Brother:
My honour'd Antient friend, due Respects and earnest Wishes to
Him whom we serve for yr Eternall Power. I am just come upon That
Which you ought to knowe, concern'g the Matter of the Laste
Extremite and What to doe regard' yt. I am not dispos'd to followe
you in go'g Away on acct. of my yeares, for Providence hath not ye
Sharpeness of ye Bay in hunt'g oute uncommon Things and bringinge
to Tryall. I am ty'd up in Shippes and Goodes, and cou'd not doe as
you did, besides the Whiche my Farme, at Pawtuxet hatht under it
What you Knowe, that Wou'd not Waite for my com'g Backe as an Other.
But I am not unreadie for harde fortunes, as I have tolde you,
and have longe Work'd upon ye Way of get'g Backe after ye Laste.
I laste Night strucke on ye Wordes that bringe up YOGGE-SOTHOTHE,
and sawe for ye Firste Time that face spoke of by Ibn Schacabac
in ye ----. And IT said, that ye III Psalme in ye Liber-Damnatus
holdes ye Clavicle. With Sunne in V House, Saturne in Trine, drawe
ye Pentagram of Fire, and saye ye ninth Verse thrice. This Verse
repeate eache Roodemas and Hallow's Eve, and ye thing will brede in
ye Outside Spheres.
_And of ye Sede of Olde shal One be borne who shal looke Backe,
tho' know'g not what he seekes._
Yett will this availe Nothing if there be no Heir, and if the
Saltes, or the Way to make the Saltes, bee not Readie for his
Hande; and here I will owne, I have not taken needed Stepps nor
founde Much. Ye Process is plaguy harde to come neare, and it
uses up such a Store of Specimens, I am harde putte to it to get
Enough, notwithstand'g the Sailors I have from ye Indies. Ye People
aboute are become Curious, but I can stande them off. Ye gentry
are worse than ye Populace, be'g more Circumstantiall in their
Accts. and more believ'd in what they tell. That Parson and Mr.
Merritt have talk'd some, I am fearfull, but no Thing soe far is
Dangerous. Ye Chymical substances are easie of get'g, there be'g
II. goode Chymists in Towne, Dr. Bowen and Sam. Carew. I am foll'g
oute what Borellus saith, and have Helpe in Abdool Al-Hazred his
VII. Booke. Whatever I gette, you shal have. And in ye meane While,
do not neglect to make use of ye Wordes I have here given. I have
them Righte, but if you Desire to see HIM, imploy the Writinge on
ye Piece of ----, that I am putt'g in this Packet. Saye ye Verses
every Roodmas and Hallow's Eve; and if yr Line runn not out, _one
shal bee in yeares to come that shal looke backe and use what
Saltes or stuff for Salte you shal leave him_. Job XIV. XIV.
I rejoice you are again at Salem, and hope I may see you not longe
hence. I have a goode Stallion, and am think'g of get'g a Coach,
there be'g one (Mr. Merritt's) in Providence already, tho' ye
Roades are bad. If you are disposed to travel, doe not pass me
bye. From Boston take ye Post Road, thro' Dedham, Wrentham, and
Attleborough, goode Taverns be'g at all these Townes. Stop at Mr.
Bolcom's in Wrentham, where ye Beddes are finer than Mr. Hatch's,
but eate at ye other House for their cooke is better. Turne into
Prov. by Patucket falls, and ye Rd. past Mr. Sayles's Tavern. My
House opp. Mr. Epenetus Olney's Tavern off ye Towne Street, 1st on
ye N. side of Olney's Court. Distance from Boston Stone abt. XLIV
miles.
Sir, I am yr olde and true friend and Servt. in Almonsin-Metraton.
Josephus C.
To Mr. Simon Orne,
William's-Lane, in Salem.
This letter, oddly enough, was what first gave Ward the exact location
of Curwen's Providence home; for none of the records encountered up to
that time had been at all specific. The place was indeed only a few
squares from his own home on the great hill's higher ground, and was
now the abode of a Negro family much esteemed for occasional washing,
housecleaning, and furnace-tending services. To find, in distant Salem,
such sudden proof of the significance of this familiar rookery in his
own family history, was a highly impressive thing to Ward; and he
resolved to explore the place immediately upon his return.
The more mystical phases of the letter, which he took to be some
extravagant kind of symbolism, frankly baffled him; though he noted
with a thrill of curiosity that the Biblical passage referred to--Job
14, 14--was the familiar verse, "If a man die, shall he live again? All
the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come."
* * * * *
Young Ward came home in a state of pleasant excitement, and spent
the following Saturday in a long and exhaustive study of the house
in Olney Court. The place, now crumbling with age, had never been a
mansion; but was a modest two-and-a-half story wooden town house of
the familiar Providence Colonial type, with plain peaked roof, large
central chimney, and artistically carved doorway with rayed fan-light,
triangular pediment, and trim Doric pilasters. It had suffered but
little alteration externally, and Ward felt he was gazing on something
very close to the sinister matters of his quest.
The present Negro inhabitants were known to him, and he was very
courteously shown about the interior by old Asa and his stout wife
Hannah. Here there was more change than the outside indicated, and Ward
saw with regret that fully half of the fine scroll-and-urn overmantels
and shell-carved cupboard linings were gone, whilst much of the fine
wainscotting and bolection moulding was marked, hacked, and gouged,
or covered up altogether with cheap wall-paper. It was exciting to
stand within the ancestral walls which had housed such a man of horror
as Joseph Curwen; he saw with a thrill that a monogram had been very
carefully effaced from the ancient brass knocker.
From then until after the close of school Ward spent his time on the
photostatic copy of the Hutchinson cipher and the accumulation of local
Curwen data. The former still proved unyielding; but of the latter
he obtained so much, and so many clues to similar data elsewhere,
that he was ready by July to make a trip to New London and New York
to consult old letters whose presence in those places was indicated.
This trip was very fruitful, for it brought him the Fenner letters
with their terrible description of the Pawtuxet farmhouse raid, and
the Nightingale-Talbot letters in which he learned of the portrait
painted on a panel of the Curwen library. This matter of the portrait
interested him particularly, since he would have given much to know
just what Joseph Curwen looked like; and he decided to make a second
search of the house in Olney Court to see if there might not be some
trace of the ancient features beneath peeling coats of later paint or
layers of mouldy wall-paper.
Early in August that search took place, and Ward went carefully
over the walls of every room sizeable enough to have been by any
possibility the library of the evil builder. He paid especial attention
to the large panels of such overmantels as still remained; and was
keenly excited after about an hour, when on a broad area above the
fireplace in a spacious ground-floor room he became certain that the
surface brought out by the peeling of several coats of paint was
sensibly darker than any ordinary interior paint or the wood beneath it
was likely to have been. A few more careful tests with a thin knife,
and he knew that he had come upon an oil portrait of great extent.
With truly scholarly restraint the youth did not risk the damage which
an immediate attempt to uncover the hidden picture with the knife
might have done, but just retired from the scene of his discovery to
enlist expert help. In three days he returned with an artist of long
experience, Mr. Walter C. Dwight, whose studio is near the foot of
College Hill; and that accomplished restorer of paintings set to work
at once with proper methods and chemical substances. Old Asa and his
wife were duly excited over their strange visitors, and were properly
reimbursed for this invasion of their domestic hearth.
As day by day the work of restoration progressed, Charles Ward looked
on with growing interest at the lines and shades gradually unveiled
after their long oblivion. Dwight had begun at the bottom; hence since
the picture was a three-quarter-length one, the face did not come out
for some time. It was meanwhile seen that the subject was a spare,
well-shaped man with dark-blue coat, embroidered waistcoat, black satin
small-clothes, and white silk stockings, seated in a carved chair
against the background of a window with wharves and ships beyond. When
the head came out it was observed to bear a neat Albemarle wig, and
to possess a thin, calm, undistinguished face which seemed somehow
familiar to both Ward and the artist. Only at the very last, though,
did the restorer and his client begin to gasp with astonishment
at the details of that lean, pallid visage, and to recognize with
a touch of awe the dramatic trick which heredity had played. For
it took the final bath of oil and the final stroke of the delicate
scraper to bring out fully the expression which centuries had hidden;
and to confront the bewildered Charles Dexter Ward, dweller in the
past, with his own living features in the countenance of his horrible
great-great-great-grandfather.
* * * * *
Ward brought his parents to see the marvel he had uncovered, and
his father at once determined to purchase the picture despite its
execution on stationary panelling. The resemblance to the boy, despite
an appearance of rather greater age, was marvelous; and it could
be seen that through some trick of atavism the physical contours
of Joseph Curwen had found precise duplication after a century and
a half. Mrs. Ward's resemblance to her ancestor was not at all
marked, though she could recall relatives who had some of the facial
characteristics shared by her son and by the bygone Curwen. She did
not relish the discovery, and told her husband that he had better
burn the picture instead of bringing it home. There was, she averred,
something unwholesome about it; not only intrinsically, but in its very
resemblance to Charles. Mr. Ward, however, was a practical man of power
and affairs--a cotton manufacturer with extensive mills at Riverpoint
in the Pawtuxet Valley--and not one to listen to feminine scruples.
The picture impressed him mightily with its likeness to his son, and
he believed the boy deserved it as a present. In this opinion, it is
needless to say, Charles most heartily concurred; and a few days later
Mr. Ward located the owner of the house--a small rodent-featured person
with a guttural accent--and obtained the whole mantel and overmantel
bearing the picture at a curtly fixed price which cut short the
impending torrent of unctuous haggling.
It now remained to take off the panelling and remove it to the Ward
home, where provisions were made for its thorough restoration and
installation with an electric mock-fireplace in Charles' third-floor
study or library. To Charles was left the task of superintending
this removal, and on the twenty-eighth of August he accompanied two
expert workmen from the Crooker decorating firm to the house in Olney
Court, where the mantel and portrait-bearing overmantel were detached
with great care and precision for transportation in the company's
motor truck. There was left a space of exposed brickwork marking the
chimney's course, and in this young Ward observed a cubical recess
about a foot square, which must have lain directly behind the head
of the portrait. He found, beneath the deep coatings of dust and
soot some loose yellowed papers, a crude, thick copy-book, and a few
moldering textile shreds which may have formed the ribbon binding the
rest together. Blowing away the bulk of the dirt and cinders, he took
up the book and looked at the bold inscription on its cover. It was
in a hand which he had learned to recognize at the Essex Institute,
and proclaimed the volume as the "_Journall and Notes of Jos. Curwen,
Gent., of Providence-Plantations, Late of Salem._"
Excited beyond measure by his discovery, Ward showed the book to the
two curious workmen beside him. Their testimony is absolute as to
the nature and genuineness of the finding, and Dr. Willett relies on
them to help establish his theory that the youth was not mad when he
began his major eccentricities. All the other papers were likewise in
Curwen's handwriting, and one of them seemed especially portentous
because of its inscription: "_To Him Who Shal Come After, How He May
Gett Beyonde Time and Ye Spheres._" Another was in a cipher; the same,
Ward hoped, as the Hutchinson cipher which had hitherto baffled him.
A third, and here the searcher rejoiced, seemed to be a key to the
cipher; whilst the fourth and fifth were addressed respectively to
"Edw. Hutchinson, Armiger" and "Jedediah Orne, Esq.", "or Their Heir or
Heirs, or Those Represent'g Them." The sixth and last was inscribed:
"_Joseph Curwen his Life and Travells Bet'n ye yeares 1678 and 1687: of
Whither He Voyag'd, Where He Stay'd, Whom He Sawe, and What He learnt._"
* * * * *
We have now reached the point from which the more academic school of
alienists date Charles Ward's madness. Upon his discovery the youth
had looked immediately at a few of the inner pages of the book and
manuscripts, and had evidently seen something which impressed him
tremendously. Upon returning home he broke the news with an almost
embarrassed air, as if he wished to convey an idea of its supreme
importance without having to exhibit the evidence itself. He did not
even show the titles to his parents, but simply told them that he
had found some documents in Joseph Curwen's handwriting, "mostly in
cipher," which would have to be studied very carefully before yielding
up their true meaning. It is unlikely that he would have shown what he
did to the workmen, had it not been for their unconcealed curiosity. As
it was he doubtless wished to avoid any display of peculiar reticence
which would increase their discussion of the matter.
That night Charles Ward sat up in his room reading the new-found book
and papers, and when day came he did not desist. His meals, on his
urgent request when his mother called to see what was amiss, were
sent up to him; and in the afternoon he appeared only briefly when
the men came to install the Curwen picture and mantelpiece in his
study. The next night he slept in snatches in his clothes, meanwhile
wrestling feverishly with the unraveling of the cipher manuscript. In
the morning his mother saw that he was at work on the photostatic copy
of the Hutchinson cipher, which he had frequently showed her before;
but in response to her query he said that the Curwen key could not be
applied to it. That afternoon he abandoned his work and watched the
men fascinatedly as they finished their installation of the picture
with its woodwork above a cleverly realistic electric log, setting the
mock-fireplace and overmantel a little out from the north wall as if a
chimney existed, and boxing in its sides with panelling to match the
room's. After the workmen went he moved his work into the study and
sat down before it with his eyes half on the cipher and half on the
portrait which stared back at him like a year-adding century-recalling
mirror. His parents subsequently recalling his conduct at this period,
give interesting details anent the policy of concealment which he
practiced. Before servants he seldom hid any paper which he might be
studying, since he rightly assumed that Curwen's intricate and archaic
chirography would be too much for them. With his parents, however,
he was more circumspect; and unless the manuscript in question were
a cipher, or a mere mass of cryptic symbols and unknown ideographs
(as that entitled "_To Him Who Shal Come After_ etc." seemed to be)
he would cover it with some convenient paper until his caller had
departed. At night he kept the papers under lock and key in an antique
cabinet of his, where he also placed them whenever he left the room.
He soon resumed fairly regular hours and habits, except that his long
walks and other outside interests seemed to cease. The opening of
school, where he now began his senior year, seemed a great bore to
him; and he frequently asserted his determination never to bother with
college. He had, he said, important special investigations to make,
which would provide him with more avenues toward knowledge and the
humanities than any university which the world could boast.
During October Ward began visiting the libraries again, but no longer
for the antiquarian matter of his former days. Witchcraft and magic,
occultism and daemonology, were what he sought now; and when Providence
sources proved unfruitful he would take the train for Boston and tap
the wealth of the great library in Copley Square, the Widener Library
at Harvard, or the Zion Research Library in Brookline, where certain
rare works on Biblical subjects are available. He bought extensively,
and fitted up a whole additional set of shelves in his study for newly
acquired works on uncanny subjects; while during the Christmas holidays
he made a round of out-of-town trips including one to Salem to consult
certain records at the Essex Institute.
* * * * *
About the middle of January, 1920, there entered Ward's bearing an
element of triumph which he did not explain, and he was no more found
at work upon the Hutchinson cipher. Instead, he inaugurated a dual
policy of chemical research and record-scanning; fitting up for the
one a laboratory in the unused attic of the house, and for the latter
haunting all the sources of vital statistics in Providence. Local
dealers in drugs and scientific supplies, later questioned, gave
astonishingly queer and meaningless catalogues of the substances and
instruments he purchased; but clerks at the State House, the City Hall,
and the various libraries agree as to the definite object of his second
interest. He was searching intensely and feverishly for the grave of
Joseph Curwen, from whose slate slab an older generation had so wisely
blotted the name.
Little by little there grew upon the Ward family the conviction that
something was wrong. His school work was the merest pretence; he had
other concernments now; and when not in his new laboratory with a score
of obsolete alchemical books, could be found either poring over old
burial records downtown or glued to his volumes of occult lore in his
study, where the startlingly--one almost fancied increasingly--similar
features of Joseph Curwen stared blandly at him from the great
overmantel on the north wall.
Late in March Ward added to his archive-searching a ghoulish series of
rambles about the various ancient cemeteries of the city. His quest
had suddenly shifted from the grave of Joseph Curwen to that of one
Naphthali Field; and this shift was explained when, upon going over
the files that he had been over, the investigators actually found a
fragmentary record of Curwen's burial which had escaped the general
obliteration, and which stated that the curious leaden coffin had been
interred "10 ft. S. and 5 ft. W. of Naphthali Field's grave in ye----."
Hence the rambles--from which St. John's (the former King's) churchyard
and the ancient Congregational burying ground in the midst of Swan
Point Cemetery were excluded, since other statistics had shewn that the
only Naphthali Field (obit. 1729) whose grave could have been meant had
been a Baptist.
* * * * *
It was toward May when Dr. Willett, at the request of the senior Ward,
and fortified with all the Curwen data which the family had gleaned
from Charles in his non-secretive days, talked with the young man. The
interview was of little value or conclusiveness, for Willett felt at
every moment that Charles was thoroughly master of himself and in touch
with matters of real importance; but it at least forced the secretive
youth to offer some rational explanation of his recent demeanor. Of a
pallid, impassive type not easily showing embarrassment, Ward seemed
quite ready to discuss his pursuits, though not to reveal their object.
He stated that the papers of his ancestor had contained some remarkable
secrets of early scientific knowledge. To take their vivid place in the
history of human thought they must first be correlated by one familiar
with the background out of which they evolved, and to this task of
correlation Ward was now devoting himself. He was seeking to acquire as
fast as possible those neglected arts of old which a true interpreter
of the Curwen data must possess, and hoped in time to make a full
announcement and presentation of the utmost interest to mankind and to
the world of thought.
As to his graveyard search, whose object he freely admitted, but the
details of whose progress he did not relate, he said he had reason to
think that Joseph Curwen's mutilated headstone bore certain mystic
symbols--carved from directions in his will and ignorantly spared by
those who had effaced the name--which were absolutely essential to the
final solution of his cryptic system. Curwen, he believed, had wished
to guard his secret with care; and had consequently distributed the
data in an exceedingly curious fashion. When Dr. Willett asked to see
the mystic documents, Ward displayed much reluctance and tried to put
him off with such things as the photostatic copies of the Hutchinson
cipher and Orne formulae and diagrams; but finally showed him the
exteriors of some of the real Curwen finds--the "_Journal and Notes_,"
the cipher (title in cipher also) and the formula-filled message "_To
Him Who Shal Come After_"--and let him glance inside such as were in
obscure characters.
He also opened the diary at a page carefully selected for its
innocuousness and gave Willett a glimpse of Curwen's connected
handwriting in English. The doctor noted very closely the crabbed and
complicated letters, and the general aura of the seventeenth century
which clung round both penmanship and style despite the writer's
survival into the eighteenth century, and became quickly certain that
the document was genuine. The text itself was relatively trivial, and
Willett recalled only a fragment. But when Dr. Willett turned the leaf,
he was quickly checked by Ward, who almost snatched the book from his
grasp. All that the doctor had a chance to see on the newly opened page
was a brief pair of sentences; but these, strangely enough, lingered
tenaciously in his memory.
They ran: "Ye Verse from Liber-Damnatus be'g spoke V Roodmasses and IV
Hallows-Eves, I am Hopeful ye Thing is breed'g Outside ye Spheres. It
will drawe One who is to Come if I can make sure he shal bee, and he
shall think on Past thinges and looke back thro' all ye yeares, against
ye which I must have ready ye Saltes or That to make 'em with."
Willett saw no more, but somehow this small glimpse gave a new and
vague terror to the painted features of Joseph Curwen which stared
blandly down from the overmantel. Ever after that he entertained the
odd fancy--which his medical skill of course assured him was only a
fancy--that the eyes of the portrait had a sort of tendency to follow
young Charles Ward as he moved about the room. He stopped before
leaving to study the picture closely, marveling at its resemblance to
Charles and memorizing every minute detail of the cryptical, colorless
face, even down to a slight scar or pit in the smooth brow above the
right eye.
Assured by the doctor that Charles' mental health was in no danger,
but that on the other hand he was engaged in researches which might
prove of real importance, the Wards were more lenient than they might
otherwise have been when during the following June the youth made
positive his refusal to attend college. He had, he declared, studies
of much more vital importance to pursue; and intimated a wish to go
abroad the following year in order to avail himself of certain sources
of data not existing in America. The senior Ward, while denying this
latter wish as absurd for a boy of only eighteen, acquiesced regarding
the university; so that after a none too brilliant graduation from the
Moses Brown School there ensued for Charles a three year period of
intensive occult study and graveyard searching.
* * * * *
Coming of age in April, 1923, and having previously inherited a small
competence from his maternal grandfather, Ward determined at last to
take the European trip hitherto denied him. Of his proposed itinerary
he would say nothing save that the needs of his studies would carry
him to many places, but he promised to write his parents fully and
faithfully. When they saw he could not be dissuaded, they ceased all
opposition and helped as best they could; so that in June the young
man sailed for Liverpool with the farewell blessings of his father
and mother, who accompanied him to Boston and waved him out of sight
from the White Star pier in Charlestown. Letters soon told of his safe
arrival, and of his securing good quarters in Great Russell Street,
London; where he proposed to stay, shunning all family friends, till
he had exhausted the resources of the British Museum in a certain
direction. Of his daily life he wrote but little, for there was little
to write. Study and experiment consumed all his time, and he mentioned
a laboratory which he had established in one of his rooms. That he
said nothing of antiquarian rambles in the glamorous old city with its
luring skyline of ancient domes and steeples and its tangles of roads
and alleys whose mystic convolutions and sudden vistas alternately
beckon and surprise, was taken by his parents as a good index of the
degree to which his new interests had engrossed his mind.
In June, 1924, a brief note told of his departure for Paris, to
which he had before made one or two flying trips for material in the
Bibliotheque Nationale. For three months thereafter he sent only postal
cards, giving an address in the Rue St. Jacques and referring to a
special search among rare manuscripts in the library of an unnamed
private collector. He avoided acquaintances, and no tourists brought
back reports of having seen him. Then came a silence, and in October
the Wards received a picture card from Prague, Czecho-Slovakia, stating
that Charles was in that ancient town for the purpose of conferring
with a certain very aged man supposed to be the last living possessor
of some very curious mediaeval information. He gave an address in
the Newstadt, and announced no move till the following January; when
he dropped several cards from Vienna telling of his passage through
that city on the way toward a more easterly region whither one of his
correspondents and fellow-delvers into the occult had invited him.
The next card was from Klausenburg in Transylvania, and told of
Ward's progress toward his destination. He was going to visit a Baron
Ferenczy, whose estate lay in the mountains east of Rakus; and was to
be addressed at Rakus in the care of that nobleman. Another card from
Rakus a week later, saying that his host's carriage had met him and
that he was leaving the village for the mountains, was his last message
for a considerable time; indeed, he did not reply to his parents'
frequent letters until May, when he wrote to discourage the plan of his
mother for a meeting in London, Paris, or Rome during the summer, when
the elder Wards were planning to travel in Europe. His researches, he
said, were such that he could not leave his present quarters; while
the situation of Baron Ferenczy's castle did not favor visits. It was
on a crag in the dark wooded mountains, and the region was so shunned
by the country folk that normal people could not help feeling ill at
ease. Moreover, the Baron was not a person likely to appeal to correct
and conservative New England gentlefolk. His aspect and manners had
idiosyncrasies, and his age was so great as to be disquieting. It would
be better, Charles said, if his parents would wait for his return to
Providence; which could scarcely be far distant.
That return did not, however, take place until May, 1925, when after a
few heralding cards the young wanderer quietly slipped into New York on
the _Homeric_ and traversed the long miles to Providence by motor coach
eagerly drinking in the green rolling hills, the fragrant, blossoming
orchards, and the white steepled towns of Connecticut in spring; his
first taste of ancient New England in nearly four years.
Old Providence! It was this place and the mysterious forces of its
long, continuous history which had brought him into being, and which
had drawn him back toward marvels and secrets whose boundaries no
prophet might fix. Here lay the arcana, wondrous or dreadful as the
case might be, for which all his years of travel and application
had been preparing him. A taxicab whirled him through Post Office
Square with its glimpse of the river, and up the steep curved slope
of Waterman Street to Prospect. Then eight squares past the fine old
estates his childish eyes had known, and the quaint brick sidewalks
so often trodden by his youthful feet. And at last the little white
overtaken farmhouse on the right, and on the left the classic Adam
porch and stately bayed façade of the great brick house where he was
born. It was twilight, and Charles Dexter Ward had come home.
Ward was now visibly aged and hardened, but was still normal in his
general reactions; and in several talks with Willett displayed
a balance which no madman--even an incipient one--could feign
continuously for long. What elicited the notion of insanity at
this period were the _sounds_ heard at all hours from Ward's attic
laboratory, in which he kept himself most of the time. There were
chantings and repetitions, and thunderous declamations in uncanny
rhythms; and although these sounds were always in Ward's own voice,
there was something in the quality of that voice and in the accents
of the formulae it pronounced, which could not but chill the blood of
every hearer. It was noticed that Nig, the venerable and beloved black
cat of the household, bristled and arched his back perceptibly when
certain of the tones were heard.
The odors occasionally wafted from the laboratory were likewise
exceedingly strange. Sometimes they were very noxious, but more often
they were aromatic, with a haunting, elusive quality which seemed to
have the power of inducing fantastic images. People who smelled them
had a tendency to glimpse momentary mirages of enormous vistas, with
strange hills or endless avenues of sphinxes and hippogriffs stretching
off into infinite distance. His older aspect increased to a startling
degree his resemblance to the Curwen portrait in his library; and Dr.
Willett would often pause by the latter after a call, marvelling at
the virtual identity, and reflecting that only the small pit above the
picture's right eye now remained to differentiate the long-dead wizard
from the living youth. Frequently he noted peculiar things about;
little wax images of grotesque design on the shelves or tables, and the
half-erased remnants of circles, triangles, and pentagrams in chalk or
charcoal on the cleared central space of the large room. And always
in the night those rhythms and incantations thundered, till it became
very difficult to keep servants or suppress furtive talk of Charles'
madness.
In January, 1927, a peculiar incident occurred. One night about
midnight, as Charles was chanting a ritual whose weird cadence echoed
unpleasantly through the house below, there came a sudden gust of chill
wind from the bay, and a faint, obscure trembling of the earth which
everyone in the neighborhood noted. At the same time the cat exhibited
phenomenal traces of fright, while dogs bayed for as much as a mile
around. This was the prelude to a sharp thunderstorm, anomalous for
the season, which brought with it such a crash that Mr. and Mrs. Ward
believed the house had been struck. They rushed upstairs to see what
damage had been done, but Charles met them at the door to the attic;
pale, resolute, and portentous, with an almost fearsome combination of
triumph and seriousness on his face. He assured them that the house
had not really been struck, and that the storm would soon be over.
The thunder sank to a sort of dull mumbling chuckle and finally died
away. Stars came out, and the stamp of triumph on Charles Ward's face
crystallized into a very singular expression.
* * * * *
For two months or more after this incident Ward was less confined
than usual to his laboratory. He exhibited a curious interest in the
weather, and made odd inquiries about the date of the spring thawing of
the ground. One night late in March he left the house after midnight,
and did not return till almost morning; when his mother, being wakeful,
heard a rumbling motor draw up the carriage entrance. Muffled oaths
could be distinguished, and Mrs. Ward, rising and going to the window,
saw four dark figures removing a long, heavy box from a truck at
Charles' direction and carrying it within by the side door. She heard
labored breathing and ponderous footfalls on the stairs, and finally a
dull thumping in the attic; after which the footfalls descended again,
and the four men reappeared outside and drove off in their truck.
The next day Charles resumed his strict attic seclusion, drawing
down the dark shades of his laboratory windows and appearing to be
working on some metal substance. He would open the door to no one,
and steadfastly refused all proffered food. About noon a wrenching
sound followed by a terrible cry and a fall were heard, but when Mrs.
Ward rapped at the door her son at length answered faintly, and told
her that nothing had gone amiss. The hideous and indescribable stench
now welling out was absolutely harmless and unfortunately necessary.
Solitude was the one prime essential, and he would appear later for
dinner. That afternoon, after the conclusion of some odd hissing sounds
which came from behind the locked portal, he did finally appear;
wearing an extremely haggard aspect and forbidding anyone to enter
the laboratory upon any pretext. This, indeed, proved the beginning
of a new policy of secrecy; for never afterward was any other person
permitted to visit either the mysterious garret workroom or the
adjacent storeroom which he cleared out, furnished roughly, and added
to his inviolably private domain as a sleeping apartment. Here he
lived, with books brought up from his library beneath, till the time
he purchased the Pawtuxet bungalow and moved to it all his scientific
effects.
In the evening Charles secured the paper before the rest of the family
and damaged part of it through an apparent accident. Later on Dr.
Willett, having fixed the date from statements by various members
of the household, looked up an intact copy at the _Journal_ office
and found that in the destroyed section the following small item had
occurred: