There was a brief struggle; at the end of which Dumpy pulled a rope tight around Fang’s neck, tugged on it, and cried ‘Gotcha!’ while his six companions clustered ghoulishly round, like commentators on election night.

‘—Running away.’

In all the excitement, Dumpy quite failed to notice that he was a dwarf short — rephrase: that he’d mislaid one of his companions. The missing person in question was Rumpelstiltskin, who had missed his footing in a clump of briars and fallen head first down a hole.

If he’d known as he fell that a few minutes previously a huge white rabbit had scurried down the same hole, repeatedly checking an old-fashioned fob watch and exclaiming ‘I’m late! Oh, my ears and whiskers!’ as it did so, it probably wouldn’t have meant very much to him. It wouldn’t have made the tunnel any less dark or steep, or the bump on the head he suffered when eventually he finished sliding any less painful. Even if he’d understood the significance of the white rabbit, it’d probably only have depressed and worried him. The fact is, there are times when it’s far better not to know.

The same goes for the fact that while he was lying in the darkness unconscious and bleeding from a shallow scalp wound, a rat, a toad and a badger, all armed with cudgels, pistols and cutlasses, stepped over him under the impression that he was a tree root, passed on round a bend in the tunnel and were never seen or heard of again.

Chapter 10

‘Squeak.’

The other two mice ignored her. It had been a mistake bringing her in the first place, of course, but there was nothing to be done about it now.

‘Squeak.’

(Roughly translated: I think this is probably the larder. There’s a strong smell of cheese. Follow me.)

The largest of the three blind mice twitched its nose. ‘Squeak,’ it said.

‘Squeak,’ replied the third mouse irritably. ‘Squeak.’

(Simultaneous translation: (a) That doesn’t smell like Camembert to me. That’s that industrial grade cheddar they put on cheeseburgers. (b) Oh put a sock in it, will you? Cheese is cheese. And besides, what d’you expect them to do, put the brand name on the labels in braille?)

In the big four-poster bed at the opposite end of the room, Snow White slept fitfully, her dreams strangely troubled by an image of a little wooden puppet with a perky expression, an Alpine hat and a very long nose, which grinned out at her every time she looked in the mirror. She grunted and turned over; there it was again, dammit, smirking at her out of the polished brass doorknob, wanting to be her friend…

‘Squeak,’ whispered the first mouse, and he wasn’t exaggerating. The other two mice froze in their tracks until the sleeper in the bed stopped thrashing about and started to snore again, making a sound like a bandsaw grating on a concealed nail. No great risk of her hearing them over that racket.

‘Squeak?’

‘Squeak,’ replied the first mouse, suiting the action to the word. Immediately the other two followed, and with exquisite caution they tiptoed along the mantelpiece, down the tie-back on to the curtain, and dropped the last inch to the floor.

‘Snff.’

‘Squeak!’

‘Snif snif. Squeak.’

The third mouse had a point, although she could have expressed her concerns in a rather less vulgar manner. They didn’t know what they were looking for; it was all very well to home in on a strong cheese smell and follow it to its logical conclusion, but in this case there were other elements that had to be factored into the equation. For example: a sleeping human, and a powerful scent that the mice weren’t to know was something as innocuous as Mr Hiroshige’s armour polish. The whole enterprise was, to quote the large mouse, completely squeak from the word Go.

Nevertheless, mouse’s reach must exceed mouse’s grasp, or what’s a whisker for? The first mouse took a deep breath, fed the spatio-temporal coordinates of the cheese smell into his superb natural navigation computer, and scuttled across the floor…

‘Squeak!’ he cursed, sitting up and rubbing his nose. Without further data it wasn’t possible to say what exactly he had just scuttled full-tilt into; but it was big and made of wood, and it was standing in the middle of the floor.

‘Tick,’ it said.

The first mouse ran a quick analysis. Large, made of wood and given to saying ‘Tick’ ruled out the vast majority of known predators, which was a good sign. On the other paw, there wasn’t anything about it that implied the presence of cheese. Yet it was directly in line with the source of the cheese smell. Decision time. Round, over, up or under?

‘Squeak?’

‘Squeak. Squeak squeak.’

The first mouse’s whiskers bristled. Squeak, it muttered to itself, and that was fair enough; this was a cheese heist, after all, not a parish council meeting, and the concept of one mouse, one vote was as out of place in this context as a battleship in a milking parlour. That aside, up was indeed as good a choice as any, given that none of them had a clue where they were.

The mice ran up the clock.

At 1:01 precisely (the clock was a minute slow) the whole structure began to vibrate alarmingly and a terrible noise shattered the silence. ‘Squeeeeeak? wailed the mouse who ought to have been left behind; then she turned tail (what was left of it after the last time) and ran back down again, hotly pursued by her two colleagues.

It wasn’t, unfortunately, a straight-sided clock. Instead, it had a sort of concave knee arrangement which could have been purpose-made to trip up a speeding mouse and catapult it through the air at an angle of forty-five degrees. There would, of course, be no saying where such a mouse would land; a lot would depend on how fast the mouse was going, whether he made an effort to stop in the final heart-crimping fraction of a second before his paws lost traction on the polished walnut, the effect of wind resistance and drag on the ultimate escape velocity, and so forth. One thing, though, is tolerably certain: the chances of said mouse landing in a nearby bucket of water would be effectively squeak—

Splosh.

Followed in quick succession by splosh, splosh.

Maybe it served them right; certainly, successive generations of moralising mice thought so, which is where the expression away from the farmer’s wife into the bucket is reputed to come from. All in all, a pretty sorry state of affairs. But it wasn’t until the bucket burped, rippled and said ‘Running DOS’ that the mice realised the full extent of the problem. Of course, the mice weren’t to know that this was the most valuable and significant bucket of water in the whole domain, sold to its present owner by an opportunistic leprechaun accountant for rather more money than the domain’s economy actually contained at any given time.

‘Squeak?’ spluttered the big mouse, frantically pawing water.

The first mouse replied to the effect that he didn’t know, but whatever the hell DOS was he didn’t plan on hanging around long enough to find out. One desperate push with the hind paws, and the first mouse was scrabbling against the sheer side of the bucket, failing to find a pawhold of any kind. No prizes for guessing what he said.

‘Bad command or file—’

‘Squeak!’

‘Running Help,’ said the bucket calmly. ‘Please wait.’

It couldn’t have said anything more aggravating if it had tried. ‘Squeak!’ said the big mouse with admirable restraint. ‘Squeak squeak glug—’

‘Running SQUEAK. Please wait.’

The mouse who should have stayed at home tried to say ‘?’, but since her head was an inch underwater, all that came up was a small cluster of bubbles. Fortunately, Bubbles 3.1.1. For Mirrors was included in the accessories menu. ‘Glublublububub,’ the bucket enunciated; then a small hole appeared in its side and the water started to stream out on to the floor.