Horror Stories

Rap Rat

Ever heard of "Nightmare?" Like a lot of other games in the 90's, it came with a VHS which you timed with your play. The character on the video would give you instructions on what to do while you played the game in real-time. Being a scardy-cat, I refused to play it when my mom bought it for us. My brother was disappointed about not being able to play Nightmare, but my mom had a solution. She brought out "Rap Rat". It was a cheap, dingy little thing catered to kids my age; you went around the board, collected cheese, and the first player to reach the end would win. It seemed simple enough, and since it reminded us of "Mouse Trap" (which we didn't have), there were no objections. We popped the movie into the VHS and set up the board. The first part of the video was just a simple explanation of the rules as well as instructions on how the game worked.

Then, Rap Rat came onto the TV. He was... not what any of us had been expecting. My smaller brother, who was only three at the time, immediately left the room crying. The rat did not even resemble a rat. The ears were far too big. It had a mouth lined with two teeth, and the inside of the mouth looked almost swollen. The most striking part about the thing, though, was the eyes. They were large, glassy, and fish-like. I asked, then bothered, then begged my mom to turn it off. Rap Rat suddenly shouted loudly, screaming and wailing, saying "WAIT YOUR TURN" in a demonic, low-pitched voice that was not at all like his normal obnoxious, nasal voice. In the background, we could hear the narrator saying "He's Rap Rat, and he's the boss" over and over again in an overly serious tone.

The video was... indescribable. Images crossed the screen in quick succession, overcut with Rap Rat's expressionless eyes. The images were some of the things I was afraid of at the time. A person looking over a balcony, a hornet slowly stinging someone's eye, an extreme close-up of a tarantula, a pit full of writhing cobras, and a bloodied syringe filled with green fluid. We immediately turned the video off, and I ran out of the room screaming, slamming my door. It took my mom twenty minutes to convince me that the video was gone, that I would never, ever see it again. I had nightmares all week about Rap Rat.

That wasn't the last time I saw Rap Rat. While my girlfriend and I were preparing to move in together, I was cleaning out the closet of my room and found Rap Rat again, with the same VHS and the same board game inside. It was almost perfectly intact, save for a thick layer of cobwebs and dust bunnies on top of it. This was strange...didn't my mother get rid of it? And what was the game doing in my room? I let out a bit of a gasp when I found it, and my girlfriend came into the room, asking what was the matter: Breathing harshly, I said, "Rap Rat." She laughed a bit, asking if it was a joke. I shook my head, explaining that it wasn't. She didn't believe me—nobody did—and I decided that the only way to prove it to her was to show her the video.

I borrowed my neighbour's VHS and played the video for her. However, the images had changed. I saw a clown, it's nose bursting and spraying blood onto the screen. I saw a woman alone in a dark room. I saw a man being forced to pick up white-hot metal and hold it in his outstretched hand, turning his hand to a leathery mess. The scratching I heard as a child continued, picking up louder and louder. Then, Rap Rat showed up and began twisting and convulsing, it's arms thrusting this way and that. The costume wasn't a costume anymore—the felt was real fur.

Its face wasn't plastic, but instead a bristle of thorns with teeth. The eyes turned inwards and suddenly popped out again: Rap Rat's huge fish eyes were inside out, staring right at me, watching my every move, my every expression. It grinned widely and gestured at my girlfriend and I with a single, outstretched, inhuman hand. I could hear the faintest scratching at my front door. The TV went blank and showed static. The scratching got louder. It wasn't scratching anymore, but thumping: the thumping of tiny feet on wood. My girlfriend embraced me in fear, and my senses kicked in. Before anything else could happen, I stopped the video, ejected it and unplugged the VHS. The scratching stopped. When I looked out the living room window, nothing was there.