The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

'The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man may have the
whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his
Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without
any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie
has been incinerated.'
- Borellus
I. A Result and a Prologe
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 though
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 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 droop, 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,
and 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 Shakespeare'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 water-front 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 like 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 public 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 his nondescript aspect of a man not greatly over thirty or thirty-five. As
decades mounted up, this singular quality began to excite wide notice; but Curwen always explained it by
saying that he came of hardy forefathers, and practised a simplicity of living which did not wear him our.
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 lead-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 read 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 numbers 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 though 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. This
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's 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 Zetsner's edition, Roger Bacon's Thesaurus Chemicus, Fludd's Clavis
Alchimiae, and Trithemius's 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 Massachussetts-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 downwards 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 of Pawtuxet Road, and that few of the sailors had ever
been seen to return from that place, was not forgotten; so that in time it became exceedingly difficult for
Curwen to keep his oddly assorted hands. Almost invariably several would desert soon after hearing the
gossip of the Providence wharves, and their replacement in the West Indies became an increasingly great
problem to the merchant.
By 1760 Joseph Curwen was virtually an outcast, suspected of vague horrors and 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 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. Judgement
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 or 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 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 torn 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 discover 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, as 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 Shakespeare's Head. In politics
he ardently supported Governor Hopkins against the Ward party whose prime strength was in Newport,
and his really eloquent speech at Hacher's Hall in 1765 against the setting off of North Providence as a
separate town with a pro-Ward vote in the General Assembly did more than any other 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; although 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 five 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 absence; 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 non 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
conversations 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 he 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 had spoken the Three Words.
Failing to obtain replies, the inquisitor had seemingly resorted to extreme means; for there was a terrific
shriek followed by silence and muttering and a bumping sound.
None of these colloquies was ever ocularly witnessed, since the windows were always heavily draped.
Once, though, during a discourse in an unknown tongue, a shadow was seen on the curtain which startled
Weeden exceedingly; reminding him of one of the puppets in a show he had seen in the autumn of 1764
in Hacher's Hall, when a man from Germantown, Pennsylvania, had given a clever mechanical spectacle
advertised as
'A View of the Famous City of Jerusalem, in which are represented Jerusalem, the Temple of Solomon,
his Royal Throne, the noted Towers, and Hills, likewise the Suffering 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 a locality where old Indian bury-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 scow 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 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 placed 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 in 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 waters below, or the way
that another half cried out although its condition had greatly departed from that of objects which normally
cried 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 evidence 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 moon-light
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 ye 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 but ye liveliest Awfulness in that
which H. rais'd upp from What he cou'd gather onlie a part of. What you sente, did not Worke, whether
because of Any Thing miss'g, or because ye Wordes were not Righte from my Speak'g or yr Copy'g. I
alone am at a Loss. I have not ye Chymicall art to followe Borellus, and owne my Self confounded by ye
VII. Booke of ye Necronomicon that you recommende. But I wou'd have you Observe what was told to
us aboute tak'g Care whom to calle upp, for you are Sensible what Mr. Mather writ in ye Magnalia of
------, and can judge how truely that Horrendous thing is reported. I say to you againe, doe not call 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 shal not
wish to Answer, and shal 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
ye Black Man learnt from Sylvanus Cocidius in ye Vault, under ye Roman Wall, and will be oblig'd for ye
lend'g of ye MS. you speak of.
Another and unsigned letter from Philadelphia provoked equal thought, especially for the following
passage:
I will observe what you say respecting the sending of Accounts only by yr Vessels, but can not always
be certain when to expect them. In the Matter spoke of, I require 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 yr Brig, and inquire daily at Mr. Biddle's Wharf.
A third suspicious letter was in an unknown tongue and even an unknown alphabet. In the Smith diary
found by Charles Ward a single oft-repeated combination of characters is clumsily copied; and
authorities at Brown University have pronounced the alphabet Amharic or Abyssinian, although they do
not recognise the word. None of these epistles was ever delivered to Curwen, though the disappearance
of Jedediah Orne from Salem as recorded shortly afterward 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 skipper, 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 more 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 wait and
capture 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 teh 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 the 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 an intolerable stench that only
the strong freshness of the sea could have prevented its being notice by the shore party or by any wakeful
souls in the 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 unmistakable 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 shal not wish to Answer, and shal 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 the 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 and anyone else ever gained
repecting the end of the accursed sorcerer.
From that time on the obliteration of Curwen's memory became increasingly rigid, extending at last by
common consent even to the town records and files of the Gazette. It can be compared in spirit only to
the hush that lay on Oscar Wilde's name for a decade after his disgrace, and in extent only to the fate of
that sinful King of 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 ------ home.'
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 the 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 the strange characters were available at teh 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 ye 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 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.
Providence, 1. May
Brother:-
My honour'd Antient Friende, due Respects and earnest Wishes to Him whom we serue for yr eternall
Power. I am just come upon That which you ought to knowe, concern'g the Matter of the Laste
Extremitie and what to doe regard'g yt. I am not dispos'd to followe you in go'g Away on acct. of my
Yeares, for Prouidence hath not ye Sharpeness of ye Bay in hunt'g oute uncommon Things and bringinge
to Tryall. I am ty'd up in Shippes and Goodes, and cou'd not doe as you did, besides the Whiche my
Farme at Patuxet hath under it What you Knowe, and wou'd not waite for my com'g Backe as an Other.
But I am unreadie for harde Fortunes, as I haue tolde you, and haue longe work'd upon ye Way of get'g
Backe after ye Laste. I laste Night strucke on ye Wordes that bringe up YOGGE-SOTHOTHE, and
sawe for ye first Time that Face spoke of by Ibn Schacabao in ye ------. And IT said, that ye III Psalme
in ye Liber-Damnatus holdes ye Clauicle. With Sunne in V House, Saturne in Trine, drawe ye Pentagram
of Fire, and saye ye ninth Uerse thrice. This Uerse repeate eache Roodemas and Hallow's Eue; and ye
Thing will breede in ye Outside Spheres.
And of ye Seede of Olde shal One be borne who shal looke Backe, tho' know'g not what he seekes.
Yett will this auaile 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 haue not taken needed Stepps nor founde Much. Ye
Process is plaguy harde to come neare; and it used up such a Store of Specimens, I am harde putte to it
to get Enough, notwithstand'g the Sailors I haue from ye Indies. Ye People aboute are become curious,
but I can stande them off. Ye Gentry are worse that the Populace, be'g more Circumstantiall in their
Accts. and more belieu'd in what they tell. That Parson and Mr. Merritt haue 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. Whateuer I gette, you shal haue. And in ye meane while, do not
neglect to make use of ye Wordes I haue here giuen. I haue them Righte, but if you Desire to see HIM,
imploy the Writings on ye Piece of ------ that I am putt'g in this Packet. Saye ye Uerses euery Roodmas
and Hallow's Eue; and if ye Line runn out not, one shal 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 haue a goode Stallion, and
am think'g of get'g a Coach, there be'g one (Mr. Merritt's) in Prouidence already, tho' ye Roades are
bad. If you are dispos'd to Trauel, doe not pass me bye. From Boston take ye Post Rd. thro' Dedham,
Wrentham, and Attleborough, goode Tauerns be'g at all these Townes. Stop at Mr. Balcom's in
Wrentham, where ye Beddes are finer than Mr. Hatch's, but eate at ye other House for their Cooke is
better. Turne into Prou. by Patucket Falls, and ye Rd. past Mr. Sayles's Tauern. My House opp. Mr.
Epenetus Olney's Tauern off ye Towne Street, Ist on ye N. side of Olney's Court. Distance from Boston
Stone abt. XLIV Miles.
Sir, I am ye olde and true Friend and Serut. in Almonsin-Metraton.
Josephus C.
To Mr. Simon Orne,
William's-Lane, in Salem.
This letter, oddly enough, was what first gave Ward the exact location of Curwen's Providence home;
for none of the records encountered up to that time had been at all specific. The 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 curiousity 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, until 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 most 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 been, 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 the 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
grasp 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 great 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 price which cut short the
impending torrent of unctuous haggling.
It now remained to take off the panelling and remove it to the Ward home, where provisions were made
for its thorough restoration and installation with an electric mock-fireplace in Charles'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
Prouidence-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 & Ye
Spheres.'
Another was in a cipher; the same, Ward hoped, as the Hutchinson cipher which had hitherto baffled
him. A third, and here the searcher rejoiced, seemed to be a key to the cipher; whilst the fourth and fifth
were addressed respectively to:'Edw: Hutchinson, Armiger' and Jedediah Orne, esq.', 'or Their Heir or
Heirs, or Those Represent'g Them.' The sixth and last was inscribed: 'Joseph Curwen his Life and
Travells Bet'n ye yeares 1678 and 1687: Of Whither He Voyag'd, Where He Stay'd, Whom He Sawe,
and What He Learnt.'
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 curiousity. 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 practised. Before servants he seldom hid any paper which he might by 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 older 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-.' 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 thorough
master of himself and in touch with matters of real importance; but it at least force 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 made 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 wish
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 ye Indies, Spaniards from Martineco and 2 Dutch Men from Surinam. Ye Dutch Men are
like to Desert from have'g hearde Somewhat ill of these Ventures, but I will see to ye Inducing of them to
Staye. For Mr. Knight Dexter of ye Bay 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. For Mr. Green at ye Elephant 50 Gallon Cyttles, 20 Warm'g Pannes, 15 Bake
Cyttles, 10 pr. Smoke'g Tonges. For Mr. Perrigo 1 Sett of Awles. For Mr. Nightingale 50 Reames
prime Foolscap. Say'd ye SABAOTH thrice last Nighte but None appear'd. I must heare more from Mr.
H. in Transylvania, tho' it is Harde reach'g him and exceeding strange he 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 tenacious in his memory. They ran: 'Ye
Verse from Liber-Damnatus be'g spoke V Roodmasses and IV Hallows-Eves, I am Hopeful ye Thing is
breed'g Outside ye Spheres. It will drawe One who is to Come, if I can make sure he shal Bee, and he
shal think on Past Thinges and look back thro' all ye Yeares, against ye Which I must have ready ye
Saltes or That to make 'em with.'
Willett saw no more, but somehow this small glimpse gave a new and vague terror to the painted
features of Joseph Curwen which stared blandly down from the overmantel. Even 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 move
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 to a strange mulatto who dwelt in a swamp and
about whom a newspaper hand 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 by
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 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 to 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, and 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 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 may 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 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 concede. There
was, he insists, something later; and the queerness 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 Dr. 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 by 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 teh 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 inquires 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 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 inviolable 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 noise 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 hold
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 though the escaping truck had headed up Rochambeau
Avenue, though he could not be sure.
During the next few days Charles Ward was seldom seen by his family. Having added sleeping quarters
to his attic realm, he kept closely to himself there, ordering food brought to the door and not taking it in
until after the servant had gone away. The droning of monotonous formulae and the chanting of bizarre
rhythms recurred at intervals, while at other times occasional listeners could detect the sound of tinkling
glass, hissing chemicals, running water, or roaring gas flames. 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 God, Almonsin, Gibor, Jehosua,
Evam, Zariatnatmik, veni, veni, veni.'
This had been going on for two hours without change or intermission when over all the 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 non 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 imports; for Charles had told of its evil
fame in dark books, and of the manner in which it had thundered, according to the Fenner letter, 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 throdag' - ending in a 'Yah!' whose maniacal force mounted in an ear-splitting crescendo.
A second later all previous memories were effaced by the wailing scream which burst out with frantic
explosiveness and gradually changed form to a paroxysm of diabolic and hysterical laughter. Mrs. Ward,
with the mingled fear and blind courage of maternity, advanced and knocked affrightedly at the
concealing panels, but obtained no sign of recognition. She knocked again, but paused nervelessly as a
second shriek arose, this one unmistakably in the familiar voice of her son, and sounding concurrently
with the still bursting cachinnations of that other voice. Presently she fainted, although she is still unable to
recall the precise and immediate cause. Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.
Mr. Ward returned from the business section at about quarter past six; and not finding his wife
downstairs, was told by the frightened servants that she was probably watching at Charles's door, from
which the sounds had been far stranger than ever before. Mounting the stairs at once, he saw Mrs. Ward
stretched out 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 in response to it from behind the
locked door the first distinguishable words which that masked and terrible colloquy had yielded. They
were merely an excited caution in Charles's own voice, but somehow their implications held a nameless
fright for the father who overheard them. The phrase was just this: 'Sshh!-write!'
Mr. and Mrs. Ward conferred at some length after dinner, and the former resolved to have a firm and
serious talk with Charles that very night. No matter how important the object, such conduct could 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 great 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 blue-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. This matter was not recalled till later, when
Dr. Willett began checking up loose ends and searching out missing links here and there. In the Journal
office he found the section which Charles had lost, and marked two items as of possible significance.
They were as follows:
More Cemetery Delving
It was this morning discovered by Robert Hart, night watchman at the North Burial Ground, that ghouls
were again at work in the ancient portion of the cemetery. The grave of Ezra Weeden, who was born in
1740 and died in 1824 according to his uprooted and savagely splintered slate headstone, was found
excavated and rifled, the work being evidently done with a spade stolen from an adjacent tool-shed.
Whatever the contents may have been after more than a century of burial, all was gone except a few
slivers of decayed wood. There were no wheel tracks, but the police have measured a single set of
footprints which they found in the vicinity, and which indicate the boots of a man of refinement.
Hart is inclined to link this incident with the digging discovered last March, when a party in a motor truck
were frightened away after making a deep excavation; but 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 heart 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 concerning 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 curiousity 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 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 almost became involved in
serious trouble. For some time the nocturnal arrival and departure of motor trucks at the Pawtuxet
bungalow had been commented upon, and at this juncture an unforeseen hitch exposed the nature of at
least one item of their contents. In a lonely spot near Hope Valley had occurred one of the frequent
sordid waylaying of trucks by "hi-jackers" in quest of liquor shipments, but this time the robbers had been
destined to receive the greater shock. For the long cases they seized proved upon opening to contain
some exceedingly gruesome things; so gruesome, in fact, that the matter could not be kept quiet amongst
the denizens of the underworld. The thieves had hastily buried what they discovered, but when the State
Police got wind of the matter a careful search was made. A recently arrived 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 those 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 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 by 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 no 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. It
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 curiousity, 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 the 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 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 though 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 own 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's Histrionick Academy in King Street on the eleventh of February, 1762, which
fell on a Thursday; or about how the actors cut the text of Steele's Conscious Lover so badly that one
was almost glad the Baptist-ridden legislature closed the theatre a fortnight later. That Thomas Sabin's
Boston coach was "damn'd uncomfortable" old letters may well have told; but what healthy antiquarian
could recall how the creaking of Epenetus Olney's new signboard (the gaudy crown he set up after he
took to calling his tavern the Crown Coffee House) was exactly like the first few notes of the new jazz
piece all the radios in Pawtuxet were playing?
Ward, however, would not be quizzed long in this vein. Modern and personal topics he waved aside
quite summarily, whilst regarding antique affairs he soon 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 to have ever 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 speculations.
Local tradesmen spoke of the queerness of the orders brought them by the evil-looking mulatto, and in
particular of the inordinate amounts of mean 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 point
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 of 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 degree.
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 reassured less than they ought to have been
when the youth hoarsely explained that he hand had lately been so much affected by a nervous shock as
to make normal writing impossible. He could, he said, from 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 cheque, 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, although 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 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 curiousity.
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 signs 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 he 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 ye Divell his Marke upon Bridget S., Jonathan A., Simon O.,
Deliverance W., Joseph C., Susan P., Mehitable C., and Deborah B.' Ward's face, too, troubled him
horribly, till at length he suddenly discovered why he was horrified. 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 Almonsin-Metraton:-
I this day receiv'd yr mention of what came up from the Saltes I sent you. It was wrong, and meanes
clearly that ye Headstones had been chang'd when Barnabas gott me the Specimen. It is often so, as you
must be sensible of from the Thing you gott from ye 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 ye Boy saw on me here in 1924. As I told you longe ago, do not calle up That
which you can not put downe; either from dead Saltes or out of ye Spheres beyond. Have ye Wordes
for laying at all times readie, and stopp not to be sure when there is any Doubte of Whom you have.
Stones are all chang'd now in Nine groundes out of 10. You are never sure till you question. I this day
heard from H., who has had Trouble with the Soldiers. He is like to be sorry Transylvania is pass't from
Hungary to Roumania, and wou'd change his Seat if the Castel weren't so fulle of What we Knowe. But
of this he hath doubtless writ you. In my next Send'g there will be Somewhat from a Hill tomb from ye
East that will delight you greatly. Meanwhile forget not I am desirous of B. F. if you can possibly get him
for me. You know G. in Philada. better than I. Have him upp firste if you will, but doe not use him soe
hard he will be Difficult, for I must speake to him in ye 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 shown him. What horrors and mysteries, what contradictions and
contraventions of Nature, had come back after a century and a half to harass Old Providence with her
clustered spires and domes?
The father and the old physician, virtually at a loss what to do or think, went to see Charles at the
hospital and questioned him as delicately as they could about Dr. Allen, about the Prague visit, and about
what he had learned of Simon or Jedediah Orne of Salem. To all these enquiries 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 Food.
Last monthe M. got me ye Sarcophagus of ye Five Sphinxes from ye Acropolis where He whome I
call'd up say'd it wou'd be, and I have hadde 3 Talkes with What was therein inhum'd. It will go to S. O.
in Prague directly, and thence to you. It is stubborn but you know ye Way with Such.
You shew Wisdom in having lesse about than Before; for there was no Neede to keep the Guards in
Shape and eat'g off their 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 ye Formulae so another may saye them with Success, but Borellus fancy'd it
wou'd be so if just ye right Wordes were hadd. Does ye Boy use 'em often? I regret that he growes
squeamish, as I fear'd he wou'd when I hadde him here nigh 15 Monthes, but am sensible you knowe
how to deal with him. You can't saye him down with ye Formula, for that will Worke only upon such as
ye other Formula hath call'd up from Saltes; but you still have strong Handes and Knife and Pistol, and
Graves are not harde to digg, nor Acids loth to burne.
O. sayes you have promis'd him B. F. I must have him after. B. goes to you soone, and may he give you
what you wishe of that Darke Thing belowe Memphis. Imploy care in what you calle up, and beware of
ye Boy.
It will be ripe in a yeare's time to have up ye Legions from Underneath, and then there are no Boundes
to what shal be oures. Have Confidence in what I saye, for you knowe O. and I have hadd these 150
yeares more than you to consulte these Matters in.
Nephreu - Ka nai 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 present 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 traffic was going on among these nightmare ghouls, whereby illustrious bones were bartered
with the calm calculativeness of schoolboys swapping books; and from what was extorted from this
centuried dust there was anticipated a power and a wisdom beyond anything which the cosmos had ever
seen concentred 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 yearning 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 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 hold. 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 Like 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 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 in the
middle of the vaulting and ten or twelve feet broad. Its pavement was of large chipped flagstone, 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 used. 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 noisomness 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 search 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 three 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 almanacs 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.
Y'AI 'NG'NGAH,
YOG-SOTHOTH
H'EE-L'GEB
F'AI THRODOG
UAAAH
OGTHROD AI'F
GEB'L-EE'H
YOG-SOTHOTH
'NGAH'NG AI'Y
ZHRO
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 ceaseless 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 time 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 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 unnameable now rose up from below, and the doctor's head reeled dizzily as he laid back the
slab and turned his torch upon the exposed square yard of gaping blackness.
If he had expected a flight of steps to some wide gulf of ultimate abomination, Willett was destined to be
disappointed; for amidst that foetor and cracked whining he discerned only the brick-faced top of a
cylindrical well perhaps a yard and a half in diameter and devoid of any ladder or other means of
descent. As the light shone down, the wailing changed suddenly to a series of horrible yelps; in
conjunction with which there came again that sound of blind, futile scrambling and slippery thumping. The
explorer trembled, unwilling even to imagine what noxious thing might be lurking in that abyss, but in a
moment mustered up the courage to peer over the rough-hewn brink; lying at full length and holding the
torch downward at arm's length to see what might lie below. For a second he could distinguish nothing
but the slimy, moss-grown brick walls sinking illimitably into that half-tangible miasma of murk and
foulness and anguished frenzy; and then he saw that something dark was leaping clumsily and frantically
up and down at the bottom of the narrow shaft, which must have been from twenty to twenty-five feet
below the stone floor where he lay. The torch shook in his hand, but he looked again to see what manner
of living creature might be immured there in the darkness of that unnatural well; left starving by young
Ward through all the long month since the doctors had taken him away, and clearly only one of a vast
number prisoned in the kindred wells whose pierced stone covers so thickly studded the floor of the
great vaulted cavern. Whatever the things were, they could not lie down in their cramped spaces; but
must have crouched and whined and waited and feebly leaped all those hideous weeks since their master
had abandoned them unheeded.
But Marinus Bicknell Willett was sorry that he looked again; for surgeon and veteran of the
dissecting-room though he was, he has not been the same since. It is hard to explain just how a single
sight of a tangible object with measurable dimensions could so shake and change a man; and we may
only say that there is about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts
frightfully on a sensitive thinker's perspective and whispers terrible hints of obscure cosmic relationships
and unnameable realities behind the protective illusions of common vision. In that second look Willett saw
such an outline or entity, for during the next few instants he was undoubtedly as stark raving 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 from 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 those
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 but ye 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 noisomness 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 the
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 in Curwen's farmhouse more than a
century and half before. That old 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 of 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 his palm.
The meaning of the two signs puzzled him, and he wondered why this battery of chemicals was
separated so radically from those in glass jars on the shelves of the laboratory proper. "Custodes",
"Materia"; that was the Latin for "Guards" and "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 Edwin 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 further 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 that 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 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.'
'Sawe olde V. saye ye Sabaoth and learnt yee Way.'
'Rais'd Yog-Sothoth thrice and was ye nexte Day deliver'd.'
'F. soughte to wipe out all know'g howe to raise Those from Outside.'
As the strong Argand blaze lit up the entire chamber the doctor saw that the wall opposite the door,
between the two groups of torturing appliances in the corners, was covered with pegs from which hung a
set of shapeless-looking robes of a rather dismal yellowish-white. But far more interesting were the two
vacant walls, both of which were thickly covered with mystic symbols and formulae roughly chiselled in
the smooth dressed stone. The damp floor also bore marks of carving; and with but little difficulty Willett
deciphered a huge pentagram in the centre, with a plain circle about three feet wide half way between this
and each corner. In one of these four circles, near where a yellowish robe had been flung carelessly
down, there stood a shallow kylix of the sort found on the shelves above the whip-rack; and just outside
the periphery was one of the Phaleron jugs from the shelves in the other room, its tag numbered 118.
This was unstoppered, and proved upon inspection to be empty; but the explorer saw with a shiver that
the kylix was not. Within its shallow area, and saved from scattering only by the absence of wind in this
sequestered cavern, lay a small amount of a dry, dull-greenish efflorescent powder which must have
belonged in the jug; and Willett almost reeled at the implications that came sweeping over him as he
correlated little by little the several elements and antecedents 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, Almonsin, and Zariatnatmik sent a shudder of fright through the search 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 when he came up 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 ye Wordes for laying at all times readie, and stopp not to be
sure when there is any Doubte of Whom you have ... 3 Talkes with What was therein inhum'd ..." Mercy
of Heaven, what is that shape behind the parting smoke?
5
Marinus Bicknell Willett has not 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.
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 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
chucked 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
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 outre-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. If 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 particular nauseousness which hung indefinitely about; a
nauseousness which the older servants connected with some curse left by the vanished Curwen portrait.
At nine o'clock the three detectives presented themselves and immediately delivered all that they had to
say. They had not, regrettably enough, located the Brava Tony Gomes as they had wished, nor had they
found the least trace of Dr. Allen's source or present whereabouts; but they had managed to unearth a
considerable number of local impressions and facts concerning the reticent stranger. Allen had struck
Pawtuxet people as a vaguely unnatural being, and there was a universal belief that his thick sandy beard
was either dyed or false - a belief conclusively upheld by the finding of such a false beard, together with a
pair of dark glasses, in his room at the fateful bungalow. His voice, Mr. Ward could well testify from his
one telephone conversation, had a depth and hollowness that could not be forgotten; and his glanced
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 starving 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 lighted, 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 Again Active
After a lull of ten months since the dastardly vandalism in the Weeden lot at the North Burial Ground, a
nocturnal prowler was glimpsed early this morning in the same cemetery by Robert Hart, the night
watchman. Happening to glance for a moment from his shelter at about 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 teh 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 of 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 two full 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, Joseph 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.