In the Shadow of the Ears

In the depths of the void, there is darkness. The darkness roils, a shapeless, hungry mass.
It is waiting to take form.

The year is 1928. Walt Disney is the owner of a struggling cartoon studio, and has just lost the rights to his one successful cartoon series. Reeling from the treachery of his staff and the theft of his creation, Disney realizes he needs an entirely new character to keep his floundering company from going under. In desperation he reaches out for a muse... and it is the Mouse that answers.

A brush intrudes into the deep void of the ink bottle. It emerges, dripping with black ink, and hovers above a blank canvas...

Disney is not getting enough sleep. Memories of a long-dead mouse haunt his dreams - the scrabbling of tiny paws beneath the kitchen cabinet, glimpses of teeth and ears and whiskers. Disney believes he can banish the dreams by granting them shape and form - and grant a new lease on life for his collapsing studio as well. The mouse - a rodent, a vermin long associated with disease and evil and decay - is recast anew as a cartoon character. "Mortimer," Disney names it at first, a name that recalls morbidity and mortuaries, but the dreams do not diminish, until his wife Lillian, thrashing beside him in her sleep, suddenly awakens, eyes ablaze. "Mickey!" she gasps. "His name is Mickey!"

And so the Mouse is named.

An empty white canvas. A drop of darkest ink, teetering on the edge of a brush. The ink drop falls...

Ub Iwerks is Disney's most trusted animator - one of the few who stayed steadfast and loyal when Disney lost the rights to his cartoon - and it is to Iwerks that Disney entrusts the task of giving the Mouse physical shape and form.

Huddled together in the darkened animation studio, Disney and Iwerks labor over the alchemy of their creation. Iwerks puts pencil to paper, and the Mouse's anatomy emerges: the elongated snout, the buttoned trousers, the mischievious smile, the whip of a tail, the black dot eyes. It is less like drawing from the imagination, and more like uncovering a long-buried statue. It is an excavation; an unearthing.

Iwerks' sketch is complete. The Mouse is a still figure smiling impishly out of the canvas. Disney leans over the sketch, mouth moving wordlessly. Iwerks has designed the Mouse's form: it is Disney who animates it and brings it to life.




The blot of ink seeps into the white canvas. It stares out at you like the accusing eye of a mute beast. It is not complete. You know what you have to do.

Black and white is the Mouse, roguish and amorous as it cavorts silently on the screen - but its antics are not well received; it disturbs rather than amuses. Perhaps this should be the end of it: for the Mouse to briefly flit into existence from the mind of a haunted animator, and then to disappear just as quickly into obscurity. But Disney's distant muse intervenes once more.

In the silent stillness of the night, the Mouse's high-pitched squeak wrenches him out of his sweat-drenched sleep. And Disney knows what it is he must do.

It is November 1928. The first cartoon with a synchronized soundtrack makes its highly acclaimed debut. "Steamboat Willie" - the suspiciously phallic title of the animated short - combines sound and animation to sublime effect, masking the Mouse's true nature beneath a glamor of music and merriment. It is hailed as a breakthrough, the passing of a hitherto unknown event horizon.

The Mouse is loosed upon the world.

Slowly, tentatively, two more dots join the dark sphere of the blot, their edges brushing against it. The blot swells, seeming to gather the smaller dots in its shadowy embrace. From three black circles upon the white canvas, a new shape emerges.

The visage of the Mouse.

In the years after the Mouse's debut, other creatures have since been born of Disney's fevered imagination. The Duck of Rage. The Halfwit Hound of Lunacy and Chaos. The Terrifying Tree Rodent Twins. The Twisted Princesses. But all of them are eclipsed by the silhouette of the Mouse That Must Not Be Mentioned.

Its symbol has been engraved upon our consciousness. Without warning, it could appear anywhere, at any time. It could be three coins, falling upon the ground in that ominous order. It could be a desk imprinted with coffee rings: the remnant stains of long-forgotten coffee cups, by questionable coincidence forming three overlapping circles. It could be an innocuous paragraph, the letter O and the number zero conspiring to shape that odious pattern.

How could we have been so blind? The mystics have long warned us to be wary of things that come in three, and we have always known that there is much power in the forming of a circle. What more power then, the elegant grace and might of those three circles? Wherever you see that sign, know that the Mouse has marked that space for its own. Do not gaze too long into the depths of that abyss, for before long it will turn its gaze upon you.

But we are not the Mouse's true targets. It is too soon forgotten that the most ancient magic required the willing sacrifice of innocent blood. And what is it that we have done to appease the Mouse's demands? To what idol do we turn our young to, when the toil of caring for them becomes too much? Who is it that we have cast into that forbidding maw, to sate the Mouse's hunger?

It has tasted the blood of our young, and now its hunger grows. The process has already begun...

The Mouse will consume our children.