‘But it’s what rats do!’ said Maurice.

‘But we feel we shouldn’t,’ said Dangerous Beans. ‘We should be making our own way in the world!’

‘Oh dear oh dear oh dear,’ said Maurice, shaking his head. ‘Ho for the island, eh? The Kingdom of the Rats! Not that I’m laughing at your dream,’ he added hastily. ‘Everyone needs their little dreams.’ Maurice truly believed that, too. If you knew what it was that people really, really wanted, you very nearly controlled them.

Sometimes he wondered what the stupid-looking kid wanted. Nothing, as far as Maurice could tell, but to be allowed to play his flute and be left alone. But … well, it was like that thing with the coconuts. Every so often the kid would come out with something that suggested he’d been listening all along. People like that are hard to steer.

But cats are good at steering people. A miaow here, a purr there, a little gentle pressure with a claw … and Maurice had never had to think about it before. Cats didn’t have to think. They just had to know what they wanted. Humans had to do the thinking. That’s what they were for.

Maurice thought about the good old days before his brain had started whizzing like a firework. He’d turn up at the door of the University kitchens and look sweet, and then the cooks would try to work out what he wanted. It was amazing! They’d say things like ‘Does oo want a bowl of milk, den? Does oo want a biscuit? Does oo want dese nice scraps, den?’ And all Maurice would have to do was wait patiently until they got to a sound he recognized, like ‘turkey legs’ or ‘minced lamb’.

But he was sure he’d never eaten anything magical. There was no such thing as enchanted chicken giblets, was there?

It was the rats who’d eaten the magical stuff. The dump they called ‘home’ and also called ‘lunch’ was round the back of the University, and it was a university for wizards, after all. The old Maurice hadn’t paid much attention to people who weren’t holding bowls, but he was aware that the big men in pointy hats made strange things happen.

And now he knew what happened to the stuff they used, too. It got tossed over the wall when they’d finished with it. All the old worn-out spell-books and the stubs of the dribbly candles and the remains of the green bubbly stuff in the cauldrons all ended up on the big dump, along with the tin cans and old boxes and the kitchen waste. Oh, the wizards had put up signs saying ‘Dangerous’ and ‘Toxic’, but the rats hadn’t been able to read in those days and they liked dribbly candle ends.

Maurice had never eaten anything off the dump. A good motto in life, he’d reckoned, was: don’t eat anything that glows.

But he’d become intelligent, too, at about the same time as the rats. It was a mystery.