I feel that at last the time has come for me to make the
disclosures which I have so long promised you, and for which you
have pressed me so often. The patience you have shewn in waiting,
and the confidence you have shewn in my mind and integrity, are
things I shall never cease to appreciate.
And now that I am ready to speak, I must own with humiliation
that no triumph such as I dreamed of can ever be mine. Instead
of triumph I have found terror, and my talk with you will not be
a boast of victory but a plea for help and advice in saving both
myself and the world from a horror beyond all human conception
or calculation. You recall what those Fenner letters said of the
old raiding party at Pawtuxet. That must all be done again, and
quickly. Upon us depends more than can be put into words--all
civilisation, all natural law, perhaps even the fate of the solar
system and the universe. I have brought to light a monstrous
abnormality, but I did it for the sake of knowledge. Now for the
sake of all life and nature you must help me thrust it back into
the dark again.
I have left that Pawtuxet place forever, and we must extirpate
everything existing there, alive or dead. I shall not go there
again, and you must not believe it if you ever hear that I am
there. I will tell you why I say this when I see you. I have come
home for good, and wish you would call on me at the very first
moment that you can spare five or six hours continuously to hear
what I have to say. It will take that long--and believe me when I
tell you that you never had a more genuine professional duty than
this. My life and reason are the very least things which hang in
the balance.
I dare not tell my father, for he could not grasp the whole thing.
But I have told him of my danger, and he has four men from a
detective agency watching the house. I don't know how much good
they can do, for they have against them forces which even you could
scarcely envisage or acknowledge. So come quickly if you wish to
see me alive and hear how you may help to save the cosmos from
stark hell.
Any time will do--I shall not be out of the house. Don't telephone
ahead, for there is no telling who or what may try to intercept
you. And let us pray to whatever gods there be that nothing may
prevent this meeting.
In utmost gravity and desperation,
Charles Dexter Ward.
P. S.--Shoot Dr. Allen on sight _and dissolve his body in acid.
Don't burn it._
Dr. Willett received this note about ten-thirty a.m., and immediately
arranged to spare the whole late afternoon and evening for the
momentous talk, letting it extend on into the night as long as might
be necessary. He planned to arrive about four o'clock, and through
all the intervening hours was so engulfed in every sort of wild
speculation that most of his tasks were very mechanically performed.
Maniacal as the letter would have sounded to a stranger, Willett had
seen too much of Charles Ward's oddities to dismiss it as sheer raving.
That something very subtle, ancient, and horrible was hovering about
he felt quite sure, and the reference to Dr. Allen could almost be
comprehended in view of what Pawtuxet gossip said of Ward's enigmatical
colleague. Willett had never seen the man, but had heard much of his
aspect and bearing, and could not but wonder what sort of eyes those
much-discussed dark glasses might conceal.
Promptly at four Dr. Willett presented himself at the Ward residence,
but found to his annoyance that Charles had not adhered to his
determination to remain indoors. The guards were there, but said that
the young man seemed to have lost part of his timidity. He had that
morning done much apparently frightened arguing and protesting over
the telephone, one of the detectives said, replying to some unknown
voice with phrases such as "I am very tired and must rest awhile,"
"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 high terrified fashion upon entering his library, afterward
trailing off into a kind of choking gasp. When, however, the butler had
gone to inquire what the trouble was, he had appeared at the door with
a great show of boldness, and had silently gestured the man away in a
manner that terrified him unaccountably. Then he had evidently done
some rearranging of his shelves, for a great clattering and thumping
and creaking ensued; after which he had reappeared and left at once.
Willett inquired whether or not any message had been left, but was
told that there was none. The butler seemed queerly disturbed about
something in Charles' 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 paneled overmantel on
the north wall, whence a year before the suave features of old Joseph
Curwen had looked mildly down. After a time the shadows began to
gather, and the sunset cheer gave place to a vague growing terror which
flew shadow-like before the night. Mr. Ward finally arrived, and showed
much surprise and anger at his son's absence after all the pains which
had been taken to guard him. He had not known of Charles' appointment,
and promised to notify Willett when the youth returned. In bidding
the doctor good night he expressed his utter perplexity at his son's
condition, and urged his caller to do all he could to restore the boy
to normal poise. Willett was glad to escape from that library, for
something frightful and unholy seemed to haunt it; as if the vanished
picture had left behind a legacy of evil. He had never liked that
picture; and even now, strong-nerved though he was, there lurked a
quality in its vacant panel which made him feel an urgent need to get
out into the pure air as soon as possible.
* * * * *
The next morning Willett received a message from the senior Ward,
saying that Charles was still absent. Mr. Ward mentioned that Dr.
Allen had telephoned him to say that Charles would remain at Pawtuxet
for some time, and that he must not be disturbed. This was necessary
because Allen himself was suddenly called away for an indefinite
period, leaving the researches in need of Charles' constant oversight.
Charles sent his best wishes, and regretted any bother his abrupt
change of plans might have caused. In listening to this message Mr.
Ward heard Dr. Allen's voice for the first time, and it seemed to
excite some vague and elusive memory which could not be actually
placed, but which was disturbing to the point of fearfulness.
Faced by these baffling and contradictory reports, Dr. Willett was
frankly at a loss what to do. The frantic earnestness of Charles'
note was not to be denied, yet what could one think of its writer's
immediate violation of his own expressed policy? Young Ward had written
that his delvings had become blasphemous and menacing, that they and
his bearded colleague must be extirpated at any cost, and that he
himself would never return to their final scene; yet according to
latest advices he had forgotten all this and was back in the thick
of the mystery. Common sense bade one leave the youth alone with his
freakishness, yet some deeper instinct would not permit the impression
of that frenzied letter to subside. Willett read it over again, and
could not make its essence sound as empty and insane as both its
bombastic verbiage and its lack of fulfilment would seem to imply.
Its terror was too profound and real, and in conjunction with what
the doctor already knew evoked too vivid hints of monstrosities from
beyond time and space, to permit of any cynical explanation. There were
nameless horrors abroad; and no matter how little one might be able to
get at them, one ought to stand prepared for any sort of action at any
time.
For over a week Dr. Willett pondered on the dilemma which seemed thrust
upon him, and became more and more inclined to pay Charles a call at
the Pawtuxet bungalow. No friend of the youth had ever ventured to
storm this forbidden retreat, and even his father knew of its interior
only from such descriptions as he chose to give; but Willett felt that
some direct conversation with his patient was necessary. Mr. Ward had
been receiving brief and non-committal typed notes from his son, and
said that Mrs. Ward in her Atlantic City retirement had had no better
word. So at length the doctor resolved to act; and despite a curious
sensation inspired by old legends of Joseph Curwen, and by more recent
revelations and warnings from Charles Ward, set boldly out for the
bungalow on the bluff above the river.
Willett had visited the spot before through sheer curiosity, though of
course never entering the house or proclaiming his presence; hence knew
exactly the route to take. Driving out Broad Street one early afternoon
toward the end of February in his small motor, he thought oddly of the
grim party which had taken that selfsame road a hundred and fifty-seven
years before, on a terrible errand which none might ever comprehend.
The ride through the city's decaying fringe was short, and trim
Edgewood and sleepy Pawtuxet presently spread out ahead. Willett turned
to the right down Lockwood Street and drove his car as far along that
rural road as he could, then alighted and walked north to where the
bluff towered above the lovely bends of the river and the sweep of
misty downlands beyond. Houses were still few here, and there was no
mistaking the isolated bungalow with its concrete garage on a high
point of land at his left. Stepping briskly up the neglected gravel
walk he rapped at the door with a firm hand, and spoke without a tremor
to the evil Portuguese mulatto who opened it to the width of a crack.
He must, he said, see Charles Ward at once on vitally important
business. No excuse would be accepted, and a repulse would mean only
a full report of the matter to the elder Ward. The mulatto still
hesitated, and pushed against the door when Willett attempted to open
it; but the doctor merely raised his voice and renewed his demands.
Then there came from the dark interior a husky whisper which somehow
chilled the hearer through and through, though he did not know why he
feared it. "Let him in, Tony," it said, "we may as well talk now as
ever." But disturbing as was the whisper, the greater fear was that
which immediately followed. The floor creaked and the speaker hove in
sight--and the owner of those strange and resonant tones was seen to be
no other than Charles Dexter Ward.
The minuteness with which Dr. Willett recalled and recorded his
conversation of that afternoon is due to the importance he assigns
to this particular period. For at last he concedes a vital change in
Charles Dexter Ward's mentality, and believes that the youth now spoke
from a brain hopelessly alien to the brain whose growth he had watched
for six and twenty years. Controversy with Dr. Lyman has compelled him
to be very specific, and he definitely dates the madness of Charles
Ward from the time the typewritten notes began to reach his parents.
Those notes are not in Ward's normal style; not even in the style of
that last frantic letter to Willett. Instead, they are strange and
archaic, as if the snapping of the writer's mind had released a flood
of tendencies and impressions picked up unconsciously through boyhood
antiquarianism. There is an obvious effort to be modern, but the spirit
and occasionally the language are those of the past.
* * * * *
The past, too, was evident in Ward's every tone and gesture as he
received the doctor in that shadowy bungalow. He bowed, motioned
Willett to a seat, and began to speak abruptly in that strange whisper
which he sought to explain at the very outset.
"I am grown phthisical," he began, "from this cursed river air. You
must excuse my speech. I suppose you are come from my father to see
what ails me, and I hope you will say nothing to alarm him."
Willett was studying these scraping tones with extreme care, but
studying even more closely the face of the speaker. Something, he felt,
was wrong; and he thought of what the family had told him about the
fright of that Yorkshire butler one night. He wished it were not so
dark, but did not request that any blind be opened. Instead, he merely
asked Ward why he had so belied the frantic note of little more than a
week before.
"I was coming to that," the host replied. "You must know, I am in a
very bad state of nerves, and do and say queer things I cannot account
for. As I have told you often, I am on the edge of great matters; and
the bigness of them has a way of making me light-headed. Any man might
well be frighted of what I have found, but I am not to be put off for
long. I was a dunce to have that guard and stick at home; for having
gone this far, my place is here. I am not well spoke of by my prying
neighbors, and perhaps I was led by weakness to believe myself what
they say of me. There is no evil to any in what I do, so long as I do
it rightly. Have the goodness to wait six months, and I'll show you
what will pay your patience well.
"You may as well know I have a way of learning old matters from things
surer than books, and I'll leave you to judge the importance of what I
can give to history, philosophy, and the arts by reason of the doors
I have access to. My ancestor had all this when those witless peeping
Toms came and murdered him. I now have it again, or am coming very
imperfectly to have a part of it. This time nothing must happen, and
least of all through any idiot fears of my own. Pray forget all I writ
you, Sir, and have no fear of this place or any in it. Dr. Allen is a
man of fine parts, and I owe him an apology for anything ill I have
said of him. I wish I had no need to spare him, but there were things
he had to do elsewhere. His zeal is equal to mine in all those matters,
and I suppose that when I feared the work I feared him too as my
greatest helper in it."
Ward paused, and the doctor hardly knew what to say or think. He felt
almost foolish in the face of this calm repudiation of the letter;
and yet there clung to him the fact that while the present discourse
was strange and alien and indubitably mad, the note itself had been
tragic in its naturalness and likeness to the Charles Ward he knew.
Willett now tried to turn the talk on early matters, and recall to the
youth some past events which would restore a familiar mood; but in
this process he obtained only the most grotesque results. It was the
same with all the alienists later on. Important sections of Charles
Ward's store of mental images, mainly those touching modern times and
his own personal life, had been unaccountably expunged; while all the
massed antiquarianism of his youth had welled up from some profound
subconsciousness to engulf the contemporary and the individual. The
youth's ultimate knowledge of elder things was abnormal and unholy, and
he tried his best to hide it. When Willett would mention some favorite
object of his boyhood archaistic studies he often shed by pure accident
such a light as no normal mortal could conceivably be expected to
possess, and the doctor shuddered as the glib allusion glided by.
It was not wholesome to know so much about the way the fat sheriff's
wig fell off as he leaned over at the play in Mr. Douglass' Histrionick
Academy in King Street on the eleventh of February, 1762, which fell of
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 theater a fortnight later. That Thomas Sabin's Boston coach
was "damn'd uncomfortable" old letters may well have told; but what
healthy antiquarian could recall how the creaking of Epenetus Olney's
new signboard (the gaudy Crown he set up after he took to calling his
tavern the Crown Coffee House) was exactly like the first few notes of
the new jazz piece all the radios in Pawtuxet were playing?
Ward, however, would not be quizzed long in this vein. Modern and
personal topics he waved aside quite summarily, whilst regarding
antique affairs he soon shewed the plainest boredom. What he wished
clearly enough was only to satisfy his visitor enough to make him
depart without the intention of returning. To this end he offered to
shew Willett the entire house, and at once proceeded to lead the doctor
through every room from cellar to attic. Willett looked sharply, but
noted that the visible books were far too few and trivial ever to have
filled the wide gaps on Ward's shelves at home, and that the meager
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 spoke out loud at all, averring that his
throat was in a 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
rumors because people talked more frankly to him than to a parent of
the central figure, and from all he heard he could tell that young
Ward's life had become indeed a strange one. Common tongues would
not dissociate his household from the vampirism of the previous
summer, while the nocturnal comings and goings of the motor trucks
provided their share of dark speculation. Local tradesmen spoke of
the queerness of the orders brought them by the evil-looking mulatto,
and in particular of the inordinate amounts of meat and fresh blood
secured from the two butcher shops in the immediate neighborhood. For a
household of only three, these quantities were quite absurd.
Then there was the matter of the sounds beneath the earth. Reports of
these things were harder to pin down, but all the vague hints tallied
in certain basic essentials. Noises of a ritual nature positively
existed, and at times when the bungalow was dark. They might, of
course, have come from the known cellar; but rumor insisted that there
were deeper and more spreading crypts. Recalling the ancient tales of
Joseph Curwen's catacombs, and assuming for granted that the present
bungalow had been selected because of its situation on the old Curwen
site as revealed in one or another of the documents found behind the
picture, Willett and Mr. Ward gave this phase of the gossip much
attention; and searched many times without success for the door in the
river bank which old manuscripts mentioned. As to popular opinions of
the bungalow's various inhabitants, it was soon plain that the Brava
Portuguese was loathed, the bearded and spectacled Dr. Allen feared,
and the pallid young scholar disliked to a profound extent. During
the last week or two Ward had obviously changed much, abandoning his
attempts at affability and speaking only in hoarse but oddly repellent
whispers on the few occasions that he ventured forth.
Such were the shreds and fragments gathered here and there; and over
these Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett held many long and serious conferences.
They strove to exercise deduction, induction, and constructive
imagination to their utmost extent; and to correlate every known fact
of Charles' later life, including the frantic letter which the doctor
now shewed the father, with the meager documentary evidence available
concerning old Joseph Curwen. They would have given much for a glimpse
of the papers Charles had found, for very clearly the key to the
youth's madness lay in what he had learned of the ancient wizard and
his doings.
And yet, after all, it was from no step of Mr. Ward's or Dr. Willett's
that the next move in this singular case proceeded. The father and
the physician, rebuffed and confused by a shadow too shapeless and
intangible to combat, had rested uneasily on their oars while the
typed notes of young Ward to his parents grew fewer and fewer. Then
came the first of the month with its customary financial adjustments,
and the clerks at certain banks began a peculiar shaking of heads and
telephoning from one to the other. Officials who knew Charles Ward
by sight went down to the bungalow to ask why every cheque of his
appearing at this juncture was a clumsy forgery, and were reassured
less than they ought to have been when the youth hoarsely explained
that his hand had lately been so much affected by a nervous shock as
to make normal writing impossible. He could, he said, form no written
characters at all except with great difficulty; and could prove it by
the fact that he had been forced to type all his recent letters, even
those to his father and mother, who would bear out the assertion.
What made the investigators pause in confusion was not this
circumstance alone, for that was nothing unprecedented or fundamentally
suspicious; nor even the Pawtuxet gossip, of which one or two of them
had caught echoes. It was the muddled discourse of the young man
which nonplussed them, implying as it did a virtually total loss of
memory concerning important monetary matters which he had had at his
fingertips only a month or two before. Something was wrong; for despite
the apparent coherence and rationality of his speech, there could be
no normal reason for this ill-concealed blankness on vital points.
Moreover, although none of these men knew Ward well, they could not
help observing the change in his language and manner. They had heard
he was an antiquarian, but even the most hopeless antiquarians do not
make 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
rumors; and after their departure the party of officials decided that a
talk with the senior Ward was imperative.
* * * * *
So on the sixth of March, 1928, there was a long and serious conference
in Mr. Ward's office, after which the utterly bewildered father
summoned Dr. Willett in a kind of helpless resignation. Willett looked
over the strained and awkward signatures of the cheques, and compared
them in his mind with the penmanship of that last frantic note.
Certainly, the change was radical and profound, and yet there was
something damnably familiar about the new writing. It had crabbed and
archaic tendencies of a very curious sort, and seemed to result from a
type of stroke utterly different from that which the youth had always
used. It was strange--but where had he seen it before? On the whole, it
was obvious that Charles was insane. Of that there could be no doubt.
And since it appeared unlikely that he could handle his property or
continue to deal with the outside world much longer, something must
quickly be done toward his oversight and possible cure. It was then
that the alienists were called in, Drs. Peck and Waite of Providence
and Dr. Lyman of Boston, to whom Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett gave the most
exhaustive possible history of the case, and who conferred at length
in the now unused library of their young patient, examining what books
and papers of his were left in order to gain some further notion of
his habitual mental cast. After scanning this material and examining
the meaningless note to Willett, they all agreed that Charles Ward's
studies had been enough to unseat or at least to warp any ordinary
intellect, and wished most heartily that they could see his more
intimate volumes and documents; but this latter they knew they could
do, if at all, only after a scene at the bungalow itself. Willett now
reviewed the whole case with febrile energy; it being at this time that
he obtained the statements of the workmen who had seen Charles find the
Curwen documents, and that he collated the incidents of the destroyed
newspaper items, looking up the latter at the _Journal_ office.
On Thursday, the eighth of March, Drs. Willett, Peck, Lyman and Waite,
accompanied by Mr. Ward, paid the youth their momentous call; making
no concealment of their object and questioning the now acknowledged
patient with extreme minuteness. Charles, though he was ordinately
long in answering the summons and was still redolent of strange
and noxious laboratory odors 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 the 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 the
shadowy bungalow possessed no library or laboratory beyond the visible
ones, and waxed abstruse in explaining the absence from the house of
such odors as now saturated all his clothing. Neighborhood gossip he
attributed to nothing more than the cheap inventiveness of baffled
curiosity. Of the whereabouts of Dr. Allen he said he did not feel
at liberty to speak definitely, but assured his inquisitors that the
bearded and spectacled man would return when needed. In paying off
the stolid Brava who resisted all questioning by the visitors, and in
closing the bungalow which still seemed to hold such nighted secrets,
Ward shewed no sign of nervousness save a barely noticed tendency to
pause as though listening for something very faint. He was apparently
animated by a calmly philosophic resignation, as if his removal were
the merest transient incident which would cause the least trouble if
facilitated and disposed of once and for all. It was clear that he
trusted to his obviously unimpaired keenness of absolute mentality to
overcome all the embarrassments into which his twisted memory, his
lost voice and handwriting, and his secretive and eccentric behavior
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 disorganization. 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. 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.