H.P. Lovecraft - The Rats In The Walls

H.P. LOVECRAFT

THE RATS IN THE WALLS

Written August-September 1923
First published in Weird Tales, March 1924

THE RATS IN THE WALLS

On 16 July 1923, I moved into Exham Priory after the last workman had finished
his labors. 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 neighbors, we seldom boasted of crusading
ancestors or other medieval 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 honorable, 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 had 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 grayness 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 to 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 colorful 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 so 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 showed 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 medieval 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
ancestors 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. The sentiment was so great that it was sometimes
communicated to the outside laborers, 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 ostracized 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 worshipers 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 center 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 disappearances 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 favorite
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
forebears—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 medieval custom. Prying curiosity meant
death, and more than one severed head had been publicly shown 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 the 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, wainscoted 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 could 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 medievally 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 16 July 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 demeanor, but which, except by implication,
he disclosed to no one save perhaps the servants who assisted him and
afterwards 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 honored, 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, honor, and delicacy.

On 22 July 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
Gothic structure. I realize 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 storey,
with groined arches, black oak paneling, 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 a singular odor 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 wainscoting, 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 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 awakened 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 show 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 realization 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 towards 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-paneled 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 realized 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 medieval 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 · PRAEG · 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 center of the room, had certain features on the upper surface
which indicated its connection with fire—probably burnt offerings.

Such were the sights in that crypt before whose door the cats 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 awakened
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 paralyzes 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 round 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 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 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 skeptical as I had anticipated, but instead seemed profoundly
moved. He motioned to me to notice that the cats at the door had ceased their
clamor, 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 center 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 fervor 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
favor 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 the
centuries which joined the massive pre-Roman block to the tessellated floor. He
did not find anything, and was about to abandon his efforts 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 two-fold; 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 recognized 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 symbolized 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 7 August 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 clay, 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 still quietly asleep. On going down, I found that the same tranquillity
had prevailed elsewhere; a condition which one of the assembled servants —a
fellow named Thornton, devoted to the psychic—rather absurdly laid to the fact
that I had now been shown the thing which certain forces had wished to show 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 center, was a ghastly array of human or semi-human bones.
Those which retained their collocation as skeletons showed 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
chiseled 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 chiseled 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 over-looked 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 aeronaut 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 men 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 the 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, stopped 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
hones 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 Hoffman nor 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, 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 the 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 Phyrgia.

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
indescribably 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 showed 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 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 center where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly in
the darkness 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 the 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 land 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 aodaun... agus bas dunarch ort! Dhonas's dholas ort, agus leat-
sa!... Ungl unl... rrlh... chchch...

This 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 experience.
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 this 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.

THE END