What doyouthink?
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42 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1924
“Through all this horror my cat stalked unperturbed. Once I saw him monstrously perched atop a mountain of bones, and wondered at the secrets that might lie behind his yellow eyes.”
'Unlike our planter neighbours, we seldom boasted of crusading ancestors or other mediaeval and Renaissance heroes; nor was any kind of tradition handed down except what may have been recorded in the sealed envelope left before the Civil War by every squire to his eldest son for posthumous opening.'Unfortunately, that letter was lost in a fire so neither the narrator nor his father found out what's in it. One of his ancestors Walter de la Poer, the eleventh baron Exham, fled to America after he killed members of his family. The fact that 'this deliberate slaughter, which included a father, three brothers, and two sisters, was largely condoned by the villagers' should have told him something.
"the walls were alive with nauseous sound the veminous slithering of ravenous, gigantic rats."
"My searchlight expired, but still I ran. I heard voices, and yowls, and echoes, but above all there gently rose that impious, insidious scurrying; gently rising, rising, as a stiff bloated corpse gently rises above an oily river that flows under the endless onyx bridges to a black, putrid sea."