Rat-Trap

Imagine yourself wandering alone in Paris in the 1850s, heartsick for your own true love. You are distracted by this separation and end up farther and farther afield until you are in the land of the pauper: the dusty piles and rat-infested encampments of the poorest of the poor. Living among the rags and the war-torn are giant, beady-eyed rats. Hideous beasts that can clean a dead (or dying) body down to its skeleton before the flesh is even cold. Add to that a swampy quagmire, some curious intuitions, and a terrifying chase, and you have a masterful tale of the macabre that is not for the faint of heart.

If you have a fear of mice or rats, you will want to stop right here. Do not read any further. The harsh reality and realism within this short story are enough to haunt not only your dreams but your daily waking life. Every scurrying in the corner of a room, each passing shadow, will seem like the moves of a tiny rodent-beast, patiently watching—waiting for you to show your weakness, waiting for you to trip and lay helpless, waiting for you to fall under its teeth.

Bram Stoker's The Burial of the Rats was one of several shorter works published posthumously in 1914 by his widow, Florence. In her preface to the original collection, she writes:

A few months before the lamented death of my husband—I might say even as the shadow of death was over him—he planned three series of short stories for publication, and the present volume is one of them. To his original list of stories in this book, I have added an hitherto unpublished episode from Dracula. It was originally excised owing to the length of the book, and may prove of interest to the many readers of what is considered my husband's most remarkable work. The other stories have already been published in English and American periodicals. Had my husband lived longer, he might have seen fit to revise this work, which is mainly from the earlier years of his strenuous life. But, as fate has entrusted to me the issuing of it, I consider it fitting and proper to let it go forth practically as it was left by him.

~FLORENCE BRAM STOKER

Her love for him and his works comes across in this preface, just as I hope my ardor for the macabre comes across to you when you read this wonderful short story, the second of many of Stoker's lesser known works to be published in the Magical Creatures collection. This is not a tale of vampires or werewolves but rather a more terrifying creature: one that lives and thrives in every city, in every household, who dines on scraps and crumbs, who can swim for miles in underground sewers, who can hold its breath for minutes at a time—a patient observer waiting for you to slip up.

Not to worry. It's only a rat.

IN FREAKITUDE,

VARLA VENTURA

SAN FRANCISCO, 2012