Dreeme pushed the untasted tumbler of apple-jack away with an
expression of disgust, and stood up and pointed a questioning finger at
the old doctor. He demanded:
“Where is the place called Dagon?”
There was a finality in his voice that rang through the room. Humphrey
Lathrop’s jaw dropped and his three chins quivered like jelly. He
pushed back his reinforced chair from the table with a mighty effort
and an enormous scraping sound. For an instant Dreeme feared that the
old man’s eyes would pop out of his head. There was amazement in them,
consternation, something very like terror. For the first time since
Dreeme had known him the old doctor was completely taken off his guard,
surprised, and routed.
“Where did ... where did....”
Lathrop fumbled for speech unsuccessfully, his tongue sticking to the
roof of his mouth. He glanced cautiously about the room as though he
expected invisible foes to spring up on all sides. Dreeme, amazed at
Lathrop’s reaction, stood with outstretched hand and pointing finger,
awaiting his answer with an obvious determination that no beating
about the bush might distract. The rain dripped from the bottom of his
trousers, and made a dark pool about him on the round rag carpet. The
clock ticked desolately as he waited. Lathrop spoke slowly and with
evident reluctance. He said:
“Where the bones were buried.”
He appeared to have given up all hope of dissuading Dreeme from the
subject.
“Bones? What bones? What does that mean?” cried Dreeme.
Lathrop’s voice was monotonous.
“The bones of the Salem witches.”
A great light seemed to flood Dreeme’s mind, that light that had once
been so far away, but it was too dazzling for him as yet. A voice
deep inside him was talking feverishly, saying things, explaining,
indicating. He could not catch the sound of the words. The voice was
talking too fast. The words ran together. They were a febrile blur of
sound.
“You must explain everything, Humphrey,” he said in a calm voice as
he sat down. “I’m in this thing too deep now. Somebody I know ... is
affected.”
The old doctor nodded, and then, reaching for his tumbler of
apple-jack, drank the entire potion down in a single draught. He choked
and wheezed for a moment.
“You hit me amidships then,” he remarked soberly. “Where did you hear
of the place called Dagon?”
“Never mind,” returned Dreeme. “Don’t stave me off with questions. Tell
me things.”
“I’m going to,” answered Lathrop mildly. “I’m going to tell you things.
You’re going to have it all now, and much good may it do you.”
His eyes roved about the room. Then they reverted to Dreeme.
“Suppose you tell me everything first,” he said in a wheedling voice.
“I want to know what you’ve found out. There is no use duplicating the
few facts and suspicions that I possess.”
Dreeme eyed him impatiently.
“All right,” he said shortly, and plunged immediately into his tale. In
a rapid condensed form he told Lathrop of the first visit he had paid
to Westcott’s house, of the two conversations with Martha Westcott,
of the death of Wagner, of the strange fright of Deborah, and of
the goat’s head. He strove to reinterpret the theory of will which
Jeffrey Westcott had put forward in the burned mill. He explained
his suspicions of the Reverend George Burroughs. Lathrop listened
attentively, his head on one side, and his great lips pursed so that
they thrust out like the snout of a pig. Occasionally he would nod.
Once or twice his eyes opened very wide. In one instance he emitted a
triumphant cluck as though some suspicion he had carried in his mind
for years were verified.
“Will you fetch me down that big black book?” he said softly when
Dreeme concluded his tale, indicating the little shelf that was nailed
high on the wall behind him. Dreeme strode over and drew forth a bulky
volume that was covered with dust, blew it off, and brought it to the
table where he placed it. He deliberately read the title on the back of
the tome as he laid it down. The name “Cotton Mather” was printed there
in faded gilt letters. Lathrop smiled, a smile with no humor in it, and
drew the book toward him. Then he adjusted his spectacles and leaned
back very much like a judge about to give a decision.
“I tried to keep you away from this,” he said, “for good and sufficient
reasons, and chief among them was the peace of your own mind and the
degree of your success in Marlborough. Well, you have lost the peace of
your mind, and there is no longer any reason to suppose that you will
ever have any success in Marlborough. There is no reason, therefore,
why you should not know as much as I know. I will tell you, Daniel,
that what you have told me has made some dark places clear to me,
and verified certain suspicions which I have wisely kept to myself.
Therefore, in making plain to you what I know I shall adjust some of
your own information into the scheme of things.”
After this preamble he cleared his throat loudly, searched through the
huge volume before him until he found a certain place, closed the book
upon a pudgy finger that retained the page, and glanced soberly at
Dreeme.
“It’s witchcraft we have to deal with,” he said mildly. “It’s a cursed
madness that has ruled this valley since 1692.”
Dreeme nodded without surprise. He suspected this, indeed, he knew it.
“Yes, sir, witchcraft,” repeated the old doctor. “You probably don’t
believe in it. No more do I. But the outward forms of it exist just as
surely as the outward forms of the Christian religion exist. It has its
established hierarchy, although I believe today that it is the weapon
of madmen, charlatans, and fanatics.”
He sighed loudly.
“This is a mad world, Daniel,” he said. “We are all more or less
insane. Well, I’m getting nowhere. As I age I grow more discursive.”
Dreeme moved restlessly and the old doctor lifted a hand.
“Let me tell you this in my own way,” he said. “You’ll have it all
before I am done.”
Lathrop cleared his throat and fastened his eyes upon Dreeme.
“In 1692,” he said, “the little town of Salem went insane. You’ve read
your history and you know all about the witch scares and the hangings
on Gallows Hill. You know how the children cried out that they were
possessed, and gave testimony against various men and women in the
community, and how the judges and preachers strove to battle with
this strange outbreak of insanity. I don’t have to give you a resumé
of that history. It is enough to remind you of it. It is the common
conclusion of most scholars that all this was a form of religious
mania, and that the people who were hanged were not professed witches
but victims of hallucinations and enmity. I don’t believe it. I believe
those people belonged to a secret and blasphemous order that met all
over the world, that they were divided into covens or parishes, that
they each had their leader in the shape of a Black Man who represented
the Devil, that they worshipped Satan, and that they attempted to
practise magic. I believe that they were unhinged to such a degree that
they could imagine themselves flying through the air, that they were
addicted to hallucinations and delusions and visions, that, like the
whirling dervishes, they could fling themselves into hysteric trances
and dwell in the domain of their sick imaginations. They believed those
things, Daniel. They had faith in Satan. And they attained a malevolent
strength through their faith. They could superimpose their will on
innocent people and make those people sick by the power of suggestion.
There is nothing supernatural in that, after all. It is supernormal,
perhaps, but you know my views on these things. The trappings and
the ceremonies and the results might seem supernatural, but that was
because the people in those days did not know about such things as
thought-transference, auto-suggestion, and the impulsion of the will.
In a measure, these people were liberating themselves from time, moving
beyond the limitations of their days, subsisting in an arcane of their
own manufacture through the full strength of those fanatical beliefs,
which, after all, is saying no more than that they liberated their
wills and believed in the strength of their wills. Well, in 1692 all
this was brought to a halt by the hangings and the persecutions of the
witch-judges. The Salem coven was demolished and scattered. Do not
think, however, that all the witches were strung up on Gallows Hill.
Others fled into the woods and sought far places where they might
conduct their orgies and ceremonies in their own way. The larger group,
and now, Daniel, I am telling you something I read in a book of which
you have heard, hovered in the wilderness about Salem for some weeks,
living on roots and berries and what the Indians might give them, for
the Indians, too, believed in witchcraft. By night they ventured to the
desolate graves of their hanged companions and dug up those bodies and
bore them away with them into the thick forest. They pushed westward,
avoiding the little settlements in the clearing, passing north of
Springfield, crossing the Connecticut River, and eventually they came
to a valley and discovered it to be a lost cul-de-sac in the hills,
and there they settled down. With them they had the black book of the
order, a book filled with ceremonies and liturgies, and in which a
scribe set down the account of their wanderings. Can you guess where
they settled, Daniel?”
Dreeme nodded.
“Here,” he said. “They settled in this valley. These farmers are their
descendants. The black book they carried with them was the black book
of old Uriah Carrier.”
Lathrop wagged his head up and down.
“That’s right,” he said. “As a boy I looked into that book and was
frightened out of my wits. Yes, Daniel, they settled here, still
carrying on their frightful ceremonies, still calling upon the devil by
night and meeting in the secret forest clearings to dance in the light
of the moon. One place they kept sacred. It was a hidden place, known
only to the adepts. It was there that they buried the bones of the
hanged witches, those poor bodies that they had carried for two hundred
miles through the thick wilderness. There, too, they raised the Devil
Stone upon which the Black Man stood during the great ceremonies. They
called the place Dagon and strewed it with ashes. I can picture that
place lighted by torches at midnight. I can picture the rapt faces of
the witches and the compelling eyes of the Black Man as he stood above
them and called on Satan, on Beelzebub, on Asmodeus, the fiends that he
imagined served his purpose. I can hear the laughter of the women and
see their glistening eyes as the madness took them. By day they were
taciturn people, carrying on the quiet masquerade of pioneers, building
up homes in the clearing, pushing the forest farther and farther back;
but when the moon rose the madness that was in their blood swept them
out of themselves and they became other creatures employing pagan
symbols and ancient phallic ceremonials. They existed in a domain
out of place and time, then, a land of hallucinations and dreams and
primitive urges. It was a land where they celebrated the Black Mass
and the Witches’ Sabaoth, and gave full rein to the frenzies of the
blood and brain. I’ve never seen the place called Dagon, Daniel, and
I never hope to see it, but I suspect where it is. I suspect that the
Devil Stone is still there, and if one dug deep enough one would come
to crumbled bones, if, indeed, bones last that long.”
The old doctor drew a long breath and paused. He reached for the
apple-jack bottle and poured himself a drink.
“I’m developing into an old drunkard,” he remarked. “Imagine it. At my
age!”
He drank half the tumbler of amber liquor and set it down on the table.
The roar of the rain filled the room and Dreeme, gazing toward the
window, could perceive nothing but a silver opaqueness that ran and
glittered. He waited for Lathrop to go on, knowing that the old doctor
could tell his story best in his own way.
“Now then,” said Lathrop, wiping his mouth with a fat hand. “Where was
I? Where, for that matter, are any of us? That’s philosophy, Daniel.”
He summoned up a smile, but it was lost in the earnest attention of the
young doctor. He said slowly:
“I didn’t actually lie to you, Daniel, but I did conveniently forget
to tell you some things the other day. I thought there was no need
of spreading a story that had better not have existed at all in the
beginning. Well!”
He sighed wheezily. Then he resumed his story.
“It was not alone the descendants of the Salem witches who wandered
into this valley and established homes,” he said. “You’ve heard of
Thomas Morton of Merry Mount, haven’t you?”
Dreeme nodded. Of course, he had. Why, Deborah....
“Morton,” said the old doctor, “was a rascal who headed a colony
of loose fellows. They sold liquor to the Indians, disregarded the
Puritanical laws of living, laughed at religion, and injected a
licentious scarlet into the gray cloth of the old New England. You can
imagine that carousing colony near enough to Boston to cause the good
Puritans a prodigious loss of sleep. It was something that they hated
and feared because it stirred in them the covered embers of their own
suppressed excesses, I suppose. Uncommitted sins that are buried in the
blood and brain are fearful things, Daniel. I imagine that most of the
Puritans sublimated their fleshly longings into a religious ardor but
this would make them fear the downright honesty of openly committed
sin more than ever. Anyway, when news reached Boston that the Morton
colonists had reared a huge May pole and were dancing about it with
their skins full of good liquor and debauching all the likely squaws
they could lay hands on, they decided that something drastic should be
done. So a body of armed men (crusaders of the Lord, Daniel) marched
to Merry Mount, cut the May Pole down, strewed the place with ashes,
cursed it and called it Dagon (you see how the name crops up?), and
scattered the befuddled revelers. What was more natural than that some
of these topers and lechers should push westward into the wilderness,
having, so to speak, their bellies full of Puritanical oppression? To
the west they came, then, following an old trail that led north of
Springfield and across the Connecticut River, and eventually they found
themselves in this valley. Leeminster was the town settled by them. So
there you have the two towns, Daniel. I don’t know which was settled
first. It doesn’t make any difference. They were near enough for daily
intercourse, and I suppose there was some inter-marriage. Whether the
witch-fever spread to Leeminster or not is a mystery. I am on dubious
ground now, for most of the opinions I have arrived at are the result
of deduction and there is no documentary proof to bolster me up. That
is why I am chary at giving vent to them. Some of the things that you
have told me seem to substantiate a few of the suspicions I have had.
My voice, Daniel, is getting awfully hoarse.”
He paused and finished his tumbler of apple-jack.
“You are going to be reeling in a minute,” said Dreeme impatiently.
Lathrop wheezed and chuckled.
“No, sir,” he said. “When you see me reel you’ll see a sight.”
He chuckled again. Dreeme observed an apoplectic glow on his fat
cheeks, however, and it made him uneasy. He was afraid that the old
doctor’s head would loll to one side, and that the continuation of the
story would be a series of stertorous snores. He had seen it happen
before for Lathrop plied the apple-jack not wisely but too well.
“Where was I?” inquired Lathrop mildly. He rolled his blue eyes at the
ceiling in thought.
“Oh!” he said in faint surprise as he unexpectedly lighted on the
thread of his conversation. “Oh, yes!”
“Marlborough and Leeminster proceeded on their solitary way while the
land developed,” he declared. “Towns sprang up on all sides of them,
but they were protected by their valley and the fact that no large
artery of travel cut through them. They were in a cul-de-sac. They
accepted the modernities of living suspiciously and in a gingerly
manner. Being farmers, the natives subsisted by themselves and without
too much aid from the outside world. As time passed on I imagine the
witch practices ceased, although the memories of them were handed down
from father to son, and mother to daughter. They were not so much
ashamed of these practices, at first, as they were reticently jealous.
The very fact of them made them different from other men and women.
When I came here I found no signs of secret practices. I did find a
dour reticence, perhaps a more antagonistic one than you have run up
against. But I paid no attention to it, and I minded my own business. I
did not ask questions. I did not watch people. I admit that I thought
a lot. I read a great deal of history, and tried to orientate these
people. It was from old Captain Uriah Carrier himself that I got my
clew, for, thinking me no more than a mere boy and being a boastful old
scoundrel, he told me that he was the last Black Man, and he even, in
a burst of drunken recklessness one night, showed me the book that had
been in his family for generations. It was easy enough for me to put
two and two together after that. Being wise though I put them together
by myself and kept my convictions to myself. I....”
Lathrop developed a choking fit and sputtered for a few minutes while
Dreeme waited impatiently. The old doctor made a half-gesture toward
the apple-jack bottle, thought better of it, and withdrew his hand
reluctantly.
“You see Marlborough today,” he said wearily, leaning back in his
chair, “and you see a community that has hugged a secret to its bosom
for centuries. These men and women are alive to the past, to the
terrible heritage which they possess, and they desire to eradicate it
from common knowledge, to bury it, as it were, in the dust-heap of gone
things. That is their first impulse. They do not want strangers to know
that they have descended from condemned witches. Now there’s Jeffrey
Westcott.”
He paused and blinked his blue eyes.
“Who is he?” he proceeded. “I don’t know. You don’t know. But we can
guess what his purpose is. You’ve told me all about his maunderings
about the mightiness of the will, the theory he hinted at to you in
the burned mill that night. Now this is what I see, Daniel. Westcott
fell in with Peleg Carrier in Germany, learned from him about the
witch-cult that had existed here, and came to find out more about
it. He had a theory of his own, a theory in an inchoate state, and
he fancied that witch practices might be subdued to the ends of that
theory. When he was settled here he found that he could start nothing,
for these people had ceased to practice the so-called Black Arts.
What he needed was a key, a weapon to drive the farmers before him.
He found that weapon in Captain Uriah Carrier’s black book. All he
had to do was to startle the morose inhabitants of Marlborough and
its outlying district with the testimony from this book, for the will
toward witchcraft was already a part of their blood’s inheritance. I
believe, Daniel, that he reinstituted witch meetings, formed a coven
here, and made himself the ruling Black Man. That’s why he’s avoided;
that’s why his farm is shunned territory. He commands the dark side of
the nature of Marlborough. These people lead two lives, and one of them
is the surface life that we see going on about us. The other is the
secret life that centers about the place called Dagon. Westcott drives
them through their fears and their secret weaknesses, weaknesses that
they might fight against and successfully conquer if he were not here.
When he goes the whole scaffolding of mummeries will break down, these
people will become normal inhabitants, and all this stuff will seem
like some wild dream. That’s what I think, Daniel.”
Dreeme nodded an assent.
“That’s it,” he agreed. “Now what can we do about it?”
Lathrop scowled heavily.
“_I_,” he emphasized, “can do nothing about it.”
“Something must be done about it,” urged Dreeme.
“Then you do it, Daniel,” said the old doctor. “And God be with you.”
He shook his head dolefully.
“I’m not a witch-hunter,” he explained mildly. “Neither am I Don
Quixote or Bayard or Sherlock Holmes or ... or....”
He continued to roll his head from side to side slowly.
“No, Daniel,” he protested, “I’m the man who sits in a chair all day.”
He reverted to the phenomena that Dreeme had adumbrated during his
story.
“The various things you’ve told me,” he said, “clear up, as I’ve
pointed out before, some of my suspicions. Let us take up the wax
figures first, those little puppets that Deborah Morton found behind
Westcott’s books. That’s an old witchcraft trick. A doll is made
and baptized with the name of some living person against whom the
witch desires revenge or evil. Then needles are thrust into those
places where the person is to be injured and charms are recited over
the little figure. Westcott, I believe, imagined this mummery would
sharpen and direct the invisible strength of his will. You say one of
the dolls had a needle thrust into its leg. Well, Westcott got shot in
the leg, didn’t he? I imagine that was his first charm, a charm against
himself. And it worked. Never ask me how it worked, but it did. The
other doll had needles through its eyes. Well, how about the wooden
pegs driven into Wagner’s eye-sockets?”
Dreeme shuddered as he recalled the disfigured face grinning up at him
from the bank of the Saccarac River.
“I don’t believe Westcott killed Wagner,” added Lathrop. “No, sir. I
believe he wanted the hired man dead because he found out that the poor
fellow was acting as a go-between for Martha Westcott and yourself. Now
into whose brain did Westcott force the thought of and will for this
murder? Find that out, Daniel, if you can.”
“I intend to,” said the young doctor, his mouth a thin line of
determination.
“But don’t forget,” remarked Lathrop, “that there may be a little doll
somewhere christened Daniel Dreeme with a needle through its heart.”
“I’ll take my chance,” said Dreeme.
“We come to the goat’s head,” proceeded Lathrop. “That puzzles me. I
know its origin but not its purpose.”
Dreeme was visibly excited at this topic.
“Here we sit like two Sherlock Holmes,” chuckled the old narrator,
“and we’re really two Doctor Watsons. Amateurs, Daniel, amateurs.”
Suddenly he sobered up.
“The goat’s head,” he explained, “was the seal of Thomas Morton of
Merry Mount. It is still extant upon legal documents which he left
behind him. I’ll venture to assert, Daniel, that your Deborah, who
wears that seal, apparently, about her neck, is a descendant of the
Morton clan. Old Thomas left enough illegitimate progeny, God knows,
and there is no reason why some of these women may not have taken
the rascal’s name. Why the goat’s head should have been clutched in
Wagner’s hand or why it is branded on Martha Westcott’s shoulder is
beyond my reasoning faculties. Those are things that you will have to
find out.”
Slowly he opened the bulky black volume before him.
“Daniel,” he said, “listen to this. I am reading from Cotton Mather.”
He bowed over the page and read slowly:
“... this Rampant Hag, Martha Carrier, was the person, of whom the
Confessions of the Witches, and of her own Children among the rest,
agreed, That the Devil had promised her, she should be Queen of Hell.”
He looked up solemnly.
“That, I take it,” he remarked, “is the fountainhead of the Carrier
family. You notice she had children. She was the Queen of Hell, Daniel,
the Queen of Hell. That’s a brave title for a Puritan lady.”
He turned back to the book and searched through a few pages. Finding
what he sought for, he cleared his throat and looked up.
“Now then,” he said, and began to read again.
“‘Richard Carrier affirmed to the jury that he saw Mr. George
Burroughs at the witch meeting at the village and saw him administer
the sacrament.’ And here’s another interesting bit. ‘He,’ ... that’s
Burroughs, Daniel.... ‘He was Accused by Eight of the Confessing
Witches, as being an Head Actor at some of their Hellish Rendezvouses,
and one who had the promise of being a King in Satan’s kingdom, now
going to be erected....’”
Lathrop closed the book with a snap and a puff of dust started up from
it.
“And there,” he said, “is the stock from which your sallow
preacher-friend, the Reverend George Burroughs, descends. I point these
things out to you, Daniel, so that you may understand how clear the
stock has come down from the Salem witch-days. There’s another place
in this book, if I recollect aright, where the witches accused George
Burroughs of bringing puppets with him and sticking thorns into those
puppets. Burroughs, I suppose, was the Black Man, or one of the Black
Men, who ruled the New England coven. There we are, Daniel. Now you
know all that I know and I imagine you can see why I wanted to keep
it from you. I thought the ancient fever would die out and that there
would be no need of all this speculation. It seems not.”
He wheezed heavily and shook his head.
“What must I do, Humphrey?” asked Dreeme.
Lathrop opened his eyes very wide and pointed a pudgy finger at the
young doctor.
“Do?” he said. “Why, be a wise man. Take your little Deborah Morton
with you and get out of the valley and settle elsewhere and live your
life without worrying about these things. This situation cannot last.
Westcott is undoubtedly mad, and he will blow himself up in some
devilish experiment, or some farmer will do for him. Why should you
stay here rooting into things that, after all, are no concern of yours?
If these fools want to play at being witches, let them. Much good may
it do them! Your life is all before you, and it moves on another arc
than the existence in this gray town of Marlborough.”
He sighed and glanced at the silver-streaked window where the runnels
of rain slid unceasingly.
“I’m anchored here,” he said sadly. “I’m an old hulk rotting in a
forgotten dry-dock. Time has forgotten me. All I can do is sit in this
chair and watch absolutely nothing go by and cogitate upon it. It’s a
bright prospect, Daniel, a bright prospect.”
“I shall go away,” remarked Dreeme slowly. “Just when, I don’t know,
but soon ... soon.”
He, too, watched the rain beating against the window-panes and listened
to the confused roar of the storm as it beat over Marlborough. It
was pleasant to sit in a dry warm nook and observe the elements
raging vainly outside. The valley was full of the grey smoke of the
down-pour, and the greedy soil, that had parched beneath the hot sun;
was drinking the cool water, bringing its measure of relief to the tiny
thrusting roots that fumbled about in the darkness for nourishment. It
had not rained since the night he had first gone to the Westcott farm,
since he had stood in the dark doorway with Martha Westcott listening
for the sound of wings in the air; and that had been but a brief storm,
a swift and vanishing interruption of the parched season that had
hovered over the valley. That had been but a few days ago, and yet how
far away it seemed. Wonderingly he watched the rain beat against the
window and listened to the whirring music that filled the cloudy air.