00:02:25.240H.P. Lovecraft's The Rats in the Walls.
00:02:29.280This is, I consider, one of the really perfect Lovecraft short stories.
00:02:38.100The visuals, the geography of the story, the narrative tempo, it somehow captures everything in Lovecraft's thought and vision and his horror at the revelations coming out about the modern world or the world in general.
00:03:03.660that that the universe you see above you in the night sky is not the universe it's a galaxy there
00:03:12.380actually billions of those out there and the thing that made you feel so small a speck in all of
00:03:21.240existence uh that itself is a speck in all of existence uh the revelations that time and space
00:03:31.040uh are malleable the revelations that um the history the age of the world in the universe is
00:03:40.960not 6 000 years old as conceived in the bible this uh ancient deep time uh going back to adam
00:03:49.2406 000 years no no no it's millions of years old billions of years old uh in those darkened
00:03:57.780eons of antiquity antiquity that antediluvian black nothing anything could be back there0.66
00:04:06.200uh the revelations of um the revelations of evolution and the revelation that you are0.99
00:04:14.080evolved from lesser life forms in fact your ancestors were degraded apes and like incestuous0.99
00:04:23.260tribesmen and that you have cannibals and and sex slaves and rapists and all kinds of0.99
00:04:31.400antediluvian horrors buried in the back there that that all the horrifying sacrifice rituals0.97
00:04:38.380you see in the most primitive cultures somewhere far enough back in your ancestry that's buried0.84
00:04:45.560in there too and that that has left a mark on you that those instincts those nightmarish ideals
00:04:53.040are buried in there which to us is we see it as kind of obvious um if you've ever approves the uh
00:05:04.940romance fantasy section of the bookstore the female smut section of the bookstore which is
00:05:13.780now basically all barnton nobles slowly devoured the entire institution uh you you know that these0.97
00:05:21.360instincts are buried in the hearts of all those bookish girls. This is less of a revelation to us.
00:05:27.400We've had the terrifying, nightmarish fantasies of the male and female imagination, human sexuality
00:05:37.340laid bare to us to really profound cultural damage. But Lovecraft is experiencing this all
00:05:48.420when it's fresh. He's experiencing this all when it is a new revelation that only he can see the
00:05:57.360implications of. Lovecraft is seeing this all, and whereas other people are debating, no, that
00:06:02.720doesn't feel right, or no, that isn't compelling to me, or oh, this is true, but I'm not actually
00:06:09.240going to adjust from it. Lovecraft is seeing all these nightmarish implications of the world that
00:06:16.340science and general research has laid bare in philosophy has uncovered for us. And he's seeing
00:06:26.540all the horrifying truths behind it. And uniquely, because this is where I consider him one of the
00:06:34.220greatest philosophers of all time, he has to invent these stories, these horror stories,
00:06:45.260these long digressing stories to try and convince people of it. Because of course,
00:06:52.040you can't argue people into something they don't want to believe. You can't argue someone into
00:06:57.960believing something that they need to, that they want to reject with all their being and they don't
00:07:05.120want to even contemplate. And they're constantly asking themselves, do I have to believe this?
00:22:06.420wolson's scope appeared to include both the priory and its ancient family my son had told
00:22:14.040me that he was somewhat avoided during his visits because he was a delapore and i now found myself
00:22:19.620subtly ostracized for for like reason until i convinced the peasants how little i knew of my
00:22:25.520heritage even then they sullenly disliked me so that i had to collect most of the village
00:22:31.940tradition served the mediation of Norse. What the people could not forget, perhaps, was that I had
00:22:37.700come to restore a symbol so abhorrent to them, for, rationally or not, they viewed Ex-Impriori
00:22:44.140as nothing less than a haunt of fiends and werewolves. Piecing together the tales which
00:22:49.700Norse collected for me, and supplementing them with the account of several savants who had studied
00:22:55.620the ruins. I deduce that Exempriori stood on the site of a prehistoric temple, a druidical or0.82
00:23:03.040anti-druidical thing which must have been contemporary with Stonehenge. That indescribable
00:23:10.520rites had been celebrated there. Hugh doubted, and there were unpleasant tales of the transference
00:23:16.160of these rites into the Sibylle worship which the Romans had introduced. Inscriptions still
00:23:22.600visible in the sub-cellar bore the unmistakable letters of D.I.V. O.P.S. Magna Mat. Signs of the
00:23:32.840Magna Mater, whose dark worship was once vainly forbidden to Roman citizens. Anticastor had been0.84
00:23:40.840the camp of the Third Augustine Legion, as many remains attest, and it was said that the Temple
00:23:48.180of Sibyl was splendid and thronged with worshippers who performed nameless ceremonies0.81
00:23:53.120at the bidding of a frigging priest. Tales added that the fall of the old religion did not end the
00:24:00.000orgies at the temple, and that the priests lived on in the new fate without real change. Likewise
00:24:07.200was it said that the rites did not vanish with the Roman power, and that certain among the
00:24:13.260Saxons added to what remained of the temple and gave it the essential outline it subsequently
00:24:19.140preserved, making it the center of a cold fear to the half the heptarchy. About 1000 AD, the place0.99
00:24:27.500is mentioned in a chronicle as being a substantial stone priory house, a strange and powerful
00:24:33.880monastic order and surrounded by house how the place is mentioned in a chronicle is being a
00:24:42.360substantial about 1000 AD the place is mentioned in a chronicle is being a substantial stone priory
00:24:50.920house of a strange and powerful monastic order of the housing a strange and powerful monastic
00:24:57.060order and surrounded by extensive gardens which need to know walls to exclude a frightened populace
00:25:03.660It was never destroyed by the Danes, though after the Norman conquest it must have declined tremendously, since there was no impediment when Henry III granted the site to my ancestor, Gilbert de la Poire, 1st baron in Vaxim, in 1261.
00:25:21.520Of my family before the state, there is no evil report.
00:25:27.440But something strange must have happened then.
00:25:30.400In one chronicle, there is a reference to Adelapeu as cursed of God in 1307.
00:25:37.260While the village legendary had nothing but evil and frantic fear to tell of the castle
00:25:43.020that went up on the foundation of the old temple and priory.
00:25:47.140The fireside tales were of the most grisly description,
00:25:51.500all the ghastlier because of their frightened reticence and cloudy evasiveness.
00:25:56.600They represented my ancestors as a race of hereditary demons,0.96
00:26:00.400beside whom Gilderets and the Marquis de Sade would have seen the various Tyros,0.84
00:26:06.920and hinted whisperingly at their responsibility for the occasional disappearance of villagers through several generations.
00:26:16.720The worst characters, apparently, were the barons and their direct heirs.
00:26:21.980At least most was whispered about these.
00:26:23.760if of healthier inclination it was said an heir would early and mysteriously die to make way for
00:26:31.180another more typical scion there seemed to be an inner cult in the family preside over by the head
00:26:37.340of the house and sometimes close except to a few members temperament rather than ancestry was
00:26:43.700evidently the base of this cult for it was entered by several who married into the family
00:26:48.800lady margaret trevor from cornwall wife of godfrey the second son of the fifth baron became a favorite
00:26:55.640bane of children all over the countryside in the demon heroine of a particularly horrible
00:27:00.880old old bough not yet extinct near the walsh border preservation of baldery too though not
00:27:08.420illustrating this same point is the hideous tale of lady mary delapour who shortly after her
00:27:15.700marriage to the earl of shrewsfield was killed by him and his mother both of the slayers being
00:27:21.200absolved and blessed by the priests to whom they confessed that they what they dared not repeat to
00:27:26.400the world these misimbalances typical as they were of crude superstition repelled me greatly
00:27:33.640their persistence and their preach application to so long a line of my ancestors were especially
00:27:41.560annoying whilst the imputation of monstrous habits proved unpleasant pleasantly reminiscent
00:27:49.240of the one known scandal of my immediate forebears the case of my cousin young randolph delapour of1.00
00:27:55.420carfax who went among the negroes and became a voodoo priest after he returned from the mexican0.83
00:28:00.660war i was much less disturbed by the vaguer tales of whales and howlings of the barons0.71
00:28:07.880wince-up valleys beneath the limestone cliffs of the graveyard stenches after the spring rains
00:28:14.280of the floodings of the floundering squealing white thing on which sir john clave's horse had
00:28:21.800trod one night in a lonely field and of the servant who had gone mad at what he saw in the
00:28:28.560prairie in the full light in the and at of the servant who had gone mad at what he saw in the
00:28:34.760priory in the full light of day these things were hackneyed spectral lore and i was at the time a
00:28:42.880pronounced skeptic the accounts of vanished peasants were less to be dismissed though not
00:28:48.800especially significant in view of medieval custom prying curiosity meant death and more than one
00:28:55.820severed head had been publicly shunned on the bastions now faced around ex and priory
00:29:00.820a few of the tales were exceedingly picturesque and made me wish i learned more of comparative
00:29:07.660mythology in my youth there was for instance the belief that legion of batwing devils kept
00:29:14.440witches sabbaths each night at the priory a legion whose sustenance must explain the
00:29:20.900disproportionate abundance of coarse vegetables harvested in the vast gardens and most vivid of0.69
00:29:27.820all, there were the dramatic epic of the rats, the scampering army of obscene birdmen, which had
00:29:34.160burst forth from the castle three months after the tragedy that doomed it to desertion, the lean,
00:29:41.680filthy, ravenous army, which had swept all before it and devoured foul cats, dogs, hogs, sheep,
00:29:49.360and even two hapless human beings before its fury was spent. Around that unforgettable rodent army,
00:29:56.460a whole separate cycle of myths resolve revolves for it scattered among the village homes and
00:30:03.340brought curses and horrors in its train such was the lore that assailed me as i pushed to completion
00:30:10.700with an elderly obstinacy the work of restoring my ancestral home it must not be imagined for
00:30:18.000a moment that these tales formed my principal psychological environment on the other hand i
00:30:22.840was constantly appraised and encouraged by Captain Norris and the antiquarians who surrounded and
00:30:28.300aided me. When the task was done over two years after its commencement, I viewed the great rooms,
00:30:34.580wainscoted walls, vaulted ceilings, mullion windowed as a broad staircase with a pride
00:30:40.340which fully compensated for the prodigious expense of the restoration. Every attribute
00:30:45.960had of the Middle Ages was cunningly reproduced, and the new parts blended perfectly with the
00:30:51.680walls and foundations. The seat of my father's was complete, and I looked forward to redeeming
00:30:57.480at last the local fame of the line which ended in me. I would reside here permanently, and prove
00:31:04.300that Adelapore, for I had adopted again the original spelling of the name, need not be a
00:31:09.520fiend. My comfort was perhaps augmented by the fact that, although Exumpriori was medievally
00:31:16.520fitted. Its interior was, in truth, wholly new and free from old vermin and old ghosts alike.
00:31:24.300As I had said, I moved in on July 16, 1923. My household consisted of seven servants and nine
00:31:32.840cats, of which latter speeches I'm particularly fond. My eldest cat, Nigger Man, was seven years
00:31:40.140old and had come with me from my home in Bolton, Massachusetts. The others I had accumulated whilst
00:31:45.860living with Captain Norris's families during the restoration of the Priory. For five days,
00:31:51.000our routines proceeded with the utmost placidity. My time being spent mostly in the codification
00:31:57.220of old family data, I had now obtained some very circumstantial accounts of the final tragedy and
00:32:04.400the flight of Walter Delapour, which I conceived to be the probable contents of the hereditary
00:32:10.920paper lost in the fire at carfax it appeared that my ancestor was accused with much reason of having
00:32:16.720killed all the other members of his household except four servant confederates in their sleep
00:32:22.160about two weeks after a shocking discovery which changed his whole demeanor but which except by
00:32:27.900implication he disclosed to no one say perhaps the servants who assisted him and afterwards fled
00:32:33.660beyond reach this deliberate slaughter which included a father three brothers and two sisters
00:32:42.640was largely condoned by the villagers and so slackly treated by the law that's
00:32:48.700perpetrator escaped honored unharmed and undistinguished to virginia the general whispered
00:32:55.700sentiment being that he had purged the land of an immemorial curse what discovery had prompted
00:33:01.940an act so terrible i could scarcely even conjecture walter delapour must have known for
00:33:07.960years the sinister tales about his family so that this material could have gotten given him no fresh
00:33:14.520impulse had he then witnessed some appalling ancient rite or stumbled upon some frightful
00:33:20.540and revealing symbol in the priory or its vicinity he was reputed to have been a shy gentle youth of
00:33:26.820england in virginia he seemed not so much charred or bitter as harassed and apprehensive he was
00:33:34.860spoken of in the diary of another gentleman adventure francis harley of bellevue as a man
00:33:41.280of unexampled justice honor and delicacy on july 22nd occurred the first incident which
00:33:49.620bill lightly dismissed at the time takes on a preternatural significance in relation to latter
00:33:55.320events. It was so simple as to be almost negligible, and could not possibly have been noticed under
00:34:01.260the circumstances, for it must be recalled that since I was in a building practically fresh and
00:34:07.500new except for the walls, and surrounded by a well-bound staff of servitors, apprehension would
00:34:13.020have been absurd despite the locality. What I afterwards remember is merely this, that my old
00:34:19.300black cat, whose moves I know so well, was undoubtedly alert and anxious to an extent
00:34:25.440wholly out of keeping with his natural character. He roved from room to room, restless and disturbed,
00:34:32.700and sniffed constantly about the walls which formed part of the old Gothic structure.
00:34:39.360I realize how trite this sounds, like the inevitable dog in the ghost story, which always
00:34:45.180growls before his master sees this sheet of fear. Yet I cannot consistently suppress it.
00:34:52.360The following day, a servant complained of restlessness amongst all the cats of the house.
00:34:57.980He came to me in my study, a loft west room on the second story, with groined arches, black oak
00:35:04.700paneling, and a triple gothic window overlooking the limestone cliff and desolate valley.1.00
00:35:10.380And even as he spoke, I saw the jetty form of nigger man creeping along the west wall1.00
00:35:15.840and scratching at the new pails which overlaid the ancient stone.1.00
00:35:20.580I told the man that there must be some singular odor or emanation from the old stone,
00:35:26.540imperceptible to human senses but affecting the delicate organs of cats,
00:39:33.020but was harassed by dreams of the most horrible sword.
00:39:36.480I seemed to be looking down from an immense height upon a twilight grotto, knee-deep with filth, where a white-bearded demon swineherd drove about with his staff a flock of fungus-flabby beasts, whose appearance filled me with unutterable loathing.
00:39:55.900then as the swineherd paused and nodded over his task a mighty swarm of rats rained down on the
00:40:03.180stinky abyss and fell to devouring the beasts and man to devouring beasts and man alike1.00
00:40:10.200from this terrific vision i was abruptly awakened by the motions of nigger man1.00
00:40:15.580who had been sleeping as usual across my feet this time i did not have to question the source1.00
00:40:22.020of his snarls and hisses, and of the fear which made him sink his claws into my ankles.
00:40:29.480Unconscious of their effect, for on every side of the chamber the walls were alive with
00:40:33.580nace, nauseous sound, the verminous slithering of ravenous, gigantic rats.
00:40:40.640There was now no aura to shoo the state of the Eris, the fallen section of which had
00:40:46.880been replaced, but I was not too frightened to switch on the light.
00:40:50.840as the bulbs leapt into radiance i saw a hideous shaking all over the tapestry
00:40:57.380causing so what peculiar designs to execute a singular dance of death this motion disappeared
00:41:05.080almost at once and sound with it springing out of bed i poked at the uruses with a long handle of a
00:41:12.160warm warming pan that rested near and lifted one section to see what lay beneath beneath there was
00:41:19.080nothing but the patched stone walls and even the cat had lost his tense relay realization of
00:41:26.160abnormal presences when i examined the circular traps that had been placed in the room i found
00:41:32.100all the openings sprung though no trace remained of what had been caught and had escaped
00:41:37.680further sleep was out of the question so lighting a candle i opened the door and went out in the
00:41:47.220gallery, towards the stairs to my study. Nigger Man falling at my heels. Before we had reached1.00
00:41:53.380the stone step hour, the cat darted ahead of me and vanished down the ancient flight.
00:41:59.220As I descended the stairs myself, I became suddenly aware of sounds in the great room below.
00:42:04.740Sounds of the nature which cannot be mistaken. Yoke-paneled walls were alive with rats,
00:42:12.000rats scampering and milling whilst nigger man was racing about with the fury of a baffled hunter1.00
00:42:18.880reaching the bottom i switched on the lights which did not this time cause the noise to subside0.99
00:42:26.160the rats continued their riot sampeting with such force and distinctness that i could
00:42:32.300finally assign to their motion a definite direction these creatures and in numbers
00:42:39.120apparently inexhaustible were engaged in one stupendous migration from inconceivable heights
00:42:45.780to some depth conceivably or inconceivably below i now heard steps in the corridor and in another
00:42:53.980moment two servants pushed to open the massive doors there is the searching the house for some
00:42:59.560unknown disturbance which had thrown all the cats into the snarling panic and caused them to plunge
00:43:05.360precipitately set down several flights of stairs
00:43:08.860and squat, yowling before the closed door of the sub-cellar.
00:43:14.340I asked them if they had heard the rats,
00:51:37.080and which came indubitably from the crevice between the floor and altar
00:51:42.720where Norris was scraping away the lichens.
00:51:46.720We spent the rest of the night in the brilliantly lit study, nervously discussing what we should do next.
00:51:52.400The discovery of some vault deeper than the deepest known masonry of the Romans underlay this recursive pile.
00:52:00.180Some vault unsuspected by the curious antiquarians of three centuries would have been sufficient to excite us without any background of the sinister.
00:52:09.820As it was, the fascination became twofold, and we paused and dealt 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.
00:52:27.180By 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.
00:52:35.200It should be mentioned that before leaving the Subsar, we had vainly tried to move this central altar, which we now recognize as the gate of the new pit of nameless fear.
00:52:46.900What secret would open the gate, wiser men than we would have to find?
00:52:52.380During many days of London, Captain Orr Norris and I presented our facts, conjectures, and legendary anecdotes to five eminent authorities.
00:53:01.340all men who could be trusted to respect any family disclosures which future explorations might develop.
00:53:09.580We found most of them little-disposed scoff, but instead intensely interested and sincerely sympathetic.
00:53:18.180It is hardly necessary to name them all, but I may say that they included Sir William Brinton,
00:53:24.640whose excavations in the Troad excited most of the world in their day.
00:53:29.860As we all took the train for Ancaster, I felt myself poised on the brink of frightful revelations,
00:53:37.140a sensation symbolized by the air mourning among the many Americans
00:53:41.320at the unexpected death of the President on the other side of the world.
00:53:46.800On the evening of August 7th, we reached Exum Priory,
00:53:51.320where the servants assured me that nothing unusual had happened.0.98
00:53:54.660The cats, even old Migger Man, had been perfectly placid.1.00
00:53:59.860And not a nothing unusual had occurred.0.99
00:54:04.100The cad, even a trap in the house, had been sprung.
00:54:10.600We were to begin exploring on the following day,
00:54:14.940awaiting which I assigned wall-pointed rooms to all my guests.1.00
00:54:19.800I myself retired to my own tower chamber, with nigger men across my feet.1.00
00:54:24.880Sleep came quickly, but hideous dreams assailed me.1.00
00:54:28.560There was a vision of a Roman feast, like that of Tremaclio, with a whore in a covered platter.0.99
00:54:38.480Then came that damned wolf recurrent thing about the swineherd and his filthy drove in the twilight grotto.0.99
00:54:46.160Yet when I woke, it was the full daylight, with normal sounds in the house below.0.99
00:54:51.240The rat's living or spectral had not troubled me, and Nigger Man was quietly asleep.0.62
00:54:57.720On going down, I found that the same tranquility had prevailed elsewhere,0.99
00:55:02.180a condition which one of the assembled sabants, a fellow named Thornton,0.94
00:55:08.080devoted to the psychic, rather absurdly laid to the fact
00:55:12.620that I had now been shewn the things which certain forces had wished to show me.
00:55:19.940All was now ready, and at 11 a.m., our entire group of seven men,
00:55:25.320bearing powerful electric searchlights and implements of excavation,
00:55:29.240went down to the sub-cellar and bolted the door behind us.
00:55:33.080Negerman was with us, for the investigators found no occasion to despise his excitability
00:55:38.240and were indeed anxious to be present in case of obscure rodent manifestations.
00:55:44.300We noted the Roman inscriptions and unknown altar designs only briefly,
00:55:49.900for three of the savants had already seen them and all knew their characteristics.
00:55:53.540Prime attention was paid to the momentous cellar altar, and within an hour, William Brighton had caused it to tilt backwards, balanced by some unknown species of counterweight.
00:56:07.980There now lay revealed such a horror as it would have overwhelmed us had we not been prepared.
00:56:15.720Though a nearly square opening in the tile of four, sprawling on the flight of stone steps so prodigiously worn that it was little more than an inclined plane in the center, was a ghastly array of human or semi-human bones.
00:56:32.020Those which retained their collocation as skeletons shooed attitudes of panic fear, and overall were the marks of rodent gnawing.0.97
00:56:41.460The skulls denoted nothing short of utter idiocy, cretinism, or primitive semi-apedom, or primitive semi-apedom.0.97
00:56:53.380Above the hellish-belittered steps arched to the sending passage, seemingly chiseled from a solid rock, and conducting a current of air,0.98
00:57:03.940This current was not a sudden and noxious rest as from a closed vault,
00:57:09.020but a cool breeze with something of freshness in it.
00:57:13.000We did not pause long, but shivering began to clear a passage down the steps.
00:57:18.780It was then that Sir William, examining the hewn walls,
00:57:21.740made the odd observation that this passage, according to the direction of the strokes,
00:57:30.380i must be very deliberate now and choose my words
00:57:35.760after plowing down a few steps amidst the gnawed bones we saw that there was light ahead
00:57:44.180not any mystic phosphorescence but a filtered daylight which could not come except from
00:57:50.780unknown fissures in the cliff that overlooked the waste valley that such fissures had escaped
00:57:57.120noticed from outside was hardly remarkable for not only is the valley wholly uninhabited but the
00:58:03.280cliff is so high and in beetling that only an aeronaut could study its face in detail a few
00:58:11.680steps more and our breasts were literally snatched from us by what we saw so literally that thornton
00:58:17.940the psychic investigator actually fainted in the arms of the dazed man who stood behind him nor is
00:58:24.900his plump face, utterly white and flabby, simply cried out inarticulately, whilst I
00:58:31.820think that what I did was to gasp or hiss and cover my eyes. The man behind me, the
00:58:37.880only one of the party older than I, croaked with hackneyed, my God, in the most cracked
00:58:45.500voice I ever heard. Of seven cultivated men, only Sir William Brinton retained his
00:58:52.920composure, a thing most to his credit because he led the party and must have seen the site first.
00:58:59.940It was a twilight grotto of enormous height, stretching way farther than any eye could see,
00:59:07.460a subterraneous world of limitless mystery and horrible suggestion. There were buildings and
00:59:14.460other architectural remains. In one terrific glance, I saw a weird pattern of temuli,
00:59:20.220a savage circle of monoliths, a low-domed Roman ruin, a sprawling Saxon pile, and an early English
00:59:29.240edifice of wood. But all these were dwarfed by the ghoulish spectacle presented by the general
00:59:36.080surface of the ground, for yards about the steps extended an insane tangle of human bones,
00:59:43.240or bones at least as human as those on the steps. Like a foaming sea they stretched,
00:59:48.520some fallen apart and others wholly or partly articulated as skeletons.
00:59:53.600These later invariably in posture or demonic frenzy,
00:59:57.700either fighting off some menace or clutching other forms with cannibal intent.
01:00:04.480When Dr. Trask, the anthropologist, had stopped to classify the skulls,
01:00:09.880he found a degraded mixture which utterly baffled him.
01:00:12.880they're mostly lower than the pilled down man in the scale of evolution but in every case
01:00:20.620definitely human many were of higher grade and a very few were the skulls of supremely
01:00:27.320insensitively developed types all the bones were gnawed mostly by rats but somewhat by others
01:00:34.620of the half-human drobe. Many of them were many tiny bones of rats, fallen members of the lethal
01:00:47.240army which closed in the ancient epic. I wonder that any human among us lived and kept his sanity
01:00:56.800through that hideous day of discovery. Not Hoffman or Huseman could conceive a scene more
01:01:02.700wildly incredible more frantically repellent or more gothically grotesque than the twilight grotto
01:01:09.160through which we seven stared each stumbling on revelation after revelation and trying to keep
01:01:16.480from the nonce from thinking of the events which must have taken place there three hundred years
01:01:21.800or a thousand or two thousand or ten thousand years ago it was the antechamber of hell and
01:01:28.400Poor Thornton feigned again when Trask told him that some of the skeleton things must have descended as quadrupeds through the last twenty or more generations.
01:01:38.760Horror piled on horror as we began to interpret the architectural remains.
01:01:44.520the quadruped things with their occasional recruits from the biped class had been kept1.00
01:01:52.100in stone pens out of which many out of which they must have broken in their last delirium of hunger0.99
01:01:59.040or rat fear there had been great herds of them evidently fattened on the coarse vegetables
01:02:05.640who remains could be found as some sort of poisonous ensilage at the bottom of a huge stone
01:02:11.980been older than Rome. I knew now why my ancestors had had such excessive gardens.
01:02:19.380Would to heaven I could forget. The purpose of the herds did not have to ask.
01:02:30.400Sir William, standing with his searchlight in the Roman ruin, translated aloud the most
01:02:35.420shocking ritual I had ever known, and told of the diet of the antediluvian cult which the
01:02:41.480priests of Sybil found and miggled with their own. Norris, used as he was to the trenches,
01:02:48.020could not walk straight when he came out of the English building. It was a butcher shop and
01:02:53.360kitchen. He had expected that. There is too much to see familiar English implements in such a place
01:03:00.220and to read familiar English graffiti there. Some is recent is in 1610. I could not go to that
01:03:08.300building that building whose demon activities were stopped only by the dagger of my ancestor
01:03:13.340walter de la poor what i did venture to enter was a low saxon building whose oaken door had fallen
01:03:20.920and there i found a terrible row of 10 stone cells with rusty bars three head tenants all
01:03:28.040skeletons of high grade and on their bony phone and on the bony four finger one i found a seal
01:03:35.580ring with my own coat of arms. Sir William found a vault with far older cells below the Roman
01:03:43.120chapel, but these cells were empty. Below them was a low crypt with cases of formerly arranged
01:03:51.260bones, some of them bearing terrible parallel inscriptions carved in Latin, Greek, and the
01:03:57.040tongue of Phrygia. Meanwhile, Dr. Trask had opened one of the prehistoric tumuli and brought the
01:04:05.140light skulls which were inside more human and brought to light skulls which were slightly more
01:04:12.740human than a gorilla and which bore indescribable ideographic carvings. Through all this horror my
01:04:21.120cat stopped unperturbed. Once I saw him monstrously perch atop a mountain of bones
01:04:28.260and wondered at the secrets that may lie behind his yellow eyes having grasped to some slight
01:04:36.040degree the frightful revelation of this twilight era an area area so hideously foreshadowed by my
01:04:44.000recurrent dreams we turned to that apparent boundless depth of midnight
01:04:48.760depth of midnight cavern where no ray of light from the cliff could penetrate
01:04:54.220We shall never know what sightless Stygian worlds yawned beyond this little distance we went.1.00
01:05:03.020For it was decided that such secrets are not good for mankind.1.00
01:05:07.320But there was plenty to engross as close at hand,
01:05:10.480for we had not gone far before the searchlights shooed that accursed affinity of pits in which the rats had feasted,
01:05:17.640and in whose some lack of replenishment had driven the ravenous rodent army
01:05:21.820first to turn on the living herd and the starving herds of starving things
01:05:27.000and then to burst forth from the priory in that historic orgy of devastation
01:10:13.100Ah, ah, dear listener, I love this story.
01:10:17.060so much. I love the magic of the story. I love the progression. I love the tempo. I love the
01:10:24.720sudden ending. I love the language. I love everything to do with the story. I love the
01:10:32.120philosophy behind it. I love the vision of history. I love the tale of the horror Lovecraft is trying
01:10:45.180to unlock. It's truly magical. One of my great favorites. And you see how restrained it is.
01:10:56.280Despite how obscene the descriptions are, how vast the revelation is, despite the
01:11:06.600picturesque geography that's almost like a model, like you've built a model of this1.00
01:11:12.580of this house you know just had the downwards layers from the topmost tower with nigger men1.00
01:11:19.700sleeping on the bed to uh the fathomless pits below like just a cutaway in a posters or like1.00
01:11:29.140actually built on a table and yet it's so restrained compared to everything else lovecraft
01:11:35.820does uh it's so limited uh the there's no tentacles there's no uh there's no lost ancient
01:11:45.980gods there's no cults there's no black rituals there's no spells there's no non-euclidean
01:11:51.820geometry it's a it's a house you know it's a house a guy has to rebuild himself
01:11:58.840and and yet just within that just within like finding a hidden subsub basement
01:12:07.900uh you know one of the the oldest tales in all of gothic fiction just finding a hidden
01:12:15.160subsub basement and then venturing deeper and finding you know lost catacombs uh tales old
01:12:24.340his time uh just within that setup lovecraft lays out his entire philosophy his entire recoiling
01:12:34.740horror at the fastness of of deep time which like objectively isn't that deep like uh he
01:12:43.720hints that these rituals might have been going on for 10 000 years which is like
01:12:50.240And to the Luvian, it's older than the biblical universe, you know, which is supposed to be 6,000 years old.
01:12:56.820Yet in the scope of like, imagine history, it's like what science and like basic research has revealed about the age of the world.0.92
01:13:11.560Like, it's a very small blink, and yet the degraded apes of the thousand generations that have been prisoner in there, the skeletons that show that they have been descended back to quadruped for 20 generations,0.53
01:13:33.860the degraded apes the the post-human domesticated herds the demon rats uh within that is contained
01:13:45.660the entirety of of Lovecraft's eldritch horror and the fact that it's in the blood it's infecting0.63
01:13:53.860it it's infecting uh the old man Delapore it's still in there it's in the back of his hindbrain0.82
01:14:01.640Just like the terrible, the terrible sexualities of women who long for chains, remembering their hindbrain, remembering some deep experience of their ancestral 444 mothers.0.92
01:14:21.100Well, there's the blackened arcades of ancient prehistorical antiquity, the evolutionary bottlenecks around the mention of warfare and slavery, and all the horrors attendant, the monstrosities that were carried out when the domestication of animals was first invented, but upon people themselves.1.00
01:14:49.260the the descent the fact that that female breast tissue is eternally developed the same way that
01:14:59.140uh that domestic cows have breast tissue uh before they start lactating
01:15:05.860all all these darkened darkened horrors all these little things that are just hinted or
01:15:13.940buried in the subconscious or only exist in fleeting glimpses of the prehistoric or like
01:15:21.140the the grim writing writings of like far-right schizoids lovecraft captures it all in such a
01:15:30.820simple and beautiful package oh i love it and i hope hope you love it too i hope this has been
01:15:38.680a good introduction for you to his work and to the questions of these antitheluvian subjects.
01:15:52.460I find these questions, these questions of what human biology actually is, how it intersects with
01:16:02.820ancient pre-christian religious practices because it's not just it's not just the syrians or the
01:16:11.540aztecs that have elaborate human sacrifice rituals if you go back to the ancient germans
01:16:17.440and the ancient romans and like the spartans famously you find detailed elaborate human
01:16:24.360sacrifice rituals recounted by various sources that are all designed to bring various things
01:16:32.180about and the famous examples that we have are of course you know the spartans sacrifice all the
01:16:40.440the weaker like lame children uh the germans uh played like these odd games with uh their slave0.69
01:16:50.380women to to make the the least proud or the most like shameless like trick them into volunteering0.98
01:17:03.120to be sacrificing as in rituals to produce uh more prideful and violent descendants1.00
01:17:11.040descendants and you know produce the shockingly masculine uh features of german women i've
01:17:19.140written about this uh i'll link it in the show notes my piece on feral aryan femininity uh the
01:17:25.960sacrifice rituals of the my deep dive into the sacrifice rituals of the ancient germans
01:17:31.080but this these blackened arc arcades of unrecorded time that now we're unlocking0.57
01:17:42.820looking through the genetic records and finding all the the horrors of the of the origin of
01:17:52.440european and and other men uh which of course to communists and and various liberal thinkers
01:18:03.640really tried to bury like a lot of the stuff um is accounted or hinted at in
01:18:10.740And most of the pre-19th and most of the 19th century histories, the migratory invasions, the vast displacements of people, these are accounted and yet liberal thinkers and like university professors who are basically like priests of humanism all tried to dismiss these.
01:18:31.220And famously, it was repeated eternally in anthropology that pottery is not people.
01:18:40.080That when you see pottery styles change in regions, that totally doesn't correlate with a violent conquest.0.98
01:18:48.260No, ancient man was peaceful, which we now know is bullshit.0.83
01:18:51.680because we can do genetic analyses and we can see that all those wars that are in the ancient records0.96
01:19:01.820and all the exchanges accounted by the archaeology and all the changes in pottery and other styles
01:19:07.580accounted by the archaeology, all that directly ties to war and slave capture
01:19:14.840and all these genetic changes and exterminations and genocides.
01:19:26.100And much like Lovecraft's maddened heroes,
01:19:33.420for a hundred years, academia has flinched away from this
01:19:36.980or tried to proffer some communist Eden,
01:19:44.360a primitive man living in peace until capitalism corrupts him.
01:19:48.940But of course, we all subconsciously know it's there.