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Title: The case of Charles Dexter Ward
Author: H. P. Lovecraft
Release date: May 5, 2024 [eBook #73547]
Language: English
Original publication: New York, NY: Weird Tales, 1941
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD ***
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
By H. P. LOVECRAFT
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales May, July 1941
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Here is THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD--the last, and many think
the best, the most exciting--of all H. P. Lovecraft's superb weird
fantasies.
Discovered after years of difficult search--and pieced together with
as much careful patience as Charles Ward puts into his terrifying
researches in the story--August Derleth and Donald Wandrei at long last
had all the scattered pages of Lovecraft's novel complete.
The manuscript, gathered over the course of many years from attics,
forgotten strong boxes and old bureaus, is published now--in WEIRD
TALES.
In it you are going to read again of Cthulhu and the fearful
Necronomicon; in these pages you will also find a perfect wealth of new
thrills. In _Charles Ward_ you will read ... but why go on, when you're
just raring to get ahead with the story?
So just turn the page--and on with the show!
* * * * *
The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved,
that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his owne
Studie and raise the fine shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at
his Pleasure; and by the lyke method from the essential Saltes of
humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy,
call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his
Bodie has been incinerated.
BORELLUS.
_1. A Result and a Prologue_
From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island,
there recently disappeared an exceedingly singular person. He bore
the name of Charles Dexter Ward, and was placed under restraint most
reluctantly by his grieving father.
The patient seemed oddly older than his twenty-six years would warrant;
his face had taken on a subtle cast which only the very aged usually
acquire. While his organic processes showed a certain queerness
of proportion which nothing in medical experience can parallel.
Respiration and heart action had a baffling lack of symmetry, the voice
was lost, so that no sounds above a whisper were possible, digestion
was incredibly prolonged and minimized. The skin had a morbid chill and
dryness, and the cellular structure of the tissue seemed exaggeratedly
coarse and loosely-knit. Even a large olive birthmark on his right hip
had disappeared, whilst there had formed on his chest a very peculiar
mole or blackish spot of which no trace existed before.
Psychologically, too, Charles Ward was unique. His madness held no
affinity to any sort recorded in even the latest and most exhaustive
of treatises, and was conjoined to a mental force which would have
made him a genius or a leader had it not been twisted into strange and
grotesque forms.
Only Dr. Willett, who brought Charles Ward into the world and watched
his growth of body and mind ever since, seemed frightened at the
thought of his future freedom. He had had a terrible experience and had
made a terrible discovery which he dared not reveal to his skeptical
colleagues. Willett, indeed, presents a minor mystery all his own
in his connection with the case. He was the last to see the patient
before his flight, and emerged from that final conversation in a state
of mixed horror and relief which several recalled when Ward's escape
became known three hours later. That escape itself is one of the
unsolved wonders of Dr. Waite's hospital. A window open above a sheer
drop of sixty feet could hardly explain it, yet after that talk with
Willett the youth was undeniably gone.
He had found Ward in his room, but shortly after his departure the
attendants knocked in vain. When they opened the door the patient was
not there, and all they found was the open window with a chill April
breeze blowing in a cloud of fine bluish-gray dust that almost choked
them. True, the dogs had howled some time before; but that was while
Willett was still present, and they had caught nothing and shown
no disturbance later on. Ward's father was told at once over the
telephone, but he seemed more saddened than surprised. By the time Dr.
Waite called in person, Dr. Willett had been talking with him, and both
disavowed any knowledge or complicity in the escape. Only from certain
closely confidential friends of Willett and the senior Ward have any
clues been gained, and even these are too wildly fantastic for general
credence. The one fact which remains is that up to the present time no
trace of the missing madman has been unearthed.
* * * * *
Charles Ward was an antiquarian from infancy, no doubt gaining his
taste from the venerable town around him, and from the relics of the
past which filled every corner of his parent's old mansion in Prospect
Street on the crest of the hill. With the years his devotion to ancient
things increased; so that history, genealogy, and the study of Colonial
architecture, furniture, and craftsmanship at length crowded everything
else from his sphere of interests. These tastes are important to
remember in considering his madness. One would have fancied the patient
literally transferred to a former age through some obscure sort of
auto-hypnosis. The odd thing was that Ward seemed no longer interested
in the antiquities he knew so well. He had, it appears, lost his regard
for them through sheer familiarity; and all his final efforts were
obviously bent toward mastering those common facts of the modern world
which had been so totally and unmistakably expunged from his brain. His
whole program of reading and conversation was determined by a frantic
wish to imbibe such knowledge of his own life and of the ordinary
practical and cultural background of the twentieth century as ought to
have been his by virtue of his birth in 1902 and his education in the
schools of our own time. Alienists are of the dominant opinion that the
escaped patient is "lying low" in some humble and unexacting position
till his stock of modern information can be brought up to the normal.
The beginning of Ward's madness is a matter of dispute among alienists.
Dr. Lyman, the eminent Boston authority, places it in 1919 or 1920,
during the boy's last year at the Moses Brown School, when he suddenly
turned from the study of the past to the study of the occult, and
refused to qualify for college on the ground that he had individual
researches of much greater importance to make.
It is, broadly speaking, undeniable that the winter of 1919-20 saw
a great change in Ward; whereby he abruptly dropped his general
antiquarian pursuits and embarked on a desperate delving into occult
subjects both at home and abroad, varied only by this strangely
persistent search for his fore-father's grave.
From this opinion, however, Dr. Willett substantially dissents, basing
his verdict on his close and continuous knowledge of the patient, and
on certain frightful investigations and discoveries which he made
toward the last.
Those investigations and discoveries have left their mark upon him; so
that his voice trembles when he tells them, and his hand trembles when
he tries to write of them.
The true madness, he is certain, came with a later change; after the
Curwen portrait and the ancient papers had been unearthed; after a trip
to strange foreign places had been made, and some terrible invocations
chanted under strange and secret circumstances; after certain _answers_
to these invocations had been plainly indicated, and a frantic letter
penned under agonizing and inexplicable conditions; after the wave of
vampirism and the ominous Pawtuxet gossip; and after the patient's
memory commenced to exclude contemporary images whilst his voice failed
and his physical aspect underwent the subtle modification so many
subsequently noticed.
It was only about this time, Willett points out with much acuteness,
that the nightmare qualities became indubitably linked with Ward, and
the doctor feels shudderingly sure that enough solid evidence exists to
sustain the youth's claim regarding his crucial discovery. There were
the mysteries and coincidences of the Orne and Hutchinson letters, and
the problem of the Curwen penmanship and of what the detectives brought
to light about Dr. Allen; these things, and the terrible message
in mediaeval minuscules found in Willett's pocket when he gained
consciousness after his shocking experience.
And most conclusive of all, there are the two hideous _results_ which
the doctor obtained from a certain pair of formulae during his final
investigations; results which virtually proved the authenticity of the
papers and of their monstrous implications at the same time that those
papers were borne for ever from human knowledge.
* * * * *
One must look back at Charles Ward's earlier life as at something
belonging as much to the past as the antiquities he loved so keenly.
His home was a great Georgian mansion atop the well-nigh precipitous
hill that rises just east of the river, and from the rear windows of
its rambling wings he could look dizzily out over all the clustered
spires, domes, roofs and skyscraper summits of the lower town to the
purple hills of the countryside beyond. Here he was born, and from the
lovely classic porch of the double-bayed brick façade his nurse had
first wheeled him in his carriage; past the little white farmhouse of
two hundred years before that the town had long ago overtaken, and on
toward the stately colleges along the shady, sumptuous street, whose
old square brick mansions and smaller wooden houses with narrow,
heavy-columned Doric porches dreamed solid and exclusive amidst their
generous yards and gardens.
He had been wheeled, too, along sleepy Congdon Street, one tier lower
down on the steep hill, and with all its eastern houses on high
terraces. The small wooden houses averaged a greater age here, for
it was up this hill that the growing town had climbed. One of the
child's first memories is of the great westward sea of hazy roofs and
domes and steeples and far hills which he saw one winter afternoon
from that great railed embankment, all violet and mystic against a
fevered, apocalyptic sunset of reds and golds and purples and curious
greens. The vast marble dome of the State House stood out in massive
silhouette, its crowning statue haloed fantastically by a break in one
of the tinted stratus clouds that barred the flaming sky.
When he was larger his famous walks began; first with his impatiently
dragged nurse and then alone in dreamy meditation. One may picture him
yet as he was in those days; tall, slim, and blond, with studious eyes
and a slight stoop, dressed somewhat carelessly, and giving a dominant
impression of harmless awkwardness rather than attractiveness.
He would seek for vivid contrasts; spending half a walk in the
crumbling colonial regions northwest of his home, where the hill drops
to the lower eminence of Stampers Hill with its ghetto and Negro
quarter clustering round the place where the Boston stagecoach used
to start before the Revolution, and the other half in the gracious
southerly realm about George, Benevolent, Power, and Williams Streets,
where the old slope holds unchanged the fine estates and bits of walled
garden and steep green lane in which so many fragrant memories linger.
Dr. Willett is certain that, up to this ill-omened winter of first
change, Charles Ward's antiquarianism was free from every trace of
the morbid. Graveyards held for him no particular attraction beyond
their quaintness and historic value, and of anything like violence or
savage instinct he was utterly devoid. Then, by insidious degrees,
there appeared to develop a curious sequel to one of his genealogical
triumphs of the year before; when he had discovered among his maternal
ancestors a certain very long-lived man named Joseph Curwen, who had
come from Salem in March of 1692, and about whom a whispered series of
highly peculiar and disquieting stories clustered.
* * * * *
Ward's great-great-grandfather Welcome Potter had in 1785 married a
certain "Ann Tillinghast, daughter to Mrs. Eliza, daughter to Capt.
James Tillinghast," of whose paternity the family had preserved no
trace. Late in 1918, whilst examining a volume of original town records
in manuscript, the young genealogist encountered an entry describing a
legal change of name, by which in 1772 a Mrs. Eliza Curwen, widow of
Joseph Curwen, resumed, along with her seven-year-old daughter Ann,
her maiden name of Tillinghast; on the ground "that her Husband's
name was become a public Reproach by Reason of what was knowne after
his Decease; the which confirming antient common Rumour, tho' not to
be credited by a loyall Wife till so proven as to be wholely past
Doubting." This entry came to light upon the accidental separation of
two leaves which had been carefully pasted together and treated as one
by a labored revision of the page numbers.
It was at once clear to Charles Ward that he had indeed discovered a
hitherto unknown great-great-great-grandfather. Having discovered his
own relationship to this apparently "hushed-up" character, he at once
proceeded to hunt out as systematically as possible whatever he might
find concerning him. In this excited quest he eventually succeeded
beyond his highest expectations, for old letters, diaries and sheaves
of unpublished memoirs in cobwebbed Providence garrets and elsewhere
yielded many illuminating passages which their writers had not thought
it worth their while to destroy. One important sidelight came from
a point as remote as New York, where some Rhode Island colonial
correspondence was stored in the Museum at Fraunces' Tavern. The really
crucial thing, though, and what in Dr. Willett's opinion formed the
definite source of Ward's undoing, was the matter found in August,
1919, behind the panelling of the crumbling house in Olney Court. It
was that, beyond a doubt, which opened up those black vistas whose end
was deeper than the pit.
_2. An Antecedent and a Horror_
Joseph Curwen, as revealed by the rambling legends embodied in what
Ward heard and unearthed, was a very astonishing, enigmatic, obscurely
horrible individual. He had fled from Salem to Providence--that
universal haven of the odd, the free, and the dissenting--at the
beginning of the great witchcraft panic; being in fear of accusation
because of his solitary ways and queer chemical or alchemical
experiments. He was a colorless-looking man of about thirty, and was
soon found qualified to become a freeman of Providence; thereafter
buying a home lot just north of Gregory Dexter's at about the foot of
Olney Street. His house was built on Stampers Hill west of the Town
Street, in what later became Olney Court; and in 1761 he replaced this
with a larger one, on the same site, which is still standing.
Now the first odd thing about Joseph Curwen was that he did not seem
to grow much older than he had been on his arrival. He engaged in
shipping enterprises, purchased wharfage near Mile-End Cove, helped
rebuild the Great Bridge in 1713, and in 1723 was one of the founders
of the Congregational Church on the hill; but always did he retain the
nondescript aspect of a man not greatly over thirty or thirty-five.
As the decades mounted up, this singular quality began to excite wide
notice; but Curwen always explained it by saying that he came of hardy
forefathers, and practiced a simplicity of living which did not wear
him out. How such simplicity could be reconciled with the inexplicable
comings and goings of the secretive merchant, and with the queer
gleamings of his windows at all hours of night, was not very clear to
the townsfolk; and they were prone to assign other reasons for his
continued youth and longevity. It was held, for the most part, that
Curwen's incessant mixings and boilings of chemicals had much to do
with his condition. At length, when over fifty years had passed since
the stranger's advent, and without producing more than five years'
apparent change in his face and physique, the people began to whisper
more darkly; and to meet more than halfway that desire for isolation
which he had always shown.
Private letters and diaries of the period reveal, too, a multitude
of other reasons why Joseph Curwen was marvelled at, feared, and
finally shunned like a plague. His passion for graveyards, in which
he was glimpsed at all hours and under all conditions, was notorious;
though no one had witnessed any deed on his part which could actually
be termed ghoulish. On the Pawtuxet Road he had a farm, at which he
generally lived during the summer, and to which he would frequently be
seen riding at various odd times of the day or night. Here his only
visible servants, farmers, and caretakers were a sullen pair of aged
Narragansett Indians; the husband dumb and curiously scarred, and the
wife of a very repulsive cast of countenance, probably due to a mixture
of Negro blood. In the lean-to of this house was the laboratory where
most of the chemical experiments were conducted. Curious porters
and teamers who delivered bottles, bags or boxes at the small rear
door would exchange accounts of the fantastic flasks, crucibles,
alembics, and furnaces they saw in the low-shelved room; and prophesied
in whispers that the close-mouthed "chymist"--by which they meant
_alchemist_--would not be long in finding the Philosopher's Stone.
The nearest neighbors to this farm--the Fenners, a quarter of a mile
away--had still queerer things to tell of certain sounds which they
insisted came from the Curwen place in the night. There were cries,
they said, and sustained howlings; and they did not like the large
number of livestock which thronged the pastures. Then, too, there was
something very obnoxious about a certain great stone outbuilding with
only high narrow slits for windows.
Great Bridge idlers likewise had much to say of Curwen's town house in
Olney Court; not so much the fine new one built in 1761, when the man
must have been nearly a century old, but the first low gambrel-roofed
one with the windowless attic and shingled sides, whose timbers he took
the peculiar precaution of burning after its demolition. Here there
was less mystery, it is true; but the hours at which lights were seen,
the secretiveness of the two swarthy foreigners who comprised the only
manservants, the hideous indistinct mumbling of the incredibly aged
French housekeeper, the large amounts of food seen to enter a door
within which only four persons lived, and the _quality_ of certain
voices often heard in muffled conversation at highly unseasonable
times, all combined with what was known of the Pawtuxet farm to give
the place a bad name.
* * * * *
In choicer circles, too, the Curwen home was by no means undiscussed;
for as the newcomer had gradually worked into the church and trading
life of the town, he had naturally made acquaintances of the better
sort, whose company and conversation he was well fitted by education to
enjoy.
His birth was known to be good, since the Curwens or Carwens of Salem
needed no introduction in New England. It developed that Joseph Curwen
had traveled much in very early life, living for a time in England and
making at least two voyages to the Orient; and his speech, when he
deigned to use it, was that of a learned and cultivated Englishman.
There seemed to lurk in his bearing some cryptic, sardonic arrogance,
as if he had come to find all human beings dull through having moved
among stranger and more potent entities.
In 1746 Mr. John Merritt, an elderly English gentleman of literary and
scientific leanings, came from Newport to the town which was so rapidly
overtaking it in standing, and built a fine country seat on the Neck in
what is now the heart of the best residence section where he lived in
considerable style and comfort. Hearing of Curwen as the owner of the
best library in Providence, Mr. Merritt early paid him a call, and was
more cordially received than most other callers at the house had been.
Curwen suggested a visit to the farmhouse and laboratory whither he
had never invited anyone before; and the two drove out at once in Mr.
Merritt's coach.
Mr. Merritt maintained that the titles of the books in the special
library of thaumaturgical, alchemical, and theological subjects which
Curwen kept in a front room were alone sufficient to inspire him with a
lasting loathing. This bizarre collection, besides a host of standard
works which Mr. Merritt was not too alarmed to envy, embraced nearly
all the cabalists, demonologists, and magicians known to man; and was a
treasure-house of lore in the doubtful realms of alchemy and astrology.
Hermes Trismegistus in Mesnard's edition, the _Turba Philosophorum_,
Geber's _Liber Investigationis_, and Artephous' _Key of Wisdom_ all
were there; with the cabalistic _Zohar_, Peter Jammy's set of Albertus
Magnus, Raymond Lully's _Ars Magna et Ultima_ in Zetzner's edition,
Roger Bacon's _Thesaurus Chemicus_, Fludd's _Clavis Alchimiae_, and
Trithemius' _De Lapide Philosophico_ crowding them close. Mediaeval
Jews and Arabs were represented in profusion, and Mr. Merritt turned
pale when, upon taking down a fine volume conspicuously labeled as the
_Qunoon-e-Islam_, he found it was in truth the forbidden _Necronomicon_
of the mad Arab Abdul Al-hazred, of which he had heard such monstrous
things whispered some years previously after the exposure of nameless
rites at the strange little fishing village of Kingsport, in the
Province of the Massachusetts-Bay.
But the worthy gentleman owned himself most impalpably disquieted by a
mere minor detail. On the huge mahogany table there lay face downward
a badly worn copy of Borellus, bearing many cryptical marginalia and
interlineations in Curwen's hand.
The book was open at about its middle, and one paragraph displayed
such thick and tremulous pen-strokes beneath the lines of mystic
black-letters that the visitor could not resist scanning it through. He
recalled it to the end of his days, writing it down from memory in his
diary and once trying to recite it to his close friend Dr. Checkley,
till he saw how greatly it disturbed that urbane rector. It read:
The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved,
that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his owne
Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at
his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of
humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy,
call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his
Bodie has been incinerated.
* * * * *
It was near the docks along the southerly part of the Town Street,
however, that the worst things were muttered about Joseph Curwen.
Sailors are superstitious folk; and all made strange furtive signs of
protection when they saw the slim, deceptively young-looking figure
with its yellow hair and slight stoop entering the Curwen warehouse
in Doubloon Street or talking with captains and supercargos on the
long quay where the Curwen ships rode restlessly. Curwen's own clerks
and captains hated and feared him, and all his sailors were mongrel
riff-raff from Martinique, St. Eustatius, Havana, or Port Royal. It
was, in a way, the frequency with which these sailors were replaced,
which inspired the acutest and most tangible part of the fear in which
the old man was held, and in time it became exceedingly difficult for
Curwen to keep his oddly assorted hands.
By 1760 Joseph Curwen was virtually an outcast, suspected of vague
horrors and daemoniac alliances which seemed all the more menacing
because they could not be named, understood, or even proved to exist.
Meanwhile the merchant's worldly affairs were prospering. He had a
virtual monopoly of the town's trade in saltpetre, black pepper, and
cinnamon, and easily led any other one shipping establishment save the
Browns in his importation of brassware, indigo, cotton, woollens, salt,
rigging, iron, paper and English goods of every kind. Curwen was, in
fact, one of the prime exporters of the Colony.
* * * * *
The sight of this strange, pallid man, hardly middle-aged in aspect
yet certainly not less than a full century old, seeking at last to
emerge from a cloud of fright and detestation too vague to pin down or
analyze, was at once a pathetic, a dramatic, and a contemptible thing.
Such is the power of wealth and of surface gestures, however, that
there came indeed a slight abatement in the visible aversion displayed
toward him; especially after the rapid disappearances of his sailors
abruptly ceased. He must likewise have begun to practice an extreme
care and secrecy in his graveyard expeditions, for he was never again
caught at such wanderings; whilst the rumors of uncanny sounds and
maneuvers at his Pawtuxet farm diminished in proportion.
But the effect of all this belated mending was necessarily slight.
Curwen continued to be avoided and distrusted, as indeed the one fact
of his continued air of youth at a great age would have been enough
to warrant; and he could see that in the end his fortunes would be
likely to suffer. So about this time the crafty scholar hit upon a last
desperate expedient to regain his footing in the community. Hitherto
a complete hermit, he now determined to contract an advantageous
marriage; securing as a bride some lady whose unquestioned position
would make all ostracism of his home impossible. It may be that he also
had deeper reasons for wishing an alliance; reasons so far outside
the known cosmic sphere that only papers found a century and a half
after his death caused anyone to suspect them; but of this nothing
certain can ever be learned. Naturally he was aware of the horror and
indignation with which any ordinary courtship of his would be received,
hence looked about for some likely candidate upon whose parents he
might exert a suitable pressure. Such candidates, he found, were not
at all easy to discover; since he had very particular requirements in
the way of beauty, accomplishments, and social security. At length his
survey narrowed down to the household of one of his best and oldest
ship-captains, a widower of high birth and unblemished standing named
Dutie Tillinghast, whose only daughter Eliza seemed dowered with every
conceivable advantage save prospects as an heiress. Captain Tillinghast
was completely under the domination of Curwen; and consented, after
a terrible interview in his cupolaed house on Power's Lane hill, to
sanction the blasphemous alliance.
* * * * *
Eliza Tillinghast was at that time eighteen years of age, and had been
reared as gently as the reduced circumstances of her father permitted.
Her arguments with her father concerning the proposed Curwen marriage
must have been painful indeed; but of these we have no record. Certain
it is that her engagement to young Ezra Weeden, second mate of the
Crawford packet _Enterprise_, was dutifully broken off, and that her
union with Joseph Curwen took place on the seventh of March, 1763, in
the Baptist church, in the presence of one of the most distinguished
assemblages which the town could boast; the ceremony being performed
by the youngest Samuel Winson. The _Gazette_ mentioned the event very
briefly, and in most surviving copies the item in question seems to be
cut or torn out. Ward found a single intact copy after much search in
the archives of a private collector of note, observing with amusement
the meaningless urbanity of the language:
Monday evening last, Mr. Joseph Curwen, of this Town, Merchant,
was married to Miss Eliza Tillinghast, Daughter of Captain Dutie
Tillinghast, a young Lady who has real Merit, added to a beautiful
Person, to grace the connubial State and perpetuate its Felicity.
The social influence of the Tillinghasts, however, was not to be
denied; and once more Joseph Curwen found his house frequented by
persons whom he could never otherwise have induced to cross his
threshold. His acceptance was by no means complete, and his bride was
socially the sufferer through her forced venture; but at all events the
wall of utter ostracism was somewhat worn down. In his treatment of
his wife the strange bridegroom astonished both her and the community
by displaying an extreme graciousness and consideration. The new house
in Olney Court was now wholly free from disturbing manifestations,
and although Curwen was much absent at the Pawtuxet farm which his
wife never visited, he seemed more like a normal citizen than at any
other time in his long years of residence. Only one person remained
in open enmity with him, this being the youthful ship's officer
whose engagement to Eliza Tillinghast had been so abruptly broken.
Ezra Weeden had frankly vowed vengeance; and though of a quiet and
originally mild disposition, was now gaining a hate-bred, dogged
purpose which boded no good to the usurping husband.
On the seventh of May, 1765, Curwen's only child Ann was born; and was
christened by the Reverend John Graves of King's Church, of which both
husband and wife had become communicants shortly after their marriage,
in order to compromise between their respective Congregational and
Baptist affiliations. The record of this birth, as well as that of
the marriage two years before, was stricken from most copies of the
church and town annals where it ought to appear; and Charles Ward
located both with the greatest difficulty after his discovery of the
widow's change of name had apprised him of his own relationship, and
engendered the feverish interest which culminated in his madness. The
birth entry, indeed, was found very curiously through correspondence
with the heirs of the loyalist Dr. Graves, who had taken with him a
duplicate set of records when he left his pastorate at the outbreak
of the Revolution. Ward had tried this source because he knew that
his great-great-grandmother, Ann Tillinghast Potter, had been an
Episcopalian.
Shortly after the birth of his daughter, an event he seemed to welcome
with a fervor greatly out of keeping with his usual coldness, Curwen
resolved to sit for a portrait. This he had painted by a very gifted
Scotsman named Cosmo Alexander, then a resident of Newport, and since
famous as the early teacher of Gilbert Stuart. The likeness was said to
have been executed on a wall-panel of the library of the house in Olney
Court, but neither of the two old diaries mentioning it gave any hint
of its ultimate disposition.
* * * * *
In 1766 came the final change in Joseph Curwen. It was very sudden,
and gained wide notice amongst the curious townsfolk; for the air of
suspense and expectancy dropped like an old cloak, giving instant place
to an ill-concealed exaltation of perfect triumph. It was after this
transition, which appears to have come early in July, that the sinister
scholar began to astonish people by his possession of information which
only their long-dead ancestors would seem to be able to impart.
But Curwen's feverish secret activities by no means ceased with this
change. On the contrary, they tended rather to increase; so that more
and more of his shipping business was handled by the captains whom
he now bound to him by ties of fear as potent as those of bankruptcy
had been. He altogether abandoned the slave trade, alleging that its
profits were constantly decreasing. Every possible moment was spent
at the Pawtuxet farm; though there were rumors now and then of his
presence in places which, though not actually near graveyards, were yet
so situated in relation to graveyards that thoughtful people wondered
just how thorough the old merchant's change of habits really was.
Ezra Weeden, though his periods of espionage were necessarily brief
and intermittent on account of his sea voyaging, had a vindictive
persistence which the bulk of the practical townsfolk and farmers
lacked; and subjected Curwen's affairs to a scrutiny such as they had
never had before.
Smuggling and evasion were the rule in Narragansett Bay, and nocturnal
landings of illicit cargoes were continuous commonplaces. But Weeden,
night after night, following the lighters or small sloops which he saw
steal off from the Curwen warehouses at the Town Street docks, soon
felt assured that it was not merely His Majesty's armed ships which the
sinister skulker was anxious to avoid. The lighters were wont to put
out from the black silent docks, and they would go down the bay some
distance, perhaps as far as Namquit Point, where they would meet and
receive cargo from strange ships of considerable size and widely varied
appearance. Curwen's sailors would then deposit this cargo at the usual
point on the shore, and transport it overland to the farm; locking it
in the same cryptical stone building which had formerly received the
Negroes. The cargo consisted almost wholly of boxes and cases, of which
a large proportion were oblong and heavy, and disturbingly suggestive
of coffins.
Weeden always watched the farm with unremitting assiduity, visiting
it each night for long periods, and seldom letting a week go by
without a sight except when the ground bore a footprint-revealing
snow. Finding his own vigils interrupted by nautical duties, he hired
a tavern companion named Eleazar Smith to continue the survey during
his absences; and between them the two could have set in motion some
extraordinary rumors. That they did not do so was only because they
knew the effect of publicity would be to warn their quarry and make
further progress impossible.
* * * * *
It is gathered that Weeden and Smith became early convinced that a
great series of tunnels and catacombs, inhabited by a very sizable
staff of persons besides the old Indian and his wife, underlay the
farm. The house was an old peaked relic of the middle seventeenth
century with enormous stack chimney and diamond-paned lattice windows,
the laboratory being in a lean-to toward the north, where the roof
came nearly to the ground. This building stood clear of any other; yet
judging by the different voices heard at odd times within, it must
have been accessible through secret passages beneath. These voices
ran the gamut betwixt dronings of dull acquiescence and explosions of
frantic pain or fury, rumblings of conversation and whines of entreaty,
pantings of eagerness and shouts of protest. They appeared to be in
different languages, all known to Curwen, whose rasping accents were
frequently distinguishable in reply, reproof, or threatening.
Weeden had many verbatim reports of overheard scraps in his notebook,
for English, French, and Spanish, which he knew, were frequently used;
but of these nothing has survived. He did, however, say that besides a
few ghoulish dialogues in which the past affairs of Providence families
were concerned, most of the questions and answers he could understand
were historical or scientific; occasionally pertaining to very remote
places and ages. Once, for example, an alternately raging and sullen
figure was questioned in French about the Black Prince's massacre at
Limoges in 1370, as if there were some hidden reason which he ought to
know. Curwen asked the prisoner--if prisoner it were--whether the order
to slay was given because of the Sign of the Goat found on the altar
in the ancient Roman crypt beneath the cathedral, or whether The Dark
Man of the Haute Vienne Coven had spoken the Three Words. Failing to
obtain replies, the inquisitor had seemingly resorted to extreme means;
for there was a terrific shriek followed by silence and muttering and a
bumping sound.
None of these colloquies was ever ocularly witnessed, since the windows
were always heavily draped. Later, no more conversations were ever
heard in the house, and Weeden and Smith concluded that Curwen had
transferred his field of action to regions below.
That such regions in truth existed, seemed amply clear from many
things. Faint cries and groans unmistakably came up now and then from
what appeared to be the solid earth in places far from any structure;
whilst hidden in the bushes along the river-bank in the rear, where the
high ground sloped steeply down to the valley of the Pawtuxet, there
was found an arched oaken door in a frame of heavy masonry, which was
obviously an entrance to caverns within the hill.
* * * * *
It was in January, 1770, whilst Weeden and Smith were still debating
vainly on what, if anything, to think or do about the whole bewildering
business, that the incident of the _Fortaleza_ occurred. Exasperated
by the burning of the revenue sloop _Liberty_ at Newport during the
previous summer, the customs fleet under Admiral Wallace had adopted an
increased vigilance concerning strange vessels; and on this occasion
His Majesty's armed schooner _Cygnet_, under Captain Charles Leshe,
captured after a short pursuit one early morning the scow _Fortaleza_
of Barcelona, Spain, under Captain Manuel Arruda, bound according to
its log from Grand Cairo, Egypt, to Providence. When searched for
contraband material, this ship revealed the astonishing fact that its
cargo consisted exclusively of Egyptian mummies, consigned to "Sailor
A. B. C.," who would come to remove his goods in a lighter just off
Namquit Point, and whose identity Captain Arruda felt himself in honor
bound not to reveal. The Vice-Admiralty Court at Newport, at a loss
what to do in view of the non-contraband nature of the cargo on the
one hand and of the unlawful secrecy of the entry on the other hand,
compromised on Collector Robinson's recommendation by freeing the
ship but forbidding it a port in Rhode Island waters. There were later
rumors of its having been seen in Boston Harbor, though it never openly
entered the Port of Boston.
This extraordinary incident did not fail of wide remark in Providence
and there were not many who doubted the existence of some connection
between the cargo of mummies and the sinister Joseph Curwen; it did
not take much imagination to link him with a freakish importation
which could not conceivably have been destined for anyone else in
the town. Weeden and Smith, of course, felt no doubt whatsoever of
the significance of the thing; and indulged in the wildest theories
concerning Curwen and his monstrous labors.
The following spring, like that of the year before, had heavy rains;
and the watchers kept careful track of the river-bank behind the Curwen
farm. Large sections were washed away, and a certain number of bones
discovered; but no glimpse was afforded of any actual subterranean
chambers or burrows. Something was rumored, however, at the village
of Pawtuxet about a mile below, where the river flows in falls over a
rocky terrace to join the placid landlocked cove. The fisherfolk about
the bridge did not like the wild way that one of the things stared as
it shot down to the still water below, or the way that another half
cried out although its condition had greatly departed from that of
objects which normally cry out.
That rumor sent Smith--for Weeden was just then at sea--in haste to
the river-bank behind the farm; where surely enough there remained the
evidences of an extensive cave-in. Smith went to the extent of some
experimental digging, but was deterred by lack of success--or perhaps
by fear of possible success. It is interesting to speculate on what the
persistent and revengeful Weeden would have done had he been ashore at
the time.
* * * * *
By the autumn of 1770 Weeden decided that the time was ripe to tell
others of his discoveries; for he had a large number of facts to link
together, and a second eye-witness to refute the possible charge
that jealousy and vindictiveness had spurred his fancy. As his first
confidant he selected Captain James Mathewson of the _Enterprise_,
who on the one hand knew him well enough not to doubt his veracity,
and on the other hand was sufficiently influential in the town to be
heard in turn with respect. The colloquy took place in an upper room
of Sabin's Tavern near the docks, with Smith present to corroborate
virtually every statement; and it could be seen that Captain Mathewson
was tremendously impressed. Like nearly everyone else in the town,
he had had black suspicions of his own anent Joseph Curwen; hence it
needed only this confirmation and enlargement of data to convince
him absolutely. At the end of the conference he was very grave, and
enjoined strict silence upon the two younger men.
The right persons to tell, he believed, would be Dr. Benjamin West,
whose pamphlet on the late transit of Venus proved him a scholar
and keen thinker; Reverend James Manning, President of the College;
ex-Governor Stephen Hopkins, who had been a member of the Philosophical
Society at Newport, and was a man of very broad perceptions; John
Carter, publisher of the _Gazette_; all four of the Brown brothers,
John, Joseph, Nicholas and Moses, who formed the recognized local
magnates; old Dr. Jabez Bowen, whose erudition was considerable, and
who had much first-hand knowledge of Curwen's odd purchases; and
Captain Abraham Whipple, a privateersman of phenomenal boldness and
energy who could be counted on to lead in any active measures needed.
The mission of Captain Mathewson prospered beyond his highest
expectations; for whilst he found one or two of the chosen confidants
somewhat skeptical of the possible ghostly side of Weeden's tale, there
was not one who did not think it necessary to take some sort of secret
and coördinated action. Curwen, it was clear, formed a vague potential
menace to the welfare of the town and Colony; and must be eliminated at
any cost.
Late in December, 1770, a group of eminent townsmen met at the home of
Stephen Hopkins and debated tentative measures. Weeden's notes, which
he had given to Captain Mathewson, were carefully read; and he and
Smith were summoned to give testimony anent details. Something very
like fear seized the whole assemblage before the meeting was over,
though there ran through that fear a grim determination which Captain
Whipple's bluff and resonant profanity best expressed. They would not
notify the Governor, because a more than legal course seemed necessary.
With hidden powers of uncertain extent apparently at his disposal,
Curwen was not a man who could safely be warned to leave town. He must
be surprised at his Pawtuxet farm by a large raiding party of seasoned
privateersmen and given one decisive chance to explain himself. If
he proved a madman, amusing himself with shrieked and imaginary
conversations in different voices, he would be properly confined. If
something graver appeared, and if the underground horrors indeed turned
out to be real, he and all with him must die. It could be done quietly,
and even the widow and her father need not be told how it came about.
* * * * *
While these serious steps were under discussion there occurred in the
town an incident so terrible and inexplicable that for a time little
else was mentioned for miles around. In the middle of a moonlit
January night with heavy snow underfoot there resounded over the river
and up the hill a shocking series of cries which brought sleepy heads
to every window; and people around Weybosset Point saw a great white
thing plunging frantically along the badly cleared space in front of
the Turk's Head. There was a baying of dogs in the distance, but this
subsided as soon as the clamor of the awakened town became audible.
Parties of men with lanterns and muskets hurried out to see what
was happening, but nothing rewarded their search. The next morning,
however, a giant, muscular body, stark naked, was found on the jams
of ice around the southern piers of the Great Bridge, where the Long
Dock stretched out beside Abbott's distil-house, and the identity of
this object became a theme for endless speculation and whispering. It
was not so much the younger as the older folk who whispered, for only
in the patriarchs did that rigid face with horror-bulging eyes strike
any chord of memory. They, shaking as they did so, exchanged furtive
murmurs of wonder and fear; for in those stiff, hideous features lay a
resemblance so marvelous as to be almost an identity--and that identity
was with a man who had died full fifty years before.
Ezra Weeden was present at the finding; and remembering the baying
of the night before, set out along Weybosset Street and across Muddy
Dock Bridge whence the sound had come. He had a curious expectancy,
and was not surprised when, reaching the edge of the settled district
where the street merged into the Pawtuxet Road, he came upon some very
curious tracks in the snow. The naked giant had been pursued by dogs
and many booted men, and the returning tracks of the hounds and their
masters could be easily traced. They had given up the chase upon coming
too near the town. Weeden smiled grimly, and as a perfunctory detail
traced the footprints back to their source. It was the Pawtuxet farm
of Joseph Curwen, as he well knew it would be; and he would have given
much had the yard been less confusingly trampled. As it was, he dared
not seem too interested in full daylight. Dr. Bowen, to whom Weeden
went at once with his report, performed an autopsy on the strange
corpse, and discovered peculiarities which baffled him utterly. The
digestive tracts of the huge man seemed never to have been in use,
whilst the whole skin had a coarse, loosely-knit texture impossible to
account for. Impressed by what the old man whispered of this body's
likeness to the long-dead blacksmith Daniel Green, whose great-grandson
Aaron Hoppin was a supercargo in Curwen's employ, Weeden asked casual
questions till he found where Green was buried. That night a party of
ten visited the old North Burying Ground opposite Herrenden's Lane and
opened a grave. They found it vacant, precisely as they had expected.
[Illustration: "They found the grave vacant--precisely as they had
expected."]
* * * * *
Meanwhile arrangements had been made with the post riders to intercept
Joseph Curwen's mail, and shortly before the incident of the naked body
there was found a letter from one Jedediah Orne of Salem which made the
coöperating citizens think deeply. Parts of it, copied and preserved in
the private archives of the Smith family where Charles Ward found it,
ran as follows:
I delight that you continue in ye getting at Olde Matters in
your Way, and doe not think better was done at Mr. Hutchinson's
in Salem-Village. Certainly, there was Noth'g butt ye liveliest
Awfulness in that which H. rais'd upp from what he cou'd gather
onlie a part of. What you sente, did not Worke, whether because
Any Thing miss'g, or because ye Wordes were not Righte from my
Speak'g or yr copy'g. Alone am at a Loss. I have not ye Chymicall
art to followe Borellus, and owne my Selfe confounded by ye VII.
Booke of ye Necronomicon that you recommende. But I wou'd have you
Observe what was tolde to us aboute tak'g Care whom to calle up,
for you are Sensible what Mr. Mather writ in ye Magnalia of ----,
and can judge how truely that Horrendous thing is reported. I say
to you againe, doe not call upp Any that you can not put downe; by
the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against
you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of
the Lesser, lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall
commande more than you. I was frighted when I read of your know'g
what Ben Zariatnatmik hadde in his Ebony Boxe, for I was conscious
who must have told you. And againe I ask that you shalle write me
as Jedediah and not Simon. In this Community a Man may not live too
long, and you knowe my Plan by which I came back as my Son. I am
desirous you will Acquaint me with what ye Blacke Man learnt from
Sylvanus Cocidius in ye Vault, under ye Roman wall, and will be
oblig'd for ye Lend'g of ye MS. you speak of.
Another and unsigned letter from Philadelphia provoked equal thought,
especially for the following passage:
I will observe what you say respecting the sending of Accounts only
by yr Vessels, but can not always be certain when to expect them.
In the Matter spoke of, I require only one more thing; but wish to
be sure I apprehend you exactly. You inform me, that no Part must
be missing if the finest Effects are to be had, but you can not but
know how hard it is to be sure. It seems a great Hazard and Burthen
to take away the whole Box, and in Town (i. e. St. Peter's, St.
Paul's, St. Mary's, or Christ Church) it can scarce be done at all.
But I know what Imperfections were in the one rais'd up October
last, and how many live Specimens you were forced to imploy before
you hit upon the right Mode in the year 1766; so will be guided by
you in all Matters. I am impatient for yr Brig, and inquire daily
at Mr. Biddle's Wharf.
A third suspicious letter was in an unknown tongue and even an
unknown alphabet. In the Smith diary found by Charles Ward a single
oft-repeated combination of characters is clumsily copied; and
authorities at Brown University have pronounced the alphabet Amharic
or Abyssinian, although they do not recognize the word. None of these
epistles was ever delivered to Curwen, though the disappearance of
Jedediah Orne from Salem as recorded shortly afterward showed that the
Providence men took certain quiet steps.
Curwen, despite all precautions, apparently felt that something was in
the wind; for he was now remarked to wear an unusually worried look.
His coach was seen at all hours in the town and on the Pawtuxet Road,
and he dropped little by little the air of forced geniality with which
he had latterly sought to combat the town's prejudice. The nearest
neighbors to his farm, the Fenners, one night remarked a great shaft
of light shooting into the sky from some aperture in the roof of that
cryptical stone building with the high excessively narrow windows; an
event which they quickly communicated to John Brown in Providence.
Mr. Brown had become the executive leader of the select group bent
on Curwen's extirpation, and had informed the Fenners that some
action was about to be taken. To them Mr. Brown had entrusted the duty
of watching the Curwen farmhouse, and of regularly reporting every
incident which took place there.
* * * * *
The probability that Curwen was on guard and attempting unusual things,
as suggested by the odd shaft of light, precipitated at last the action
so carefully devised by the band of serious citizens. According to the
Smith diary a company of about one hundred men met at ten P.M.
on Friday, April twelfth, 1771, in the great room of Thurston's Tavern
at the Sign of the Golden Lion on Weybosset Point across the Bridge.
Of the guiding group of prominent men in addition to the leader,
John Brown, there were present Dr. Bowen, with his case of surgical
instruments, President Manning without the great periwig (the largest
in the Colonies) for which he was noted, Governor Hopkins, wrapped in
a dark cloak and accompanied by his seafaring brother Eseh whom he had
initiated at the last moment with the permission of the rest, John
Carter, Captain Mathewson, and Captain Whipple, who was to lead the
actual raiding party. These chiefs conferred apart in a rear chamber,
after which Captain Whipple emerged to the great room and gave the
gathered seamen their last oaths and instructions. Eleazar Smith was
with the leaders as they sat in the rear apartment awaiting the arrival
of Ezra Weeden, whose duty was to keep track of Curwen and report the
departure of his coach for the farm.
About ten-thirty a heavy rumble was heard on the Great Bridge, followed
by the sound of a coach in the street outside; and at that hour there
was no need of waiting for Weeden in order to know that the doomed
man had set out for his last night of unhallowed wizardry. A moment
later, as the receding coach clattered faintly over the Muddy Dock
Bridge, Weeden appeared; and the raiders fell silently into military
order in the street, shouldering the firelocks, fowling-pieces, or
whaling harpoons which they had with them. Weeden and Smith were with
the party, and of the deliberating citizens there were present for
active service Captain Whipple, the leader, Captain Eseh Hopkins, John
Carter, President Manning, Captain Mathewson, and Dr. Bowen; together
with Moses Brown, who had come up at the eleventh hour though absent
from the preliminary session in the tavern. All these freemen and their
hundred sailors began the long march without delay, grim and a trifle
apprehensive as they left the Muddy Dock behind and mounted the gentle
rise of Broad Street toward the Pawtuxet Road.
An hour and a quarter later the raiders arrived, as previously agreed,
at the Fenner farmhouse; where they heard a final report on their
intended victim. He had reached his farm more than half an hour before,
and the strange light had soon afterward shot once into the sky. There
were no lights in any visible windows, but this was always the case of
late. Even as this news was given another great glare arose toward the
south, and the party realized that they had indeed come close to the
scene of awesome and unnatural wonders. Captain Whipple now ordered his
force to separate into three divisions; one of twenty men under Eleazar
Smith to strike across to the shore and guard the landing-place against
possible reinforcements for Curwen until summoned by a messenger for
desperate service; a second of twenty men under Captain Eseh Hopkins to
steal down into the river valley behind the Curwen farm and demolish
with axes or gunpowder the oaken door in the high, steep bank; and
the third to close in on the house and adjacent buildings themselves.
Of this last division one third was to be led by Captain Mathewson to
the cryptical stone edifice with high narrow windows, another third to
follow Captain Whipple himself to the main farmhouse, and the remaining
third to preserve a circle around the whole group of buildings until
summoned by a final emergency signal.
The river party would break down the hillside door at the sound of a
single whistle-blast, waiting and capturing anything which might issue
from the regions within. At the sound of two whistle blasts it would
advance through the aperture to oppose the enemy or join the rest of
the raiding contingent. The party at the stone building would accept
these respective signals in an analogous manner; forcing an entrance
at the first, and at the second descending whatever passage into the
ground might be discovered, and joining the general or focal warfare
expected to take place within the caverns. A third or emergency signal
of three blasts would summon the immediate reserve from its general
guard duty; its twenty men dividing equally and entering the unknown
depths through both farmhouse and stone building. Captain Whipple's
belief in the existence of catacombs was absolute, and he took no
alternative into consideration when making his plans. He had with him
a whistle of great power and shrillness and did not fear any mistaking
or misunderstanding of signals. The final reserve at the landing, of
course, was nearly out of the whistle's range; hence, would require a
special messenger if needed for help. Moses Brown and John Carter went
with Captain Hopkins to the river-bank, while President Manning was
detailed with Captain Mathewson to the stone building. Dr. Bowen, with
Ezra Weeden, remained in Captain Whipple's party which was to storm the
farmhouse itself. The attack was to begin as soon as a messenger from
Captain Hopkins had joined Captain Whipple to notify him of the river
party's readiness. The leader would then deliver the loud single blast,
and the various advance parties would commence their simultaneous
attack on three points. Shortly before one A.M. the three
divisions left the Fenner farmhouse; one to guard the landing, another
to seek the river valley and the hillside door, and the third to
subdivide and attend to the actual buildings of the Curwen farm.
* * * * *
Eleazar Smith, who accompanied the shore-guarding party, records in
his diary an uneventful march and a long wait on the bluff by the
bay; broken once by what seemed to be the distant sound of the signal
whistle and again by a peculiar muffled blend of roaring and crying
and a powder blast which seemed to come from the same direction. Later
on one man thought he caught some distant gunshots, and still later
Smith himself felt the throb of titanic thunderous words resounding
in upper air. It was just before dawn that a single haggard messenger
with wild eyes and a hideous unknown odor about his clothing appeared
and told the detachment to disperse quietly to their homes and never
again think or speak of the night's doings or of him who had been
Joseph Curwen. Something about the bearing of the messenger carried
a conviction which his mere words could never have conveyed; for
though he was a seaman well known to many of them, there was something
obscurely lost or gained in his soul which set him for evermore apart.
It was the same later on when they met other old companions who
had gone into that zone of horror. Most of them had lost or gained
something imponderable and indescribable. They had seen or heard or
felt something which was not for human creatures, and could not forget
it. From them there was never any gossip, for to even the commonest of
mortal instincts there are terrible boundaries. And from that single
messenger the party at the shore caught a nameless awe which almost
sealed their own lips. Very few are the rumors which ever came from any
of them, and Eleazar Smith's diary is the only written record which has
survived from that whole expedition which set forth from the Sign of
the Golden Lion under the Stars.
* * * * *
Charles Ward, however, discovered another vague sidelight in some
Fenner correspondence which he found in New London, where he knew
another branch of the family had lived. It seems that the Fenners,
from whose house the doomed farm was distantly visible, had watched
the departing columns of raiders; and had heard very clearly the
angry barking of the Curwen dogs, followed by the first shrill blast
which precipitated the attack. This blast had been followed by a
repetition of the great shaft of light from the stone building, and in
another moment, after a quick sounding of the second signal ordering a
general invasion, there had come a subdued rattle of musketry followed
by a horrible roaring cry which the correspondent Luke Fenner had
represented in his epistle by the characters "Waaaahrrrrr--R'waaahrrr."
This cry, however, had possessed a quality which no mere writing
could convey, and the correspondent mentions that his mother fainted
completely at the sound. It was later repeated less loudly, and
further but more muffled evidences of gunfire ensued; together with
a loud explosion of powder from the direction of the river. About an
hour afterward all the dogs began to bay frightfully, and there were
vague ground rumblings so marked that the candlesticks tottered on the
mantelpiece. A strong smell of sulphur was noted; and Luke Fenner's
father declared that he heard the third or emergency whistle signal,
though the others failed to detect it. Muffled musketry sounded again,
followed by a deep scream less piercing but even more horrible than
those which had preceded it; a kind of throaty, nastily plastic cough
or gurgle whose quality as a scream must have come more from its
continuity and psychological import than from its actual acoustic value.
Then the flaming thing burst into sight at a point where the Curwen
farm ought to lie, and the human cries of desperate and frightened men
were heard. Muskets flashed and cracked, and the flaming thing fell
to the ground. A second flaming thing appeared, and a shriek of human
origin was plainly distinguished. Fenner wrote that he could even
gather a few words belched in frenzy: "Almighty, protect thy lamb!"
Then there were more shots, and the second flaming thing fell. After
that came silence for about three-quarters of an hour; at the end of
which time little Arthur Fenner, Luke's brother, exclaimed that he
saw "a red fog" going up to the stars from the accursed farm in the
distance. No one but the child can testify to this, but Luke admits
the significant coincidence implied by the panic of almost convulsive
fright which at the same moment arched the backs and stiffened the fur
of the three cats then within the room.
Five minutes later a chill wind blew up, and the air became suffused
with such an intolerable stench that only the strong freshness of the
sea could have prevented its being noticed by the shore party or by
any wakeful souls in Pawtuxet village. This stench was nothing which
any of the Fenners had ever encountered before, and produced a kind of
clutching, amorphous fear beyond that of the tomb or the charnel-house.
Close upon it came the awful voice which no hapless hearer will ever be
able to forget. It thundered out of the sky like a doom, and windows
rattled as its echoes died away. It was deep and musical; powerful as
a bass organ, but evil as the forbidden books of the Arabs. What it
said no man can tell, for it spoke in an unknown tongue, but this is
the writing Luke Fenner set down to portray the daemoniac intonations:
"DEESMEES--JESHET--BONEDOSEFEDUVEMA--ENITEMOSS." Not till the year 1919
did any soul link this crude transcript with anything else in mortal
knowledge, but Charles Ward paled as he recognized what Mirandola
had denounced in shudders as the ultimate horror among black magic's
incantations.
An unmistakably human shout or deep chorused scream seemed to answer
this malign wonder from the Curwen farm, after which the unknown
stench grew complex with an added odor equally intolerable. A wailing
distinctly different from the scream now burst out and was protracted
ululantly in rising and falling paroxysms. At times it became almost
articulate, though no auditor could trace any definite words; and
at one point it seemed to verge toward the confines of diabolic and
hysterical laughter. Then a yell of utter, ultimate fright and stark
madness wrenched from scores of human throats; a yell which came strong
and clear despite the depth from which it must have burst; after which
darkness and silence ruled all things. Spirals of acrid smoke ascended
to blot out the stars, though no flames appeared, and no buildings were
observed to be gone or injured on the following day.
Toward dawn two frightened messengers with monstrous and unplaceable
odor saturating their clothing knocked at the Fenner door and requested
a keg of rum for which they paid very well indeed. One of them told
the family that the affair of Joseph Curwen was over, and that the
events of the night were not to be mentioned again. Arrogant as the
order seemed, the aspect of him who gave it took away all resentment
and lent it a fearsome authority; so that only these furtive letters
of Luke Fenner, which he urged his Connecticut relative to destroy,
remain to tell what was seen and heard. The non-compliance of that
relative, whereby the letters were saved after all, has alone kept
the matter from a merciful oblivion. Charles Ward had one detail to
add as a result of a long canvass of Pawtuxet residents for ancestral
traditions. Old Charles Slocum of that village said that there was
known to his grandfather a queer rumor concerning a charred, distorted
body found in the fields a week after the death of Joseph Curwen was
announced. What kept the talk alive was the notion that this body, so
far as could be seen in its burnt and twisted condition, was neither
thoroughly human nor wholly allied to any animal which Pawtuxet folk
had ever seen or read about.
* * * * *
Not one man who participated in that terrible raid could ever be
induced to say a word concerning it, and every fragment of the vague
data which survives comes from those outside the final fighting party.
There is something frightful in the care with which these actual
raiders destroyed each scrap which bore the least allusion to the
matter.
Eight sailors had been killed, but although their bodies were not
produced their families were satisfied with the statement that a clash
with customs officers had occurred. The same statement also covered
the numerous cases of wounds, all of which were extensively bandaged
and treated only by Dr. Jabez Bowen, who had accompanied the party.
Hardest to explain was the nameless odor clinging to all the raiders,
a thing which was discussed for weeks. Of the citizen leaders, Captain
Whipple and Moses Brown were most severely hurt, and letters of their
wives testify the bewilderment which their reticence and close guarding
of their bandages produced. Psychologically every participant was
aged, sobered, and shaken. It is fortunate that they were all strong
men of action and simple, orthodox religionists, for with more subtle
introspectiveness and mental complexity they would have fared ill
indeed. President Manning was the most disturbed; but even he outgrew
the darkest shadow, and smothered memories in prayers. Every man of
those leaders had a stirring part to play in later years, and it is
perhaps fortunate that this is so. Little more than a twelve-month
afterward Captain Whipple led the mob who burnt the revenue ship
_Gaspee_, and in this bold act we may trace one step in the blotting
out of unwholesome images.
There was delivered to the widow of Joseph Curwen a sealed leaden
coffin of curious design, obviously found ready on the spot when
needed, in which she was told her husband's body lay. He had, it was
explained, been killed in a customs battle about which it was not
politic to give details. More than this no tongue ever uttered of
Joseph Curwen's end, and Charles Ward had only a single hint wherewith
to construct a theory. This hint was the merest thread--a shaky
underscoring of a passage in Jedediah Orne's confiscated letter to
Curwen, partly copied in Ezra Weeden's handwriting. The copy was found
in the possession of Smith's descendants; and we are left to decide
whether Weeden gave it to his companion after the end, as a mute clue
to the abnormality which had occurred, or whether, as is more probable,
Smith had it before, and added the underscoring himself from what he
had managed to extract from his friend by shrewd guessing and adroit
cross-questioning. The underlined passage is merely this:
I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you cannot put downe;
by the which I meane, Any that can in turn calle up somewhat
against you, whereby your powerfullest Devices may not be of use.
Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer, and
shall commande more than you.
In the light of this passage, and reflecting on what last unmentionable
allies a beaten man might try to summon in his direst extremity,
Charles Ward may well have wondered whether any citizen of Providence
killed Joseph Curwen.
The deliberate effacement of every memory of the dead man from
Providence life and annals was vastly aided by the influence of the
raiding leaders. They had not at first meant to be so thorough, and
had allowed the widow and her father and child to remain in ignorance
of the true conditions; but Captain Tillinghast was an astute man,
and soon uncovered enough rumors to whet his horror and cause him to
demand that his daughter and grand-daughter change their name, burn the
library and all remaining papers, and chisel the inscription from the
slate slab above Joseph Curwen's grave. He knew Captain Whipple well,
and probably extracted more hints from that bluff mariner than anyone
else ever gained respecting the end of the accursed sorcerer.
From that time on the obliteration of Curwen's memory became
increasingly rigid, extending at last by common consent even to the
town records and files of the _Gazette_. It can be compared in spirit
only to the hush that lay on Oscar Wilde's name for a decade after his
disgrace, and in extent only to the fate of that sinful King of Runagur
in Lord Dunsany's tale, whom the gods decided must not only cease to
be, but must cease ever to have been.
Mrs. Tillinghast, as the widow became known after 1772, sold the
house in Olney Court and resided with her father in Power's Lane till
her death in 1817. The farm at Pawtuxet, shunned by every living
soul, remained to molder through the years; and seemed to decay with
unaccountable rapidity. By 1780 only the stone and brickwork were
standing, and by 1800 even these had fallen to shapeless heaps. None
ventured to pierce the tangled shrubbery on the river-bank behind which
the hillside door may have lain, nor did any try to frame a definite
image of the scenes amidst which Joseph Curwen departed from the
horrors he had wrought.
Only robust old Captain Whipple was heard by alert listeners to mutter
once in awhile to himself, "Pox on that ----, but he had no business to
laugh while he screamed. 'Twas as though the damn'd ---- had some 'at
up his sleeve. For half a crown I'd burn his ---- house."
_3. A Search and an Evocation_
Charles Ward, as we have seen, first learned in 1918 of his descent
from Joseph Curwen. That he at once took an intense interest in
everything pertaining to the bygone mystery is not to be wondered at;
for every vague rumor that he had heard of Curwen now became something
vital to himself, in whom flowed Curwen's blood.
In his first delvings there was not the slightest attempt at
secrecy; he talked freely with his family--though his mother was not
particularly pleased to own an ancestor like Curwen--and with the
officials of the various museums and libraries he visited. In applying
to private families for records thought to be in their possession
he made no concealment of his object, and shared the somewhat
amused skepticism with which the accounts of the old diarists and
letter-writers were regarded.
When he came across the Smith diary and archives and encountered
the letter from Jedediah Orne he decided to visit Salem and look
up Curwen's early activities and connections there, which he did
during the Easter vacation of 1919. At the Essex Institute, which
was well known to him from former sojourns in the glamorous old town
of crumbling Puritan gables and clustered gambrel roofs, he was very
kindly received, and unearthed there a considerable amount of Curwen
data. He found that his ancestor was born in Salem-Village, now
Danvers, seven miles from town, on the eighteenth of February (O. S.)
1662-3; and that he had run away to sea at the age of fifteen, not
appearing again for nine years, when he returned with the speech,
dress, and manners of a native Englishman and settled in Salem proper.
At that time he had little to do with his family, but spent most of
his hours with the curious books he had brought from Europe, and the
strange chemicals which came for him on ships from England, France,
and Holland. Certain trips of his into the country were the objects of
much local inquisitiveness, and were whisperingly associated with vague
rumors of fires on the hills at night.
Curwen's only close friends had been one Edward Hutchinson of
Salem-Village and one Simon Orne of Salem. Hutchinson had a house well
out toward the woods, and it was not altogether liked by sensitive
people because of the sounds heard there at night. He was said to
entertain strange visitors, and the lights seen from his windows were
not always of the same color. The knowledge he displayed concerning
long-dead persons and long-forgotten events was considered distinctly
unwholesome, and he disappeared about the time the witchcraft panic
began, never to be heard from again. At that time Joseph Curwen also
departed, but his settlement in Providence was soon learned of. Simon
Orne lived in Salem until 1720, when his failure to grow visibly old
began to excite attention. He thereafter disappeared, though thirty
years later his precise counterpart and self-styled son turned up to
claim his property. The claim was allowed on the strength of documents
in Simon Orne's known hand, and Jedediah Orne continued to dwell in
Salem till 1771, when certain letters from Providence citizens to the
Reverend Thomas Barnard and others brought about his quiet removal to
parts unknown.
* * * * *
Certain documents by and about all of these strange matters were
available at the Essex Institute, the Court House, and the Registry
of Deeds, and included both harmless commonplaces such as land titles
and bills of sale, and furtive fragments of a more provocative
nature. There were four or five unmistakable allusions to them on
the witchcraft trial records; as when one Hepzibah Lawson swore on
July sixteenth, 1692, at the Court of Oyer and Terminen under Judge
Hathorne, that "fortie Witches and the Blacke Man were wont to meete
in the Woodes behind Mr. Hutchinson's house," and one Amity How
declared at a session of August eighth before Judge Gedney that "Mr.
G. B. (George Burroughs) on that Nighte put the Divell his Marke upon
Bridget S., Jonathan A., _Simon O._, Deliverance W., _Joseph C._,
Susan P., Mehitable C., and Deborah B." Then there was a catalogue of
Hutchinson's uncanny library as found after his disappearance, and an
unfinished manuscript in his handwriting, couched in a cipher none
could read. Ward had a photostatic copy of this manuscript made, and
began to work casually on the cipher as soon as it was delivered to
him. After the following August his labors on the cipher became intense
and feverish, and there is reason to believe from his speech and
conduct that he hit upon the key before October or November. He never
stated, though, whether or not he had succeeded.
But of greatest immediate interest was the Orne material. It took
Ward only a short time to prove from identity of penmanship a thing
he had already considered established from the text of the letter to
Curwen; namely, that Simon Orne and his supposed son were one and the
same person. As Orne had said to his correspondent, it was hardly
safe to live too long in Salem, hence he resorted to a thirty-year
sojourn abroad, and did not return to claim his lands except as a
representative of a new generation. Orne had apparently been careful to
destroy most of his correspondence, but the citizens who took action
in 1771 found and preserved a few letters and papers which excited
their wonder. There were cryptic formulae and diagrams in his and other
hands which Ward now either copied with care or had photographed, and
one extremely mysterious letter in a chirography that the searcher
recognized from items in the Registry of Deeds as positively Joseph
Curwen's.
Providence, 1 May
Brother:
My honour'd Antient friend, due Respects and earnest Wishes to
Him whom we serve for yr Eternall Power. I am just come upon That
Which you ought to knowe, concern'g the Matter of the Laste
Extremite and What to doe regard' yt. I am not dispos'd to followe
you in go'g Away on acct. of my yeares, for Providence hath not ye
Sharpeness of ye Bay in hunt'g oute uncommon Things and bringinge
to Tryall. I am ty'd up in Shippes and Goodes, and cou'd not doe as
you did, besides the Whiche my Farme, at Pawtuxet hatht under it
What you Knowe, that Wou'd not Waite for my com'g Backe as an Other.
But I am not unreadie for harde fortunes, as I have tolde you,
and have longe Work'd upon ye Way of get'g Backe after ye Laste.
I laste Night strucke on ye Wordes that bringe up YOGGE-SOTHOTHE,
and sawe for ye Firste Time that face spoke of by Ibn Schacabac
in ye ----. And IT said, that ye III Psalme in ye Liber-Damnatus
holdes ye Clavicle. With Sunne in V House, Saturne in Trine, drawe
ye Pentagram of Fire, and saye ye ninth Verse thrice. This Verse
repeate eache Roodemas and Hallow's Eve, and ye thing will brede in
ye Outside Spheres.
_And of ye Sede of Olde shal One be borne who shal looke Backe,
tho' know'g not what he seekes._
Yett will this availe Nothing if there be no Heir, and if the
Saltes, or the Way to make the Saltes, bee not Readie for his
Hande; and here I will owne, I have not taken needed Stepps nor
founde Much. Ye Process is plaguy harde to come neare, and it
uses up such a Store of Specimens, I am harde putte to it to get
Enough, notwithstand'g the Sailors I have from ye Indies. Ye People
aboute are become Curious, but I can stande them off. Ye gentry
are worse than ye Populace, be'g more Circumstantiall in their
Accts. and more believ'd in what they tell. That Parson and Mr.
Merritt have talk'd some, I am fearfull, but no Thing soe far is
Dangerous. Ye Chymical substances are easie of get'g, there be'g
II. goode Chymists in Towne, Dr. Bowen and Sam. Carew. I am foll'g
oute what Borellus saith, and have Helpe in Abdool Al-Hazred his
VII. Booke. Whatever I gette, you shal have. And in ye meane While,
do not neglect to make use of ye Wordes I have here given. I have
them Righte, but if you Desire to see HIM, imploy the Writinge on
ye Piece of ----, that I am putt'g in this Packet. Saye ye Verses
every Roodmas and Hallow's Eve; and if yr Line runn not out, _one
shal bee in yeares to come that shal looke backe and use what
Saltes or stuff for Salte you shal leave him_. Job XIV. XIV.
I rejoice you are again at Salem, and hope I may see you not longe
hence. I have a goode Stallion, and am think'g of get'g a Coach,
there be'g one (Mr. Merritt's) in Providence already, tho' ye
Roades are bad. If you are disposed to travel, doe not pass me
bye. From Boston take ye Post Road, thro' Dedham, Wrentham, and
Attleborough, goode Taverns be'g at all these Townes. Stop at Mr.
Bolcom's in Wrentham, where ye Beddes are finer than Mr. Hatch's,
but eate at ye other House for their cooke is better. Turne into
Prov. by Patucket falls, and ye Rd. past Mr. Sayles's Tavern. My
House opp. Mr. Epenetus Olney's Tavern off ye Towne Street, 1st on
ye N. side of Olney's Court. Distance from Boston Stone abt. XLIV
miles.
Sir, I am yr olde and true friend and Servt. in Almonsin-Metraton.
Josephus C.
To Mr. Simon Orne,
William's-Lane, in Salem.
This letter, oddly enough, was what first gave Ward the exact location
of Curwen's Providence home; for none of the records encountered up to
that time had been at all specific. The place was indeed only a few
squares from his own home on the great hill's higher ground, and was
now the abode of a Negro family much esteemed for occasional washing,
housecleaning, and furnace-tending services. To find, in distant Salem,
such sudden proof of the significance of this familiar rookery in his
own family history, was a highly impressive thing to Ward; and he
resolved to explore the place immediately upon his return.
The more mystical phases of the letter, which he took to be some
extravagant kind of symbolism, frankly baffled him; though he noted
with a thrill of curiosity that the Biblical passage referred to--Job
14, 14--was the familiar verse, "If a man die, shall he live again? All
the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come."
* * * * *
Young Ward came home in a state of pleasant excitement, and spent
the following Saturday in a long and exhaustive study of the house
in Olney Court. The place, now crumbling with age, had never been a
mansion; but was a modest two-and-a-half story wooden town house of
the familiar Providence Colonial type, with plain peaked roof, large
central chimney, and artistically carved doorway with rayed fan-light,
triangular pediment, and trim Doric pilasters. It had suffered but
little alteration externally, and Ward felt he was gazing on something
very close to the sinister matters of his quest.
The present Negro inhabitants were known to him, and he was very
courteously shown about the interior by old Asa and his stout wife
Hannah. Here there was more change than the outside indicated, and Ward
saw with regret that fully half of the fine scroll-and-urn overmantels
and shell-carved cupboard linings were gone, whilst much of the fine
wainscotting and bolection moulding was marked, hacked, and gouged,
or covered up altogether with cheap wall-paper. It was exciting to
stand within the ancestral walls which had housed such a man of horror
as Joseph Curwen; he saw with a thrill that a monogram had been very
carefully effaced from the ancient brass knocker.
From then until after the close of school Ward spent his time on the
photostatic copy of the Hutchinson cipher and the accumulation of local
Curwen data. The former still proved unyielding; but of the latter
he obtained so much, and so many clues to similar data elsewhere,
that he was ready by July to make a trip to New London and New York
to consult old letters whose presence in those places was indicated.
This trip was very fruitful, for it brought him the Fenner letters
with their terrible description of the Pawtuxet farmhouse raid, and
the Nightingale-Talbot letters in which he learned of the portrait
painted on a panel of the Curwen library. This matter of the portrait
interested him particularly, since he would have given much to know
just what Joseph Curwen looked like; and he decided to make a second
search of the house in Olney Court to see if there might not be some
trace of the ancient features beneath peeling coats of later paint or
layers of mouldy wall-paper.
Early in August that search took place, and Ward went carefully
over the walls of every room sizeable enough to have been by any
possibility the library of the evil builder. He paid especial attention
to the large panels of such overmantels as still remained; and was
keenly excited after about an hour, when on a broad area above the
fireplace in a spacious ground-floor room he became certain that the
surface brought out by the peeling of several coats of paint was
sensibly darker than any ordinary interior paint or the wood beneath it
was likely to have been. A few more careful tests with a thin knife,
and he knew that he had come upon an oil portrait of great extent.
With truly scholarly restraint the youth did not risk the damage which
an immediate attempt to uncover the hidden picture with the knife
might have done, but just retired from the scene of his discovery to
enlist expert help. In three days he returned with an artist of long
experience, Mr. Walter C. Dwight, whose studio is near the foot of
College Hill; and that accomplished restorer of paintings set to work
at once with proper methods and chemical substances. Old Asa and his
wife were duly excited over their strange visitors, and were properly
reimbursed for this invasion of their domestic hearth.
As day by day the work of restoration progressed, Charles Ward looked
on with growing interest at the lines and shades gradually unveiled
after their long oblivion. Dwight had begun at the bottom; hence since
the picture was a three-quarter-length one, the face did not come out
for some time. It was meanwhile seen that the subject was a spare,
well-shaped man with dark-blue coat, embroidered waistcoat, black satin
small-clothes, and white silk stockings, seated in a carved chair
against the background of a window with wharves and ships beyond. When
the head came out it was observed to bear a neat Albemarle wig, and
to possess a thin, calm, undistinguished face which seemed somehow
familiar to both Ward and the artist. Only at the very last, though,
did the restorer and his client begin to gasp with astonishment
at the details of that lean, pallid visage, and to recognize with
a touch of awe the dramatic trick which heredity had played. For
it took the final bath of oil and the final stroke of the delicate
scraper to bring out fully the expression which centuries had hidden;
and to confront the bewildered Charles Dexter Ward, dweller in the
past, with his own living features in the countenance of his horrible
great-great-great-grandfather.
* * * * *
Ward brought his parents to see the marvel he had uncovered, and
his father at once determined to purchase the picture despite its
execution on stationary panelling. The resemblance to the boy, despite
an appearance of rather greater age, was marvelous; and it could
be seen that through some trick of atavism the physical contours
of Joseph Curwen had found precise duplication after a century and
a half. Mrs. Ward's resemblance to her ancestor was not at all
marked, though she could recall relatives who had some of the facial
characteristics shared by her son and by the bygone Curwen. She did
not relish the discovery, and told her husband that he had better
burn the picture instead of bringing it home. There was, she averred,
something unwholesome about it; not only intrinsically, but in its very
resemblance to Charles. Mr. Ward, however, was a practical man of power
and affairs--a cotton manufacturer with extensive mills at Riverpoint
in the Pawtuxet Valley--and not one to listen to feminine scruples.
The picture impressed him mightily with its likeness to his son, and
he believed the boy deserved it as a present. In this opinion, it is
needless to say, Charles most heartily concurred; and a few days later
Mr. Ward located the owner of the house--a small rodent-featured person
with a guttural accent--and obtained the whole mantel and overmantel
bearing the picture at a curtly fixed price which cut short the
impending torrent of unctuous haggling.
It now remained to take off the panelling and remove it to the Ward
home, where provisions were made for its thorough restoration and
installation with an electric mock-fireplace in Charles' third-floor
study or library. To Charles was left the task of superintending
this removal, and on the twenty-eighth of August he accompanied two
expert workmen from the Crooker decorating firm to the house in Olney
Court, where the mantel and portrait-bearing overmantel were detached
with great care and precision for transportation in the company's
motor truck. There was left a space of exposed brickwork marking the
chimney's course, and in this young Ward observed a cubical recess
about a foot square, which must have lain directly behind the head
of the portrait. He found, beneath the deep coatings of dust and
soot some loose yellowed papers, a crude, thick copy-book, and a few
moldering textile shreds which may have formed the ribbon binding the
rest together. Blowing away the bulk of the dirt and cinders, he took
up the book and looked at the bold inscription on its cover. It was
in a hand which he had learned to recognize at the Essex Institute,
and proclaimed the volume as the "_Journall and Notes of Jos. Curwen,
Gent., of Providence-Plantations, Late of Salem._"
Excited beyond measure by his discovery, Ward showed the book to the
two curious workmen beside him. Their testimony is absolute as to
the nature and genuineness of the finding, and Dr. Willett relies on
them to help establish his theory that the youth was not mad when he
began his major eccentricities. All the other papers were likewise in
Curwen's handwriting, and one of them seemed especially portentous
because of its inscription: "_To Him Who Shal Come After, How He May
Gett Beyonde Time and Ye Spheres._" Another was in a cipher; the same,
Ward hoped, as the Hutchinson cipher which had hitherto baffled him.
A third, and here the searcher rejoiced, seemed to be a key to the
cipher; whilst the fourth and fifth were addressed respectively to
"Edw. Hutchinson, Armiger" and "Jedediah Orne, Esq.", "or Their Heir or
Heirs, or Those Represent'g Them." The sixth and last was inscribed:
"_Joseph Curwen his Life and Travells Bet'n ye yeares 1678 and 1687: of
Whither He Voyag'd, Where He Stay'd, Whom He Sawe, and What He learnt._"
* * * * *
We have now reached the point from which the more academic school of
alienists date Charles Ward's madness. Upon his discovery the youth
had looked immediately at a few of the inner pages of the book and
manuscripts, and had evidently seen something which impressed him
tremendously. Upon returning home he broke the news with an almost
embarrassed air, as if he wished to convey an idea of its supreme
importance without having to exhibit the evidence itself. He did not
even show the titles to his parents, but simply told them that he
had found some documents in Joseph Curwen's handwriting, "mostly in
cipher," which would have to be studied very carefully before yielding
up their true meaning. It is unlikely that he would have shown what he
did to the workmen, had it not been for their unconcealed curiosity. As
it was he doubtless wished to avoid any display of peculiar reticence
which would increase their discussion of the matter.
That night Charles Ward sat up in his room reading the new-found book
and papers, and when day came he did not desist. His meals, on his
urgent request when his mother called to see what was amiss, were
sent up to him; and in the afternoon he appeared only briefly when
the men came to install the Curwen picture and mantelpiece in his
study. The next night he slept in snatches in his clothes, meanwhile
wrestling feverishly with the unraveling of the cipher manuscript. In
the morning his mother saw that he was at work on the photostatic copy
of the Hutchinson cipher, which he had frequently showed her before;
but in response to her query he said that the Curwen key could not be
applied to it. That afternoon he abandoned his work and watched the
men fascinatedly as they finished their installation of the picture
with its woodwork above a cleverly realistic electric log, setting the
mock-fireplace and overmantel a little out from the north wall as if a
chimney existed, and boxing in its sides with panelling to match the
room's. After the workmen went he moved his work into the study and
sat down before it with his eyes half on the cipher and half on the
portrait which stared back at him like a year-adding century-recalling
mirror. His parents subsequently recalling his conduct at this period,
give interesting details anent the policy of concealment which he
practiced. Before servants he seldom hid any paper which he might be
studying, since he rightly assumed that Curwen's intricate and archaic
chirography would be too much for them. With his parents, however,
he was more circumspect; and unless the manuscript in question were
a cipher, or a mere mass of cryptic symbols and unknown ideographs
(as that entitled "_To Him Who Shal Come After_ etc." seemed to be)
he would cover it with some convenient paper until his caller had
departed. At night he kept the papers under lock and key in an antique
cabinet of his, where he also placed them whenever he left the room.
He soon resumed fairly regular hours and habits, except that his long
walks and other outside interests seemed to cease. The opening of
school, where he now began his senior year, seemed a great bore to
him; and he frequently asserted his determination never to bother with
college. He had, he said, important special investigations to make,
which would provide him with more avenues toward knowledge and the
humanities than any university which the world could boast.
During October Ward began visiting the libraries again, but no longer
for the antiquarian matter of his former days. Witchcraft and magic,
occultism and daemonology, were what he sought now; and when Providence
sources proved unfruitful he would take the train for Boston and tap
the wealth of the great library in Copley Square, the Widener Library
at Harvard, or the Zion Research Library in Brookline, where certain
rare works on Biblical subjects are available. He bought extensively,
and fitted up a whole additional set of shelves in his study for newly
acquired works on uncanny subjects; while during the Christmas holidays
he made a round of out-of-town trips including one to Salem to consult
certain records at the Essex Institute.
* * * * *
About the middle of January, 1920, there entered Ward's bearing an
element of triumph which he did not explain, and he was no more found
at work upon the Hutchinson cipher. Instead, he inaugurated a dual
policy of chemical research and record-scanning; fitting up for the
one a laboratory in the unused attic of the house, and for the latter
haunting all the sources of vital statistics in Providence. Local
dealers in drugs and scientific supplies, later questioned, gave
astonishingly queer and meaningless catalogues of the substances and
instruments he purchased; but clerks at the State House, the City Hall,
and the various libraries agree as to the definite object of his second
interest. He was searching intensely and feverishly for the grave of
Joseph Curwen, from whose slate slab an older generation had so wisely
blotted the name.
Little by little there grew upon the Ward family the conviction that
something was wrong. His school work was the merest pretence; he had
other concernments now; and when not in his new laboratory with a score
of obsolete alchemical books, could be found either poring over old
burial records downtown or glued to his volumes of occult lore in his
study, where the startlingly--one almost fancied increasingly--similar
features of Joseph Curwen stared blandly at him from the great
overmantel on the north wall.
Late in March Ward added to his archive-searching a ghoulish series of
rambles about the various ancient cemeteries of the city. His quest
had suddenly shifted from the grave of Joseph Curwen to that of one
Naphthali Field; and this shift was explained when, upon going over
the files that he had been over, the investigators actually found a
fragmentary record of Curwen's burial which had escaped the general
obliteration, and which stated that the curious leaden coffin had been
interred "10 ft. S. and 5 ft. W. of Naphthali Field's grave in ye----."
Hence the rambles--from which St. John's (the former King's) churchyard
and the ancient Congregational burying ground in the midst of Swan
Point Cemetery were excluded, since other statistics had shewn that the
only Naphthali Field (obit. 1729) whose grave could have been meant had
been a Baptist.
* * * * *
It was toward May when Dr. Willett, at the request of the senior Ward,
and fortified with all the Curwen data which the family had gleaned
from Charles in his non-secretive days, talked with the young man. The
interview was of little value or conclusiveness, for Willett felt at
every moment that Charles was thoroughly master of himself and in touch
with matters of real importance; but it at least forced the secretive
youth to offer some rational explanation of his recent demeanor. Of a
pallid, impassive type not easily showing embarrassment, Ward seemed
quite ready to discuss his pursuits, though not to reveal their object.
He stated that the papers of his ancestor had contained some remarkable
secrets of early scientific knowledge. To take their vivid place in the
history of human thought they must first be correlated by one familiar
with the background out of which they evolved, and to this task of
correlation Ward was now devoting himself. He was seeking to acquire as
fast as possible those neglected arts of old which a true interpreter
of the Curwen data must possess, and hoped in time to make a full
announcement and presentation of the utmost interest to mankind and to
the world of thought.
As to his graveyard search, whose object he freely admitted, but the
details of whose progress he did not relate, he said he had reason to
think that Joseph Curwen's mutilated headstone bore certain mystic
symbols--carved from directions in his will and ignorantly spared by
those who had effaced the name--which were absolutely essential to the
final solution of his cryptic system. Curwen, he believed, had wished
to guard his secret with care; and had consequently distributed the
data in an exceedingly curious fashion. When Dr. Willett asked to see
the mystic documents, Ward displayed much reluctance and tried to put
him off with such things as the photostatic copies of the Hutchinson
cipher and Orne formulae and diagrams; but finally showed him the
exteriors of some of the real Curwen finds--the "_Journal and Notes_,"
the cipher (title in cipher also) and the formula-filled message "_To
Him Who Shal Come After_"--and let him glance inside such as were in
obscure characters.
He also opened the diary at a page carefully selected for its
innocuousness and gave Willett a glimpse of Curwen's connected
handwriting in English. The doctor noted very closely the crabbed and
complicated letters, and the general aura of the seventeenth century
which clung round both penmanship and style despite the writer's
survival into the eighteenth century, and became quickly certain that
the document was genuine. The text itself was relatively trivial, and
Willett recalled only a fragment. But when Dr. Willett turned the leaf,
he was quickly checked by Ward, who almost snatched the book from his
grasp. All that the doctor had a chance to see on the newly opened page
was a brief pair of sentences; but these, strangely enough, lingered
tenaciously in his memory.
They ran: "Ye Verse from Liber-Damnatus be'g spoke V Roodmasses and IV
Hallows-Eves, I am Hopeful ye Thing is breed'g Outside ye Spheres. It
will drawe One who is to Come if I can make sure he shal bee, and he
shall think on Past thinges and looke back thro' all ye yeares, against
ye which I must have ready ye Saltes or That to make 'em with."
Willett saw no more, but somehow this small glimpse gave a new and
vague terror to the painted features of Joseph Curwen which stared
blandly down from the overmantel. Ever after that he entertained the
odd fancy--which his medical skill of course assured him was only a
fancy--that the eyes of the portrait had a sort of tendency to follow
young Charles Ward as he moved about the room. He stopped before
leaving to study the picture closely, marveling at its resemblance to
Charles and memorizing every minute detail of the cryptical, colorless
face, even down to a slight scar or pit in the smooth brow above the
right eye.
Assured by the doctor that Charles' mental health was in no danger,
but that on the other hand he was engaged in researches which might
prove of real importance, the Wards were more lenient than they might
otherwise have been when during the following June the youth made
positive his refusal to attend college. He had, he declared, studies
of much more vital importance to pursue; and intimated a wish to go
abroad the following year in order to avail himself of certain sources
of data not existing in America. The senior Ward, while denying this
latter wish as absurd for a boy of only eighteen, acquiesced regarding
the university; so that after a none too brilliant graduation from the
Moses Brown School there ensued for Charles a three year period of
intensive occult study and graveyard searching.
* * * * *
Coming of age in April, 1923, and having previously inherited a small
competence from his maternal grandfather, Ward determined at last to
take the European trip hitherto denied him. Of his proposed itinerary
he would say nothing save that the needs of his studies would carry
him to many places, but he promised to write his parents fully and
faithfully. When they saw he could not be dissuaded, they ceased all
opposition and helped as best they could; so that in June the young
man sailed for Liverpool with the farewell blessings of his father
and mother, who accompanied him to Boston and waved him out of sight
from the White Star pier in Charlestown. Letters soon told of his safe
arrival, and of his securing good quarters in Great Russell Street,
London; where he proposed to stay, shunning all family friends, till
he had exhausted the resources of the British Museum in a certain
direction. Of his daily life he wrote but little, for there was little
to write. Study and experiment consumed all his time, and he mentioned
a laboratory which he had established in one of his rooms. That he
said nothing of antiquarian rambles in the glamorous old city with its
luring skyline of ancient domes and steeples and its tangles of roads
and alleys whose mystic convolutions and sudden vistas alternately
beckon and surprise, was taken by his parents as a good index of the
degree to which his new interests had engrossed his mind.
In June, 1924, a brief note told of his departure for Paris, to
which he had before made one or two flying trips for material in the
Bibliotheque Nationale. For three months thereafter he sent only postal
cards, giving an address in the Rue St. Jacques and referring to a
special search among rare manuscripts in the library of an unnamed
private collector. He avoided acquaintances, and no tourists brought
back reports of having seen him. Then came a silence, and in October
the Wards received a picture card from Prague, Czecho-Slovakia, stating
that Charles was in that ancient town for the purpose of conferring
with a certain very aged man supposed to be the last living possessor
of some very curious mediaeval information. He gave an address in
the Newstadt, and announced no move till the following January; when
he dropped several cards from Vienna telling of his passage through
that city on the way toward a more easterly region whither one of his
correspondents and fellow-delvers into the occult had invited him.
The next card was from Klausenburg in Transylvania, and told of
Ward's progress toward his destination. He was going to visit a Baron
Ferenczy, whose estate lay in the mountains east of Rakus; and was to
be addressed at Rakus in the care of that nobleman. Another card from
Rakus a week later, saying that his host's carriage had met him and
that he was leaving the village for the mountains, was his last message
for a considerable time; indeed, he did not reply to his parents'
frequent letters until May, when he wrote to discourage the plan of his
mother for a meeting in London, Paris, or Rome during the summer, when
the elder Wards were planning to travel in Europe. His researches, he
said, were such that he could not leave his present quarters; while
the situation of Baron Ferenczy's castle did not favor visits. It was
on a crag in the dark wooded mountains, and the region was so shunned
by the country folk that normal people could not help feeling ill at
ease. Moreover, the Baron was not a person likely to appeal to correct
and conservative New England gentlefolk. His aspect and manners had
idiosyncrasies, and his age was so great as to be disquieting. It would
be better, Charles said, if his parents would wait for his return to
Providence; which could scarcely be far distant.
That return did not, however, take place until May, 1925, when after a
few heralding cards the young wanderer quietly slipped into New York on
the _Homeric_ and traversed the long miles to Providence by motor coach
eagerly drinking in the green rolling hills, the fragrant, blossoming
orchards, and the white steepled towns of Connecticut in spring; his
first taste of ancient New England in nearly four years.
Old Providence! It was this place and the mysterious forces of its
long, continuous history which had brought him into being, and which
had drawn him back toward marvels and secrets whose boundaries no
prophet might fix. Here lay the arcana, wondrous or dreadful as the
case might be, for which all his years of travel and application
had been preparing him. A taxicab whirled him through Post Office
Square with its glimpse of the river, and up the steep curved slope
of Waterman Street to Prospect. Then eight squares past the fine old
estates his childish eyes had known, and the quaint brick sidewalks
so often trodden by his youthful feet. And at last the little white
overtaken farmhouse on the right, and on the left the classic Adam
porch and stately bayed façade of the great brick house where he was
born. It was twilight, and Charles Dexter Ward had come home.
Ward was now visibly aged and hardened, but was still normal in his
general reactions; and in several talks with Willett displayed
a balance which no madman--even an incipient one--could feign
continuously for long. What elicited the notion of insanity at
this period were the _sounds_ heard at all hours from Ward's attic
laboratory, in which he kept himself most of the time. There were
chantings and repetitions, and thunderous declamations in uncanny
rhythms; and although these sounds were always in Ward's own voice,
there was something in the quality of that voice and in the accents
of the formulae it pronounced, which could not but chill the blood of
every hearer. It was noticed that Nig, the venerable and beloved black
cat of the household, bristled and arched his back perceptibly when
certain of the tones were heard.
The odors occasionally wafted from the laboratory were likewise
exceedingly strange. Sometimes they were very noxious, but more often
they were aromatic, with a haunting, elusive quality which seemed to
have the power of inducing fantastic images. People who smelled them
had a tendency to glimpse momentary mirages of enormous vistas, with
strange hills or endless avenues of sphinxes and hippogriffs stretching
off into infinite distance. His older aspect increased to a startling
degree his resemblance to the Curwen portrait in his library; and Dr.
Willett would often pause by the latter after a call, marvelling at
the virtual identity, and reflecting that only the small pit above the
picture's right eye now remained to differentiate the long-dead wizard
from the living youth. Frequently he noted peculiar things about;
little wax images of grotesque design on the shelves or tables, and the
half-erased remnants of circles, triangles, and pentagrams in chalk or
charcoal on the cleared central space of the large room. And always
in the night those rhythms and incantations thundered, till it became
very difficult to keep servants or suppress furtive talk of Charles'
madness.
In January, 1927, a peculiar incident occurred. One night about
midnight, as Charles was chanting a ritual whose weird cadence echoed
unpleasantly through the house below, there came a sudden gust of chill
wind from the bay, and a faint, obscure trembling of the earth which
everyone in the neighborhood noted. At the same time the cat exhibited
phenomenal traces of fright, while dogs bayed for as much as a mile
around. This was the prelude to a sharp thunderstorm, anomalous for
the season, which brought with it such a crash that Mr. and Mrs. Ward
believed the house had been struck. They rushed upstairs to see what
damage had been done, but Charles met them at the door to the attic;
pale, resolute, and portentous, with an almost fearsome combination of
triumph and seriousness on his face. He assured them that the house
had not really been struck, and that the storm would soon be over.
The thunder sank to a sort of dull mumbling chuckle and finally died
away. Stars came out, and the stamp of triumph on Charles Ward's face
crystallized into a very singular expression.
* * * * *
For two months or more after this incident Ward was less confined
than usual to his laboratory. He exhibited a curious interest in the
weather, and made odd inquiries about the date of the spring thawing of
the ground. One night late in March he left the house after midnight,
and did not return till almost morning; when his mother, being wakeful,
heard a rumbling motor draw up the carriage entrance. Muffled oaths
could be distinguished, and Mrs. Ward, rising and going to the window,
saw four dark figures removing a long, heavy box from a truck at
Charles' direction and carrying it within by the side door. She heard
labored breathing and ponderous footfalls on the stairs, and finally a
dull thumping in the attic; after which the footfalls descended again,
and the four men reappeared outside and drove off in their truck.
The next day Charles resumed his strict attic seclusion, drawing
down the dark shades of his laboratory windows and appearing to be
working on some metal substance. He would open the door to no one,
and steadfastly refused all proffered food. About noon a wrenching
sound followed by a terrible cry and a fall were heard, but when Mrs.
Ward rapped at the door her son at length answered faintly, and told
her that nothing had gone amiss. The hideous and indescribable stench
now welling out was absolutely harmless and unfortunately necessary.
Solitude was the one prime essential, and he would appear later for
dinner. That afternoon, after the conclusion of some odd hissing sounds
which came from behind the locked portal, he did finally appear;
wearing an extremely haggard aspect and forbidding anyone to enter
the laboratory upon any pretext. This, indeed, proved the beginning
of a new policy of secrecy; for never afterward was any other person
permitted to visit either the mysterious garret workroom or the
adjacent storeroom which he cleared out, furnished roughly, and added
to his inviolably private domain as a sleeping apartment. Here he
lived, with books brought up from his library beneath, till the time
he purchased the Pawtuxet bungalow and moved to it all his scientific
effects.
In the evening Charles secured the paper before the rest of the family
and damaged part of it through an apparent accident. Later on Dr.
Willett, having fixed the date from statements by various members
of the household, looked up an intact copy at the _Journal_ office
and found that in the destroyed section the following small item had
occurred:
Nocturnal Diggers Surprised in North Burial Ground
Robert Hart, night watchman at the North Burial Ground, this
morning discovered a party of several men with a motor truck in
the oldest part of the cemetery, but apparently frightened them off
before they had accomplished whatever their object may have been.
The discovery took place at about four o'clock, when Hart's
attention was attracted by the sound of a motor outside his
shelter. Investigating, he saw a large truck on the main drive
several rods away; but could not reach it before the sound of his
feet on the gravel had revealed his approach. The men hastily
placed a large box in the truck and drove away toward the street
before they could be overtaken; and since no known grave was
disturbed, Hart believes that this box was an object which they
wished to bury.
The diggers must have been at work for a long while before
detection, for Hart found an enormous hole dug at a considerable
distance back from the roadway in the lot of Amosa Field, where
most of the old stones have long ago disappeared. The hole, a place
as large and deep as a grave, was empty; and did not coincide with
any interment mentioned in the cemetery records.
Sergeant Riley of the Second Station viewed the spot and gave the
opinion that the hole was dug by bootleggers rather gruesomely and
ingeniously seeking a safe cache for liquor in a place not likely
to be disturbed. In reply to questions Hart said he thought the
escaping truck had headed up Rochambeau Avenue, though he could not
be sure.
During the next few days Charles Ward was seldom seen by his family.
Having added sleeping quarters to his attic realm, he kept closely to
himself there, ordering food brought to the door and not taking it
in until after the servant had gone away. The droning of monotonous
formulae and the chanting of bizarre rhythms recurred at intervals,
while at other times occasional listeners could detect the sound of
tinkling glass, hissing chemicals, running water, or roaring gas
flames. Odors of the most unplaceable quality, wholly unlike any before
noted, hung at times around the door; and the air of tension observable
in the young recluse whenever he did venture briefly forth was such as
to excite the keenest speculation. Once he made a hasty trip to the
Athenaeum for a book he required, and again he hired a messenger to
fetch him a highly obscure volume from Boston. Suspense was written
portentously over the whole situation, and both the family and Dr.
Willett confessed themselves wholly at a loss what to do or think about
it.
* * * * *
Then on the fifteenth of April a strange development occurred. While
nothing appeared to grow different in kind, there was certainly a very
terrible difference in degree; and Dr. Willett somehow attaches great
significance to the change. The day was Good Friday, a circumstance of
which the servants made much, but which others quite naturally dismiss
as an irrelevant coincidence. Late in the afternoon young Ward began
repeating a certain formula in a singularly loud voice, at the same
time burning some substance so pungent that its fumes escaped over the
entire house. The formula was so plainly audible in the hall outside
the locked door that Mrs. Ward could not help memorizing it as she
waited and listened anxiously, and later on she was able to write it
down at Dr. Willett's request. It ran as follows, and experts have told
Dr. Willett that its very close analogue can be found in the mystic
writings of "Eliphas Levi," that cryptic soul who crept through a crack
in the forbidden door and glimpsed the frightful vistas of the void
beyond:
Per Adonai Eloim, Adonai Jehova, Adonai Sabaoth, Metraton Ou
Agla Methon, verbum pythonicum, mysterium salamandrae, conventus
sylvorum, antra, gnomorum, daemonia Coeli God, Almonsin, Gibor,
Jehosua, Evam, Zariatnatmik, veni, veni, veni.
This had been going on for two hours without change or intermission
when over all the neighborhood a pandemoniac howling of dogs set in.
The extent of this howling can be judged from the space it received
in the papers the next day, but to those in the Ward household it was
over-shadowed by the odor which instantly followed it; a hideous,
all-pervasive odour which none of them had ever smelt before or have
ever smelt since. In the midst of this mephitic flood there came a
very perceptible flash like that of lightning, which would have been
blinding and impressive but for the daylight around; and then was heard
_the voice_ that no listener can ever forget because of its thunderous
remoteness, its incredible depth, and its eldritch dissimilarity to
Charles Ward's voice. It shook the house, and was clearly heard by at
least two neighbors above the howling of the dogs. Mrs. Ward, who had
been listening in despair outside her son's locked laboratory, shivered
as she recognized its hellish import; for Charles had told her of its
evil fame in dark books, and of the manner in which it had thundered,
according to the Fenner letters, above the doomed Pawtuxet farmhouse on
the night of Joseph Curwen's annihilation. There was no mistaking that
nightmare phrase, for Charles had described it too vividly in the old
days when he had talked frankly of his Curwen investigations. And yet
it was only this fragment of an archaic and forgotten language: "DIES
MIES JESCHET BOENE DOESEF DOUVEMA ENITEMAUS."
Close upon this thundering there came a momentary darkening
of the daylight, though sunset was still an hour distant,
and then a puff of added odor, different from the first but
equally unknown and intolerable. Charles was chanting again
now and his mother could hear syllables that sounded like
"Yi-ngah-Yog-Sothoth-he-lglb-fi-throdag"--ending in a "Yah!" whose
maniacal force mounted in an ear-splitting crescendo. A second later
all previous memories were effaced by the wailing scream which burst
out with frantic explosiveness and gradually changed form to a paroxysm
of diabolic and hysterical laughter. Mrs. Ward, with the mingled fear
and blind courage of maternity, advanced and knocked affrightedly
at the concealing panels, but obtained no sign of recognition. She
knocked again, but paused nervelessly as a second shriek arose, this
one unmistakably in the familiar voice of her son, and _sounding
concurrently with the still bursting cachinnations of that other
voice_. Presently she fainted, although she is still unable to recall
the precise and immediate cause. Memory sometimes makes merciful
deletions.
* * * * *
Mr. Ward returned from the business section at about quarter past
six; and not finding his wife downstairs, was told by the frightened
servants that she was probably watching at Charles' door, from which
the sounds had been far stranger than ever before. Mounting the stairs
at once, he saw Mrs. Ward stretched at full length on the floor of the
corridor outside the laboratory; and realizing that she had fainted,
hastened to fetch a glass of water from a set bowl in a neighboring
alcove. Dashing the cold fluid in her face, he was heartened to observe
an immediate response on her part, and was watching the bewildered
opening of her eyes when a chill shot through him and threatened to
reduce him to the very state from which she was emerging. For the
seemingly silent laboratory was not as silent as it had appeared to be,
but held the murmurs of a tense, muffled conversation in tones too low
for comprehension, yet of a quality profoundly disturbing to the soul.
It was not, of course, new for Charles to mutter formulae; but this
muttering was definitely different. It was so palpably a dialogue, or
imitation of a dialogue, with the regular alternation of inflections
suggesting question and answer, statement and response. One voice
was undisguisedly that of Charles, but the other had a depth and
hollowness which the youth's best powers of ceremonial mimicry had
scarcely approached before. There was something hideous, blasphemous,
and abnormal about it, and but for a cry from his recovering wife
which cleared his mind by arousing his protective instincts, it is not
likely that Theodore Howland Ward could have maintained for nearly
a year more his old boast that he had never fainted. As it was, he
seized his wife in his arms and bore her quickly downstairs before
she could notice the voices which had so horribly disturbed him. Even
so, however, he was not quick enough to escape catching something
himself which caused him to stagger dangerously with his burden. For
Mrs. Ward's cry had evidently been heard by others than he and there
had come in response to it from behind the locked door the first
distinguishable words which that hushed and terrible colloquy had
yielded. They were merely an excited caution in Charles' own voice, but
somehow their implications held a nameless fright for the father who
overheard them. The phrase was just this: "_Sshh!--write!_"
Mr. and Mrs. Ward conferred at some length after dinner, and the former
resolved to have a firm and serious talk with Charles that very night.
No matter how important the object, such conduct could no longer be
permitted; for these latest developments transcended every limit of
sanity and formed a menace to the order and nervous well-being of the
entire household. The youth must indeed have taken complete leave of
his senses, since only downright madness could have prompted the wild
screams and imaginary conversations in assumed voices which the present
day had brought forth. All this must be stopped, or Mrs. Ward would be
made ill and the keeping of servants become an impossibility.
* * * * *
Mr. Ward rose at the close of the meal and started upstairs for
Charles' laboratory. On the third floor, however, he paused at the
sounds which he heard proceeding from the now disused library of his
son. Books were apparently being flung about and papers wildly rustled,
and upon stepping to the door Mr. Ward beheld the youth within,
excitedly assembling a vast armful of literary matter of every size
and shape. Charles' aspect was very drawn and haggard, and he dropped
his entire load with a start at the sound of his father's voice. At
the elder man's command he sat down, and for some time listened to the
admonitions he had so long deserved. There was no scene. At the end of
the lecture he agreed that his father was right, and that his noises,
mutterings, incantations, and chemical odors were indeed inexcusable
nuisances. For the fright and fainting of his mother he expressed the
keenest contrition, and explained that the conversation later heard
was part of an elaborate symbolism designed to create a certain mental
atmosphere. His use of abstruse chemical terms somewhat bewildered
Mr. Ward, but the parting impression was one of undeniable sanity and
poise, despite a mysterious tension of the utmost gravity. Mr. Ward
hardly knew what to make of the entire business. It was as mysterious
as the death of poor old Nig, whose stiffening form had been found an
hour before in the basement, with staring eyes and fear-distorted mouth.
Driven by some vague detective instinct, the bewildered parent now
glanced curiously at the vacant shelves to see what his son had
taken up to the attic. The youth's library was plainly and rigidly
classified, so that one might tell at a glance the books or at least
the kind of books which had been withdrawn. On this occasion Mr. Ward
was astonished to find that nothing of the occult or the antiquarian,
beyond what had been previously removed, was missing. These new
withdrawals were all modern items; histories, scientific treatises,
geographies, manuals of literature, philosophic works, and certain
contemporary newspapers and magazines. It was a very curious shift
from Charles Ward's recent run of reading, and the father paused in a
growing vortex of perplexity and an engulfing sense of strangeness. The
strangeness was a very poignant sensation, and almost clawed at his
chest as he strove to see just what was wrong around him. Something was
indeed wrong, and tangibly as well as spiritually so.
On the north wall rose still the ancient carved overmantel from the
house in Olney Court, but to the cracked and precariously restored
oils of the large Curwen portrait disaster had come. Time and unequal
heating had done their work at last, and at some time since the room's
last cleaning the worst had happened. Peeling clear of the wood,
curling tighter and tighter, and finally crumbling into small bits with
what must have been malignly silent suddenness, the portrait of Joseph
Curwen had resigned for ever its staring surveillance of the youth it
so strangely resembled, and now lay scattered on the floor as a thin
coating of fine bluish-gray dust.
_4. A Mutation and a Madness_
In the week following that memorable Good Friday, Charles Ward was seen
more often than usual, and was continually carrying books between his
library and the attic laboratory. His actions were quiet and rational,
but he had a furtive, hunted look which his mother did not like, and
developed an incredibly ravenous appetite as gauged by his demands upon
the cook.
Dr. Willett had been told of those Friday noises and happenings, and
on the following Tuesday had a long conversation with the youth in the
library where the picture stared no more. The interview was, as always,
inconclusive; but Willett is still ready to swear that the youth
was sane and himself at the time. He held out promises of an early
revelation, and spoke of the need of securing a laboratory elsewhere.
At the loss of the portrait he grieved singularly little considering
his first enthusiasm over it, but seemed to find something of positive
humor in its sudden crumbling.
About the second week Charles began to be absent from the house for
long periods, and one day when good old black Hannah came to help with
the spring cleaning she mentioned his frequent visits to the old house
in Olney Court, where he would come with a large valise and perform
curious delvings in the cellar. He was always very liberal to her and
to old Asa, but seemed more worried than he used to be; which grieved
her very much, since she had watched him grow up from birth.
Another report of his doings came from Pawtuxet, where some friends
of the family saw him at a distance a surprising number of times. He
seemed to haunt the resort and canoe-house of Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet,
and subsequent inquiries by Dr. Willett at that place brought out
the fact that his purpose was always to secure access to the rather
hedged-in river-bank, along which he would walk toward the north,
usually not reappearing for a very long while.
Later in May came a momentary revival of ritualistic sounds in the
attic laboratory which brought a stern reproof from Mr. Ward and a
somewhat distracted promise of amendment from Charles. It occurred one
morning, and seemed to form a resumption of the imaginary conversation
noted on that turbulent Good Friday. The youth was arguing or
remonstrating hotly with himself, for there suddenly burst forth a
perfectly distinguishable series of clashing shouts in differentiated
tones like alternate demands and denials, which caused Mrs. Ward to run
upstairs and listen at the door. She could hear no more than a fragment
whose only plain words were "must have it red for three months," and
upon her knocking all sounds ceased at once. When Charles was later
questioned by his father he said that there were certain conflicts of
spheres of consciousness which only great skill could avoid, but which
he would try to transfer to other realms.
About the middle of June a queer nocturnal incident occurred. In the
early evening there had been some noise and thumping in the laboratory
upstairs, and Mr. Ward was on the point of investigating when it
suddenly quieted down. That midnight, after the family had retired, the
butler was nightlocking the front door when according to his statement
Charles appeared somewhat blunderingly and uncertainly at the foot of
the stairs with a large suitcase and made signs that he wished egress.
The youth spoke no word, but the worthy Yorkshireman caught one sight
of his fevered eyes and trembled causelessly. He opened the door and
young Ward went out, but in the morning he presented his resignation to
Mrs. Ward. There was, he said, something unholy in the glance Charles
had fixed on him. It was no way for a young gentleman to look at an
honest person, and he could not possibly stay another night. Mrs. Ward
allowed the man to depart, but she did not value his statement highly.
To fancy Charles in a savage state that night was quite ridiculous, for
as long as she had remained awake she had heard faint sounds from the
laboratory above; sounds as if of sobbing and pacing, and of a sighing
which told only of despair's profoundest depths. Mrs. Ward had grown
used to listening for sounds in the night, for the mystery of her son
was fast driving all else from her mind.
The next evening, much as on another evening nearly three months
before, Charles Ward seized the newspaper very early and accidentally
lost the main section. This matter was not recalled till later,
when Dr. Willett began checking up loose ends and searching out
missing links here and there. In the _Journal_ office he found the
section which Charles had lost, and marked two items as of possible
significance. They were as follows:
More Cemetery Delving
It was this morning discovered by Robert Hart, night watchman at the
North Burial ground, that ghouls were again at work in the ancient
portion of the cemetery. The grave of Ezra Weeden, who was born
in 1740 and died in 1824 according to his uprooted and savagely
splintered slate headstone, was found excavated and rifled, the work
being evidently done with a spade stolen from an adjacent tool shed.
Whatever the contents may have been after more than a century of
burial, all was gone except a few slivers of decayed wood. There
were no wheel tracks, but the police have measured a single set of
footprints which they found in the vicinity, and which indicate the
boots of a man of refinement.
Hart is inclined to link this incident with the digging
discovered last March, when a party in a motor truck were
frightened away after making a deep excavation; but Sergeant Riley
of the Second Station discounts this theory and points to vital
differences in the two cases. In March the digging had been in a
spot where no grave was known; but this time a well-marked and
cared-for grave had been rifled with every evidence of deliberate
purpose and with a conscious malignity expressed in the splintering
of the slab which had been intact up to the day before.
Members of the Weeden family, notified of the happening, expressed
their astonishment and regret; and were wholly unable to think of
any enemy who would care to violate the grave of their ancestor.
Hazard Weeden of 598 Angell Street recalls a family legend
according to which Ezra Weeden was involved in some very peculiar
circumstances, not dishonourable to himself, shortly before the
Revolution; but of any modern feud or mystery he is frankly
ignorant. Inspector Cunningham has been assigned to the case, and
hopes to uncover some valuable clues in the near future.
Dogs Noisy in Pawtuxet
Residents of Pawtuxet were aroused about three A.M. today by a
phenomenal baying of dogs which seemed to centre near the river
just north of Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet. The volume and quality of
the howling were unusually odd, according to most who heard it;
and Fred Lemdin, night watchman at Rhodes, declares it was mixed
with something very like the shrieks of a man in mortal terror
and agony. A sharp and very brief thunderstorm, which seemed to
strike somewhere near the bank of the river, put an end to the
disturbance. Strange and unpleasant odours, probably from the oil
tanks along the bay, are popularly linked with this incident; and
may have had their share in exciting the dogs.
The aspect of Charles now became very haggard and hunted, and all
agree in retrospect that he may have wished at this period to make
some statement or confession from which sheer terror withheld him. The
morbid listening of his mother in the night brought out the fact that
he made frequent sallies abroad under cover of darkness, and most of
the more academic alienists unite at present in charging him with the
revolting cases of vampirism which the press so sensationally reported
about this time, but which have not yet been definitely traced to any
known perpetrator. These cases, too recent and celebrated to need
detailed mention, involved victims of every age and type and seemed
to cluster around two distinct localities; the residential hill and
the North End, near the Ward home, and the suburban districts across
the Cranston line near Pawtuxet. Both late wayfarers and sleepers with
open windows were attacked, and those who lived to tell the tale spoke
unanimously of a lean, lithe, leaping monster with burning eyes which
fastened its teeth in the throat or upper arm and feasted ravenously.
[Illustration: "These cases of Vampirism involved victims of every age
and type."]
Dr. Willett, who refuses to date the madness of Charles Ward as far
back as even this, is cautious in attempting to explain these horrors.
He has, he declares, certain theories of his own; and limits his
positive statements to a peculiar kind of negation. "I will not,"
he says, "state who or what I believe perpetrated these attacks and
murders, but I will declare that Charles Ward was innocent of them. I
have reason to be sure he was ignorant of the taste of blood, as indeed
his continued anaemic decline and increasing pallor prove better than
any verbal argument. Ward meddled with terrible things, but he has paid
for it, and he was never a monster or a villain.
"As for now, I don't like to think. A change came, and I'm content to
believe that the old Charles Ward died with it. His soul did, anyhow,
for that mad flesh that vanished from Waite's hospital had another."
Willett speaks with authority, for he was often at the Ward home
attending Mrs. Ward, whose nerves had begun to snap under the strain.
Her nocturnal listening had bred some morbid hallucinations which
she confided to the doctor with hesitancy, and which he ridiculed in
talking to her, although they made him ponder deeply when alone. These
delusions always concerned the faint sounds which she fancied she heard
in the attic laboratory and bedroom, and emphasized the occurrence
of muffled sighs and sobbings at the most impossible times. Early in
July Willett ordered Mrs. Ward to Atlantic City for an indefinite
recuperative sojourn, and cautioned both Mr. Ward and the haggard and
elusive Charles to write her only cheering letters. It is probably
to this enforced and reluctant escape that she owes her life and
continued sanity.
* * * * *
Not long after his mother's departure Charles Ward began negotiating
for the Pawtuxet bungalow. It was a squalid little wooden edifice with
a concrete garage, perched high on the sparsely settled bank of the
river slightly above Rhodes, but for some odd reason the youth would
have nothing else. He gave the real-estate agencies no peace till one
of them secured it for him at an exorbitant price from a somewhat
reluctant owner, and as soon as it was vacant he took possession under
cover of darkness, transporting in a great closed van the entire
contents of his attic laboratory, including the books both weird and
modern which he had borrowed from his study. He had this van loaded in
the black small hours, and his father recalls only a drowsy realization
of stifled oaths and stamping feet on the night the goods were taken
away. After that Charles moved back to his own old quarters on the
third floor, and never haunted the attic again.
To the Pawtuxet bungalow Charles transferred all the secrecy with
which he had surrounded his attic realm, save that he now appeared to
have two sharers of his mysteries; a villainous-looking Portuguese
half-caste from the South Main Street Waterfront who acted as a
servant, and a thin scholarly stranger with dark glasses and a
stubbly full beard of dyed aspect whose status was evidently that of
a colleague. Neighbors vainly tried to engage these odd persons in
conversation. The mulatto, Gomes, spoke very little English, and the
bearded man who gave his name as Dr. Allen voluntarily followed his
example. Ward himself tried to be more affable, but succeeded only in
provoking curiosity with his rambling accounts of chemical research.
Before long queer tales began to circulate regarding the all-night
burning of lights; and somewhat later, after this burning had suddenly
ceased, there rose still queerer tales of disproportionate orders of
meat from the butcher's and of the muffled shouting, declamation,
rhythmic chanting, and screaming supposed to come from some very deep
cellar below the place. Most distinctly the new and strange household
was bitterly disliked by the honest bourgeoisie of the vicinity, and it
is not remarkable that dark hints were advanced connecting the hated
establishment with the current epidemic of vampiristic attacks and
murders; especially since the radius of that plague seemed now confined
wholly to Pawtuxet and the adjacent streets of Edgewood.
Ward spent most of his time at the bungalow, but slept occasionally at
home and was still reckoned a dweller beneath his father's roof. Twice
he was absent from the city on week-long trips, whose destinations have
not yet been discovered. He grew steadily paler and more emaciated even
than before, and lacked some of his former assurance when repeating
to Dr. Willett his old, old story of vital research and future
revelations. Willett often waylaid him at his father's house, for the
elder Ward was deeply worried and perplexed, and wished his son to get
as much sound oversight as could be managed in the case of so secretive
and independent an adult. The doctor still insists that the youth was
sane even as late as this, and adduces many a conversation to prove his
point.
About September the vampirism declined, but in the following January,
Ward almost became involved in serious trouble. For some time the
nocturnal arrival and departure of motor trucks at the Pawtuxet
bungalow had been commented upon, and at this juncture an unforeseen
hitch exposed the nature of at least one item of their contents. In a
lonely spot near Hope Valley had occurred one of the frequent sordid
waylayings of trucks by "hi-jackers" in quest of liquor shipments,
but this time the robbers had been destined to receive the greater
shock. For the long cases they seized proved upon opening to contain
some exceedingly gruesome things; so gruesome, in fact, that the matter
could not be kept quiet amongst the denizens of the underworld. The
thieves had hastily buried what they discovered, but when the State
Police got wind of the matter a careful search was made. A recently
arrested vagrant, under promise of immunity from prosecution on any
additional charge, at last consented to guide a party of troopers to
the spot; and there was found in that hasty cache a very hideous and
shameful thing. It would not be well for the national--or even the
international--sense of decorum if the public were ever to know what
was uncovered by that awestruck party. There was no mistaking it, even
by these far from studious officers; and telegrams to Washington ensued
with feverish rapidity.
The cases were addressed to Charles Ward at his Pawtuxet bungalow,
and State and Federal officials at once paid him a very forceful and
serious call. They found him pallid and worried with his two odd
companions, and received from him what seemed to be a valid explanation
and evidence of innocence. He had needed certain anatomical specimens
as part of a program of research whose depth and genuineness anyone
who had known him in the last decade could prove, and had ordered
the required kind and number from agencies which he had thought as
reasonably legitimate as such things can be. Of the _identity_ of the
specimens he had known absolutely nothing, and was properly shocked
when the inspectors hinted at the monstrous effect on public sentiment
and national dignity which a knowledge of the matter would produce. In
this statement he was firmly sustained by his bearded colleague Dr.
Allen, whose oddly hollow voice carried even more conviction than his
own nervous tones; so that in the end the officials took no action,
but carefully set down the New York name and address which Ward gave
them as a basis for a search which came to nothing. It is only fair
to add that the specimens were quickly and quietly restored to their
proper places, and that the general public will never know of their
blasphemous disturbance.
* * * * *
On February 9, 1928, Dr. Willett received a letter from Charles Ward
which he considers of extraordinary importance, and about which he has
frequently quarreled with Dr. Lyman. Lyman believes that this note
contains positive proof of a well-developed case of _dementia praecox_,
but Willett on the other hand regards it as the last perfectly sane
utterance of the hapless youth. He calls especial attention to the
normal character of the penmanship; which though shewing traces of
shattered nerves, is nevertheless distinctly Ward's own. The text in
full is as follows:
100 Prospect St.,
Providence, R. I.,
March 8, 1928.
Dear Dr. Willett--
I feel that at last the time has come for me to make the
disclosures which I have so long promised you, and for which you
have pressed me so often. The patience you have shewn in waiting,
and the confidence you have shewn in my mind and integrity, are
things I shall never cease to appreciate.
And now that I am ready to speak, I must own with humiliation
that no triumph such as I dreamed of can ever be mine. Instead
of triumph I have found terror, and my talk with you will not be
a boast of victory but a plea for help and advice in saving both
myself and the world from a horror beyond all human conception
or calculation. You recall what those Fenner letters said of the
old raiding party at Pawtuxet. That must all be done again, and
quickly. Upon us depends more than can be put into words--all
civilisation, all natural law, perhaps even the fate of the solar
system and the universe. I have brought to light a monstrous
abnormality, but I did it for the sake of knowledge. Now for the
sake of all life and nature you must help me thrust it back into
the dark again.
I have left that Pawtuxet place forever, and we must extirpate
everything existing there, alive or dead. I shall not go there
again, and you must not believe it if you ever hear that I am
there. I will tell you why I say this when I see you. I have come
home for good, and wish you would call on me at the very first
moment that you can spare five or six hours continuously to hear
what I have to say. It will take that long--and believe me when I
tell you that you never had a more genuine professional duty than
this. My life and reason are the very least things which hang in
the balance.
I dare not tell my father, for he could not grasp the whole thing.
But I have told him of my danger, and he has four men from a
detective agency watching the house. I don't know how much good
they can do, for they have against them forces which even you could
scarcely envisage or acknowledge. So come quickly if you wish to
see me alive and hear how you may help to save the cosmos from
stark hell.
Any time will do--I shall not be out of the house. Don't telephone
ahead, for there is no telling who or what may try to intercept
you. And let us pray to whatever gods there be that nothing may
prevent this meeting.
In utmost gravity and desperation,
Charles Dexter Ward.
P. S.--Shoot Dr. Allen on sight _and dissolve his body in acid.
Don't burn it._
Dr. Willett received this note about ten-thirty a.m., and immediately
arranged to spare the whole late afternoon and evening for the
momentous talk, letting it extend on into the night as long as might
be necessary. He planned to arrive about four o'clock, and through
all the intervening hours was so engulfed in every sort of wild
speculation that most of his tasks were very mechanically performed.
Maniacal as the letter would have sounded to a stranger, Willett had
seen too much of Charles Ward's oddities to dismiss it as sheer raving.
That something very subtle, ancient, and horrible was hovering about
he felt quite sure, and the reference to Dr. Allen could almost be
comprehended in view of what Pawtuxet gossip said of Ward's enigmatical
colleague. Willett had never seen the man, but had heard much of his
aspect and bearing, and could not but wonder what sort of eyes those
much-discussed dark glasses might conceal.
Promptly at four Dr. Willett presented himself at the Ward residence,
but found to his annoyance that Charles had not adhered to his
determination to remain indoors. The guards were there, but said that
the young man seemed to have lost part of his timidity. He had that
morning done much apparently frightened arguing and protesting over
the telephone, one of the detectives said, replying to some unknown
voice with phrases such as "I am very tired and must rest awhile,"
"I can't receive anyone for some time, you'll have to excuse me,"
"Please postpone decisive action till we can arrange some sort of
compromise," or "I am very sorry, but I must take a complete vacation
from everything; I'll talk with you later." Then, apparently gaining
boldness through meditation, he had slipped out so quietly that no one
had seen him depart or knew that he had gone until he returned about
one o'clock and entered the house without a word. He had gone upstairs,
where a bit of his fear must have surged back; for he was heard to cry
out in a high terrified fashion upon entering his library, afterward
trailing off into a kind of choking gasp. When, however, the butler had
gone to inquire what the trouble was, he had appeared at the door with
a great show of boldness, and had silently gestured the man away in a
manner that terrified him unaccountably. Then he had evidently done
some rearranging of his shelves, for a great clattering and thumping
and creaking ensued; after which he had reappeared and left at once.
Willett inquired whether or not any message had been left, but was
told that there was none. The butler seemed queerly disturbed about
something in Charles' appearance and manner, and asked solicitously if
there was much hope for a cure of his disordered nerves.
For almost two hours Dr. Willett waited vainly in Charles Ward's
library, watching the dusty shelves with their wide gaps where books
had been removed, and smiling grimly at the paneled overmantel on
the north wall, whence a year before the suave features of old Joseph
Curwen had looked mildly down. After a time the shadows began to
gather, and the sunset cheer gave place to a vague growing terror which
flew shadow-like before the night. Mr. Ward finally arrived, and showed
much surprise and anger at his son's absence after all the pains which
had been taken to guard him. He had not known of Charles' appointment,
and promised to notify Willett when the youth returned. In bidding
the doctor good night he expressed his utter perplexity at his son's
condition, and urged his caller to do all he could to restore the boy
to normal poise. Willett was glad to escape from that library, for
something frightful and unholy seemed to haunt it; as if the vanished
picture had left behind a legacy of evil. He had never liked that
picture; and even now, strong-nerved though he was, there lurked a
quality in its vacant panel which made him feel an urgent need to get
out into the pure air as soon as possible.
* * * * *
The next morning Willett received a message from the senior Ward,
saying that Charles was still absent. Mr. Ward mentioned that Dr.
Allen had telephoned him to say that Charles would remain at Pawtuxet
for some time, and that he must not be disturbed. This was necessary
because Allen himself was suddenly called away for an indefinite
period, leaving the researches in need of Charles' constant oversight.
Charles sent his best wishes, and regretted any bother his abrupt
change of plans might have caused. In listening to this message Mr.
Ward heard Dr. Allen's voice for the first time, and it seemed to
excite some vague and elusive memory which could not be actually
placed, but which was disturbing to the point of fearfulness.
Faced by these baffling and contradictory reports, Dr. Willett was
frankly at a loss what to do. The frantic earnestness of Charles'
note was not to be denied, yet what could one think of its writer's
immediate violation of his own expressed policy? Young Ward had written
that his delvings had become blasphemous and menacing, that they and
his bearded colleague must be extirpated at any cost, and that he
himself would never return to their final scene; yet according to
latest advices he had forgotten all this and was back in the thick
of the mystery. Common sense bade one leave the youth alone with his
freakishness, yet some deeper instinct would not permit the impression
of that frenzied letter to subside. Willett read it over again, and
could not make its essence sound as empty and insane as both its
bombastic verbiage and its lack of fulfilment would seem to imply.
Its terror was too profound and real, and in conjunction with what
the doctor already knew evoked too vivid hints of monstrosities from
beyond time and space, to permit of any cynical explanation. There were
nameless horrors abroad; and no matter how little one might be able to
get at them, one ought to stand prepared for any sort of action at any
time.
For over a week Dr. Willett pondered on the dilemma which seemed thrust
upon him, and became more and more inclined to pay Charles a call at
the Pawtuxet bungalow. No friend of the youth had ever ventured to
storm this forbidden retreat, and even his father knew of its interior
only from such descriptions as he chose to give; but Willett felt that
some direct conversation with his patient was necessary. Mr. Ward had
been receiving brief and non-committal typed notes from his son, and
said that Mrs. Ward in her Atlantic City retirement had had no better
word. So at length the doctor resolved to act; and despite a curious
sensation inspired by old legends of Joseph Curwen, and by more recent
revelations and warnings from Charles Ward, set boldly out for the
bungalow on the bluff above the river.
Willett had visited the spot before through sheer curiosity, though of
course never entering the house or proclaiming his presence; hence knew
exactly the route to take. Driving out Broad Street one early afternoon
toward the end of February in his small motor, he thought oddly of the
grim party which had taken that selfsame road a hundred and fifty-seven
years before, on a terrible errand which none might ever comprehend.
The ride through the city's decaying fringe was short, and trim
Edgewood and sleepy Pawtuxet presently spread out ahead. Willett turned
to the right down Lockwood Street and drove his car as far along that
rural road as he could, then alighted and walked north to where the
bluff towered above the lovely bends of the river and the sweep of
misty downlands beyond. Houses were still few here, and there was no
mistaking the isolated bungalow with its concrete garage on a high
point of land at his left. Stepping briskly up the neglected gravel
walk he rapped at the door with a firm hand, and spoke without a tremor
to the evil Portuguese mulatto who opened it to the width of a crack.
He must, he said, see Charles Ward at once on vitally important
business. No excuse would be accepted, and a repulse would mean only
a full report of the matter to the elder Ward. The mulatto still
hesitated, and pushed against the door when Willett attempted to open
it; but the doctor merely raised his voice and renewed his demands.
Then there came from the dark interior a husky whisper which somehow
chilled the hearer through and through, though he did not know why he
feared it. "Let him in, Tony," it said, "we may as well talk now as
ever." But disturbing as was the whisper, the greater fear was that
which immediately followed. The floor creaked and the speaker hove in
sight--and the owner of those strange and resonant tones was seen to be
no other than Charles Dexter Ward.
The minuteness with which Dr. Willett recalled and recorded his
conversation of that afternoon is due to the importance he assigns
to this particular period. For at last he concedes a vital change in
Charles Dexter Ward's mentality, and believes that the youth now spoke
from a brain hopelessly alien to the brain whose growth he had watched
for six and twenty years. Controversy with Dr. Lyman has compelled him
to be very specific, and he definitely dates the madness of Charles
Ward from the time the typewritten notes began to reach his parents.
Those notes are not in Ward's normal style; not even in the style of
that last frantic letter to Willett. Instead, they are strange and
archaic, as if the snapping of the writer's mind had released a flood
of tendencies and impressions picked up unconsciously through boyhood
antiquarianism. There is an obvious effort to be modern, but the spirit
and occasionally the language are those of the past.
* * * * *
The past, too, was evident in Ward's every tone and gesture as he
received the doctor in that shadowy bungalow. He bowed, motioned
Willett to a seat, and began to speak abruptly in that strange whisper
which he sought to explain at the very outset.
"I am grown phthisical," he began, "from this cursed river air. You
must excuse my speech. I suppose you are come from my father to see
what ails me, and I hope you will say nothing to alarm him."
Willett was studying these scraping tones with extreme care, but
studying even more closely the face of the speaker. Something, he felt,
was wrong; and he thought of what the family had told him about the
fright of that Yorkshire butler one night. He wished it were not so
dark, but did not request that any blind be opened. Instead, he merely
asked Ward why he had so belied the frantic note of little more than a
week before.
"I was coming to that," the host replied. "You must know, I am in a
very bad state of nerves, and do and say queer things I cannot account
for. As I have told you often, I am on the edge of great matters; and
the bigness of them has a way of making me light-headed. Any man might
well be frighted of what I have found, but I am not to be put off for
long. I was a dunce to have that guard and stick at home; for having
gone this far, my place is here. I am not well spoke of by my prying
neighbors, and perhaps I was led by weakness to believe myself what
they say of me. There is no evil to any in what I do, so long as I do
it rightly. Have the goodness to wait six months, and I'll show you
what will pay your patience well.
"You may as well know I have a way of learning old matters from things
surer than books, and I'll leave you to judge the importance of what I
can give to history, philosophy, and the arts by reason of the doors
I have access to. My ancestor had all this when those witless peeping
Toms came and murdered him. I now have it again, or am coming very
imperfectly to have a part of it. This time nothing must happen, and
least of all through any idiot fears of my own. Pray forget all I writ
you, Sir, and have no fear of this place or any in it. Dr. Allen is a
man of fine parts, and I owe him an apology for anything ill I have
said of him. I wish I had no need to spare him, but there were things
he had to do elsewhere. His zeal is equal to mine in all those matters,
and I suppose that when I feared the work I feared him too as my
greatest helper in it."
Ward paused, and the doctor hardly knew what to say or think. He felt
almost foolish in the face of this calm repudiation of the letter;
and yet there clung to him the fact that while the present discourse
was strange and alien and indubitably mad, the note itself had been
tragic in its naturalness and likeness to the Charles Ward he knew.
Willett now tried to turn the talk on early matters, and recall to the
youth some past events which would restore a familiar mood; but in
this process he obtained only the most grotesque results. It was the
same with all the alienists later on. Important sections of Charles
Ward's store of mental images, mainly those touching modern times and
his own personal life, had been unaccountably expunged; while all the
massed antiquarianism of his youth had welled up from some profound
subconsciousness to engulf the contemporary and the individual. The
youth's ultimate knowledge of elder things was abnormal and unholy, and
he tried his best to hide it. When Willett would mention some favorite
object of his boyhood archaistic studies he often shed by pure accident
such a light as no normal mortal could conceivably be expected to
possess, and the doctor shuddered as the glib allusion glided by.
It was not wholesome to know so much about the way the fat sheriff's
wig fell off as he leaned over at the play in Mr. Douglass' Histrionick
Academy in King Street on the eleventh of February, 1762, which fell of
a Thursday; or about how the actors cut the text of Steele's "Conscious
Lover" so badly that one was almost glad the Baptist-ridden legislature
closed the theater a fortnight later. That Thomas Sabin's Boston coach
was "damn'd uncomfortable" old letters may well have told; but what
healthy antiquarian could recall how the creaking of Epenetus Olney's
new signboard (the gaudy Crown he set up after he took to calling his
tavern the Crown Coffee House) was exactly like the first few notes of
the new jazz piece all the radios in Pawtuxet were playing?
Ward, however, would not be quizzed long in this vein. Modern and
personal topics he waved aside quite summarily, whilst regarding
antique affairs he soon shewed the plainest boredom. What he wished
clearly enough was only to satisfy his visitor enough to make him
depart without the intention of returning. To this end he offered to
shew Willett the entire house, and at once proceeded to lead the doctor
through every room from cellar to attic. Willett looked sharply, but
noted that the visible books were far too few and trivial ever to have
filled the wide gaps on Ward's shelves at home, and that the meager
so-called "laboratory" was the flimsiest sort of a blind. Clearly,
there were a library and a laboratory elsewhere; but just where, it
was impossible to say. Essentially defeated in his quest for something
he could not name, Willett returned to town before evening and told
the senior Ward everything which had occurred. They agreed that the
youth must be definitely out of his mind, but decided that nothing
drastic need be done just then. Above all, Mrs. Ward must be kept in as
complete an ignorance as her son's own strange typed notes would permit.
* * * * *
Mr. Ward now determined to call in person upon his son, making it
wholly a surprise visit. Dr. Willett took him in his car one evening,
guiding him to within sight of the bungalow and waiting patiently for
his return. The session was a long one, and the father emerged in a
very saddened and perplexed state. His reception had developed much
like Willett's, save that Charles had been an excessively long time
in appearing after the visitor had forced his way into the hall and
sent the Portuguese away with an imperative demand; and in the bearing
of the altered son there was no trace of filial affection. The lights
had been dim, yet even so the youth had complained that they dazzled
him outrageously. He had not spoke out loud at all, averring that his
throat was in a very poor condition; but in his hoarse whisper there
was a quality so vaguely disturbing that Mr. Ward could not banish it
from his mind.
Now definitely leagued together to do all they could toward the youth's
mental salvation, Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett set about collecting
every scrap of data which the case might afford. Pawtuxet gossip was
the first item they studied, and this was relatively easy to glean
since both had friends in that region. Dr. Willett obtained the most
rumors because people talked more frankly to him than to a parent of
the central figure, and from all he heard he could tell that young
Ward's life had become indeed a strange one. Common tongues would
not dissociate his household from the vampirism of the previous
summer, while the nocturnal comings and goings of the motor trucks
provided their share of dark speculation. Local tradesmen spoke of
the queerness of the orders brought them by the evil-looking mulatto,
and in particular of the inordinate amounts of meat and fresh blood
secured from the two butcher shops in the immediate neighborhood. For a
household of only three, these quantities were quite absurd.
Then there was the matter of the sounds beneath the earth. Reports of
these things were harder to pin down, but all the vague hints tallied
in certain basic essentials. Noises of a ritual nature positively
existed, and at times when the bungalow was dark. They might, of
course, have come from the known cellar; but rumor insisted that there
were deeper and more spreading crypts. Recalling the ancient tales of
Joseph Curwen's catacombs, and assuming for granted that the present
bungalow had been selected because of its situation on the old Curwen
site as revealed in one or another of the documents found behind the
picture, Willett and Mr. Ward gave this phase of the gossip much
attention; and searched many times without success for the door in the
river bank which old manuscripts mentioned. As to popular opinions of
the bungalow's various inhabitants, it was soon plain that the Brava
Portuguese was loathed, the bearded and spectacled Dr. Allen feared,
and the pallid young scholar disliked to a profound extent. During
the last week or two Ward had obviously changed much, abandoning his
attempts at affability and speaking only in hoarse but oddly repellent
whispers on the few occasions that he ventured forth.
Such were the shreds and fragments gathered here and there; and over
these Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett held many long and serious conferences.
They strove to exercise deduction, induction, and constructive
imagination to their utmost extent; and to correlate every known fact
of Charles' later life, including the frantic letter which the doctor
now shewed the father, with the meager documentary evidence available
concerning old Joseph Curwen. They would have given much for a glimpse
of the papers Charles had found, for very clearly the key to the
youth's madness lay in what he had learned of the ancient wizard and
his doings.
And yet, after all, it was from no step of Mr. Ward's or Dr. Willett's
that the next move in this singular case proceeded. The father and
the physician, rebuffed and confused by a shadow too shapeless and
intangible to combat, had rested uneasily on their oars while the
typed notes of young Ward to his parents grew fewer and fewer. Then
came the first of the month with its customary financial adjustments,
and the clerks at certain banks began a peculiar shaking of heads and
telephoning from one to the other. Officials who knew Charles Ward
by sight went down to the bungalow to ask why every cheque of his
appearing at this juncture was a clumsy forgery, and were reassured
less than they ought to have been when the youth hoarsely explained
that his hand had lately been so much affected by a nervous shock as
to make normal writing impossible. He could, he said, form no written
characters at all except with great difficulty; and could prove it by
the fact that he had been forced to type all his recent letters, even
those to his father and mother, who would bear out the assertion.
What made the investigators pause in confusion was not this
circumstance alone, for that was nothing unprecedented or fundamentally
suspicious; nor even the Pawtuxet gossip, of which one or two of them
had caught echoes. It was the muddled discourse of the young man
which nonplussed them, implying as it did a virtually total loss of
memory concerning important monetary matters which he had had at his
fingertips only a month or two before. Something was wrong; for despite
the apparent coherence and rationality of his speech, there could be
no normal reason for this ill-concealed blankness on vital points.
Moreover, although none of these men knew Ward well, they could not
help observing the change in his language and manner. They had heard
he was an antiquarian, but even the most hopeless antiquarians do not
make daily use of obsolete phraseology and gestures. Altogether, this
combination of hoarseness, palsied hands, bad memory, and altered
speech and bearing must represent some disturbance or malady of genuine
gravity, which, no doubt, formed the basis of the prevailing odd
rumors; and after their departure the party of officials decided that a
talk with the senior Ward was imperative.
* * * * *
So on the sixth of March, 1928, there was a long and serious conference
in Mr. Ward's office, after which the utterly bewildered father
summoned Dr. Willett in a kind of helpless resignation. Willett looked
over the strained and awkward signatures of the cheques, and compared
them in his mind with the penmanship of that last frantic note.
Certainly, the change was radical and profound, and yet there was
something damnably familiar about the new writing. It had crabbed and
archaic tendencies of a very curious sort, and seemed to result from a
type of stroke utterly different from that which the youth had always
used. It was strange--but where had he seen it before? On the whole, it
was obvious that Charles was insane. Of that there could be no doubt.
And since it appeared unlikely that he could handle his property or
continue to deal with the outside world much longer, something must
quickly be done toward his oversight and possible cure. It was then
that the alienists were called in, Drs. Peck and Waite of Providence
and Dr. Lyman of Boston, to whom Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett gave the most
exhaustive possible history of the case, and who conferred at length
in the now unused library of their young patient, examining what books
and papers of his were left in order to gain some further notion of
his habitual mental cast. After scanning this material and examining
the meaningless note to Willett, they all agreed that Charles Ward's
studies had been enough to unseat or at least to warp any ordinary
intellect, and wished most heartily that they could see his more
intimate volumes and documents; but this latter they knew they could
do, if at all, only after a scene at the bungalow itself. Willett now
reviewed the whole case with febrile energy; it being at this time that
he obtained the statements of the workmen who had seen Charles find the
Curwen documents, and that he collated the incidents of the destroyed
newspaper items, looking up the latter at the _Journal_ office.
On Thursday, the eighth of March, Drs. Willett, Peck, Lyman and Waite,
accompanied by Mr. Ward, paid the youth their momentous call; making
no concealment of their object and questioning the now acknowledged
patient with extreme minuteness. Charles, though he was ordinately
long in answering the summons and was still redolent of strange
and noxious laboratory odors when he did finally make his agitated
appearance, proved a far from recalcitrant subject; and admitted
freely that his memory and balance had suffered somewhat from close
application to abstruse studies. He offered no resistance when his
removal to other quarters was insisted upon; and seemed, indeed, to
display a high degree of intelligence as apart from mere memory. His
conduct would have sent his interviewers away in bafflement had not
the persistently archaic trend of his speech and the unmistakable
replacement of modern by ancient ideas in his consciousness marked
him out as one definitely removed from the normal. Of his work he
would say no more to the group of doctors than he had formerly said to
his family and to Dr. Willett, and his frantic note of the previous
month he dismissed as mere nerves and hysteria. He insisted that the
shadowy bungalow possessed no library or laboratory beyond the visible
ones, and waxed abstruse in explaining the absence from the house of
such odors as now saturated all his clothing. Neighborhood gossip he
attributed to nothing more than the cheap inventiveness of baffled
curiosity. Of the whereabouts of Dr. Allen he said he did not feel
at liberty to speak definitely, but assured his inquisitors that the
bearded and spectacled man would return when needed. In paying off
the stolid Brava who resisted all questioning by the visitors, and in
closing the bungalow which still seemed to hold such nighted secrets,
Ward shewed no sign of nervousness save a barely noticed tendency to
pause as though listening for something very faint. He was apparently
animated by a calmly philosophic resignation, as if his removal were
the merest transient incident which would cause the least trouble if
facilitated and disposed of once and for all. It was clear that he
trusted to his obviously unimpaired keenness of absolute mentality to
overcome all the embarrassments into which his twisted memory, his
lost voice and handwriting, and his secretive and eccentric behavior
had led him. His mother, it was agreed, was not to be told of the
change; his father supplying typed notes in his name. Ward was taken to
the restfully and picturesquely situated private hospital maintained
by Dr. Waite on Conanicut Island in the bay, and subjected to the
closest scrutiny and questioning by all the physicians connected
with the case. It was then that the physical oddities were noticed;
the slackened metabolism, the altered skin, and the disproportionate
neural reactions. Dr. Willett was the most perturbed of the various
examiners, for he had attended Ward all his life and could appreciate
with terrible keenness the extent of his physical disorganization. Even
the familiar olive-mark on his hip was gone, while on his chest was a
great black mole or cicatrice which had never been there before, and
which made Willett wonder whether the youth had ever submitted to any
of the "witch markings" reputed to be inflicted at certain unwholesome
nocturnal meetings in wild and lonely places. The doctor could not keep
his mind off a certain transcribed witch-trial record from Salem which
Charles had shewn him in the old non-secretive days, and which read:
"Mr. G. B. on that Nighte putt ye Divell his Marke upon Bridget S.,
Jonathan A., Simon O., Deliverance W., Joseph C., Susan P., Mehitable
C., and Deborah B." Ward's face, too, troubled him horribly, till at
length he suddenly discovered why he was horrified. Above the young
man's right eye was something which he had never previously noticed--a
small scar or pit precisely like that in the crumbled painting of
old Joseph Curwen, and perhaps attesting some hideous ritualistic
inoculation to which both had submitted at a certain stage of their
occult careers.
While Ward himself was puzzling all the doctors at the hospital, a very
strict watch was kept on all mail addressed either to him or to Dr.
Allen, which Mr. Ward had ordered delivered at the family home. Willett
had predicted that very little would be found, since any communications
of a vital nature would probably have been exchanged by messenger; but
in the latter part of March there did come a letter from Prague for Dr.
Allen which gave both the doctor and the father deep thought. It was in
a very crabbed and archaic hand; and though clearly not the effort of a
foreigner, shewed almost as singular a departure from modern English as
the speech of young Ward himself. It read:
Kleinstrasse 11,
Altstadt, Prague,
11th Feby. 1928.
Brother in Almousin-Metraton!--
I this day receiv'd yr mention of what came up from the Salts I
sent you. It was wrong, and meanes clearly that ye Headstones had
been chang'd when Barnabas gott me the Specimen. It is often so,
as you must be sensible of from the Thing you gott from ye King's
Chapell ground in 1769 and what H. gott from Olde Bury'g Point in
1690, that was like to ende him. I gott such a Thing in Aegypt 75
yeares gone, from the which came that Scar ye Boy saw on me here
in 1924. As I told you longe ago, do not calle up That which you
can not put downe; either from dead Saltes or out of ye Spheres
beyond. Have ye Wordes for laying at all times readie, and stopp
not to be sure when there is any Doubte of _Whom_ you have. Stones
are all chang'd now in Nine groundes out of 10. You are never sure
till you question. I this day heard from H., who has had Trouble
with the Soldiers. He is like to be sorry Transylvania is pass'd
from Hungary to Roumania, and wou'd change his Seat if the Castel
weren't so fulle of What we Knowe. But of this he hath doubtless
writ you. In my next Send'g there will be Somewhat from a Hill
tomb from ye East that will delight you greatly. Meanwhile forget
not I am desirous of B. F. if you can possibly get him for me. You
know G. in Philadelphia better than I. Have him up firste if you
will, but doe not use him soe hard he will be Difficult, for I must
speake to him in ye Ende.
Yogg-Sothoth Neblod Zin
Simon O.
To Mr. J. C. in
Providence.
Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett paused in utter chaos before this apparent
bit of unrelieved insanity. Only by degrees did they absorb what it
seemed to imply. So the absent Dr. Allen, and not Charles Ward, had
come to be the leading spirit at Pawtuxet? That must explain the wild
reference and denunciation in the youth's last frantic letter. And
what of this addressing of the bearded and spectacled stranger as "Mr.
J. C.?" There was no escaping the inference, but there are limits to
possible monstrosity. Who was "Simon O."; the old man Ward had visited
in Prague four years previously? Perhaps, but in the centuries behind
there had been another Simon O.--Simon Orne, alias Jedediah, of Salem,
who vanished in 1771, _and whose peculiar handwriting Dr. Willett
now unmistakably recognized from the photostatic copies of the Orne
formulae which Charles had once shewn him_. What horrors and mysteries,
what contradictions and contraventions of nature, had come back after a
century and a half to harass Old Providence with her clustered spires
and domes?
The father and the old physician, virtually at a loss what to do or
think, went to see Charles at the hospital and questioned him as
delicately as they could about Dr. Allen, and the Prague visit, and
about what he had learned of Simon or Jedediah Orne of Salem. To all
these inquiries the youth was politely non-committal, merely barking
in his hoarse whisper that he had found Dr. Allen to have a remarkable
spiritual rapport with certain souls from the past, and that any
correspondent that the bearded man might have in Prague would probably
be similarly gifted. When they left, Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett realized
to their chagrin that they had really been the ones under catechism;
and that without imparting anything vital himself, the confined youth
had adroitly pumped them of everything the Prague letter had contained.
Drs. Peck, Waite, and Lyman were not inclined to attach much
importance to the strange correspondence of young Ward's companion; for
they knew the tendency of kindred eccentrics and monomaniacs to band
together, and believed that Charles or Allen had merely unearthed an
expatriated counterpart--perhaps one who had seen Orne's handwriting
and copied it in an attempt to pose as the bygone character's
reincarnation. Allen himself was perhaps a similar case, and may have
persuaded the youth into accepting him as an avatar of the long-dead
Curwen. Such things had been known before, and on the same basis the
hard-headed doctors disposed of Willett's growing disquiet about
Charles Ward's present handwriting, as studied from unpremeditated
specimens obtained by various ruses. Willett thought he had placed its
odd familiarity at last, and that what it vaguely resembled was the
bygone penmanship of old Joseph Curwen himself; but this the other
physicians regarded as a phase of imitativeness only to be expected
in a mania of this sort, and refused to grant it any importance
either favorable or unfavorable. Recognizing this prosaic attitude
in his colleagues, Willett advised Mr. Ward to keep to himself the
letter which arrived for Dr. Allen on the second of April from Rakus,
Transylvania, in a handwriting so intensely and fundamentally like that
of the Hutchinson cipher that both father and physician paused in awe
before breaking the seal. This read as follows:
Castle Ferenczy,
7 March 1928.
Dear C.--
Hadd a Squd of 20 Militia up to talk about what the Country Folk
say. Must digg deeper and have less Hearde. These Roumanians
plague one damnably, being officious and particular where you
cou'd buy a Magyar off with a Drinke and food. Last Monthe M. got
me ye sarcophagus of ye Five Sphinxes from ye Acropolis where He
whome I call'd up say'd it wou'd be, and I have hadde 3 Talkes
_with What was therein inhum'd_. It will go to S. O. in Prague
directly, and thence to you. It is stubborn but you know ye Way
with Such. You shew Wisdom in having lesse about than Before;
for there was no Neede to keep the Guards in Shape and eat'g off
their Heades, and it made much to be founde in case of Trouble, as
you too welle know. You can now move and Worke elsewhere with no
Kill'g Trouble if nedful, though I hope no Thing will soon force
you to so Bothersome a Course. I rejoice that you traffick not so
much with _Those Outside_; for there was ever a Mortall Peril in
it, and you are sensible what it did when you asked Protection of
One not dispos'd to give it. You excel me in gett'g ye formulae
so _another_ may saye them with Success, but Borellus fancy'd it
wou'd be so if just ye right Wordes were hadd. Does ye Boy use 'em
often? I regret that he growes squeamish, as I fear'd he wou'd when
I hadde him here nigh fiften Monthes, but am sensible you knowe how
to deal with him. You can't saye him down with ye Formula, for that
will Worke only upon such as ye other Formula hath call'd up from
Saltes; but you still have strong Handes and Knife and Pistol, and
Graves are not harde to digg, nor Acids loth to burne. O. sayes
you have promis'd him B. F. I must have him after. B. goes to you
soone, and may he give you what you wishe of that Darke Thing
belowe Memphis. Imploy care in what you calle up, and beware of ye
Boy. It will be ripe in a yeare's time to have up ye Legions from
Underneath, and then there are no Boundes to what shal be oures.
Have Confidence in what I saye, for you knowe O. and I have hadd
these 150 yeares more than you to consulte these Matters in.
Nephreu--Ka nai Hadoh
Edw: H.
For J. Curwen, Esq.
Providence.
But if Willett and Mr. Ward refrained from shewing this letter to
the alienists, they did not refrain from acting upon it themselves.
No amount of learned sophistry could controvert the fact that the
strangely bearded and spectacled Dr. Allen, of whom Charles' frantic
letter had spoken as such a monstrous menace, was in close and sinister
correspondence with two inexplicable creatures whom Ward had visited
in his travels and who plainly claimed to be survivals or avatars of
Curwen's old Salem colleagues; that he was regarding himself as the
reincarnation of Joseph Curwen, and that he entertained--or was at
least advised to entertain--murderous designs against a "boy" who could
scarcely be other than Charles Ward. There was organized horror afoot;
and no matter who had started it, the missing Allen was by this time
at the bottom of it. Therefore, thanking Heaven that Charles was now
safe in the hospital, Mr. Ward lost no time in engaging detectives to
learn all they could of the cryptic bearded doctor; finding whence he
had come and what Pawtuxet knew of him, and if possible discovering
his current whereabouts. Supplying the men with one of the bungalow
keys which Charles had yielded up, he urged them to explore Allen's
vacant room which had been identified when the patient's belongings had
been packed; obtaining what clues they could from any effects he might
have left about. Mr. Ward talked with the detectives in his son's old
library, and they felt a marked relief when they left it at last; for
there seemed to hover about the place a vague aura of evil. Perhaps it
was what they had heard of the infamous old wizard whose picture had
once stared from the paneled overmantel, and perhaps it was something
different and irrelevant; but in any case they all half-sensed an
intangible miasma which centered in that carven vestige of an older
dwelling and which at times almost rose to the intensity of a material
emanation.
_5. A Nightmare and a Cataclysm_
And now swiftly followed that hideous experience which has left its
indelible mark of fear on the soul of Marinus Bicknell Willett, and
has added a decade to the visible age of one whose youth was even then
far behind. Dr. Willett had conferred at length with Mr. Ward, and had
come to an agreement with him on several points which both felt the
alienists would ridicule. There was, they conceded, a terrible movement
alive in the world, whose direct connection with a necromancy even
older than the Salem witchcraft could not be doubted. That at least
two living men--and one other of whom they dared not think--were in
absolute possession of minds or personalities which had functioned as
early as 1690 or before was likewise almost unassailably proved even in
the face of all known natural laws. What these horrible creatures--and
Charles Ward as well--were doing or trying to do seemed fairly clear
from their letters and from every bit of light both old and new which
had filtered in upon the case. They were robbing the tombs of all the
ages, including those of the world's wisest and greatest men, in the
hope of recovering from bygone ashes some vestige of the consciousness
and lore which had once animated and informed them.
A hideous traffic was going on among these nightmare ghouls, whereby
illustrious bones were bartered with the calm calculativeness of
schoolboys swapping books; and from what was extorted from this
centuried dust there was anticipated a power and a wisdom beyond
anything which the cosmos had ever seen concentrated in one man or
group. They had found unholy ways to keep their brains alive, either
in the same body or different bodies; and had evidently achieved a way
of tapping the consciousness of the dead whom they gathered together.
There had, it seems, been some truth in chimerical old Borellus when
he wrote of preparing from even the most antique remains certain
"Essential Saltes" from which the shade of a long-dead living thing
might be raised up. There was a formula for evoking such a shade, and
another for putting it down; and it had now been so perfected that it
could be taught successfully. One must be careful about evocations, for
the markers of old graves are not always accurate.
Willett and Mr. Ward shivered as they passed from conclusion to
conclusion. Things--presences or voices of some sort--could be drawn
down from unknown places as well as from the grave, and in this process
also one must be careful. Joseph Curwen had indubitably evoked many
forbidden things, and as for Charles--what might one think of him?
What forces "outside the spheres" had reached him from Joseph Curwen's
day and turned his mind on forgotten things? He had been led to find
certain directions, and he had used them. He had talked with the man
of horror in Prague and stayed long with the creature in the mountains
of Transylvania. And he must have found the grave of Joseph Curwen at
last. That newspaper item and what his mother had heard in the night
were too significant to overlook. Then he had summoned something, and
it must have come. That mighty voice aloft on Good Friday, and those
_different_ tones in the locked attic laboratory. What were they
like, with their depth and hollowness? Was there not here some awful
foreshadowing of the dreaded stranger Dr. Allen with his spectral bass?
Yes, _that_ was what Mr. Ward had felt with vague horror in his single
talk with the man--if man it were--over the telephone!
What hellish consciousness or voice, what morbid shade or presence,
had come to answer Charles Ward's secret rites behind that locked
door? Those voices heard in argument--"must have it red for three
months"--Good God! Was not that just before the vampirism broke out?
The rifling of Ezra Weeden's ancient grave, and the cries later at
Pawtuxet--whose mind had planned the vengeance and rediscovered the
shunned seat of elder blasphemies? And then the bungalow and the
bearded stranger, and the gossip, and the fear. The final madness of
Charles neither father nor doctor could attempt to explain, but they
did feel sure that the mind of Joseph Curwen had come to earth again
and was following its ancient morbidities. Was demoniac possession
in truth a possibility? Allen had something to do with it, and the
detectives must find out more about one whose existence menaced the
young man's life. In the meantime, since the existence of some vast
crypt beneath the bungalow seemed virtually beyond dispute, some
effort must be made to find it. Willett and Mr. Ward, conscious of
the sceptical attitude of the alienists, resolved during their final
conference to undertake a joint secret exploration of unparalleled
thoroughness; and agreed to meet at the bungalow on the following
morning with valises and with certain tools and accessories suited to
architectural search and underground exploration.
* * * * *
The morning of April sixth dawned clear, and both explorers were at the
bungalow by ten o'clock. Mr. Ward had the key, and an entry and cursory
survey were made. From the disordered condition of Dr. Allen's room it
was obvious that the detectives had been there before, and the later
searchers hoped that they had found some clue which might prove of
value. Of course the main business lay in the cellar; so thither they
descended without much delay, again making the circuit which each had
vainly made before in the presence of the mad young owner. For a time
everything seemed baffling, each inch of the earthen floor and stone
walls having so solid and innocuous an aspect that the thought of a
yawning aperture was scarcely to be entertained. Willett reflected that
since the original cellar was dug without knowledge of any catacombs
beneath, the beginning of the passage would represent the strictly
modern delving of young Ward and his associates, where they had probed
for the ancient vaults whose rumor could have reached them by no
wholesome means.
The doctor tried to put himself in Charles' place and see how a delver
would be likely to start, but could not gain much inspiration from this
method. Then he decided on elimination as a policy, and went carefully
over the whole subterranean surface both vertical and horizontal,
trying to account for every inch separately. He was soon substantially
narrowed down, and at last had nothing left but the small platform
before the washtubs, which he had tried once before in vain. Now
experimenting in every possible way, and exerting a double strength,
he finally found that the top did indeed turn and slide horizontally
on a corner pivot. Beneath it lay a trim concrete surface with an iron
man-hole, to which Mr. Ward at once rushed with excited zeal. The
cover was not hard to lift, and the father had quite removed it when
Willett noticed the queerness of his aspect. He was swaying and nodding
dizzily, and in the gust of noxious air which swept up from the black
pit beneath the doctor soon recognized ample cause.
In a moment Dr. Willett had his fainting companion on the floor above
and was reviving him with cold water. Mr. Ward responded feebly, but it
could be seen that the mephitic blast from the crypt had in some way
gravely sickened him. Wishing to take no chances, Willett hastened out
to Broad Street for a taxicab and had soon dispatched the sufferer home
despite his weak-voiced protests; after which he produced an electric
torch, covered his nostrils with a band of sterile gauze, and descended
once more to peer into the new-found depths. The foul air had now
slightly abated, and Willett was able to send a beam of light down the
Stygian hole. For about ten feet, he saw, it was a sheer cylindrical
drop with concrete walls and an iron ladder; after which the hole
appeared to strike a flight of old stone steps which must originally
have emerged to earth somewhat southward of the present building.
* * * * *
Willett freely admits that for a moment the memory of the old Curwen
legends kept him from climbing down alone into that malodorous gulf.
He could not help thinking of what Luke Fenner had reported on that
last monstrous night. Then duty asserted itself and he made the plunge,
carrying a great valise for the removal of whatever papers might
prove of supreme importance. Slowly, as befitted one of his years,
he descended the ladder and reached the slimy steps below. This was
ancient masonry, his torch told him; and upon the dripping walls he
saw the unwholesome moss of centuries. Down, down, ran the steps; not
spirally, but in three abrupt turns; and with such narrowness that two
men could have passed only with difficulty. He had counted about thirty
when a sound reached him very faintly; and after that he did not feel
disposed to count any more.
It was a godless sound; one of those low-keyed, insidious outrages
of nature which are not meant to be. To call it a dull wail, a
doom-dragged whine, or a hopeless howl of chorused anguish and
stricken flesh without mind would be to miss its most quintessential
loathesomeness and soul-sickening overtones. Was it for this that
Ward had seemed to listen on that day he was removed? It was the most
shocking thing that Willett had ever heard, and it continued from
no determinate point as the doctor reached the bottom of the steps
and cast his torchlight around on lofty corridor walls surmounted by
Cyclopean vaulting and pierced by numberless black archways. The hall
in which he stood was perhaps fourteen feet high to the middle of
the vaulting and ten or twelve feet broad. Its pavement was of large
chipped flagstones, and its walls and roof were of dressed masonry. Its
length he could not imagine, for it stretched ahead indefinitely into
the blackness. Of the archways, some had doors of the old six-paneled
colonial type, whilst others had none.
Overcoming the dread induced by the smell and the howling, Willett
began to explore these archways one by one; finding beyond them
rooms with groined stone ceilings, each of medium size and apparently
of bizarre uses. Most of them had fireplaces, the upper courses of
whose chimneys would have formed an interesting study in engineering.
Never before or since had he seen such instruments or suggestions
of instruments as here loomed up on every hand through the burying
dust and cobwebs of a century and a half, in many cases evidently
shattered as if by the ancient raiders. For many of the chambers
seemed wholly untrodden by modern feet, and must have represented the
earliest and most obsolete phases of Joseph Curwen's experimentation.
Finally there came a room of obvious modernity, or at least of recent
occupancy. There were oil heaters, bookshelves and tables, chairs and
cabinets, and a desk piled high with papers of varying antiquity and
contemporaneousness. Candlesticks and oil lamps stood about in several
places; and finding a match safe handy, Willett lighted such as were
ready for use.
In the fuller gleam it appeared that this apartment was nothing less
than the latest study or library of Charles Ward. Of the books the
doctor had seen many before, and a good part of the furniture had
plainly come from the Prospect Street mansion. Here and there was
a piece well known to Willett, and the sense of familiarity became
so great that he half forgot the noisomeness and the wailing, both
of which were plainer here than they had been at the foot of the
steps. His first duty, as planned long ahead, was to find and seize
any papers which might seem of vital importance; especially those
portentous documents found by Charles so long ago behind the picture
in Olney Court. As he searched he perceived how stupendous a task the
final unraveling would be; for file on file was stuffed with papers
in curious hands and bearing curious designs, so that months or even
years might be needed for a thorough deciphering and editing. Once he
found large packets of letters with Prague and Rakus postmarks, and in
writing clearly recognizable as Orne's and Hutchinson's; all of which
he took with him as part of the bundle to be removed in his valise.
At last, in a locked mahogany cabinet once gracing the Ward home,
Willett found the batch of old Curwen papers; recognizing them from
the reluctant glimpse Charles had granted him so many years ago. The
youth had evidently kept them together very much as they had been when
first he found them, since all the titles recalled by the workmen were
present except the papers addressed to Orne and Hutchinson, and the
cipher with its key. Willett placed the entire lot in his valise and
continued his examination of the files. Since young Ward's immediate
condition was the greatest matter at stake, the closest searching was
done among the most obviously recent matter; and in this abundance of
contemporary manuscript one very baffling oddity was noted. That oddity
was the slight amount in Charles' normal writing, which indeed included
nothing more recent than two months before. On the other hand, there
were literally reams of symbols and formulae, historical notes and
philosophical comment, in a crabbed penmanship absolutely identical
with the ancient script of Joseph Curwen, though of undeniably modern
dating. Plainly, a part of the latter-day program had been a sedulous
imitation of the old wizard's writing, which Charles seemed to have
carried to a marvelous state of perfection. Of any third hand which
might have been Allen's there was not a trace. If he had indeed come to
be the leader, he must have forced young Ward to act as his amanuensis.
In this new material one mystic formula, or rather pair of formulae,
recurred so often that Willett had it by heart before he had half
finished his quest. It consisted of two parallel columns, the left-hand
one surmounted by the archaic symbol called "Dragon's Head" and used
in almanacs to indicate the ascending node, and the right-hand one
headed by the corresponding sign of "Dragon's Tail" or descending
node. The appearance of the whole was something like this, and almost
unconsciously the doctor realized that the second half was no more
than the first written syllabically backward with the exception of the
final monosyllables and of the odd name _Yog-Sothoth_, which he had
come to recognize under various spellings from other things he had
seen in connection with this horrible matter. The formulae were as
follows--_exactly_ so, as Willett is abundantly able to testify--and
the first one struck an odd note of uncomfortable latent memory in his
brain, which he recognized later when reviewing the events of that
horrible Good Friday of the previous year.
[Illustration:
Y'AI 'NG'NGAH,
_YOG-SOTHOTH_
H'EE----L'GEB
F'AI THRODOG
_UAAAH_
]
[Illustration:
OGTHROD AI'F
GEB'L----EE'H
_YOG-SOTHOTH_
'NGAH'NG AI'Y
_ZHRO_
]
So haunting were these formulae, and so frequently did he come upon
them, that before the doctor knew it he was repeating them under his
breath. Eventually, however, he felt he had secured all the papers he
could digest to advantage for the present; hence resolved to examine no
more till he could bring the sceptical alienists en masse for an ample
and more systematic raid. He had still to find the hidden laboratory,
so leaving his valise in the lighted room he emerged again into the
black noisome corridor whose vaulting echoed ceaselessly with that dull
and hideous whine.
The next few rooms he tried were all abandoned or filled only with
crumbling boxes and ominous-looking leaden coffins; but impressed him
deeply with the magnitude of Joseph Curwen's original operations. He
thought of the slaves and seamen who had disappeared, of the graves
which had been violated in every part of the world, and of what
that final raiding party must have seen; and then he decided it was
better not to think any more. Once a great stone staircase mounted at
his right, and he deduced that this must have reached to one of the
Curwen outbuildings--perhaps the famous stone edifice with the high
slitlike windows--provided the steps he had descended had led from the
steep-roofed farmhouse. Suddenly the walls seemed to fall away ahead,
and the stench and the wailing grew stronger. Willett saw that he had
come upon a vast open space, so great that his torchlight would not
carry across it; and as he advanced he encountered occasional stout
pillars supporting the arches of the roof.
After a time he reached a circle of pillars grouped like the monoliths
of Stonehenge, with a large carved altar on a base of three steps in
the center; and so curious were the carvings on that altar that he
approached to study them with his electric light. But when he saw what
they were he shrank away shuddering, and did not stop to investigate
the dark stains which discolored the upper surface and had spread down
the sides in occasional thin lines. Instead, he found the distant wall
and traced it as it swept around in a gigantic circle perforated by
occasional black doorways and indented by a myriad of shallow cells
with iron gratings and wrist and ankle bonds on chains fastened to the
stone of the concave rear masonry. These cells were empty, but still
the horrible odor and the dismal moaning continued, more insistent
now than ever, and seemingly varied at times by a sort of slippery
thumping.
* * * * *
From that frightful smell and that uncanny noise Willett's attention
could no longer be diverted. Both were plainer and more hideous in the
great pillared hall than anywhere else, and carried a vague impression
of being far below, even in this dark nether world of subterrene
mystery. Before trying any of the black archways for steps leading
further down, the doctor cast his beam of light about the stone-flagged
floor. It was very loosely paved, and at irregular intervals there
would occur a slab curiously pierced by small holes in no definite
arrangement, while at one point there lay a very long ladder carelessly
flung down. To this ladder, singularly enough, appeared to cling a
particularly large amount of the frightful odor which encompassed
everything. As he walked slowly about, it suddenly occurred to Willett
that both the noise and the odor seemed strongest directly above the
oddly pierced slabs, as if they might be crude trap-doors leading down
to some still deeper region of horror. Kneeling by one, he worked at it
with his hands, and found that with extreme difficulty he could budge
it. At his touch the moaning beneath ascended to a louder key, and only
with vast trepidation did he persevere in the lifting of the heavy
stone. A stench unnamable now rose from below, and the doctor's head
reeled dizzily as he laid back the slab and turned his torch upon the
exposed square yard of gaping blackness.
If he had expected a flight of steps to some wide gulf of ultimate
abomination, Willett was destined to be disappointed; for amidst
that foetor and cracked whining he discerned only the brick-faced
top of a cylindrical well perhaps a yard and a half in diameter and
devoid of any ladder or other means of descent. As the light shone
down, the wailing changed suddenly to a series of horrible yelps; in
conjunction with which there came again that sound of blind, futile
scrambling and slippery thumping. The explorer trembled, unwilling even
to imagine what noxious thing might be lurking in that abyss; but in
a moment mustered up the courage to peer over the rough-hewn brink;
lying at full length and holding the torch downward at arm's length to
see what might lie below. For a second he could distinguish nothing
but the slimy, moss-grown brick walls sinking illimitably into that
half-tangible miasma of murk and foulness and anguished frenzy; and
then he saw that something dark was leaping clumsily and frantically
up and down at the bottom of the narrow shaft, which must have been
from twenty to twenty-five feet below the stone floor where he lay.
The torch shook in his hand, but he looked again to see what manner
of living creature might be immured there in the darkness of that
unnatural well; left starving by young Ward through all the long month
since the doctors had taken him away, and clearly only one of a vast
number prisoned in the kindred wells whose pierced stone covers so
thickly studded the floor of the great vaulted cavern. Whatever the
things were, they could not lie down in their cramped spaces; but must
have crouched and whined and waited and feebly leaped all those hideous
weeks since their master had abandoned them unheeded.
But Marinus Bicknell Willett was sorry that he looked again; for
surgeon and veteran of the dissecting-room though he was, he has not
been the same since. It is hard to explain just how a single sight of
a tangible object with measurable dimensions could so shake and change
a man; and we may only say that there is about certain outlines and
entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts frightfully
on a sensitive thinker's perspective and whispers terrible hints
of obscure cosmic relationships and unnamable realities behind the
protective illusions of common vision. In that second look Willett
saw such an outline or entity, for during the next few instants he was
undoubtedly as stark mad as any inmate of Dr. Waite's private hospital.
He dropped the electric torch from a hand drained of muscular power or
nervous coordination, nor heeded the sound of crunching teeth which
told of its fate at the bottom of the pit. He screamed and screamed
and screamed in a voice whose falsetto panic no acquaintance of his
would ever have recognized, and though he could not rise to his feet he
crawled and rolled desperately away over the damp pavement where dozens
of Tartarean wells poured forth their exhausted whining and yelping
to answer his own insane cries. He tore his hands on the rough, loose
stones, and many times bruised his head against the frequent pillars,
but still he kept on. Then at last he slowly came to himself in the
utter blackness and stench, and stopped his ears against the droning
wail into which the burst of yelping had subsided. He was drenched
with perspiration and without means of producing a light; stricken and
unnerved in the abysmal blackness and horror, and crushed with a memory
he never could efface. Beneath him dozens of those things still lived,
and from one of the shafts the cover was removed. He knew that what he
had seen could never climb up the slippery walls, yet shuddered at the
thought that some obscure foothold might exist.
* * * * *
What the thing was, he would never tell. It was like some of the
carvings on the hellish altar, but it was alive. Nature had never made
it in this form, for it was too palpably _unfinished_. The deficiencies
were of the most surprising sort, and the abnormalities of proportion
could not be described. Willett consents only to say that this type
of thing must have represented entities which Ward called up from
_imperfect salts_, and which he kept for servile or ritualistic
purposes. If it had not had a certain significance, its image would not
have been carved on that damnable stone. It was not the worst thing
depicted on that stone--but Willett never opened the other pits. At the
time, the first connected idea in his mind was an idle paragraph from
some of the old Curwen data he had digested long before; a phrase used
by Simon or Jedediah Orne in that portentous confiscated letter to the
bygone sorcerer:
"Certainly, there was Noth'g butt ye liveliest Awfullness in That which
H. rais'd upp from What he cou'd gather onlie a Part of."
Then, horribly supplementing rather than displacing this image, there
came a recollection of those ancient lingering rumors anent the burned
and twisted thing found in the fields a week after the Curwen raid.
Charles Ward had once told the doctor what old Slocum said of that
object; that it was neither thoroughly human, nor wholly allied to any
animal which Pawtuxet folk had ever seen or read about.
These words hummed in the doctor's mind as he rocked to and fro,
squatting on the nitrous stone floor. He tried to drive them out,
and repeated the Lord's Prayer to himself; eventually trailing off
into a mnemonic hodge-podge like the modernistic "Waste Land" of Mr.
T. S. Eliot and finally reverting to the oft-repeated dual formula
he had lately found in Ward's underground library: "_Y'ai 'ng-'ngah,
Yog-Sothoth_," and so on till the final underlined "_Zhro_." It seemed
to soothe him and he staggered to his feet after a time; lamenting
bitterly his fright-lost torch and looking wildly about for any gleam
of light in the clutching inkiness of the chilly air. Think he would
not; but he strained his eyes in every direction for some faint glint
or reflection of the bright illumination he had left in the library.
After awhile he thought he detected a suspicion of a glow infinitely
far away, and toward this he crawled in agonized caution on hands and
knees amidst the stench and howling, always feeling ahead lest he
collide with the numerous great pillars or stumble into the abominable
pit he had uncovered.
Once his shaking fingers touched something which he knew must be the
steps leading to the hellish altar, and from this spot he recoiled
in loathing. At another time he encountered the pierced slab he had
removed, and here his caution became almost pitiful. But he did not
come upon the dread aperture after all, nor did anything issue from
that aperture to detain him. What had been down there made no sound
nor stir. Evidently its crunching of the fallen electric torch had not
been good for it. Each time Willett's fingers felt a perforated slab
he trembled. His passage over it would sometimes increase the groaning
below, but generally it would produce no effect at all, since he moved
very noiselessly. Several times during his progress the glow ahead
diminished perceptibly, and he realized that the various candles and
lamps he had left must be expiring one by one. The thought of being
lost in utter darkness without matches amidst this underground world of
nightmare labyrinths impelled him to rise to his feet and run, which he
could safely do now that he had passed the open pit; for he knew that
once the light failed his only hope of rescue and survival would lie
in whatever relief party Mr. Ward might send after missing him for a
sufficient period.
Presently, however, he emerged from the open space into the narrower
corridor and definitely located the glow as coming from a door on his
right. In a moment he had reached it and was standing once more in
young Ward's secret library, trembling with relief, and watching the
sputterings of that last lamp which had brought him to safety.
* * * * *
In another moment he was hastily filling the burned-out lamps from an
oil supply he had previously noticed, and when the room was bright
again he looked about to see if he might find a lantern for further
exploration. For racked though he was with horror, his sense of
grim purpose was still uppermost, and he was firmly determined to
leave no stone unturned in his search for the hideous facts behind
Charles Ward's bizarre madness. Failing to find a lantern, he chose
the smallest of the lamps to carry; also filling his pockets with
candles and matches, and taking with him a gallon can of oil, which
he proposed to keep for reserve use in whatever hidden laboratory he
might uncover beyond the terrible open space with its unclean altar and
nameless covered wells. To traverse that space again would require his
utmost fortitude, but he knew it must be done. Fortunately neither the
frightful altar nor the opened shaft was near the vast cell-indented
wall which bounded the cavern area, and whose black mysterious archways
would form the next goals of a logical search.
So Willett went back to that great pillared hall of stench and
anguished howling; turning down his lamp to avoid any distant glimpse
of the hellish altar, or of the uncovered pit with the pierced stone
slab beside it. Most of the black doorways led merely to small
chambers, some vacant and some evidently used as store rooms; and
in several of the latter he saw some very curious accumulations of
various objects. One was packed with rotting and dust-draped bales
of spare clothing, and the explorer thrilled when he saw that it was
unmistakably the clothing of a century and a half before. In another
room he found numerous odds and ends of modern clothing, as if gradual
provisions were being made to equip a large body of men. But what
he disliked most of all were the huge copper vats which occasionally
appeared; these, and the sinister incrustations upon them. He liked
them even less than the weirdly figured leaden bowls whose ruins
retained such obnoxious deposits and around which clung repellent odors
perceptible above even the general noisomeness of the crypt. When
he had completed about half the entire circuit of the wall he found
another corridor like that from which he had come, and out of which
many doors opened.
This he proceeded to investigate; and after entering three rooms of
medium size and of no significant contents, he came at last to a large
oblong apartment whose businesslike tanks and tables, furnaces and
modern instruments, occasional books and endless shelves of jars and
bottles proclaimed it indeed the long-sought laboratory of Charles
Ward--and no doubt of old Joseph Curwen before him.
After lighting the three lamps which he found filled and ready, Dr.
Willett examined the place and all its appurtenances with the keenest
interest; noting from the relative quantities of various reagents on
the shelves that young Ward's dominant concern must have been with some
branch of organic chemistry. On the whole, little could be learned from
the scientific ensemble, which included a gruesome-looking dissecting
table; so that the room was really rather a disappointment. Among the
books was a tattered old copy of Borellus in black-letter, and it was
weirdly interesting to note that Ward had underlined the same passage
whose marking had so perturbed good Mr. Merritt at Curwen's farmhouse
more than a century and a half before. That older copy, of course,
must have perished along with the rest of Curwen's occult library in
the final raid. Three archways opened off the laboratory, and these
the doctor proceeded to sample in turn. From his cursory survey he
saw that two led merely to small storerooms; but these he canvassed
with care, remarking the piles of coffins in various stages of damage
and shuddering violently at two or three of the few coffin-plates he
could decipher. There was much clothing also stored in these rooms,
and several new and tightly-nailed boxes which he did not stop to
investigate. Most interesting of all, perhaps, were some odd bits which
he judged to be fragments of old Joseph Curwen's laboratory appliances.
These had suffered damage at the hands of the raiders, but were still
partly recognizable as the chemical paraphernalia of the Georgian
period.
* * * * *
The third archway led to a very sizeable chamber entirely lined with
shelves and having in the center a table bearing two lamps. These
lamps Willett lighted, and in their brilliant glow studied the endless
shelving which surrounded him. Some of the upper levels were wholly
vacant, but most of the space was filled with small odd-looking
leaden jars of two general types; one tall and without handles like a
Grecian lekythos or oil-jug, and the other with a single handle and
proportioned like a Phaleron jug. All had metal stoppers, and were
covered with peculiar-looking symbols moulded in low relief. In a
moment the doctor noticed that these jugs were classified with great
rigidity; all the lekythoi being on one side of the room with a large
wooden sign reading "Custodes" above them, and all the Phalerons on
the other, correspondingly labeled with a sign reading "Materia." Each
of the jars or jugs, except some on the upper shelves that turned out
to be vacant, bore a cardboard tag with a number apparently referring
to a catalogue; and Willett resolved to look for the latter presently.
For the moment, however, he was more interested in the nature of the
array as a whole; and experimentally opened several of the lekythoi
and Phalerons at random with a view to a rough generalization. The
result was invariable. Both types of jar contained a small quantity
of a single kind of substance; a fine dusty powder of very light
weight and of many shades of dull neutral color. To the colors which
formed the only point of variation there was no apparent method of
disposal; and no distinction between what occurred in the lekythoi and
what occurred in the Phalerons. A bluish-gray powder might be by the
side of a pinkish-white one, and any one in a Phaleron might have its
exact counterpart in a lekythos. The most individual feature about
the powders was their non-adhesiveness. Willett would pour one into
his hand, and upon returning it to its jug would find that no residue
whatever remained on his palm.
The meaning of the two signs puzzled him, and he wondered why this
battery of chemicals was separated so radically from those in glass
jars on the shelves of the laboratory proper. "Custodes," "Materia";
that was the Latin for "Guards" and "Material," respectively--and
then there came a flash of memory as to where he had seen that word
"Guards" before in connection with this dreadful mystery. It was, of
course, in the recent letter to Dr. Allen purporting to be from old
Edward Hutchinson; and the phrase had read: "There was no Neede to keep
the Guards in shape and eat'g off their Heades, and it made much to
be founde in Case of Trouble, as you too welle Knowe." What did this
signify? But wait--was there not still _another_ reference to "guards"
in this matter which he had failed wholly to recall when reading the
Hutchinson letter? Back in the old non-secretive days Ward had told him
of the Eleazar Smith diary recording the spying of Smith and Weeden
on the Curwen farm, and in that dreadful chronicle there had been
a mention of conversations overheard before the old wizard betook
himself wholly beneath the earth. There had been, Smith and Weeden
insisted, terrible colloquies wherein figured Curwen, certain captives
of his, _and the guards of those captives_. Those guards, according to
Hutchinson or his avatar, had "eaten their heads off," so that now Dr.
Allen did not keep them _in shape_. And if not _in shape_, how save
as the "salts" to which it appears this wizard band was engaged in
reducing as many human bodies or skeletons as they could?
So _that_ was what these lekythoi contained; the monstrous fruit of
unhallowed rites and deeds, presumably won or cowed to such submission
as to help when called up by some hellish incantation, in the defense
of their blasphemous master or the questioning of those who were not so
willing? Willett shuddered at the thought of what he had been pouring
in and out of his hands, and for a moment felt an impulse to flee in
panic from that cavern of hideous shelves with their silent and perhaps
watching sentinels. Then he thought of the "Materia"--in the myriad
Phaleron jugs on the other side of the room. Salts too--and if not the
salts of "guards," then the salts of what? God! Could it be possible
that here lay the mortal relics of half the titan thinkers of all the
ages; snatched by supreme ghouls from crypts where the world thought
them safe, and subject to the beck and call of madmen who sought to
drain their knowledge for some still wilder end whose ultimate effect
would concern, as poor Charles had hinted in his frantic note, "all
civilization, all natural law, perhaps even the fate of the solar
system and the universe?" And Marinus Bicknell Willett had sifted their
dust through his hands!
Then he noticed a small door at the farther end of the room, and calmed
himself enough to approach it and examine the crude sign chiseled
above. It was only a symbol, but it filled him with vague spiritual
dread; for a morbid, dreaming friend of his had once drawn it on paper
and told him a few of the things it means in the dark abyss of sleep.
It was the sign of Koth, that dreamers see fixed above the archway
of a certain black tower standing alone in twilight--and Willett did
not like what his friend Randolph Carter had said of its powers. But
a moment later he forgot the sign as he recognized a new acrid odor
in the stench-filled air. This was a chemical rather than animal
smell, and came clearly from the room beyond the door. And it was,
unmistakably, the same odor which had saturated Charles Ward's clothing
on the day the doctors had taken him away. So it was here that the
youth had been interrupted by the final summons? He was wiser than old
Joseph Curwen, for he had not resisted. Willett, boldly determined to
penetrate every wonder and nightmare this nether realm might contain,
seized the small lamp and crossed the threshold. A wave of nameless
fright rolled out to meet him, but he yielded to no whim and deferred
to no intuition. There was nothing alive here to harm him, and he would
not be stayed in his piercing of the eldritch cloud which engulfed his
patient.
* * * * *
The room beyond the door was of medium size, and had no furniture
save a table, a single chair, and two groups of curious machines with
clamps and wheels which Willett recognized after a moment as medieval
instruments of torture. On one side of the door stood a rack of savage
whips, above which were some shelves bearing empty rows of shallow
pedestaled cups of lead shaped like Grecian kylikes. On the other side
was the table; with a powerful Argand lamp, a pad and pencil, and
two of the stoppered lekythoi from the shelves outside set down at
irregular places as if temporarily or in haste. Willett lighted the
lamp and looked carefully at the pad to see what notes young Ward
might have been jotting down when interrupted; but found nothing more
intelligible than the following disjointed fragments in that crabbed
Curwen chirography, which shed no light on the case as a whole:
"B. dy'd not. Escap'd into walls and founde Place below.
"Saw olde V. saye ye Sabaoth and learnt ye Way.
"Rais'd _Yog-Sothoth_ thrice and was ye nexte Day deliver'd.
"F. soughte to wipe out all know'g howe to raise Those from Outside."
As the strong Argand blaze lit up the entire chamber the doctor saw
that the wall opposite the door, between the two groups of torturing
appliances in the corners, was covered with pegs from which hung a set
of shapeless looking robes of a rather dismal yellowish-white. But
far more interesting were the two vacant walls, both of which were
thickly covered with mystic symbols and formulae roughly chiseled in
the smooth dressed stone. The damp floor also bore marks of carving;
and with but little difficulty Willett deciphered a huge pentagram in
the center, with a plain circle about three feet wide halfway between
this and each corner. In one of these four circles, near where a
yellowish robe had been flung carelessly down, there stood a shallow
kylix of the sort found on the shelves above the whip-rack; and just
outside the periphery was one of the Phaleron jugs from the shelves in
the other room, its tag numbered 118. This was unstoppered, and proved
upon inspection to be empty; but the explorer saw with a shiver that
the kylix was not. Within its shallow area, and saved from scattering
only by the absence of wind in this sequestered cavern, lay a small
amount of a dry, dull-greenish efflorescent powder which must have
belonged in the jug; and Willett almost reeled at the implications that
came sweeping over him as he correlated little by little the several
elements and antecedents of the scene. The whips and the instruments of
torture; the dust or salts from the jug of "Materia," the two lekythoi
from the "Custodes" shelf, the robes, the formulae on the walls, the
notes on the pad, the hints from letters and legends, and the thousand
glimpses, doubts, and suppositions which had come to torment the
friends and parents of Charles Ward--all these engulfed the doctor in a
tidal wave of horror as he looked at that dry greenish powder outspread
in the pedestalled leaden kylix on the floor.
With an effort, however, Willett pulled himself together and began
studying the formulae chiseled on the walls. From the stained and
incrusted letters it was obvious that they were carved in Joseph
Curwen's time, and their text was such as to be vaguely familiar to
one who had read much Curwen material or delved extensively into the
history of magic. One the doctor clearly recognized as what Mrs. Ward
heard her son chanting on that ominous Good Friday a year before,
and what an authority had told him was a very terrible invocation
addressed to secret gods outside the normal spheres. It was not
spelled here exactly as Mrs. Ward had set it down from memory, nor
yet as the authority had shewn it to him in the forbidden pages of
"Eliphas Levi"; but its identity was unmistakable, and such words as
_Sabaoth_, _Metraton_, _Almonsin_, and _Zariatnatmik_ sent a shudder
of fright through the searcher who had seen and felt so much of cosmic
abomination just around the corner.
This was on the left-hand wall as one entered the room. The right-hand
wall was no less thickly inscribed, and Willett felt a start of
recognition as he came upon the pair of formulae so frequently
occurring in the recent notes in the library. They were, roughly
speaking, the same; with the ancient symbols of "Dragon's Head" and
"Dragon's Tail" heading them as in Ward's scribblings. But the spelling
differed quite widely from that of the modern versions, as if old
Curwen had had a different way of recording sound, or as if later study
had evolved more powerful and perfected variants of the invocations in
question. The doctor tried to reconcile the chiseled version with the
one which still ran persistently in his head, and found it hard to do.
Where the script he had memorized began "_Y'ai 'Ng'ngah, Yog-Sothoth_,"
this epigraph started out as "_Aye, cngengah, Yogge-Sothotha_"; which
to his mind would seriously interfere with the syllabification of the
second word.
Ground as the later text was into his consciousness, the discrepancy
disturbed him; and he found himself chanting the first of the formulae
aloud in an effort to square the sound he conceived with the letters
he found carved. Weird and menacing in that abyss of antique blasphemy
rang his voice! its accents keyed to a droning sing-song either through
the spell of the past and the unknown, or through the hellish example
of that dull, godless wail from the pits whose inhuman cadences rose
and fell rhythmically in the distance through the stench and darkness.
"Y'AI 'NG'NGAH
_YOG-SOTHOTH_
H'EE----L'GEB
F'AI' THRODOG
_UAAH_!"
* * * * *
But what was this cold wind which had sprung into life at the very
outset of the chant? The lamps were sputtering woefully, and the
gloom grew so dense that the letters on the wall nearly faded from
sight. There was smoke, too, and an acrid odor which quite drowned out
the stench from the far-away wells; an odor like that he had smelt
before, yet infinitely stronger and more pungent. He turned from the
inscriptions to face the room with its bizarre contents, and saw
that the kylix on the floor, in which the ominous efflorescent powder
had lain, was giving forth a cloud of thick, greenish-black vapor of
surprising volume and opacity. That powder--Great God! it had come from
the shelf of "Materia"--what was it doing now, and what had started it?
The formula he had been chanting--the first of the pair--Dragon's Head,
_ascending node_--Blessed Saviour, could it be--
The doctor reeled, and through his head raced wildly disjointed scraps
from all he had seen, heard, and read of the frightful case of Joseph
Curwen and Charles Dexter Ward. "I say to you againe, doe not call up
Any that you cannot put downe.... Have ye Wordes for laying at all
times readie, and stopp not to be sure when there is any Doubte of
_Whom_ you have--Three Talkes with _What_ was therein inhum'd--" _Mercy
of Heaven, what is that shape behind the parting smoke?_
* * * * *
Marinus Bicknell Willett has no hope that any part of his tale will
be believed except by certain sympathetic friends, hence has made
no attempt to tell it beyond his most intimate circle. Only a few
outsiders have ever heard it repeated, and of these the majority laugh
and remark that the doctor surely is getting old. He has been advised
to take a long vacation and to shun future cases dealing with mental
disturbance. But Mr. Ward knows that the veteran physician speaks only
a horrible truth. Did not he himself see the noisome aperture in the
bungalow cellar? Did not Willett send him home overcome and ill at
eleven o'clock that portentous morning? Did he not telephone the doctor
in vain that evening, and again the next day, and had he not driven
to the bungalow itself on that following noon, finding his friend
unconscious but unharmed on one of the beds upstairs? Willett had been
breathing stertorously, and opened his eyes slowly when Mr. Ward gave
him some brandy fetched from the car. Then he shuddered and screamed,
crying out, "_That beard--those eyes--God, who are you?_" A very
strange thing to say to a trim, blue-eyed, clean-shaven gentleman whom
he had known from the latter's boyhood.
In the bright noon sunlight the bungalow was unchanged since the
previous morning. Willett's clothing bore no disarrangement beyond
certain smudges and worn places at the knees, and only a faint acrid
odor reminded Mr. Ward of what he had smelt on his son that day he was
taken to the hospital. The doctor's flashlight was missing, but his
valise was safely there, as empty as when he had brought it. Before
indulging in any explanations, and obviously with great moral effort,
Willett staggered dizzily down to the cellar and tried the fateful
platform before the tubs. It was unyielding. Crossing to where he had
left his yet-unused tool satchel the day before, he obtained a chisel
and began to pry up the stubborn planks one by one. Underneath the
smooth concrete was still visible, but of any opening or perforation
there was no longer a trace. Nothing yawned this time to sicken the
mystified father who had followed the doctor downstairs; only the
smooth concrete underneath the planks--no noisome well, no world of
subterrene horrors, no secret library, no Curwen papers, no nightmare
pits of stench and howling, no laboratory or shelves or chiseled
formulae, no--Dr. Willett turned pale, and clutched at the younger man.
"Yesterday," he asked softly, "did you see it here--and smell it?" And
when Mr. Ward, himself transfixed with dread and wonder, found strength
to nod an affirmative, the physician gave a sound half a sigh and half
a gasp, and nodded in turn. "Then I will tell you," he said.
So for an hour, in the sunniest room they could find upstairs, the
physician whispered his frightful tale to the wondering father. There
was nothing to relate beyond the looming up of that form when the
greenish-black vapor from the kylix parted, and Willett was too tired
to ask himself what had really occurred. There were futile, bewildered
head-shakings from both men, and once Mr. Ward ventured a hushed
suggestion, "Do you suppose it would be of any use to dig?" The doctor
was silent, for it seemed hardly fitting for any human brain to answer
when powers of unknown spheres had so vitally encroached on this side
of the Great Abyss. Again Mr. Ward asked, "But where did it go? It
brought you here, you know, and it sealed up the hole somehow."
And Willett again let silence answer for him.
But after all, this was not the final phase of the matter. Reaching for
his handkerchief before rising to leave, Dr. Willett's fingers closed
upon a piece of paper in his pocket which had not been there before,
and which was companioned by the candles and matches he had seized in
the vanished vault. It was a common sheet, torn obviously from the
cheap pad in that fabulous room of horror somewhere underground, and
the writing upon it was that of an ordinary lead pencil--doubtless
the one which had lain beside the pad. It was folded very carelessly,
and beyond the faint acrid scent of the cryptic chamber bore no print
or mark of any world but this. But in the text itself it did indeed
reek with wonder; for here was no script of any wholesome age, but the
labored strokes of mediaeval darkness, scarcely legible to the laymen
who now strained over it, yet having combinations of symbols which
seemed vaguely familiar. The briefly scrawled message was this, and its
mystery lent purpose to the shaken pair, who forthwith walked steadily
out to the Ward car and gave orders to be driven first to a quiet
dining place and then to the John Hay Library on the hill.
* * * * *
At the library it was easy to find good manuals of palaeography, and
over these the two men puzzled till the lights of evening shone out
from the great chandelier. In the end they found what was needed. The
letters were indeed no fantastic invention, but the normal script of
a very dark period. They were the pointed Saxon minuscules of the
eighth or ninth century A. D., and brought with them memories of an
uncouth time when under a fresh Christian veneer ancient faiths and
ancient rites stirred stealthily, and the pale moon of Britain looked
sometimes on strange deeds in the Roman ruins at Caerleon and Hexhaus,
and by the Towers along Hadrian's crumbling wall. The words were in
such Latin as a barbarous age might remember--"_Corvinus, necandus est.
Cadaver aq(ua) forti dissolvendum, nec aliq(ui)d retinendum. Tace ut
potes._"--which may roughly be translated, "Curwen must be killed. The
body must be dissolved in aqua fortis, nor must anything be retained.
Keep silence as best you are able."
Willett and Mr. Ward were mute and baffled. They had met the unknown,
and found that they lacked emotions to respond to it as they vaguely
believed they ought. With Willett, especially, the capacity for
receiving fresh impressions of awe was well-nigh exhausted; and both
men sat still and helpless till the closing of the library forced them
to leave. Then they drove listlessly to the Ward mansion in Prospect
Street, and talked to no purpose into the night. The doctor rested
toward morning, but did not go home. And he was still there Sunday
noon when a telephone message came from the detectives who had been
assigned to look up Dr. Allen.
Mr. Ward, who was pacing nervously about in a dressing-gown, answered
the call in person; and told the men to come up early the next day when
he heard their report was almost ready. Both Willett and he were glad
that this phase of the matter was taking form, for whatever the origin
of the strange minuscule message, it seemed certain that the "Curwen"
who must be destroyed could be no other than the bearded and spectacled
stranger. Charles had feared this man, and had said in the frantic note
that he must be killed and dissolved in acid. Allen, moreover, had been
receiving letters from the strange wizards in Europe under the name
of Curwen, and palpably regarded himself as an avatar of the bygone
necromancer. And now from a fresh and unknown source had come a message
saying that "Curwen" must be killed and dissolved in acid. The linkage
was too unmistakable to be factitious; and besides, was not Allen
planning to murder young Ward upon the advice of the creature called
Hutchinson? Of course, the letter they had seen had never reached
the bearded stranger; but from its text they could see that Allen
had already formed plans for dealing with the youth if he grew too
"squeamish." Without doubt, Allen must be apprehended; and even if the
most drastic directions were not carried out, he must be placed where
he could inflict no harm upon Charles Ward.
That afternoon, hoping against hope to extract some gleam of
information anent the inmost mysteries from the only available one
capable of giving it, the father and the doctor went down the bay and
called on young Charles at the hospital. Simply and gravely Willett
told him all he had found, and noticed how pale he turned as each
description made certain the truth of the discovery. The physician
employed as much dramatic effect as he could, and watched for a
wincing on Charles' part when he approached the matter of the covered
pits and the nameless hybrids within. But Ward did not wince. Willett
paused, and his voice grew indignant as he spoke of how the things were
starving. He taxed the youth with shocking inhumanity, and shivered
when only a sardonic laugh came in reply. For Charles, having dropped
as useless his pretense that the crypt did not exist, seemed to see
some ghastly jest in this affair; and chuckled hoarsely at something
which amused him. Then he whispered, in accents doubly terrible
because of the cracked voice he used, "Damn 'em, they _do_ eat, but
they _don't_ need to! That's the rare part! A month, you say, without
food? Lud, Sir, you be modest! D'ye know, that was the joke on poor old
Whipple with his virtuous bluster! Kill everything off, would he? Why,
damme, he was half-deaf with the noise from Outside and never saw or
heard aught from the wells. He never dreamed they were there at all!
Devil take ye, _those cursed things have been howling down there ever
since Curwen was done for a hundred and fifty-seven years gone_!"
But no more than this could Willett get from the youth. Horrified, yet
almost convinced against his will, he went on with his tale in the hope
that some incident might startle his auditor out of the mad composure
he maintained. Looking at the youth's face, the doctor could not but
feel a kind of terror at the changes which recent months had wrought.
Truly, the boy had drawn down nameless horrors from the skies. When the
room with the formulae and the greenish dust was mentioned, Charles
shewed his first sign of animation. A quizzical look overspread his
face as he heard what Willett had read on the pad, and he ventured
the mild statement that those notes were old ones, of no possible
significance to anyone not deeply initiated in the history of magic.
"But," he added, "had you but known the words to bring up that which I
had out in the cup, you had not been here to tell me this. 'Twas Number
118, and I conceive you would have shook had you looked it up in my
list in t'other room. 'Twas never raised by me, but I meant to have it
up that day you came to invite me hither."
Then Willett told of the formula he had spoken and of the
greenish-black smoke which had arisen; and as he did so he saw true
fear dawn for the first time on Charles Ward's face. "It _came_, and
you be here alive!" As Ward croaked the words his voice seemed almost
to burst free of its trammels and sink to cavernous abysses of uncanny
resonance. Willett, gifted with a flash of inspiration, believed he
saw the situation, and wove into his reply a caution from a letter he
remembered. "No. 118, you say? But don't forget that _stones are all
changed now in nine grounds out of ten. You are never sure till you
question!_" And then, without warning, he drew forth the minuscule
message and flashed it before the patient's eyes. He could have wished
no stronger result, for Charles Ward fainted forthwith.
* * * * *
All this conversation, of course, had been conducted with the greatest
secrecy lest the resident alienists accuse the father and the physician
of encouraging a madman in his delusions. Unaided, too, Dr. Willett
and Mr. Ward picked up the stricken youth and placed him on the couch.
In reviving, the patient mumbled many times of some word which he must
get to Orne and Hutchinson at once; so when his consciousness seemed
fully back the doctor told him that of those strange creatures at
least one was his bitter enemy, and had given Dr. Allen advice for his
assassination. This revelation produced no visible effect, and before
it was made the visitors could see that their host had already the look
of a hunted man. After that he would converse no more, so Willett and
the father departed presently; leaving behind a caution against the
bearded Allen, to which the youth only replied that this individual
was very safely taken care of, and could do no one any harm even if he
wished.
This was said with an almost evil chuckle very painful to hear. They
did not worry about any communications Charles might write to that
monstrous pair in Europe, since they knew that the hospital authorities
seized all outgoing mail for censorship and would pass no wild or
outré-looking missive.
There is, however, a curious sequel to the matter of Orne and
Hutchinson, if such indeed the exiled wizards were. Moved by some vague
presentiment amidst the horrors of that period, Willett arranged with
an international press-cutting bureau for accounts of notable current
crimes and accidents in Prague and in eastern Transylvania; and after
six months believed that he had found two very significant things
amongst the multifarious items he received and had translated. One
was the total wrecking of a house by night in the oldest quarter of
Prague, and the disappearance of the evil old man called Josef Nadeh,
who had dwelt in it alone ever since anyone could remember. The other
was a titan explosion in the Transylvania mountains east of Rakus, and
the utter extirpation with all its inmates of the ill-regarded Castle
Ferenczy, whose master was so badly spoken of by peasants and soldiery
alike that he would shortly have been summoned to Bucharest for serious
questioning had not this incident cut off a career already so long as
to antedate all common memory. Willett maintains that the hand which
wrote those minuscules was able to wield stronger weapons as well; and
that while Curwen was left to him to dispose of, the writer felt able
to find and deal with Orne and Hutchinson itself. Of what their fate
may have been the doctor strives sedulously not to think.
* * * * *
The following morning Dr. Willett hastened to the Ward home to
be present when the detectives arrived. Allen's destruction or
imprisonment--or Curwen's, if one might regard the tacit claim to
reincarnation as valid--he felt must be accomplished at any cost, and
he communicated this conviction to Mr. Ward as they sat waiting for the
men to come. They were downstairs this time, for the upper parts of the
house were beginning to be shunned because of a peculiar nauseousness
which hung indefinitely about; a nauseousness which the older servants
connected with some curse left by the vanished Curwen portrait.
At nine o'clock the three detectives presented themselves and
immediately delivered all that they had to say. They had not,
regrettably enough, located the Brava Tony Gomes as they had wished,
nor had they found the least trace of Dr. Allen's source or present
whereabouts; but they had managed to unearth a considerable number of
local impressions and facts concerning the reticent stranger. Allen
had struck Pawtuxet people as a vaguely unnatural being and there was
an universal belief that his thick Vandyke beard was either dyed or
false--a belief conclusively upheld by the finding of such a false
beard, together with a heavy pair of dark glasses, in his room at the
fateful bungalow. His voice, Mr. Ward could well testify from his one
telephone conversation, had a depth and hollowness that could not be
forgotten; and his glance seemed malign even through his smoked and
horn-rimmed glasses. One shopkeeper, in the course of negotiations, had
seen a specimen of his handwriting and declared it was very queer and
crabbed; this being confirmed by penciled notes of no clear meaning
found in his room and identified by the merchant.
In connection with the vampirism ructions of the preceding summer, a
majority of the gossips believed that Allen rather than Ward was the
actual vampire. Statements were also obtained from the officials who
had visited the bungalow after the unpleasant incident of the motor
truck robbery. They had felt less of the sinister in Dr. Allen, but had
recognized him as the dominant figure in the queer shadowy cottage. The
place had been too dark for them to observe him clearly, but they would
know him again if they saw him. His beard had looked odd, and they
thought he had some slight scar above his dark spectacled right eye. As
for the search of Allen's room, it yielded nothing definite save the
beard and glasses, and several penciled notes in a crabbed writing,
which Willett at once saw was identical with that shared by the old
Curwen manuscripts and by the voluminous recent notes of young Ward
found in the vanished catacombs of horror.
Dr. Willett and Mr. Ward caught something of a profound, subtle, and
insidious cosmic fear from this data as it was gradually unfolded,
and almost trembled in following up the vague, mad thought which had
simultaneously reached their minds. The false beard and glasses, the
crabbed Curwen penmanship--the old portrait and its tiny scar--_and
the altered youth in the hospital with such a scar_--that deep, hollow
voice on the telephone--was it not of this that Mr. Ward was reminded
when his son barked forth those pitiable tones to which he now claimed
to be reduced? Who had ever seen Charles and Allen together? Yes, some
officials had once, but who later on? Was it not when Allen left that
Charles suddenly lost his growing fright and began to live wholly at
the bungalow? Curwen--Allen--Ward--in what blasphemous and abominable
fusion had two ages and two persons become involved? That damnable
resemblance of the picture to Charles--had it not used to stare and
stare, and follow the boy around the room with its eyes? Why, too, did
both Allen and Charles copy Joseph Curwen's handwriting, even when
alone and off guard? And then the frightful work of those people--the
lost crypt of horrors that had aged the doctor overnight; the starved
monsters in the noisome pits; the awful formula which had yielded such
nameless results; the message in minuscules found in Willett's pocket;
the papers and the letters and all the talk of graves and "salts" and
discoveries--whither did everything lead? In the end Mr. Ward did the
most sensible thing. Steeling himself against any realization of why he
did it, he gave the detectives an article to be shewn to such Pawtuxet
shopkeepers as had seen the portentous Dr. Allen. That article was a
photograph of his luckless son, on which he now carefully drew in ink
the pair of heavy glasses and the black pointed beard, which the men
had brought from Allen's room.
For two hours he waited with the doctor in the oppressive house where
fear and miasma were slowly gathering as the empty panel in the
upstairs library leered and leered and leered. Then the men returned.
Yes, _the altered photograph was a very passable likeness of Dr.
Allen_. Mr. Ward turned pale, and Willett wiped a suddenly dampened
brow with his handkerchief. Allen--Ward--Curwen--it was becoming too
hideous for coherent thought. What had the boy called out of the void,
and what had it done to him? What really had happened from first to
last? Who was this Allen who sought to kill Charles as too "squeamish,"
and why had his destined victim said in the postscript to that frantic
letter that he must be so completely obliterated in acid? Why, too,
had the minuscule message, of whose origin no one dared think, said
that "Curwen" must be likewise obliterated? What was the _change_,
and when had the final stage occurred? That day when his frantic note
was received--he had been nervous all the morning, then there was an
alteration. He had slipped out unseen and swaggered boldly in past the
men hired to guard him. That was the time, when he was out. But no--had
he not cried out in terror as he entered his study--this very room?
What had he found there? Or wait--_what had found him?_ That simulacrum
which brushed boldly in without having been seen to go--was that an
alien shadow and a horror forcing itself upon a trembling figure which
had never gone out at all? Had not the butler spoken of queer noises?
* * * * *
Willett rang for the man and asked him some low-toned questions. It
had, surely enough, been a bad business. There had been noises--a cry,
a gasp, a choking, and a sort of clattering or creaking or thumping,
or all of these. And Mr. Charles was not the same when he stalked out
without a word. The butler shivered as he spoke, and sniffed at the
heavy air that blew down from some open window upstairs. Terror had
settled definitely upon the house, and only the businesslike detectives
failed to imbibe a full measure of it. Even they were restless, for
this case had held vague elements in the background which pleased
them not at all. Dr. Willett was thinking deeply and rapidly, and his
thoughts were terrible ones. Now and then he would almost break into
muttering as he ran over in his head a new, appalling, and increasingly
conclusive chain of nightmare happenings.
Then Mr. Ward made a sign that the conference was over, and everyone
save him and the doctor left the room. It was noon now, but shadows as
of coming night seemed to engulf the phantom-haunted mansion. Willett
began talking very seriously to his host, and urged that he leave a
great deal of the future investigation to him. There would be, he
predicted, certain obnoxious elements which a friend could bear better
than a relative. As family physician he must have a free hand, and
the first thing he required was a period alone and undisturbed in the
abandoned library upstairs, where the ancient overmantel had gathered
about itself an aura of noisome horror more intense than when Joseph
Curwen's features themselves glanced slyly down from the painted panel.
Mr. Ward, dazed by the flood of grotesque morbidities and unthinkably
maddening suggestions that poured in upon him from every side, could
only acquiesce; and half an hour later the doctor was locked in the
shunned room with the paneling from Olney Court. The father, listening
outside, heard fumbling sounds of moving and rummaging as the moments
passed; and finally a wrench and a creak, as if a tight cupboard door
were being opened. Then there was a muffled cry, a kind of snorting
choke, and a hasty slamming of whatever had been opened. Almost at
once the key rattled and Willett appeared in the hall, haggard and
ghastly, and demanding wood for the real fireplace on the south wall
of the room. The furnace was not enough, he said; and the electric log
had little practical use. Longing yet not daring to ask questions,
Mr. Ward gave the requisite orders and a man brought some stout pine
logs, shuddering as he entered the tainted air of the library to place
them in the grate. Willett meanwhile had gone up to the dismantled
laboratory and brought down a few odds and ends not included in the
moving of the July before. They were in a covered basket, and Mr. Ward
never saw what they were.
Then the doctor locked himself up in the library once more, and by the
clouds of smoke which rolled down past the windows from the chimney it
was known that he had lighted the fire. Later, after a great rustling
of newspapers, that odd wrench and creaking were heard again; followed
by a thumping which none of the eavesdroppers liked. Thereafter two
suppressed cries of Willett's were heard, and hard upon these came a
swishing rustle of indefinable hatefulness. Finally the smoke that the
wind beat down from the chimney grew very dark and acrid, and everyone
wished that the weather had spared them this choking and venomous
inundation of peculiar fumes. Mr. Ward's head reeled, and the servants
all clustered together in a knot to watch the horrible black smoke
swoop down. After an age of waiting the vapors seemed to lighten, and
half-formless sounds of scraping, sweeping, and other minor operations
were heard behind the bolted door. And at last, after the slamming
of some cupboard within, Willett made his appearance, sad, pale and
haggard, and bearing the cloth-draped basket he had taken from the
upstairs laboratory. He had left the window open, and into that once
accursed room was pouring a wealth of pure, wholesome air to mix with
a queer new smell of disinfectants. The ancient overmantel still
lingered; but it seemed robbed of malignity now, and rose as calm and
stately in its white paneling as if it had never borne the picture of
Joseph Curwen. Night was coming on, yet this time its shadows held
no latent fright, but only a gentle melancholy. Of what he had done
the doctor would never speak. To Mr. Ward he said, "I can answer no
questions, but I will say that there are different kinds of magic. I
have made a great purgation. Those in this house will sleep the better
for it."
* * * * *
That Dr. Willett's "purgation" had been an ordeal almost as
nerve-racking in its way as his hideous wandering in the vanished crypt
is shewn by the fact that the elderly physician gave out completely
as soon as he reached home that evening. For three days he rested
constantly in his room, though servants later muttered something
about having heard him after midnight on Wednesday, when the outer
door softly opened, and closed with phenomenal softness. Servants'
imaginations, fortunately, are limited, else comment might have been
excited by an item in Thursday's _Evening Bulletin_ which ran as
follows:
North End Ghouls Again Active
After a lull of ten months since the dastardly vandalism in the
Weeden lot at the North Burial Ground, a nocturnal prowler was
glimpsed early this morning in the same cemetery by Robert Hart,
the night watchman. Happening to glance for a moment from his
shelter at about two a.m., Hart observed a glow of a lantern or
pocket torch not far to the northward, and upon opening the door
detected the figure of a man with a trowel very plainly silhouetted
against a nearby electric light. At once starting in pursuit, he
saw the figure dart hurriedly toward the main entrance, gaining
the street and losing himself among the shadows before approach or
capture was possible.
Like the first of the ghouls active during the past year, this
intruder had done no real damage before detection. A vacant part
of the Ward lot shewed signs of a little superficial digging, but
nothing even nearly the size of a grave had been attempted, and no
previous grave had been disturbed.
Hart, who cannot describe the prowler except as a small man
probably having a full beard, inclines to the view that all three
of the digging incidents have a common source; but police from the
Second Station think otherwise on account of the savage nature of
the second incident, where an ancient coffin was removed and its
headstone violently shattered.
The first of the incidents, in which it is thought an attempt to
bury something was frustrated, occurred a year ago last March, and
has been attributed to bootleggers seeking a cache. It is possible,
says Sergeant Riley, that this third affair is of similar nature.
Officers at the Second Station are taking especial pains to capture
the gang of miscreants responsible for these repeated outrages.
All day Thursday Dr. Willett rested as if recuperating from something
past or nerving himself for something to come. In the evening he wrote
a note to Mr. Ward, which was delivered the next morning and which
caused the half-dazed parent to ponder long and deeply. Mr. Ward
had not been able to go down to business since the shock of Monday
with its baffling reports and its sinister "purgation," but he found
something calming about the doctor's letter in spite of the despair it
seemed to promise and the fresh mysteries it seemed to evoke.
10 Barnes St.,
Providence, R. I.,
April 12, 1928.
Dear Theodore:
I feel that I must say a word to you before doing what I am going
to do tomorrow. It will conclude the terrible business we have been
going through (for I feel that no spade is ever likely to reach
that monstrous place we know of), but I'm afraid it won't set your
mind at rest unless I expressly assure you how very conclusive it
is.
You have known me ever since you were a small boy, so I think you
will not distrust me when I hint that some matters are best left
undecided and unexplored. It is better that you attempt no further
speculation as to Charles's case, and almost imperative that you
tell his mother nothing more than she already suspects. When I call
on you tomorrow Charles will have escaped. That is all which need
remain in anyone's mind. He was mad, and he escaped.
So don't ask me any questions when I call. It may be that something
will go wrong, but I'll tell you if it does. I don't think it will.
There will be nothing more to worry about, for Charles will be
very, very safe. He is now--safer than you dream. You need hold
no fears about Allen, and who or what he is. He forms as much a
part of the past as Joseph Curwen's picture, and when I ring your
doorbell you may feel certain that there is no such person. And
what wrote that minuscule message will never trouble you or yours.
But you must steel yourself to melancholy, and prepare your wife to
do the same. I must tell you frankly that Charles's escape will not
mean his restoration to you. He has been afflicted with a peculiar
disease, as you must realize from the subtle physical as well as
mental changes in him, and you must not hope to see him again. He
stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back
through the years as no one ever should reach; and something came
out of those years to engulf him.
And now comes the matter in which I must ask you to trust me most
of all. For there will be, indeed, no uncertainty about Charles's
fate. In about a year, say, you can if you wish devise a suitable
account of the end, for the boy will be no more. You can put up a
stone in your lot at the North Burial ground exactly ten feet west
of your father's and facing the same way, and that will mark the
true resting-place of your son. Nor need you fear that it will
mark any abnormality or changeling. The ashes in that grave will
be those of your own unaltered bone and sinew--of the real Charles
Dexter Ward whose mind you watched from infancy--the real Charles
with the olive-mark on his hip and without the black witch-mark
on his chest or the pit on his forehead. The Charles who never
did actual evil, and who will have paid with his life for his
"squeamishness."
That is all. Charles will have escaped, and a year from now you can
put up his stone. Do not question me tomorrow. And believe that the
honour of your ancient family remains untainted now, as it has been
at all times in the past.
With profoundest sympathy, and exhortations to fortitude, calmness,
and resignation, I am ever
Sincerely your friend,
Marinus B. Willett.
So on the morning of Friday, April 13, 1928, Marinus Bicknell Willett
visited the room of Charles Dexter Ward at Dr. Waite's private
hospital on Conanicut Island. After the interchange of a few strained
formalities, a new element of constraint crept in, as Ward seemed to
read behind the doctor's masklike face a terrible purpose which had
never been there before.
Ward actually turned pale, and the doctor was the first to speak.
"More," he said, "has been found out, and I must warn you fairly that a
reckoning is due."
"Digging again, and coming upon more poor starving pets?" was the
ironic reply. It was evident that the youth meant to shew bravado to
the last.
"No," Willett slowly rejoined, "this time I did not have to dig. We
have had men looking up Dr. Allen, and they found the false beard and
spectacles in the bungalow!"
"Excellent," commented the disquieted host in an effort to be wittily
insulting, "and I trust they proved more becoming than the beard and
glasses you now have on!"
"They would become you very well," came the even and studied response,
"_as indeed they seem to have done_."
As Willett said this, it almost seemed as though a cloud passed over
the sun; though there was no change in the shadows on the floor. Then
Ward ventured:
"And is this what asks so hotly for a reckoning? Suppose a man does
find it now and then useful to be twofold?"
"No," said Willett gravely, "again you are wrong. It is no business of
mine if any man seeks duality; _provided he has any right to exist at
all, and provided he does not destroy what called him out of space_."
Ward now started violently. "Well, Sir, what _have_ ye found, and what
d'ye want with me?"
The doctor let a little time elapse before replying, as if choosing his
words for an effective answer.
"I have found," he finally intoned, "something in a cupboard behind an
ancient overmantel where a picture once was, and I have burned it and
buried the ashes where the grave of Charles Dexter Ward ought to be."
The madman choked and sprang from the chair in which he had been
sitting:
"Damn ye, who did ye tell--and who'll believe it was he after these
full two months, with me alive? What d'ye mean to do?"
Willett, though a small man, actually took on a kind of judicial
majesty as he calmed the patient with a gesture.
"I have told no one. This is no common case--it is a madness out of
time and a horror from beyond the spheres which no police or lawyers
or courts or alienists could ever fathom or grapple with. _You cannot
deceive me, Joseph Curwen, for I know that your accursed magic is true!_
"I know how you wove the spell that brooded outside the years and
fastened on your double and descendant; I know how you drew him into
the past and got him to raise you up from your detestable grave; I
know how he kept you hidden in his laboratory while you studied modern
things and roved abroad as a vampire by night, and how you later
shewed yourself in beard and glasses that no one might wonder at your
godless likeness to him; I know what you resolved to do when he balked
at your monstrous rifling of the world's tombs, _and at what you
planned afterward_, and I know how you did it.
"You left off your beard and glasses and fooled the guards around
the house. They thought it was he who went in, and they thought it
was he who came out when you had strangled and hidden him. But you
hadn't reckoned on the different contacts of two minds. You were a
fool, Curwen, to fancy that a mere visual identity would be enough.
Why didn't you think of the speech and the voice and the handwriting?
It hasn't worked, you see, after all. You know better than I who or
what wrote that message in minuscules, but I will warn you it was not
written in vain. There are abominations and blasphemies which must be
stamped out, and I believe that the writer of those words will attend
to Orne and Hutchinson. One of those creatures wrote you once, 'do not
call up any that you cannot put down.' Curwen, a man can't tamper with
Nature beyond certain limits, and every horror you have woven will rise
up to wipe you out."
* * * * *
But here the doctor was cut short by a convulsive cry from the creature
before him. Hopelessly at bay, weaponless, and knowing that any show
of physical violence would bring a score of attendants to the doctor's
rescue, Joseph Curwen had recourse to his one ancient ally, and began a
series of cabalistic motions with his forefingers as his deep, hollow
voice, now unconcealed by feigned hoarseness, bellowed out the opening
words of a terrible formula.
"PER ADONAI ELOIM, ADONAI JEHOVA, ADONAI SABAOTH, METRATON...."
But Willett was too quick for him. Even as the dogs in the yard outside
began to howl, and even as a chill wind sprang suddenly up from the
bay, the doctor commenced the solemn and measured intonation of that
which he had meant all along to recite. An eye for an eye--magic for
magic--let the outcome shew how well the lesson of the abyss had
been learned! So in a clear voice Marinus Bicknell Willett began the
_second_ of that pair of formulae whose first had raised the writer of
those minuscules--the cryptic invocation whose heading was the Dragon's
Tail, sign of the _descending_ node--
"OGTHROD AI'F
GEB'L----EE''H
_YOG-SOTHOTH_
'NGAH'NG AI'Y
_ZHRO_!"
At the very first word from Willett's mouth the previously commenced
formula of the patient stopped short. Unable to speak, the monster
made wild motions with his arms until they too were arrested. When the
awful name of _Yog-Sothoth_ was uttered, the hideous change began.
It was not merely a _dissolution_, but rather a _transformation_ or
_recapitulation_; and Willett shut his eyes lest he faint before the
rest of the incantation could be pronounced.
But he did not faint, and that man of unholy centuries and forbidden
secrets never troubled the world again. The madness out of time had
subsided, and the case of Charles Dexter Ward was closed. Opening his
eyes before staggering out of that room of horror, Dr. Willett saw that
what he had kept in memory had not been kept amiss. There had, as he
had predicted, been no need for acids. For like his accursed picture
a year before, Joseph Curwen now lay scattered on the floor as a thin
coating of fine bluish-gray dust.
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