Scurry. We scurry. And scrabble. Best to keep moving. Here are worms that bite. Spiders that sting. Bats that scream with the wind. The light is bright, casting shadows sharp as knives. Ugly shadows of scurrying, scrabbling things. Shades of us.
The fire is bright, so bright, bright, bright. It shows our teeth, our tiny claws. It shows our souls which is this cave. This place of shadow and flame, rot and wind, worm and heat and hunger. This cave is us. We scrabble, we scurry. No getting out. We are in it. It is in us.
When we meet another rat-soul we fight! Tangle and screech and bite! Why? Ah, because we fear. And we hate. Hate! We loath. Loath! Loath. Disgusting creatures, we dead soul-rats.
When I was a man outside myself, instead of a rat within this hot rotting hell that is myself, I walked and talked in grand ways. Such grand ways! But deep in the caves of my head was always the rat thing, scrabbling, biting, whispering.
I did not wish to hurt the farmer I stabbed or the baker I hit, hiding the body in the well. Nor harm the maid or my brother. It was the scurrying rat inside me. I feared it, and it hated me. It hungered. All my life it nibbled, gnawed at me. Eventually it ate me up.
When the miller boy dragged my body into the pines, I thought, now at last I shall rest. I shall become a tree in the woods, drinking the sweet rain, the happy beams of light.
But the rat scrabbled in my breast. The light within shown bright, bright. Revealing this cave of rot and heat and shadow and worm that is me. Fight, bite, scrabble, scurry! This is what I am. All that was me is inside of me, and I cannot get it out of me.
YOU ARE READING
Barnaby the Wanderer
FantasyBeing the astonishing adventures of a widow's son journeying the Land of Saints, with a magic cat, a dark ghost and the map of a cursed tower; and what became thereof.
