Chapter One
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 that 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 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 line 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 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 ancestor 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. This 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 ostracised 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 disappearance 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 forbears--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 shewn 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 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, wainscotted 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 would 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 July 16, 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 afterward 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 Viriginia 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 July 22 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 old Gothic structure. I realise 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 story, 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 some 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 wainscotting, 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 north 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 that 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 awaked 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 shew 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 realisation 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 toward 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 realised
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. PRAEC ... 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 connexion with fire--probably burnt offerings.
Such were the sights in that crypt before whose door the cats had 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 awaked 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
around 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 of
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 the scurrying; which had retreated still downward, far underneath this deepest of subcellars 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.
continued