MICE
Every time I walked up the stairs there’d be this faint little whiff of death. Small death. Oddly, the smell of something dead is very similar to the smell of propane gas, that’s because they add sulfur chemicals to gas so when it leaks you notice it rather than ending existence unexpectedly in smell free silence. So for a brief hopeful period I convinced myself perhaps the tiny gas stove I make tea on was leaking instead. Which it was. Sadly, once I fixed the leak, the smell of dead something remained.
For several days no one else could smell it. I’d ask, “do you smell something dead?” and everyone would say no. Then one afternoon my friend Clare walked down the stairs and paused halfway.
“Yip,” she said. “Alison, something died.”
Now I had to go and find the fucker.
No matter how much you prepare yourself for discovering a dead thing, it’s still awful. Dead things insist we think about mortality in such a direct way. Small children understand this instinctively. They touch something gross and squeal and flap their hands around in horror while also remaining deeply fascinated. That’s essentially me, except middle-aged and mostly swearing softly under my breath rather than squealing.
I checked under the stairs because a week earlier I had discovered at least forty tiny carcasses in various stages of decay. One recently dead, the others reduced to fur, bones and vague mouse-shaped collapse. What can only be described as a mouse cemetery.
Although I had not laid any poison, I suspect someone before me had. People told me poisoned mice search desperately for water before they die. The poison, apparently, is designed to drive them outside. The theory struck me as plausible, but here was my crawl space beneath the stairs, not exactly on the way to water. The brook is more than thirty feet away. If you're dying of thirst, whether mouse or man, a cramped hole beneath the stairs seems an odd destination.
Yet here they were. Generation after generation of them.
Which made me wonder if these mice, rather than seeking water, had, like the myth about elephants, sought out a common ancestral place to die. The bones beneath my stairs lay tangled together in layers, generations of tiny mouse endings compressed into one hidden space. An archaeological record of mouse death spanning decades.
The cabin itself encourages these thoughts. It was built in the late 1960s by two gay men escaping both the Vietnam War and a world not especially welcoming to gay men who also didn’t want to go and fight in it. People tell me a lot of conscientious objectors came to this part of Vermont. People escape here. That’s one of the things Vermont is for - pacifists, idealists, artists, social reformers, back-to-the-landers, and people living somewhat outside mainstream American culture. And mice clearly move here too.
The cabin is hidden down a rough dirt drive and tucked into a hollow amidst a hemlock forest. Inside the house itself are hiding places within hiding places. A concealed attic entrance behind a removable wall in the little bedroom closet. A hidden space above the porch. Tiny areas made for concealment. Having watched many films about people hiding, I'm not convinced fake walls are especially effective. Surely, eventually, someone says, "Has anyone checked the attic?"
Still, there is something moving about the instinct behind it. Humans building secret places to disappear into, to keep what is precious hidden from menace for as long as possible. Unfortunately, romanticism aside, one of these hidden spaces appears to contain a dead mouse. Which meant I had to crawl through a tiny closet, remove a wall, and clamber up slats to investigate the attic space above the stairs where, judging by the smell, a mouse had gone to die.
The closet smells dry and stale, like old people’s clothing packed away in drawers. Gaining access involves fighting with a collection of old wire coat hangers I should have removed months ago. Wire coat hangers are uniquely infuriating objects. They snag on everything. On each other. On sleeves. On skin. On your soul. Trying to move a pile of wire coat hangers is almost as annoying as trying to free a stapler from plastic packaging. You always end up slightly injured and irrationally furious.
The coat hangers at least provided temporary distraction because underneath all the clanging metal was the constant smell of death. This was both gratifying and horrifying. Gratifying because it meant I was getting closer. Horrifying because it meant I was getting closer. Once I disentangled myself from the hangers I removed the hidden wall panel. Behind it a narrow shaft rose into darkness, a series of steep wooden slats leading to the attic above. More ladder than staircase. Climbing them requires an awkward scrambling, almost hand over hand.
I crawled up trying very hard not to imagine putting my hand directly onto a decomposing mouse. When I was seventeen I stepped barefoot on a dead mouse and I can still remember exactly how it felt between my toes. I shudder. Certain sensations wait patiently in the nervous system forever.
The attic space was over a hundred degrees. I climbed up and in and rested on the wooden board at the top and noticed the smell had almost disappeared. Good news, because if the mouse had died somewhere beneath the insulation and tar paper that cover the entire attic floor I would probably still be searching for it at Christmas. I shuffled backwards down the ladder slats and the smell strengthened immediately. Ahhh fuck, it’s in this space somewhere. But where?
Shuffling over to one side I shone my headlamp down into the narrow gap beside the wall, the wall joists obstructing my view. I shuffled closer, peering down. A tiny space, a cramped cavity, dropped down to the floor. And there they were. They. Dozens of tiny collapsed bodies packed at the bottom in the space between the joists, more than two arms lengths away. Some ancient enough to look almost archaeological. Others are merely old. Layer upon layer of mice who had apparently chosen this exact hidden cavity as the place to end their tiny mouse lives.
I shone my light down the next cavity. More dead mice. Another gap. More. An entire hidden civilization of mouse death. Finally, in the very last cavity, I found the semi-fresh one. The source of the smell. At this point it no longer smelled vaguely like propane. It smelled exactly like a dead mouse.
Relief that I had found it melted into what the fuck, a whole mouse cemetery that made the one under the stairs look like a feeble attempt at a graveyard. And then came the dawning question of how the fuck do you remove hundreds of dead mice from inside the walls of a house?
Other questions welled in my mind, less immediately practical. Surely in sixty years somebody else had discovered this? Surely at some point another homeowner smelled death and thought perhaps they should investigate further? Unless they simply possessed terrible sensory perception, which honestly, sounds immensely peaceful. Next life, I think, I would quite like a nose that notices absolutely nothing.
The only practical solution I could think of, save removing the walls, was vacuuming them out.
Unfortunately I did not own a vacuum. Clare and Paul accompanied me to the hardware store where, because I am there so often now buying strange repair items, they have given me a commercial account. Like American pharmacies, American hardware stores are one of life's great pleasures. In pharmacies you discover products like Fanny Cream, which means something rather different to a New Zealander than it does to an American, but either way you wonder why a cream specifically for your fanny? Hardware stores offer a similar experience. You can wander for hours thinking, "Oooh, who knew twine came in this many thicknesses?" and "What situation would require this particular clamp?" and "Do I need a drill bit one-sixteenth of an inch smaller than the drill bit I already own?" The answer to this question is probably yes.
The three of us wandered for a while, giggling and ooohing and ahhhing before I got down to the serious business of vacuums. Paul and I spent some time eying them up. Eventually I bought a wet-and-dry shop vac because, given my current life circumstances, wet and dry felt like it might be able to deal with old and new dead mice equally well.
Back at the house Clare very intelligently poured herself a gin and emotionally supported me from a deck chair placed at a safe distance. Paul suggested helpfully that this sounded “maybe like a two-person job?” but looked visibly relieved when I declined the offer. It’s my horror and I knew the space was barely big enough for me and the vacuum.
I unpacked the vacuum, barely glanced at the instructions, hauled extension cords and lights into place, got the generator going, forgot to plug things in correctly. This required multiple trips up and down the stairs. Smiling at Paul every time and muttering about forgetting the plug. Finally I climbed back into the sloped space armed with safety glasses, a mold mask and a plastic bag. Brownie training. Be prepared. Everything now functioning, I turned on the vacuum cleaner, actually mildly excited to be ready to get this fucking done.
The vacuum hose repeatedly clogged with compacted mouse remains. Which meant that after a few minutes of sucking I had to place a plastic bag over the end of the tube, switch the machine off and shake loose another dense plug of decomposed mice. Fur. Bones. Dust. Tiny generations compressed together. Then start again. And again. In one hundred-degree heat balanced halfway up the slatted space. It is difficult to adequately communicate how fucking gross this was.
I emerged from the attic drenched in sweat and existential despair. Red face marked by the mask, hair tangled. Clare looked up from her chair.
“Was it absolutely gross?”
“Oh my god,” I said. “That has to be one of the most hideous things I’ve ever done.” As I shook my body and waggled my arms to let the horror loose from my soul. Clare has known me for twenty-five years. She knows some of the hideous things I’ve done.
“Oooh,” she said softly. “Time for gin then?”
“Fuck yes, I’ll just go empty this”
I emptied the vacuum canister and discovered that beneath what was approximately three hundred dead mice, were the vacuum attachments and wheels I had assumed were missing from the box. Stored neatly inside the vacuum itself, genius space-saving design. So smart and efficient. Must read the instructions next time. Laughing, I walked towards Clare, who was standing there with an icy gin and tonic in her outstretched hand.