A scholar takes up residence in the former home of a judge with a very evil reputation. He finds the place infested with rats, but it suits his purposes… until one of the rats grows too bold, and the scholar realizes the horror he’s stumbled into.

This short and eerie story is just 52 pages long. It was first published in the special Christmas issue of the weekly “Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News” magazine, on December 5th 1891. It was later republished in “Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories” in 1914, and has since appeared in many anthologies.

“Rats is bogies, I tell you, and bogies is rats.”

As the main character, Malcolmson, moves into the house, he is warned that a previous cruel judge used to live in it and that the house is infested by rats.

He hears them gnawing, scratching, and racing up and down behind the old wainscoting. He takes his lamp and walks around the room. There are old pictures on the walls, but they are coated with dust and grime, and he cannot see any details. He can see rats peeking through cracks and holes in the beautifully carved oak wainscoting. In the corner of the room, to the right hand side of the fireplace Malcolmson notices a rope hanging from a great bell on the roof. This is the rope that the rats keep jumping on and pulling.

His face was strong and merciless, evil, crafty, and vindictive, with a sensual mouth, hooked nose of ruddy colour, and shaped like the beak of a bird of prey. The rest of the face was of a cadaverous colour. The eyes were of peculiar brilliance and with a terribly malignant expression”

Malcolmson decides to track the rat down. He takes the shade off the lamp, and the bright light illuminates all the pictures. Malcolmson’s eyes are drawn to the third painting from the fireplace. However, right in the centre, there is a patch of blank canvas where the Judge should have been. “The figure of the Judge had disappeared.” Horrified, Malcolmson slowly turns around. Sitting there in the high-backed oak chair, he sees the Judge in his scarlet robe. Malcolmson stands frozen with terror as with a cruel smile, the Judge lifts up the black cap in his hand. On the stroke of midnight, the Judge triumphantly puts the black cap on his head: a sentence of death.

The judge’s ghost proceeds to chase the young student around the room and try to hang him from the bell rope. He eventually succeeds and thus the young boy is found dangling in the morning by the servants who came and could not get in the house. And the painting of the judge is smirking malevolently above the fireplace.

The Judge’s House is a disturbing analysis of the perils of self-isolation, self-reliance, and intellectual hubris, and as such, stands a little outside most Victorian fiction. Throughout the 1890s, Bram Stoker wrote several such stories, where a solitary male characters is plagued by a supernatural enemy, because of a slight mistake he has made and which he must be punished for. In The Judge’s House the sin is one which would also become a favourite of M.R. James later: the cynicism and arrogance of intellectualism.