The
Rats in the Walls
By
H. P. Lovecraft
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.