No eyes but yours, acclimated and looking in the right place, would see what slowly becomes visible. The air itself, somehow more dark than the air in front of it, is bending, showing contour, like a plate-glass window bowing outward in a hurricane wind—or inward, toward you. Yet the contour that you half-see, half-sense, is wrong. It bulges like a blown bubble—but a bubble blown backward, drawn in rather than pushed out. You half-expect to hear breath sucked inward to match what you almost-see. The bubble gets bigger and bigger, spanning the tracks. The darkness in the air streaks, pulled past its tolerances. Not-light shows through the thin places; wincing, you glance away. The faintest possible shrilling sound fills your twitching ears, the sound of spacetime yielding to intolerable pressure, under protest: it scales up and up, piercing you like pins—

—and stops, as the bubble breaks, letting through whatever has been leaning on it from the other side. You look at it, blinking. Silence again: darkness. A false alarm—

Until, as you shake your head again at the shrilling, you realize that you shouldn't still be hearing it. And out of the blackness in front of you, pattering, rustling, they come. First, just a few. Then ten of them, a hundred of them, more. Hurrying, scattering, humpily running, their little wicked eyes gleaming dull red in the light from far behind you, they flow at you like darkness come alive, darkness with teeth, darkness shrilling with hunger: the rats.

There is more than hunger in those voices, though, more than just malice in those eyes. Their screams have terror in them. They will destroy anything that gets between them and their flight from what comes behind them, driving them; they'll strip the flesh from your bones and never even stop to enjoy it.



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