Magnus Powermouse Read online

  Contents

  1 Do Not Exceed the Stated Dose

  2 Nasty Cat!

  3 The Ghost

  4 Too Too Solid Flesh

  5 Uncle Roland

  6 Magnus Earns His Name

  7 To the Potting Shed

  8 Daddy Means ‘Thank You’

  9 Jim the Rat

  10 The Seventh Buck

  11 Fit for a King

  12 Nightmare

  13 I’ll Be Jugged!

  14 A Scream of Brakes

  15 Squash You Flat!

  16 A Good Square Meal

  17 Tailpiece

  About the Author

  Dick King-Smith served in the Grenadier Guards during the Second World War, and afterwards spent twenty years as a farmer in Gloucestershire, the county of his birth. Many of his stories are inspired by his farming experiences. Later he taught at a village primary school. His first book, The Fox Busters, was published in 1978. He wrote a great number of children’s books, including The Sheep-Pig (winner of the Guardian Award and filmed as Babe), Harry’s Mad, Noah’s Brother, The Queen’s Nose, Martin’s Mice, Ace, The Cuckoo Child and Harriet’s Hare (winner of the Children’s Book Award in 1995). At the British Book Awards in 1991 he was voted Children’s Author of the Year. In 2009 he was made an OBE for services to children’s literature. Dick King-Smith died in 2011 at the age of eighty-eight.

  Discover more about Dick King-Smith at:

  dickkingsmith.com

  Some other books by Dick King-Smith

  BLESSU

  DINOSAUR SCHOOL

  DINOSAUR TROUBLE

  DUMPLING

  FAT LAWRENCE

  THE FOX BUSTERS

  GEORGE SPEAKS

  THE GOLDEN GOOSE

  HARRY’S MAD

  THE HODGEHEG

  THE JENIUS

  JUST BINNIE

  LADY DAISY

  THE MAGIC CARPET SLIPPERS

  MAGNUS POWERMOUSE

  MARTIN’S MICE

  THE MOUSE FAMILY ROBINSON

  POPPET

  THE QUEEN’S NOSE

  THE SCHOOLMOUSE

  THE SHEEP-PIG

  SMASHER

  THE SWOOSE

  UNDER THE MISHMASH TREES

  THE WATER HORSE

  ONE

  Do Not Exceed the Stated Dose

  Madeleine was a country girl. You could hear it in her speech, especially when she was excited. She carefully examined the new arrivals and then suddenly drew back, her black eyes round with surprise, her hair on end.

  ‘Crumbs!’ cried Madeleine loudly. ‘Just look at thik girt hummock!’ And had there been others there to look, they would have seen five normal newborn pink babies, each the size of a little finger-nail, and a sixth that was newborn and pink but most definitely not normal, so huge and strong and active was it.

  Already, at half an hour of age, it was beginning to crawl blindly about the nest, steamrollering its way over its brothers and sisters, and lifting its blunt snout hungrily in the air.

  ‘Crumbs!’ said Madeleine again. ‘He’s as big as a baby rat! Whatever will his father say?’

  The father of the six was a mouse of a different colour. Not only had he a dark grey coat, in contrast to Madeleine’s warm brown, but he had come originally from a very different background. He had been born in fact behind the panelling of a room in an Oxford college, and had travelled down to Somerset as a youngster, quite by mistake, in a trunk full of clothes. The occupant of the room had been a Professor of Classics, and with such a history of culture behind him Madeleine’s husband considered himself several cuts above country mice. His name was Marcus Aurelius.

  Marcus Aurelius had his own private den, close to the sitting-room fireplace. Later that day he rose from his bed of torn newspaper, where he had been reading snippets of the Western Daily Press. He made his way down the passage behind the sitting-room wainscot that led to the family home. This was in a hole in the wall at the back of the larder. It was the beginning of winter, and as usual they had come into the warmth of the cottage from their summer residence under the raised wooden floor of the pigsty at the bottom of the garden.

  He found his wife, looking, it seemed to him, rather worried, sitting in the middle of her nest. Of babies he could see no sign.

  ‘Well, Maddie my dear,’ he said, peering shortsightedly, for reading in a bad light had weakened his eyes, ‘when are we to hear the patter of tiny feet?’

  ‘Oh, Markie, Markie!’ cried Madeleine in a distracted voice. ‘Tidden the patter of tiny feet we shall hear. Tis the thunder of hugeous girt big ’uns!’ And she rolled upon her side to show what lay beneath her.

  Marcus Aurelius gave a squeak of amazement at the sight which met his myopic eyes. Five feeble babies, already more blue than pink, fumbled weakly in search of their mother’s milk; but in vain. Only too plainly it had all been drunk, by the red swollen sausage-shaped monster that lay distended in the centre of the nest. And even as the horrified father watched, the giant baby bestirred itself, bullocking its way through the others and knocking them flying as it made once more for the milk-bar.

  At last Marcus Aurelius found his voice, after a fashion. Normally long-winded, the shock reduced him to a series of gasps.

  ‘Never in all my . . . what on earth . . . how?’ he gulped.

  ‘Oh, Markie,’ said Madeleine in low tones, as though fearful that the huge infant might overhear her. ‘I’ve never seen such a big ’un neither. And it ain’t a changeling, if that’s what you’re thinking, it’s mine all right, I should know. And as for “how”, I can’t rightly tell. Must be something I ate.’

  She sounded so miserable that Marcus immediately set himself to comfort her.

  ‘Now, now, dear girl,’ he said briskly. ‘You must look upon the bright side. The, er, boy – it is a boy? Yes – is a magnificent specimen of mousehood, beyond any shadow of doubt. A great credit to you, Maddie my love, very great.’ He paused. ‘Very great indeed,’ he went on absently.

  ‘Yes, but what about t’others, poor little mites?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Marcus. ‘The others. Yes. Indeed. Well, my dear, it would appear to me that their chances of survival, are, to say the least of it, thin, very thin.’ He paused. ‘Very thin indeed,’ he mused.

  ‘Talk plain,’ said Madeleine perplexedly. ‘D’you mean you think the other five are going to . . .?’

  ‘Snuff it,’ said Marcus Aurelius shortly. And by next morning they had.

  At sunrise Marcus left the cottage through a hole that emerged behind a stone flower-trough by the back door, and ran down the garden path towards the pigsty. Unable to stand the sight of the five weakening babies and, especially, the one that seemed to grow larger and stronger by the minute, he had spent the night alone in his newspaper bed, much of it in deep thought. Always his mind came back to Madeleine’s words. ‘Must be something I ate,’ she had said.

  The pigsty was really a double one, but the cottagers, since they only ever fattened one pig at a time, used the other half of the covered-in section as a food store. In spring and summer time the mice found this an admirable arrangement, but in the autumn the pig would disappear, they never knew where, and there would be no food in the store.

  Now, as Marcus ran up the drainhole into the sty, there was nothing in the outer run but a lingering smell of disinfectant. Inside was the empty staging, and, next door, the food store, swept clean of the last particles of barley meal.

  But on top of one of the meal bins, Marcus noticed, was a large cardboard packet, and he ran up the wall and scuttled across to look at it.

  At first he could not decipher the printed writing on it, but then he realized it had been left upside down. He hung head downward from the top o
f it, balancing himself with his long tail, and could now clearly read it:

  Pennyfeather’s Patent Porker Pills

  Add one pill per day to a normal fattening ration

  You will be amazed at the weight gain

  There followed a long selection of extracts from letters from satisfied users and a list of the various ingredients of the pills, and then finally a single sentence, printed in red capitals:

  WARNING: DO NOT EXCEED

  THE STATED DOSE

  ‘Oh no,’ said Marcus Aurelius to himself, ‘she could not have done so foolish a thing. Surely not? No, no, the packet is unopened. They cannot long have bought it. It must be for next year’s pig.’

  He slid down the packet and ran all round it. And there, in the back bottom corner, was a small hole, a hole which something had nibbled, a hole which, as he nudged at it with his nose, expelled one round shiny white pill, the size of an aspirin.

  Marcus ran out of the pigsty and back up the path to the cottage. So preoccupied was he with his whirling thoughts that he almost bumped into the cat as it came out of the flap in the back door.

  Once in the family home, he confronted his wife as she lay and nursed the giant child, alone now in the nest.

  ‘Maddie, my dear,’ said Marcus Aurelius. ‘Recently, that is to say, in our summer residence, did you eat anything at all out of the ordinary?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Markie,’ replied Madeleine. ‘Though of course we all do tend to fancy some funny things at these times. No, just barley meal, bit of flaked maize, the pick of the pigswill. Oh, wait a minute though. There was a cardboard packet on top of the bin, had some big round sweets in it. I opened it up myself just about the time these babies – this baby, I do mean, oh dear! – was started. I fancied them, Markie, they was nice! I ate one every day.’

  ‘Oh, Maddie, Maddie!’ said Marcus Aurelius, more in sorrow than in anger. ‘Did you not read what was written on that packet?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Markie dear,’ said Madeleine comfortably. ‘You knows I can’t read.’

  TWO

  Nasty Cat!

  If only Madeleine had let well alone. If, that is, you could say that things were well, when the monster baby mouse, now three weeks old, was already almost as big as his mother and constantly, incessantly, demanding food.

  At first Madeleine tried to manage alone, not wishing to disturb Marcus Aurelius from his regular routine of reading and contemplation, but the strain of constant foraging to supplement her dwindling milk supply was too much for her; and soon both parents were continually on the run, searching everywhere for anything remotely edible to offer to the ravenous baby, like two little birds feeding a cuckoo child.

  But if only Madeleine could have left it at that. Perhaps they would have managed somehow. Perhaps the creature would not have become much larger, for its rate of growth did seem to be slowing down.

  As it was, there came a morning when she said to her husband, tiredly (for they had been up all night scavenging), ‘It’s no good, Markie, we’ll have to try those sweets.’

  ‘Sweets, my dear?’ panted Marcus Aurelius, breathless from the effort of dragging into the nest a crust of bread, fallen from the cottagers’ table. ‘What sweets?’

  ‘The ones in that packet,’ said Madeleine. ‘The ones I was telling you about. Down at our summer house. You know. I took them. When I was expecting. I found them ever so filling, so maybe they’d fill him up.’

  Marcus peered consideringly at their son, who had already devoured most of the bread and was chomping his way through what was left with ceaselessly moving jaws.

  ‘Ah, the Porker Pills, my dear. Ahum. Would you really consider such a course of action to be wise?’

  ‘Dunno about wise,’ said Madeleine. ‘But we’d be fools not to try it. I’m fair working my claws to the bone for him. Listen to him now.’ The huge baby, his crust finished, was making loud use of his first and favourite word.

  ‘More!’ he yelled. ‘More! More!’

  ‘Well, Maddie,’ said Marcus Aurelius, ‘you may be right. But you must also ask yourself whether, in view of the season of the year and the sheer physical difficulties of transporting the material, such a course is practicable?’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Can we do it? Can we, in short, bunt, butt, shunt, shove or otherwise propel such an awkward object as a Porker Pill all the way up the path in the wind and rain? I make no mention of the cat.’

  ‘Mebbe not,’ said Madeleine, ‘but we don’t have to. We’ll go back down there, to the pigsty. And then he can make a proper pig of himself.’

  ‘It will be very cold,’ said Marcus doubtfully, for his newspaper nest in the sitting-room wall was no more than three feet from the fireplace and beautifully warm in winter.

  ‘It won’t be for long,’ said Madeleine. ‘He’ll soon be able to look after himself and then we can come back indoors. And there’s another thing. We’ll have to get him out of here soon anyways or he won’t never get out. He’ll be too big.’

  Some days later, when they made the move, the truth of Madeleine’s words was plain to see, for it took the combined efforts of both parents to force the massive body of their child through the hole behind the stone flower-trough. They had chosen their moment carefully. The cottagers were at work at the other end of the garden, and the cat, Marcus had carefully noted, was asleep in front of the sitting-room fire. Madeleine made haste down the path, calling to her son to follow, for he was inclined to linger and investigate the strange sights and smells of the outside world. Behind him Marcus Aurelius fussed and fretted, anxious to be under cover. In his agitation he actually resorted to the use of slang.

  ‘Skedaddle, lad!’ he cried to the lumbering infant. ‘Stir your stumps! Look lively! Put your foot down! Get your skates on! Step on the gas!’

  ‘He means “hurry”!’ cried Madeleine over her shoulder.

  As they neared safety a strange thing happened. A blackbird, disturbed from the nearby hedge, flew suddenly low over the three mice with a loud cry of alarm. Madeleine shot into the drainhole of the sty while Marcus instinctively froze in his tracks. But the great baby, far from showing fear, made an angry leap at the bird as it passed and chattered shrilly with rage, his little jaws clacking together upon the empty air.

  Once inside the food store, the parents’ first action was to nose out from the packet one of Pennyfeather’s Patent Porker Pills. Having rolled it on to the floor, they manoeuvred it under the wooden staging where their waiting child immediately fell upon it with little grunts of greed. They watched him, awestruck.

  ‘Do you know, Maddie,’ said Marcus Aurelius in a low voice, ‘that not only was he not frightened by that blackbird, but he actually tried to assail it?’

  ‘Assail it?’

  ‘Attack it. Have a go at it.’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘He did, I give you my word.’

  Madeleine shook her head in bewilderment as they watched this strange son of theirs gorging upon the Porker Pill.

  ‘He hasn’t got a name, Markie,’ she said in a distracted voice. ‘I was thinking just now, when I called him to hurry. We must give him a name, it don’t make no sense to go on calling him Baby like I’ve been doing.’

  ‘Very true, my dear,’ said Marcus. ‘Undoubtedly he needs a name befitting his great size.’

  ‘Well, that ought to be easy enough,’ said Madeleine. ‘I remember you telling me your family nest was lined with pages from dictionaries and lexicons and suchlike when you was up at Oxford. What’s the Latin for “great”?’

  ‘Magnus.’

  ‘Magnus,’ said Madeleine consideringly. ‘I like the sound of that. Yes. We’ll call him Magnus.’ And as if to celebrate the occasion, the newly named Magnus set up his customary cry of ‘More! More!’ and off went his parents to fetch another pill.

  By midday he had eaten three. He lay, sated and asleep at last, in the old summer nest of hay and straw and dried moss, and it seeme
d to Madeleine and Marcus Aurelius that he had grown appreciably in size since the morning. A fourth Porker Pill was clasped in his powerful forearms, ready for the moment of waking.

  ‘They don’t seem to have done him no harm,’ said Madeleine.

  ‘Certainly that voracious appetite would seem, if only temporarily, to have been gratified,’ said Marcus.

  ‘You mean he’s had enough.’

  ‘Just so. Indeed it occurs to me that, were we to supply the boy –’

  ‘Magnus.’

  ‘– were we to supply Magnus with an adequate ration – a dozen of these things should last him for some long time – we might leave him here and return to the cottage. I find this place distinctly chilly.’

  ‘Chilly?’ said Madeleine in a voice that was positively icy. ‘Marcus Aurelius, you find it chilly, do you?’

  Marcus flinched inwardly at her use of his full and proper name, a sure sign of trouble, but he persisted bravely. ‘Indeed I do, my dear. I am no longer a young mouse, you know.’

  ‘But Magnus,’ said Madeleine distinctly, ‘is a young mouse. A very young mouse. Don’t you think he might find it chilly? All by himself?’

  ‘I doubt it, my dear,’ said Marcus earnestly. ‘The young do not feel the cold as we older ones do. And the boy, er, Magnus, that is, has a thick coat of hair now, very thick.’ He paused. ‘Very thick indeed.’

  ‘Marcus Aurelius!’

  ‘Yes, dear?’

  ‘Scarper!’

  ‘I beg your pardon, my dear?’

  ‘Push off!’ said Madeleine angrily.

  ‘But . . . what about you?’

  ‘Me? I shall stay with little Magnus of course,’ said Madeleine, and she ranged herself protectively alongside the sleeping infant, now nearly twice her size.

  Marcus Aurelius was sorely tempted to leave. The afternoon air was indeed cold, and the picture of himself curled up in his fireside nest with an interesting extract from The Somerset Guardian was clear in his mind. But what he would have decided was not to be known, for at that moment there was a heavy thump on the wooden staging above their heads and the air of the pigsty was filled with the strong reek of cat.