Rap Rat



For sixteen years, I haven't been able to sleep. I have horrible nightmares, penetrated by an eerie scratching sound outside of my bedroom door and footsteps on the floor.

I suppose I should start at the beginning. When I was little, I was quite a jumpy child. I was afraid of practically everything. Bees, the dark, heights, snakes, and ESPECIALLY horror movies. Small wonder, then, that when I was eight I absolutely refused to let my brother bring the board game "Nightmare" into the house during game night. Like a lot of other games in the 90's, it came with a VHS which you timed with your play. The character on the video would give you instructions on what to do while you played the game in real-time. Needless to say, I wasn't exactly thrilled about playing that. My brother was disappointed about not being able to play Nightmare, but my mom had a solution. There were a lot of other VHS board games that came out at the time, mostly produced my small companies to make money from the fad. My mom brought out a game called "Rap Rat". It was a cheap, dingy little thing catered to kids my age; you went around the board, collected cheese, and the first player to reach the end would win. It seemed simple enough, and since it reminded us of "Mouse Trap" (which we didn't have), there were no objections. We popped the movie into the VHS and set up the board. The first part of the video was just a simple explanation of the rules as well as instructions on how the game worked. Then, rap rat came onto the TV. He was...not what any of us had been expecting. My smaller brother Jason, who was only three at the time, immediately left the room crying. The rat did not even resemble a rat. The ears were far too big. It had a mouth lined with two teeth, and the inside of the mouth looked almost swollen. The eyes were large and reptilian, and were always open. Throughout the entire video, it never blinked once. I think that was what really scared me: "Rap Rat" was neither a human nor an animal. Humans and animals blinked, didn't they? I asked, then bothered, then begged my mom to turn it off. My brother, being the arrogant prick he was at the time, insisted that we continue watching it.

To make matters worse, my brother missed Rap Rat's instruction and we had to rewind the video. That was when things got a little too much for me to handle. My mum, being technically inept, accidentally fast-forwarded the video to the end without any of us realizing that she had done so. We shouted at her to play the video, and she paused, then played it. Rap Rat suddenly shouted loudly, screaming and wailing, saying "WAIT YOUR TURN" in a demonic, low-pitched voice that was not at all like his normal voice. In the background, we could hear the narrator saying "He's Rap Rat, and he's the boss" over and over again. The video was...indescribeable. Images crossed the screen in quick succession, overcut with Rap Rat's reptilian eyes. The images were some of the things I was afraid of at the time. A person looking over a balcony, a hornet slowly stinging someone's eye, an extreme close-up of a spider, and a bloodied syringe. We immediately turned the video off, and I ran out of the room screaming, slamming my door. It took my mom twenty minutes to convince me that the video was gone: that I would never, ever see it again. Me, not convinced, came out and told her to get rid of it. She brought me to the kitchen, where she tossed it in the garbage.

I had nightmares all week about Rap Rat. The puppet came to me in complete darkness. I couldn't see anything. I couldn't move; I was paralysed. It leaned forward. All I knew was that I could smell feces and stinking, disgusting cheese. Rap Rat, in a rumbling bass that was not at all like the video, whispered "I am fear". I would wake up in my bed panting and sweating. Half-awake, I could hear a high-pitched scratching sound, as if something were being dragged across the ground. "He's in the room with me", I would convince myself. The moment I turned on the lights, the scratching stopped, and I would go to my mom's room, turn on her light and sit on the bed covering my face. At first, my mom didn't mind, but eventually she got sick of being woken up in the middle of the night. She would tell me to go to bed. I really didn't want this. I was forced to go back and lie in my room in the dark, shuddering in my bed, with the covers all the way up to my chest until I finally succumbed to exhaustion. The scratching would continue all night. Eventually, I would wake up to go to my mother's room, only to find her and my father sitting in the kitchen looking exhausted My family received therapy for the nightmares we were all having, and they eventually became less frequent. Despite sleeping pills, I would have the nightmares at least once a month. I wouldn't see the Rap Rat board game for several years: thirteen years, to be exact.

While my girlfriend and I were preparing to move in together, I was cleaning out the closet of my room and found Rap Rat again, with the same VHS and the same board game inside. It was almost perfectly intact, save for a thick layer of cobwebs and dust bunnies on top of it. This was strange...didn't my mother get rid of it? And what was the game doing in my room? I let out a bit of a gasp when I found it, and my girlfriend came into the room, asking what was the matter: had I found a rat or a cockroach? Breathing harshly, I said, "Rap Rat". She laughed a bit, asking if it was a joke. I shook my head, explaining that it wasn't. We took a short break from cleaning and packing for me to explain the Rap Rat story. She didn't believe me--nobody did--and I decided that the only way to prove it to her was to show her the video.

I borrowed my neighbour's VHS and played the video for her. However, the images had changed. I saw a clown, it's nose bursting and spraying blood onto the screen. I saw a woman alone in a dark room. I saw a man being forced to pick up white-hot metal and hold it in his outstretched hand. The scratching I heard as a child continued, picking up louder and louder. Then, Rap Rat showed up and began twisting and convulsing, it's arms thrusting this way and that. The costume wasn't a costume anymore--the felt was real fur. It's face wasn't plastic, but instead a brustle of thorns with teeth. The eyes turned inwards and suddenly popped out again: Rap Rat's reptillian-like eyes were inside out, staring right at me, watching my every move, my every expression. It grinned widely and gestured at my girlfriend and I with a single, outstretched, inhuman hand. I could hear the faintest scratching at my front door. The TV went blank and showed static. The scratching got louder. It wasn't scratching anymore, but thumping: the thumping of tiny feet on wood. My girlfriend embraced me in fear, and my senses kicked in. Before anything else could happen, I stopped the video, ejected it and unplugged the VHS. The scratching stopped. I took a baseball bat and slowly approached the door, kicking it open. Nothing was there. The police showed up soon after, warning us that a neighbour had seen a figure outside of our door and had called in concern. My girlfriend and I simply couldn't explain what had happened, and had to tell the police officer that it was us. He gave us a lecture on "public safety" and "the use of tax dollars". I was furious...furious that I couldn't do anything about this confounded rat, furious that a children's game was terrifying me, furious at the nightmares and my own inability to protect the people I loved. I went to pick up the tape, but the VHS burned my hand. It felt like I had touched a bunsen burner on the highest setting. We had to get the oven mitts from the kitchen in order to take it out, and even then it was scorching hot. I brought it outside, tossed it down on the sidewalk, and crushed it with my winter boots. My girlfriend tried to stop me, but I couldn't. I crushed it over and over again. These terrible dreams I had as a child were all the fault of this stupid video tape and this stupid rat. My girfriend began having the nightmares now. We would both wake up in the middle of the night, and describe eerily similar images that we saw in our sleep. The scratching would always be there at night, when lights were off and the room was pitch-black (save for the moonlight coming in through the window). Now, though, the scratching would happen every time I went near the front door, and every time we said Rap Rat's name. It sounded as if something very small was dragging something across the ground outside of the door...pacing...waiting... At this point, I was determined to sue the company for damages. The first thing I did was call my mother and ask where she got Rap Rat. "That was a long time ago" she said to me. "I don't remember. I didn't buy it at a store. I definitely didn't buy it online. Maybe someone gave it to me?" I pressed her forward, but she abruptly ended the call. I found a merchant who sold versions of "Rap Rat" and asked how I could get in trouch with the company. He sent me this email.  "I don't know about the game, but I know it was created by the same people who created Nightmare. The company is called "A Couple of Cowboys". Try them." I tried to contact the creators of A Couple of Cowboys about Rap Rat, but the phone was out of service, and I think I know why. I did a bit more research, and discovered that the company became defunct in 1994...only two years after the company created Rap Rat. I became obsessed with finding the origins of the doll. I would come home from work, say hello to my girlfriend, and hop on the computer. I would go to old board gaming conventions, comic book stores...anywhere where I might find evidence of Rap Rat's existence. At my first vintage gaming convention, I saw a gentleman selling a copy and asked him about the game. He looked shocked, and asked me if I was some sort of industrial spy. I shook my head no. "I just want answers. I watched the video, and now I'm having nightmares." I explained what I had seen on the video just a few months before. Was my copy defective?

He shook his head, having a slight grin as he did it. "This isn't a normal game", he said. "It's haunted". In 1992, the year of the game's development, A Couple of Cowboys had comissioned a manufacturing company in Haiti to create the doll portrayed in the game. The company who created the puppet ran a sweatshop, where they forced women and children to produce the various components of the puppet, including the felt and plastic of the doll. One day, a young Haitian girl got her arm caught in the industrial sewing machine. The other workers tried as hard as they could to pull her out of the machine, but the oscellating pin pierced the bone and pulled her face into the machine. The spring-loader, unable to handle the weight on the machine, came loose and struck the child's neck, killing her instantly. A few days after the funeral, the mother of the child came to the factory, demanding to see the owner. A fierce argument began, ending in the owner slapping the woman across the face. In a fit of rage, the mother used Haitian voodoo to curse the puppet with the Haitian demon Aparat, the demon of fear. She said that the 'blood from the innocent' would seep into every crevice of the doll, every component with which it was created and all who touched it would die. Every time the demon's name was spoken, it would be summoned to terrify the owner. The owner simply laughed and told his corporate bosses about Aparat. They spread the joke from person to person, and the game was renamed "Rap Rat", a loose anagram of Aparat. Each recitation of the name Aparat brought with it a greater and greater curse. Only two years after "Rap Rat" was created, the company was shut down and the owners hired by Mattel. Every other employee had either been comitted to the hospital, had killed themselves, or had a family member kill themselves. There were stories of workers in the sweatshop finding the doll in strange places that they hadn't left it. Even after locking up the doll in a closet, they would come in the next day to find that the doll was sitting on top of the sewing machine the child had been killed on. Soon, there were stories of the workers begging for days off, skipping work for weeks and weeks. Sooner stil were the stories of suicides. Grim, violent suicides in which the workers would stab their hands and burn themselves to death, writing "I AM FEAR" on the nearest surface in blood.

Nobody knows where the Rap Rat doll went after the original creators disappeared. Some say that the last things the victims saw before going insane were large, sunken, reptilian eyes.