The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
"The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved,
that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own 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."
CHAPTER ONE
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
the grieving father who had watched
his aberration grow from a mere eccentricity to a dark mania involving
both a possibility of murderous tendencies and a peculiar change in the
apparent contents of his mind. Doctors confess themselves quite baffled
by his case, since it presented
oddities of a general physiological as well as psychological character.
In the first place, the patient seemed oddly older than his
twenty-six years would warrant. Mental disturbance, it is true, will age
one rapidly; but the face of this young man had taken on a subtle cast
which only the very aged normally acquire. In
the second place, 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 minimised, and neural reactions to standard
stimuli bore no relation to anything heretofore recorded, either normal
or pathological. 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,
while there had formed on his chest a very peculiar mole or blackish
spot of which no trace existed before. In general, all physicians agree
that in Ward the processes of metabolism had become retarded to a degree
beyond precedent.
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 enjoined to be a mental force which would have
made him a genius or a leader had it not been twisted into strange and
grotesque forms. Dr. Willett, who was Ward's family physician, affirms
that the patient's gross mental
capacity, as gauged by his response to matters outside the sphere of
his insanity, had actually increased since the seizure. Ward, it is
true, was always a scholar and an antiquarian; but even his most
brilliant early work did not show the prodigious grasp and insight
displayed during his examinations by the alienists. It was, indeed, a
difficult matter to obtain a legal commitment to the hospital, so
powerful and lucid did the youth's mind seem; and only on the evidence
of others, and on the strength of many abnormal gaps in his stock of
information as distinguished from his intelligence was he finally placed
in confinement. To the very moment of his vanishment he was an
omnivorous reader and as great a conversationalist as his poor voice
permitted; and shrewd observers, failing to foresee his escape, freely
predicted that he would not be long in gaining his discharge from
custody.
Only Dr. Willett, who had brought Charles Ward into the world and
watched his growth of body and mind ever since, seemed frightened at the
thought of this future freedom. He had had a terrible experience and
had made a terrible discovery which he dared not reveal to his sceptical
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 would hardly explain it, yet after that talk with Willett the
youth was undeniably gone. Willett himself has no public explanations
to offer, though he seems strangely easier in mind than before the
escape. Many, indeed, feel that he would like to say more if he thought
any considerable number would believe him. 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-grey dust that almost choked them. True, the dogs 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 parents' 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; for although they do not form its
absolute nucleus, they play a prominent part in its superficial form.
The gaps of information which the alienists noticed were all related to
modern matters and were invariably offset by a correspondingly excessive
though outwardly concealed knowledge of bygone matters as brought out
by adroit questioning: so that 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 antiquaries 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. That
this wholesale deletion had occurred, he did his best to hide; but it
was clear to all who watched him that his whole programme 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
now wondering how, in view of his wholly impaired stock of data, the
escaped patient manages to cope with the complicated world of today; the
dominant opinion being that he 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,
where 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. This is
certainly brought out by Ward's altered habits at the time, especially
by his continual search through town records and among old burying
grounds for a certain grave dug in 1771; the grave of an ancestor named
Joseph Curwen, some of whose papers he professed to have found behind
the panelling of a very old house in Olney Court, on Stampers Hill,
which Curwen was known to have occupied.
It is, broadly speaking, undeniable that the winter of 1919–20
saw a great change in Ward; whereby he abruptly stopped 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 forefather'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. Willett admits that the
change of 1919–20 would ordinarily appear to mark the beginning of a
progressive
decadence which culminated in the horrible sad uncanny alienation of
1928, but believes from personal observation that a finer distinction
must be made. Granting freely that the boy was always ill-balanced
temperamentally, and prone to be unduly susceptible and enthusiastic in
his responses to phenomena around him, he refuses to concede that the
early alteration marked the actual passage from sanity to madness;
crediting instead Ward's own statement that he had discovered or
rediscovered something whose effect on human thought was likely to be
marvellous and profound.
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 agonising 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. In
the first place, two workmen of high intelligence saw Joseph Curwen's
ancient papers found. Secondly, the boy once showed him those papers and
a page of the Curwen diary, and each of the documents had every
appearance of genuineness. The hole where Ward claimed to have found
them is a visible reality, and Willett had a very convincing final
glimpse of them in surroundings which can scarcely be believed and can
never perhaps be proved. Then 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. In
the autumn of 1918, and with a considerable show of zest in the military
training of the period, he had begun his Junior year at the Moses Brown
School, which lies very near his home. The old main building, erected
in 1819, had always charmed his youthful antiquarian sense; and the
spacious park in which the Academy is set appealed to his eye for
landscape. His social activities were few; and his hours were spent
mainly at home, in rambling walks, in his classes and drills, and in
pursuit of antiquarian and genealogical data at the City Hall, the State
House, the Public Library, the Athenaeum, the Historical Society, the
John Carter Brown and John Hay Libraries of Brown University, and the
newly opened Shepley Library in Benefit Street. 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.
His walks were always adventures in antiquity, during which he
managed to recapture from the myriad relics of a glamorous old city a
vivid and connected picture of the centuries before. 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 sky-scraper 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 overtaken, and on toward the stately colleges
along the stately, 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; and in these rides
he had imbibed something of the colour of a quaint Colonial village. The
nurse used to stop and sit on the benches of Prospect Terrace to chat
with policemen; and one of the child's first memories was 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. Farther
and farther down that almost perpendicular hill he would venture, each
time reaching older and quainter levels of the ancient city. He would
hesitate gingerly down vertical Jenckes Street with its back walls and
Colonial gables to the shady Benefit Street corner, where before him was
a wooden antique with an Ionic-pilastered pair of doorways, and beside
him a prehistoric gambrel-roofer with a bit of primal farmyard remaining,
and the great Judge Durfee house with its fallen vestiges of Georgian
grandeur. It was getting to be a slum here; but the titan elms cast a
restoring shadow over the place, and the boy used to stroll south past
the long lines of pre-Revolutionary homes with their great central
chimneys and classic portals. On the eastern side they were set high
over basements with railed double flights of stone steps, and the young
Charles could picture them as they were when the street was new, and red
heels and periwigs set off the painted pediments whose signs of wear
were now becoming so visible.
Westward the hill dropped almost as steeply as above, down to the
old "Town Street" that the founders had laid out at the river's edge in
1636. Here ran innumerable little lanes with leaning, huddled houses of
immense antiquity; and, fascinated though he was, it was long before he
dared to thread their archaic verticality for fear they would turn out
to be a dream or a gateway to unknown terrors. He found it much less
formidable to continue along Benefit Street past the iron fence of St.
John's hidden churchyard and the rear of the 1761 Colony House and the
mouldering bulk of the Golden Bail Inn where Washington stopped. At
Meeting Street—the successive Gaol Lane and King Street of other
periods—he would look upward to the east and see the arched flight of
steps to which the highway had to resort in climbing the slope, and
downward to the west, glimpsing the old brick Colonial schoolhouse that
smiles across the road at the ancient sign of Shakespear's Head where
the Providence Gazette and Country-Journal was printed before the
Revolution. Then came the exquisite First Baptist Church of 1775,
luxurious with its matchless Gibbs steeple, and the Georgian roofs and
cupolas hovering by. Here and to the southward the neighbourhood became
better, flowering at last into a marvellous group of early mansions; but
still the little ancient lanes led off down the precipice to the west;
spectral in their many-peaked archaism, and dipping to a riot of
iridescent decay where the wicked old waterfront recalls its proud East
India days amidst polyglot vice and squalor, rotting wharves and
blear-eyed ship-chandleries and such surviving alley names as Packet,
Bullion, Gold, Silver, Coin, Doubloon, Sovereign,
Guilder, Dollar, Dime, and Cent.
Sometimes, as he grew taller and more adventurous, young Ward
would venture down into this maelstrom of tottering houses, broken
transoms, bubbling steps, twisted balustrades, swarthy faces, and
nameless odours; winding from South Main to
South Water, searching out the docks where the bay and sound steamers
still touched, and returning northward at this lower level past the
steep-roofed 1816 warehouses and the broad square at the Great Bridge,
here the 1773 Market House still stands firm on its ancient arches. In
that square he would pause to drink in the bewildering beauty of the old
town as it rises on the eastward bluff, decked with its Georgian spires
and crowned by the vast new Christian Science dome as London is crowned
by St. Paul.'s. He liked mostly to reach this point in the late
afternoon, when the slanting sunlight touches the Market House and the
ancient hill roofs and belfries with gold, and throws magic around the
dreaming wharves where Providence Indiamen used to ride at anchor. After
a long look he would grow almost dizzy with a poet's love for the
sight, and then he would scale the slope homeward in the dusk past the
old white church and up the narrow precipitous ways where yellow gleams
would begin to peep out in small-paned windows and through fanlights set
high over double flights of steps with curious wrought-iron railings.
At other times, and in later years, 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 southernly 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. These rambles, together
with the diligent studies which accompanied them, certainly account for a
large amount of the antiquarian lore which at last crowded the modern
world from Charles Ward's mind; and illustrates the mental soil upon
which fell, in that fateful winter of 1919–20, the seeds that came to
such strange and terrible fruition.
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 Captain
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 publick Reproach by Reason of what was knowne after his
Decease; the which confirming an 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 laboured
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. The
discovery doubly excited him because he had already heard vague reports
and seen scattered allusions relating to this person about whom there
remained so few publicly available records, aside from those becoming
public only in modern times, that it almost seemed as if a conspiracy
had existed to blot him from memory. What did appear, moreover, was of
such singular and provocative nature that one could not fail to imagine
curiously what it was the colonial recorders were so anxious to conceal
and forget, or to suspect that the deletion had reasons all too
valid.
Before this, Ward had been content to let his romancing about old
Joseph Curwen remain in the idle stage; but having discovered his own
relationship to this apparently "hushed-up" character, he 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 worthwhile
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 Frances' 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.
CHAPTER TWO
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
colourless-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 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 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 practised 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. Gossip spoke of the strange
substances he brought from London and the Indies on his ships or
purchased in Newport, Boston and New York; and when old Dr. Jabez Bowen
came from Rehoboth and opened his apothecary shop across
the Great Bridge at the Sign of the Unicom and Mortar, there was
ceaseless talk of the drugs, acids, and metals that the taciturn recluse
incessantly bought or ordered from him. Acting on the assumption that
Curwen possessed a wondrous and secret
medical skill, many sufferers of various sorts applied to him for aid;
but though he appeared to encourage their belief in a noncommittal way,
and always gave them odd-coloured potions in response to their requests,
it was observed that his ministrations
to others seldom proved of benefit. 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 half-way 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
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 doors
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 neighbours
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, for no such amount was needed to keep a lone old
man and a very few servants in meat, milk, and wool. The identity of the
stock seemed to change from week to week as new droves were purchased
from the Kingstown farmers. Then, too, there was something very obnoxious about a certain great stone outbuilding with only high narrow slits for windows.
Great Bridge idlers 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
menservants, 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 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 travelled 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. But for some reason or other Curwen did not care for
society. Whilst never actually rebuffing a visitor, he always reared
such a wall of reserve that few could think of anything to say to him
which would not sound inane.
There seemed a 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. When Dr. Checkley,
the famous wit, came from Boston in 1738 to be rector of King's Church,
he did not neglect calling on one of whom he had heard so much; but
left in a very short while because of some sinister undercurrent he
detected in his host's discourse. Charles Ward told his father, when
they discussed Curwen one winter evening, that he would give much to
learn what the mysterious old man had said to the sprightly cleric, but
that all diarists agree concerning Dr. Checkley's reluctance to repeat
anything he had heard. The good man had been hideously shocked, and
could never recall Joseph Curwen without a visible loss of the gay urbanity for which he was famed.
More definite, however, was the reason why another man of taste
and breeding avoided the haughty hermit. 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. He lived in considerable style and comfort,
keeping the first coach and liveried servants in town, and taking great
pride in his telescope, his microscope, and his well-chosen library of
English and Latin books. 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. His
admiration for his host's ample shelves, which besides the Greek, Latin,
and English classics were equipped with a remarkable battery of
philosophical, mathematical and scientific works including Paracelsus,
Agricola, Van Helmont, Sylvius, Glauber, Boyle, Boerhaave, Becher, and
Stahl, led Curwen to suggest 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 always confessed to seeing nothing really horrible at
the farmhouse, but 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. Perhaps, however, the facial expression of the
owner in exhibiting them contributed much of the prejudice. 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 Trismogistus in
Mesnard's edition, the Turba Philosopharum, Geber's Liber Investigationis; and Artephous' Key of Wisdom; all were there; with the cabalistic Zohar, Peter Jamm'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, 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 labelled as the Qanoon-é-Islam, he found it was in truth the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, 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 oddly enough, 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 to 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. Whether it was the nature
of the passage underscored, or the feverish heaviness of the strokes
which formed the underscoring, he could not tell; but something in that
combination affected him very badly and very peculiarly. 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 the 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 the seasoned salts who manned the
infinite rum, slaves and molasses sloops, the rakish privateers and the
great brigs of the Browns, Crawfords, and Tillinghasts, 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. A crew would be turned loose in the town on shore leave, some of
its members perhaps charged with this errand or that; and when
reassembled it would be almost sure to lack one or more men. That many
of the errands had concerned the farm on the Pawtuxet Road, and that few
of the sailors had ever been seen to return from that place, was not
forgotten; so that in time it became exceedingly difficult for Curwen to
keep his oddly assorted hands. Almost invariably several would desert
soon after hearing the gossip of the Providence wharves, and their
replacement in the West Indies became an increasingly great problem to
the merchant.
By 1760 Joseph Curwen was virtually an outcast, suspected of
vague horrors and demoniac alliances which seemed all the more menacing
because they could not be named, understood, or even proved to exist.
The last straw may have come from the affair of the missing soldiers in
1758, for in March and April of that year two Royal regiments on their
way to New France were quartered in Providence, and depleted by an
inexplicable process far beyond the average rate of desertion. Rumour
dwelt on the frequency with which Curwen was wont to be seen talking
with the red-coated strangers; and as several of them began to be
missed, people thought of the odd conditions among his own seamen. What
would have happened if the regiments had not been ordered on, no one can
tell.
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. Such shopkeepers
as James Green, at the Sign of the Elephant in Cheapside, the Russells,
at the Sign of the Golden Eagle across the Bridge, or Clark and
Nightingale at the Frying-Pan and Fish near the New Coffee-House,
depended almost wholly upon him for their stock; and his arrangements
with the local distillers, the Narragansett dairymen and horse-breeders,
and the Newport candle-makers, made him one of the prime exporters of
the Colony.
Ostracised though he was, he did not lack for civic spirit of a
sort. When the Colony House burned down, he subscribed handsomely to the
lotteries by which the new brick one—still standing at the head of its
parade in the old main street—was built in 1761. In that same year, too,
he helped rebuild the Great Bridge after the October gale. He replaced
many of the books of
the public library consumed in the Colony House fire, and bought
heavily in the lottery that gave the muddy Market Parade and deep-rutted
Town Street their pavement of great round stones with a foot-walk or
"causey" in the middle. About this time, also, he built the plain but
excellent new house whose doorway is such a triumph of carving. When the
Whitefield adherents broke off from Dr. Cotton's hill church in 1743
and founded Deacon Snow's church across the Bridge, Curwen had gone with
them; though his zeal and attendance soon abated. Now, however, he
cultivated piety once more; as if to dispel the shadow which had thrown
him into isolation and would soon begin to wreck his business fortunes
if not sharply checked.
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 analyse, 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 practise an extreme care and secrecy in his graveyard
expeditions, for he was never again caught at such wanderings; whilst
the rumours of uncanny sounds and manœuvres at his Pawtuxet farm
diminished in proportion. His rate of food consumption and cattle
replacement remained abnormally high; but not until modern times, when
Charles Ward examined a set of his accounts and invoices in the Shepley
Library, did it occur to any person—save one embittered youth,
perhaps—to make dark comparisons between the large number of Guinea
blacks he imported until 1766, and the disturbingly small number for
whom he could produce bona fide bills of sale either to slave-dealers at
the Great Bridge or to the planters of the Narragansett Country.
Certainly, the cunning and ingenuity of this abhorred character were
uncannily profound, once the necessity for their exercise had become
impressed upon him.
But of course 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. His elaborate studies and
experiments, whatever they may have been, apparently required a heavy
income for their maintenance; and since
a change of environment would deprive him of the trading advantages he
had gained, it would not have profited him to begin anew in a different
region just then. Judgment demanded that he patch up his relations with
the townsfolk of Providence, so that his presence might no longer be a
signal for hushed conversation, transparent excuses of errands
elsewhere, and a general atmosphere of restraint and uneasiness. His
clerks, being now reduced to the shiftless and impecunious residue whom
no one else would employ, were giving him much worry; and he held to his
sea-captains and mates only by shrewdness in gaining some kind of
ascendancy over them—a mortgage, a promissory note, or a bit of
information very pertinent to their welfare. In many cases, diarists
have recorded with some awe, Curwen showed almost the power of a wizard
in unearthing family secrets for questionable use. During the final five
years of his life it seemed as though only direct talks with the
long-dead could possibly have furnished some of the data which he had so
glibly at his tongue's end.
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 mentioned 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 he 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. She had attended Stephen Jackson's school opposite the Court
House Parade and had been diligently instructed by her mother, before
the latter's death of small-pox in 1757, in all the arts and refinements
of domestic life. A sampler of hers, worked in 1753 at the age of nine,
may still be found in the rooms of the Rhode Island Historical Society.
After her mother's death she had kept the house, aided only by one old
black woman. 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 younger 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 collection of Durfee-Arnold letters, discovered by Charles Ward
shortly before his first reputed madness in the private collection of
Melville F. Peters of George Street, and covering this and a somewhat
antecedent period, throws vivid light on the outrage done to public
sentiment by this ill-assorted match. 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 fall 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 ordinarily mild disposition, was now gaining a hatred-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 fervour 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. At this period the erratic scholar
showed signs of unusual abstraction, and spent as much time as he
possibly could at his farm on the Pawtuxet Road. He seemed, it was
stated, in a condition of suppressed excitement or suspense; as if
expecting some phenomenal thing or on the brink of some strange
discovery. Chemistry or alchemy would
appear to have played a great part, for he took from his house to the
farm the greater number of his volumes on that subject.
His affectation of civic interest did not diminish, and he lost
no opportunities for helping such leaders as Stephen Hopkins, Joseph
Brown, and Benjamin West in their efforts to raise the cultural tone of
the town, which was then much below the level of Newport in its
patronage of the liberal arts. He had helped Daniel Jenckes found his
bookshop in 1763, and was thereafter his best customer, extending aid
likewise to the struggling Gazette that appeared each Wednesday
at the Sign of Shakespear's Head. In politics he ardently supported
Governor Hopkins against the Ward party whose prime strength was in
Newport, and his really eloquent speech at Hacher's Hall in 1765 against
the setting off of North Providence as a separate town with a pre-ward
vote in the General Assembly did more than any other one thing to wear
down the prejudice against him. But Ezra Weeden, who watched him
closely, sneered cynically at all this outward activity; and freely
swore it was no more than a mask for some nameless traffic with the
blackest gulfs of Tartarus. The revengeful youth began a systematic
study of the man and his doings whenever he was in port; spending hours
at night by the wharves with a dory in readiness when he saw lights in
the Curwen warehouses, and following the small boat which would
sometimes steal quietly off and down the bay. He also kept as close a
watch as possible on the Pawtuxet farm, and was once severely bitten by
the dogs the old Indian couple loosed upon him.
By the autumn of 1770 Weeden decided that the time was very sudden,
and gained a 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. Curwen seemed to have
difficulty in restraining himself from public harangues on what he had
found or learned or made; but apparently the need of secrecy was greater
than the longing to share his rejoicing, for no explanation was ever
offered by him. 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 rumours 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.
Many of the odd manœuvres of the strange merchant's vessels had
been taken for granted on account of the unrest of the times, when every
colonist seemed determined to resist the provisions of the Sugar Act
which hampered a prominent traffic. 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. Prior to the change in 1766 these boats had for the most part
contained chained Negroes, who were carried down and across the bay and
landed at an obscure point on the shore just north of Pawtuxet; being
afterward driven up the bluff and across country to the Curwen farm,
where they were locked in that enormous stone outbuilding which had only
high narrow slits for windows. After that change, however, the whole
programme was altered. Importation of slaves ceased at once, and for a
time Curwen abandoned his midnight sailings. Then, about the spring of
1767, a new policy appeared. Once more the lighters grew wont to put out
from the black silent docks, and this time they would go down the bay
some distance, perhaps as far as Nanquit 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.
Even then he would often walk as close as possible in the travelled
road or on the ice of the neighbouring river, to see what tracks others
might have left. 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 rumours. 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. Instead, they wished
to learn something definite before taking any action. What they did
learn must have been startling indeed, and Charles Ward spoke many times
to his parents of his regret at
Weeden's later burning of his notebooks. All that can be told of their
discoveries is what Eleazar Smith jotted down in a none too coherent
diary, and what other diarists and letter writers have timidly repeated
from the statements which they finally made—and according to which the
farm was only the outer shell of some vast and revolting menace, of a
scope and depth too profound and intangible for more than shadowy
comprehension.
It is gathered that Weeden and Smith became early convinced that a
great series of tunnels and catacombs, inhabited by a very sizeable
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, before
1766, were mere mumblings and Negro whisperings and frenzied screams,
coupled with curious chants or invocations. After that date, however,
they assumed a very singular and terrible cast as they ran the gamut
betwixt dronings of dull acquiescence and explosions of frantic 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.
Sometimes it seemed that several persons must be in the house;
Curwen, certain captives, and the guards of those captives. There were
voices of a sort that neither Weeden nor Smith had ever heard before
despite their wide knowledge of foreign ports, and many that they did
seem to place as belonging to this or that nationality. The nature of
the conversations seemed always a kind of catechism, as if Curwen were
extorting some sort of information from terrified or rebellious
prisoners.
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 spoke 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. Once, though, during a discourse in
an unknown tongue, a shadow was seen on the curtain which startled
Weeden exceedingly; reminding him of one of the puppets in a show he had
seen in the autumn of 1764 in Hacher's Hall, when a man from
Germantown, Pennsylvania, had given a clever mechanical spectacle
advertised as a "View of the Famous City of Jerusalem, in which are
represented Jerusalem, the Temple of Solomon, his Royal Throne, the
noted Towers, and Hills, likewise the Sufferings of Our Saviour from the
Garden of Gethsemane to the Cross on the Hill of Golgotha; an artful
piece of Statuary, Worthy to be seen by the Curious." It was on this
occasion that the listener, who had crept close to the window of the
front room whence the speaking proceeded, gave a start which roused the
old Indian
pair and caused them to loose the dogs on him. After that 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 riverbank 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. When or how these
catacombs could have been constructed, Weeden was unable to say; but he
frequently pointed out how easily the place might have been reached by
bands of unseen workmen from the river. Joseph Curwen put his mongrel
seamen to diverse uses indeed! During the heavy spring rains of 1769 the
two watchers kept a sharp eye on the steep river-bank to see if any
subterrene secrets might be washed to light, and were rewarded by the
sight of a profusion of both human and animal bones in places where deep
gullies had been worn in the banks. Naturally, there might be many
explanations of such things in the rear of a stock farm, and in a
locality where old Indian burying-grounds were common, but Weeden and
Smith drew their own inferences.
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 custom fleet under Admiral
Wallace had adopted an increased vigilance concerning strange vessels;
and on this occasion His Majesty's armed schooner Cygnet, under Captain Harry 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
Nanquit Point and whose identity Captain Arruda felt himself in honour
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 rumours of its having been seen in Boston Harbour,
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.
His exotic studies and his curious chemical importations being common
knowledge, and his fondness for graveyards being common suspicion; 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. As if conscious of this natural belief, Curwen took care to speak
casually on several occasions of the chemical value of the balsams found
in mummies; thinking perhaps that he might make the affair seem less
unnatural, yet stopping just short of admitting his participation.
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 labours.
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 rumoured, 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 cover. There, where quaint
old cottages climbed the hill from the rustic bridge, and fishing-smacks
lay anchored at their sleepy docks, a vague report went round of things
that were floating down the river and flashing into sight for a minute
as they went over the falls. Of course the Pawtuxet is a long river
which winds through many settled regions abounding in graveyards, and of
course the spring rains had been very heavy; but 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 rumour 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. There was,
however, no trace
of a passage into the steep bank; for the miniature avalanche had left
behind a solid wall of mixed earth and shrubbery from aloft. 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. He would, he said, transmit
the information separately to some ten or so of the most learned and
prominent citizens of Providence; ascertaining their views and following
whatever advice they might have to offer. Secrecy would probably be
essential in any case, for this was no matter that the town constables
or militia could cope with; and above all else the excitable crowd must
be kept in ignorance, lest there be enacted in these already troublous
times a repetition of that frightful Salem panic of less than a century
before which had first brought Curwen hither.
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 which
had just moved up from Warren and was temporarily housed in the new
King Street schoolhouse awaiting the completion of its building on the
hill above Presbyterian Lane; 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 recognised local magnates, and of whom Joseph was an amateur
scientist of parts; 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. These men, if favourable, might eventually be brought
together for collective deliberation; and with them would rest the
responsibility of deciding whether or not to inform the Governor of the
Colony, Joseph Wanton of Newport, before taking action.
The mission of Captain Mathewson prospered beyond his highest
expectations; for whilst he found one or two of the chosen confidants
somewhat sceptical 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 co-ordinated 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. Nameless
reprisals might ensue, and, even if the sinister creature complied, the
removal would be no more than the shifting of an unclean burden to
another place. The times were lawless, and the men who had flouted the
King's revenue forces for years were not the ones to balk at sterner
things when duty impelled. Curwen 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 moonlight
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 clamour 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 marvellous 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 men 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.
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 co-operating citizens think deeply. Parts of it, copied
and preserved in the private archives of the 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. Certainely, there was Noth'g butt ye liveliest Awfulness
in that which H. rais'd upp from what we 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
Self confounded by ye VII. Booke of ye Necronomicon that you
recommende. But I wou'd have you Observe what was told to us aboute
tak'g Care whom to calle up, for you are Sensible what Mr. Mather writ
in ye Marginalia of ———, and
can judge how truly 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 Zaristnatmik hadde in
his Ebony Boxe, for I was conscious who must have tolde 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
forc'd 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 recognise 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. The Pennsylvania Historical
Society also has some curious letter received by Dr. Shippen regarding
the presence of an unwholesome character in Philadelphia. But more
decisive steps were in the air, and it is in the secret assemblages of
sworn and tested sailors and faithful old privateersmen in the Brown
warehouses by night that we must look for
the main fruits of Weeden's disclosures. Slowly and surely a plan of
campaign was under development which would leave no trace of Joseph
Curwen's noxious mysteries.
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 neighbours 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. This he deemed needful because of the
impossibility of their not witnessing the final raid; and he explained
his course by saying that Curwen was known to be a spy of the customs
officers at Newport, against whom the hand of every Providence shipper,
merchant, and farmer was openly or clandestinely raised. Whether the
ruse was wholly believed by neighbours who had seen so many queer things
is not certain, but at any rate the Fenners were willing to connect any
evil with a man of such queer ways. 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 his 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 hamber,
after which Captain Whipple emerged to the great room and gave the
gathered seamen their last oaths and instructions.
Eleazer 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. Just
beyond Elder Snow's church some of the men turned back to take a parting
look at Providence lying outspread under the early spring stars.
Steeples and gables rose dark and shapely, and salt breezes swept up
gently from the cove north of the Bridge. Vega was climbing above the
great hill across the water, whose crest of trees was broken by the
roof-line of the unfinished College edifice. At the foot of that hill
and along the narrow mounting lanes of its side the old town dreamed;
Old Providence, for whose safety and sanity so monstrous and colossal a
blasphemy was about to be wiped out.
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 over half an hour before,
and the strange light had soon afterward shot once into the sky but
there were no lights in any visible windows. This was always the case of
late. Even as this news was given another great glare arose toward the
south, and the party realised 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 Eleazer
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 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 upsetting 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.
Eleazer 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 odour 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
known to many of them, there was something obscurely lost or gained in
his soul which set him forevermore 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 rumours which ever came from any of them, and Eleazer 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. The first 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 prattle of musketry followed
by a horrible roaring cry which the correspondent, Luke
Fenner, had represented in his epistle by the characters
"Waaaahrrrr—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 bark 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 crying 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 die sky like a doom, and windows
rattled as its echoes died away. It was deep and musical; powerful as a
brass 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 demoniac intonations:
"DEESMEES—JESHET—BONEDOSEFEDUVEMA—ENTTEMOSS." Not till the year 1919 did
any soul link this crude transcript with anything else in mortal
knowledge, but Charles Ward paled as he recognised 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
odour 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 odours 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 rumour 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 such scraps 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 parry. Hardest to explain was the nameless odour
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 twelvemonth
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 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.
In the light of this passage, and reflecting on what lost
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 rumours to whet his horror and cause him to demand that
his daughter and granddaughter 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 be not only cease to be, but must cease to ever 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 moulder 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 a while to himself, "Pox on that———, but he had no business to laugh while he screamed. 'Twas as
though the damned———had summat up his sleeve. For half a crown I'd burn his———house."
CHAPTER THREE
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 rumour that he had heard of Curwen now became something vital to
himself, in whom flowed Curwen's blood. No spirited and imaginative
genealogist could have done otherwise than begin forthwith an avid and
systematic collection of Curwen data.
In his first delvings there was not the slightest attempt at
secrecy; so that even Dr. Lyman hesitates to date the youth's madness
from any period before the close of 1919. 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
scepticism with which the accounts of the old diarists and
letter-writers were regarded. He often expressed a keen wonder as to
what really had taken place a century and a half before at that Pawtuxet
farmhouse whose site he vainly tried to find, and what Joseph Curwen
really had been.
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
rumours 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. With these men he was often
seen in conference about the Common, and visits among them were by no
means infrequent. 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 colour. 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 tenth, 1692, at
the Court of Oyer and Terminen under Judge Hathorne, that "fortie
Witches and the Blacke Man were wont to meet in the Woodes behind Mr.
Hutchinson's house", and one Amity How declared at a session of August
eighth before Judge Gedney that "Mr. C. B. (George Burroughs) on that
Nighte putt 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 hand writing, 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 labours 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
aboard, 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 recognised from
items in the
Registry of Deeds as positively Joseph Curwen's.
This Curwen letter, though undated as to the year, was evidently
not the one in answer to which Orne had written the confiscated missive;
and from internal evidence Ward placed it not much later than 1750. It
may not be amiss to give the text in full, as a sample of the style of
one whose history was so dark and terrible. The recipient is addressed
as "Simon", but a line (whether drawn by Curwen or Orne, Ward could not
tell) is run through the word.
Brother:—
My honour'd Antient friende, 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 Extremitie 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 Patuxet hath under it That 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 long work'd upon ye way of get'g Backe after ye Loste. I laste
Nighte 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 breede in ye Outside Spheres.
And of ye Seede of Olde shal One be borne who shal looke Backe, tho' know'g not what he seekes.
Yett will this awaite Nothing if there be no Heir, and if the
Saltes, or the Way to make the Saltes bee not Readie for his Hands. And
here I will owne, I have not taken needed Stepps nor found Much. Ye
Process is playing 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 the Indies. Ye People aboute are become curious, but
I can stande them off. Ye gentry are worse than the 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 substance 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 Roodemas and Hallow's Eve; and if yr Line runn not out, one shall bee in yeares to come that shal looke backe and use what Saltes or Stuff for Saltes 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 alreadie, tho', ye Roades
are bad. If you are dispos'd to travel,
doe not pass me bye. From Boston take ye Poste Rd. 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 Providence by Patucket
falls, and ye Rd. past Mr. Sayles's Tavern. My House opp. Mr. Epenetus
Olney's Tavern off ye Towne
Street, Ist on ye N. side of Olney's Court. Distance from Boston Store
abt. XLIV miles.
Sir, I am yr olde and true friend and Servt. in Almonsin-Metraton.
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 discovery was
doubly striking because it indicated as the newer Curwen house, built in
1761 on the site of the old, a dilapidated building still standing in
Olney Court and well known to Ward in his antiquarian rambles over
Stampers Hill. 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, house-cleaning, 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 of Olney
Court. The place, now crumbling with age, had never been a mansion; but
was a modest two-and-a-half storey wooden town house of the familiar
Providence Colonial
type, with plain peaked roof, large central chimney and artistically
carved doorway with rayed fanlight, 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
wainscoting and bolection moulding was marked, hacked, and gouged, or
covered
up altogether with cheap wall paper. In general, the survey did not
yield as much as Ward had somehow expected; but it was at least 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 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 wails 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 groundfloor 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 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 recognise 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 marvellous; and it could be
seen that through some trick 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 and 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 electric or mock-fireplace in Charles's third-floor
study 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. Curious as to what such a space might mean or
contain, the youth approached and looked within; finding beneath the
deep coatings of dust and soot some loose yellowed papers, a crude thick
copy-book, and a few mouldering 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 recognise at the Essex
Institute, and proclaimed the volume as the "Journal 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, And 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
alientists 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. Indeed, in showing the titles to the workmen he appeared
to guard the text itself with peculiar care, and to labour under a
perturbation for which even the antiquarian and genealogical
significance of the find could hardly account. 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 newfound
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 unravelling 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. The front panel holding the
picture was sawn and hinged to allow cupboard space behind it. 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 practised. 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.
Naturally, only one who had always been more or less studious,
eccentric, and solitary could have pursued this course for many days
without attracting notice. Ward, however, was constitutionally a scholar
and a hermit; hence his parents were less surprised than regretful at
the close confinement and secrecy he adopted. At the same time, both his
father and mother thought it odd that he would show them no scrap of
his treasure-trove, nor give any connected account of such data as he
had deciphered. This reticence he explained away as due to a wish to
wait until he might announce some connected revelation, but as the
weeks passed without further disclosures there began to grow up between
the youth and his family a kind of constraint; intensified in his
mother’s case by her manifest disapproval of all Curwen delvings.
During October Ward began visiting the libraries again, but no
longer for the antiquarian matter of his former days. Witchcraft and
magic, occultism and demonology, 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, 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. Charles had had freaks and changes of minor
interests before, but this growing secrecy and absorption in strange
pursuits was unlike even him. His school work was the merest pretence;
and although he failed in no test, it could be seen that the old
application had all vanished. 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 down town 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. The
cause appeared later, when it was learned from City Hall clerks that he
had probably found an important clue. His quest had suddenly shifted
from the grave of Joseph Curwen to that of one Naphthali Field; and his
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 y———." The lack of a specified burying ground
in the surviving entry greatly complicated the search, and Naphthali
Field’s grave seemed as elusive as that of Curwen’s; but here no
systematic effacement had existed, and one might reasonably be expected
to stumble on the stone itself even if its record had perished. 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 shown 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 demeanour. 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, for the most part in cipher, of an apparent
scope comparable only to the discoveries of Friar Bacon and perhaps
surpassing
even those. They were, however, meaningless except when correlated with a
body of learning now wholly obsolete; so that their immediate
presentation to a world equipped only with modern
science would rob them of all impressiveness and dramatic significance.
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. Not even
Einstein, he declared, could more profoundly revolutionise the current
conception of things.
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 photostatic copies of the Hutchinson cipher and Orne
formula and diagrams; but finally showed him the exteriors of some of
the teal 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:
“Wedn. 16 Octr. 1754. My Sloope the Wahefal this day putt
in from London with XX newe Men pick’d up in ye Indies, Spaniards from
Martineco and Dutch Men from Surinam. Ye Dutch Men are like to Desert
from hav’g hearde Somewhat ill of these Ventures, but I will see to ye
inducing of them to Staye. For Mr. Knight Dexter at ye Bay and Book 120
Pieces Camblets,
100 Pieces Assrtd. Cambleteens, 20 Pieces blue Duffles, 50 Pieces
Calamancoco, 300 Pieces each, Shendsoy and Humhums. For Mr. Green at ye
Elephant, 50 gallon Cyttles, 20 Warm’g Pannes, 15 Bake Cyttles, 10 pr.
Smoke’g Tonges. For Mr. Perrigo, 1 Sett of Awles. For Mr. Nightingale,
50 Reames prime Foolscap. Say’d ye SABAOTH thrice last Nighte but None
appear’d. I must heare more from Mr. H. In Transylvania, tho’ it is
Harde reach’g him and exceeding strange he cannot give me the use of
what he hath so well us’d these hundred yeares. Simon hath not Writ
these V. Weekes, but I expecte soon hear’g from him."
When upon reaching this point 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 Hallow’s-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 backe 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 wish, if not an actual
tendency, to follow young Charles Ward as he moved about the room. He
stopped before leaving to study the picture closely, marvelling at its
resemblance to Charles and memorising every minute detail of the
cryptical, colourless face, even down to a slight scar or pit in the
smooth brow over the right eye. Cosmo Alexander, he decided, was a
painter worthy of the Scotland that produced Raeburn, and a teacher
worthy of his illustrious pupil Gilbert Stuart.
Assured by the doctor that Charles’s 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. He
became recognised as an eccentric, and dropped even more completely from
the sight of his family’s friends than he had been before; keeping
close to his work and only occasionally making trips to other cities to
consult obscure records. Once he went south to talk with a strange old
mulatto who dwelt in a swamp and about whom a newspaper had printed a
curious article. Again he sought a small village in the Adirondacks
whence reports of certain odd ceremonial practices had come. But still
his parents forbade him the trip to the Old
World which he desired.
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 concerned 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
Bibliothèque Nationale. For three months thereafter he sent
only post-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, 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 Neustadt, 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 favour 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 vernal
Connecticut; his first taste of ancient New England in nearly four
years. When the coach crossed the Pawcatuck and entered Rhode Island
amidst the faery
goldenness of a late spring afternoon his heart beat with quickened
force, and the entry to Providence along Reservoir and Elmwood avenues
was a breathless and wonderful thing despite the depths of forbidden
lore into which he had delved. At the high square where Broad,
Weybosset, and Empire Streets join, he saw before and below him in the
fire of sunset the pleasant, remembered houses and domes and steeples of
the old town; and his head swam curiously as the vehicle rolled down to
the terminal behind the Biltmore, bringing into view the great dome and
soft, roof-pierced greenery of the ancient hill across the river, and
the tall, colonial spire of the First Baptist Church limned pink in the
magic evening light against the fresh springtime verdure of its
precipitous background.
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, the old Market House, and the head of the bay, and up the
steep curved slope of Waterman Street to Prospect, where the vast
gleaming dome and sunset-flushed Ionic columns of the Christian Science
Church beckoned northward. 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, on the left the classic Adam porch and stately bayed
facade of the great brick house where he was bom. It was twilight, and
Charles Dexter Ward had come home.
A school of alienists slightly less academic than Dr. Lyman’s assign
to Ward’s European trip the beginning of his true madness. Admitting
that he was sane when he started, they believe that his conduct upon
returning implies a disastrous change. But even to this claim Dr.
Willett refuses to accede. There was, he insists, something later; and
the queemesses of the youth at this stage he attributes to the practice
of rituals learned abroad—odd enough things, to be sure, but by no means
implying mental aberration on the pan of their celebrant. Ward himself,
though visibly aged and hardened, 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, brisked and arched his back
perceptibly when certain of the tones were heard.
The odours 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. Ward did not resume his old-time rambles,
but applied himself diligently to the strange books he had brought home,
and to equally strange delvings within his quarters; explaining that
European sources had greatly enlarged the possibilities of his work, and
promised great revelations in the years to come. 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. These
calls of Willett’s, undertaken at the request of the senior Wards, were
curious affairs. Ward at no time repulsed the doctor, but the latter saw
that he could never reach the young man’s inner psychology. 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’s 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 neighbourhood 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. They paused, and looking through a window saw that he was indeed
right; for the lightning flashed farther and farther off, whilst the
trees ceased to bend in the strange frigid gust from the water. The
thunder sank to a son of dull mumbling chuckle and finally died away.
Stars came out, and the stamp of triumph on Charles Ward’s face
crystallised 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 to 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’s direction and carrying it within by the side door. She heard
laboured 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 cleaned 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 clearly 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.
Odours 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 memorising 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,
cenventus sylvorum, antra gnomorum,
daemonia Coeli God, Almonsin, Gibor,
Jehosua, Evam, Zariathnatmik, Veni, veni, veni."
This had been going on for two hours without change or intermission
when over all the neighbourhood 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
overshadowed by the odour 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
neighbours above the howling of the dogs. Mrs. Ward, who had been
listening in despair outside her son’s locked laboratory, shivered as
she recognised 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 odour, different from the first but equally unknown and
intolerable. Charles was chanting again now and his mother could hear
syllables that sounded like
"Yi-nash-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 knocke 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 a quarter past
six, and, not finding his wife downstairs, was told by the frightened
servants that she was probably watching at Charles's 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
realising that she had fainted, hastened to fetch a glass of water from a
setbowl in a neighbouring 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 inflections suggesting question and answer, statement
and response. One voice was undisguisediy 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 masked and terrible colloquy had yielded. They were merely an
excited caution in Charles's 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 not 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's 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's 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 voices,
mutterings, incantations, and chemical odours were indeed inexcusable
nuisances. He agreed to a policy of greater quiet, though insisting on a
prolongation of his extreme privacy. Much of his future work, he said,
was in any case purely book research; and he could obtain quarters
elsewhere for any such vocal rituals as might be necessary at a later
stage. 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. The interview was really quite inconclusive, and as
Charles picked up his armful and left the room 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, with staring eyes and
fear-distorted mouth, had been found an hour before in the basement.
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 withdrawls
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. Ever since he had been in this room
he had known that something was amiss, and at last it dawned upon him
what it was.
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-grey dust.
CHAPTER FOUR
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 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 grieving singularly little considering his
first enthusiasm over it, but seemed to find something of positive
humour 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 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 had 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 the butler gave in
his notice to Mrs. Ward. There was, he said, something unholy in the
glance 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 tha 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:
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 a 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.
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
agreed 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.
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 emphasised the occurrences 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 realisation of stifled oaths
and stamping feet on the night the goods were taken away. After that
Charles moved back to his own 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.
Neighbours 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 Negro 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
waylaying 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 programme 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 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 quarrelled 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 showing 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 shown in waiting, and the
confidence you have shown 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,
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 a while", "I can’t
receive anyone for some time, you’ll have to excuse me", "Please
postpone decisive action till we can arrange some son 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’s 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 panelled 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’s appointment, and
promised to notifiy Willett when the youth returned. In bidding the
doctor goodnight 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’s 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’s
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 by 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 self-same 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 frightened 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 neighbours, 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
older things was abnormal and unholy, and he tried his best to hide it.
When Willett would mention some favourite 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’s
Histrionick Academy in King Street on the eleventh of February, 1762,
which fell on 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 theatre 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 showed 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 show
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 meagre
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 spoken out loud at all, averring that his
throat was in 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 rumours
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 neighbourhood. 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 rumour 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’s later life, including the frantic letter which
the doctor now showed the father, with the meagre 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 use of obsolete phraseology and gestures. Altogether, this
combination of hoarseness, palsied hands, bad memory, altered speech and
bearing, represented some disturbance or malady of genuine gravity,
which, no doubt, formed the basis of the prevailing odd rumours; 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
youth’s 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
inordinately long in answering the summons and was still redolent of
strange and noxious laboratory odours 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 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 this shadowy bungalow possessed
no library or laboratory beyond the visible ones, and waxed abstruse in
explaining the absence from the house of such odours as now saturated
all his clothing. Neighbourhood 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 visitors 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 showed 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 behaviour 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 alteredskin, 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 disorganisation. 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 shown 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, showed 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 upp from the Saltes I
sent you. It was wrong, and meanes clearly that ye Headstones had been
chang’d when Barnabus 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 ye 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 Romania, 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 determination 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 recognised from the photostatic copies of the Orne formulae
which Charles had once shown 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, about 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 the bearded man might have in Prague would probably be
similarly gifted. When they left, Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett realised 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 showed
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 favourable or unfavourable.
Recognising 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 upp to talk about what the Country Folk
say. Must digg deeper and have less Hearde. These Romanians plague one
damnably, being officious and
particular where you cou’d buy a Magyar off ith a Drinke and food. Last
Monthe M. gott me the sarcophagus of the Five Sphinxes from ye Acropolis
where He whome I call’d
up say’d it wou’d be, and I have hadde 3 Taikes 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 two welle knowe. You can now move and Worke elsewhere
with no Kill’g Trouble if needful, 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
fifteen Monthes, but am sensible you knowe how to deal with him. You
can’t saye him down with ye Formulae, for that will Worke only upon such
as ye other Formulae hath call’d upp from Saltes; but you still have
strong Handes and Knife and Pistol, and Graves are not
harde to digg, nor Acids loth to bume. 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 upp, and beware of ye Boy. It will be ripe in a yeare’s time
to have upp 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 Hadoth
Edw: H.
For J. Curwen, Esq.
Providence.
But if Willett and Mr. Ward refrained from showing 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’s 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 organised 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 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 panelled overmantel, and perhaps it was
something different and irrelevant; but in any case they all
half-sensed an intangible miasma which centred in that carven vestige of
an older dwelling and which at times almost rose to the intensity of a
material emanation.
CHAPTER FIVE
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 of
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 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 rumour could have reached them by no
wholesome means.
The doctor tried to put himself in Charles’s place to 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 way possible, 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
manhole, 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 recognised
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
loathsomeness 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 panelled 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 which 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 experimentations. Finally there came a room of
obvious modernity, or at least of recent occupancy. There were oil
meters, 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 box of
matches 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 unravelling 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 recognisable 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; recognising 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’s 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 programme had been a
sedulous imitation of the old wizard’s writing, which Charles seemed to
have carried to a marvellous 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 almanacks to indicate the ascending node, and the right-hand
one headed by a corresponding sign of “Dragon’s Tail” or descending
node. The appearance of the whole was something like this, and almost
unconsciously the doctor realised that the second half was no more than
the first written syllabically backward with the exception of
☊ |
|
☋
|
Y’AI ’NG’NGAH, YOG-SOTHOTH H’EE—L’GEB F’AI THRODOG UAAAH
|
OGTHROD AI’F GEB’L—EE’H YOG-SOTHOTH ’NGAH’NG AI’Y ZHRO
|
the final monosyllables and of the odd name Yog-Sothoth,
which he had come to recognise 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 recognised later when reviewing the events
of that horrible Good Friday of the previous year. 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 slit-like
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 centre; 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 discoloured 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 round 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
odour 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 odour which encompassed
everything. As he walked slowly about it suddenly occurred to Willett
that both the noise and the odour seemed strongest directly above the
oddly pierced slabs, as if they might be crude trap-doors leading down
still deeper to some 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 unnameable now rose up 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 he 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 inimitably 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 unnameable 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
co-ordination, 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
recognised, 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:
"Certainely, 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 these ancient lingering rumours 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 a while he thought he detected a
suspicion of a glow infinitely far away, and toward this he crawled in
agonised 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 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 realised 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, turned down his lamps to avoid any distant glimpse of
the hellish altar, or of the uncovered pit with the pierced stone slab
beside it. Most of the 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 odours
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-letters, and it was weirdly interesting to note that Ward had
underlined the same passage whose marking had so perturbed good Mr.
Merrit 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 recognisable 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 centre 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 labelled 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 generalisation. 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 colour. To the colours
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 occured in the Phalerons. A bluish-grey 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 defence 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 civilisation, 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
chiselled 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 recognised a new acrid odour 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 odour 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 recognised after a moment as
mediaeval 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 pedestalled 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. sage 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 chiselled 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 centre,
with a plain circle about three feet wide half way 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 ofthe 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 trial 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 chiselled 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 recognised as what Mrs. Ward heard her
son chanting on that noxious 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
as yet the authority had shown 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 comer.
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 chiselled version with the one which still ran
persistently in his head, and found it hard to do. Where the script he
had memorised 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 coldness rose and fell rhythmically in the distance
through the stench and the darkness.
"Y’AI ’NG’NGAH
YOG-SOTHOTH
H’EE—L’GEB
F’AI’ THRODOG
UAAAH!"
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 odour
which quite drowned out the stench from the far-away wells; an odour
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 vapour 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
calle up Any that you cannot putt 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 he 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
odour 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 chiselled 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 vapour 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 encrouched
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 laboured 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 of Caerleon and
Hexhaus, and by the Towers along Hadrian’s crumbling wali. The words
were in such Latin as a barbarous
age might remember—"Corwinus necandus est. Cadaver aq(ua) forti dissolvendum, nec aliq(ui)d retinendum. Tace ut poles."—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 dll 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's 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 pretence 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 showed 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
significence 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 Transylvanian
mountains east of Rakus, and the utter extirpation with all its inmates
of the illregarded 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 a
universal belief that his thick sandy beard was either dyed or false—a
belief conclusively
upheld by the finding of such a false beard, together with a pair of
dark glasses, in his room at the fateful bungalow. His voice, Mr. Ward
could here 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
pencilled 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
recognised 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 pencilled 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 these data as they were 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, the 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 realisation of why he
did it, he gave the detectives an article to be shown 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 mutterings 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 panelling 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 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 vapours 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 panelling 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 shown 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 showed 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 Bames 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. You can tell his mother
gently and gradually about the mad part when you stop sending the typed
notes in his name. I’d advise you to join her
in Atlantic City and take a rest yourself. God knows you need one after
this shock, as I do myself. I am going South for a while to calm down
and brace up.
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 realise from the subtle physical as well as mental
changes in him, and you must not hope to see him again. Have only this
consolation—that he was never a fiend or even truly a madman, but only
an eager, studious, and curious boy whose love of mystery and of
the past was his undoing. 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, indeeed, 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. The youth,
though making no attempt to evade his caller, was in a sullen mood; and
seemed disinclined to open the conversation which Willett obviously
desired. The doctor’s discovery of the crypt and his monstrous
experience therein had of course created a
new source of embarrassment, so that both hesitated perceptibly after
the interchange of a few strained formalities. Then 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. The patient
quailed, conscious that since the last visit there had been a change
whereby the solicitous family physician had given place to the ruthless
and implacable
avenger.
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 show 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 alientists
could ever fathom or grapple with. Thank God some chance has left
inside me the spark of imagination, that I might not go astray in
thinking out this thing. 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 showed
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 or 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'. You were undone once before, perhaps in that
very way, and it may be that your own evil magic will undo you all
again. 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 alley,
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
show 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-grey dust.
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About the Author
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American writer of weird, science, fantasy, and horror fiction. He is best known for his creation of the Cthulhu Mythos.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft spent most of his life in New England. Wikipedia
Born: August 20, 1890, Providence, RI
Died: March 15, 1937, Providence, RI
Full Name: Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Spouse: Sonia Greene (m. 1924–1937)
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