, rotting meat or some such. A hole had led through the wall, and he had tumbled into water before he knew it, water so deep he had had to swim. Now his problem was to find an exit. His left foreleg and right hind leg smarted, but his eye hurt worse. He explored a bit, but found no hole or slit of escape, and at last he clung to slimy threads of moss by the claws of his right forefoot and was still, rather in a daze.
    Some time later, chill and numb, the rat moved again. The water had gone down a little, but the rat was not aware of this, because he still had to swim. Now a narrow beam of light showed in a wall. The rat made for this, squeezed through, and escaped from the watery dungeon. He was in a kind of sewer in semi-darkness. He found an exit from this: a crack in a pavement. His next hours were a series of short journeys to an ashcan’s shelter, to a doorway, to a shadow behind a tub of flowers. He was, in a circuitous way, heading for home. The rat had no family as yet, but was indifferently accepted in the house or headquarters of several rat families where he had been born. It was dark when he got there—the cellar of an abandoned grocery store, long ago plundered of anything edible. The cellar’s wooden door was falling apart, which made entry easy for