The Loch and the Monster
- Louie
- Dec 8, 2025
- 10 min read
Jimmy: Dear Rats, it’s another week and another short story from one of our wonderful Rat writers, Louie Keight. Louie is a writer extraordinaire based in London who specialises in horror fiction, so expect plenty of thrills and chills from them in the future. This piece, which we feel very lucky to unleash into your unsuspecting inboxes, is a perfectly wintry yarn, ready for you just when the days are at their shortest and the nights are at their darkest. This one is best enjoyed just before bedtime so you get spooked by a branch knocking against your window and start to think you can see something lurking at the end of the corridor when you get up to get a glass of water at 3am. It’s a story that feels very new and very old at the same time, which is a very rare thing to experience, so I hope you all enjoy!
A long time ago before you and I were born, in the great Kingdom of Alba, there lived a Thane more grasping and greedy than any before seen. He and his army governed a region of rugged mountains and hills with a deep and wide loch that split the land like a wound.
In this wild country the soil produced few good harvests. Livestock were taken by animals in the night or else grew so sick that the beasts would not touch them, marked as they were with the stain of death’s approach. The loch, meanwhile, was beset by foul storms that broke lures and nets and smashed boats against rocks with ease. There was little to eat, and little to hunt. Their youngsters became accustomed to the blank chasm of persistent hunger; knew to strip their slaughtered carcasses of the blood, brains and eyes; ventured further and further into the loch with their spears glistening like the gristle of the few eels they could catch. The people there lived sad, brief lives untroubled by the burdens of a profitable trade for all they knew how to do was stay alive, and this could not be sold or bartered.
The Thane noticed the wildness in the young men’s eyes and recruited some for his army, who pillaged and plundered in distant lands or else enforced his local rule. These men quickly forgot themselves and would take great delight in harassing and tormenting the villagers they had once called kin. The peasants, in response, learned to turn their backs on any boy who was sent to the castle to be a soldier; for though when he returned with his armour and sword he looked and spoke like a villager, he was a stranger now, and meant them harm.
