Lovecraft, H P - The Rats In The Walls

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The Rats in the Walls

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written Aug-Sep 1923

Published in March 1924 in Weird Tales, Vol. 3, No. 3, p. 25-31.

On 16 July 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 forebear 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.

The Rats in the Walls

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

The Rats in the Walls

almost unbelievable fear and hatred of the place. The 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 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 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 disappearances of villagers

through several generations.

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摘要：

TheRatsintheWallsTheRatsintheWallsbyH.P.LovecraftWrittenAug-Sep1923PublishedinMarch1924inWeirdTales,Vol.3,No.3,p.25-31.On16July1923,ImovedintoExhamPrioryafterthelastworkmanhadfinishedhislabours.Therestorationhadbeenastupendoustask,forlittlehadremainedofthedesertedpilebutashell-likeruin;yetbecauseith...

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