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Rat-catcher ‘…a fantastic face came into sight…a whole fiery face… ‘Yes, a head of fire came toward them, at a man’s height, but with no body attached to it. The face shed fire, looked in the darkness like a flame shaped as a man’s face.’ ‘…they again saw the head of fire behind their two heads. It had followed them. And it must have run also, and perhaps faster than they, fore it seemed to be nearer to them. ‘At the same time, they began to perceiver a certain noise of which they could not guess the nature. They simply noticed that the sound seemed to move and to approach with the fiery face. It was a noise as though thousands of nails had been scraped against a blackboard, the perfectly unendurable noise that is sometimes made by a little stone inside the chalk that grates on the blackboard. ‘They continued to retreat, but the fiery face came on, came on, gaining on them. They could see its features clearly now. The eyes were round and staring, the nose a little crooked and the mouth large, with a hanging lower tip, very like the eyes, nose, and lip of the moon, when the moon is quite red, bright red. ‘How did that moon manage to glide through the darkness at a man’s height, with nothing to support it, at least apparently? And how did it go so fast, so straight ahead, with such staring, staring eyes? And what was that scratching, grating sound which it brought with it?’ ‘…swarming, living, “numerous” sound, for the sound was certainly made up of hundreds of little sounds that moved in the darkness under the fiery face. ‘And the fiery face came on…with its noise came…came level with them!… ‘And the two companions, flat against their wall, felt their hair stand on end with horror, for they now knew what the thousand noises meant. They came in a troop, hustled along in the shadow by innumerable little hurried waves, swifter than the waves that rush over the sands at high tide, little night-waves foaming under the moon, under the fiery head that was like a moon. And the little waves passed between their legs, climbing their legs…’ “Don’t move! Don’t move! Whatever you do, don’t come after me! … I am the rat-catcher! … Let me pass, with my rats! …” |
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