Weird Horror: "The Graveyard Rats" by Henry Kuttner

Story download page: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79279

A gnarly short story from Weird Tales, 1936.

Old Masson is the caretaker of an old neglected cemetery. Of course, we can’t have a good, upstanding caretaker for our story. Nope. Turns out the dude actually robs the graves. Can’t let all that jewelry and fine clothing go to waste!

Unfortunately, something else is robbing them too. As in rats. Really freaking big rats.

The cemetery is infested with generations of enormous rats that have dug a network of tunnels beneath the graves. Some are as big as cats, and they’ve developed the charming habit of chewing through coffins and dragging the corpses underground.

One night, Masson is opening a freshly buried grave when the rats get to the corpse first. He watches the body disappear through a hole in the coffin and makes the sort of decision that characters in Weird Tales exist to make: He crawls into the rat hole after it!

Bad news is that it turns out the rats aren’t the worst things living beneath the cemetery.