H. P. Lovecraft - The Rats in the Walls.pdf - H.P. Lovecraft - napalmhead666

The Rats in the Walls

Lovecraft, Howard Phillips

Published: 1924

Categorie(s): Fiction, Short Stories

Source: http://en.wikisource.org

About Lovecraft:

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American author of fantasy, horror

and science fiction. He is notable for blending elements of science fiction

and horror; and for popularizing "cosmic horror": the notion that some

concepts, entities or experiences are barely comprehensible to human

minds, and those who delve into such risk their sanity. Lovecraft has be-

come a cult figure in the horror genre and is noted as creator of the

"Cthulhu Mythos," a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a

"pantheon" of nonhuman creatures, as well as the famed Necronomicon,

a grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works typically had a

tone of "cosmic pessimism," regarding mankind as insignificant and

powerless in the universe. Lovecraft's readership was limited during his

life, and his works, particularly early in his career, have been criticized as

occasionally ponderous, and for their uneven quality. Nevertheless,

Lovecraft’s reputation has grown tremendously over the decades, and he

is now commonly regarded as one of the most important horror writers

of the 20th Century, exerting an influence that is widespread, though of-

ten indirect. Source: Wikipedia

Also available on Feedbooks for Lovecraft:

• The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

• At the Mountains of Madness (1931)

• The Alchemist (1916)

• The Dunwich Horror (1928)

• The Outsider (1926)

• The Shadow out of Time (1934)

• The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1931)

• The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927)

• The Haunter of the Dark (1936)

• The Whisperer in Darkness (1930)

Life+70 .

Note: This book is brought to you by Feedbooks

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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 pro-

genitor 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 him-

self 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 singu-

lar thing, being merged on one side with the solid limestone of the pre-

cipice 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 for-

gotten centuries, but the country folk hated it. They had hated it hun-

dreds 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 al-

ways 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 main-

tained by the Delapores. Unlike our planter neighbours, we seldom boas-

ted 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 honour-

able, if somewhat reserved and unsocial Virginia line.

During the war our fortunes were extinguished and our whole exist-

ence changed by the burning of Carfax, our home on the banks of the

James. My grandfather, advanced in years, had perished in that incendi-

ary 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 howl-

ing 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 stol-

id Yankee. Neither my father nor I ever knew what our hereditary envel-

ope 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 re-

versed the order of family information, for although I could give him

only jesting conjectures about the past, he wrote me of some very inter-

esting ancestral legends when the late war took him to England in 1917

as an aviation officer. Apparently the Delapores had a colourful and per-

haps 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 re-

lated 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 re-

store 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 inval-

id. 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 manufac-

turer 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 emo-

tion, a jumble of tottering mediaeval ruins covered with lichens and hon-

eycombed 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 imme-

diate locality, for the Anchester villagers had an almost unbelievable fear

and hatred of the place. The sentiment was so great that it was some-

times communicated to the outside labourers, causing numerous deser-

tions; 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 sym-

bol so abhorrent to them; for, rationally or not, they viewed Exham Pri-

ory as nothing less than a haunt of fiends and werewolves.

Piecing together the tales which Norrys collected for me, and supple-

menting 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 con-

temporary 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

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