The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear. / A rat crept softly...

This is the Tale of Mr. Stinkerbutt, his sudden transformation into the awful Gigas Mus, and his untimely demise.

Once upon a time, in a charming townehouse situated at the outskirts of a large county, there lived four beautiful damsels called Erin, Gina, Meg and Me -- and one squatter called Mr. Stinkerbutt.  For the first few months that the girls occupied the house, they were blissfully unaware of Mr. Stinkerbutt's presence.  Alas such ignorance could not last forever!  One chilly morning in winter, Meghan discovered she was unable to eat her last bagel for breakfast, because Someone Else had devoured it betwixt dusk and dawn, leaving only crumbs in the bag in the closet.  This was our very first introduction to that gluttonous, pilfering soul, Mr. Stinkerbutt.

Shortly thereafter, he made a second attack against our closet.  He seemed to favour Meg's shelf, shunning the dried goods on every other shelf, and nommed a giant hole into her loaf of bread.

Meg despairingly held up the remains of her bread the following day and commented in dismay, "He was stepping all over my onions!"

We set pretty little mouse traps for him.  They were girly traps - the kind where the vermin gets squashed inside a plastic container, and you never have to face the reality of blood, guts, and death.

He passed by the traps with disdain, and in an act of sheer villainy, desecrated one of Erin's apples during the night.

It was at this point that I discovered he had also shredded one of our paper towel rolls that we kept under the kitchen sink.  Clearly, he was declaring open war - well, it was really more like gorilla warfare: he struck in the night and vanished with a puff of smoke, leaving us to growl over the evidence of his presence.  We very seriously considered investing in a guard-python.

But then Mr. Stinkerbutt seemed to have moved on.  He still had not ventured into any of the traps, and he stopped snacking on our food.

Until one morning when we awoke to discover an epic display:

7 APPLES!

And check out the size of that bite on the 8th! (Nevermind Will Turner's head - that bite is 3/4"!)


A terrible reality struck us.  We had always imagined that Mr. Stinkerbutt, a grey little fellow, resembled the overstuffed but endearing Gus Gus, the brave and daring Despero, or the lightfooted Speedy Gonzales.

 

INSTEAD, his true nature becoming unmasked, he grew in our imaginations into the awful Gigas Mus.

I didn't even clean up the apples. I just skirted around them while I made my morning coffee and called my Papa.  "Papa, I think we have a RAT in the kitchen.  WHAT do I do?"  I explained the whole situation to him, first the bread and the single apple, then the SEVEN apples that the Nefarious Pilfering Glutton had devoured, and the size of his bite.  I also mentioned that I maintained a few doubts as to the verity of his rattiness, due to the small size of the hole through which I believed he was entering.  But Papa quickly dispelled those doubts: "A rat can dislocate all its bones, and fit through a hole the size of a quarter." Gross.

I got off the phone with him and called the landlady.  She was out, and her husband answered.  I explained to him that it was urgent she call me back, we had a rat.

And he laughed.  "A rat? Oh I doubt that.  Maybe it's a little field mouse coming in from the cold... but a rat? Hehehe..."  

Oooo.  I was not happy with him.  But see, I had a cold, and could not properly express myself as most of my words came out as silence, interjected here and there by a cough.

So I had to content myself with, "It's a rat, we know it's a rat, please have her call me back."

I hung up the phone with some very uncharitable thoughts.  Puck, in the meantime, had had a thought about a way to make the landlady's husband believe it was a rat, and took this opportunity to draw my attention to his idea. 

The Unconscious comes up with very startling things sometimes...

"You disturb me."

Never fear, I had no intention of going all mafioso on my landlady's husband, however condescending he was.  Neither was I going to sit idly twiddling my thumbs while I waited for the landlady to get back to me.  I marched out to the store and bought a nice big rat trap - the proper old-fashioned kind that allows you to stand in triumph over your vanquished enemy.  And I got him a body-bag with his name on it:

The next day the landlady called me back and said she was emailing me a number for Pest Control immediately and she was very sorry we had to deal with such a nasty thing and she was thoroughly grossed out.  As she should be.  And as we were.  A few days later the exterminator arrived to do an inspection.

Actually, he didn't look anything like Superman.  He didn't even look like Clark Kent.  But when you come to rescue a group of girls from a rodent (or bug or anything else creepy and unacceptable indoors) they will think of you as Superman, even if you are a short Indian guy named Raj. 

Who, incidentally, asked me a whole bunch of questions during the inspection about mechanical engineering school... Um...try and stay on point little hero.

Up to this point, all our effort has been in vain, and Giant still scurries about, very much alive and very much not interested in my trap smothered in peanut butter.  Hence, his demise is untimely precisely because it has not happened yet.  Superman is coming bright and early tomorrow morning, however, to do... whatever he does... and hopefully that will be the end of Gigas Mus.