The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

by H.P. Lovecraft

'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

CHAPTER ONE

A Result and a Prologue

1

From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island, there

recently disappeared an exceedingly singular person. He bore the name of

Charles Dexter Ward, and was placed under restraint most reluctantly by the

grieving father who had watched his aberration grow from a mere eccentricity

to a dark mania involving both a possibility of murderous tendencies and

a profound and peculiar change in the apparent contents of his mind. Doctors

confess themselves quite baffled by his case, since it presented oddities

of a general physiological as well as psychological character.

In the first place, the patient seemed oddly older than his twenty-six years

would warrant. Mental disturbance, it is true, will age one rapidly; but

the face of this young man had taken on a subtle cast which only the very

aged normally acquire. In the second place, his organic processes shewed

a certain queerness of proportion which nothing in medical experience can

parallel. Respiration and heart action had a baffling lack of symmetry; the

voice was lost, so that no sounds above a whisper were possible; digestion

was incredibly prolonged and minimised, and neural reactions to standard

stimuli bore no relation at all to anything heretofore recorded, either normal

or pathological. The skin had a morbid chill and dryness, and the cellular

structure of the tissue seemed exaggeratedly coarse and loosely knit. Even

a large olive birthmark on the right hip had disappeared, whilst there had

formed on the chest a very peculiar mole or blackish spot of which no trace

existed before. In general, all physicians agree that in Ward the processes

of metabolism had become retarded to a degree beyond precedent.

Psychologically, too, Charles Ward was unique. His madness held no affinity

to any sort recorded in even the latest and most exhaustive of treatises,

and was conjoined to a mental force which would have made him a genius or

a leader had it not been twisted into strange and grotesque forms. Dr. Willett,

who was Ward's family physician, affirms that the patient's gross mental

capacity, as gauged by his response to matters outside the sphere of his

insanity, had actually increased since the seizure. Ward, it is true, was

always a scholar and an antiquarian; but even his most brilliant early work

did not shew the prodigious grasp and insight displayed during his last

examinations by the alienists. It was, indeed, a difficult matter to obtain

a legal commitment to the hospital, so powerful and lucid did the youth's

mind seem; and only on the evidence of others, and on the strength of many

abnormal gaps in his stock of information as distinguished from his intelligence,

was he finally placed in confinement. To the very moment of his vanishment

he was an omnivorous reader and as great a conversationalist as his poor

voice permitted; and shrewd observers, failing to foresee his escape, freely

predicted that he would not be long in gaining his discharge from custody.

Only Dr. Willett, who brought Charles Ward into the world and had watched

his growth of body and mind ever since, seemed frightened at the thought

of his future freedom. He had had a terrible experience and had made a terrible

discovery which he dared not reveal to his sceptical colleagues. Willett,

indeed, presents a minor mystery all his own in his connexion with the case.

He was the last to see the patient before his flight, and emerged from that

final conversation in a state of mixed horror and relief which several recalled

when Ward's escape became known three hours later. That escape itself is

one of the unsolved wonders of Dr. Waite's hospital. A window open above

a sheer drop of sixty feet could hardly explain it, yet after that talk with

Willett the youth was undeniably gone. Willett himself has no public explanations

to offer, though he seems strangely easier in mind than before the escape.

Many, indeed, feel that he would like to say more if he thought any considerable

number would believe him. He had found Ward in his room, but shortly after

his departure the attendants knocked in vain. When they opened the door the

patient was not there, and all they found was the open window with a chill

April breeze blowing in a cloud of fine bluish-grey dust that almost choked

them. True, the dogs howled some time before; but that was while Willett

was still present, and they had caught nothing and shewn no disturbance later

on. Ward's father was told at once over the telephone, but he seemed more

saddened than surprised. By the time Dr. Waite called in person, Dr. Willett

had been talking with him, and both disavowed any knowledge or complicity

in the escape. Only from certain closely confidential friends of Willett

and the senior Ward have any clues been gained, and even these are too wildly

fantastic for general credence. The one fact which remains is that up to

the present time no trace of the missing madman has been unearthed.

Charles Ward was an antiquarian from infancy, no doubt gaining his taste

from the venerable town around him, and from the relics of the past which

filled every corner of his parents' old mansion in Prospect Street on the

crest of the hill. With the years his devotion to ancient things increased;

so that history, genealogy, and the study of colonial architecture, furniture,

and craftsmanship at length crowded everything else from his sphere of interests.

These tastes are important to remember in considering his madness; for although

they do not form its absolute nucleus, they play a prominent part in its

superficial form. The gaps of information which the alienists noticed were

all related to modern matters, and were invariably offset by a correspondingly

excessive though outwardly concealed knowledge of bygone matters as brought

out by adroit questioning; so that one would have fancied the patient literally

transferred to a former age through some obscure sort of auto-hypnosis. The

odd thing was that Ward seemed no longer interested in the antiquities he

knew so well. He had, it appears, lost his regard for them through sheer

familiarity; and all his final efforts were obviously bent toward mastering

those common facts of the modern world which had been so totally and unmistakably

expunged from his brain. That this wholesale deletion had occurred, he did

his best to hide; but it was clear to all who watched him that his whole

programme of reading and conversation was determined by a frantic wish to

imbibe such knowledge of his own life and of the ordinary practical and cultural

background of the twentieth century as ought to have been his by virtue of

his birth in 1902 and his education in the schools of our own time. Alienists

are now wondering how, in view of his vitally impaired range of data, the

escaped patient manages to cope with the complicated world of today; the

dominant opinion being that he is "lying low" in some humble and unexacting

position till his stock of modern information can be brought up to the

normal.

The beginning of Ward's madness is a matter of dispute among alienists. Dr.

Lyman, the eminent Boston authority, places it in 1919 or 1920, during the

boy's last year at the Moses Brown School, when he suddenly turned from the

study of the past to the study of the occult, and refused to qualify for

college on the ground that he had individual researches of much greater

importance to make. This is certainly borne out by Ward's altered habits

at the time, especially by his continual search through town records and

among old burying-grounds for a certain grave dug in 1771; the grave of an

ancestor named Joseph Curwen, some of whose papers he professed to have found

behind the panelling of a very old house in Olney Court, on Stampers' Hill,

which Curwen was known to have built and occupied. It is, broadly speaking,

undeniable that the winter of 1919-20 saw a great change in Ward; whereby

he abruptly stopped his general antiquarian pursuits and embarked on a desperate

delving into occult subjects both at home and abroad, varied only by this

strangely persistent search for his forefather's grave.

From this opinion, however, Dr. Willett substantially dissents; basing his

verdict on his close and continuous knowledge of the patient, and on certain

frightful investigations and discoveries which he made toward the last. Those

investigations and discoveries have left their mark upon him; so that his

voice trembles when he tells them, and his hand trembles when he tries to

write of them. Willett admits that the change of 1919-20 would ordinarily

appear to mark the beginning of a progressive decadence which culminated

in the horrible and uncanny alienation of 1928; but believes from personal

observation that a finer distinction must be made. Granting freely that the

boy was always ill-balanced temperamentally, and prone to be unduly susceptible

and enthusiastic in his responses to phenomena around him, he refuses to

concede that the early alteration marked the actual passage from sanity to

madness; crediting instead Ward's own statement that he had discovered or

rediscovered something whose effect on human 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.

CHAPTER THREE

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 Bibliothque

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.

CHAPTER FOUR

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.

CHAPTER FIVE

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 cordination, 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 outr-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.