Delapore
Delapore is the unnamed American businessman who narrates The Rats in the Walls and resumes the ancestral spelling de la Poer after restoring Exham Priory. His attempt to recover and redeem a family past ends in an underground discovery, the death of his companion and a denial that frames the entire surviving account.
4 min read · 777 words
Childhood and the missing inheritance
The narrator grows up within the American branch of a family that left England under a cloud of violence. Its Virginia home, Carfax, burns during the Civil War when he is seven, killing his grandfather and destroying a sealed family document.
His later life moves north and develops through business success in Massachusetts. Neither he nor his father learns what the lost document contained.
The family’s reticence therefore produces a real gap in knowledge. He knows the name and the migration but not the institution or discovery behind them.
The loss of Alfred
His only child, Alfred, is ten when the narrator’s father dies in 1904. During the First World War Alfred serves in England as an aviation officer and befriends Captain Edward Norrys.
The son’s letters revive interest in Exham Priory. After returning severely wounded, he receives his father’s care for two years before dying.
Bereavement redirects the father’s remaining energy toward the restoration. His later hostility toward Norrys emerges against this history: the friend survived the war while Alfred did not.
Restoration as a new purpose
The narrator buys the estate in 1918 and pursues reconstruction after Alfred’s death. Norrys helps gather local information and obtain expert advice.
The owner hopes to demonstrate that a de la Poer need not repeat the family’s feared reputation. He resumes the old spelling and plans permanent residence in the restored house.
That intention combines pride with a desire for moral repair. The revelation below the house becomes devastating partly because it undermines the very purpose for which he has spent his wealth and effort.
The sounds only he hears
Cats respond to something in the old walls, and the narrator hears a downward movement of rats. Servants and Norrys observe the cats but do not hear the same scurrying.
He tries ordinary explanations and remedies, including traps. The empty sprung traps and apparent movement through solid masonry make those explanations increasingly difficult to sustain.
The narrative never gives an outside human witness full confirmation of the sound. Its recurrence in his padded room at the end links the initial investigation with his later denial and confinement.
The dreams and the family role
His recurrent dream shows a keeper driving a herd of repellent beings in a grotto. As the imagery sharpens, one creature’s face acquires a disturbing familiarity.
The underground discovery later reveals a human population kept as livestock, making the dream appear anticipatory. During the breakdown, the narrator connects the creature’s face with Norrys and struggles against seeing himself as the keeper.
The account does not settle whether this is supernatural memory, psychological association or a combination within the story’s horror. What matters narratively is that the observer can no longer remain separate from the roles he has uncovered.
The descent with the specialists
The narrator and Norrys obtain help from five experts, allowing the hidden entrance to be opened and the complex examined. Their findings explain the gardens, disappearances and older rat outbreak.
A skeleton wearing the family arms complicates his response to the ancestry. The institution could consume members of its own ruling line as well as outsiders.
Farther into the darkness, the narrator follows the apparent rats and loses contact with most of the party. The prose collapses into memories, accusation and changes of language, abandoning the controlled account with which he began.
Norrys and the final denial
According to the other investigators, the narrator is found over Norrys’s partly consumed body, with the black cat attacking him. He reports their finding but rejects its implication.
He is confined at Hanwell and separated from both the cat and Thornton, who occupies another room. Exham Priory is destroyed, and access to the discovery is restricted.
He insists that the rats are responsible. The ending leaves his account as testimony from someone capable of describing evidence yet unable or unwilling to accept what others say that evidence means about him.
Reading his reliability
The narrator is not unreliable in the simple sense that every object or date must be false. Other specialists participate in the excavation, and his account includes findings that do not flatter the family.
The central failure concerns interpretation and responsibility. He wants to distinguish himself from the ancestral crimes while attributing the present catastrophe to an external agent only he can hear.
In this encyclopedia’s reading, the story turns the pursuit of family continuity against the person seeking it. The name, house and recovered history that promise belonging also become the terms through which he loses his ability to describe himself securely.
References
- The Rats in the Walls — Unspeakable Tales ebook
The fictional narrative is evidence for what the story says, not proof of events in the real world.
At a glance
Delapore; resumes de la Poer; no first name supplied
The Rats in the Walls
Retired manufacturer
Carfax, Virginia
Bolton, Massachusetts
Alfred
Captain Edward Norrys
Exham Priory
Confinement at Hanwell