Lair
James Herbert
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0330522051
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The mutant white rat had grown and mated, creating offspring in its own image. They dominated the others, the dark-furred ones, who foraged for food and brought it back to the Lair. The dark rats were restless, tormented by a craving they could not satisfy—but the white slug-like thing that ruled them knew. Its two heads weaved to and fro, and a stickiness drooled from its mouth, as it remembered the taste of human flesh.
from a point to her left. Mollison frowned and tried to see into the thicket. Must be an animal in there. Come on, you silly cow, it can’t hurt you! He tugged at the trousers of his tracksuit, pulling them down his legs, the elasticated bottoms catching at the heels of his plimsolls. Sod it! he said to himself. No time to work them free, she’ll be off down another path in a minute! His whole body was trembling now, a light sheen of perspiration covering his well-developed muscles. He began to
landing on top of him, claws slashing at his face and hands as he tried to protect himself. But the rats were too confused and startled to attack. They scrambled around in the underground chamber, snarling and clawing at each other in their panic, trying to climb the walls of the cellar as though this was a place in which they had no desire to be. Pender wiped the grit from his eyes and looked up at the gaping hole above, the sunlight shining down through the old mansion’s shell, flooding the
backwards, falling stiffly like a stone statue. Pender closed his eyes as the slumped form was once more covered by the jostling vermin and when he opened them all he could see of the tutor was a hand, the fingers missing, twitching in the air above the gorging bodies. The tutor was dead – of that there could be no doubt – and the macabre action was caused by the elbow tendons being gnawed. Pender felt vomit rising and suddenly he was leaning forward, the sickness pouring from him. Something
in the cellar once more. He could see the dark trembling shapes, the basement floor littered with the creatures, and the bigger, pinkish mutants gathered around the still form of Whittaker, blood bubbling from his stripped body, filling the air with its sickly heavy odour. He could hear the shuffling, dragging sounds coming from the dark place Whittaker had backed away from only minutes before. The beast emerged from the shadows into the glaring sunlight, two of its eyes flinching in the
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