“The Rats in the Walls” was an ARG project originally created for the 2015 Twitter Fiction Festival. It was local to New York City and incorporated puzzles, live performances, and social media posts from multiple accounts to create an immersive experience.
In 2017, I delivered a presentation on the project at the inaugural Glasgow International Fantasy Convention.
Photos
After moving to New York City, I thought it would be fun to create an interactive story that blended Lovecraft’s mythos with the anonymous, underground figures of New York graffiti, who create an enigmatic (and sometimes disturbing) mosaic of symbols around the city.
After hearing about the 2015 Twitter Fiction Festival, I came up with the story of Kilroy and the Rats in the Walls, a cult made of Queens and Brooklyn-based graffiti artists who went underground after the crackdown on graffiti in the 1980s. Inspired by the work of Lovecraft and their readings at the New York Theosophical Society, Kilroy and his acolytes performed dark rituals within New York’s subway system, discovering that Lovecraft’s fiction had given fictional names to things that were very real.
After years of rituals, the Rats in the Walls discovered the secret to immortality: for every subway train that passed through their tunnels, they would siphon minutes of time from each of the passengers, adding to their own lives. In time, other graffiti artists joined the Rats, becoming inducted into a worldwide conspiracy that involved the involved the Toynbee Tiles, the Son of Sam murders, and the real-life Underbelly Gallery, a secret subterranean graffiti gallery.
For the “main event” of the story, I imagined the Rats re-emerging from obscurity to enact a kind of apocalypse on New York City, to remind the city’s inhabitants of the power of the Old Gods and the legacy of graffiti artists like COST and REVS. This would begin with a series of public omens created by the leader of the Rats, Kilroy, and culminate in a story on Twitter that narrated a fictional set of events, including the kidnapping of several subway trains.
Promo Video
You can check out an overview of the project here.
Chris Mahon 