It was a little more than two years ago, on June the 16th 1923 that I was brought to the restored house at Exham Priory. Prior to that I had resided in a small cottage on the outskirts of nearby Anchester dwelling with the man that I called Shakes. I had been with Shakes for most of my life and had lived with him in America in a town very different from Anchester, one filled with factories billowing dark smoke and the near constant sound of machines churning both night and day. In Anchester, Shakes had added eight others of my kind to our household, and these came with us to Exham Priory. They were, in no particular order, a Siamese who preferred to be called Mao; Lady Pyrr, of Persian descent; Katrina who was Siberian; the Manx Stubbins, and the queer Abyssinian Madame Cassandra. Finally, there were the siblings, two burly British shorthairs Johnnybull and Jackymac. These were not their birth names, nor were these the names used by the mans, but rather their day-to-day names.
As for me, these fellows called me Mr. Ginger, not because of my color, which back then was as black as moonless night, but because even amongst the tribes of cats I was light-footed. My steps were like a breeze through the grass, and when I ran, it was merely a rush of whispers. We were as most households of our type, a motley crew, friendly as cats go, but not without our moods and fights, but united when it came to defending our home and mates. Stubbins may have been a foul-mouthed bastard, but he was our foul-mouth bastard, and woe to the stranger who laid a claw upon him.
As eldest, and clearly Shakes favorite, it was I who dominated our new home. I say new, but that was both true and not true. Exham Priory tasted both old and fresh, and as I explored, I learned that new construction had been laid over old—ancient—foundations. The place reeked of freshly cut wood stained and painted with all matter of solvents and dyes, but also always lingering in the background was the ever-present odor of the aged stone itself, stone that had endured centuries of weathering and moss and lichen, and still held the scents of place that such age imbues. It was a large house though, large enough for several temperamental cats, with many high places with which to set up individual dominions and routines without too much conflict. I of course took control of the bedroom in the west tower, where Shakes slept, as well as the library which contained plenty of comfortable couches and chairs, as well as a rather massive fireplace that I knew would be needed to heat the place when winter finally came. Despite claiming these territories, I was a benevolent prince, and allowed the others to share the library with me, but the master bedroom was mine alone.
Shakes and our family was attended to by a pantheon of mans who each specialized in cleaning or cooking or tending the garden, and these were all strangers to us, and we spent the first few days learning their personalities and training them in their service to us. Also present in those first few days was a young man whom we called Tubby. I had known him from his many visits to the cottage, and knew from the years that Shakes would often go and visit the man in his own home, or in the village pub. They were good friends, and it pleased me that Shakes had such a person in his life. Once there had been others, but since his wife and son had died Shakes had become increasingly isolated, and at least Tubby was someone to speak with.
It was on the morning of the third day that the first hint of trouble was raised. Stubbins came to me with strange news. He had found his way out the kitchen door, and spent the night prowling, first around the walls of the great house and then later in the garden and woods beyond. But in all his explorations he had been able to catch no sign of any small animals of any kind. There were birds a plenty, but these kept to the treetops or to the edge of the cliff that overlooked the crashing sea. There were no signs of field mice, or voles or moles. There were no hedgehogs, no hares, no shrews, not even a dormouse.
“A bad sign,” he muttered. Which was true, but as Stubbins was not the brightest of felines, I decided to have someone else look into the matter.
It was two days later that Madame Cassandra came to me with her report. All cats are by their nature sensitive to the preternatural, we are after all one of the few species able to move - albeit with some effort— between the waking world and that of Dream, but Madame Cassandra was particularly precocious when. She came to me in the way that she did, and I fully expected her to speak of something odd found in the stomach of a vole, or perhaps the colors of the intestines themselves were wrong. But there were no intestines to look at, no trichobezoars to marvel over, no deformed baby rabbits to excise from the wombs of their dead parents, no malformed toads with three eyes, indeed there was nothing to look at all.
Nothing tangible.
“There is something queer in the grounds.” She mewled. “Some of the leaves on the trees and bushes are odd, grey and brittle, and not just the fallen ones. There are berries on the edge of the wood, but I don’t know what species they are, but when I slice them open the juice is black and almost like a paste and the flesh is ashy. I’ve seen no trace of animal life, and yet … ” she trailed off. “The ground cover moves. The grass and litter on occasion shudders, as if mice were hiding within it.” She arched her back a little. “I saw a whole field come to life, undulating and roiling as if it were full of vermin, and then it suddenly stopped. It became as still as it could possibly be. I crept in, but there was nothing there, nothing at all.” She whined a little. “I don’t like it Mr. Ginger, I don’t like it one bit.” She wandered off after that, as cats do, the issue unresolved.
I was intrigued, but after all my years I had become something of a house cat, and I took this to be a concern of the land outside our abode rather than within. It was early on that evening that I was proven wrong. With the sun setting over a calm ocean in a drift glass sky, that I myself began to detect something unusual. What it was I could not initially determine. It was a sound, a low annoying drone that set my whiskers to twitching, but the origin of the incessant rustling was unclear. Determined to locate the source of the minor discomfort I roamed from room to room, at ill-ease, constantly sniffing at the walls and columns that formed the outer structure of the edifice. Yet no matter how much I searched, or what I sniffed at, I could find no relief from the murmuring vibration that I could feel even in the very pads of my paws. It grew louder and it seemed to me that it was as if thousands of tiny feet were clawing their way up the outer walls of the building, climbing slowly from stone to stone, moving as a single mass up the towers and into the very sky above Exham Priory. The whole phenomenon lasted for about two or three minutes and toward the end the demonic marching tapered off at the bottom and then spiraled off into the towers and the sky above.
The mans had not reacted to the event, and as much as I wanted to simply ignore the phantasmal cacophony, I simply couldn’t and after the mans had gone to sleep I called a convocation of my fellow cats and all reported sensing the same thing and being equally unable to discover its origin. At the suggestion of one of the younger cats, Katrina, the troop began to systematically explore the house from tower to ground. It was an exhaustive search of the upper levels and extended beyond the rising of the sun and into the early morning. The activity caught the eye of the mans who seemed both distressed and amused at the members of the home prowling about in search of what they knew not.
Our efforts were fruitless, we found nothing of any particular interest, though in the cellar we found a large door that none of us had ever been through, and we were all confused by the minute traces of scent that were both strange and repellant that were leaking out of the small gaps between door and frame. We also sensed a disturbance while we prowled the attic regions, though these were not in the attic itself, but seemed to be in the air above the house itself. It was something darkly electric, that clawed at the bases of our ancient feline brains and made us as uneasy as kittens in a room full of rocking chairs. It placed us all on edge, as if a great storm were churning into existence right above our heads. Still, the feeling was highly localized, and scampering down just one flight of stairs eliminated all ability to sense the psychic maelstrom.
That night, my normal routine upset, I retired quite exhausted. As usual, I was in the west tower, sleeping at the feet of the man Shakes, comfortable in my slumber. It was therefore surprising that quite unexpectedly I passed from the world and into Dream, rousing at the gates of Ulthar itself. Passage from one realm to another is not uncommon amongst cats, but I had made no effort to reach the virtual world that sat beside ours and was puzzled by the transition. The cat city was abuzz with activity though I could not say why, but as I prowled its streets, I caught sight of cats from around the world and beyond. On the temple road I fell in behind the trail of an otherworldly saturnine feline that stalked down the road and into the conjoined temples of Bast and that of Ulthar, for whom Bast is high priestess. It was a curious thing to see the iridescent hues of a distant cousin as it moved ethereally through our lower gravity and paid homage to our common maker the Q’Hrell quintet known as the Ulthar, but it was reassuring as well. To know that your species was favored by the makers, and that version of cats existed throughout the universe, more so than any other design, was somehow comforting, in an existential manner. The great candy-colored grimalkin kneeled before the altar of Ulthar and gave obeisance to our lord, and feeling a momentary pang of guilt I followed suit, bowing my head and closing my eyes in respectful devotion. Imagine my surprise when I looked up and found the mysteriously beautiful cat from Saturn standing over me, her mouth open wide and her eyes rolled back in her head. She was flehming, and I held still so that she could assess my status and confirm that I was neither a threat nor a worthy mate. Though I was puzzled why I should even merit her attention.
Imagine my surprise when she finally relaxed and spoke to me, her voice a deep melodic thing, like a dying star. “You have the stink of the Qabba upon you. Why do you reek of such pestilent things tiny one?”
I was deferential, she could have easily swallowed me whole. “Apologies my liege, but I am a simple terrestrial cat, I cannot even say what the Qabba are, let alone why I smell of them.”
She sighed, “Do they not teach you the ways of the universe on your tiny little blue planet? On Cykranosh even the milkfed are taught of the Rats of Qybele, the thin lurkers of the void, children of the dark star-goddess Qybele.”
I bowed my head in shame and being a crafty old cat made up an excuse. “My parents were killed while my eyes were still shut. I was raised by mans and only now have begun to educate myself in the ways of our lord Ulthar.” I peeked and saw that she was exasperated with my ignorance, but also was poised to seize the opportunity to complete my education.
“No one knows where the Rats of Qybele originally come from, but they exist in the depths of space between systems, far from any stars, for the pure light of a sun may itself destroy them. They are vast bidimensional things that cross vast distances in instants and drive lesser minds mad with their touch. Only those of the feline variety are swift enough to catch and kill the cosmic vermin, though truth be told there are those sensitives amongst lesser species that might catch a glimpse, but here is where we differ from such creatures. We see them as pests, to be hunted and killed, where others see them as tremendous beasts, draconians of the void, to be feared and fled from.”
“But I have never been to the depths of space, I’ve never even been off Earth, my most excellent of teachers.”
“The Qabba lifecycle requires that their young be hatched on worlds with life upon which their enigmatically colored offspring can feed. Woe to those that dwell in the land infested by the Qabbalin, for the energy that binds their very molecules together shall be torn away, leaving nothing but dust behind.” She paused and stretched her neck. “The worst of things is that even after the Qabbalin departs for space, it leaves in the land a festering presence, a corruption that effects even the most stalwart. It may linger for centuries, eventually spawning forth yet another child, one that must be nourished foully but which may grant terrible gifts to those who protect it and through it worship the dark mother Qybele. It is the charge of our creators to destroy such things, no matter where they may dwell.” She paused and stared at me with those strange purple eyes. “Even now, the Qabbalin comes near to you!”
I woke with a start. Something was moving behind the tapestry, up the walls, through the walls themselves. The noise, it was not just a single noise, but a cacophony, an orchestral chaos of thousands of tiny claws scrapping against the wall. Enraged, I sprang from the bed and onto the vast cloth that concealed the masonry. It collapsed under my weight and fell, revealing nothing. At least nothing visible, but with all my senses I was confronted with the sensation of a horrid vista. It was not just one thing, but a horde of things, spectral memories of a terrifying event that had scarred the very foundations themselves. And then as soon as I resolved what it was, it was gone, vanished, as if it never was. I prowled up and down the floor where the cloth had fallen, but to no avail. I could find nothing, and after a few more minutes of poking and prodding I abandoned my searches and returned to the bed. We are nothing if not a practical species and it seemed that the only thing to do was to go back to sleep. I was even sure if Shakes had seen what I had seen, or he had just been disturbed by my antics. Thinking back to what the cat from Cykranosh said, I wondered if perhaps Shakes was a touch sensitive himself. I had never noticed it before. I tried to fall back to Dream, but that doorway had closed for the night.
Any doubt on what Shakes had seen was removed the next day when we all observed the men moving about the house deploying small circular wire traps filled with bait tinted with a small amount of powder of an unwholesome yellowish green in nature. The cats of the house tried to dissuade the deployment of such things, for it seemed a wasted effort, but mans are not known for their ability to perceive the preternatural, and thus the protestations of the household cats were ignored. Even the west tower bedroom was violated with one of the poisoned contraptions and though I made my distaste at the situation quite clear, nothing was done to change it.
That night I was once again roused from sleep by a spectral cacophony, but this time of such magnitude that even the great cloth that hung against the wall could be seen to be moving. I howled and hissed enough to wake Shakes who made the cool light shine so as to allow his weak eyes to better see the source of the maddening sounds. It was a fright to see the tapestry moving in that manner, as if it were a net full of fish struggling to escape. Almost immediately the haunting ceased, and the man poked and prodded the wall hanging in an attempt to elicit a response, but there was none. The wire trap that had been set in the room had been sprung, but no trace of what had triggered it remained visible.
Unable to return to sleep Shakes left the room and began to move to the ground level, and I as is my habit, followed. As we mounted the great terraced slope both of us heard the unmistakable sound of those ghostly rats behind the wooden panels of the great room. This time as the lights came on the action of that phantom army did not cease but rather continued their mad and maddening frenzy, I, with the help of the light and keen ears was able to discern that the great horde of spirit rats was engaged in a momentous migration from the upper levels of the house through the ground level, and into the depths beneath the restored domicile. I, and indeed all the cats of the house, careened down several flights of stairs and began yowling at the door to the sub-cellar, a door that had been closed ever since we had taken up residence. We crouched there at the bottom of the stairs for a minute or two, but then the storm of ghostly vermin ceased, and we settled our nerves and dispersed back amongst the upper floors and rooms of the house.
Late in the next day Tubby came to visit, and after a short conversation both he and Shakes descended through the door where they spent several hours out of the sight of I or any other cat. Then in the evening there was a great flurry of activity, and a number of couches were brought down the stairs and set up in a vault deep beneath the house. Shakes and I, along with Tubby all set forth to spend the night in the roughly built crypt. I took a moment or two to prowl about the place and in doing so caught sight of the human letters carved into the stone. I may not speak any human language, nor can I read the marks they make, but somehow, I knew that these dank scratches made reference to the dark mother Qybele and her human disciples. I shuddered with loathing at the thought that this place had been infected for so long that even the mans had forgotten about it. Frustrated I found my way back to our small encampment and it was not long before the Shakes was asleep, and I was curled up on his chest. His sleep was not sound, and Shakes tossed and turned before waking up screaming. Tubby laughed for a moment, but only for a moment, before both I and Shakes fell back to sleep.
It was hours later that the next wave of the phenomenon began. I woke to the sound of the cats in the upper part of the house howling at the door. The Qabba had returned, and I could hear them all around us, moving down the walls of the sub-cellars. I leapt from my place and began franticly running about trying to find the source of the spectral invasion, but to no avail. The rats were still moving down, deeper into the earth and I and Shakes could hear the scuttling claws as they clambered deeper and deeper, far deeper than the sub-cellar. It was then that I realized that what we were hearing were merely the spectral echoes of the monstrous void-spawn clambering in the spaces inbetween and that we would have to make a supreme effort to reach and destroy the monsters.
Then, all of the sudden, my comrades beyond the door ceased their screeching, but I was suddenly revitalized. I had found a small spot, a hole really, at the base of a stone block that sat in the center of the room. It was from this hole that the last echoes of the verminous horde could be heard, and I was determined to bring it to the attention of the mans. Finally, after nearly a minute of frenetic pawing and scraping Tubby brought his portable flame towards the crevice and discovered the slight draft emanating from the minuscule crack.
We spent the rest of the night on the brightly lit main floor. Shakes and Tubby talked incessantly well into the morning, and I listened intently trying to discern what they were saying, but to no avail. While cats may have made some progress in understanding the language of canines, even the greatest of cat philosophers has failed to make sense of the guttural sounds, that emanate from the mouths of the mans. Oh, we understand them plain enough, about as much as they understand us, but it is a crude sort of communication, and only the basics are ever conveyed. All I know is that later that day Shakes packed a large bag and left the house. Tubby was waiting for him in a car, and together they drove off into the setting sun.
The next day I called for a conclave and informed my colleagues of the situation and of my visit to Ulthar and the words of the Saturnine Feline. Mao was skeptical, but Cassandra simply nodded as if she had known these things for all her lives. Together we nine came up with a plan to deal with the terrors, the enemies of our Lords Ulthar. There was dissention. Lady Pyrr would at any opportunity, launch into discourse on the idea of moving, suggesting that we should abandon the man and the house he had built, in favor of one of the neighboring manors or farms. It was an interesting proposition, but I was too old to find a new master, and while Katrina, Stubbins and the twins might be able to earn their keep as working cats, Madame Cassandra had always been a house cat, and Lady Pyrr herself was not the most comfortable moving about the wilds or even the alleyways of a town or city.
It was two weeks after they had left that Shakes and Tubby returned, and they brought with them five of the strangest people I had ever seen. One was definitely sensitive for he seemed the meekest of all of them, and yet there exuded from him a kind of palpable fear, but also understanding. Johnnybull hissed at him, but Lady Cassandra approached him with reverence and would not leave his side for the entirety of that afternoon. Even at dinner she stayed by his feet. It was my fear that his presence and her infatuation with him might derail our plans. I confronted her later that night, but she assured me that all was well and that she merely sought to protect him from what she felt was an impending doom.
She was of course most prescient on that point.
Late in the morning of the next day Shakes and his cohorts gathered together a small quantity of equipment and began to gather at the cellar door. It was a surreal sight as the wooden gate was unlocked and the expedition to the lower level filed in. I was calm in the arms of Shakes even as the door was barred behind us and for the full hour it took for one of the party to pry up the altar stone and reveal the horror that lay beneath. There was a passage leading downward, steps worn so badly they were scarcely more than an inclined pathway, and lined as it were with all matter of bones. Most of these were easily recognizable as belonging to mans, though many were marked by the evidence of inbreeding and poor diet for they showed greatly diminished brain capacity and even queer alignments between the bones of the arms and legs that suggested the gait of a quadruped rather than an upright stance. Also present was a second shaft, this one was much smaller than the other, large enough for a cat or small dog to fit through, and it sloped upwards and from it issued a gentle breeze of cool air. With the air came a raft of odors all of which I recognized, and I immediately realized that this shaft must work its way through the very walls of the house, perhaps even up to the towers, acting as a kind of natural ventilator, but also as a passage for the Qabba to make their way from the upper levels into the catacombs below.
I will not bore you with the details of what the expedition found in the vast dimly lit caverns at the base of those stairs, but I will say that it not only sent Lady Cassandra’s favorite into catatonia, but it drove Shakes into a violent rage. He attacked Tubby with his hands and teeth, frothing and raging in the most terrible way. I scratched him across the face, and the others had to pull him off his friend and restrain him. It took an hour for the party to make their way back to the wooden door in the sub-cellar, during which time Tubby whose throat had been torn open, slowly but inevitably bled to death. As the gate to the upper world opened Shakes began to struggle violently, screaming and frothing at the mouth. I think it was only he that caught sight of me and the others on the floor there, and he called my name. He screamed it actually, over and over and over again, but I was too busy. In all the madness it was only the madman that saw the household cats stream through the legs of the expedition and vanish down into the depths below. It was only the madman who saw our plan begin as the door to the netherworld was slammed shut behind us.
That was two years ago. Down we ran, down past the tumbled altar stone, down past misshapen skulls and tunnels of bone. Down past a twilight tableau of ageless horrors, of pens and abattoirs where mans and things that had once been mans were corralled and fed and slaughtered to feed those who once dwelt in this place, and the vermin that haunted the darkness beyond. Down we plunged into stygian darkness. Down into the abyss itself, warriors in pursuit of prey that itself crawled ever deeper into the unending caverns below.
Two years. We lost Mao first. She died the first time we caught up to them. They hadn’t known we were in pursuit. But even with the advantage of surprise we were only able to destroy a hundred or so of them, and they killed Mao. She thought she could hide in the dark, that her color would protect her. But the natural place for the Rats of Qybele are the places between stars. The darkness only makes the Qabba stronger, and we, limited as we are to feeding on fungi, worms and grubs, have become weaker with time. Stubbins and Jackymac were killed in a rock fall, a year or so in. Johnnybull wandered off a week later, delirious with grief. I still hear him, or at least I think I do, howling in pain, out there in the dark.
Two years, and you my son are the firstborn of our first litter, and now old enough to lead our clan in pursuit of our quarry. Listen to your mother, Lady Pyrr may not be as perceptive as Madame Cassandra, but at least she hasn’t been driven mad yet. I’m too old to go on, too old to keep the pace, to chase the draconian darklings that must be defeated. I was never much good at it anyway. You were born here, in the black, in the pall of the earth. You will lead, your mother and brothers and sisters, and the rest of the clan to victory. I know that for a fact. Madame Cassandra has foretold it. She may be mad, but she still can catch glimpses of the future, and of the world we left behind.
Go now, do what I could not. And if in your quest you hear caterwauling in the distance, if you hear a lost grimalkin calling out in the endless night, it may be Johnnybull, but it may also be me. Tired and slow, but still there, still in pursuit, still hunting in the darkness for the Qabbalin, the Rats of Qybele, a lone and lonely cat in the pall.