The Rats in the Walls (Fantasy and Horror Classics)

With a Dedication by George Henry Weiss

H. P. Lovecraft, George Henry Weiss

• Publisher: Fantasy and Horror Classics
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781447468288
• eBook ISBN: 9781473369092
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature

Silence is a lie. The hunger of the past is always waiting.

After the untimely death of his only son, Delapore, an American heir, resolves to restore his ancestral seat: the sprawling, ruined Exham Priory in England. A place shunned and feared by the surrounding villagers for centuries, the Priory is steeped in legends of blood, madness, and unspeakable acts performed by Delapore's ancestors.

As he meticulously restores the crumbling structure, Delapore begins to be tormented by a sound that defies logic and engineering: the soft, continuous, sickening scurrying of rats behind the walls. The noise grows in volume and intensity, even as the walls prove solid and empty. Driven by curiosity and deepening mania, Delapore eventually discovers the horrifying source of the sounds--a vast, hidden crypt deep beneath the foundation.

What he uncovers there is the ultimate secret of the Delapore family: a monstrous, multi-generational cult of cannibalism, kept alive by generations of depraved ancestors and a terrifyingly efficient mechanism for butchering humans. The "rats" are not rodents, but the degenerate, devolved descendants of his family, waiting to feed.

H. P. Lovecraft's chilling masterwork is a visceral, deeply psychological tale that merges atmospheric gothic horror with the most gruesome elements of the Cthulhu Mythos. The Rats in the Walls is a disturbing exploration of inherited madness, ancestral guilt, and the thin barrier between civilization and a primal, endless hunger.

THE RATS
IN THE WALLS

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 t...

Table of contents

• H. P. Lovecraft
• THE RATS IN THE WALLS