A complex mouse habitat, Lou thought. Just the sort of thing the eccentric kid of a hundred knots would build.

Then he stopped and caught his breath. The surface of the castle was moving.

“Get it?” Joey asked proudly. “The mice aren’t my pets. They’re the food for my pets.”

“Pet what?” Lou asked, his voice breaking between the words.

He remained fixed to where he was standing, unable to advance as he struggled to sort out what he was seeing.

“Termites,” Joey said simply. “Beautiful, aren’t they?”

“Termites?”

Lou could see them now—a sheet of constant motion coating virtually the entire castle. He managed a couple of baby steps toward them.

Termites—huge termites, some of them half an inch long or more.

“Joey, I’m not any kind of a bug expert, but I do know that termites eat wood, not mice.”

Lou tried with minimal success to tie the bizarre scene to the events surrounding Joey’s nearly amputated thumb, and the other strange behaviors he’d observed since coming to Kings Ridge.

“You watch and then tell me what these guys can and cannot eat,” Joey said.

He removed his arm from the sling and used it to hold the animal container while he removed one of the mice by its tail and set it in a mason jar with a cotton ball on the bottom. The other mouse he placed in the wire cage.

“I have to knock this fellow out first,” Joey said. “The termites won’t eat them if they’re dead, and I don’t want them to feel any pain.”

Lou watched, transfixed, as Joey poured a bit of liquid onto the cotton ball.

Chloroform.

In seconds, the mouse was on its side.

Joey used a long forceps to pick up the limp animal. Then he removed the rubber stopper from the Lucite access tube, set the mouse inside, and nudged it onto the small trapdoor with a thin stick, all the while, softly whistling the theme from The Andy Griffith Show.

Then, after giving Lou a final look at the ingenious setup, the cook pushed down the lever opening the trapdoor.

Instantly, the lower third of the princess’s castle flowed like lava onto the inert mouse, covering every millimeter of it. There was a loud clicking noise that reminded Lou of rain pelting against a tin roof.

More insects—huge heads with black pinchers and yellow bodies—poured or flew around it. The clicking sounds intensified as the swarm became more frenzied. The animal corpse, for surely it was already that, was now encased in a ball of clamoring insects at least three inches around, each trying to burrow down onto the meal. Then, just as quickly as the termites advanced, they began to retreat back to and into the mound. The clicking decreased in volume until it could no longer be heard.