Bats

Bats are a living presence in the Icehouse and, during its final collapse, part of the violence that overwhelms the people inside. First glimpsed hanging above a bone-strewn corridor, they are suddenly driven into motion by the cries of Edgar Allan Poe and Lea Marquis; as the icehouse gives way, many are crushed beneath falling ice. Their movement carries the scene from concealed, watchful stillness into chaos.

Presence in the Icehouse

While Augustus Landor crawls through a corridor, sweeping small animal bones from his path by matchlight, he looks up and sees a colony of bats hanging from the ceiling. The animals are motionless in that brief encounter, suspended above a passage where even a careless footstep would crunch the bones scattered across the floor. Their placement makes the corridor feel inhabited before Landor reaches the brightly lit room beyond it.

The discovery also marks a shift in his progress through the building. At first, the match is his only light; then a strange light from a gap in the wall competes with its flame and leads him toward the room where the Marquis family’s private rite is underway. The bats belong to the hidden interior through which he must pass to reach that scene, not to the orderly spectacle of the Academy outside.

The Collapse

When Lea Marquis rises amid the icehouse confrontation, Edgar Allan Poe tries to reach her, and his cry joins hers in a wail that wakes the bats. They bounce off the walls, skid through the people’s legs, and scramble through their hair as Augustus Landor pulls Poe and Mrs. Marquis away from the chamber. Their sudden flight makes the passage itself chaotic: the rescuers are retreating through the same space as a startled colony, while the cries continue behind them.

The escape does not spare the animals. Ice falls in blocks into the chamber, crushing Lea and striking the bats as they fly past her. The account emphasizes their number—dozens upon dozens—and their cries as they are trapped between ice and stone. The bats’ fate unfolds alongside the room’s destruction, rather than after it: the falling ice swallows the candles and torches, seals the doorway, and spills into the hall while the animals are caught in the collapse.

Narrative Significance

The bats connect two stages of the Icehouse sequence. Hanging above the corridor, they first register the place as a concealed, inhabited environment; awakened during the confrontation, they become part of the physical tumult that carries the characters away from the chamber. Their passage from stillness to frantic movement parallels the change in the building around them, from a hidden route toward a staged rite to a corridor threatened by falling ice.

Their presence also keeps the disaster material and bodily. The scene’s terror is not confined to the human figures or to the family’s private ceremony: bats are roused, driven through the rescuers’ path, and crushed as the chamber collapses. They are neither explained as supernatural agents nor given a separate motive. The force of their role comes from the way ordinary animals share the same confined space and suffer the same sudden destruction.