Selección Terror: Un Demonio Particular

About this issue

"Un demonio particular" by Clark Carrados, serialized in this Spanish terror anthology. The story concerns the English village of Byburn-on-Syne, a deceptively orderly settlement harboring widespread infidelity and hypocrisy. When the beautiful, exiled Maggie Billings returns playing a enchanted flute, she publicly denounces the townspeople's hidden moral transgressions—naming specific adulteries and scandals—before cursing them: "Pues bien, pueblo de ratas, tendréis ratas!" (People of rats, you shall have rats!). That evening, an unstoppable plague of enormous, ferocious rats invades the village, killing livestock, pets, and residents. The wealthy, disabled widow Pamela Bromfield—who led Maggie's expulsion years earlier—is devoured in her mansion, which collapses. The rats devastate Byburn-on-Syne before departing at dawn, leaving the village in ruins. The narrative shifts to Eddie Crane, watching televised coverage of the catastrophe, skeptical yet intrigued by witness accounts linking the disaster to Maggie's curse and her mysterious flute.