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.
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 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.
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 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 mediaeval 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 environinent. 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
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 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 demeanour, 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 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 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 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 a 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
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 reminiscenses 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 veminous 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-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 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 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. 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 centre 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 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 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 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 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 dlay, 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 depise 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 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
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 gnawled 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 mem 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
centre 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.
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