"...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 endless onyx bridges to a black putrid sea."

"Something bumped into me... something soft and plump. It must have been the rats; the viscous, gelatinous, ravenous army that feast on the dead and living..."

"That is what they say I said when they found me in the blackness after three hours; found me crouching in the blackness over the plump, half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys... When I speak of Norrys they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the rats; the slithering scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me on to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they cannot hear, the rats, the rats in the walls."

-H.P. Lovecraft, The Rats in the Walls, 1924