I saw the rat first in the chicken coop. Nothing strange there, they're a usual threat. When I opened the wire gate it was already gone and the chickens weren't bitten. I put some poison around the edges of the farm and didn't think much more of it.
A few days later I was driving back from the outer edges of the reserve and I saw it again. I didn't know it was the same one at the time, looked like any other rat to me. But I'm sure now that it was the same one. It'd gnawed through the wiring of the coop and savaged one of the chicken's rears. It scarpered off before I could reach for the rifle.
Then I started seeing it in the house. Running around a door frame. Chittering in the gutters. Scraping along the walls. I'd see it on the windowsill, leaving smudges of blood where it dragged its nose. It looked worse each time I saw it. Fur grew more ragged and matted. Deep cuts and weeping wounds scarred its sides. Its eyes grew pale and milky.
I thought it was sick. That'd it bring sickness to us. We tried all sorts to kill it. Traps. Poison. Even called in an expert from the nearby village. We must of killed two dozen other rats in the course of a few weeks. But not that one.
It never came near me. Other people got bit or scratched. My friend, his kids, who all lived nearby and came around often. My wife had to go to hospital after it gored her toe in the night. Chewed almost down to the bone. We lived in fear of it. It was always out of reach of me. Just by a hair. Always around a corner. Across a fence. Through a wall.
We got a call from one of the rangers. Chimpanzees were acting up. I drove off into the jungle in the early hours of the morning.
When I got there they told me the chimps were pacing by the reinforced glass of the visitor centre. I went down with some envelope paste which might coax them away. I never got near.
As soon as they saw me they charged. They slaughtered themselves against the glass. Banging fists. Screaming. Biting. Ramming their bodies against the blood smattered glass. Again and again. Unnatural will overriding the survival instinct. They butchered themselves to matted chunks in their blind rage. Their bodies failing before the glass did. All of them looking at me with uncontrollable wrath until their eyes were bloodied, pulped, and pressed from their skulls.
And stood behind them on the verge; the rat. It's skin flaying. Its eyes white.
I helped clean up the bodies. No one had anything to say. What could we say? Of the rat we found no trace.
In my nightmares that night I saw all my sins spelled out in the blood and gore of those chimpanzees pasted on the glass. Things I had done. Things I hadn't. Liar. Thief. Murderer, the rat called me. It wasn't the chimps who wrote that with their blood. It was the rat.
And the next day nothing felt the same. I woke to a dreary sun. I made a bland breakfast. And all the while I am waiting for it to come again. Flesh sloughing from its bones. Hatred boring through its eyes. The horror grinning in its wake.
Paddy Dobson
10th December 2021