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 two a.m., Hart observed a glow of a lantern or
pocket torch not far to the northward, and upon opening the door
detected the figure of a man with a trowel very plainly silhouetted
against a nearby electric light. At once starting in pursuit, he
saw the figure dart hurriedly toward the main entrance, gaining
the street and losing himself among the shadows before approach or
capture was possible.
Like the first of the ghouls active during the past year, this
intruder had done no real damage before detection. A vacant part
of the Ward lot shewed signs of a little superficial digging, but
nothing even nearly the size of a grave had been attempted, and no
previous grave had been disturbed.
Hart, who cannot describe the prowler except as a small man
probably having a full beard, inclines to the view that all three
of the digging incidents have a common source; but police from the
Second Station think otherwise on account of the savage nature of
the second incident, where an ancient coffin was removed and its
headstone violently shattered.
The first of the incidents, in which it is thought an attempt to
bury something was frustrated, occurred a year ago last March, and
has been attributed to bootleggers seeking a cache. It is possible,
says Sergeant 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.
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 realize from the subtle physical as well as
mental changes in him, and you must not hope to see him again. 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. After the interchange of a few strained
formalities, a new element of constraint crept in, as Ward seemed to
read behind the doctor's masklike face a terrible purpose which had
never been there before.
Ward actually turned pale, and the doctor was the first to speak.
"More," he said, "has been found out, and I must warn you fairly that a
reckoning is due."
"Digging again, and coming upon more poor starving pets?" was the
ironic reply. It was evident that the youth meant to shew bravado to
the last.
"No," Willett slowly rejoined, "this time I did not have to dig. We
have had men looking up Dr. Allen, and they found the false beard and
spectacles in the bungalow!"
"Excellent," commented the disquieted host in an effort to be wittily
insulting, "and I trust they proved more becoming than the beard and
glasses you now have on!"
"They would become you very well," came the even and studied response,
"_as indeed they seem to have done_."
As Willett said this, it almost seemed as though a cloud passed over
the sun; though there was no change in the shadows on the floor. Then
Ward ventured:
"And is this what asks so hotly for a reckoning? Suppose a man does
find it now and then useful to be twofold?"
"No," said Willett gravely, "again you are wrong. It is no business of
mine if any man seeks duality; _provided he has any right to exist at
all, and provided he does not destroy what called him out of space_."
Ward now started violently. "Well, Sir, what _have_ ye found, and what
d'ye want with me?"
The doctor let a little time elapse before replying, as if choosing his
words for an effective answer.
"I have found," he finally intoned, "something in a cupboard behind an
ancient overmantel where a picture once was, and I have burned it and
buried the ashes where the grave of Charles Dexter Ward ought to be."
The madman choked and sprang from the chair in which he had been
sitting:
"Damn ye, who did ye tell--and who'll believe it was he after these
full two months, with me alive? What d'ye mean to do?"
Willett, though a small man, actually took on a kind of judicial
majesty as he calmed the patient with a gesture.
"I have told no one. This is no common case--it is a madness out of
time and a horror from beyond the spheres which no police or lawyers
or courts or alienists could ever fathom or grapple with. _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 contacts of two minds. You were a
fool, Curwen, to fancy that a mere visual identity would be enough.
Why didn't you think of the speech and the voice and the handwriting?
It hasn't worked, you see, after all. You know better than I who or
what wrote that message in minuscules, but I will warn you it was not
written in vain. There are abominations and blasphemies which must be
stamped out, and I believe that the writer of those words will attend
to Orne and Hutchinson. One of those creatures wrote you once, 'do not
call up any that you cannot put down.' 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 cabalistic 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-gray dust.