Snowball got the best of me. I had been running about the room oblivious of my age for several minutes when I suddenly had to stop and sit down. I caught my breath and was about to resume the game when I heard the noise again.
Now Snowball was right in front of me, so it could not have been him making the noise earlier in the day after all. I excused myself from him and once again made the trek upstairs, this time going straight to the third room. The noise stopped when I opened the door.
It was dark in there. I snapped on the light and looked amongst the dozens of boxes and old pews and Bibles with missing covers—the flotsam and jetsam of old churches. Despite my certainty that the noise had originated in this room, I could find nothing amiss, except for the hole in the ceiling that led, if one were tiny enough to pass through it, into the boarded-up top room of the bell tower.
I closed the door and walked around the corner to the narrow staircase to the upper room, at the top of which was a boarded-up door. I was of half a mind to retrieve my tools and open up the door right then when I thought I smelled smoke. The smoke alarm went off and I raced downstairs, thoughts of an investigation dropped for this more pressing matter.
Back in the living room I found that the throw rug from in front of my chair was half in the fireplace, and that flames had progressed it far enough for smoke to have escaped the chimney and gone wafting through the room. The easiest thing to do was simply to throw the remainder of the rug into the fire, which I did, and then I turned to find Snowball calmly licking his paws.
No doubt the kitty had dragged the rug up to the fireplace to sleep upon. Somehow the end had fallen into the fire. This had probably used up one of Snowball’s nine lives.
I got the key to the smoke alarm from the cupboard and shut off the keening whine, then called the fire department to report that I had things under control. This turned out to be fortunate for them since they had barrelled out of the station in their truck, only to have it slide across the street and lodge itself in a snow bank.
I brought Snowball an old pillow that my wife had used as a pew pad and he slept in front of the fire that night.
I woke up in pain. Oh, it was nothing serious—just the aftereffects of my tussle with Snowball the previous night. When I’d gone to bed I had fully intended to investigate the upper room that morning, but now my body would protest even going up the stairs, and rebel completely if I tried to do any real labor.
Besides, it had probably just been the rats.
I’ve said before that my church is an old one—it goes back over a hundred years. Early in its existence it gained a colony of rats and became part of an ecosystem involving rodents, the local farmer’s fields, and itself. Usually the rats are not much of a problem, confining themselves to the lower sections of the church and to hollows just outside the foundations. Only during harsh winters do they tend to congregate in the warmth down below to the extent that they become a nuisance.
Although they apparently had discovered some new passageway up into the bell tower, I decided to go into the basement to see if they’d again reached problem population. Over the years I’d developed a nice operational definition (a term I learned in a psychology class) for too many rats. ” If I could go into the boiler room and spot two rats within the first two minutes, then I knew their population was too high. In ordinary times, one could wait over an hour without even hearing a rat walk by.
Snowball had awakened with me, so I asked if he’d like to join me, and he followed along. I retrieved my flashlight from the broom closet and set off down the stairs. Most of the basement is given over to abandoned meeting rooms and a kitchen with cobwebs in the cupboards, but the boiler room was fairly close to the bottom of the stairs, and we arrived at the door swiftly.
The door was unlocked so we went right inside, then stood quietly, listening. Snowball purred and bumped my legs, but he didn’t seem interested in exploring the boiler area. I couldn’t hear anything in the first couple of minutes, so I snapped on the light. No sign of rats here. I took the flashlight and poked into various nooks and crannies, but to no avail—there wasn’t a rat in sight.
Now that was odd in itself—not to see any rats even when I went to look for them with a flashlight. I decided to take the stepladder from the corner and climb up to look in the crawl space. There were always rats up there. Always.
Despite the protestations of my stiff and sore body, I climbed the ladder and peered over the edge into the crawl space. It was dark in there so I shone the flashlight into the gloom. Nothing. No beady eyes looking back. Nothing scurrying away into the shadows. Not a rat anywhere.
There were, however, bones. Little bones. Pointy bones. Most looked to still have meat on them. I reached in and grabbed one of the nearer bones and looked it over. It was a leg bone, but the foot was still attached. The foot had yet to dry out, had yet to begin decaying and stinking.
Something had killed off all the rats in the past couple of days. I looked at Snowball. The rats I’d had in the past were his size or better, and Snowball was as unmarked as a kitten could be.
“This is most curious,” I told him. “You aren’t keeping secrets from me, are you Snowball?” I asked, but he wasn’t talking.
I heard the sound again the next two days, always just after dusk. But these times it lasted for only a minute each time, and was gone before I could even decide to go upstairs to try again to find out its cause.
But it was in the dead of night on that second day that I finally discovered the origin of the noise, and Snowball’s secret.
I awoke in the dark, fished my spectacles off the nightstand, and saw from the clock that it was two in the morning. I also noticed that Snowball was not sleeping at my feet, though these past few mornings I had always left him there at night and found him there in the morning.
Despite the hour, this was one of those late night awakenings where I had really come fully awake, and decided I might as well use the bathroom and perhaps read for a while until I grew sleepy again.
It suddenly occurred to me—and looking back on the event it was as if the Lord whispered to me—that now would be a good time to search for the cause of the perplexing sound.
I did use the bathroom, then took my flashlight and my tools and crept slowly up the stairs. Though I felt silly doing it, I even avoided the creaky boards, just in case some spirit, human or otherwise, might be listening. The brief trip to the narrow staircase was also done silently, but I knew there was no way I could do the same going up those stairs.
I set the flashlight upright on its tail end for illumination, then fairly charged up those stairs, screwdriver and hammer in hand. With a few swift strokes and a little prying the locking boards fell off and I flung open the door.
It was pitch dark in there, but I heard scurrying and swift scampering, hisses and meows. I recalled there was a light switch just inside the room, and with a quick prayer that the bulb was still working and that time or rats hadn’t damaged the wires, I flipped it on.
It worked. Light flooded the room. The secret was revealed.
The room was full of kittens. Or runt cats, maybe, just like Snowball. They were all clustered in the corners except for a few that dove down through the hole to the storage room below. They were of a multiplicity of colors; black, white, orange, striped. But none were larger than a several-month-old kitten.
And they were all looking at me.
Then my Snowball separated himself from the others and came before me. He sat down and stared at me, and uttered a plaintive meow. He got up again and bumped my leg with his head. I picked him up. He purred loudly. “Just what am I going to do about this, Snowball?” I asked him.