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object:1f.lovecraft - The Rats in the Walls
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter


On July 16, 1923, I moved into Exham Priory after the last workman had
finished his labours. The restoration had been a stupendous task, for
little had remained of the deserted pile but a shell-like ruin; yet
because it had been the seat of my ancestors I let no expense deter me.
The place had not been inhabited since the reign of James the First,
when a tragedy of intensely hideous, though largely unexplained, nature
had struck down the master, five of his children, and several servants;
and driven forth under a cloud of suspicion and terror the third son,
my lineal progenitor and the only survivor of the abhorred line. With
this sole heir denounced as a murderer, the estate had reverted to the
crown, nor had the accused man made any attempt to exculpate himself or
regain his property. Shaken by some horror greater than that of
conscience or the law, and expressing only a frantic wish to exclude
the ancient edifice from his sight and memory, Walter de la Poer,
eleventh Baron Exham, fled to Virginia and there founded the family
which by the next century had become known as Delapore.
Exham Priory had remained untenanted, though later allotted to the
estates of the Norrys family and much studied because of its peculiarly
composite architecture; an architecture involving Gothic towers resting
on a Saxon or Romanesque substructure, whose foundation in turn was of
a still earlier order or blend of orders—Roman, and even Druidic or
native Cymric, if legends speak truly. This foundation was a very
singular thing, being merged on one side with the solid limestone of
the precipice from whose brink the priory overlooked a desolate valley
three miles west of the village of Anchester. Architects and
antiquarians loved to examine this strange relic of forgotten
centuries, but the country folk hated it. They had hated it hundreds of
years before, when my ancestors lived there, and they hated it now,
with the moss and mould of abandonment on it. I had not been a day in
Anchester before I knew I came of an accursed house. And this week
workmen have blown up Exham Priory, and are busy obliterating the
traces of its foundations.
The bare statistics of my ancestry I had always known, together with
the fact that my first American forbear had come to the colonies under
a strange cloud. Of details, however, I had been kept wholly ignorant
through the policy of reticence always maintained by the Delapores.
Unlike our planter neighbours, we seldom boasted of crusading ancestors
or other mediaeval and Renaissance heroes; nor was any kind of
tradition handed down except what may have been recorded in the sealed
envelope left before the Civil War by every squire to his eldest son
for posthumous opening. The glories we cherished were those achieved
since the migration; the glories of a proud and honourable, if somewhat
reserved and unsocial Virginia line.
During the war our fortunes were extinguished and our whole existence
changed by the burning of Carfax, our home on the banks of the James.
My grandfather, advanced in years, had perished in that incendiary
outrage, and with him the envelope that bound us all to the past. I can
recall that fire today as I saw it then at the age of seven, with the
Federal soldiers shouting, the women screaming, and the negroes howling
and praying. My father was in the army, defending Richmond, and after
many formalities my mother and I were passed through the lines to join
him. When the war ended we all moved north, whence my mother had come;
and I grew to manhood, middle age, and ultimate wealth as a stolid
Yankee. Neither my father nor I ever knew what our hereditary envelope
had contained, and as I merged into the greyness of Massachusetts
business life I lost all interest in the mysteries which evidently
lurked far back in my family tree. Had I suspected their nature, how
gladly I would have left Exham Priory to its moss, bats, and cobwebs!
My father died in 1904, but without any message to leave me, or to my
only child, Alfred, a motherless boy of ten. It was this boy who
reversed the order of family information; for although I could give him
only jesting conjectures about the past, he wrote me of some very
interesting ancestral legends when the late war took him to England in
1917 as an aviation officer. Apparently the Delapores had a colourful
and perhaps sinister history, for a friend of my son’s, Capt. Edward
Norrys of the Royal Flying Corps, dwelt near the family seat at
Anchester and related some peasant superstitions which few novelists
could equal for wildness and incredibility. Norrys himself, of course,
did not take them seriously; but they amused my son and made good
material for his letters to me. It was this legendry which definitely
turned my attention to my transatlantic heritage, and made me resolve
to purchase and restore the family seat which Norrys shewed to Alfred
in its picturesque desertion, and offered to get for him at a
surprisingly reasonable figure, since his own uncle was the present
owner.
I bought Exham Priory in 1918, but was almost immediately distracted
from my plans of restoration by the return of my son as a maimed
invalid. During the two years that he lived I thought of nothing but
his care, having even placed my business under the direction of
partners. In 1921, as I found myself bereaved and aimless, a retired
manufacturer no longer young, I resolved to divert my remaining years
with my new possession. Visiting Anchester in December, I was
entertained by Capt. Norrys, a plump, amiable young man who had thought
much of my son, and secured his assistance in gathering plans and
anecdotes to guide in the coming restoration. Exham Priory itself I saw
without emotion, a jumble of tottering mediaeval ruins covered with
lichens and honeycombed with rooks’ nests, perched perilously upon a
precipice, and denuded of floors or other interior features save the
stone walls of the separate towers.
As I gradually recovered the image of the edifice as it had been when
my ancestor left it over three centuries before, I began to hire
workmen for the reconstruction. In every case I was forced to go
outside the immediate locality, for the Anchester villagers had an
almost unbelievable fear and hatred of the place. This sentiment was so
great that it was sometimes communicated to the outside labourers,
causing numerous desertions; whilst its scope appeared to include both
the priory and its ancient family.
My son had told me that he was somewhat avoided during his visits
because he was a de la Poer, and I now found myself subtly ostracised
for a like reason until I convinced the peasants how little I knew of
my heritage. Even then they sullenly disliked me, so that I had to
collect most of the village traditions through the mediation of Norrys.
What the people could not forgive, perhaps, was that I had come to
restore a symbol so abhorrent to them; for, rationally or not, they
viewed Exham Priory as nothing less than a haunt of fiends and
werewolves.
Piecing together the tales which Norrys collected for me, and
supplementing them with the accounts of several savants who had studied
the ruins, I deduced that Exham Priory stood on the site of a
prehistoric temple; a Druidical or ante-Druidical thing which must have
been contemporary with Stonehenge. That indescribable rites had been
celebrated there, few doubted; and there were unpleasant tales of the
transference of these rites into the Cybele-worship which the Romans
had introduced. Inscriptions still visible in the sub-cellar bore such
unmistakable letters as “DIV . . . OPS . . . MAGNA. MAT . . .” sign of
the Magna Mater whose dark worship was once vainly forbidden to Roman
citizens. Anchester had been the camp of the third Augustan legion, as
many remains attest, and it was said that the temple of Cybele was
splendid and thronged with worshippers who performed nameless
ceremonies at the bidding of a Phrygian priest. Tales added that the
fall of the old religion did not end the orgies at the temple, but that
the priests lived on in the new faith without real change. Likewise was
it said that the rites did not vanish with the Roman power, and that
certain among the Saxons added to what remained of the temple, and gave
it the essential outline it subsequently preserved, making it the
centre of a cult feared through half the heptarchy. About 1000 A.D. the
place is mentioned in a chronicle as being a substantial stone priory
housing a strange and powerful monastic order and surrounded by
extensive gardens which needed no walls to exclude a frightened
populace. It was never destroyed by the Danes, though after the Norman
Conquest it must have declined tremendously; since there was no
impediment when Henry the Third granted the site to my ancestor,
Gilbert de la Poer, First Baron Exham, in 1261.
Of my family before this date there is no evil report, but something
strange must have happened then. In one chronicle there is a reference
to a de la Poer as “cursed of God” in 1307, whilst village legendry had
nothing but evil and frantic fear to tell of the castle that went up on
the foundations of the old temple and priory. The fireside tales were
of the most grisly description, all the ghastlier because of their
frightened reticence and cloudy evasiveness. They represented my
ancestors as a race of hereditary daemons beside whom Gilles de Retz
and the Marquis de Sade would seem the veriest tyros, and hinted
whisperingly at their responsibility for the occasional disappearance
of villagers through several generations.
The worst characters, apparently, were the barons and their direct
heirs; at least, most was whispered about these. If of healthier
inclinations, it was said, an heir would early and mysteriously die to
make way for another more typical scion. There seemed to be an inner
cult in the family, presided over by the head of the house, and
sometimes closed except to a few members. Temperament rather than
ancestry was evidently the basis of this cult, for it was entered by
several who married into the family. Lady Margaret Trevor from
Cornwall, wife of Godfrey, the second son of the fifth baron, became a
favourite bane of children all over the countryside, and the daemon
heroine of a particularly horrible old ballad not yet extinct near the
Welsh border. Preserved in balladry, too, though not illustrating the
same point, is the hideous tale of Lady Mary de la Poer, who shortly
after her marriage to the Earl of Shrewsfield was killed by him and his
mother, both of the slayers being absolved and blessed by the priest to
whom they confessed what they dared not repeat to the world.
These myths and ballads, typical as they were of crude superstition,
repelled me greatly. Their persistence, and their application to so
long a line of my ancestors, were especially annoying; whilst the
imputations of monstrous habits proved unpleasantly reminiscent of the
one known scandal of my immediate forbears—the case of my cousin, young
Randolph Delapore of Carfax, who went among the negroes and became a
voodoo priest after he returned from the Mexican War.
I was much less disturbed by the vaguer tales of wails and howlings in
the barren, windswept valley beneath the limestone cliff; of the
graveyard stenches after the spring rains; of the floundering,
squealing white thing on which Sir John Clave’s horse had trod one
night in a lonely field; and of the servant who had gone mad at what he
saw in the priory in the full light of day. These things were hackneyed
spectral lore, and I was at that time a pronounced sceptic. The
accounts of vanished peasants were less to be dismissed, though not
especially significant in view of mediaeval custom. Prying curiosity
meant death, and more than one severed head had been publicly shewn on
the bastions—now effaced—around Exham Priory.
A few of the tales were exceedingly picturesque, and made me wish I had
learnt more of comparative mythology in my youth. There was, for
instance, the belief that a legion of bat-winged devils kept Witches’
Sabbath each night at the priory—a legion whose sustenance might
explain the disproportionate abundance of coarse vegetables harvested
in the vast gardens. And, most vivid of all, there was the dramatic
epic of the rats—the scampering army of obscene vermin which had burst
forth from the castle three months after the tragedy that doomed it to
desertion—the lean, filthy, ravenous army which had swept all before it
and devoured fowl, cats, dogs, hogs, sheep, and even two hapless human
beings before its fury was spent. Around that unforgettable rodent army
a whole separate cycle of myths revolves, for it scattered among the
village homes and brought curses and horrors in its train.
Such was the lore that assailed me as I pushed to completion, with an
elderly obstinacy, the work of restoring my ancestral home. It must not
be imagined for a moment that these tales formed my principal
psychological environment. On the other hand, I was constantly praised
and encouraged by Capt. Norrys and the antiquarians who surrounded and
aided me. When the task was done, over two years after its
commencement, I viewed the great rooms, wainscotted walls, vaulted
ceilings, mullioned windows, and broad staircases with a pride which
fully compensated for the prodigious expense of the restoration. Every
attribute of the Middle Ages was cunningly reproduced, and the new
parts blended perfectly with the original walls and foundations. The
seat of my fathers was complete, and I looked forward to redeeming at
last the local fame of the line which ended in me. I would reside here
permanently, and prove that a de la Poer (for I had adopted again the
original spelling of the name) need not be a fiend. My comfort was
perhaps augmented by the fact that, although Exham Priory was
mediaevally fitted, its interior was in truth wholly new and free from
old vermin and old ghosts alike.
As I have said, I moved in on July 16, 1923. My household consisted of
seven servants and nine cats, of which latter species I am particularly
fond. My eldest cat, “Nigger-Man”, was seven years old and had come
with me from my home in Bolton, Massachusetts; the others I had
accumulated whilst living with Capt. Norrys’ family during the
restoration of the priory. For five days our routine proceeded with the
utmost placidity, my time being spent mostly in the codification of old
family data. I had now obtained some very circumstantial accounts of
the final tragedy and flight of Walter de la Poer, which I conceived to
be the probable contents of the hereditary paper lost in the fire at
Carfax. It appeared that my ancestor was accused with much reason of
having killed all the other members of his household, except four
servant confederates, in their sleep, about two weeks after a shocking
discovery which changed his whole demeanour, but which, except by
implication, he disclosed to no one save perhaps the servants who
assisted him and afterward fled beyond reach.
This deliberate slaughter, which included a father, three brothers, and
two sisters, was largely condoned by the villagers, and so slackly
treated by the law that its perpetrator escaped honoured, unharmed, and
undisguised to Virginia; the general whispered sentiment being that he
had purged the land of an immemorial curse. What discovery had prompted
an act so terrible, I could scarcely even conjecture. Walter de la Poer
must have known for years the sinister tales about his family, so that
this material could have given him no fresh impulse. Had he, then,
witnessed some appalling ancient rite, or stumbled upon some frightful
and revealing symbol in the priory or its vicinity? He was reputed to
have been a shy, gentle youth in England. In Virginia he seemed not so
much hard or bitter as harassed and apprehensive. He was spoken of in
the diary of another gentleman-adventurer, Francis Harley of Bellview,
as a man of unexampled justice, honour, and delicacy.
On July 22 occurred the first incident which, though lightly dismissed
at the time, takes on a preternatural significance in relation to later
events. It was so simple as to be almost negligible, and could not
possibly have been noticed under the circumstances; for it must be
recalled that since I was in a building practically fresh and new
except for the walls, and surrounded by a well-balanced staff of
servitors, apprehension would have been absurd despite the locality.
What I afterward remembered is merely this—that my old black cat, whose
moods I know so well, was undoubtedly alert and anxious to an extent
wholly out of keeping with his natural character. He roved from room to
room, restless and disturbed, and sniffed constantly about the walls
which formed part of the old Gothic structure. I realise how trite this
sounds—like the inevitable dog in the ghost story, which always growls
before his master sees the sheeted figure—yet I cannot consistently
suppress it.
The following day a servant complained of restlessness among all the
cats in the house. He came to me in my study, a lofty west room on the
second story, with groined arches, black oak panelling, and a triple
Gothic window overlooking the limestone cliff and desolate valley; and
even as he spoke I saw the jetty form of Nigger-Man creeping along the
west wall and scratching at the new panels which overlaid the ancient
stone. I told the man that there must be some singular odour or
emanation from the old stonework, imperceptible to human senses, but
affecting the delicate organs of cats even through the new woodwork.
This I truly believed, and when the fellow suggested the presence of
mice or rats, I mentioned that there had been no rats there for three
hundred years, and that even the field mice of the surrounding country
could hardly be found in these high walls, where they had never been
known to stray. That afternoon I called on Capt. Norrys, and he assured
me that it would be quite incredible for field mice to infest the
priory in such a sudden and unprecedented fashion.
That night, dispensing as usual with a valet, I retired in the west
tower chamber which I had chosen as my own, reached from the study by a
stone staircase and short gallery—the former partly ancient, the latter
entirely restored. This room was circular, very high, and without
wainscotting, being hung with arras which I had myself chosen in
London. Seeing that Nigger-Man was with me, I shut the heavy Gothic
door and retired by the light of the electric bulbs which so cleverly
counterfeited candles, finally switching off the light and sinking on
the carved and canopied four-poster, with the venerable cat in his
accustomed place across my feet. I did not draw the curtains, but gazed
out at the narrow north window which I faced. There was a suspicion of
aurora in the sky, and the delicate traceries of the window were
pleasantly silhouetted.
At some time I must have fallen quietly asleep, for I recall a distinct
sense of leaving strange dreams, when the cat started violently from
his placid position. I saw him in the faint auroral glow, head strained
forward, fore feet on my ankles, and hind feet stretched behind. He was
looking intensely at a point on the wall somewhat west of the window, a
point which to my eye had nothing to mark it, but toward which all my
attention was now directed. And as I watched, I knew that Nigger-Man
was not vainly excited. Whether the arras actually moved I cannot say.
I think it did, very slightly. But what I can swear to is that behind
it I heard a low, distinct scurrying as of rats or mice. In a moment
the cat had jumped bodily on the screening tapestry, bringing the
affected section to the floor with his weight, and exposing a damp,
ancient wall of stone; patched here and there by the restorers, and
devoid of any trace of rodent prowlers. Nigger-Man raced up and down
the floor by this part of the wall, clawing the fallen arras and
seemingly trying at times to insert a paw between the wall and the
oaken floor. He found nothing, and after a time returned wearily to his
place across my feet. I had not moved, but I did not sleep again that
night.
In the morning I questioned all the servants, and found that none of
them had noticed anything unusual, save that the cook remembered the
actions of a cat which had rested on her windowsill. This cat had
howled at some unknown hour of the night, awaking the cook in time for
her to see him dart purposefully out of the open door down the stairs.
I drowsed away the noontime, and in the afternoon called again on Capt.
Norrys, who became exceedingly interested in what I told him. The odd
incidents—so slight yet so curious—appealed to his sense of the
picturesque, and elicited from him a number of reminiscences of local
ghostly lore. We were genuinely perplexed at the presence of rats, and
Norrys lent me some traps and Paris green, which I had the servants
place in strategic localities when I returned.
I retired early, being very sleepy, but was harassed by dreams of the
most horrible sort. I seemed to be looking down from an immense height
upon a twilit grotto, knee-deep with filth, where a white-bearded
daemon swineherd drove about with his staff a flock of fungous, flabby
beasts whose appearance filled me with unutterable loathing. Then, as
the swineherd paused and nodded over his task, a mighty swarm of rats
rained down on the stinking abyss and fell to devouring beasts and man
alike.
From this terrific vision I was abruptly awaked by the motions of
Nigger-Man, who had been sleeping as usual across my feet. This time I
did not have to question the source of his snarls and hisses, and of
the fear which made him sink his claws into my ankle, unconscious of
their effect; for on every side of the chamber the walls were alive
with nauseous sound—the verminous slithering of ravenous, gigantic
rats. There was now no aurora to shew the state of the arras—the fallen
section of which had been replaced—but I was not too frightened to
switch on the light.
As the bulbs leapt into radiance I saw a hideous shaking all over the
tapestry, causing the somewhat peculiar designs to execute a singular
dance of death. This motion disappeared almost at once, and the sound
with it. Springing out of bed, I poked at the arras with the long
handle of a warming-pan that rested near, and lifted one section to see
what lay beneath. There was nothing but the patched stone wall, and
even the cat had lost his tense realisation of abnormal presences. When
I examined the circular trap that had been placed in the room, I found
all of the openings sprung, though no trace remained of what had been
caught and had escaped.
Further sleep was out of the question, so, lighting a candle, I opened
the door and went out in the gallery toward the stairs to my study,
Nigger-Man following at my heels. Before we had reached the stone
steps, however, the cat darted ahead of me and vanished down the
ancient flight. As I descended the stairs myself, I became suddenly
aware of sounds in the great room below; sounds of a nature which could
not be mistaken. The oak-panelled walls were alive with rats,
scampering and milling, whilst Nigger-Man was racing about with the
fury of a baffled hunter. Reaching the bottom, I switched on the light,
which did not this time cause the noise to subside. The rats continued
their riot, stampeding with such force and distinctness that I could
finally assign to their motions a definite direction. These creatures,
in numbers apparently inexhaustible, were engaged in one stupendous
migration from inconceivable heights to some depth conceivably, or
inconceivably, below.
I now heard steps in the corridor, and in another moment two servants
pushed open the massive door. They were searching the house for some
unknown source of disturbance which had thrown all the cats into a
snarling panic and caused them to plunge precipitately down several
flights of stairs and squat, yowling, before the closed door to the
sub-cellar. I asked them if they had heard the rats, but they replied
in the negative. And when I turned to call their attention to the
sounds in the panels, I realised that the noise had ceased. With the
two men, I went down to the door of the sub-cellar, but found the cats
already dispersed. Later I resolved to explore the crypt below, but for
the present I merely made a round of the traps. All were sprung, yet
all were tenantless. Satisfying myself that no one had heard the rats
save the felines and me, I sat in my study till morning; thinking
profoundly, and recalling every scrap of legend I had unearthed
concerning the building I inhabited.
I slept some in the forenoon, leaning back in the one comfortable
library chair which my mediaeval plan of furnishing could not banish.
Later I telephoned to Capt. Norrys, who came over and helped me explore
the sub-cellar. Absolutely nothing untoward was found, although we
could not repress a thrill at the knowledge that this vault was built
by Roman hands. Every low arch and massive pillar was Roman—not the
debased Romanesque of the bungling Saxons, but the severe and
harmonious classicism of the age of the Caesars; indeed, the walls
abounded with inscriptions familiar to the antiquarians who had
repeatedly explored the place—things like “P.GETAE. PROP . . .
TEMP . . . DONA . . .” and “L. PRAEC . . . VS . . . PONTIFI . . .
ATYS . . .”
The reference to Atys made me shiver, for I had read Catullus and knew
something of the hideous rites of the Eastern god, whose worship was so
mixed with that of Cybele. Norrys and I, by the light of lanterns,
tried to interpret the odd and nearly effaced designs on certain
irregularly rectangular blocks of stone generally held to be altars,
but could make nothing of them. We remembered that one pattern, a sort
of rayed sun, was held by students to imply a non-Roman origin,
suggesting that these altars had merely been adopted by the Roman
priests from some older and perhaps aboriginal temple on the same site.
On one of these blocks were some brown stains which made me wonder. The
largest, in the centre of the room, had certain features on the upper
surface which indicated its connexion with fire—probably burnt
offerings.
Such were the sights in that crypt before whose door the cats had
howled, and where Norrys and I now determined to pass the night.
Couches were brought down by the servants, who were told not to mind
any nocturnal actions of the cats, and Nigger-Man was admitted as much
for help as for companionship. We decided to keep the great oak door—a
modern replica with slits for ventilation—tightly closed; and, with
this attended to, we retired with lanterns still burning to await
whatever might occur.
The vault was very deep in the foundations of the priory, and
undoubtedly far down on the face of the beetling limestone cliff
overlooking the waste valley. That it had been the goal of the
scuffling and unexplainable rats I could not doubt, though why, I could
not tell. As we lay there expectantly, I found my vigil occasionally
mixed with half-formed dreams from which the uneasy motions of the cat
across my feet would rouse me. These dreams were not wholesome, but
horribly like the one I had had the night before. I saw again the
twilit grotto, and the swineherd with his unmentionable fungous beasts
wallowing in filth, and as I looked at these things they seemed nearer
and more distinct—so distinct that I could almost observe their
features. Then I did observe the flabby features of one of them—and
awaked with such a scream that Nigger-Man started up, whilst Capt.
Norrys, who had not slept, laughed considerably. Norrys might have
laughed more—or perhaps less—had he known what it was that made me
scream. But I did not remember myself till later. Ultimate horror often
paralyses memory in a merciful way.
Norrys waked me when the phenomena began. Out of the same frightful
dream I was called by his gentle shaking and his urging to listen to
the cats. Indeed, there was much to listen to, for beyond the closed
door at the head of the stone steps was a veritable nightmare of feline
yelling and clawing, whilst Nigger-Man, unmindful of his kindred
outside, was running excitedly around the bare stone walls, in which I
heard the same babel of scurrying rats that had troubled me the night
before.
An acute terror now rose within me, for here were anomalies which
nothing normal could well explain. These rats, if not the creatures of
a madness which I shared with the cats alone, must be burrowing and
sliding in Roman walls I had thought to be of solid limestone
blocks . . . unless perhaps the action of water through more than
seventeen centuries had eaten winding tunnels which rodent bodies had
worn clear and ample. . . . But even so, the spectral horror was no
less; for if these were living vermin why did not Norrys hear their
disgusting commotion? Why did he urge me to watch Nigger-Man and listen
to the cats outside, and why did he guess wildly and vaguely at what
could have aroused them?
By the time I had managed to tell him, as rationally as I could, what I
thought I was hearing, my ears gave me the last fading impression of
the scurrying; which had retreated still downward, far underneath this
deepest of sub-cellars till it seemed as if the whole cliff below were
riddled with questing rats. Norrys was not as sceptical as I had
anticipated, but instead seemed profoundly moved. He motioned to me to
notice that the cats at the door had ceased their clamour, as if giving
up the rats for lost; whilst Nigger-Man had a burst of renewed
restlessness, and was clawing frantically around the bottom of the
large stone altar in the centre of the room, which was nearer Norrys’
couch than mine.
My fear of the unknown was at this point very great. Something
astounding had occurred, and I saw that Capt. Norrys, a younger,
stouter, and presumably more naturally materialistic man, was affected
fully as much as myself—perhaps because of his lifelong and intimate
familiarity with local legend. We could for the moment do nothing but
watch the old black cat as he pawed with decreasing fervour at the base
of the altar, occasionally looking up and mewing to me in that
persuasive manner which he used when he wished me to perform some
favour for him.
Norrys now took a lantern close to the altar and examined the place
where Nigger-Man was pawing; silently kneeling and scraping away the
lichens of centuries which joined the massive pre-Roman block to the
tessellated floor. He did not find anything, and was about to abandon
his effort when I noticed a trivial circumstance which made me shudder,
even though it implied nothing more than I had already imagined. I told
him of it, and we both looked at its almost imperceptible manifestation
with the fixedness of fascinated discovery and acknowledgment. It was
only this—that the flame of the lantern set down near the altar was
slightly but certainly flickering from a draught of air which it had
not before received, and which came indubitably from the crevice
between floor and altar where Norrys was scraping away the lichens.
We spent the rest of the night in the brilliantly lighted study,
nervously discussing what we should do next. The discovery that some
vault deeper than the deepest known masonry of the Romans underlay this
accursed pile—some vault unsuspected by the curious antiquarians of
three centuries—would have been sufficient to excite us without any
background of the sinister. As it was, the fascination became twofold;
and we paused in doubt whether to abandon our search and quit the
priory forever in superstitious caution, or to gratify our sense of
adventure and brave whatever horrors might await us in the unknown
depths. By morning we had compromised, and decided to go to London to
gather a group of archaeologists and scientific men fit to cope with
the mystery. It should be mentioned that before leaving the sub-cellar
we had vainly tried to move the central altar which we now recognised
as the gate to a new pit of nameless fear. What secret would open the
gate, wiser men than we would have to find.
During many days in London Capt. Norrys and I presented our facts,
conjectures, and legendary anecdotes to five eminent authorities, all
men who could be trusted to respect any family disclosures which future
explorations might develop. We found most of them little disposed to
scoff, but instead intensely interested and sincerely sympathetic. It
is hardly necessary to name them all, but I may say that they included
Sir William Brinton, whose excavations in the Troad excited most of the
world in their day. As we all took the train for Anchester I felt
myself poised on the brink of frightful revelations, a sensation
symbolised by the air of mourning among the many Americans at the
unexpected death of the President on the other side of the world.
On the evening of August 7th we reached Exham Priory, where the
servants assured me that nothing unusual had occurred. The cats, even
old Nigger-Man, had been perfectly placid; and not a trap in the house
had been sprung. We were to begin exploring on the following day,
awaiting which I assigned well-appointed rooms to all my guests. I
myself retired in my own tower chamber, with Nigger-Man across my feet.
Sleep came quickly, but hideous dreams assailed me. There was a vision
of a Roman feast like that of Trimalchio, with a horror in a covered
platter. Then came that damnable, recurrent thing about the swineherd
and his filthy drove in the twilit grotto. Yet when I awoke it was full
daylight, with normal sounds in the house below. The rats, living or
spectral, had not troubled me; and Nigger-Man was quietly asleep. On
going down, I found that the same tranquillity had prevailed elsewhere;
a condition which one of the assembled savants—a fellow named Thornton,
devoted to the psychic—rather absurdly laid to the fact that I had now
been shewn the thing which certain forces had wished to shew me.
All was now ready, and at 11 a.m. our entire group of seven men,
bearing powerful electric searchlights and implements of excavation,
went down to the sub-cellar and bolted the door behind us. Nigger-Man
was with us, for the investigators found no occasion to despise his
excitability, and were indeed anxious that he be present in case of
obscure rodent manifestations. We noted the Roman inscriptions and
unknown altar designs only briefly, for three of the savants had
already seen them, and all knew their characteristics. Prime attention
was paid to the momentous central altar, and within an hour Sir William
Brinton had caused it to tilt backward, balanced by some unknown
species of counterweight.
There now lay revealed such a horror as would have overwhelmed us had
we not been prepared. Through a nearly square opening in the tiled
floor, sprawling on a flight of stone steps so prodigiously worn that
it was little more than an inclined plane at the centre, was a ghastly
array of human or semi-human bones. Those which retained their
collocation as skeletons shewed attitudes of panic fear, and over all
were the marks of rodent gnawing. The skulls denoted nothing short of
utter idiocy, cretinism, or primitive semi-apedom. Above the hellishly
littered steps arched a descending passage seemingly chiselled from the
solid rock, and conducting a current of air. This current was not a
sudden and noxious rush as from a closed vault, but a cool breeze with
something of freshness in it. We did not pause long, but shiveringly
began to clear a passage down the steps. It was then that Sir William,
examining the hewn walls, made the odd observation that the passage,
according to the direction of the strokes, must have been chiselled
from beneath.
I must be very deliberate now, and choose my words.
After ploughing down a few steps amidst the gnawed bones we saw that
there was light ahead; not any mystic phosphorescence, but a filtered
daylight which could not come except from unknown fissures in the cliff
that overlooked the waste valley. That such fissures had escaped notice
from outside was hardly remarkable, for not only is the valley wholly
uninhabited, but the cliff is so high and beetling that only an
aëronaut could study its face in detail. A few steps more, and our
breaths were literally snatched from us by what we saw; so literally
that Thornton, the psychic investigator, actually fainted in the arms
of the dazed man who stood behind him. Norrys, his plump face utterly
white and flabby, simply cried out inarticulately; whilst I think that
what I did was to gasp or hiss, and cover my eyes. The man behind
me—the only one of the party older than I—croaked the hackneyed “My
God!” in the most cracked voice I ever heard. Of seven cultivated men,
only Sir William Brinton retained his composure; a thing more to his
credit because he led the party and must have seen the sight first.
It was a twilit grotto of enormous height, stretching away farther than
any eye could see; a subterraneous world of limitless mystery and
horrible suggestion. There were buildings and other architectural
remains—in one terrified glance I saw a weird pattern of tumuli, a
savage circle of monoliths, a low-domed Roman ruin, a sprawling Saxon
pile, and an early English edifice of wood—but all these were dwarfed
by the ghoulish spectacle presented by the general surface of the
ground. For yards about the steps extended an insane tangle of human
bones, or bones at least as human as those on the steps. Like a foamy
sea they stretched, some fallen apart, but others wholly or partly
articulated as skeletons; these latter invariably in postures of
daemoniac frenzy, either fighting off some menace or clutching other
forms with cannibal intent.
When Dr. Trask, the anthropologist, stooped to classify the skulls, he
found a degraded mixture which utterly baffled him. They were mostly
lower than the Piltdown man in the scale of evolution, but in every
case definitely human. Many were of higher grade, and a very few were
the skulls of supremely and sensitively developed types. All the bones
were gnawed, mostly by rats, but somewhat by others of the half-human
drove. Mixed with them were many tiny bones of rats—fallen members of
the lethal army which closed the ancient epic.
I wonder that any man among us lived and kept his sanity through that
hideous day of discovery. Not Hoffmann or Huysmans could conceive a
scene more wildly incredible, more frenetically repellent, or more
Gothically grotesque than the twilit grotto through which we seven
staggered; each stumbling on revelation after revelation, and trying to
keep for the nonce from thinking of the events which must have taken
place there three hundred years, or a thousand, or two thousand, or ten
thousand years ago. It was the antechamber of hell, and poor Thornton
fainted again when Trask told him that some of the skeleton things must
have descended as quadrupeds through the last twenty or more
generations.
Horror piled on horror as we began to interpret the architectural
remains. The quadruped things—with their occasional recruits from the
biped class—had been kept in stone pens, out of which they must have
broken in their last delirium of hunger or rat-fear. There had been
great herds of them, evidently fattened on the coarse vegetables whose
remains could be found as a sort of poisonous ensilage at the bottom of
huge stone bins older than Rome. I knew now why my ancestors had had
such excessive gardens—would to heaven I could forget! The purpose of
the herds I did not have to ask.
Sir William, standing with his searchlight in the Roman ruin,
translated aloud the most shocking ritual I have ever known; and told
of the diet of the antediluvian cult which the priests of Cybele found
and mingled with their own. Norrys, used as he was to the trenches,
could not walk straight when he came out of the English building. It
was a butcher shop and kitchen—he had expected that—but it was too much
to see familiar English implements in such a place, and to read
familiar English graffiti there, some as recent as 1610. I could not go
in that building—that building whose daemon activities were stopped
only by the dagger of my ancestor Walter de la Poer.
What I did venture to enter was the low Saxon building, whose oaken
door had fallen, and there I found a terrible row of ten stone cells
with rusty bars. Three had tenants, all skeletons of high grade, and on
the bony forefinger of one I found a seal ring with my own
coat-of-arms. Sir William found a vault with far older cells below the
Roman chapel, but these cells were empty. Below them was a low crypt
with cases of formally arranged bones, some of them bearing terrible
parallel inscriptions carved in Latin, Greek, and the tongue of
Phrygia. Meanwhile, Dr. Trask had opened one of the prehistoric tumuli,
and brought to light skulls which were slightly more human than a
gorilla’s, and which bore indescribable ideographic carvings. Through
all this horror my cat stalked unperturbed. Once I saw him monstrously
perched atop a mountain of bones, and wondered at the secrets that
might lie behind his yellow eyes.
Having grasped to some slight degree the frightful revelations of this
twilit area—an area so hideously foreshadowed by my recurrent dream—we
turned to that apparently boundless depth of midnight cavern where no
ray of light from the cliff could penetrate. We shall never know what
sightless Stygian worlds yawn beyond the little distance we went, for
it was decided that such secrets are not good for mankind. But there
was plenty to engross us close at hand, for we had not gone far before
the searchlights shewed that accursed infinity of pits in which the
rats had feasted, and whose sudden lack of replenishment had driven the
ravenous rodent army first to turn on the living herds of starving
things, and then to burst forth from the priory in that historic orgy
of devastation which the peasants will never forget.
God! those carrion black pits of sawed, picked bones and opened skulls!
Those nightmare chasms choked with the pithecanthropoid, Celtic, Roman,
and English bones of countless unhallowed centuries! Some of them were
full, and none can say how deep they had once been. Others were still
bottomless to our searchlights, and peopled by unnamable fancies. What,
I thought, of the hapless rats that stumbled into such traps amidst the
blackness of their quests in this grisly Tartarus?
Once my foot slipped near a horribly yawning brink, and I had a moment
of ecstatic fear. I must have been musing a long time, for I could not
see any of the party but the plump Capt. Norrys. Then there came a
sound from that inky, boundless, farther distance that I thought I
knew; and I saw my old black cat dart past me like a winged Egyptian
god, straight into the illimitable gulf of the unknown. But I was not
far behind, for there was no doubt after another second. It was the
eldritch scurrying of those fiend-born rats, always questing for new
horrors, and determined to lead me on even unto those grinning caverns
of earth’s centre where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls
blindly to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute-players.
My searchlight expired, but still I ran. I heard voices, and yowls, and
echoes, but above all there gently rose that impious, insidious
scurrying; gently rising, rising, as a stiff bloated corpse gently
rises above an oily river that flows under endless onyx bridges to a
black, putrid sea. Something bumped into me—something soft and plump.
It must have been the rats; the viscous, gelatinous, ravenous army that
feast on the dead and the living. . . . Why shouldn’t rats eat a de la
Poer as a de la Poer eats forbidden things? . . . The war ate my boy,
damn them all . . . and the Yanks ate Carfax with flames and burnt
Grandsire Delapore and the secret . . . No, no, I tell you, I am not
that daemon swineherd in the twilit grotto! It was not Edward Norrys’
fat face on that flabby, fungous thing! Who says I am a de la Poer? He
lived, but my boy died! . . . Shall a Norrys hold the lands of a de la
Poer? . . . It’s voodoo, I tell you . . . that spotted snake . . .
Curse you, Thornton, I’ll teach you to faint at what my family
do! . . . ’Sblood, thou stinkard, I’ll learn ye how to gust . . . wolde
ye swynke me thilke wys? . . . Magna Mater! Magna Mater! . . .
Atys . . . Dia ad aghaidh ’s ad aodann . . . agus bas dunach ort!
Dhonas ’s dholas ort, agus leat-sa! . . . Ungl . . . ungl . . .
rrrlh . . . chchch . . .
That is what they say I said when they found me in the blackness after
three hours; found me crouching in the blackness over the plump,
half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys, with my own cat leaping and tearing at
my throat. Now they have blown up Exham Priory, taken my Nigger-Man
away from me, and shut me into this barred room at Hanwell with fearful
whispers about my heredity and experiences. Thornton is in the next
room, but they prevent me from talking to him. They are trying, too, to
suppress most of the facts concerning the priory. When I speak of poor
Norrys they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did
not do it. They must know it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying
rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that
race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater
horrors than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats,
the rats in the walls.
Return to “The Rats in the Walls”


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