object:1f.lovecraft - The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
“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.”
BORELLUS
I. A Result and a Prologue
1.
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 profound and 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 shewed 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 at all 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 the right hip had disappeared, whilst
there had formed on the 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 conjoined to a mental force which would have made
him a genius or a leader had it not been twisted into strange and
grotesque forms. 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 shew the
prodigious grasp and insight displayed during his last 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 brought Charles Ward into the world and had
watched his growth of body and mind ever since, seemed frightened at
the thought of his future freedom. He had had a terrible experience and
had made a terrible discovery which he dared not reveal to his
sceptical colleagues. Willett, indeed, presents a minor mystery all his
own in his connexion with the case. He was the last to see the patient
before his flight, and emerged from that final conversation in a state
of mixed horror and relief which several recalled when Ward’s escape
became known three hours later. That escape itself is one of the
unsolved wonders of Dr. Waite’s hospital. A window open above a sheer
drop of sixty feet could hardly explain it, yet after that talk with
Willett the youth was undeniably gone. 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 shewn 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 antiquities he knew so well. He had, it appears, lost
his regard for them through sheer familiarity; and all his final
efforts were obviously bent toward mastering those common facts of the
modern world which had been so totally and unmistakably expunged from
his brain. 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 vitally
impaired range 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, when he suddenly
turned from the study of the past to the study of the occult, and
refused to qualify for college on the ground that he had individual
researches of much greater importance to make. This is certainly borne
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 built and 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 and 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 shewed Dr. Willett 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 was long 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 forever from human knowledge.
2.
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 sharp 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
skyscraper summits of the lower town to the purple hills of the
countryside beyond. Here he was born, and from the lovely classic porch
of the double-bayed brick facade his nurse had first wheeled him in his
carriage; past the little white farmhouse of two hundred years before
that the town had long ago overtaken, and on toward the stately
colleges along the shady, sumptuous street, whose old square brick
mansions and smaller wooden houses with narrow, heavy-columned Doric
porches dreamed solid and exclusive amidst their generous yards and
gardens.
He had been wheeled, too, along sleepy Congdon Street, one tier lower
down on the steep hill, and with all its eastern homes 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 bank 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 the 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
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 Ball 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-gabled 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, with 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,
tumbling 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, where 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 its eastward
bluff, decked with its two 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 stage coach used to start before the Revolution, and the other
half in the gracious southerly realm about George, Benevolent, Power,
and Williams Streets, where the old slope holds unchanged the fine
estates and bits of walled garden and steep green lane in which so many
fragrant memories linger. 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 illustrate 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 of Mrs. Eliza, daughter to Capt.
James Tillinghast”, of whose paternity the family had preserved no
trace. Late in 1918, whilst examining a volume of original town records
in manuscript, the young genealogist encountered an entry describing a
legal change of name, by which in 1772 a Mrs. Eliza Curwen, widow of
Joseph Curwen, resumed, along with her seven-year-old daughter Ann, her
maiden name of Tillinghast; on the ground ‘that her Husband’s name was
become a 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
a singular and provocative nature that one could not fail to imagine
curiously what it was that 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 worth their while to destroy. One important sidelight came from a
point as remote as New York, where some Rhode Island colonial
correspondence was stored in the Museum at Fraunces’ Tavern. The really
crucial thing, though, and what in Dr. Willett’s opinion formed the
definite source of Ward’s undoing, was the matter found in August 1919
behind the panelling of the crumbling house in Olney Court. It was
that, beyond a doubt, which opened up those black vistas whose end was
deeper than the pit.
II. An Antecedent and a Horror
1.
Joseph Curwen, as revealed by the rambling legends embodied in what
Ward heard and unearthed, was a very astonishing, enigmatic, and
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 in 1723 was one of the founders of the
Congregational Church on the hill; but always did he retain the
nondescript aspect of a man not greatly over thirty or thirty-five. As
decades mounted up, this singular quality began to excite wide notice;
but Curwen always explained it by saying that he came of hardy
forefathers, and practiced a simplicity of living which did not wear
him out. How such simplicity could be reconciled with the inexplicable
comings and goings of the secretive merchant, and with the queer
gleaming 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 Unicorn 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
non-committal 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 shewn.
Private letters and diaries of the period reveal, too, a multitude of
other reasons why Joseph Curwen was marvelled at, feared, and finally
shunned like a plague. His passion for graveyards, in which he was
glimpsed at all hours and under all conditions, was notorious; though
no one had witnessed any deed on his part which could actually be
termed ghoulish. On the Pawtuxet Road he had a farm, at which he
generally lived during the summer, and to which he would frequently be
seen riding at various odd times of the day or night. Here his only
visible servants, farmers, and caretakers were a sullen pair of aged
Narragansett Indians; the husband dumb and curiously scarred, and the
wife of a very repulsive cast of countenance, probably due to a mixture
of negro blood. In the lean-to of this house was the laboratory where
most of the chemical experiments were conducted. Curious porters and
teamers who delivered bottles, bags, or boxes at the small rear door
would exchange accounts of the fantastic flasks, crucibles, alembics,
and furnaces they saw in the low shelved room; and prophesied in
whispers that the close-mouthed “chymist”—by which they meant
alchemist—would not be long in finding the Philosopher’s Stone. The
nearest 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 likewise had much to say of Curwen’s town house in
Olney Court; not so much the fine new one built in 1761, when the man
must have been nearly a century old, but the first low gambrel-roofed
one with the windowless attic and shingled sides, whose timbers he took
the peculiar precaution of burning after its demolition. Here there was
less mystery, it is true; but the hours at which lights were seen, the
secretiveness of the two swarthy foreigners who comprised the only
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 by education to
enjoy. His birth was known to be good, since the Curwens or Corwins 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 to lurk in his bearing some cryptic, sardonic arrogance,
as if he had come to find all human beings dull through having moved
among stranger and more potent entities. 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 soon 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. The bizarre
collection, besides a host of standard works which Mr. Merritt was not
too alarmed to envy, embraced nearly all the cabbalists,
daemonologists, and magicians known to man; and was a treasure-house of
lore in the doubtful realms of alchemy and astrology. Hermes
Trismegistus in Mesnard’s edition, the Turba Philosophorum, Geber’s
Liber Investigationis, and Artephius’ Key of Wisdom all were there;
with the cabbalistic Zohar, Peter Jammy’s set of Albertus Magnus,
Raymond Lully’s Ars Magna et Ultima in Zetzner’s edition, Roger Bacon’s
Thesaurus Chemicus, Fludd’s Clavis Alchimiae, and Trithemius’ De Lapide
Philosophico crowding them close. Mediaeval Jews and Arabs were
represented in profusion, and Mr. Merritt turned pale when, upon taking
down a fine volume conspicuously labelled as the Qanoon-e-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 at
about its middle, and one paragraph displayed such thick and tremulous
pen-strokes beneath the lines of mystic black-letter 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 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.”
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, slave, 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
supercargoes 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.
In 1760 Joseph Curwen was virtually an outcast, suspected of vague
horrors and daemoniac alliances which seemed all the more menacing
because they could not be named, understood, or even proved to exist.
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 brick footwalk or “causey” in the middle. About this
time, also, he built the plain but excellent new house whose doorway is
still 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.
2.
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 practice 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
manoeuvres 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
constraint 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
shewed 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 unquestioned position would make all ostracism of
his home impossible. It may be that he also had deeper reasons for
wishing an alliance; reasons so far outside the known cosmic sphere
that only papers found a century and a half after his death caused
anyone to suspect them; but of this nothing certain can ever be
learned. Naturally he was aware of the horror and indignation with
which any ordinary courtship of his would be received, hence 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
Dutee Tillinghast, whose only daughter Eliza seemed dowered with every
conceivable advantage save prospects as an heiress. Capt. 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 smallpox 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 Winsor. 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 Capt. Dutee
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, Esq., of George St., 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 wall of utter ostracism was
somewhat worn down. In his treatment of his wife the strange bridegroom
astonished both her and the community by displaying an extreme
graciousness and consideration. The new house in Olney Court was now
wholly free from disturbing manifestations, and although Curwen was
much absent at the Pawtuxet farm which his wife never visited, he
seemed more like a normal citizen than at any other time in his long
years of residence. Only one person remained in open enmity with him,
this being the youthful ship’s officer whose engagement to Eliza
Tillinghast had been so abruptly broken. Ezra Weeden had frankly vowed
vengeance; and though of a quiet and ordinarily mild disposition, was
now gaining a hate-bred, dogged purpose which boded no good to the
usurping husband.
On the seventh of May, 1765, Curwen’s only child Ann was born; and was
christened by the Rev. 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 shewed
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 Hacker’s Hall in 1765 against the setting
off of North Providence as a separate town with a pro-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 traffick 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.
3.
In 1766 came the final change in Joseph Curwen. It was very sudden, and
gained wide notice amongst the curious townsfolk; for the air of
suspense and expectancy dropped like an old cloak, giving instant place
to an ill-concealed exaltation of perfect triumph. 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 manoeuvres 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 traffick. 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 Namquit Point, where they
would meet and receive cargo from strange ships of considerable size
and widely varied appearance. Curwen’s sailors would then deposit this
cargo at the usual point on the shore, and transport it overland to the
farm; locking it in the same cryptical stone building which had
formerly received the negroes. The cargo consisted almost wholly of
boxes and cases, of which a large proportion were oblong and heavy and
disturbingly suggestive of coffins.
Weeden always watched the farm with unremitting assiduity; visiting it
each night for long periods, and seldom letting a week go by without a
sight except when the ground bore a footprint-revealing snow. 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 pain or
fury, rumblings of conversation and whines of entreaty, pantings of
eagerness and shouts of protest. They appeared to be in different
languages, all known to Curwen, whose rasping accents were frequently
distinguishable in reply, reproof, or threatening. 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 parts, 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 spoken the Three Words. Failing to obtain
replies, the inquisitor had seemingly resorted to extreme means; for
there was a terrific shriek followed by silence and muttering and a
bumping sound.
None of these colloquies were 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 Hacker’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 river-bank in the rear, where the
high ground sloped steeply down to the valley of the Pawtuxet, there
was found an arched oaken door in a frame of heavy masonry, which was
obviously an entrance to caverns within the hill. 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 customs fleet under Admiral Wallace had adopted an
increased vigilance concerning strange vessels; and on this occasion
His Majesty’s armed schooner Cygnet, under Capt. Charles Leslie,
captured after a short pursuit one early morning the snow Fortaleza of
Barcelona, Spain, under Capt. Manuel Arruda, bound according to its log
from Grand Cairo, Egypt, to Providence. When searched for contraband
material, this ship revealed the astonishing fact that its cargo
consisted exclusively of Egyptian mummies, consigned to “Sailor A. B.
C.”, who would come to remove his goods in a lighter just off Namquit
Point and whose identity Capt. 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 connexion
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 cove. 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.
4.
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 Capt. 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 Capt. 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; Rev. 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 Capt.
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 Capt. Mathewson prospered beyond his highest
expectations; for whilst he found one or two of the chosen confidants
somewhat sceptical of the possible ghastly side of Weeden’s tale, there
was not one who did not think it necessary to take some sort of secret
and coördinated action. Curwen, it was clear, formed a vague potential
menace to the welfare of the town and Colony; and must be eliminated at
any cost. Late in December 1770 a group of eminent townsmen met at the
home of Stephen Hopkins and debated tentative measures. Weeden’s notes,
which he had given to Capt. 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 Capt.
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 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 shrieks 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
coöperating citizens think deeply. Parts of it, copied and preserved in
the private archives of the Smith family where Charles Ward found it,
ran as follows:
“I delight that you continue in y^e Gett’g 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 y^e liveliest
Awfulness in that which H. rais’d upp from What he cou’d gather
onlie a part of. What you sente, did not Worke, whether because of
Any Thing miss’g, or because y^e Wordes were not Righte from my
Speak’g or y^r Copy’g. I alone am at a Loss. I have not y^e
Chymicall art to followe Borellus, and owne my Self confounded by
y^e VII. Booke of y^e Necronomicon that you recommende. But I wou’d
have you Observe what was tolde to us aboute tak’g Care whom to
calle up, for you are Sensible what Mr. Mather writ in y^e Magnalia
of ——, and can judge how truely that Horrendous thing is reported. I
say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe;
by the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against
you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the
Lesser, lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall
commande more than you. I was frighted when I read of your know’g
what Ben Zariatnatmik hadde in his ebony Boxe, for I was conscious
who must have 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 y^e Blacke Man learnt from
Sylvanus Cocidius in y^e Vault, under y^e Roman Wall, and will be
oblig’d for y^e Lend’g of y^e 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 y^r Vessels, but can not always be certain when to expect them.
In the Matter spoke of, I require onlie 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 I 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 y^r 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 shewed that the
Providence men took certain quiet steps. The Pennsylvania Historical
Society also has some curious letters 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.
5.
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 100 men met at 10 p.m. on Friday, April
12th, 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 Esek, whom he had initiated at the
last moment with the permission of the rest, John Carter, Capt.
Mathewson, and Capt. Whipple, who was to lead the actual raiding party.
These chiefs conferred apart in a rear chamber, after which Capt.
Whipple emerged to the great room and gave the gathered seamen their
last oaths and instructions. Eleazar Smith was with the leaders as they
sat in the rear apartment awaiting the arrival of Ezra Weeden, whose
duty was to keep track of Curwen and report the departure of his coach
for the farm.
About 10:30 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 Capt.
Whipple, the leader, Capt. Esek Hopkins, John Carter, President
Manning, Capt. 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. Capt. Whipple now ordered his
force to separate into three divisions; one of twenty men under Eleazar
Smith to strike across to the shore and guard the landing-place against
possible reinforcements for Curwen until summoned by a messenger for
desperate service, a second of twenty men under Capt. Esek 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 Capt. Mathewson to the
cryptical stone edifice with high narrow windows, another third to
follow Capt. 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, then 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. Capt. 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 Capt. Hopkins to the river-bank, while President Manning was
detailed with Capt. Mathewson to the stone building. Dr. Bowen, with
Ezra Weeden, remained in Capt. Whipple’s party which was to storm the
farmhouse itself. The attack was to begin as soon as a messenger from
Capt. Hopkins had joined Capt. 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 1 a.m. the three divisions left
the Fenner farmhouse; one to guard the landing, another to seek the
river valley and the hillside door, and the third to subdivide and
attend to the actual buildings of the Curwen farm.
Eleazar Smith, who accompanied the shore-guarding party, records in his
diary an uneventful march and a long wait on the bluff by the bay;
broken once by what seemed to be the distant sound of the signal
whistle and again by a peculiar muffled blend of roaring and crying and
a powder blast which seemed to come from the same direction. Later on
one man thought he caught some distant gunshots, and still later Smith
himself felt the throb of titanic and 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 well known to many of them, there was something
obscurely lost or gained in his soul which set him for evermore apart.
It was the same later on when they met other old companions who had
gone into that zone of horror. Most of them had lost or gained
something imponderable and indescribable. They had seen or heard or
felt something which was not for human creatures, and could not forget
it. From them there was never any gossip, for to even the commonest of
mortal instincts there are terrible boundaries. And from that single
messenger the party at the shore caught a nameless awe which almost
sealed their own lips. Very few are the rumours which ever came from
any of them, and Eleazar Smith’s diary is the only written record which
has survived from that whole expedition which set forth from the Sign
of the Golden Lion under the stars.
Charles Ward, however, discovered another vague sidelight in some
Fenner correspondence which he found in New London, where he knew
another branch of the family had lived. It seems that the Fenners, from
whose house the doomed farm was distantly visible, had watched the
departing columns of raiders; and had heard very clearly the angry
barking of the Curwen dogs, followed by the first shrill blast which
precipitated the attack. This blast had been followed by a repetition
of the great shaft of light from the stone building, and in another
moment, after a quick sounding of the second signal ordering a general
invasion, there had come a subdued prattle of musketry followed by a
horrible roaring cry which the correspondent Luke Fenner had
represented in his epistle by the characters “Waaaahrrrrr—R’waaahrrr”.
This cry, however, had possessed a quality which no mere writing could
convey, and the correspondent mentions that his mother fainted
completely at the sound. It was later repeated less loudly, and further
but more muffled evidences of gunfire ensued; together with a loud
explosion of powder from the direction of the river. About an hour
afterward all the dogs began to 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
origin was plainly distinguished. Fenner wrote that he could even
gather a few words belched in frenzy: “Almighty, protect thy lamb!”
Then there were more shots, and the second flaming thing fell. After
that came silence for about three-quarters of an hour; at the end of
which time little Arthur Fenner, Luke’s brother, exclaimed that he saw
‘a red fog’ going up to the stars from the accursed farm in the
distance. No one but the child can testify to this, but Luke admits the
significant coincidence implied by the panic of almost convulsive
fright which at the same moment arched the backs and stiffened the fur
of the three cats then within the room.
Five minutes later a chill wind blew up, and the air became suffused
with such an intolerable stench that only the strong freshness of the
sea could have prevented its being noticed by the shore party or by any
wakeful souls in Pawtuxet village. This stench was nothing which any of
the Fenners had ever encountered before, and produced a kind of
clutching, amorphous fear beyond that of the tomb or the charnel-house.
Close upon it came the awful voice which no hapless hearer will ever be
able to forget. It thundered out of the sky like a doom, and windows
rattled as its echoes died away. It was deep and musical; powerful as a
bass organ, but evil as the forbidden books of the Arabs. What it said
no man can tell, for it spoke in an unknown tongue, but this is the
writing Luke Fenner set down to portray the daemoniac intonations:
“DEESMEES–JESHET–BONE DOSEFE DUVEMA–ENITEMOSS”. Not till the year 1919
did any soul link this crude transcript with anything else in mortal
knowledge, but Charles Ward paled as he 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.
6.
Not one man who participated in that terrible raid could ever be
induced to say a word concerning it, and every fragment of the vague
data which survives comes from those outside the final fighting party.
There is something frightful in the care with which these actual
raiders destroyed each scrap which bore the least allusion to the
matter. Eight sailors had been killed, but although their bodies were
not produced their families were satisfied with the statement that a
clash with customs officers had occurred. The same statement also
covered the numerous cases of wounds, all of which were extensively
bandaged and treated only by Dr. Jabez Bowen, who had accompanied the
party. Hardest to explain was the nameless odour clinging to all the
raiders, a thing which was discussed for weeks. Of the citizen leaders,
Capt. 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 Capt. 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, as 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 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.”
In the light of this passage, and reflecting on what last unmentionable
allies a beaten man might try to summon in his direst extremity,
Charles Ward may well have wondered whether any citizen of Providence
killed Joseph Curwen.
The deliberate effacement of every memory of the dead man from
Providence life and annals was vastly aided by the influence of the
raiding leaders. They had not at first meant to be so thorough, and had
allowed the widow and her father and child to remain in ignorance of
the true conditions; but Capt. 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 Capt. Whipple well, and
probably extracted more hints from that bluff mariner than anyone else
ever gained respecting the end of the accused 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 Runazar
in Lord Dunsany’s tale, whom the Gods decided must not only cease to
be, but must cease ever to have been.
Mrs. Tillinghast, as the widow became known after 1772, sold the house
in Olney Court and resided with her father in Power’s Lane till her
death in 1817. The farm at Pawtuxet, shunned by every living soul,
remained to 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 Capt. 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 damn’d ——— had some’at up
his sleeve. For half a crown I’d burn his ——— house.”
III. A Search and an Evocation
1.
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 connexions 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 Rev. Thomas
Barnard and others brought about his quiet removal to parts unknown.
Certain documents by and about all of these strange characters 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 10,
1692, at the Court of Oyer and Terminer under Judge Hathorne, that
‘fortie Witches and the Blacke Man were wont to meete in the Woodes
behind Mr. Hutchinson’s house’, and one Amity How declared at a session
of August 8th before Judge Gedney that ‘Mr. G. B. (Rev. George
Burroughs) on that Nighte putt y^e Divell his Marke upon Bridget S.,
Jonathan A., Simon O., Deliverance W., Joseph C., Susan P., Mehitable
C., and Deborah B.’ Then there was a catalogue of Hutchinson’s uncanny
library as found after his disappearance, and an unfinished manuscript
in his handwriting, couched in a cipher none could read. Ward had a
photostatic copy of this manuscript made, and began to work casually on
the cipher as soon as it was delivered to him. After the following
August his 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 the greatest immediate interest was the Orne material. It took
Ward only a short time to prove from identity of penmanship a thing he
had already considered established from the text of the letter to
Curwen; namely, that Simon Orne and his supposed son were one and the
same person. As Orne had said to his correspondent, it was hardly safe
to live too long in Salem, hence he resorted to a thirty-year sojourn
abroad, and did not return to claim his lands except as a
representative of a new generation. Orne had apparently been careful to
destroy most of his correspondence, but the citizens who took action in
1771 found and preserved a few letters and papers which excited their
wonder. There were cryptic formulae and diagrams in his and other hands
which Ward now either copied with care or had photographed, and one
extremely mysterious letter in a chirography that the searcher
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.
Prouidence, I. May (Ut. vulgo)
Brother:—
My honour’d Antient ffriende, due Respects and earnest Wishes to Him
whom we serve for y^r 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’g yt. I am not dispos’d to followe you in go’g
Away on acct. of my Yeares, for Prouidence hath not y^e Sharpeness
of y^e 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 ffarme at Patuxet hath under it What you
Knowe, that wou’d not waite for my com’g Backe as an Other.
But I am not unreadie for harde ffortunes, as I haue tolde you, and
haue longe work’d upon y^e Way of get’g Backe after y^e Laste. I
laste Night strucke on y^e Wordes that bringe up YOGGE-SOTHOTHE, and
sawe for y^e firste Time that fface spoke of by Ibn Schacabao in ye
——. And IT said, that y^e III Psalme in y^e Liber-Damnatus holdes
y^e Clauicle. With Sunne in V House, Saturne in Trine, drawe y^e
Pentagram of Fire, and saye y^e ninth Uerse thrice. This Uerse
repeate eache Roodemas and Hallow’s Eue; and y^e Thing will breede
in y^e Outside Spheres.
And of y^e Seede of Olde shal One be borne who shal looke Backe,
tho’ know’g not what he seekes.
Yett will this availe Nothing if there be no Heir, and if the
Saltes, or the Way to make the Saltes, bee not Readie for his Hande;
and here I will owne, I have not taken needed Stepps nor founde
Much. Ye Process is plaguy harde to come neare; and it uses up such
a Store of Specimens, I am harde putte to it to get Enough,
notwithstand’g the Sailors I have from y^e 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 substances are easie of get’g, there be’g II. goode
Chymists in Towne, Dr. Bowen and Sam: Carew. I am foll’g oute what
Borellus saith, and haue Helpe in Abdool Al-Hazred his VII. Booke.
Whatever I gette, you shal haue. And in y^e meane while, do not
neglect to make use of y^e Wordes I haue here giuen. I haue them
Righte, but if you Desire to see HIM, imploy the Writings on y^e
Piece of —— that I am putt’g in this Packet. Saye y^e Uerses every
Roodmas and Hallow’s Eue; and if y^r Line runn out not, one shall
bee in yeares to come that shal looke backe and use what Saltes or
Stuff for Saltes you shal leaue 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 Prouidence already, tho’ y^e
Roades are bad. If you are dispos’d to Travel, doe not pass me bye.
From Boston take y^e Post Rd. thro’ Dedham, Wrentham, and
Attleborough, goode Taverns be’g at all these Townes. Stop at Mr.
Bolcom’s in Wrentham, where y^e Beddes are finer than Mr. Hatch’s,
but eate at y^e other House for their Cooke is better. Turne into
Prou. by Patucket ffalls, and y^e Rd. past Mr. Sayles’s Tavern. My
House opp. Mr. Epenetus Olney’s Tavern off y^e Towne Street, Ist on
y^e N. side of Olney’s Court. Distance from Boston Stone abt. XLIV
Miles.
Sir, I am y^r olde and true ffriend and Servt. in Almousin-Metraton.
Josephus C.
To Mr. Simon Orne,
William’s-Lane, in Salem.
This letter, oddly enough, was what first gave Ward the exact location
of Curwen’s Providence home; for none of the records encountered up to
that time had been at all specific. The 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, housecleaning, and furnace-tending
services. To find, in distant Salem, such sudden proof of the
significance of this familiar rookery in his own family history, was a
highly impressive thing to Ward; and he resolved to explore the place
immediately upon his return. The more mystical phases of the letter,
which he took to be some extravagant kind of symbolism, frankly baffled
him; though he noted with a thrill of curiosity that the Biblical
passage referred to—Job 14, 14—was the familiar verse, “If a man die,
shall he live again? All the days of my appointed time will I wait,
till my change come.”
2.
Young Ward came home in a state of pleasant excitement, and spent the
following Saturday in a long and exhaustive study of the house in Olney
Court. The place, now crumbling with age, had never been a mansion; but
was a modest two-and-a-half story wooden town house of the familiar
Providence colonial type, with plain peaked roof, large central
chimney, and artistically carved doorway with rayed 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 shewn about the interior by old Asa and his stout wife
Hannah. Here there was more change than the outside indicated, and Ward
saw with regret that fully half of the fine scroll-and-urn overmantels
and shell-carved cupboard linings were gone, whilst much of the fine
wainscotting and bolection moulding was marked, hacked, and gouged, or
covered up altogether with cheap wall-paper. 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 by July to make a trip to New London and New York to consult
old letters whose presence in those places was indicated. This trip was
very fruitful, for it brought him the Fenner letters with their
terrible description of the Pawtuxet farmhouse raid, and the
Nightingale-Talbot letters in which he learned of the portrait painted
on a panel of the Curwen library. This matter of the portrait
interested him particularly, since he would have given much to know
just what Joseph Curwen looked like; and he decided to make a second
search of the house in Olney Court to see if there might not be some
trace of the ancient features beneath peeling coats of later paint or
layers of mouldy wall-paper.
Early in August that search took place, and Ward went carefully over
the walls of every room sizeable enough to have been by any possibility
the library of the evil builder. He paid especial attention to the
large panels of such overmantels as still remained; and was keenly
excited after about an hour, when on a broad area above the fireplace
in a spacious ground-floor room he became certain that the surface
brought out by the peeling of several coats of paint was sensibly
darker than any ordinary interior paint or the wood beneath it was
likely to have been. A few more careful tests with a thin knife, and he
knew that he had come upon an oil portrait of great extent. With truly
scholarly restraint the youth did not risk the damage which an
immediate attempt to uncover the hidden picture with the knife might
have done, but just retired from the scene of his discovery to enlist
expert help. In three days he returned with an artist of long
experience, Mr. Walter C. Dwight, whose studio is near the foot of
College Hill; and that accomplished restorer of paintings set to work
at once with proper methods and chemical substances. Old Asa and his
wife were duly excited over their strange visitors, and were properly
reimbursed for this invasion of their domestic hearth.
As day by day the work of restoration progressed, Charles Ward looked
on with growing interest at the lines and shades gradually unveiled
after their long oblivion. Dwight had begun at the bottom; hence since
the picture was a three-quarter-length one, the face did not come out
for some time. It was meanwhile seen that the subject was a spare,
well-shaped man with dark-blue coat, embroidered waistcoat, black satin
small-clothes, and white silk stockings, seated in a carved chair
against the background of a window with wharves and ships beyond. When
the head came out it was observed to bear a neat Albemarle wig, and to
possess a thin, calm, undistinguished face which seemed somehow
familiar to both Ward and the artist. Only at the very last, though,
did the restorer and his client begin to gasp with astonishment at the
details of that lean, pallid visage, and to 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 of atavism the physical contours of Joseph
Curwen had found precise duplication after a century and a half. Mrs.
Ward’s resemblance to her ancestor was not at all marked, though she
could recall relatives who had some of the facial characteristics
shared by her son and by the bygone Curwen. She did not relish the
discovery, and told her husband that he had better burn the picture
instead of bringing it home. There was, she averred, something
unwholesome about it; not only intrinsically, but in its very
resemblance to Charles. Mr. Ward, however, was a practical man of power
and affairs—a cotton manufacturer with extensive mills at Riverpoint in
the Pawtuxet Valley—and not one to listen to feminine scruples. The
picture impressed him mightily with its likeness to his son, and he
believed the boy deserved it as a present. In this opinion, it is
needless to say, Charles most heartily concurred; and a few days later
Mr. Ward located the owner of the house—a small rodent-featured person
with a guttural accent—and obtained the whole mantel and overmantel
bearing the picture at a curtly fixed priced which cut short the
impending torrent of unctuous haggling.
It now remained to take off the panelling and remove it to the Ward
home, where provisions were made for its thorough restoration and
installation with an electric mock-fireplace in Charles’s third-floor
study or library. To Charles was left the task of superintending this
removal, and on the twenty-eighth of August he accompanied two expert
workmen from the Crooker decorating firm to the house in Olney Court,
where the mantel and portrait-bearing overmantel were detached with
great care and precision for transportation in the company’s motor
truck. There was left a space of exposed brickwork marking the
chimney’s course, and in this young Ward observed a cubical recess
about a foot square, which must have lain directly behind the head of
the portrait. 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
copybook, 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 “Journall and Notes of Jos:
Curwen, Gent., of Providence-Plantations, Late of Salem.”
Excited beyond measure by his discovery, Ward shewed the book to the
two curious workmen beside him. Their testimony is absolute as to the
nature and genuineness of the finding, and Dr. Willett relies on them
to help establish his theory that the youth was not mad when he began
his major eccentricities. All the other papers were likewise in
Curwen’s handwriting, and one of them seemed especially portentous
because of its inscription: “To Him Who Shal Come After, & How He May
Gett Beyonde Time & y^e 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 y^e yeares 1678 and 1687: Of
Whither He Voyag’d, Where He Stay’d, Whom He Sawe, and What He Learnt.”
3.
We have now reached the point from which the more academic school of
alienists date Charles Ward’s madness. Upon his discovery the youth had
looked immediately at a few of the inner pages of the book and
manuscripts, and had evidently seen something which impressed him
tremendously. Indeed, in shewing 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 shew 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 shewn what he did to the workmen, had it not been for their
unconcealed curiosity. As it was he doubtless wished to avoid any
display of peculiar reticence which would increase their discussion of
the matter.
That night Charles Ward sat up in his room reading the new-found book
and papers, and when day came he did not desist. His meals, on his
urgent request when his mother called to see what was amiss, were sent
up to him; and in the afternoon he appeared only briefly when the men
came to install the Curwen picture and mantelpiece in his study. The
next night he slept in snatches in his clothes, meanwhile wrestling
feverishly with the 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 shewn 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 the 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 and century-recalling mirror.
His parents, subsequently recalling his conduct at this period, give
interesting details anent the policy of concealment which he practiced.
Before servants he seldom hid any paper which he might be studying,
since he rightly assumed that Curwen’s intricate and archaic
chirography would be too much for them. With his parents, however, he
was more circumspect; and unless the manuscript in question were a
cipher, or a mere mass of cryptic symbols and unknown ideographs (as
that entitled “To Him Who Shal Come After etc.” seemed to be), he would
cover it with some convenient paper until his caller had departed. At
night he kept the papers under lock and key in an antique cabinet of
his, where he also placed them whenever he left the room. He soon
resumed fairly regular hours and habits, except that his long walks and
other outside interests seemed to cease. The opening of school, where
he now began his senior year, seemed a great bore to him; and he
frequently asserted his determination never to bother with college. He
had, he said, important special investigations to make, which would
provide him with more avenues toward knowledge and the humanities than
any university which the world could boast.
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 shew 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 daemonology, were what he sought now; and when Providence
sources proved unfruitful he would take the train for Boston and tap
the wealth of the great library in Copley Square, the Widener Library
at Harvard, or the Zion Research Library in Brookline, where certain
rare works on Biblical subjects are available. He bought extensively,
and fitted up a whole additional set of shelves in his study for newly
acquired works on uncanny subjects; while during the Christmas holidays
he made a round of out-of-town trips including one to Salem to consult
certain records at the Essex Institute.
About the middle of January, 1920, there entered Ward’s bearing an
element of triumph which he did not explain, and he was no more found
at work upon the Hutchinson cipher. Instead, he inaugurated a dual
policy of chemical research and record-scanning; fitting up for the one
a laboratory in the unused attic of the house, and for the latter
haunting all the sources of vital statistics in Providence. Local
dealers in drugs and scientific supplies, later questioned, gave
astonishingly queer and meaningless catalogues of the substances and
instruments he purchased; but clerks at the State House, the City Hall,
and the various libraries agree as to the definite object of his second
interest. He was searching intensely and feverishly for the grave of
Joseph Curwen, from whose slate slab an older generation had so wisely
blotted the name.
Little by little there grew upon the Ward family the conviction that
something was wrong. 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 this
shift was explained when, upon going over the files that he had been
over, the investigators actually found a fragmentary record of Curwen’s
burial which had escaped the general obliteration, and which stated
that the curious leaden coffin had been interred “10 ft. S. and 5 ft.
W. of Naphthali Field’s grave in y^e—”. 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; 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 shewn
that the only Naphthali Field (obiit 1729) whose grave could have been
meant had been a Baptist.
4.
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 shewing 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 formulae and diagrams; but finally shewed him the exteriors of
some of the real Curwen finds—the “Journall 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 Wakeful this Day putt in from
London with XX newe Men pick’d up in y^e Indies, Spaniards from
Martineco and 2 Dutch Men from Surinam. Y^e Dutch Men are like to
Desert from have’g hearde Somewhat ill of these Ventures, but I will
see to y^e Inducing of them to Staye. ffor Mr. Knight Dexter of y^e
Boy and Book 120 Pieces Camblets, 100 Pieces Assrtd. Cambleteens, 20
Pieces blue Duffles, 100 Pieces Shalloons, 50 Pieces Calamancoes,
300 Pieces each, Shendsoy and Humhums. ffor Mr. Green at y^e
Elephant 50 Gallon Cyttles, 20 Warm’g Pannes, 15 Bake Cyttles, 10
pr. Smoke’g Tonges. ffor Mr. Perrigo 1 Sett of Awles, ffor Mr.
Nightingale 50 Reames prime Foolscap. Say’d y^e 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
can not 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 Hallows-Eves, I am Hopeful y^e Thing is
breed’g Outside y^e 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 look back
thro’ all y^e yeares, against y^e which I must have ready y^e 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 above 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 consumed all his time, and he mentioned
a laboratory which he had established in one of his rooms. That he said
nothing of antiquarian rambles in the glamorous old city with its
luring skyline of ancient domes and steeples and its tangles of roads
and alleys whose mystic convolutions and sudden vistas alternately
beckon and surprise, was taken by his parents as a good index of the
degree to which his new interests had engrossed his mind.
In June, 1924, a brief note told of his departure for Paris, to which
he had before made one or two flying trips for material in the
Bibliothèque Nationale. For three months thereafter he sent only postal
cards, giving an address in the Rue St. Jacques and referring to a
special search among rare manuscripts in the library of an unnamed
private collector. He avoided acquaintances, and no tourists brought
back reports of having seen him. Then came a silence, and in October
the Wards received a picture card from Prague, Czecho-Slovakia, stating
that Charles was in that ancient town for the purpose of conferring
with a certain very aged man supposed to be the last living possessor
of some very curious mediaeval information. He gave an address in the
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, 1926, 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 to 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
born. It was twilight, and Charles Dexter Ward had come home.
5.
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 queernesses 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 part 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,
bristled 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 promising 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 sort 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 Amasa 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.
Sergt. 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 Ward was seldom seen by his family. Having
added sleeping quarters to his attic realm, he kept closely to himself
there, ordering food brought to the door and not taking it in until
after the servant had gone away. The droning of monotonous formulae and
the chanting of bizarre rhythms recurred at intervals, while at other
times occasional listeners could detect the sound of tinkling glass,
hissing chemicals, running water, or roaring gas flames. 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.
6.
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 On Agla Mathon,
verbum pythonicum, mysterium salamandrae,
conventus sylvorum, antra gnomorum,
daemonia Coeli Gad, Almousin, Gibor, Jehosua,
Evam, Zariatnatmik, veni, veni, veni.”
This had been going on for two hours without change or intermission
when over all the neighbourhood a pandaemoniac 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-lgeb-fi-throdog”—ending in a “Yah!” whose
maniacal force mounted in an ear-splitting crescendo. A second later
all previous memories were effaced by the wailing scream which burst
out with frantic explosiveness and gradually changed form to a paroxysm
of diabolic and hysterical laughter. Mrs. Ward, with the mingled fear
and blind courage of maternity, advanced and knocked affrightedly at
the concealing panels, but obtained no sign of recognition. She knocked
again, but paused nervelessly as a second shriek arose, this one
unmistakably in the familiar voice of her son, and sounding
concurrently with the still bursting cachinnations of that other voice.
Presently she fainted, although she is still unable to recall the
precise and immediate cause. Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.
Mr. Ward returned from the business section at about quarter past six;
and not finding his wife downstairs, was told by the frightened
servants that she was probably watching at Charles’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 set bowl 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 a dialogue, with the regular alteration of inflections
suggesting question and answer, statement and response. One voice was
undisguisedly that of Charles, but the other had a depth and hollowness
which the youth’s best powers of ceremonial mimicry had scarcely
approached before. There was something hideous, blasphemous, and
abnormal about it, and but for a cry from his recovering wife which
cleared his mind by arousing his protective instincts it is not likely
that Theodore Howland Ward could have maintained for nearly a year more
his old boast that he had never fainted. As it was, he seized his wife
in his arms and bore her quickly downstairs before she could notice the
voices which had so horribly disturbed him. Even so, however, he was
not quick enough to escape catching something himself which caused him
to stagger dangerously with his burden. For Mrs. Ward’s cry had
evidently been heard by others than he, and there had come 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 no longer be
permitted; for these latest developments transcended every limit of
sanity and formed a menace to the order and nervous well-being of the
entire household. The youth must indeed have taken complete leave of
his senses, since only downright madness could have prompted the wild
screams and imaginary conversations in assumed voices which the present
day had brought forth. All this must be stopped, or Mrs. Ward would be
made ill and the keeping of servants become an impossibility.
Mr. Ward rose at the close of the meal and started upstairs for
Charles’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 noises,
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 technical 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
had been found an hour before in the basement, with staring eyes and
fear-distorted mouth.
Driven by some vague detective instinct, the bewildered parent now
glanced curiously at the vacant shelves to see what his son had taken
up to the attic. The youth’s library was plainly and rigidly
classified, so that one might tell at a glance the books or at least
the kind of books which had been withdrawn. On this occasion Mr. Ward
was astonished to find that nothing of the occult or the antiquarian,
beyond what had been previously removed, was missing. These new
withdrawals were all modern items; histories, scientific treatises,
geographies, manuals of literature, philosophic works, and certain
contemporary newspapers and magazines. It was a very curious shift from
Charles Ward’s recent run of reading, and the father paused in a
growing vortex of perplexity and an engulfing sense of strangeness. The
strangeness was a very poignant sensation, and almost clawed at his
chest as he strove to see just what was wrong around him. Something was
indeed wrong, and tangibly as well as spiritually so. 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 forever 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.
IV. A Mutation and a Madness
1.
In the week following that memorable Good Friday Charles Ward was seen
more often than usual, and was continually carrying books between his
library and the attic laboratory. His actions were quiet and rational,
but he had a furtive, hunted look which his mother did not like, and
developed an incredibly ravenous appetite as gauged by his demands upon
the cook. Dr. Willett had been told of those Friday noises and
happenings, and on the following Tuesday had a long conversation with
the youth in the library where the picture stared no more. The
interview was, as always, inconclusive; but Willett is still ready to
swear that the youth was sane and himself at the time. He held out
promises of an early revelation, and spoke of the need of securing a
laboratory elsewhere. At the loss of the portrait he grieved singularly
little considering his first enthusiasm over it, but seemed to find
something of positive 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 had watched him grow up from birth. Another
report of his doings came from Pawtuxet, where some friends of the
family saw him at a distance a surprising number of times. He seemed to
haunt the resort and canoe-house of Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet, and
subsequent inquiries by Dr. Willett at that place brought out the fact
that his purpose was always to secure access to the rather hedged-in
river-bank, along which he would walk toward the north, usually not
reappearing for a very long while.
Late in May came a momentary revival of ritualistic sounds in the attic
laboratory which brought a stern reproof from Mr. Ward and a somewhat
distracted promise of amendment from Charles. It occurred one morning,
and seemed to form a resumption of the imaginary conversation noted on
that turbulent Good Friday. The youth was arguing or remonstrating
hotly with himself, for there suddenly burst forth a perfectly
distinguishable series of clashing shouts in differentiated tones like
alternate demands and denials which caused Mrs. Ward to run upstairs
and listen at the door. She could hear no more than a fragment whose
only plain words were “must have it red for three months”, and upon her
knocking all sounds ceased at once. When Charles was later questioned
by his father he said that there were certain conflicts of spheres of
consciousness which only great skill could avoid, but which he would
try to transfer to other realms.
About the middle of June a queer nocturnal incident occurred. In the
early evening there had been some noise and thumping in the laboratory
upstairs, and Mr. Ward was on the point of investigating when it
suddenly quieted down. That midnight, after the family had retired, the
butler was nightlocking the front door when according to his statement
Charles appeared somewhat blunderingly and uncertainly at the foot of
the stairs with a large suitcase and made signs that he wished egress.
The youth spoke no word, but the worthy Yorkshireman caught one sight
of his fevered eyes and trembled causelessly. He opened the door and
young Ward went out, but in the morning he presented his resignation to
Mrs. Ward. There was, he said, something unholy in the glance Charles
had fixed on him. It was no way for a young gentleman to look at an
honest person, and he could not possibly stay another night. Mrs. Ward
allowed the man to depart, but she did not value his statement highly.
To fancy Charles in a savage state that night was quite ridiculous, for
as long as she had remained awake she had heard faint sounds from the
laboratory above; sounds as if of sobbing and pacing, and of a sighing
which told only of despair’s profoundest depths. Mrs. Ward had grown
used to listening for sounds in the night, for the mystery of her son
was fast driving all else from her mind.
The next evening, much as on another evening nearly three months
before, Charles Ward seized the newspaper very early and accidentally
lost the main section. The matter was not recalled till later, when Dr.
Willett began checking up loose ends and searching out missing links
here and there. In the Journal office he found the section which
Charles had lost, and marked two items as of possible significance.
They were as follows:
More Cemetery Delving
It was this morning discovered by Robert Hart, night watchman at the
North Burial Ground, that ghouls were again at work in the ancient
portion of the cemetery. The grave of Ezra Weeden, who was born in
1740 and died in 1824, according to his uprooted and savagely
splintered slate headstone, was found excavated and rifled, the work
being evidently done with a spade stolen from an adjacent tool-shed.
Whatever the contents may have been after more than a century of
burial, all was gone except a few slivers of decayed wood. There
were no wheel tracks, but the police have measured a single set of
footprints which they found in the vicinity, and which indicate the
boots of a man of refinement.
Hart is inclined to link this incident with the digging discovered
last March, when a party in a motor truck were frightened away after
making a deep excavation; but Sergt. Riley of the Second Station
discounts this theory and points to vital differences in the two
cases. In March the digging had been in a spot where no grave was
known; but this time a well-marked and cared-for grave had been
rifled with every evidence of deliberate purpose, and with a
conscious malignity expressed in the splintering of the slab which
had been intact up to the day before.
Members of the Weeden family, notified of the happening, expressed
their astonishment and regret; and were wholly unable to think of
any enemy who would care to violate the grave of their ancestor.
Hazard Weeden of 598 Angell Street recalls a family legend according
to which Ezra Weeden was involved in some very peculiar
circumstances, not dishonourable to himself, shortly before the
Revolution; but of any modern feud or mystery he is frankly
ignorant. Inspector Cunningham has been assigned to the case, and
hopes to uncover some valuable clues in the near future.
Dogs Noisy in Pawtuxet
Residents of Pawtuxet were aroused about 3 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 occurrence of
muffled sighs and sobbings at the most impossible times. Early in July
Willett ordered Mrs. Ward to Atlantic City for an indefinite
recuperative sojourn, and cautioned both Mr. Ward and the haggard and
elusive Charles to write her only cheering letters. It is probably to
this enforced and reluctant escape that she owes her life and continued
sanity.
2.
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 old quarters on the
third floor, and never haunted the attic again.
To the Pawtuxet bungalow Charles transferred all the secrecy with which
he had surrounded his attic realm, save that he now appeared to have
two sharers of his mysteries; a villainous-looking Portuguese
half-caste from the South Main St. 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 hated
establishment with the current epidemic of vampiristic attacks and
murders; especially since the radius of that plague seemed now confined
wholly to Pawtuxet and the adjacent streets of Edgewood.
Ward spent most of his time at the bungalow, but slept occasionally at
home and was still reckoned a dweller beneath his father’s roof. Twice
he was absent from the city on week-long trips, whose destinations have
not yet been discovered. He grew steadily paler and more emaciated even
than before, and lacked some of his former assurance when repeating to
Dr. Willett his old, old story of vital research and future
revelations. Willett often waylaid him at his father’s house, for the
elder Ward was deeply worried and perplexed, and wished his son to get
as much sound oversight as could be managed in the case of so secretive
and independent an adult. The doctor still insists that the youth was
sane even as late as this, and adduces many a conversation to prove his
point.
About September the vampirism declined, but in the following January
Ward almost became involved in serious trouble. For some time the
nocturnal arrival and departure of motor trucks at the Pawtuxet
bungalow had been commented upon, and at this juncture an unforeseen
hitch exposed the nature of at least one item of their contents. In a
lonely spot near Hope Valley had occurred one of the frequent sordid
waylayings of trucks by “hi-jackers” in quest of liquor shipments, but
this time the robbers had been destined to receive the greater shock.
For the long cases they seized proved upon opening to contain some
exceedingly gruesome things; so gruesome, in fact, that the matter
could not be kept quiet amongst the denizens of the underworld. The
thieves had hastily buried what they discovered, but when the State
Police got wind of the matter a careful search was made. A recently
arrested vagrant, under promise of immunity from prosecution on any
additional charge, at last consented to guide a party of troopers to
the spot; and there was found in that hasty cache a very hideous and
shameful thing. It would not be well for the national—or even the
international—sense of decorum if the public were ever to know what was
uncovered by that awestruck party. There was no mistaking it, even by
these far from studious officers; and telegrams to Washington ensued
with feverish rapidity.
The cases were addressed to Charles Ward at his Pawtuxet bungalow, and
State and Federal officials at once paid him a very forceful and
serious call. They found him pallid and worried with his two odd
companions, and received from him what seemed to be a valid explanation
and evidence of innocence. He had needed certain anatomical specimens
as part of a 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 that the general public will never know of their
blasphemous disturbance.
On February 9, 1928, Dr. Willett received a letter from Charles Ward
which he considers of extraordinary importance, and about which he has
frequently 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 shewing traces of
shattered nerves, is nevertheless distinctly Ward’s own. The text in
full is as follows:
“100 Prospect St.
Providence, R.I.,
February 8, 1928.
“Dear Dr. Willett:—
“I feel that at last the time has come for me to make the
disclosures which I have so long promised you, and for which you
have pressed me so often. The patience you have shewn in waiting,
and the confidence you have shewn in my mind and integrity, are
things I shall never cease to appreciate.
“And now that I am ready to speak, I must own with humiliation that
no triumph such as I dreamed of can ever be mine. Instead of triumph
I have found terror, and my talk with you will not be a boast of
victory but a plea for help and advice in saving both myself and the
world from a horror beyond all human conception or calculation. You
recall what those Fenner letters said of the old raiding party at
Pawtuxet. That must all be done again, and quickly. Upon us depends
more than can be put into words—all civilisation, all natural law,
perhaps even the fate of the solar system and the universe. I have
brought to light a monstrous abnormality, but I did it for the sake
of knowledge. Now for the sake of all life and Nature you must help
me thrust it back into the dark again.
“I have left that Pawtuxet place forever, and we must extirpate
everything existing there, alive or dead. I shall not go there
again, and you must not believe it if you ever hear that I am there.
I will tell you why I say this when I see you. I have come home for
good, and wish you would call on me at the very first moment that
you can spare five or six hours continuously to hear what I have to
say. It will take that long—and believe me when I tell you that you
never had a more genuine professional duty than this. My life and
reason are the very least things which hang in the balance.
“I dare not tell my father, for he could not grasp the whole thing.
But I have told him of my danger, and he has four men from a
detective agency watching the house. I don’t know how much good they
can do, for they have against them forces which even you could
scarcely envisage or acknowledge. So come quickly if you wish to see
me alive and hear how you may help to save the cosmos from stark
hell.
“Any time will do—I shall not be out of the house. Don’t telephone
ahead, for there is no telling who or what may try to intercept you.
And let us pray to whatever gods there be that nothing may prevent
this meeting.
“In utmost gravity and desperation,
“Charles Dexter Ward.”
“P.S. Shoot Dr. Allen on sight and dissolve his body in acid. Don’t
burn it.”
Dr. Willett received this note about 10:30 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 sort of compromise”,
or “I am very sorry, but I must take a complete vacation from
everything; I’ll talk with you later”. Then, apparently gaining
boldness through meditation, he had slipped out so quietly that no one
had seen him depart or knew that he had gone until he returned about
one o’clock and entered the house without a word. He had gone upstairs,
where a bit of his fear must have surged back; for he was heard to cry
out in a highly 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 shewed
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 notify 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.
3.
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 Broad Street one early afternoon
toward the end of February in his small motor, he thought oddly of the
grim party which had taken that selfsame road a hundred and fifty-seven
years before on a terrible errand which none might ever comprehend.
The ride through the city’s decaying fringe was short, and trim
Edgewood and sleepy Pawtuxet presently spread out ahead. Willett turned
to the right down Lockwood Street and drove his car as far along that
rural road as he could, then alighted and walked north to where the
bluff towered above the lovely bends of the river and the sweep of
misty downlands beyond. Houses were still few here, and there was no
mistaking the isolated bungalow with its concrete garage on a high
point of land at his left. Stepping briskly up the neglected gravel
walk he rapped at the door with a firm hand, and spoke without a tremor
to the evil Portuguese mulatto who opened it to the width of a crack.
He must, he said, see Charles Ward at once on vitally important
business. No excuse would be accepted, and a repulse would mean only a
full report of the matter to the elder Ward. The mulatto still
hesitated, and pushed against the door when Willett attempted to open
it; but the doctor merely raised his voice and renewed his demands.
Then there came from the dark interior a husky whisper which somehow
chilled the hearer through and through though he did not know why he
feared it. “Let him in, Tony,” it said, “we may as well talk now as
ever.” But disturbing as was the whisper, the greater fear was that
which immediately followed. The floor creaked and the speaker hove in
sight—and the owner of those strange and resonant tones was seen to be
no other than Charles Dexter Ward.
The minuteness with which Dr. Willett recalled and recorded his
conversation of that afternoon is due to the importance he assigns to
this particular period. For at last he concedes a vital change in
Charles Dexter Ward’s mentality, and believes that the youth now spoke
from a brain hopelessly alien to the brain whose growth he had watched
for six and twenty years. Controversy with Dr. Lyman has compelled him
to be very specific, and he definitely dates the madness of Charles
Ward from the time the typewritten notes began to reach his parents.
Those notes are not in Ward’s normal style; not even in the style of
that last frantic letter to Willett. Instead, they are strange and
archaic, as if the snapping of the writer’s mind had released a flood
of tendencies and impressions picked up unconsciously through boyhood
antiquarianism. There is an obvious effort to be modern, but the spirit
and occasionally the language are those of the past.
The past, too, was evident in Ward’s every tone and gesture as he
received the doctor in that shadowy bungalow. He bowed, motioned
Willett to a seat, and began to speak abruptly in that strange whisper
which he sought to explain at the very outset.
“I am grown phthisical,” he began, “from this cursed river air. You
must excuse my speech. I suppose you are come from my father to see
what ails me, and I hope you will say nothing to alarm him.”
Willett was studying these scraping tones with extreme care, but
studying even more closely the face of the speaker. Something, he felt,
was wrong; and he thought of what the family had told him about the
fright of that Yorkshire butler one night. He wished it were not so
dark, but did not request that any blind be opened. Instead, he merely
asked Ward why he had so belied the frantic note of little more than a
week before.
“I was coming to that,” the host replied. “You must know, I am in a
very bad state of nerves, and do and say queer things I cannot account
for. As I have told you often, I am on the edge of great matters; and
the bigness of them has a way of making me light-headed. Any man might
well be frighted of what I have found, but I am not to be put off for
long. I was a dunce to have that guard and stick at home; for having
gone this far, my place is here. I am not well spoke of by my prying
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 shew 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; whilst all the massed
antiquarianism of his youth had welled up from some profound
subconsciousness to engulf the contemporary and the individual. The
youth’s intimate knowledge of elder 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’ 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
Lovers 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 shewed the plainest boredom. What he wished
clearly enough was only to satisfy his visitor enough to make him
depart without the intention of returning. To this end he offered to
shew Willett the entire house, and at once proceeded to lead the doctor
through every room from cellar to attic. Willett looked sharply, but
noted that the visible books were far too few and trivial ever to have
filled the wide gaps on Ward’s shelves at home, and that the 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 shewed 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.
4.
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 reassurred
less than they ought to have been when the youth hoarsely explained
that his hand had lately been so much affected by a nervous shock as to
make normal writing impossible. He could, he said, form no written
characters at all except with great difficulty; and could prove it by
the fact that he had been forced to type all his recent letters, even
those to his father and mother, who would bear out the assertion.
What made the investigators pause in confusion was not this
circumstance alone, for that was nothing unprecedented or fundamentally
suspicious; nor even the Pawtuxet gossip, of which one or two of them
had caught echoes. It was the muddled discourse of the young man which
nonplussed them, implying as it did a virtually total loss of memory
concerning important monetary matters which he had had at his
fingertips only a month or two before. Something was wrong; for despite
the apparent coherence and rationality of his speech, there could be no
normal reason for this ill-concealed blankness on vital points.
Moreover, although none of these men knew Ward well, they could not
help observing the change in his language and manner. They had heard he
was an antiquarian, but even the most hopeless antiquarians do not make
daily use of obsolete phraseology and gestures. Altogether, this
combination of hoarseness, palsied hands, bad memory, and altered
speech and bearing must represent some disturbance or malady of genuine
gravity, which no doubt formed the basis of the prevailing odd 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
ominous 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 inquisitors that the bearded and spectacled
man would return when needed. In paying off the stolid Brava who
resisted all questioning by the visitors, and in closing the bungalow
which still seemed to hold such nighted secrets, Ward shewed no sign of
nervousness save a barely noticed tendency to pause as though listening
for something very faint. He was apparently animated by a calmly
philosophic resignation, as if his removal were the merest transient
incident which would cause the least trouble if facilitated and
disposed of once and for all. It was clear that he trusted to his
obviously unimpaired keenness of absolute mentality to overcome all the
embarrassments into which his twisted memory, his lost voice and
handwriting, and his secretive and eccentric 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
altered skin, and the disproportionate neural reactions. Dr. Willett
was the most perturbed of the various examiners, for he had attended
Ward all his life and could appreciate with terrible keenness the
extent of his physical 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 shewn him in the old non-secretive days, and which read: “Mr. G. B.
on that Nighte putt y^e 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. For above the young man’s
right eye was something which he had never previously noticed—a small
scar or pit precisely like that in the crumbled painting of old Joseph
Curwen, and perhaps attesting some hideous ritualistic inoculation to
which both had submitted at a certain stage of their occult careers.
While Ward himself was puzzling all the doctors at the hospital a very
strict watch was kept on all mail addressed either to him or to Dr.
Allen, which Mr. Ward had ordered delivered at the family home. Willett
had predicted that very little would be found, since any communications
of a vital nature would probably have been exchanged by messenger; but
in the latter part of March there did come a letter from Prague for Dr.
Allen which gave both the doctor and the father deep thought. It was in
a very crabbed and archaic hand; and though clearly not the effort of a
foreigner, shewed almost as singular a departure from modern English as
the speech of young Ward himself. It read:
Kleinstrasse 11,
Altstadt, Prague,
11th Feby. 1928.
Brother in Almousin-Metraton:—
I this day receiv’d y^r mention of what came up from the Salts I
sent you. It was wrong, and meanes clearly that y^e Headstones had
been chang’d when Barnabas gott me the Specimen. It is often so, as
you must be sensible of from the Thing you gott from y^e Kings
Chapell ground in 1769 and what H. gott from Olde Bury’g Point in
1690, that was like to ende him. I gott such a Thing in Aegypt 75
yeares gone, from the which came that Scar y^e 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 y^e Spheres beyond.
Have y^e Wordes for laying at all times readie, and stopp not to be
sure when there is any Doubte of Whom you have. Stones are all
chang’d now in Nine groundes out of 10. You are never sure till you
question. I this day heard from H., who has had Trouble with the
Soldiers. He is like to be sorry Transylvania is pass’d from Hungary
to Roumania, and wou’d change his Seat if the Castel weren’t so
fulle of What we Knowe. But of this he hath doubtless writ you. In
my next Send’g there will be Somewhat from a Hill tomb from y^e 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 Philada.
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 y^e End.
Yogg-Sothoth Neblod Zin
Simon O.
To Mr. J. C. in
Providence.
Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett paused in utter chaos before this apparent bit
of unrelieved insanity. Only by degrees did they absorb what it seemed
to imply. So the absent Dr. Allen, and not Charles Ward, had come to be
the leading spirit at Pawtuxet? That must explain the wild reference
and denunciation in the youth’s last frantic letter. And what of this
addressing of the bearded and spectacled stranger as “Mr. J. C.”? There
was no escaping the inference, but there are limits to possible
monstrosity. Who was “Simon O.”; the old man Ward had visited in Prague
four years previously? Perhaps, but in the centuries behind there had
been another Simon O.—Simon Orne, alias Jedediah, of Salem, who
vanished in 1771, and whose peculiar handwriting Dr. Willett now
unmistakably recognised from the photostatic copies of the Orne
formulae which Charles had once shewn him. What horrors and mysteries,
what contradictions and contraventions of Nature, had come back after a
century and a half to harass Old Providence with her clustered spires
and domes?
The father and the old physician, virtually at a loss what to do or
think, went to see Charles at the hospital and questioned him as
delicately as they could about Dr. Allen, 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 studied from unpremeditated specimens obtained by
various ruses. Willett thought he had placed its odd familiarity at
last, and that what it vaguely resembled was the bygone penmanship of
old Joseph Curwen himself; but this the other physicians regarded as a
phase of imitativeness only to be expected in a mania of this sort, and
refused to grant it any importance either 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 Squad of 20 Militia up to talk about what the
Country Folk say. Must digg deeper and have less Hearde. These
Roumanians plague me damnably, being officious and particular where
you cou’d buy a Magyar off with a Drinke and ffood. Last monthe M.
got me y^e Sarcophagus of y^e Five Sphinxes from y^e Acropolis where
He whome I call’d up say’d it wou’d be, and I have hadde 3 Talkes
with What was therein inhum’d. It will go to S. O. in Prague
directly, and thence to you. It is stubborn but you know y^e 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
Heads, and it made Much to be founde in Case of Trouble, as you too
welle knowe. You can now move and worke elsewhere with no Kill’g
Trouble if needful, tho’ 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 ask’d Protection of One not dispos’d
to give it. You excel me in gett’g y^e fformulae so another may saye
them with Success, but Borellus fancy’d it wou’d be so if just y^e
right Wordes were hadd. Does y^e Boy use ’em often? I regret that he
growes squeamish, as I fear’d he wou’d when I hadde him here nigh 15
Monthes, but am sensible you knowe how to deal with him. You can’t
saye him down with y^e fformula, for that will Worke only upon such
as y^e other fformula hath call’d up from Saltes; but you still have
strong Handes and Knife and Pistol, and Graves are not harde to
digg, nor Acids loth to burne. O. sayes you have promis’d him B. F.
I must have him after. B. goes to you soone, and may he give you
what you wishe of that Darke Thing belowe Memphis. Imploy care in
what you calle up, and beware of y^e Boy. It will be ripe in a
yeare’s time to have up y^e 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.
Nephren-Ka nai Hadoth
Edw: H.
For J. Curwen, Esq.
Providence.
But if Willett and Mr. Ward refrained from shewing this letter to the
alienists, they did not refrain from acting upon it themselves. No
amount of learned sophistry could controvert the fact that the
strangely bearded and spectacled Dr. Allen, of whom Charles’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.
V. A Nightmare and a Cataclysm
1.
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 connexion 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 the bygone ashes some vestige of the consciousness and
lore which had once animated and informed them.
A hideous traffick was going on among these nightmare ghouls, whereby
illustrious bones were bartered with the calm calculativeness of
schoolboys swapping books; and from what was extorted from this
centuried dust there was anticipated a power and a wisdom beyond
anything which the cosmos had ever seen concentrated in one man or
group. They had found unholy ways to keep their brains alive, either in
the same body or different bodies; and had evidently achieved a way of
tapping the consciousness of the dead whom they gathered together.
There had, it seems, been some truth in chimerical old Borellus when he
wrote of preparing from even the most antique remains certain
“Essential Saltes” from which the shade of a long-dead living thing
might be raised up. There was a formula for evoking such a shade, and
another for putting it down; and it had now been so perfected that it
could be taught successfully. One must be careful about evocations, for
the markers of old graves are not always accurate.
Willett and Mr. Ward shivered as they passed from conclusion to
conclusion. Things—presences or voices of some sort—could be drawn down
from unknown places as well as from the grave, and in this process also
one must be careful. Joseph Curwen had indubitably evoked many
forbidden things, and as for Charles—what might one think of him? What
forces “outside the spheres” had reached him from Joseph Curwen’s day
and turned his mind on forgotten things? He had been led to find
certain directions, and he had used them. He had talked with the man of
horror in Prague and stayed long with the creature in the mountains of
Transylvania. And he must have found the grave of Joseph Curwen at
last. That newspaper item and what his mother had heard in the night
were too significant to overlook. Then he had summoned something, and
it must have come. That mighty voice aloft on Good Friday, and those
different tones in the locked attic laboratory. What were they like,
with their depth and hollowness? Was there not here some awful
foreshadowing of the dreaded stranger Dr. Allen with his spectral bass?
Yes, that was what Mr. Ward had felt with vague horror in his single
talk with the man—if man it were—over the telephone!
What hellish consciousness or voice, what morbid shade or presence, had
come to answer Charles Ward’s secret rites behind that locked door?
Those voices heard in argument—“must have it red for three months”—Good
God! Was not that just before the vampirism broke out? The rifling of
Ezra Weeden’s ancient grave, and the cries later at Pawtuxet—whose mind
had planned the vengeance and rediscovered the shunned seat of elder
blasphemies? And then the bungalow and the bearded stranger, and the
gossip, and the fear. The final madness of Charles neither father nor
doctor could attempt to explain, but they did feel sure that the mind
of Joseph Curwen had come to earth again and was following its ancient
morbidities. Was daemoniac possession in truth a possibility? Allen had
something to do with it, and the detectives must find out more about
one whose existence menaced the young man’s life. In the meantime,
since the existence of some vast crypt beneath the bungalow seemed
virtually beyond dispute, some effort must be made to find it. Willett
and Mr. Ward, conscious of the sceptical attitude of the alienists,
resolved during their final conference to undertake a joint secret
exploration of unparalleled thoroughness; and agreed to meet at the
bungalow on the following morning with valises and with certain tools
and accessories suited to architectural search and underground
exploration.
The morning of April 6th 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 possible way, and exerting a double strength, he
finally found that the top did indeed turn and slide horizontally on a
corner pivot. Beneath it lay a trim concrete surface with an iron
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 southwest of the present building.
2.
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 as here loomed up on every hand through the burying dust
and cobwebs of a century and a half, in many cases evidently shattered
as if by the ancient raiders. For many of the chambers seemed wholly
untrodden by modern feet, and must have represented the earliest and
most obsolete phases of Joseph Curwen’s experimentation. Finally there
came a room of obvious modernity, or at least of recent occupancy.
There were oil heaters, bookshelves and tables, chairs and cabinets,
and a desk piled high with papers of varying antiquity and
contemporaneousness. Candlesticks and oil lamps stood about in several
places; and finding a match-safe handy, Willett lighted such as were
ready for use.
In the fuller gleam it appeared that this apartment was nothing less
than the latest study or library of Charles Ward. Of the books the
doctor had seen many before, and a good part of the furniture had
plainly come from the Prospect Street mansion. Here and there was a
piece well known to Willett, and the sense of familiarity became so
great that he half forgot the noisomeness and the wailing, both of
which were plainer here than they had been at the foot of the steps.
His first duty, as planned long ahead, was to find and seize any papers
which might seem of vital importance; especially those portentous
documents found by Charles so long ago behind the picture in Olney
Court. As he searched he perceived how stupendous a task the final
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. The 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 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
connexion 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.
[cdw1.gif]
Y’AI ’NG’NGAH,
YOG-SOTHOTH
H’EE—L’GEB
F’AI THRODOG
UAAAH
[cdw2.gif]
OGTHROD AI’F
GEB’L—EE’H
YOG-SOTHOTH
’NGAH’NG AI’Y
ZHRO
So haunting were these formulae, and so frequently did he come upon
them, that before the doctor knew it he was repeating them under his
breath. Eventually, however, he felt he had secured all the papers he
could digest to advantage for the present; hence resolved to examine no
more till he could bring the sceptical alienists en masse for an ampler
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.
3.
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
to some still deeper region of horror. Kneeling by one, he worked at it
with his hands, and found that with extreme difficulty he could budge
it. At his touch the moaning beneath ascended to a louder key, and only
with vast trepidation did he persevere in the lifting of the heavy
stone. A stench unnamable now rose 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
mustered up the courage to peer over the rough-hewn brink; lying at
full length and holding the torch downward at arm’s length to see what
might lie below. For a second he could distinguish nothing but the
slimy, moss-grown brick walls sinking illimitably into that
half-tangible miasma of murk and foulness and anguished frenzy; and
then he saw that something dark was leaping clumsily and frantically up
and down at the bottom of the narrow shaft, which must have been from
twenty to twenty-five feet below the stone floor where he lay. The
torch shook in his hand, but he looked again to see what manner of
living creature might be immured there in the darkness of that
unnatural well; left starving by young Ward through all the long month
since the doctors had taken him away, and clearly only one of a vast
number prisoned in the kindred wells whose pierced stone covers so
thickly studded in 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 measureable dimensions could so shake and change a
man; and we may only say that there is about certain outlines and
entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts frightfully on
a sensitive thinker’s perspective and whispers terrible hints of
obscure cosmic relationships and unnamable realities behind the
protective illusions of common vision. In that second look Willett saw
such an outline or entity, for during the next few instants he was
undoubtedly as stark mad as any inmate of Dr. Waite’s private hospital.
He dropped the electric torch from a hand drained of muscular power or
nervous coördination, 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 foot-hold 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 y^e liveliest Awfulness in
that which H. rais’d upp from What he cou’d gather onlie a part of.”
Then, horribly supplementing rather than displacing this image, there
came a recollection of those ancient lingering rumours anent the
burned, 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 after all, nor did anything issue from
that aperture to detain him. What had been down there made no sound nor
stir. Evidently its crunching of the fallen electric torch had not been
good for it. Each time Willett’s fingers felt a perforated slab he
trembled. His passage over it would sometimes increase the groaning
below, but generally it would produce no effect at all, since he moved
very noiselessly. Several times during his progress the glow ahead
diminished perceptibly, and he 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.
4.
In another moment he was hastily filling the burned-out lamps from an
oil supply he had previously noticed, and when the room was bright
again he looked about to see if he might find a lantern for further
exploration. For racked though he was with horror, his sense of grim
purpose was still uppermost; and he was firmly determined to leave no
stone unturned in his search for the hideous facts behind Charles
Ward’s bizarre madness. Failing to find a lantern, he chose the
smallest of the lamps to carry; also filling his pockets with candles
and matches, and taking with him a gallon can of oil, which he proposed
to keep for reserve use in whatever hidden laboratory he might uncover
beyond the terrible open space with its unclean altar and nameless
covered wells. To traverse that space again would require his utmost
fortitude, but he knew it must be done. Fortunately neither the
frightful altar nor the opened shaft was near the vast cell-indented
wall which bounded the cavern area, and whose black mysterious archways
would form the next goals of a logical search.
So Willett went back to that great pillared hall of stench and
anguished howling; turning down his lamp to avoid any distant glimpse
of the hellish altar, or of the uncovered pit with the pierced stone
slab beside it. Most of the black doorways led merely to small
chambers, some vacant and some evidently used as storerooms; 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 rims
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 business-like tanks and
tables, furnaces and modern instruments, occasional books and endless
shelves of jars and bottles proclaimed it indeed the long-sought
laboratory of Charles Ward—and no doubt of old Joseph Curwen before
him.
After lighting the three lamps which he found filled and ready, Dr.
Willett examined the place and all its appurtenances with the keenest
interest; noting from the relative quantities of various reagents on
the shelves that young Ward’s dominant concern must have been with some
branch of organic chemistry. On the whole, little could be learned from
the scientific ensemble, which included a gruesome-looking dissecting
table; so that the room was really rather a disappointment. Among the
books was a tattered old copy of Borellus in black-letter, and it was
weirdly interesting to note that Ward had underlined the same passage
whose marking had so perturbed good Mr. Merritt at Curwen’s farmhouse
more than a century and a half before. That older copy, of course, must
have perished along with the rest of Curwen’s occult library in the
final raid. Three archways opened off the laboratory, and these the
doctor proceeded to sample in turn. From his cursory survey he saw that
two led merely to small storerooms; but these he canvassed with care,
remarking the piles of coffins in various stages of damage and
shuddering violently at two or three of the few coffin-plates he could
decipher. There was much clothing also stored in these rooms, and
several new and tightly nailed boxes which he did not stop to
investigate. Most interesting of all, perhaps, were some odd bits which
he judged to be fragments of old Joseph Curwen’s laboratory appliances.
These had suffered damage at the hands of the raiders, but were still
partly 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 occurred
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 its 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 “Materials”, respectively—and then
there came a flash of memory as to where he had seen that word “Guards”
before in connexion 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 Heads, 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. saye y^e Sabaoth and learnt y^e Way.
“Rais’d Yog-Sothoth thrice and was y^e 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 of the scene. The whips and the instruments of
torture, the dust or salts from the jug of “Materia”, the two lekythoi
from the “Custodes” shelf, the robes, the formulae on the walls, the
notes on the pad, the hints from letters and legends, and the thousand
glimpses, doubts, and suppositions which had come to torment the
friends and parents of Charles Ward—all these engulfed the doctor in a
tidal wave of horror as he looked at that dry greenish powder outspread
in the pedestalled leaden kylix on the floor.
With an effort, however, Willett pulled himself together and began
studying the formulae 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 ominous Good Friday a year before, and
what an authority had told him was a very terrible invocation addressed
to secret gods outside the normal spheres. It was not spelled here
exactly as Mrs. Ward had set it down from memory, nor yet as the
authority had shewn it to him in the forbidden pages of “Eliphas Levi”;
but its identity was unmistakable, and such words as Sabaoth, Metraton,
Almousin, and Zariatnatmik sent a shudder of fright through the
searcher who had seen and felt so much of cosmic abomination just
around the corner.
This was on the left-hand wall as one entered the room. The right-hand
wall was no less thickly inscribed, and Willett felt a start of
recognition as he came upon the pair of formulae so frequently
occurring in the recent notes in the library. They were, roughly
speaking, the same; with the ancient symbols of “Dragon’s Head” and
“Dragon’s Tail” heading them as in Ward’s scribblings. But the spelling
differed quite widely from that of the modern versions, as if old
Curwen had had a different way of recording sound, or as if later study
had evolved more powerful and perfected variants of the invocations in
question. The doctor tried to reconcile the 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, engengah, Yogge-Sothotha”; which to
his mind would seriously interfere with the syllabification of the
second word.
Ground as the later text was into his consciousness, the discrepancy
disturbed him; and he found himself chanting the first of the formulae
aloud in an effort to square the sound he conceived with the letters he
found carved. Weird and menacing in that abyss of antique blasphemy
rang his voice; its accents keyed to a droning sing-song either through
the spell of the past and the unknown, or through the hellish example
of that dull, godless wail from the pits whose inhuman cadences rose
and fell rhythmically in the distance through the stench and 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 call up
Any that you can not put downe. . . . Have y^e 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?
5.
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 encroached on this side
of the Great Abyss. Again Mr. Ward asked, “But where did it go? It
brought you here, you know, and it sealed up the hole somehow.” And
Willett again let silence answer for him.
But after all, this was not the final phase of the matter. Reaching for
his handkerchief before rising to leave, Dr. Willett’s fingers closed
upon a piece of paper in his pocket which had not been there before,
and which was companioned by the candles and matches he had seized in
the vanished vault. It was a common sheet, torn obviously from the
cheap pad in that fabulous room of horror somewhere underground, and
the writing upon it was that of an ordinary lead pencil—doubtless the
one which had lain beside the pad. It was folded very carelessly, and
beyond the faint acrid scent of the cryptic chamber bore no print or
mark of any world but this. But in the text itself it did indeed reek
with wonder; for here was no script of any wholesome age, but the
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.
[cdw3.gif]
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 Hexham, and by the
towers along Hadrian’s crumbling wall. The words were in such Latin as
a barbarous age might remember—“Corvinus necandus est. Cadaver aq(ua)
forti dissolvendum, nec aliq(ui)d retinendum. Tace ut potes.”—which may
roughly be translated, “Curwen must be killed. The body must be
dissolved in aqua fortis, nor must anything be retained. Keep silence
as best you are able.”
Willett and Mr. Ward were mute and baffled. They had met the unknown,
and found that they lacked emotions to respond to it as they vaguely
believed they ought. With Willett, especially, the capacity for
receiving fresh impressions of awe was well-nigh exhausted; and both
men sat still and helpless till the closing of the library forced them
to leave. Then they drove listlessly to the Ward mansion in Prospect
Street, and talked to no purpose into the night. The doctor rested
toward morning, but did not go home. And he was still there Sunday noon
when a telephone message came from the detectives who had been assigned
to look up Dr. Allen.
Mr. Ward, who was pacing nervously about in a dressing-gown, answered
the call in person; and told the men to come up early the next day when
he heard their report was almost ready. Both Willett and he were glad
that this phase of the matter was taking form, for whatever the origin
of the strange minuscule message, it seemed certain that the “Curwen”
who must be destroyed could be no other than the bearded and spectacled
stranger. Charles had feared this man, and had said in the frantic note
that he must be killed and dissolved in acid. Allen, moreover, had been
receiving letters from the strange wizards in Europe under the name of
Curwen, and palpably regarded himself as an avatar of the bygone
necromancer. And now from a fresh and unknown source had come a message
saying that “Curwen” must be killed and dissolved in acid. The linkage
was too unmistakable to be factitious; and besides, was not Allen
planning to murder young Ward upon the advice of the creature called
Hutchinson? Of course, the letter they had seen had never reached the
bearded stranger; but from its text they could see that Allen had
already formed plans for dealing with the youth if he grew too
‘squeamish’. Without doubt, Allen must be apprehended; and even if the
most drastic directions were not carried out, he must be placed where
he could inflict no harm upon Charles Ward.
That afternoon, hoping against hope to extract some gleam of
information anent the inmost mysteries from the only available one
capable of giving it, the father and the doctor went down the bay and
called on young Charles at the hospital. Simply and gravely Willett
told him all he had found, and noticed how pale he turned as each
description made certain the truth of the discovery. The physician
employed as much dramatic effect as he could, and watched for a wincing
on Charles’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
shewed his first sign of animation. A quizzical look overspread his
face as he heard what Willett had read on the pad, and he ventured the
mild statement that those notes were old ones, of no possible
significance to anyone not deeply initiated in the history of magic.
“But,” he added, “had you but known the words to bring up that which I
had out in the cup, you had not been here to tell me this. ’Twas Number
118, and I conceive you would have shook had you looked it up in my
list in t’other room. ’Twas never raised by me, but I meant to have it
up that day you came to invite me hither.”
Then Willett told of the formula he had spoken and of the
greenish-black smoke which had arisen; and as he did so he saw true
fear dawn for the first time on Charles Ward’s face. “It came, and you
be here alive?” As Ward croaked the words his voice seemed almost to
burst free of its trammels and sink to cavernous abysses of uncanny
resonance. Willett, gifted with a flash of inspiration, believed he saw
the situation, and wove into his reply a caution from a letter he
remembered. “No. 118, you say? But don’t forget that stones are all
changed now in nine grounds out of ten. You are never sure till you
question!” And then, without warning, he drew forth the minuscule
message and flashed it before the patient’s eyes. He could have wished
no stronger result, for Charles Ward fainted forthwith.
All this conversation, of course, had been conducted with the greatest
secrecy lest the resident alienists accuse the father and the physician
of encouraging a madman in his delusions. Unaided, too, Dr. Willett and
Mr. Ward picked up the stricken youth and placed him on the couch. In
reviving, the patient mumbled many times of some word which he must get
to Orne and Hutchinson at once; so when his consciousness seemed fully
back the doctor told him that of those strange creatures at least one
was his bitter enemy, and had given Dr. Allen advice for his
assassination. This revelation produced no visible effect, and before
it was made the visitors could see that their host had already the look
of a hunted man. After that he would converse no more, so Willett and
the father departed presently; leaving behind a caution against the
bearded Allen, to which the youth only replied that this individual was
very safely taken care of, and could do no one any harm even if he
wished. This was said with an almost evil chuckle very painful to hear.
They did not worry about any communications Charles might indite 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 Nadek, 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 ill-regarded Castle
Ferenczy, whose master was so badly spoken of by peasants and soldiery
alike that he would shortly have been summoned to Bucharest for serious
questioning had not this incident cut off a career already so long as
to antedate all common memory. Willett maintains that the hand which
wrote those minuscules was able to wield stronger weapons as well; and
that while Curwen was left to him to dispose of, the writer felt able
to find and deal with Orne and Hutchinson itself. Of what their fate
may have been the doctor strives sedulously not to think.
6.
The following morning Dr. Willett hastened to the Ward home to be
present when the detectives arrived. Allen’s destruction or
imprisonment—or Curwen’s, if one might regard the tacit claim to
reincarnation as valid—he felt must be accomplished at any cost, and he
communicated this conviction to Mr. Ward as they sat waiting for the
men to come. They were downstairs this time, for the upper parts of the
house were beginning to be shunned because of a peculiar nauseousness
which hung indefinitely about; a nauseousness which the older servants
connected with some curse left by the vanished Curwen portrait.
At nine o’clock the three detectives presented themselves and
immediately delivered all that they had to say. They had not,
regrettably enough, located the Brava Tony Gomes as they had wished,
nor had they found the least trace of Dr. Allen’s source or present
whereabouts; but they had managed to unearth a considerable number of
local impressions and facts concerning the reticent stranger. Allen had
struck Pawtuxet people as a vaguely unnatural being, and there was an
universal belief that his thick Vandyke beard was either dyed or
false—a belief conclusively upheld by the finding of such a false
beard, together with a pair of dark glasses, in his room at the fateful
bungalow. His voice, Mr. Ward could well testify from his one telephone
conversation, had a depth and hollowness that could not be forgotten;
and his glance seemed malign even through his smoked and horn-rimmed
glasses. One shopkeeper, in the course of negotiations, had seen a
specimen of his handwriting and declared it was very queer and crabbed;
this being confirmed by pencilled notes of no clear meaning found in
his room and identified by the merchant. In connexion with the
vampirism rumours 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 detectives’
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 this data as it was gradually unfolded, and
almost trembled in following up the vague, mad thought which had
simultaneously reached their minds. The false beard and glasses—the
crabbed Curwen penmanship—the old portrait and its tiny scar—and the
altered youth in the hospital with such a scar—that deep, hollow voice
on the telephone—was it not of this that Mr. Ward was reminded when his
son barked forth those pitiable tones to which he now claimed to be
reduced? Who had ever seen Charles and Allen together? Yes, 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 shewn to such Pawtuxet
shopkeepers as had seen the portentous Dr. Allen. That article was a
photograph of his luckless son, on which he now carefully drew in ink
the pair of heavy glasses and the black pointed beard which the men had
brought from Allen’s room.
For two hours he waited with the doctor in the oppressive house where
fear and miasma were slowly gathering as the empty panel in the
upstairs library leered and leered and leered. Then the men returned.
Yes. The altered photograph was a very passable likeness of Dr. Allen.
Mr. Ward turned pale, and Willett wiped a suddenly dampened brow with
his handkerchief. Allen—Ward—Curwen—it was becoming too hideous for
coherent thought. What had the boy called out of the void, and what had
it done to him? What, really, had happened from first to last? Who was
this Allen who sought to kill Charles as too ‘squeamish’, and why had
his destined victim said in the postscript to that frantic letter that
he must be so completely obliterated in acid? Why, too, had the
minuscule message, of whose origin no one dared think, said that
“Curwen” must be likewise obliterated? What was the change, and when
had the final stage occurred? That day when his frantic note was
received—he had been nervous all the morning, then there was an
alteration. He had slipped out unseen and swaggered boldly in past the
men hired to guard him. That was the time, when he was out. But no—had
he not cried out in terror as he entered his study—this very room? What
had he found there? Or wait—what had found him? That simulacrum which
brushed boldly in without having been seen to go—was that an alien
shadow and a horror forcing itself upon a trembling figure which had
never gone out at all? Had not the butler spoken of queer noises?
Willett rang for the man and asked him some low-toned questions. It
had, surely enough, been a bad business. There had been noises—a cry, a
gasp, a choking, and a sort of clattering or creaking or thumping, or
all of these. And Mr. Charles was not the same when he stalked out
without a word. The butler shivered as he spoke, and sniffed at the
heavy air that blew down from some open window upstairs. Terror had
settled definitely upon the house, and only the business-like
detectives failed to imbibe a full measure of it. Even they were
restless, for this case had held vague elements in the background which
pleased them not at all. Dr. Willett was thinking deeply and rapidly,
and his thoughts were terrible ones. Now and then he would almost break
into muttering as he ran over in his head a new, appalling, and
increasingly conclusive chain of nightmare happenings.
Then Mr. Ward made a sign that the conference was over, and everyone
save him and the doctor left the room. It was noon now, but shadows as
of coming night seemed to engulf the phantom-haunted mansion. Willett
began talking very seriously to his host, and urged that he leave a
great deal of the future investigation to him. There would be, he
predicted, certain obnoxious elements which a friend could bear better
than a relative. As family physician he must have a free hand, and the
first thing he required was a period alone and undisturbed in the
abandoned library upstairs, where the ancient overmantel had gathered
about itself an aura of noisome horror more intense than when Joseph
Curwen’s features themselves glanced slyly down from the painted panel.
Mr. Ward, dazed by the flood of grotesque morbidities and unthinkably
maddening suggestions that poured in upon him from every side, could
only acquiesce; and half an hour later the doctor was locked in the
shunned room with the 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, and those in this house will sleep the
better for it.”
7.
That Dr. Willett’s “purgation” had been an ordeal almost as
nerve-racking in its way as his hideous wandering in the vanished crypt
is shewn by the fact that the elderly physician gave out completely as
soon as he reached home that evening. For three days he rested
constantly in his room, though servants later muttered something about
having heard him after midnight on Wednesday, when the outer door
softly opened and closed with phenomenal softness. Servants’
imaginations, fortunately, are limited, else comment might have been
excited by an item in Thursday’s Evening Bulletin which ran as follows:
North End Ghouls
Active Again
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 2 a.m., Hart observed the glow of a lantern or pocket torch
not far to the northwest, and upon opening the door detected the
figure of a man with a trowel very plainly silhouetted against a
nearby electric light. At once starting in pursuit, he saw the
figure dart hurriedly toward the main entrance, gaining the street
and losing himself among the shadows before approach or capture was
possible.
Like the first of the ghouls active during the past year, this
intruder had done no real damage before detection. A vacant part of
the Ward lot shewed signs of a little superficial digging, but
nothing even nearly the size of a grave had been attempted, and no
previous grave had been disturbed.
Hart, who cannot describe the prowler except as a small man probably
having a full beard, inclines to the view that all three of the
digging incidents have a common source; but police from the Second
Station think otherwise on account of the savage nature of the
second incident, where an ancient coffin was removed and its
headstone violently shattered.
The first of the incidents, in which it is thought an attempt to
bury something was frustrated, occurred a year ago last March, and
has been attributed to bootleggers seeking a cache. It is possible,
says Sergt. Riley, that this third affair is of similar nature.
Officers at the Second Station are taking especial pains to capture
the gang of miscreants responsible for these repeated outrages.
All day Thursday Dr. Willett rested as if recuperating from something
past or nerving himself for something to come. In the evening he wrote
a note to Mr. Ward, which was delivered the next morning and which
caused the half-dazed parent to ponder long and deeply. Mr. Ward had
not been able to go down to business since the shock of Monday with its
baffling reports and its sinister “purgation”, but he found something
calming about the doctor’s letter in spite of the despair it seemed to
promise and the fresh mysteries it seemed to evoke.
“10 Barnes St.,
Providence, R.I.,
April 12, 1928.
“Dear Theodore:—I feel that I must say a word to you before doing
what I am going to do tomorrow. It will conclude the terrible
business we have been going through (for I feel that no spade is
ever likely to reach that monstrous place we know of), but I’m
afraid it won’t set your mind at rest unless I expressly assure you
how very conclusive it is.
“You have known me ever since you were a small boy, so I think you
will not distrust me when I hint that some matters are best left
undecided and unexplored. It is better that you attempt no further
speculation as to Charles’s case, and almost imperative that you
tell his mother nothing more than she already suspects. When I call
on you tomorrow Charles will have escaped. That is all which need
remain in anyone’s mind. He was mad, and he escaped. 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, indeed, no uncertainty about Charles’s
fate. In about a year, say, you can if you wish devise a suitable
account of the end; for the boy will be no more. You can put up a
stone in your lot at the North Burial Ground exactly ten feet west
of your father’s and facing the same way, and that will mark the
true resting-place of your son. Nor need you fear that it will mark
any abnormality or changeling. The ashes in that grave will be those
of your own unaltered bone and sinew—of the real Charles Dexter Ward
whose mind you watched from infancy—the real Charles with the
olive-mark on his hip and without the black witch-mark on his chest
or the pit on his forehead. The Charles who never did actual evil,
and who will have paid with his life for his ‘squeamishness’.
“That is all. Charles will have escaped, and a year from now you can
put up his stone. Do not question me tomorrow. And believe that the
honour of your ancient family remains untainted now, as it has been
at all times in the past.
“With profoundest sympathy, and exhortations to fortitude, calmness,
and resignation, I am ever
Sincerely your friend,
Marinus B. Willett”
So on the morning of Friday, April 13, 1928, Marinus Bicknell Willett
visited the room of Charles Dexter Ward at Dr. Waite’s private hospital
on Conanicut Island. 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
mask-like 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 shew bravado to
the last.
“No,” Willett slowly rejoined, “this time I did not have to dig. We
have had men looking up Dr. Allen, and they found the false beard and
spectacles in the bungalow.”
“Excellent,” commented the disquieted host in an effort to be wittily
insulting, “and I trust they proved more becoming than the beard and
glasses you now have on!”
“They would become you very well,” came the even and studied response,
“as indeed they seem to have done.”
As Willett said this, it almost seemed as though a cloud passed over
the sun; though there was no change in the shadows on the floor. Then
Ward ventured:
“And is this what asks so hotly for a reckoning? Suppose a man does
find it now and then useful to be twofold?”
“No,” said Willett gravely, “again you are wrong. It is no business of
mine if any man seeks duality; provided he has any right to exist at
all, and provided he does not destroy what called him out of space.”
Ward now started violently. “Well, Sir, what have ye found, and what
d’ye want with me?”
The doctor let a little time elapse before replying, as if choosing his
words for an effective answer.
“I have found,” he finally intoned, “something in a cupboard behind an
ancient overmantel where a picture once was, and I have burned it and
buried the ashes where the grave of Charles Dexter Ward ought to be.”
The madman choked and sprang from the chair in which he had been
sitting:
“Damn ye, who did ye tell—and who’ll believe it was he after these full
two months, with me alive? What d’ye mean to do?”
Willett, though a small man, actually took on a kind of judicial
majesty as he calmed the patient with a gesture.
“I have told no one. This is no common case—it is a madness out of time
and a horror from beyond the spheres which no police or lawyers or
courts or alienists could ever fathom or grapple with. 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 shewed
yourself in beard and glasses that no one might wonder at your godless
likeness to him; I know what you resolved to do when he balked at your
monstrous rifling of the world’s tombs, and at what you planned
afterward, and I know how you did it.
“You left off your beard and glasses and fooled the guards around the
house. They thought it was he who went in, and they thought it was he
who came out when you had strangled and hidden him. But you hadn’t
reckoned on the different contents of two minds. You were a fool,
Curwen, to fancy that a mere visual identity would be enough. Why
didn’t you think of the speech and the voice and the handwriting? It
hasn’t worked, you see, after all. You know better than I who or what
wrote that message in minuscules, but I will warn you it was not
written in vain. There are abominations and blasphemies which must be
stamped out, and I believe that the writer of those words will attend
to Orne and Hutchinson. One of those creatures wrote you once, ‘do not
call up any that you can not 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 ally, and began a
series of cabbalistic motions with his forefingers as his deep, hollow
voice, now unconcealed by feigned hoarseness, bellowed out the opening
words of a terrible formula.
“PER ADONAI ELOIM, ADONAI JEHOVA, ADONAI SABAOTH, METRATON. . . .”
But Willett was too quick for him. Even as the dogs in the yard outside
began to howl, and even as a chill wind sprang suddenly up from the
bay, the doctor commenced the solemn and measured intonation of that
which he had meant all along to recite. An eye for an eye—magic for
magic—let the outcome shew how well the lesson of the abyss had been
learned! So in a clear voice Marinus Bicknell Willett began the second
of that pair of formulae whose first had raised the writer of those
minuscules—the cryptic invocation whose heading was the Dragon’s Tail,
sign of the descending node—
“OGTHROD AI’F
GEB’L—EE’H
YOG-SOTHOTH
‘NGAH’NG AI’Y
ZHRO!”
At the very first word from Willett’s mouth the previously commenced
formula of the patient stopped short. Unable to speak, the monster made
wild motions with his arms until they too were arrested. When the awful
name of Yog-Sothoth was uttered, the hideous change began. It was not
merely a dissolution, but rather a transformation or recapitulation;
and Willett shut his eyes lest he faint before the rest of the
incantation could be pronounced.
But he did not faint, and that man of unholy centuries and forbidden
secrets never troubled the world again. The madness out of time had
subsided, and the case of Charles Dexter Ward was closed. Opening his
eyes before staggering out of that room of horror, Dr. Willett saw that
what he had kept in memory had not been kept amiss. There had, as he
had predicted, been no need for acids. For like his accursed picture a
year before, Joseph Curwen now lay scattered on the floor as a thin
coating of fine bluish-grey dust.
Return to The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
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