Just finished reading this story last night and I have no idea what happened. Admittedly, I read it quickly as I knew it was building to something traumatic, but by the end of the story I was left quite confused.
What were the rituals performed by the ancestors? Cannibalization? Or some sort of sacrifice to the rats?
Were the rats in the modern day part of the story real or a figment of the narrator’s imagination? Or were they spirit rats? (since the cats could hear them)
What happened to cause the rat stampede in the legend? Did that happen after Walter de la Poer killed his family after discovering their rituals?
As in many of Lovecraft’s stories, the degeneration of the main character’s ancestors was both moral and physical. They practiced “nameless ceremonies”, which included canabalism, worship of blasphemous pagen gods, and, presumably, sexual “practices”. They also degenerated physically, perhaps interbreeding with lower primates or just become so degraded that they were indistinguishable from lower primates.
There were indeed rats in the grottos below the mansion, which overcame the team of explorers. The rats may have chewed on the narrator’s companion, or he may have gone nuts and done it himself – or both.
The rats in the walls, I am guessing, were real, but “tuned” to the De La Pore family, so that no one else can hear them.
The rat stampede in the legend happened a couple of months after the family was wiped out by the villiagers. Presumably, the family could no longer feed them, so at some point they escaped and went in search of food…namely, anyone and anything in their way.
Pretty creepy story.
(The above is from memory, so deal kindly with it!)
Lovecraft was typicially vague. I got the impression that the worshippers were cannabalizing the people in the pens. The image of the rat-herding shepherd I took to be a sort of twisted allegory of Christ and his flock – that the rats were the ancestors, either transformed in body, or in a form taken by their souls after death.
I guess my interpretation is coloured by “Shadow Over Innsmouth” – another story in which the narrator seems to be reverting to an ancestral horror. Maybe the narrator of “Rats” will turn into a rat creature, given time?