Rats in the Walls
Jerusalem's Lot, Lovecraft, and another bad house
If you’re new here, welcome to The Barrens, a Stephen King book club. This is our first short story. For the next 19 weeks, we’re reading through his first collection, Night Shift. If you want to join in, Graveyard Shift is next!
As always please comment, engage, share with anyone who might enjoy. Happy Reading!
I read this story over two nights after my family had gone to bed. The nights are still hot where I am. The end of summer has brought some surprising heat, but Jerusalem’s Lot transported me to the Maine coast. As always, I am grateful and amazed by the ability the written word has to take us out of our lives, and put us in another’s mind and body for a while. But after finishing my reading, I can say that I am unequivocally thrilled that the world of Jerusalem’s Lot resides in the land of make believe.
I don’t know if there is any town I have despised more. ‘Salem’s Lot revealed her evil slowly, peeling back layers bit by bit. Somehow that made the landing softer. This shorter work was potent, a shock to the system. The evil described felt closer to the skin, made more so by the mention of noises in the night, attributed to rats in the walls. Right now my own house is quiet. Crickets sing outside. For sleep’s sake, let’s pray it stays that way.
My Dear Bones
It was fun to read a King story written through a series of journal entries and letters. His voice was perfectly adapted to a man writing in the 1800’s. Fevers, omens, and chills were all in good supply, which made me wonder: is this Jane Austen or the Master of Horror?
This is something that King excels at, bringing in other mediums of writing in his stories, be it newspapers, interviews, scientific journals, and in this story, personal letters. He seems able to adapt his writing to any format and style, and portray it convincingly. Think of the newspapers Jack Torrance discovers in The Shining or the articles, interviews and court transcripts throughout Carrie.
Fevers, Insanity, Charles Boone
Aristocrat Charles Boone takes up residence in a family home, Chapelwaite, near the ocean. Through various mentions, we learn that he has suffered from a fever at some point in the past, one that drove him to temporary insanity of some kind following his wife’s death.
To me, this is old speak for a nervous breakdown. His health is a constant concern of his manservant Calvin, as revealed in the few journal entries we read alongside Charles’ letters to his good friend, Bones. The man seems to go to his inherited family home seeking refuge and to regain his health fully. Instead, he stumbles upon an evil family secret that leads to his undoing.
The Townspeople
The old mansion is the talk of the nearby town, Preacher’s Corners. Like the Marsten House in ‘Salem’s Lot, Chapelwaite is a “bad house.” Everyone who has lived there has met some evil end. When an elderly house cleaner Mrs. Cloris brings a cleaning crew to the place, Charles notices that the women seem nervous there.
They all seemed a little nervous as they went about their chores; indeed, one flighty miss uttered a small screech when I entered the upstairs parlour as she dusted.
I asked Mrs. Cloris about this…and she turned to me and said with an air of determination: “They don’t like the house, and I don’t like the house, sir, because it has always been a bad house.”
Mrs. Cloris goes on to give the Boone family history, pointing to the crux of bad happenings.
“…and no Boone has ever been happy here since your grandfather Robert and his brother Philip fell out over stolen items in seventeen and eighty-nine.”
Here we have a mystery. An old family feud and the unhappy events that have unfolded in the house ever since. People have disappeared. Charles’ Uncle Randolph hung himself after his daughter Marcella fell down the cellar stairs.
“I have worked here, Mr. Boone, and I am neither blind nor deaf. I’ve heard awful sounds in the walls sir, awful sounds—thumpings and crashings and once a strange wailing that was half-laughter. It made my blood curdle. It’s a dark place, sir.”
A Discovery
The evening after his discussion with Mrs. Cloris, Charles’ manservant, Calvin McCann, comes to him in the living room to tell him that he’s found something, something Charles should see. As they climb the stairs, he explains that he was reading a strange book in the study when he heard a noise behind the wall.
“Rats,” I said. “Is that all?”
“Not rats,” Cal said. “There was a kind of blundering, thudding sound from behind the book-cases, and then a horrible gurgling—horrible, sir. And scratching, as if something were struggling to get out…to get at me!”
The noises moved, leading him to one part of the bookshelf. Charles is shocked, given that Calvin is not a superstitious type, and follows Calving into the study. Next to the book case is a square black hole, once covered by dummy books that, when moved, revealed a hiding place. Inside was a yellowed map of a town. There were seven buildings portrayed, one with a steeple with the words “The Worm That Doth Corrupt” inscribed beneath it.
Curiosity Killed the Cat
Their curiosity piqued, the two men decide to attempt to find the town the following day. They discover an overgrown road and follow it until they hear rushing water. A footbridge leads the way to the abandoned town of Jerusalem’s Lot.
The two men make their way through the worn but otherwise untouched houses and a tavern. The furniture is still as it was. Beds are made in the Boars Head Inn And Tavern. Only there is a rotten smell in all the buildings, so bad that Charles and Calvin have to cover their noses and mouths.
Such a stench as might issue from corrupt coffins or violated tombs.
Both are astounded that none of the windows have been broken, and not a single young person has vandalized the place. The townspeople surrounding are so afraid, no one has entered the town for what looks like decades.
They reach the church last, its steeple like the one depicted on the map. When they open the doors, the smell of death overwhelms them. In the vestibule is a painting, an obscene take of a madonna and her child, demonic creatures crawling in the background.
On entering the church, they find a golden cross, hung upside down in the “symbol of Satan’s Mass.” When they reach the pulpit, they find a large book open, covered in a mix of ancient runes and Latin. The title of the book, De Vermis Mysteriis, in English, The Mysteries of the Worm. When Charles touches it, the world before him trembles, the church itself shakes.
Calvin and Charles leave that place without speaking, but the damage has been done. The sounds in their house grow louder, and on investigating the “rat” problem in the cellar, Calvin and Charles are attacked by the undead, his Uncle Randolph and daughter Marcella. The bumps and pounding in the walls were not rats after all, but the slinking half-dead bodies of his relatives.
The Diary
The town of Preacher’s Corner is affected too. Bad omens, blood moons, a child born blind, all serve as warnings to them that something has been awakened. When Calvin discovers Robert Boone’s diary, Charles’ grandfather, the story of Jerusalem’s Lot is uncovered.
The town was founded by a Puritan sect, led by James Boon, a religious fanatic who surrounded himself with women, and created an inbred town filled with people who looked disturbingly like himself. They embraced witchcraft and the occult. When Robert’s brother Philip becomes obsessed with the man and joins the cult, Robert investigates the town, eventually feeling pulled to visit. He disappears after his last entry in his diary.
And yet I feel the urge to go again, to watch, to see. It seems that philip himself calls me, and the old Man.
The Birds.
cursed cursed cursed
Charles realizes that whatever Jerusalem’s Lot is, it is blood bound. His family line is cursed in some way, and his entry into the house and venture into Jerusalem’s Lot has brought some evil back to life.
Calvin, seeing the way Charles’ mind is starting to fail, gives him sleeping powder and tries to arrange for their departure, but it is too late. Charles is pulled to go back to Jerusalem’s Lot, to obtain The Mystery of the Worm and destroy it.
On entering the church for the last time, they find the door ajar, the pews overturned, and a dead lamb laying on the pulpit, a Satanic sacrifice. As soon as they disturb the book, the walls come alive with the sound of chanting. The floor beneath them shakes. The pulpit splits in two, and Charles utters a profane prayer, overtaken by an ancient presence.
Calvin knocks him down, restoring his mind, and Charles lights the book on fire, destroying it. What follows is a screech, as of something in pain, and a great worm breaks through the floor, throwing Calvin aside and killing him.
And then there was a huge surge of gray, vibrating flesh. The smell became a nightmare tide. It was a huge outpouring of a viscid, pustulant jelly, a huge and awful form that seemed to skyrocket from the very bowels of the ground.
From the hole where it broke through, the undead James Boon emerges, meaning to take Charles with him. Charles flees back to Chapelwaite, realizing that he would never escape this evil that meant to use him, to take him.
He still lives somewhere in the twisted, lightless wanderings beneath Jerusalem’s Lot and Chapelwaite—and It still lives. The burning of the book thwarted It, but there are other copies.
Yet I am the gateway, and I am the last of the Boone blood. For the good of all humanity I must die…and break the chain forever.
I go to the sea now, Bones. My journey, like my story, is at an end.
Lovecraft Anyone?
Small confession: I haven’t read any Lovecraft. The only knowledge I have of the connection between this story and Lovecraft’s The Rats in the Walls has been provided by articles and commentary I read in preparing this article. All of you better versed, please feel free to chime in, correct, etc.
This story was actually written as a school assignment while King was in college. Its inception led to King’s eventual writing of ‘Salem’s Lot, a novel that is written in his voice rather than the one we read here. If I picked this up without an author credited, there would be nothing in it to indicate it was written by Stephen King, which given the background, makes perfect sense.
The Worm that breaks through the church floors in Jerusalem’s Lot, is apparently an incarnation of Shudde M’ell, “a mile long great grey worm-like creature that burrows through the earth.” The storylines of The Rats in the Wall and Jerusalem’s Lot also appear to hit similar plot points, though as stated above, I’ll leave that to the people who have actually read both stories.
1971
The story ends with a descendent of Charles Boone, James Robert Boone, who we learn has taken up residence in Chapelwaite himself. He finds and reads these accounts, and attributes them to nothing more than some type of insanity brought on by the loss of his relative’s wife. He believes that Charles murdered Calvin, and forged the diary entries therein to make sense of his paranoid delusions before killing himself.
The only fact he can agree with, is that Chapelwaite indeed must have a rat problem. Big ones by the sound of it.
‘Salem’s Lot Connections
I went into this story imagining there would be a more direct connection to ‘Salem’s Lot. While I enjoyed the story, I didn’t find much to go on other than the land itself being cursed and evil. There weren’t any vampires to be found, unless the undead in the story are some type of vampire and I missed it.
I enjoyed the story, was even scared by parts of it, but the voice doesn’t read as original. It seems like a copy, fitting for something that is an epistolatory work set in the 1800’s, but not what I have come to expect from King.
And now over to you.
Did you see any connections that I missed between this story and ‘Salem’s Lot?
If you have read Lovecraft, did it seem like a copy of The Rats in the Walls the way that some critics have written it is?
Did any of you catch the reference to “It” when Charles describes the worm? Is this connected in any way to our ancient monster Pennywise who lives in the sewer tunnels beneath Derry?
Thanks for the recap. I've not read this for a long time. There's something about this story that reminds me of Whistle And I'll Come To You My Lad by M.R. James. I suppose it's the haunted feeling I get and the things that wait in the walls or elsewhere. I'm going to dig this collection out and join in properly next session.
Good writeup, Shaina.
This is very much Lovecraft coming through, and that's perhaps not so surprising given when King wrote this and (I assume; correct me if I'm wrong) some of his early influences. It's an unusual style for King, I'd say, but it did work here, and it was quite interesting reading it after having read the main novel. (In my version of the book it was appended after the main story. There was also another short story in there, too. Set many years after the events of 'Salem's Lot.)
Definitely read some Lovecraft. The Color Out of Space, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and The Call of Cthulhu would be the top three I would recommend. They're all pretty short, though the language/style makes them less of a quick read. The Penguin Classics version that have the footnotes by Lovecraft literary expert S.T. Joshi are superb. Other stories of note are The Music of Eric Zann as well as The Dreams in the Witch House. Oh, and let's not forget At The Mountains Of Madness.
^^^future The Barrens material pretty please!