The Darkest of Nights by Charles Eric Maine

More from curiosity and interest than malice, they made their forays, conducted their manipulations.Ĭonveniently John Christopher introduces the title characters of his novel, The Little People, fairly late in the action just as the reader and a few of the cast of eight protagonists gathered at a holiday at Castle Kilabeg in Western Ireland on the Kilabeg bog discover the mystery they have uncovered is more sinister than it origins in Nazi pseudo-science. This was not like the rats or the cats had been : they had no sense of danger. They had long known what it was to share each other’s thoughts, but now they were aware of other minds, of territories open, and vulnerable. Sometimes they talked to each other, mouthing a guttural tongue in high liquid voices, but speech was a habit, not a necessity.

Elsewhere in the house, figures, human in form though not in stature, moved silently and quickly. In their bedrooms, men and women slept, and dreamt their ordinary dreams. The mice lived on, undisturbed, because they posed no threat to the new masters. The cats, who had been their hunters, died with them. Now they were gone, killed not by starvation, or poisons, or traps, but by a new, strange, subtle and deadly weapon, wielded by creatures who still did not know the nature or the extent of their powers but who were learning. They had survived the periods of man’s absence, too. For fifteen centuries, man had waged war on them, and the rats had survived. They had come to this place a millenium and a half ago, with the first men who settled here.

In the house itself, mice came out from holes and wainscots and fed on crumbs, vaguely aware that things were easier, now the cats and the rats had gone. Small creatures moved in the lawns and gardens, fish cruised in the lake. The house lay at the heart of the wilderness.

The Darkest of Nights by Charles Eric Maine