Something had woken him.
Scraping and scuttling.
He sighed. The poison should have got them. Just like before.
Lifting the spluttering candle from his bedside table, he shuffled into the hall, trying not to wake Belinda.
Frantic shadows scurried and scampered across the walls.
The basement door lay open.
It smelled bad down there. He grabbed a hammer from the rack. That would sort them.
A noise. Was it Belinda?
“Honey?”
Scratching and scrabbling.
Red eyes flickered in the candlelight. Not one rat. Hundreds of them.
The hammer tumbled from his hand.
Before he could scream, they were on him.
Wrath : Retributory punishment to an offence
So, this story was inspired by another brilliant prompt from the wonderful : -
It had to contain the words Rat, Honey and Candle. The theme was to be Wrath or Joy. Obviously, me being me, I chose the former and I actually found it quite tough to nail the 100 words, but got there in the end. Then, I happened to look at the word “Wrath” and realised what the middle three letters are, so it worked out perfectly! Thanks very much Caro!
This is also my tribute to the late, great James Herbert whose book, “The Rats” was one of the first horror novels that I ever read. He maybe wasn’t as well known outside the UK, but his books regularly outsold Stephen King when they were published here, and lot of them were properly scary and gruesome, if not exactly subtle.
As King himself said :-
“His work had a raw urgency. Those books were bestsellers because many readers (including me) were too horrified to put them down.”
The irony is, my favourites were the ones that wouldn’t be classed as standard horror, like Survivor, Creed and Fluke. The latter probably inspired the first short story I wrote here :-
He was a brilliant writer who is sadly missed.
Anyway, I’ve rambled enough for one morning.
Thanks for reading. Until next time.
Reminds me of something Stephen King said in his 1983 Playboy interview:
"Anyway, though I wouldn’t censor myself, I was censored once. In the first draft of ‘Salem’s Lot, I had a scene in which Jimmy Cody, the local doctor, is devoured in a boardinghouse basement by a horde of rats summoned from the town dump by the leader of the vampires. They swarm all over him like a writhing, furry carpet, biting and clawing, and when he tries to scream a warning to his companion upstairs, one of them scurries into his open mouth and squirms there as it gnaws out his tongue. I loved the scene, but my editor made it clear that no way would Doubleday publish something like that, and I came around eventually and impaled poor Jimmy on knives. But, shit, it just wasn’t the same."
W-rat-h!! That's so good. It was speaking to you from within the word.
Excellent, Dan. As Sam noted too, my brain went straight to Lovecraft with this.
"Spluttering candle" captures a candle in that moment so well.
Cool footnote. Didn't think I've read any Herbert, sadly. I'll have to rectify that. Loved the snippet of trivia about King from Ari in the comments. I only just got round to Salem's Lot last year! That scene would have been great to have.