He reached the old familiar house and stood at its closed front door. Taking off the helmet, he called out again:
‘Foskins, are you in there?’
He banged on the door but the house remained silent.
Hell, I’ll have to go in, he thought. At least, if there were any rats, they’ll have all cleared out by now.
He peered through the broken window but could see nothing through the gloom, the surrounding trees and undergrowth preventing a lot of the light from penetrating into the interior of the house. Returning to his car, he brought out a torch from the glove compartment then went back to the house. He shone the light through the window and saw nothing but two old mildewed armchairs and a heavy wooden sideboard. He drew back at the stench that wasn’t due entirely to the must of age. He tried to open the front door but it was firmly locked. He then went round towards the back.
What must have been at one time the kitchen overlooked the muddy canal and its door was slightly ajar.
He pushed it open gently, its creak the only sound that broke the uneasy silence.
He went in.
The smell that assailed his nostrils was even stronger than before and he quickly replaced his helmet in the hope that it would act as a mask. The kitchen still had crockery in its sink, now dusty with time; cobwebs hung across the windows and from the corners of the small room; ashes, still lying in the fireplace, uncleared from its last fire. Whoever had lived here had left in a hurry.
Harris opened a door and went into a dark hall, switching on his torch although he was still able to see enough without it. He stopped outside a door that, as a child, when the lock-keeper had let him and his friends visit, he’d never been allowed to enter. Not that there had been any mystery on the other side, but because the lock-keeper had said it was a private room, a room used for rest and reading the Sunday papers. He didn’t understand why, but the unknown room presented him with deep apprehension, fear looming up inside his very soul. Nervously he turned the handle and pushed against the door, slowly at first but then swiftly and firmly, letting go so that it crashed against the wall.
It was almost completely dark, the dusty lace curtains across the window no longer allowing light to pass through its fine mesh. He shone the torch around the walls, searching and dreading what he might find. It seemed to have been converted into a study; a round globe stood in one corner, a blackboard in another; on the walls were drawings of animals, bone structures, variations of species; a long book-case, crammed with huge volumes; a desk piled with maps and drawings.
Harris flashed the light back to the blackboard. The chalk drawing on its surface, faded and difficult to distinguish in the poor light seemed to be of a - he removed his helmet for better vision and moved closer.
The thin pointed head, the long body, heavy haunches, slender tail - yes, it was unmistakeably a rat. And yet - it was hard to see in the poor light there appeared to be something odd about it.
A noise from somewhere downstairs abruptly broke his thoughts.
‘Foskins, is that you?’ he shouted.
For a moment, there was silence, but then he heard another sound. A faint scuffling noise. He hurried back to the door and called Foskins’ name again. Silence and then a dull thump coming, it seemed, from the back of the house, below.
He edged quietly down the hall, one hand on the wall to steady himself. Opposite the kitchen was another door he hadn’t noticed before, but now he remembered it from his childhood. It was the door to the cellar and it wasn’t quite closed.
He pushed it wide and shone the torch down the steep flight of stairs but was only able to see a small area at the bottom.
‘Foskins?’
He took a tentative step down and almost retched at the nauseating smell. He saw that the bottom of the door had been chewed away. If the zoologist had brought mutant rats into the country, this must have been where he’d kept them, Harris told himself, allowing them to breed – encouraging them. But what had happened to him? Killed byhis own monsters? And once he was dead, there would have been nothing to control their rapid growth in numbers. But the cellar must be empty now - the sound-beams would have cleared them out. But what of the rat on his car? It didn’t seem affected by them. Perhaps there were others like it.
Turn back, or go on?
He’d come this far, it would be an utter waste not to continue his search. He descended the stairs.
As he reached the bottom, he saw there was a faint light shaft coming from some point ahead. He trailed his torch along the ground towards it and discovered many white objects littered around the floor. With a gasp he recognised them as bones - many resembling human bones. If this had been a rat’s nest, they must have dragged their human victims down here, to gorge themselves in safety, or perhaps to feed their young.
He flashed the torch from side to side and discovered cages set around the room, their meshwork of wire torn away, their bottoms filled with straw andmore white objects. He played his beam back towards the small shaft of light and then realised where it came from. It was another torch, the kind kept on key-rings, giving out a weak pinpoint of light, enough to allow a person to find a keyhole in the dark.
It was lying next to a body and with dread in his heart, Harris directed his torch over it.
The lifeless eyes of Foskins stared brightly towards the ceiling. He was hard to recognise for his nose had gone and one cheek was flapped open wide, but Harris instinctively knew it was the ex-Under-Secretary. The lower half of his face was covered in blood and there was something moving at his crimson, open throat. A black rat was feeding on him, drinking the red liquid with greedy gulping motions.
It stopped as the light was shone fully on it, two evil slanted eyes, yellow and malevolent, glaring directly at the bright torch.
As Harris took an involuntary step back, the broad beam took in the rest of the mutilated corpse. The clothes were in shreds, an arm seemed to be almost torn from the body. On the exposed chest, a hole gaped where the heart had once been. Another rat lay half across the corpse’s body, its head buried into the lifeless man’s intestines, oblivious in its greed to the presence of another human. In his other hand, Foskins held an axe in a death-grip, its head buried into the skull of another giant rat. Another of the vermin lay dead nearby.
It was as though the whole scene was frozen in Harris’s mind, as if his eyes had acted as a camera lens and had snapped the macabre scene into timeless immobility.
Although he couldn’t have stood there for more than two seconds, it seemed like an age, like a void in time that couldn’t be measured in hours or minutes.
Dimly, through his shock, something else registered in his mind. Something lurked in the far comer.
Bloated and pale.
Indefinable.
The paralysing catalepsy was suddenly broken as the rat at Foskins’s throat broke loose and leapt towards the light.
Harris stumbled backwards, tripping over bones, landing fiat on his back. He lost his grip on the torch and it went skidding along the floor, fortunately not breaking. As he lay there slightly stunned, he realised he was not wearing his protective helmet, and it, too, was lost from his grasp. He felt heavy paws clambering along his body, towards his exposed face. He managed to catch the rat by its throat as it was about to sink its teeth into his flesh. The fetid breath from the creature’s jaws, inches from Harris’s face, struck even more terror into his mind. The rat appeared to be even larger and heavier than the giant species, similar to the one on his car. He rolled over desperately, his feet kicking out and landing a lucky blow on the head of the other approaching rat.