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De fleste essensielle Saltes Dyr kan være så forberedt og bevart at en genial mann kan ha hele Noahs Ark i sitt eget Studie og heve den fine form av et dyr ut av sin aske ved sin glede og ved lyke-metoden fra de essensielle saltene av menneskelig støv, kan en filosof uten en kriminell nekromancy oppkalle en hvilken som helst død forfedre fra støvet der hans kropp har blitt forbrent. og en prologue 1. Fra et privat sykehus for den vanvittige nær Providence, Rhode Island, forsvant det nylig en overordentlig enestående person. Han bar navnet Charles Dexter Ward og ble satt i restraint av motvillig av den sorgende far som hadde sett sin aberrasjon, vokse fra bare eksentrisitet til en mørk mani som involverte både mulighet for mordiske tendenser og en dyp og særegen endring i det tilsynelatende innhold i hans sinn. Legene bekjenner seg ganske forbløffet av hans tilfelle, siden det presenterte oddities av en generell fysiologisk samt psykologisk karakter. For det første virket pasienten merkelig eldre enn hans tjuefem år ville garantere. Psykisk forstyrrelse, det er sant, vil leve en raskt, men ansiktet til denne unge mannen hadde tatt på en subtil gjeng som bare de aller eldste vanligvis erverver. For det andre viste hans organiske prosesser en viss berørhet av proporsjon som ingenting i medisinsk erfaring kan parallelt. Åndedrett og hjerteaktivitet hadde en forbløffende mangel på symmetri stemmen var tapt, slik at det ikke var lyder over en hvisking. Fordi fordøyelsen var utrolig langvarig og minimert, og nevrale reaksjoner på standard stimuli ikke hadde noe forhold i det hele tatt til noe som tidligere ble registrert, enten normalt eller patologisk. Huden hadde en sykelig chill og tørrhet, og den cellulære strukturen av vevet virket overdrevet grov og løst strikket. Selv et stort olivenfødselsmerke på høyre hofte hadde forsvunnet, mens det hadde dannet seg på brystet et veldig merkelig muldvarp eller sortaktig flekk som det ikke fantes spor før. Generelt er alle leger enige om at stoffet i metabolisme har blitt retardert i en grad utover fortilfelle. Også psykologisk var Charles Ward unik. Hans galskap holdt ingen tilhørighet til noe som var registrert i selv den siste og mest uttømmende av traktater, og var forbundet med en mental styrke som ville ha gjort ham til et geni eller en leder hvis det ikke hadde blitt vridd i merkelige og groteske former. Dr. Willett, som var Wardrsquos familielege, bekrefter at patientsrsquos brutto mental kapasitet, som målt av hans svar på saker utenfor sverdens sans, faktisk hadde økt siden anfallet. Ward, det er sant, var alltid en lærde og en antikvariker, men selv hans mest strålende tidlige arbeid viste ikke den mektige forståelsen og innsiktet som ble vist under hans siste undersøkelser av alienisterne. Det var faktisk en vanskelig sak å få en lovlig forpliktelse til sykehuset, så kraftig og klar viste ungdommens sinn seg og bare på bevis av andre, og på grunn av mange unormale hull i sin informasjonskapse som skiller seg fra hans intelligens ble han endelig plassert i inneslutning. Til det øyeblikk han var forsvunnet, var han en omnivorøs leser og så stor en conversationalist som hans stakkars stemme tillod og skarpe observatører, uten å forutse hans flukt, forutsigte fritt at han ikke ville være lengre i å få sin utslipp fra forvaring. Bare Dr. Willett, som førte Charles Ward inn i verden og hadde sett sin vekst i kropp og sinn siden, virket skremt ved tanken på hans fremtidige frihet. Han hadde hatt en forferdelig opplevelse og hadde gjort en forferdelig oppdagelse som han ikke våget å avsløre for sine skeptiske kolleger. Willett presenterer faktisk et mindre mysterium hele sitt eget i forbindelse med saken. Han var den siste til å se pasienten før flyet, og kom ut fra den siste samtalen i en tilstand av blandet horror og lettelse som flere tilbakekalte når Wardrsquos flykte ble kjent tre timer senere. At flykte i seg selv er en av de uløste underverkene på Dr. Waitersquos sykehus. Et vindu som var åpent over et rent dråp på seksti meter kunne nesten ikke forklare det, men etter det snakket med Willett var ungdommen ubestridelig borte. Willett selv har ingen offentlige forklaringer å tilby, selv om han virker merkelig lettere i tankene enn før flukten. Mange føler faktisk at han vil gjerne si mer om han trodde at et stort antall ville tro på ham. Han hadde funnet Ward i sitt rom, men kort tid etter avreise banket bankene forgjeves. Da de åpnet døren, var pasienten ikke der, og alt de fant var det åpne vinduet med en kul aprilbris som blåste i en sky med fint blåttgrå støv som nesten kvelte dem. Sann, hundene hylte litt tid før, men det var mens Willett fortsatt var tilstede, og de hadde ikke tatt noe og visste ikke noe forstyrrelser senere. Wardrsquos far ble fortalt på en gang over telefon, men han virket mer trist enn overrasket. Da Dr. Waite ringte til person, hadde Dr. Willett snakket med ham, og begge disavowed noen kunnskap eller medfølelse i flukten. Bare fra visse tett konfidensielle venner av Willett og senior ward har noen ledetråder blitt oppnådd, og selv disse er for utrolig fantastiske for generell troverdighet. Det eneste faktum som gjenstår er at opp til nåværende tid er det ikke sporet av den manglende galningen som ble oppdaget. Charles Ward var en antikvariker fra barndommen, uten tvil fått sin smak fra den ærverdige byen rundt seg, og fra fortidens relikvier som fylte hvert hjørne av hans foreldre gamle gamle herregård i Prospect Street på bakken av bakken. Med årene økte hans hengivenhet til gamle ting slik at historie, slægtsforskning og studiet av kolonial arkitektur, møbler og håndverk langsomt overfylte alt annet fra hans interessesfære. Disse smakene er viktige å huske på når man vurderer sin galskap, selv om de ikke danner sin absolutte kjerne, spiller de en fremtredende rolle i overflatisk form. Manglene på informasjon som alienistene oppdaget var alle relatert til moderne saker og ble alltid utlignet av en tilsvarende overdreven skjønt utad skjult kunnskap om svarte saker som brakt ut av velbehagelig spørsmålstegn, slik at man ville ha fansert pasienten bokstavelig overført til en tidligere alder gjennom noen uklar type auto-hypnose. Det merkelige var at Ward syntes ikke lenger interessert i antikken han kjente så godt. Han hadde det, mistet sin respekt for dem gjennom ren kjennskap og alle hans endelige innsats var åpenbart bøyd mot å mestre de vanlige fakta i den moderne verden som hadde blitt så helt og umiskjennelig utgått fra hjernen hans. At denne grossistutslettingen hadde skjedd, gjorde han sitt beste for å gjemme seg, men det var klart for alle som så på ham at hele sitt program for lesing og samtale var bestemt av et hektisk ønske om å imøtekomme slik kunnskap om sitt eget liv og den vanlige praktiske og kulturell bakgrunn av det tjuende århundre som burde ha vært hans på grunn av sin fødsel i 1902 og hans utdannelse i skolene i vår egen tid. Alienistene lurer nå på hvordan den rømte pasienten, i lys av hans sterkt nedsatte dataområde, klarer å klare den kompliserte verden i dag, den dominerende oppfatningen er at han lsquolying lowrsquo i noen ydmyke og unexacting posisjon til hans lager av moderne informasjon kan bli brakt opp til det normale. Begynnelsen av Wardrsquos galskap er et spørsmål om tvist blant fremmede. Dr. Lyman, den fremtredende Boston-myndigheten, plasserer den i 1919 eller 1920, under boyrsquos i fjor på Moses Brown School, da han plutselig vendte seg fra fortidens studie til okkultstudiet og nektet å kvalifisere seg til høyskole på grunn av at han hadde individuelle undersøkelser av mye større betydning å gjøre. Dette er sikkert utbredt av Wardrsquos forandrede vaner på den tiden, spesielt ved hans kontinuerlige søk gjennom byrekord og blant gamle begravelsesplasser for en bestemt grav gravd i 1771 graven til en forfed ved navn Joseph Curwen, noen av hvilke papirer han bekjente har funnet bak panelet av et veldig gammelt hus i Olney Court, på Stampersrsquo Hill, som Curwen var kjent for å ha bygget og okkupert. Det er generelt ubestridelig at vinteren 1919ndash20 så en stor forandring i menigheten, hvor han plutselig stoppet sine generelle antikvariske sysler og startet en desperat fordypning i okkulte emner både hjemme og i utlandet, variert bare ved denne merkelige vedvarende søken etter hans forefatherrsquos grav. Fra denne oppfatningen avvike Dr. Willett imidlertid vesentlig sin dom etter sin tette og kontinuerlige kunnskap om pasienten, og på visse fryktelige undersøkelser og funn som han gjorde mot det siste. Disse undersøkelsene og funnene har lagt merke til ham slik at stemmen hans skjelver når han forteller dem, og hans hånd skjelver når han prøver å skrive av dem. Willett innrømmer at endringen av 1919ndash20 vanligvis ville markere begynnelsen på en progressiv dekadens som kulminerte i den fryktelige og uhyggelige fremmedgjøring av 1928, men mener fra personlig observasjon at det må skje en finere forskjell. Gratulerer fritt at gutten alltid var ubalansert temperamentsmessig og tilbøyelig til å være urimelig mottakelig og entusiastisk i hans svar på fenomenene rundt seg, nekter han å innrømme at den tidlige endringen markerte den faktiske passasjen fra sunnhet til galskap, i stedet for Wardrsquos egen uttalelse om at han hadde oppdaget eller gjenoppdaget noe hvis effekt på menneskelig tenkning var sannsynlig å være fantastisk og dyp. Den sanne galskapen han er sikker på, kom med en senere endring etter Curwen-portretet, og de gamle papirene ble oppdaget etter at en tur til rare fremmede steder var blitt gjort, og noen fryktelige påkallinger sang under underlige og hemmelige forhold etter bestemte svar på disse innkallinger hadde blitt tydelig angitt og et skremmende brev skrev under forstyrrende og uforklarlige forhold etter bølgen av vampyrisme og det ondskapsfulle Pawtuxet-sladderet og etter at patientens minnesmerke begynte å utelukke samtidige bilder mens stemmen hans mislyktes og hans fysiske aspekt gjennomgikk den subtile modifikasjonen så mange senere lagt merke til. Det var bare om denne tiden, påpeker Willett med mye akutthet at marerittegenskapene ble uklart knyttet til Ward og legen føler seg rystende sikker på at det foreligger nok solide bevis for å opprettholde youthrsquos krav om hans viktige funn. For det første, to arbeidere med høy intelligens så Joseph Curwenrsquos gamle papirer funnet. For det andre visste gutten en gang til Dr. Willett disse papirene og en side av Curwen-dagboken, og hver av dokumentene hadde ethvert utseende av genuinhet. Hullet der Ward hevdet å ha funnet dem, var lenge en synlig virkelighet, og Willett hadde et veldig overbevisende endelige glimt av dem i omgivelser som nesten ikke kan troes og aldri kan bevises. Deretter var det mysteriene og tilfeldighetene til Orne og Hutchinson-bokstavene, og problemet med Curwen-pennevitenskapen og av hva detektiverne brakte opp om Dr. Allen disse tingene, og den forferdelige beskjeden i middelalderlige minuscules funnet i Willettrsquos lomme da han oppnådde bevissthet etter sin sjokkerende opplevelse. Og mest avgjørende for alle, er det de to heselige resultatene som legen oppnådde fra et bestemt par formler under sine siste undersøkelser, som nesten viste bevisene i autentisiteten og deres monstrefulle implikasjoner samtidig som disse papirene ble båret for alltid fra menneskelig kunnskap. 2. Man må se tilbake på Charles Wardrsquos tidligere liv som på noe som hører så mye til fortiden som antikken han elsket så ivrig. Høsten 1918, og med et betydelig show av sinne i den militære trening av perioden, hadde han begynt sitt yngre år på Moses Brown School, som ligger svært nær hans hjem. Den gamle hovedbygningen, oppført i 1819, hadde alltid sjarmert sin ungdommelige antikvariske sans og den romslige parken der akademiet setter seg til sitt skarpe øye for landskapet. Hans sosiale aktiviteter var få, og hans timer ble brukt hovedsakelig hjemme, i vandrende turer, i hans klasser og øvelser, og i jakten på antikvariske og slektsmessige data i rådhuset, statshuset, det offentlige biblioteket, athenaeumet, den historiske Samfunnet, John Carter Brown og John Hay Bibliotek fra Brown University, og det nyåpnede Shepley Library i Benefit Street. Man kan vise ham likevel som han var i disse dager høy, slank og blond, med flinkete øyne og en liten bøyle, kledd noe uforsiktig, og ga et dominerende inntrykk av ufarlig klosseløshet i stedet for attraktivitet. Hans turer var alltid opplevelser i antikken, hvor han klarte å gjenvinne fra de myriade relikvene til en glamorøs gammel by et levende og sammenhengende bilde av århundrene før. Hjemmet hans var et flott georgiansk herregård på toppen av den nærtliggende fjellhallen som stiger like øst for elva og fra de bakre vinduene i sine vibrerende vinger kunne han se svimmel ut over alle de klyngede spirene, kuplene, takene og skyskraperens toppmøter lavere by til de lilla åsene på landsbygda utover. Her ble han født, og fra den vakre klassiske verandaen på den dobbelte buede mursteinfasaden hadde sykepleieren først rullet ham i sin vogn forbi det lille hvite våningshuset på to hundre år før byen hadde for lenge siden overhalet og videre mot den statelige høgskoler langs den skyggefulle, overdådige gaten, med gamle torghus og mindre trehus med smale, tunge kolonner med doriske verandaer, drømte solid og eksklusiv blant sine sjenerøse verft og hager. Han hadde også rullet seg langs søvnig Congdon Street, en tier lavere ned på den bratte bakken, og med alle sine østlige boliger på høye terrasser. De små trehusene var i en større alder her, for det var opp denne bakken at den voksende byen hadde klatret og i disse turene hadde han imbibet noe av fargen til en sjarmerende kolonialby. Sykepleieren pleide å stoppe og sitte på benken på Prospect Terrace for å snakke med politimenn, og en av childrsquos første minner var av det store vestlige havet av dunkle tak og kupler og tårn og fjerne åser som han så en vinter ettermiddag fra den store jernbanen embankment, alle fiolett og mystiker mot en feberet, apokalyptisk solnedgang av røde og gull og purpur og nysgjerrige greener. Den enorme marmorkuppelen i statens hus stod ut i massiv silhuett, dens kronestatue strålet fantastisk ved en pause i en av de tonede stratusskyene som sperret den flammende himmelen. Da han var større, begynte hans berømte turer først med sin utålmodige dratt sykepleier, og så alene i drømmende meditasjon. Langere og lengre ned den nesten vinkelrett bakke ville han våge, hver gang når eldre og quainter nivåer av den gamle byen. Han ville nølte med å legge ned den vertikale Jenckes Street med sine bankvegger og koloniale gavler til det skyggefulle Benefit Street Corner, der før han var en treantik med et ionisk pilastret par døråpninger, og ved siden av ham en forhistorisk gambrel-roofer med litt av gjenværende oppdrettsgård, og det store Dommer Durfee-huset med sine falne grener av georgisk storhet. Det var å bli en slum her, men titanelmene kastet en gjenopprettende skygge over stedet, og gutten pleide å spasere sørover forbi de lange linjene i de forrevolusjonære hjemmene med sine store sentrale skorsteiner og klassiske portaler. På østsiden var de høyt over kjellere med skinnede dobbeltfly av steinstrinn, og den unge Charles kunne vise dem som de var da gaten var ny, og røde hæler og periwigere satte de malte pedimenter som hadde tegn på slitasje nå blir så synlig. Vestover tuppet bakken nesten like bratt som ovenfor, ned til den gamle ldquoTown Streetrdquo som grunnleggerne hadde lagt seg ut på riverrsquos kanten i 1636. Her sprang utallige små baner med lutende, huddlede hus av enorm antikvitet og fascinert selv om han var, det var lenge før han våget å tråkke sin arkaiske vertikalitet for frykt ville de vise seg en drøm eller en inngangsport til ukjente terrors. Han fant det mye mindre formidabelt å fortsette langs Benefit Street forbi jern gjerdet av St. Johnrsquos skjulte kirkegård og baksiden av 1761 Colony House og den gruvende masse av Golden Ball Inn hvor Washington stoppet. På møte Streetmdashthe etterfølgende Gaol Lane og King Street av andre periodemdashhe ville se oppover mot øst og se den buede steget som motorveien måtte ty til klatring i skråningen, og nedover mot vest, glimt det gamle murstein koloniale skolehuset som smiler over veien ved det gamle tegn på Shakespearrsquos Head der Providence Gazette og Country-Journal ble trykt før revolusjonen. Deretter kom den utsøkte første baptistkirken fra 1775, luksuriøs med sin uforlignelige Gibbs tårn, og de georgiske takene og kupolene svømte forbi. Her og i sør ble nabolaget bedre og blomstrende til slutt til en fantastisk gruppe av tidlige herskapshus, men likevel de små gamle banene ledet av nedoverbakkningen mot vest, spektral i deres mange-buede arkaisme og dipping til et opprør av iriserende forfall hvor den onde gamle havnen husker sine stolte østindadag midt imellem polyglot vice og squalor, rotting wharves og blearøyet skip-chandleries, med slike overlevende smug navn som pakke, Bullion, Gold, Silver, Coin, Doubloon, Sovereign, Guilder, Dollar, Dime og Cent. Noen ganger, etter hvert som han vokste høyere og mer eventyrlystne, ville unge ward vike seg ned i denne maelstrømmen av tøffe hus, ødelagte transoms, tumbling trinn, vridd balustrader, svarte ansikter og navnløs lukt svingete fra South Main til South Water, søker ut havnene der Baugene og lydstøtene berørt fortsatt og returnerte nordover på dette lavere nivået forbi de bratte takene i 1816 og det brede torget ved Den store broen, der 1773 Market House fortsatt står fast på sine gamle buer. På den torget ville han pause for å drikke i den forvirrende skjønnheten i gamlebyen da den stiger på sin østlige bløff, dekorerte med sine to georgiske spirer og kronet av den store nye kristne vitenskapelige kuppel som London er kronet av St. Paulrsquos. Han likte det meste for å nå dette punktet på sen ettermiddag, når det skrånende sollyset berører Markedshuset og de gamle bakhustakene og belfries med gull, og kaster magi rundt de drømmende bryggene hvor Providence Indiamen pleide å ri på anker. Etter en lang stund ville han vokse nesten svimmel med en poetrsquos kjærlighet for synet, og da ville han skala skråningen hjem i skumringen forbi den gamle hvite kirke og oppover de smale, steinete måtene hvor gule glans ville begynne å peppe ut i små - panorerte vinduer og gjennom fanelysene høyt over dobbeltflyvninger av trinn med nysgjerrige smijernes rekkverk. På andre tidspunkter, og senere år, ville han søke etter levende kontraster til å bruke en halv spasertur i de krumlende kolonistillingene nordvest for hjemmet hans, hvor bakken faller til den nedre eminensen av Stampersrsquo Hill med sin getto og negro kvartals clustering rundt stedet hvor Boston-trenerbanen begynte før revolusjonen, og den andre halvdelen i det nådige sørlige riket om George, Benevolent, Power og Williams Streets, hvor den gamle skråningen holder uendret de fine eiendommene og biter av inngjerdet hage og bratt grønt kjørefelt der så mange duftende minner sover. Disse rambles, sammen med de flittige studier som fulgte med dem, utgjør helt sikkert en stor mengde antikvariske lore som til slutt overfylte den moderne verden fra Charles Wardrsquos sinn og illustrerer den mentale jorda som falt i den skjebnefulle vinteren 1919ndash20, frø som kom til en så merkelig og forferdelig oppfatning. Dr. Willett er sikker på at Charles Wardrsquos antikvarisme var fri fra alle spor av morbid, fram til denne ulykkelige vinteren med første forandring. Kirkegårder holdt for ham ingen spesiell tiltrekning utover deres eiendommelighet og historiske verdi, og av alt som vold eller vildinstinkt var han helt blottet. Da viste det seg at det var vanskelig å utvikle en nysgjerrig oppfølger til en av hans slektssammensetninger året før, da han blant sine foreldres forfedre hadde oppdaget en bestemt veldig lang levetid som heter Joseph Curwen, som hadde kommet fra Salem i mars 1692, og om hvem en hvisket serie svært merkelige og uhyggelige historier klynget seg. Wardrsquos overreisfarsfar Velkommen Potter hadde i 1785 giftet seg med en bestemt ldquoAnn Tillinghast, datter av fru Eliza, datter til kapt. James Tillinghastrdquo, hvis faderskap familien ikke hadde bevart spor. Sent i 1918, mens han studerte et volum av originale byrekorder i manuskriptet, oppdaget den unge genealogen en oppføring som beskriver en lovlig navnendring, hvorved en fru Eliza Curwen, enke av Joseph Curwen, gjenopptok i 1772 sammen med hennes syv - årig datter Ann, hennes pikenavn til Tillinghast på bakken lsquothat hennes Husbandrsquos navn ble blitt en publick Reproach på grunn av hva som var knowne etter hans dødsfall som bekrefter en anti-felles rykte, thorsquo ikke å bli kreditert av en lojal kone til så bevist å være wholely forbi Doubtingrsquo. Denne oppføringen kom til lys ved utilsiktet adskillelse av to blader som hadde blitt forsiktig klistret sammen og behandlet som en ved arbeidet revisjon av sidetallene. Det var straks klart for Charles Ward at han faktisk hadde oppdaget en hittil ukjent farfars bestefar. Oppdagelsen oppmuntret ham dobbelt fordi han allerede hadde hørt vage rapporter og sett spredte allusjoner knyttet til denne personen om hvem det var så få offentlig tilgjengelige plater, bortsett fra at de bare ble offentliggjort i moderne tider, at det nesten virket som om en konspirasjon hadde eksistert å kaste ham fra minnet. Det som fremkom, var dessuten en så unik og provoserende natur at man ikke kunne unngå å forestille seg hva det var at de koloniale opptakerne var så ivrige etter å skjule og glemme eller å mistenke at sletting hadde grunner altfor gyldig. Før dette hadde Ward vært fornøyd med å la hans romanse om gamle Joseph Curwen forbli i tomgang, men etter å ha oppdaget sitt eget forhold til dette tilsynelatende ldquohushed-uprdquo-tegnet, fortsatte han å jakte så systematisk som mulig, uansett hva han måtte finne om ham. I denne spennende søken lyktes han til slutt utenom hans høyeste forventninger til gamle bokstaver, dagbøker og bølger av upubliserte memoarer i cobwebbed Providence-gratulerer og andre steder ga mange lysende passasjer som deres forfattere ikke hadde trodd det var verdt å ødelegge. En viktig sidelight kom fra et punkt som fjernt som New York, hvor noen koloniale korrespondanse fra Rhode Island ble lagret i Museum på Frauncesrsquo Tavern. Den virkelig avgjørende ting, skjønt, og hva i Dr. Willettrsquos mening danner den konkrete kilden til Wardrsquos, ble utryddet, ble funnet i august 1919 bak panelen av krummet huset i Olney Court. Det var det uten tvil som åpnet de svarte utsiktene, hvis ende var dypere enn gropen. II. En antecedent og en horror 1. Joseph Curwen, som åpenbaret av de skumle legender som er forklart i hvilken menighet hørt og oppdaget, var et veldig forbløffende, gåtefullt og uklart fryktelig individ. Han hadde flyktet fra Salem til Providencemdashthat universelle paradis for den odde, den frie og den dissentingmdashat begynnelsen av den store hekseri-panikken å være i frykt for beskyldning på grunn av hans ensomme måter og queer kjemiske eller alchemical eksperimenter. Han var en fargeløs mann på rundt tretti, og ble snart funnet kvalifisert til å bli en forsyner av forsyn og deretter kjøpe et hjem mye like nord for Gregory Dexterrsquos ved foten av Olney Street. Hans hus ble bygget på Stampersrsquo Hill vest for Town Street, i det som senere ble Olney Court og i 1761 erstattet han dette med en større, på samme sted, som fortsatt står. Nå var den første merkelige tingen om Joseph Curwen at han ikke syntes å bli mye eldre enn han hadde vært ved ankomst. Han var engasjert i shippingfirmaer, kjøpt wharfage nær Mile-End Cove, hjulpet med å gjenoppbygge den store broen i 1713, og i 1723 var en av grunnleggerne av congregational kirken på bakken, men alltid beholdt han det ubeskrivelige aspektet av en mann ikke i stor grad over tretti eller trettifem. Som årtier montert opp, begynte denne uvanlige kvaliteten å vekke stor oppmerksomhet, men Curwen forklarte det alltid ved å si at han kom av hardy forfedre, og praktiserte en enkel levealder som ikke hadde på seg ham. Hvordan en slik enkelhet kunne forenes med uforklarlige komme og gjengivelser fra den hemmelige handelsmannen og med den glamrende blinkingen av vinduene hans hele natten, var ikke særlig tydelig for bymennene og de var tilbøyelige til å tildele andre grunner til hans fortsatte ungdom og lang levetid. Det ble holdt for det meste at Curwenrsquos uopphørlige blandinger og kjeler av kjemikalier hadde mye å gjøre med hans tilstand. Sladder snakket om de underlige stoffene han brakte fra London og Indies på sine skip eller kjøpt i Newport, Boston og New York, og da den gamle dr. Jabez Bowen kom fra Rehoboth og åpnet apoteksbutikken over Great Bridge ved Signs of the Unicorn og Mortar, var det uopphørlig snakk om stoffene, syrene og metaller som taciturn recluse uopphørlig kjøpt eller bestilt fra ham. Han antok at Curwen hadde en vidunderlig og hemmelig medisinsk ferdighet, og mange lider av forskjellige slag søkte på ham for hjelp, men selv om han syntes å oppmuntre sin tro på en uforpliktende måte, og alltid ga dem merkelige fargede potioner som svar på deres forespørsler ble det observert at hans ministreringer til andre sjelden viste seg å være til nytte. Når over femti år hadde gått siden strangerrsquos advent, og uten å produsere mer enn fem årers tilsynelatende endring i ansikt og kropp, begynte folket å hviske mer mørkt og møte mer enn halvveis det ønske om isolasjon som han hadde alltid visnet. Personlige brev og dagbøker av perioden avslører også en rekke andre grunner til at Joseph Curwen var undret på, fryktet, og til slutt skygget som en pest. Hans lidenskap for kirkegårder, hvor han var glimtet på alle tidspunkter og under alle forhold, var beryktet, selv om ingen hadde vært vitne til noen gjerning fra hans side som faktisk kunne bli kalt ghoulish. På Pawtuxetveien hadde han en gård, hvor han vanligvis bodde i løpet av sommeren, og som han ofte skulle se på å ri på ulike odde tider på dagen eller natten. Her var hans eneste synlige tjenere, bønder og omsorgspersoner en sullen par av gamle Narragansett-indianer, mannen var dum og nysgjerrig, og kona til et svært motstøtende gjengeleg, trolig på grunn av en blanding av negroblod. I lean-til av dette huset var laboratoriet der de fleste kjemiske forsøkene ble gjennomført. Nysgjerrige bærere og teamers som leverte flasker, poser eller bokser på den lille bakdøren, utveksler kontoer over de fantastiske flasker, crucibles, alembics og ovner de så i det lave hylleommet og profeterte i hvisker at den nærmynte ldquochymistrdquomdashby som de mente alchemist mdashwould ikke være lenge i å finne Philosopherrsquos Stone. De nærmeste naboene til denne farmmen, Fenners, en fjerdedel mil unna, spurte fortsatt ting å fortelle om bestemte lyder som de insisterte, kom fra Curwen-stedet om natten. Det var rop, sa de og opprettholde griner, og de likte ikke det store antall husdyr som trengte beitemarket, for det var ikke nødvendig med noe å holde en ensom gammel mann og en svært få tjenere i kjøtt, melk og ull. Identiteten av bestanden syntes å forandre seg fra uke til uke, da nye kjeder ble kjøpt fra Kingstown bønder. Da var det også noe veldig motbydelig med en viss stor steinutbygging med bare høyt smale slitser for vinduer. Great Bridge idlers hadde også mye å si om Curwenrsquos byhus i Olney Court, ikke så mye den fine nye en bygget i 1761, da mannen må ha vært nesten et århundre gammel, men den første lavt gambrel-takte med vindusoljen og shingled sider, hvis tømmer han tok den spesielle forsiktighet for å brenne etter rivningen. Her var det mindre mysterium, det er sant, men de timer hvor lysene ble sett, hemmeligheten til de to svarte utlendingene som utgjorde de eneste menneskene, den heslige utrykte mumling av den utrolige franske husholdersken, de store mengder mat som skulle sees inn en dør i hvilken bare fire personer bodde, og kvaliteten på visse stemmer hørte ofte i dunklet samtale på svært unseasonable tider, alt kombinert med det som var kjent for Pawtuxet gården for å gi stedet et dårlig navn. Også i valgkretsene var Curwen-hjemmet på ingen måte diskutert for da nybegynneren gradvis hadde arbeidet inn i kirken og handlet livet i byen, hadde han selvfølgelig gjort bekjente av den bedre typen, hvis selskap og samtale han var godt rustet til utdanning for å nyte. Hans fødsel var kjent for å være god, siden Curwens eller Corwins of Salem trengte ingen introduksjon i New England. Det utviklet seg at Joseph Curwen hadde reist mye i veldig tidlig liv, levd for en tid i England og gjort minst to reiser til Orienten og hans tale, da han var villig til å bruke den, var en lærde og dyrket engelsmann. Men for en eller annen grunn var det ikke noe som Curwen bryr seg om samfunnet. Mens han aldri rebuffer en besøkende, oppdrett han alltid en reservasjonsvegg som noen kunne tenke på noe å si til ham, som ikke ville høres inane. Det syntes å lure seg i at han hadde noen kryptisk, sardonisk arroganse, som om han hadde kommet for å finne alle menneskene kjedelig gjennom å ha flyttet mellom fremmede og mer potente enheter. Da Dr. Checkley den berømte viten kom fra Boston i 1738 for å være rektor for Kingrsquos kirke, forsømte han ikke å ringe til en av dem han snart hørte så mye, men igjen på kort tid på grunn av noe uheldig understrøm han oppdaget i sin hostrsquos diskurs. Charles Ward told his father, when they discussed Curwen one winter evening, that he would give much to learn what the mysterious old man had said to the sprightly cleric, but that all diarists agree concerning Dr. Checkleyrsquos reluctance to repeat anything he had heard. The good man had been hideously shocked, and could never recall Joseph Curwen without a visible loss of the gay urbanity for which he was famed. More definite, however, was the reason why another man of taste and breeding avoided the haughty hermit. In 1746 Mr. John Merritt, an elderly English gentleman of literary and scientific leanings, came from Newport to the town which was so rapidly overtaking it in standing, and built a fine country seat on the Neck in what is now the heart of the best residence section. He lived in considerable style and comfort, keeping the first coach and liveried servants in town, and taking great pride in his telescope, his microscope, and his well-chosen library of English and Latin books. Hearing of Curwen as the owner of the best library in Providence, Mr. Merritt early paid him a call, and was more cordially received than most other callers at the house had been. His admiration for his hostrsquos ample shelves, which besides the Greek, Latin, and English classics were equipped with a remarkable battery of philosophical, mathematical, and scientific works including Paracelsus, Agricola, Van Helmont, Sylvius, Glauber, Boyle, Boerhaave, Becher, and Stahl, led Curwen to suggest a visit to the farmhouse and laboratory whither he had never invited anyone before and the two drove out at once in Mr. Merrittrsquos coach. Mr. Merritt always confessed to seeing nothing really horrible at the farmhouse, but maintained that the titles of the books in the special library of thaumaturgical, alchemical, and theological subjects which Curwen kept in a front room were alone sufficient to inspire him with a lasting loathing. Perhaps, however, the facial expression of the owner in exhibiting them contributed much of the prejudice. The bizarre collection, besides a host of standard works which Mr. Merritt was not too alarmed to envy, embraced nearly all the cabbalists, daemonologists, and magicians known to man and was a treasure-house of lore in the doubtful realms of alchemy and astrology. Hermes Trismegistus in Mesnardrsquos edition, the Turba Philosophorum, Geberrsquos Liber Investigationis, and Artephiusrsquo Key of Wisdom all were there with the cabbalistic Zohar, Peter Jammyrsquos set of Albertus Magnus, Raymond Lullyrsquos Ars Magna et Ultima in Zetznerrsquos edition, Roger Baconrsquos Thesaurus Chemicus, Fluddrsquos Clavis Alchimiae, and Trithemiusrsquo De Lapide Philosophico crowding them close. Mediaeval Jews and Arabs were represented in profusion, and Mr. Merritt turned pale when, upon taking down a fine volume conspicuously labelled as the Qanoon-e-Islam, he found it was in truth the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, of which he had heard such monstrous things whispered some years previously after the exposure of nameless rites at the strange little fishing village of Kingsport, in the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay. But oddly enough, the worthy gentleman owned himself most impalpably disquieted by a mere minor detail. On the huge mahogany table there lay face downward a badly worn copy of Borellus, bearing many cryptical marginalia and interlineations in Curwenrsquos hand. The book was open at about its middle, and one paragraph displayed such thick and tremulous pen-strokes beneath the lines of mystic black-letter that the visitor could not resist scanning it through. Whether it was the nature of the passage underscored, or the feverish heaviness of the strokes which formed the underscoring, he could not tell but something in that combination affected him very badly and very peculiarly. He recalled it to the end of his days, writing it down from memory in his diary and once trying to recite it to his close friend Dr. Checkley till he saw how greatly it disturbed the urbane rector. It read: ldquoThe essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated. rdquo It was near the docks along the southerly part of the Town Street, however, that the worst things were muttered about Joseph Curwen. Sailors are superstitious folk and the seasoned salts who manned the infinite rum, slave, and molasses sloops, the rakish privateers, and the great brigs of the Browns, Crawfords, and Tillinghasts, all made strange furtive signs of protection when they saw the slim, deceptively young-looking figure with its yellow hair and slight stoop entering the Curwen warehouse in Doubloon Street or talking with captains and supercargoes on the long quay where the Curwen ships rode restlessly. Curwenrsquos own clerks and captains hated and feared him, and all his sailors were mongrel riff-raff from Martinique, St. Eustatius, Havana, or Port Royal. It was, in a way, the frequency with which these sailors were replaced which inspired the acutest and most tangible part of the fear in which the old man was held. A crew would be turned loose in the town on shore leave, some of its members perhaps charged with this errand or that and when reassembled it would be almost sure to lack one or more men. That many of the errands had concerned the farm on the Pawtuxet Road, and that few of the sailors had ever been seen to return from that place, was not forgotten so that in time it became exceedingly difficult for Curwen to keep his oddly assorted hands. Almost invariably several would desert soon after hearing the gossip of the Providence wharves, and their replacement in the West Indies became an increasingly great problem to the merchant. In 1760 Joseph Curwen was virtually an outcast, suspected of vague horrors and daemoniac alliances which seemed all the more menacing because they could not be named, understood, or even proved to exist. The last straw may have come from the affair of the missing soldiers in 1758, for in March and April of that year two Royal regiments on their way to New France were quartered in Providence, and depleted by an inexplicable process far beyond the average rate of desertion. Rumour dwelt on the frequency with which Curwen was wont to be seen talking with the red-coated strangers and as several of them began to be missed, people thought of the odd conditions among his own seamen. What would have happened if the regiments had not been ordered on, no one can tell. Meanwhile the merchantrsquos worldly affairs were prospering. He had a virtual monopoly of the townrsquos trade in saltpetre, black pepper, and cinnamon, and easily led any other one shipping establishment save the Browns in his importation of brassware, indigo, cotton, woollens, salt, rigging, iron, paper, and English goods of every kind. Such shopkeepers as James Green, at the Sign of the Elephant in Cheapside, the Russells, at the Sign of the Golden Eagle across the Bridge, or Clark and Nightingale at the Frying-Pan and Fish near the New Coffee-House, depended almost wholly upon him for their stock and his arrangements with the local distillers, the Narragansett dairymen and horse-breeders, and the Newport candle-makers, made him one of the prime exporters of the Colony. Ostracised though he was, he did not lack for civic spirit of a sort. When the Colony House burned down, he subscribed handsomely to the lotteries by which the new brick onemdashstill standing at the head of its parade in the old main streetmdashwas built in 1761. In that same year, too, he helped rebuild the Great Bridge after the October gale. He replaced many of the books of the public library consumed in the Colony House fire, and bought heavily in the lottery that gave the muddy Market Parade and deep-rutted Town Street their pavement of great round stones with a brick footwalk or ldquocauseyrdquo in the middle. About this time, also, he built the plain but excellent new house whose doorway is still such a triumph of carving. When the Whitefield adherents broke off from Dr. Cottonrsquos hill church in 1743 and founded Deacon Snowrsquos church across the Bridge, Curwen had gone with them though his zeal and attendance soon abated. Now, however, he cultivated piety once more as if to dispel the shadow which had thrown him into isolation and would soon begin to wreck his business fortunes if not sharply checked. 2. The sight of this strange, pallid man, hardly middle-aged in aspect yet certainly not less than a full century old, seeking at last to emerge from a cloud of fright and detestation too vague to pin down or analyse, was at once a pathetic, a dramatic, and a contemptible thing. Such is the power of wealth and of surface gestures, however, that there came indeed a slight abatement in the visible aversion displayed toward him especially after the rapid disappearances of his sailors abruptly ceased. He must likewise have begun to practice an extreme care and secrecy in his graveyard expeditions, for he was never again caught at such wanderings whilst the rumours of uncanny sounds and manoeuvres at his Pawtuxet farm diminished in proportion. His rate of food consumption and cattle replacement remained abnormally high but not until modern times, when Charles Ward examined a set of his accounts and invoices in the Shepley Library, did it occur to any personmdashsave one embittered youth, perhapsmdashto make dark comparisons between the large number of Guinea blacks he imported until 1766, and the disturbingly small number for whom he could produce bona fide bills of sale either to slave-dealers at the Great Bridge or to the planters of the Narragansett Country. Certainly, the cunning and ingenuity of this abhorred character were uncannily profound, once the necessity for their exercise had become impressed upon him. But of course the effect of all this belated mending was necessarily slight. Curwen continued to be avoided and distrusted, as indeed the one fact of his continued air of youth at a great age would have been enough to warrant and he could see that in the end his fortunes would be likely to suffer. His elaborate studies and experiments, whatever they may have been, apparently required a heavy income for their maintenance and since a change of environment would deprive him of the trading advantages he had gained, it would not have profited him to begin anew in a different region just then. Judgment demanded that he patch up his relations with the townsfolk of Providence, so that his presence might no longer be a signal for hushed conversation, transparent excuses of errands elsewhere, and a general atmosphere of constraint and uneasiness. His clerks, being now reduced to the shiftless and impecunious residue whom no one else would employ, were giving him much worry and he held to his sea-captains and mates only by shrewdness in gaining some kind of ascendancy over themmdasha mortgage, a promissory note, or a bit of information very pertinent to their welfare. In many cases, diarists have recorded with some awe, Curwen shewed almost the power of a wizard in unearthing family secrets for questionable use. During the final five years of his life it seemed as though only direct talks with the long-dead could possibly have furnished some of the data which he had so glibly at his tonguersquos end. About this time the crafty scholar hit upon a last desperate expedient to regain his footing in the community. Hitherto a complete hermit, he now determined to contract an advantageous marriage securing as a bride some lady whose unquestioned position would make all ostracism of his home impossible. It may be that he also had deeper reasons for wishing an alliance reasons so far outside the known cosmic sphere that only papers found a century and a half after his death caused anyone to suspect them but of this nothing certain can ever be learned. Naturally he was aware of the horror and indignation with which any ordinary courtship of his would be received, hence he looked about for some likely candidate upon whose parents he might exert a suitable pressure. Such candidates, he found, were not at all easy to discover since he had very particular requirements in the way of beauty, accomplishments, and social security. At length his survey narrowed down to the household of one of his best and oldest ship-captains, a widower of high birth and unblemished standing named Dutee Tillinghast, whose only daughter Eliza seemed dowered with every conceivable advantage save prospects as an heiress. Capt. Tillinghast was completely under the domination of Curwen and consented, after a terrible interview in his cupolaed house on Powerrsquos Lane hill, to sanction the blasphemous alliance. Eliza Tillinghast was at that time eighteen years of age, and had been reared as gently as the reduced circumstances of her father permitted. She had attended Stephen Jacksonrsquos school opposite the Court-House Parade and had been diligently instructed by her mother, before the latterrsquos death of smallpox in 1757, in all the arts and refinements of domestic life. A sampler of hers, worked in 1753 at the age of nine, may still be found in the rooms of the Rhode Island Historical Society. After her motherrsquos death she had kept the house, aided only by one old black woman. Her arguments with her father concerning the proposed Curwen marriage must have been painful indeed but of these we have no record. Certain it is that her engagement to young Ezra Weeden, second mate of the Crawford packet Enterprise, was dutifully broken off, and that her union with Joseph Curwen took place on the seventh of March, 1763, in the Baptist church, in the presence of one of the most distinguished assemblages which the town could boast the ceremony being performed by the younger Samuel Winsor. The Gazette mentioned the event very briefly, and in most surviving copies the item in question seems to be cut or torn out. Ward found a single intact copy after much search in the archives of a private collector of note, observing with amusement the meaningless urbanity of the language: ldquoMonday evening last, Mr. Joseph Curwen, of this Town, Merchant, was married to Miss Eliza Tillinghast, Daughter of Capt. Dutee Tillinghast, a young Lady who has real Merit, added to a beautiful Person, to grace the connubial State and perpetuate its Felicity. rdquo The collection of Durfee-Arnold letters, discovered by Charles Ward shortly before his first reputed madness in the private collection of Melville F. Peters, Esq. of George St. and covering this and a somewhat antecedent period, throws vivid light on the outrage done to public sentiment by this ill-assorted match. The social influence of the Tillinghasts, however, was not to be denied and once more Joseph Curwen found his house frequented by persons whom he could never otherwise have induced to cross his threshold. His acceptance was by no means complete, and his bride was socially the sufferer through her forced venture but at all events the wall of utter ostracism was somewhat worn down. In his treatment of his wife the strange bridegroom astonished both her and the community by displaying an extreme graciousness and consideration. The new house in Olney Court was now wholly free from disturbing manifestations, and although Curwen was much absent at the Pawtuxet farm which his wife never visited, he seemed more like a normal citizen than at any other time in his long years of residence. Only one person remained in open enmity with him, this being the youthful shiprsquos officer whose engagement to Eliza Tillinghast had been so abruptly broken. Ezra Weeden had frankly vowed vengeance and though of a quiet and ordinarily mild disposition, was now gaining a hate-bred, dogged purpose which boded no good to the usurping husband. On the seventh of May, 1765, Curwenrsquos only child Ann was born and was christened by the Rev. John Graves of Kingrsquos Church, of which both husband and wife had become communicants shortly after their marriage, in order to compromise between their respective Congregational and Baptist affiliations. The record of this birth, as well as that of the marriage two years before, was stricken from most copies of the church and town annals where it ought to appear and Charles Ward located both with the greatest difficulty after his discovery of the widowrsquos change of name had apprised him of his own relationship, and engendered the feverish interest which culminated in his madness. The birth entry, indeed, was found very curiously through correspondence with the heirs of the loyalist Dr. Graves, who had taken with him a duplicate set of records when he left his pastorate at the outbreak of the Revolution. Ward had tried this source because he knew that his great-great-grandmother Ann Tillinghast Potter had been an Episcopalian. Shortly after the birth of his daughter, an event he seemed to welcome with a fervour greatly out of keeping with his usual coldness, Curwen resolved to sit for a portrait. This he had painted by a very gifted Scotsman named Cosmo Alexander, then a resident of Newport, and since famous as the early teacher of Gilbert Stuart. The likeness was said to have been executed on a wall-panel of the library of the house in Olney Court, but neither of the two old diaries mentioning it gave any hint of its ultimate disposition. At this period the erratic scholar shewed signs of unusual abstraction, and spent as much time as he possibly could at his farm on the Pawtuxet Road. He seemed, it was stated, in a condition of suppressed excitement or suspense as if expecting some phenomenal thing or on the brink of some strange discovery. Chemistry or alchemy would appear to have played a great part, for he took from his house to the farm the greater number of his volumes on that subject. His affectation of civic interest did not diminish, and he lost no opportunities for helping such leaders as Stephen Hopkins, Joseph Brown, and Benjamin West in their efforts to raise the cultural tone of the town, which was then much below the level of Newport in its patronage of the liberal arts. He had helped Daniel Jenckes found his bookshop in 1763, and was thereafter his best customer extending aid likewise to the struggling Gazette that appeared each Wednesday at the Sign of Shakespearrsquos Head. In politics he ardently supported Governor Hopkins against the Ward party whose prime strength was in Newport, and his really eloquent speech at Hackerrsquos Hall in 1765 against the setting off of North Providence as a separate town with a pro-Ward vote in the General Assembly did more than any other one thing to wear down the prejudice against him. But Ezra Weeden, who watched him closely, sneered cynically at all this outward activity and freely swore it was no more than a mask for some nameless traffick with the blackest gulfs of Tartarus. The revengeful youth began a systematic study of the man and his doings whenever he was in port spending hours at night by the wharves with a dory in readiness when he saw lights in the Curwen warehouses, and following the small boat which would sometimes steal quietly off and down the bay. He also kept as close a watch as possible on the Pawtuxet farm, and was once severely bitten by the dogs the old Indian couple loosed upon him. 3. In 1766 came the final change in Joseph Curwen. It was very sudden, and gained wide notice amongst the curious townsfolk for the air of suspense and expectancy dropped like an old cloak, giving instant place to an ill-concealed exaltation of perfect triumph. Curwen seemed to have difficulty in restraining himself from public harangues on what he had found or learned or made but apparently the need of secrecy was greater than the longing to share his rejoicing, for no explanation was ever offered by him. It was after this transition, which appears to have come early in July, that the sinister scholar began to astonish people by his possession of information which only their long-dead ancestors would seem to be able to impart. But Curwenrsquos feverish secret activities by no means ceased with this change. On the contrary, they tended rather to increase so that more and more of his shipping business was handled by the captains whom he now bound to him by ties of fear as potent as those of bankruptcy had been. He altogether abandoned the slave trade, alleging that its profits were constantly decreasing. Every possible moment was spent at the Pawtuxet farm though there were rumours now and then of his presence in places which, though not actually near graveyards, were yet so situated in relation to graveyards that thoughtful people wondered just how thorough the old merchantrsquos change of habits really was. Ezra Weeden, though his periods of espionage were necessarily brief and intermittent on account of his sea voyaging, had a vindictive persistence which the bulk of the practical townsfolk and farmers lacked and subjected Curwenrsquos affairs to a scrutiny such as they had never had before. Many of the odd manoeuvres of the strange merchantrsquos vessels had been taken for granted on account of the unrest of the times, when every colonist seemed determined to resist the provisions of the Sugar Act which hampered a prominent traffick. Smuggling and evasion were the rule in Narragansett Bay, and nocturnal landings of illicit cargoes were continuous commonplaces. But Weeden, night after night following the lighters or small sloops which he saw steal off from the Curwen warehouses at the Town Street docks, soon felt assured that it was not merely His Majestyrsquos armed ships which the sinister skulker was anxious to avoid. Prior to the change in 1766 these boats had for the most part contained chained negroes, who were carried down and across the bay and landed at an obscure point on the shore just north of Pawtuxet being afterward driven up the bluff and across country to the Curwen farm, where they were locked in that enormous stone outbuilding which had only high narrow slits for windows. After that change, however, the whole programme was altered. Importation of slaves ceased at once, and for a time Curwen abandoned his midnight sailings. Then, about the spring of 1767, a new policy appeared. Once more the lighters grew wont to put out from the black, silent docks, and this time they would go down the bay some distance, perhaps as far as Namquit Point, where they would meet and receive cargo from strange ships of considerable size and widely varied appearance. Curwenrsquos sailors would then deposit this cargo at the usual point on the shore, and transport it overland to the farm locking it in the same cryptical stone building which had formerly received the negroes. The cargo consisted almost wholly of boxes and cases, of which a large proportion were oblong and heavy and disturbingly suggestive of coffins. Weeden always watched the farm with unremitting assiduity visiting it each night for long periods, and seldom letting a week go by without a sight except when the ground bore a footprint-revealing snow. Even then he would often walk as close as possible in the travelled road or on the ice of the neighbouring river to see what tracks others might have left. Finding his own vigils interrupted by nautical duties, he hired a tavern companion named Eleazar Smith to continue the survey during his absences and between them the two could have set in motion some extraordinary rumours. That they did not do so was only because they knew the effect of publicity would be to warn their quarry and make further progress impossible. Instead, they wished to learn something definite before taking any action. What they did learn must have been startling indeed, and Charles Ward spoke many times to his parents of his regret at Weedenrsquos later burning of his notebooks. All that can be told of their discoveries is what Eleazar Smith jotted down in a none too coherent diary, and what other diarists and letter-writers have timidly repeated from the statements which they finally mademdashand according to which the farm was only the outer shell of some vast and revolting menace, of a scope and depth too profound and intangible for more than shadowy comprehension. It is gathered that Weeden and Smith became early convinced that a great series of tunnels and catacombs, inhabited by a very sizeable staff of persons besides the old Indian and his wife, underlay the farm. The house was an old peaked relic of the middle seventeenth century with enormous stack chimney and diamond-paned lattice windows, the laboratory being in a lean-to toward the north, where the roof came nearly to the ground. This building stood clear of any other yet judging by the different voices heard at odd times within, it must have been accessible through secret passages beneath. These voices, before 1766, were mere mumblings and negro whisperings and frenzied screams, coupled with curious chants or invocations. After that date, however, they assumed a very singular and terrible cast as they ran the gamut betwixt dronings of dull acquiescence and explosions of frantic pain or fury, rumblings of conversation and whines of entreaty, pantings of eagerness and shouts of protest. They appeared to be in different languages, all known to Curwen, whose rasping accents were frequently distinguishable in reply, reproof, or threatening. Sometimes it seemed that several persons must be in the house Curwen, certain captives, and the guards of those captives. There were voices of a sort that neither Weeden nor Smith had ever heard before despite their wide knowledge of foreign parts, and many that they did seem to place as belonging to this or that nationality. The nature of the conversations seemed always a kind of catechism, as if Curwen were extorting some sort of information from terrified or rebellious prisoners. Weeden had many verbatim reports of overheard scraps in his notebook, for English, French, and Spanish, which he knew, were frequently used but of these nothing has survived. He did, however, say that besides a few ghoulish dialogues in which the past affairs of Providence families were concerned, most of the questions and answers he could understand were historical or scientific occasionally pertaining to very remote places and ages. Once, for example, an alternately raging and sullen figure was questioned in French about the Black Princersquos massacre at Limoges in 1370, as if there were some hidden reason which he ought to know. Curwen asked the prisonermdashif prisoner it weremdashwhether the order to slay was given because of the Sign of the Goat found on the altar in the ancient Roman crypt beneath the Cathedral, or whether the Dark Man of the Haute Vienne Coven had spoken the Three Words. Failing to obtain replies, the inquisitor had seemingly resorted to extreme means for there was a terrific shriek followed by silence and muttering and a bumping sound. None of these colloquies were ever ocularly witnessed, since the windows were always heavily draped. Once, though, during a discourse in an unknown tongue, a shadow was seen on the curtain which startled Weeden exceedingly reminding him of one of the puppets in a show he had seen in the autumn of 1764 in Hackerrsquos Hall, when a man from Germantown, Pennsylvania, had given a clever mechanical spectacle advertised as a ldquoView of the Famous City of Jerusalem, in which are represented Jerusalem, the Temple of Solomon, his Royal Throne, the noted Towers, and Hills, likewise the Sufferings of Our Saviour from the Garden of Gethsemane to the Cross on the Hill of Golgotha an artful piece of Statuary, Worthy to be seen by the Curious. rdquo It was on this occasion that the listener, who had crept close to the window of the front room whence the speaking proceeded, gave a start which roused the old Indian pair and caused them to loose the dogs on him. After that no more conversations were ever heard in the house, and Weeden and Smith concluded that Curwen had transferred his field of action to regions below. That such regions in truth existed, seemed amply clear from many things. Faint cries and groans unmistakably came up now and then from what appeared to be the solid earth in places far from any structure whilst hidden in the bushes along the river-bank in the rear, where the high ground sloped steeply down to the valley of the Pawtuxet, there was found an arched oaken door in a frame of heavy masonry, which was obviously an entrance to caverns within the hill. When or how these catacombs could have been constructed, Weeden was unable to say but he frequently pointed out how easily the place might have been reached by bands of unseen workmen from the river. Joseph Curwen put his mongrel seamen to diverse uses indeed During the heavy spring rains of 1769 the two watchers kept a sharp eye on the steep river-bank to see if any subterrene secrets might be washed to light, and were rewarded by the sight of a profusion of both human and animal bones in places where deep gullies had been worn in the banks. Naturally there might be many explanations of such things in the rear of a stock farm, and in a locality where old Indian burying-grounds were common, but Weeden and Smith drew their own inferences. It was in January 1770, whilst Weeden and Smith were still debating vainly on what, if anything, to think or do about the whole bewildering business, that the incident of the Fortaleza occurred. Exasperated by the burning of the revenue sloop Liberty at Newport during the previous summer, the customs fleet under Admiral Wallace had adopted an increased vigilance concerning strange vessels and on this occasion His Majestyrsquos armed schooner Cygnet, under Capt. Charles Leslie, captured after a short pursuit one early morning the snow Fortaleza of Barcelona, Spain, under Capt. Manuel Arruda, bound according to its log from Grand Cairo, Egypt, to Providence. When searched for contraband material, this ship revealed the astonishing fact that its cargo consisted exclusively of Egyptian mummies, consigned to ldquoSailor A. B. C. rdquo, who would come to remove his goods in a lighter just off Namquit Point and whose identity Capt. Arruda felt himself in honour bound not to reveal. The Vice-Admiralty Court at Newport, at a loss what to do in view of the non-contraband nature of the cargo on the one hand and of the unlawful secrecy of the entry on the other hand, compromised on Collector Robinsonrsquos recommendation by freeing the ship but forbidding it a port in Rhode Island waters. There were later rumours of its having been seen in Boston Harbour, though it never openly entered the Port of Boston. This extraordinary incident did not fail of wide remark in Providence, and there were not many who doubted the existence of some connexion between the cargo of mummies and the sinister Joseph Curwen. His exotic studies and his curious chemical importations being common knowledge, and his fondness for graveyards being common suspicion it did not take much imagination to link him with a freakish importation which could not conceivably have been destined for anyone else in the town. As if conscious of this natural belief, Curwen took care to speak casually on several occasions of the chemical value of the balsams found in mummies thinking perhaps that he might make the affair seem less unnatural, yet stopping just short of admitting his participation. Weeden and Smith, of course, felt no doubt whatsoever of the significance of the thing and indulged in the wildest theories concerning Curwen and his monstrous labours. The following spring, like that of the year before, had heavy rains and the watchers kept careful track of the river-bank behind the Curwen farm. Large sections were washed away, and a certain number of bones discovered but no glimpse was afforded of any actual subterranean chambers or burrows. Something was rumoured, however, at the village of Pawtuxet about a mile below, where the river flows in falls over a rocky terrace to join the placid landlocked cove. There, where quaint old cottages climbed the hill from the rustic bridge, and fishing-smacks lay anchored at their sleepy docks, a vague report went round of things that were floating down the river and flashing into sight for a minute as they went over the falls. Of course the Pawtuxet is a long river which winds through many settled regions abounding in graveyards, and of course the spring rains had been very heavy but the fisherfolk about the bridge did not like the wild way that one of the things stared as it shot down to the still water below, or the way that another half cried out although its condition had greatly departed from that of objects which normally cry out. That rumour sent Smithmdashfor Weeden was just then at seamdashin haste to the river-bank behind the farm where surely enough there remained the evidences of an extensive cave-in. There was, however, no trace of a passage into the steep bank for the miniature avalanche had left behind a solid wall of mixed earth and shrubbery from aloft. Smith went to the extent of some experimental digging, but was deterred by lack of successmdashor perhaps by fear of possible success. It is interesting to speculate on what the persistent and revengeful Weeden would have done had he been ashore at the time. 4. By the autumn of 1770 Weeden decided that the time was ripe to tell others of his discoveries for he had a large number of facts to link together, and a second eye-witness to refute the possible charge that jealousy and vindictiveness had spurred his fancy. As his first confidant he selected Capt. James Mathewson of the Enterprise, who on the one hand knew him well enough not to doubt his veracity, and on the other hand was sufficiently influential in the town to be heard in turn with respect. The colloquy took place in an upper room of Sabinrsquos Tavern near the docks, with Smith present to corroborate virtually every statement and it could be seen that Capt. Mathewson was tremendously impressed. Like nearly everyone else in the town, he had had black suspicions of his own anent Joseph Curwen hence it needed only this confirmation and enlargement of data to convince him absolutely. At the end of the conference he was very grave, and enjoined strict silence upon the two younger men. He would, he said, transmit the information separately to some ten or so of the most learned and prominent citizens of Providence ascertaining their views and following whatever advice they might have to offer. Secrecy would probably be essential in any case, for this was no matter that the town constables or militia could cope with and above all else the excitable crowd must be kept in ignorance, lest there be enacted in these already troublous times a repetition of that frightful Salem panic of less than a century before which had first brought Curwen hither. The right persons to tell, he believed, would be Dr. Benjamin West, whose pamphlet on the late transit of Venus proved him a scholar and keen thinker Rev. James Manning, President of the College which had just moved up from Warren and was temporarily housed in the new King Street schoolhouse awaiting the completion of its building on the hill above Presbyterian-Lane ex-Governor Stephen Hopkins, who had been a member of the Philosophical Society at Newport, and was a man of very broad perceptions John Carter, publisher of the Gazette all four of the Brown brothers, John, Joseph, Nicholas, and Moses, who formed the recognised local magnates, and of whom Joseph was an amateur scientist of parts old Dr. Jabez Bowen, whose erudition was considerable, and who had much first-hand knowledge of Curwenrsquos odd purchases and Capt. Abraham Whipple, a privateersman of phenomenal boldness and energy who could be counted on to lead in any active measures needed. These men, if favourable, might eventually be brought together for collective deliberation and with them would rest the responsibility of deciding whether or not to inform the Governor of the Colony, Joseph Wanton of Newport, before taking action. The mission of Capt. Mathewson prospered beyond his highest expectations for whilst he found one or two of the chosen confidants somewhat sceptical of the possible ghastly side of Weedenrsquos tale, there was not one who did not think it necessary to take some sort of secret and cooumlrdinated action. Curwen, it was clear, formed a vague potential menace to the welfare of the town and Colony and must be eliminated at any cost. Late in December 1770 a group of eminent townsmen met at the home of Stephen Hopkins and debated tentative measures. Weedenrsquos notes, which he had given to Capt. Mathewson, were carefully read and he and Smith were summoned to give testimony anent details. Something very like fear seized the whole assemblage before the meeting was over, though there ran through that fear a grim determination which Capt. Whipplersquos bluff and resonant profanity best expressed. They would not notify the Governor, because a more than legal course seemed necessary. With hidden powers of uncertain extent apparently at his disposal, Curwen was not a man who could safely be warned to leave town. Nameless reprisals might ensue, and even if the sinister creature complied, the removal would be no more than the shifting of an unclean burden to another place. The times were lawless, and men who had flouted the Kingrsquos revenue forces for years were not the ones to balk at sterner things when duty impelled. Curwen must be surprised at his Pawtuxet farm by a large raiding-party of seasoned privateersmen and given one decisive chance to explain himself. If he proved a madman, amusing himself with shrieks and imaginary conversations in different voices, he would be properly confined. If something graver appeared, and if the underground horrors indeed turned out to be real, he and all with him must die. It could be done quietly, and even the widow and her father need not be told how it came about. While these serious steps were under discussion there occurred in the town an incident so terrible and inexplicable that for a time little else was mentioned for miles around. In the middle of a moonlight January night with heavy snow underfoot there resounded over the river and up the hill a shocking series of cries which brought sleepy heads to every window and people around Weybosset Point saw a great white thing plunging frantically along the badly cleared space in front of the Turkrsquos Head. There was a baying of dogs in the distance, but this subsided as soon as the clamour of the awakened town became audible. Parties of men with lanterns and muskets hurried out to see what was happening, but nothing rewarded their search. The next morning, however, a giant, muscular body, stark naked, was found on the jams of ice around the southern piers of the Great Bridge, where the Long Dock stretched out beside Abbottrsquos distil-house, and the identity of this object became a theme for endless speculation and whispering. It was not so much the younger as the older folk who whispered, for only in the patriarchs did that rigid face with horror-bulging eyes strike any chord of memory. They, shaking as they did so, exchanged furtive murmurs of wonder and fear for in those stiff, hideous features lay a resemblance so marvellous as to be almost an identitymdashand that identity was with a man who had died full fifty years before. Ezra Weeden was present at the finding and remembering the baying of the night before, set out along Weybosset Street and across Muddy Dock Bridge whence the sound had come. He had a curious expectancy, and was not surprised when, reaching the edge of the settled district where the street merged into the Pawtuxet Road, he came upon some very curious tracks in the snow. The naked giant had been pursued by dogs and many booted men, and the returning tracks of the hounds and their masters could be easily traced. They had given up the chase upon coming too near the town. Weeden smiled grimly, and as a perfunctory detail traced the footprints back to their source. It was the Pawtuxet farm of Joseph Curwen, as he well knew it would be and he would have given much had the yard been less confusingly trampled. As it was, he dared not seem too interested in full daylight. Dr. Bowen, to whom Weeden went at once with his report, performed an autopsy on the strange corpse, and discovered peculiarities which baffled him utterly. The digestive tracts of the huge man seemed never to have been in use, whilst the whole skin had a coarse, loosely knit texture impossible to account for. Impressed by what the old men whispered of this bodyrsquos likeness to the long-dead blacksmith Daniel Green, whose great-grandson Aaron Hoppin was a supercargo in Curwenrsquos employ, Weeden asked casual questions till he found where Green was buried. That night a party of ten visited the old North Burying Ground opposite Herrendenrsquos Lane and opened a grave. They found it vacant, precisely as they had expected. Meanwhile arrangements had been made with the post riders to intercept Joseph Curwenrsquos mail, and shortly before the incident of the naked body there was found a letter from one Jedediah Orne of Salem which made the cooumlperating citizens think deeply. Parts of it, copied and preserved in the private archives of the Smith family where Charles Ward found it, ran as follows: ldquoI delight that you continue in y e Gettrsquog at Olde Matters in your Way, and doe not think better was done at Mr. Hutchinsonrsquos in Salem-Village. Certainely, there was Nothrsquog butt y e liveliest Awfulness in that which H. raisrsquod upp from What he coursquod gather onlie a part of. What you sente, did not Worke, whether because of Any Thing missrsquog, or because y e Wordes were not Righte from my Speakrsquog or y r Copyrsquog. I alone am at a Loss. I have not y e Chymicall art to followe Borellus, and owne my Self confounded by y e VII. Booke of y e Necronomicon that you recommende. But I woursquod have you Observe what was tolde to us aboute takrsquog Care whom to calle up, for you are Sensible what Mr. Mather writ in y e Magnalia of mdashmdash, and can judge how truely that Horrendous thing is reported. I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe by the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall commande more than you. I was frighted when I read of your knowrsquog what Ben Zariatnatmik hadde in his ebony Boxe, for I was conscious who must have tolde you. And againe I ask that you shalle write me as Jedediah and not Simon. In this Community a Man may not live too long, and you knowe my Plan by which I came back as my Son. I am desirous you will Acquaint me with what y e Blacke Man learnt from Sylvanus Cocidius in y e Vault, under y e Roman Wall, and will be obligrsquod for y e Lendrsquog of y e MS. you speak of. rdquo Another and unsigned letter from Philadelphia provoked equal thought, especially for the following passage: ldquoI will observe what you say respecting the sending of Accounts only by y r Vessels, but can not always be certain when to expect them. In the Matter spoke of, I require onlie one more thing but wish to be sure I apprehend you exactly. You inform me, that no Part must be missing if the finest Effects are to be had, but you can not but know how hard it is to be sure. It seems a great Hazard and Burthen to take away the whole Box, and in Town (i. e. St. Peterrsquos, St. Paulrsquos, St. Maryrsquos, or Christ Church) it can scarce be done at all. But I know what Imperfections were in the one I raisrsquod up October last, and how many live Specimens you were forcrsquod to imploy before you hit upon the right Mode in the year 1766 so will be guided by you in all Matters. I am impatient for y r Brig, and inquire daily at Mr. Biddlersquos Wharf. rdquo A third suspicious letter was in an unknown tongue and even an unknown alphabet. In the Smith diary found by Charles Ward a single oft-repeated combination of characters is clumsily copied and authorities at Brown University have pronounced the alphabet Amharic or Abyssinian, although they do not recognise the word. None of these epistles was ever delivered to Curwen, though the disappearance of Jedediah Orne from Salem as recorded shortly afterward shewed that the Providence men took certain quiet steps. The Pennsylvania Historical Society also has some curious letters received by Dr. Shippen regarding the presence of an unwholesome character in Philadelphia. But more decisive steps were in the air, and it is in the secret assemblages of sworn and tested sailors and faithful old privateersmen in the Brown warehouses by night that we must look for the main fruits of Weedenrsquos disclosures. Slowly and surely a plan of campaign was under development which would leave no trace of Joseph Curwenrsquos noxious mysteries. Curwen, despite all precautions, apparently felt that something was in the wind for he was now remarked to wear an unusually worried look. His coach was seen at all hours in the town and on the Pawtuxet Road, and he dropped little by little the air of forced geniality with which he had latterly sought to combat the townrsquos prejudice. The nearest neighbours to his farm, the Fenners, one night remarked a great shaft of light shooting into the sky from some aperture in the roof of that cryptical stone building with the high, excessively narrow windows an event which they quickly communicated to John Brown in Providence. Mr. Brown had become the executive leader of the select group bent on Curwenrsquos extirpation, and had informed the Fenners that some action was about to be taken. This he deemed needful because of the impossibility of their not witnessing the final raid and he explained his course by saying that Curwen was known to be a spy of the customs officers at Newport, against whom the hand of every Providence shipper, merchant, and farmer was openly or clandestinely raised. Whether the ruse was wholly believed by neighbours who had seen so many queer things is not certain but at any rate the Fenners were willing to connect any evil with a man of such queer ways. To them Mr. Brown had entrusted the duty of watching the Curwen farmhouse, and of regularly reporting every incident which took place there. 5. The probability that Curwen was on guard and attempting unusual things, as suggested by the odd shaft of light, precipitated at last the action so carefully devised by the band of serious citizens. According to the Smith diary a company of about 100 men met at 10 p. m. on Friday, April 12th, 1771, in the great room of Thurstonrsquos Tavern at the Sign of the Golden Lion on Weybosset Point across the Bridge. Of the guiding group of prominent men in addition to the leader John Brown there were present Dr. Bowen, with his case of surgical instruments, President Manning without the great periwig (the largest in the Colonies) for which he was noted, Governor Hopkins, wrapped in his dark cloak and accompanied by his seafaring brother Esek, whom he had initiated at the last moment with the permission of the rest, John Carter, Capt. Mathewson, and Capt. Whipple, who was to lead the actual raiding party. These chiefs conferred apart in a rear chamber, after which Capt. Whipple emerged to the great room and gave the gathered seamen their last oaths and instructions. Eleazar Smith was with the leaders as they sat in the rear apartment awaiting the arrival of Ezra Weeden, whose duty was to keep track of Curwen and report the departure of his coach for the farm. About 10:30 a heavy rumble was heard on the Great Bridge, followed by the sound of a coach in the street outside and at that hour there was no need of waiting for Weeden in order to know that the doomed man had set out for his last night of unhallowed wizardry. A moment later, as the receding coach clattered faintly over the Muddy Dock Bridge, Weeden appeared and the raiders fell silently into military order in the street, shouldering the firelocks, fowling-pieces, or whaling harpoons which they had with them. Weeden and Smith were with the party, and of the deliberating citizens there were present for active service Capt. Whipple, the leader, Capt. Esek Hopkins, John Carter, President Manning, Capt. Mathewson, and Dr. Bowen together with Moses Brown, who had come up at the eleventh hour though absent from the preliminary session in the tavern. All these freemen and their hundred sailors began the long march without delay, grim and a trifle apprehensive as they left the Muddy Dock behind and mounted the gentle rise of Broad Street toward the Pawtuxet Road. Just beyond Elder Snowrsquos church some of the men turned back to take a parting look at Providence lying outspread under the early spring stars. Steeples and gables rose dark and shapely, and salt breezes swept up gently from the cove north of the Bridge. Vega was climbing above the great hill across the water, whose crest of trees was broken by the roof-line of the unfinished College edifice. At the foot of that hill, and along the narrow mounting lanes of its side, the old town dreamed Old Providence, for whose safety and sanity so monstrous and colossal a blasphemy was about to be wiped out. An hour and a quarter later the raiders arrived, as previously agreed, at the Fenner farmhouse where they heard a final report on their intended victim. He had reached his farm over half an hour before, and the strange light had soon afterward shot once into the sky, but there were no lights in any visible windows. This was always the case of late. Even as this news was given another great glare arose toward the south, and the party realised that they had indeed come close to the scene of awesome and unnatural wonders. Capt. Whipple now ordered his force to separate into three divisions one of twenty men under Eleazar Smith to strike across to the shore and guard the landing-place against possible reinforcements for Curwen until summoned by a messenger for desperate service, a second of twenty men under Capt. Esek Hopkins to steal down into the river valley behind the Curwen farm and demolish with axes or gunpowder the oaken door in the high, steep bank, and the third to close in on the house and adjacent buildings themselves. Of this division one third was to be led by Capt. Mathewson to the cryptical stone edifice with high narrow windows, another third to follow Capt. Whipple himself to the main farmhouse, and the remaining third to preserve a circle around the whole group of buildings until summoned by a final emergency signal. The river party would break down the hillside door at the sound of a single whistle-blast, then waiting and capturing anything which might issue from the regions within. At the sound of two whistle-blasts it would advance through the aperture to oppose the enemy or join the rest of the raiding contingent. The party at the stone building would accept these respective signals in an analogous manner forcing an entrance at the first, and at the second descending whatever passage into the ground might be discovered, and joining the general or focal warfare expected to take place within the caverns. A third or emergency signal of three blasts would summon the immediate reserve from its general guard duty its twenty men dividing equally and entering the unknown depths through both farmhouse and stone building. Capt. Whipplersquos belief in the existence of catacombs was absolute, and he took no alternative into consideration when making his plans. He had with him a whistle of great power and shrillness, and did not fear any upsetting or misunderstanding of signals. The final reserve at the landing, of course, was nearly out of the whistlersquos range hence would require a special messenger if needed for help. Moses Brown and John Carter went with Capt. Hopkins to the river-bank, while President Manning was detailed with Capt. Mathewson to the stone building. Dr. Bowen, with Ezra Weeden, remained in Capt. Whipplersquos party which was to storm the farmhouse itself. The attack was to begin as soon as a messenger from Capt. Hopkins had joined Capt. Whipple to notify him of the river partyrsquos readiness. The leader would then deliver the loud single blast, and the various advance parties would commence their simultaneous attack on three points. Shortly before 1 a. m. the three divisions left the Fenner farmhouse one to guard the landing, another to seek the river valley and the hillside door, and the third to subdivide and attend to the actual buildings of the Curwen farm. Eleazar Smith, who accompanied the shore-guarding party, records in his diary an uneventful march and a long wait on the bluff by the bay broken once by what seemed to be the distant sound of the signal whistle and again by a peculiar muffled blend of roaring and crying and a powder blast which seemed to come from the same direction. Later on one man thought he caught some distant gunshots, and still later Smith himself felt the throb of titanic and thunderous words resounding in upper air. It was just before dawn that a single haggard messenger with wild eyes and a hideous unknown odour about his clothing appeared and told the detachment to disperse quietly to their homes and never again think or speak of the nightrsquos doings or of him who had been Joseph Curwen. Something about the bearing of the messenger carried a conviction which his mere words could never have conveyed for though he was a seaman well known to many of them, there was something obscurely lost or gained in his soul which set him for evermore apart. It was the same later on when they met other old companions who had gone into that zone of horror. Most of them had lost or gained something imponderable and indescribable. They had seen or heard or felt something which was not for human creatures, and could not forget it. From them there was never any gossip, for to even the commonest of mortal instincts there are terrible boundaries. And from that single messenger the party at the shore caught a nameless awe which almost sealed their own lips. Very few are the rumours which ever came from any of them, and Eleazar Smithrsquos diary is the only written record which has survived from that whole expedition which set forth from the Sign of the Golden Lion under the stars. Charles Ward, however, discovered another vague sidelight in some Fenner correspondence which he found in New London, where he knew another branch of the family had lived. It seems that the Fenners, from whose house the doomed farm was distantly visible, had watched the departing columns of raiders and had heard very clearly the angry barking of the Curwen dogs, followed by the first shrill blast which precipitated the attack. This blast had been followed by a repetition of the great shaft of light from the stone building, and in another moment, after a quick sounding of the second signal ordering a general invasion, there had come a subdued prattle of musketry followed by a horrible roaring cry which the correspondent Luke Fenner had represented in his epistle by the characters ldquoWaaaahrrrrrmdashRrsquowaaahrrrrdquo. This cry, however, had possessed a quality which no mere writing could convey, and the correspondent mentions that his mother fainted completely at the sound. It was later repeated less loudly, and further but more muffled evidences of gunfire ensued together with a loud explosion of powder from the direction of the river. About an hour afterward all the dogs began to bark frightfully, and there were vague ground rumblings so marked that the candlesticks tottered on the mantelpiece. A strong smell of sulphur was noted and Luke Fennerrsquos father declared that he heard the third or emergency whistle signal, though the others failed to detect it. Muffled musketry sounded again, followed by a deep scream less piercing but even more horrible than those which had preceded it a kind of throaty, nastily plastic cough or gurgle whose quality as a scream must have come more from its continuity and psychological import than from its actual acoustic value. Then the flaming thing burst into sight at a point where the Curwen farm ought to lie, and the human cries of desperate and frightened men were heard. Muskets flashed and cracked, and the flaming thing fell to the ground. A second flaming thing appeared, and a shriek of human origin was plainly distinguished. Fenner wrote that he could even gather a few words belched in frenzy: ldquoAlmighty, protect thy lambrdquo Then there were more shots, and the second flaming thing fell. After that came silence for about three-quarters of an hour at the end of which time little Arthur Fenner, Lukersquos brother, exclaimed that he saw lsquoa red fogrsquo going up to the stars from the accursed farm in the distance. No one but the child can testify to this, but Luke admits the significant coincidence implied by the panic of almost convulsive fright which at the same moment arched the backs and stiffened the fur of the three cats then within the room. Five minutes later a chill wind blew up, and the air became suffused with such an intolerable stench that only the strong freshness of the sea could have prevented its being noticed by the shore party or by any wakeful souls in Pawtuxet village. This stench was nothing which any of the Fenners had ever encountered before, and produced a kind of clutching, amorphous fear beyond that of the tomb or the charnel-house. Close upon it came the awful voice which no hapless hearer will ever be able to forget. It thundered out of the sky like a doom, and windows rattled as its echoes died away. It was deep and musical powerful as a bass organ, but evil as the forbidden books of the Arabs. What it said no man can tell, for it spoke in an unknown tongue, but this is the writing Luke Fenner set down to portray the daemoniac intonations: ldquoDEESMEESndashJESHETndashBONE DOSEFE DUVEMAndashENITEMOSSrdquo. Not till the year 1919 did any soul link this crude transcript with anything else in mortal knowledge, but Charles Ward paled as he recognised what Mirandola had denounced in shudders as the ultimate horror among black magicrsquos incantations. An unmistakably human shout or deep chorused scream seemed to answer this malign wonder from the Curwen farm, after which the unknown stench grew complex with an added odour equally intolerable. A wailing distinctly different from the scream now burst out, and was protracted ululantly in rising and falling paroxysms. At times it became almost articulate, though no auditor could trace any definite words and at one point it seemed to verge toward the confines of diabolic and hysterical laughter. Then a yell of utter, ultimate fright and stark madness wrenched from scores of human throatsmdasha yell which came strong and clear despite the depth from which it must have burst after which darkness and silence ruled all things. Spirals of acrid smoke ascended to blot out the stars, though no flames appeared and no buildings were observed to be gone or injured on the following day. Toward dawn two frightened messengers with monstrous and unplaceable odours saturating their clothing knocked at the Fenner door and requested a keg of rum, for which they paid very well indeed. One of them told the family that the affair of Joseph Curwen was over, and that the events of the night were not to be mentioned again. Arrogant as the order seemed, the aspect of him who gave it took away all resentment and lent it a fearsome authority so that only these furtive letters of Luke Fenner, which he urged his Connecticut relative to destroy, remain to tell what was seen and heard. The non-compliance of that relative, whereby the letters were saved after all, has alone kept the matter from a merciful oblivion. Charles Ward had one detail to add as a result of a long canvass of Pawtuxet residents for ancestral traditions. Old Charles Slocum of that village said that there was known to his grandfather a queer rumour concerning a charred, distorted body found in the fields a week after the death of Joseph Curwen was announced. What kept the talk alive was the notion that this body, so far as could be seen in its burnt and twisted condition, was neither thoroughly human nor wholly allied to any animal which Pawtuxet folk had ever seen or read about. 6. Not one man who participated in that terrible raid could ever be induced to say a word concerning it, and every fragment of the vague data which survives comes from those outside the final fighting party. There is something frightful in the care with which these actual raiders destroyed each scrap which bore the least allusion to the matter. Eight sailors had been killed, but although their bodies were not produced their families were satisfied with the statement that a clash with customs officers had occurred. The same statement also covered the numerous cases of wounds, all of which were extensively bandaged and treated only by Dr. Jabez Bowen, who had accompanied the party. Hardest to explain was the nameless odour clinging to all the raiders, a thing which was discussed for weeks. Of the citizen leaders, Capt. Whipple and Moses Brown were most severely hurt, and letters of their wives testify the bewilderment which their reticence and close guarding of their bandages produced. Psychologically every participant was aged, sobered, and shaken. It is fortunate that they were all strong men of action and simple, orthodox religionists, for with more subtle introspectiveness and mental complexity they would have fared ill indeed. President Manning was the most disturbed but even he outgrew the darkest shadow, and smothered memories in prayers. Every man of those leaders had a stirring part to play in later years, and it is perhaps fortunate that this is so. Little more than a twelvemonth afterward Capt. Whipple led the mob who burnt the revenue ship Gaspee, and in this bold act we may trace one step in the blotting out of unwholesome images. There was delivered to the widow of Joseph Curwen a sealed leaden coffin of curious design, obviously found ready on the spot when needed, in which she was told her husbandrsquos body lay. He had, it was explained, been killed in a customs battle about which it was not politic to give details. More than this no tongue ever uttered of Joseph Curwenrsquos end, and Charles Ward had only a single hint wherewith to construct a theory. This hint was the merest threadmdasha shaky underscoring of a passage in Jedediah Ornersquos confiscated letter to Curwen, as partly copied in Ezra Weedenrsquos handwriting. The copy was found in the possession of Smithrsquos descendants and we are left to decide whether Weeden gave it to his companion after the end, as a mute clue to the abnormality which had occurred, or whether, as is more probable, Smith had it before, and added the underscoring himself from what he had managed to extract from his friend by shrewd guessing and adroit cross-questioning. The underlined passage is merely this: ldquoI say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe by the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall commande more than you. rdquo In the light of this passage, and reflecting on what last unmentionable allies a beaten man might try to summon in his direst extremity, Charles Ward may well have wondered whether any citizen of Providence killed Joseph Curwen. The deliberate effacement of every memory of the dead man from Providence life and annals was vastly aided by the influence of the raiding leaders. They had not at first meant to be so thorough, and had allowed the widow and her father and child to remain in ignorance of the true conditions but Capt. Tillinghast was an astute man, and soon uncovered enough rumours to whet his horror and cause him to demand that his daughter and granddaughter change their name, burn the library and all remaining papers, and chisel the inscription from the slate slab above Joseph Curwenrsquos grave. He knew Capt. Whipple well, and probably extracted more hints from that bluff mariner than anyone else ever gained respecting the end of the accused sorcerer. From that time on the obliteration of Curwenrsquos memory became increasingly rigid, extending at last by common consent even to the town records and files of the Gazette. It can be compared in spirit only to the hush that lay on Oscar Wildersquos name for a decade after his disgrace, and in extent only to the fate of that sinful King of Runazar in Lord Dunsanyrsquos tale, whom the Gods decided must not only cease to be, but must cease ever to have been. Mrs. Tillinghast, as the widow became known after 1772, sold the house in Olney Court and resided with her father in Powerrsquos Lane till her death in 1817. The farm at Pawtuxet, shunned by every living soul, remained to moulder through the years and seemed to decay with unaccountable rapidity. By 1780 only the stone and brickwork were standing, and by 1800 even these had fallen to shapeless heaps. None ventured to pierce the tangled shrubbery on the river-bank behind which the hillside door may have lain, nor did any try to frame a definite image of the scenes amidst which Joseph Curwen departed from the horrors he had wrought. Only robust old Capt. Whipple was heard by alert listeners to mutter once in a while to himself, ldquoPox on that mdashmdashmdash, but he had no business to laugh while he screamed. rsquoTwas as though the damnrsquod mdashmdashmdash had somersquoat up his sleeve. For half a crown Irsquod burn his mdashmdashmdash house. rdquo III. A Search and an Evocation 1. Charles Ward, as we have seen, first learned in 1918 of his descent from Joseph Curwen. That he at once took an intense interest in everything pertaining to the bygone mystery is not to be wondered at for every vague rumour that he had heard of Curwen now became something vital to himself, in whom flowed Curwenrsquos blood. No spirited and imaginative genealogist could have done otherwise than begin forthwith an avid and systematic collection of Curwen data. In his first delvings there was not the slightest attempt at secrecy so that even Dr. Lyman hesitates to date the youthrsquos madness from any period before the close of 1919. He talked freely with his familymdashthough his mother was not particularly pleased to own an ancestor like Curwenmdashand with the officials of the various museums and libraries he visited. In applying to private families for records thought to be in their possession he made no concealment of his object, and shared the somewhat amused scepticism with which the accounts of the old diarists and letter-writers were regarded. He often expressed a keen wonder as to what really had taken place a century and a half before at that Pawtuxet farmhouse whose site he vainly tried to find, and what Joseph Curwen really had been. When he came across the Smith diary and archives and encountered the letter from Jedediah Orne he decided to visit Salem and look up Curwenrsquos early activities and connexions there, which he did during the Easter vacation of 1919. At the Essex Institute, which was well known to him from former sojourns in the glamorous old town of crumbling Puritan gables and clustered gambrel roofs, he was very kindly received, and unearthed there a considerable amount of Curwen data. He found that his ancestor was born in Salem-Village, now Danvers, seven miles from town, on the eighteenth of February (O. S.) 1662ndash3 and that he had run away to sea at the age of fifteen, not appearing again for nine years, when he returned with the speech, dress, and manners of a native Englishman and settled in Salem proper. At that time he had little to do with his family, but spent most of his hours with the curious books he had brought from Europe, and the strange chemicals which came for him on ships from England, France, and Holland. Certain trips of his into the country were the objects of much local inquisitiveness, and were whisperingly associated with vague rumours of fires on the hills at night. Curwenrsquos only close friends had been one Edward Hutchinson of Salem-Village and one Simon Orne of Salem. With these men he was often seen in conference about the Common, and visits among them were by no means infrequent. Hutchinson had a house well out toward the woods, and it was not altogether liked by sensitive people because of the sounds heard there at night. He was said to entertain strange visitors, and the lights seen from his windows were not always of the same colour. The knowledge he displayed concerning long-dead persons and long-forgotten events was considered distinctly unwholesome, and he disappeared about the time the witchcraft panic began, never to be heard from again. At that time Joseph Curwen also departed, but his settlement in Providence was soon learned of. Simon Orne lived in Salem until 1720, when his failure to grow visibly old began to excite attention. He thereafter disappeared, though thirty years later his precise counterpart and self-styled son turned up to claim his property. The claim was allowed on the strength of documents in Simon Ornersquos known hand, and Jedediah Orne continued to dwell in Salem till 1771, when certain letters from Providence citizens to the Rev. Thomas Barnard and others brought about his quiet removal to parts unknown. Certain documents by and about all of these strange characters were available at the Essex Institute, the Court House, and the Registry of Deeds, and included both harmless commonplaces such as land titles and bills of sale, and furtive fragments of a more provocative nature. There were four or five unmistakable allusions to them on the witchcraft trial records as when one Hepzibah Lawson swore on July 10, 1692, at the Court of Oyer and Terminer under Judge Hathorne, that lsquofortie Witches and the Blacke Man were wont to meete in the Woodes behind Mr. Hutchinsonrsquos housersquo, and one Amity How declared at a session of August 8th before Judge Gedney that lsquoMr. G. B. (Rev. George Burroughs) on that Nighte putt y e Divell his Marke upon Bridget S. Jonathan A. Simon O., Deliverance W. Joseph C., Susan P. Mehitable C. and Deborah B. rsquo Then there was a catalogue of Hutchinsonrsquos uncanny library as found after his disappearance, and an unfinished manuscript in his handwriting, couched in a cipher none could read. Ward had a photostatic copy of this manuscript made, and began to work casually on the cipher as soon as it was delivered to him. After the following August his labours on the cipher became intense and feverish, and there is reason to believe from his speech and conduct that he hit upon the key before October or November. He never stated, though, whether or not he had succeeded. But of the greatest immediate interest was the Orne material. It took Ward only a short time to prove from identity of penmanship a thing he had already considered established from the text of the letter to Curwen namely, that Simon Orne and his supposed son were one and the same person. As Orne had said to his correspondent, it was hardly safe to live too long in Salem, hence he resorted to a thirty-year sojourn abroad, and did not return to claim his lands except as a representative of a new generation. Orne had apparently been careful to destroy most of his correspondence, but the citizens who took action in 1771 found and preserved a few letters and papers which excited their wonder. There were cryptic formulae and diagrams in his and other hands which Ward now either copied with care or had photographed, and one extremely mysterious letter in a chirography that the searcher recognised from items in the Registry of Deeds as positively Joseph Curwenrsquos. This Curwen letter, though undated as to the year, was evidently not the one in answer to which Orne had written the confiscated missive and from internal evidence Ward placed it not much later than 1750. It may not be amiss to give the text in full, as a sample of the style of one whose history was so dark and terrible. The recipient is addressed as ldquoSimonrdquo, but a line (whether drawn by Curwen or Orne Ward could not tell) is run through the word. Prouidence, I. May (Ut. vulgo) Brother:mdash My honourrsquod Antient ffriende, due Respects and earnest Wishes to Him whom we serve for y r eternall Power. I am just come upon That which you ought to knowe, concernrsquog the Matter of the Laste Extremitie and what to doe regardrsquog yt. I am not disposrsquod to followe you in gorsquog Away on acct. of my Yeares, for Prouidence hath not y e Sharpeness of y e Bay in huntrsquog oute uncommon Things and bringinge to Tryall. I am tyrsquod up in Shippes and Goodes, and coursquod not doe as you did, besides the Whiche my ffarme at Patuxet hath under it What you Knowe, that woursquod not waite for my comrsquog Backe as an Other. But I am not unreadie for harde ffortunes, as I haue tolde you, and haue longe workrsquod upon y e Way of getrsquog Backe after y e Laste. I laste Night strucke on y e Wordes that bringe up YOGGE-SOTHOTHE, and sawe for y e firste Time that fface spoke of by Ibn Schacabao in ye mdashmdash. And IT said, that y e III Psalme in y e Liber-Damnatus holdes y e Clauicle. With Sunne in V House, Saturne in Trine, drawe y e Pentagram of Fire, and saye y e ninth Uerse thrice. This Uerse repeate eache Roodemas and Hallowrsquos Eue and y e Thing will breede in y e Outside Spheres. And of y e Seede of Olde shal One be borne who shal looke Backe, thorsquo knowrsquog 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, notwithstandrsquog the Sailors I have from y e Indies. Ye People aboute are become curious, but I can stande them off. Ye Gentry are worse than the Populace, bersquog more Circumstantiall in their Accts. and more believrsquod in what they tell. That Parson and Mr. Merritt have talkrsquod some, I am fearfull, but no Thing soe far is Dangerous. Ye Chymical substances are easie of getrsquog, there bersquog II. goode Chymists in Towne, Dr. Bowen and Sam: Carew. I am follrsquog oute what Borellus saith, and haue Helpe in Abdool Al-Hazred his VII. Booke. Whatever I gette, you shal haue. And in y e meane while, do not neglect to make use of y e Wordes I haue here giuen. I haue them Righte, but if you Desire to see HIM, imploy the Writings on y e Piece of mdashmdash that I am puttrsquog in this Packet. Saye y e Uerses every Roodmas and Hallowrsquos Eue and if y r Line runn out not, one shall bee in yeares to come that shal looke backe and use what Saltes or Stuff for Saltes you shal leaue him. Job XIV. XIV. I rejoice you are again at Salem, and hope I may see you not longe hence. I have a goode Stallion, and am thinkrsquog of getrsquog a Coach, there bersquog one (Mr. Merrittrsquos) in Prouidence already, thorsquo y e Roades are bad. If you are disposrsquod to Travel, doe not pass me bye. From Boston take y e Post Rd. throrsquo Dedham, Wrentham, and Attleborough, goode Taverns bersquog at all these Townes. Stop at Mr. Bolcomrsquos in Wrentham, where y e Beddes are finer than Mr. Hatchrsquos, but eate at y e other House for their Cooke is better. Turne into Prou. by Patucket ffalls, and y e Rd. past Mr. Saylesrsquos Tavern. My House opp. Mr. Epenetus Olneyrsquos Tavern off y e Towne Street, Ist on y e N. side of Olneyrsquos Court. Distance from Boston Stone abt. XLIV Miles. Sir, I am y r olde and true ffriend and Servt. in Almousin-Metraton. To Mr. Simon Orne, Williamrsquos-Lane, in Salem. This letter, oddly enough, was what first gave Ward the exact location of Curwenrsquos Providence home for none of the records encountered up to that time had been at all specific. The discovery was doubly striking because it indicated as the newer Curwen house built in 1761 on the site of the old, a dilapidated building still standing in Olney Court and well known to Ward in his antiquarian rambles over Stampersrsquo Hill. The place was indeed only a few squares from his own home on the great hillrsquos 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 tomdashJob 14, 14mdashwas the familiar verse, ldquoIf a man die, shall he live again All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come. rdquo 2. Young Ward came home in a state of pleasant excitement, and spent the following Saturday in a long and exhaustive study of the house in Olney Court. The place, now crumbling with age, had never been a mansion but was a modest two-and-a-half story wooden town house of the familiar Providence colonial type, with plain peaked roof, large central chimney, and artistically carved doorway with rayed fanlight, triangular pediment, and trim Doric pilasters. It had suffered but little alteration externally, and Ward felt he was gazing on something very close to the sinister matters of his quest. The present negro inhabitants were known to him, and he was very courteously shewn about the interior by old Asa and his stout wife Hannah. Here there was more change than the outside indicated, and Ward saw with regret that fully half of the fine scroll-and-urn overmantels and shell-carved cupboard linings were gone, whilst much of the fine wainscotting and bolection moulding was marked, hacked, and gouged, or covered up altogether with cheap wall-paper. In general, the survey did not yield as much as Ward had somehow expected but it was at least exciting to stand within the ancestral walls which had housed such a man of horror as Joseph Curwen. He saw with a thrill that a monogram had been very carefully effaced from the ancient brass knocker. From then until after the close of school Ward spent his time on the photostatic copy of the Hutchinson cipher and the accumulation of local Curwen data. The former still proved unyielding but of the latter he obtained so much, and so many clues to similar data elsewhere, that he was ready by July to make a trip to New London and New York to consult old letters whose presence in those places was indicated. This trip was very fruitful, for it brought him the Fenner letters with their terrible description of the Pawtuxet farmhouse raid, and the Nightingale-Talbot letters in which he learned of the portrait painted on a panel of the Curwen library. This matter of the portrait interested him particularly, since he would have given much to know just what Joseph Curwen looked like and he decided to make a second search of the house in Olney Court to see if there might not be some trace of the ancient features beneath peeling coats of later paint or layers of mouldy wall-paper. Early in August that search took place, and Ward went carefully over the walls of every room sizeable enough to have been by any possibility the library of the evil builder. He paid especial attention to the large panels of such overmantels as still remained and was keenly excited after about an hour, when on a broad area above the fireplace in a spacious ground-floor room he became certain that the surface brought out by the peeling of several coats of paint was sensibly darker than any ordinary interior paint or the wood beneath it was likely to have been. A few more careful tests with a thin knife, and he knew that he had come upon an oil portrait of great extent. With truly scholarly restraint the youth did not risk the damage which an immediate attempt to uncover the hidden picture with the knife might have 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 recognise with a touch of awe the dramatic trick which heredity had played. For it took the final bath of oil and the final stroke of the delicate scraper to bring out fully the expression which centuries had hidden and to confront the bewildered Charles Dexter Ward, dweller in the past, with his own living features in the countenance of his horrible great-great-great-grandfather. Ward brought his parents to see the marvel he had uncovered, and his father at once determined to purchase the picture despite its execution on stationary panelling. The resemblance to the boy, despite an appearance of rather greater age, was marvellous and it could be seen that through some trick of atavism the physical contours of Joseph Curwen had found precise duplication after a century and a half. Mrs. Wardrsquos 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 affairsmdasha cotton manufacturer with extensive mills at Riverpoint in the Pawtuxet Valleymdashand 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 housemdasha small rodent-featured person with a guttural accentmdashand obtained the whole mantel and overmantel bearing the picture at a curtly fixed priced 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 Charlesrsquos 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 companyrsquos motor truck. There was left a space of exposed brickwork marking the chimneyrsquos course, and in this young Ward observed a cubical recess about a foot square, which must have lain directly behind the head of the portrait. Curious as to what such a space might mean or contain, the youth approached and looked within finding beneath the deep coatings of dust and soot some loose yellowed papers, a crude, thick copybook, and a few mouldering textile shreds which may have formed the ribbon binding the rest together. Blowing away the bulk of the dirt and cinders, he took up the book and looked at the bold inscription on its cover. It was in a hand which he had learned to recognise at the Essex Institute, and proclaimed the volume as the ldquoJournall and Notes of Jos: Curwen, Gent. of Providence-Plantations, Late of Salem. rdquo Excited beyond measure by his discovery, Ward shewed the book to the two curious workmen beside him. Their testimony is absolute as to the nature and genuineness of the finding, and Dr. Willett relies on them to help establish his theory that the youth was not mad when he began his major eccentricities. All the other papers were likewise in Curwenrsquos handwriting, and one of them seemed especially portentous because of its inscription: ldquoTo Him Who Shal Come After, amp How He May Gett Beyonde Time amp y e Spheres. rdquo 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 ldquoEdw: Hutchinson, Armigerrdquo and ldquoJedediah Orne, Esq. rdquo, lsquoor Their Heir or Heirs, or Those Representrsquog Themrsquo. The sixth and last was inscribed: ldquo Joseph Curwen his Life and Travells Betrsquon y e yeares 1678 and 1687: Of Whither He Voyagrsquod, Where He Stayrsquod, Whom He Sawe, and What He Learnt. rdquo 3. We have now reached the point from which the more academic school of alienists date Charles Wardrsquos madness. Upon his discovery the youth had looked immediately at a few of the inner pages of the book and manuscripts, and had evidently seen something which impressed him tremendously. Indeed, in shewing the titles to the workmen he appeared to guard the text itself with peculiar care, and to labour under a perturbation for which even the antiquarian and genealogical significance of the find could hardly account. Upon returning home he broke the news with an almost embarrassed air, as if he wished to convey an idea of its supreme importance without having to exhibit the evidence itself. He did not even shew the titles to his parents, but simply told them that he had found some documents in Joseph Curwenrsquos handwriting, ldquomostly in cipherrdquo, which would have to be studied very carefully before yielding up their true meaning. It is unlikely that he would have shewn what he did to the workmen, had it not been for their unconcealed 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 unravelling of the cipher manuscript. In the morning his mother saw that he was at work on the photostatic copy of the Hutchinson cipher, which he had frequently shewn her before but in response to her query he said that the Curwen key could not be applied to it. That afternoon he abandoned his work and watched the men fascinatedly as they finished their installation of the picture with its woodwork above a cleverly realistic electric log, setting the mock-fireplace and overmantel a little out from the north wall as if a chimney existed, and boxing in the sides with panelling to match the roomrsquos. The front panel holding the picture was sawn and hinged to allow cupboard space behind it. After the workmen went he moved his work into the study and sat down before it with his eyes half on the cipher and half on the portrait which stared back at him like a year-adding and century-recalling mirror. His parents, subsequently recalling his conduct at this period, give interesting details anent the policy of concealment which he practiced. Before servants he seldom hid any paper which he might be studying, since he rightly assumed that Curwenrsquos 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 ldquoTo Him Who Shal Come After etc. rdquo seemed to be), he would cover it with some convenient paper until his caller had departed. At night he kept the papers under lock and key in an antique cabinet of his, where he also placed them whenever he left the room. He soon resumed fairly regular hours and habits, except that his long walks and other outside interests seemed to cease. The opening of school, where he now began his senior year, seemed a great bore to him and he frequently asserted his determination never to bother with college. He had, he said, important special investigations to make, which would provide him with more avenues toward knowledge and the humanities than any university which the world could boast. Naturally, only one who had always been more or less studious, eccentric, and solitary could have pursued this course for many days without attracting notice. Ward, however, was constitutionally a scholar and a hermit hence his parents were less surprised than regretful at the close confinement and secrecy he adopted. At the same time, both his father and mother thought it odd that he would shew them no scrap of his treasure-trove, nor give any connected account of such data as he had deciphered. This reticence he explained away as due to a wish to wait until he might announce some connected revelation, but as the weeks passed without further disclosures there began to grow up between the youth and his family a kind of constraint intensified in his motherrsquos case by her manifest disapproval of all Curwen delvings. During October Ward began visiting the libraries again, but no longer for the antiquarian matter of his former days. Witchcraft and magic, occultism and daemonology, were what he sought now and when Providence sources proved unfruitful he would take the train for Boston and tap the wealth of the great library in Copley Square, the Widener Library at Harvard, or the Zion Research Library in Brookline, where certain rare works on Biblical subjects are available. He bought extensively, and fitted up a whole additional set of shelves in his study for newly acquired works on uncanny subjects while during the Christmas holidays he made a round of out-of-town trips including one to Salem to consult certain records at the Essex Institute. About the middle of January, 1920, there entered Wardrsquos bearing an element of triumph which he did not explain, and he was no more found at work upon the Hutchinson cipher. Instead, he inaugurated a dual policy of chemical research and record-scanning fitting up for the one a laboratory in the unused attic of the house, and for the latter haunting all the sources of vital statistics in Providence. Local dealers in drugs and scientific supplies, later questioned, gave astonishingly queer and meaningless catalogues of the substances and instruments he purchased but clerks at the State House, the City Hall, and the various libraries agree as to the definite object of his second interest. He was searching intensely and feverishly for the grave of Joseph Curwen, from whose slate slab an older generation had so wisely blotted the name. Little by little there grew upon the Ward family the conviction that something was wrong. Charles had had freaks and changes of minor interests before, but this growing secrecy and absorption in strange pursuits was unlike even him. His school work was the merest pretence and although he failed in no test, it could be seen that the old application had all vanished. He had other concernments now and when not in his new laboratory with a score of obsolete alchemical books, could be found either poring over old burial records down town or glued to his volumes of occult lore in his study, where the startlinglymdashone almost fancied increasinglymdashsimilar features of Joseph Curwen stared blandly at him from the great overmantel on the north wall. Late in March Ward added to his archive-searching a ghoulish series of rambles about the various ancient cemeteries of the city. The cause appeared later, when it was learned from City Hall clerks that he had probably found an important clue. His quest had suddenly shifted from the grave of Joseph Curwen to that of one Naphthali Field and this shift was explained when, upon going over the files that he had been over, the investigators actually found a fragmentary record of Curwenrsquos burial which had escaped the general obliteration, and which stated that the curious leaden coffin had been interred ldquo10 ft. S. and 5 ft. W. of Naphthali Fieldrsquos grave in y e mdashrdquo. The lack of a specified burying-ground in the surviving entry greatly complicated the search, and Naphthali Fieldrsquos grave seemed as elusive as that of Curwen but here no systematic effacement had existed, and one might reasonably be expected to stumble on the stone itself even if its record had perished. Hence the ramblesmdashfrom which St. Johnrsquos (the former Kingrsquos) Churchyard and the ancient Congregational burying-ground in the midst of Swan Point Cemetery were excluded, since other statistics had shewn that the only Naphthali Field (obiit 1729) whose grave could have been meant had been a Baptist. 4. It was toward May when Dr. Willett, at the request of the senior Ward, and fortified with all the Curwen data which the family had gleaned from Charles in his non-secretive days, talked with the young man. The interview was of little value or conclusiveness, for Willett felt at every moment that Charles was 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 demeanour. Of a pallid, impassive type not easily shewing embarrassment, Ward seemed quite ready to discuss his pursuits, though not to reveal their object. He stated that the papers of his ancestor had contained some remarkable secrets of early scientific knowledge, for the most part in cipher, of an apparent scope comparable only to the discoveries of Friar Bacon and perhaps surpassing even those. They were, however, meaningless except when correlated with a body of learning now wholly obsolete so that their immediate presentation to a world equipped only with modern science would rob them of all impressiveness and dramatic significance. To take their vivid place in the history of human thought they must first be correlated by one familiar with the background out of which they evolved, and to this task of correlation Ward was now devoting himself. He was seeking to acquire as fast as possible those neglected arts of old which a true interpreter of the Curwen data must possess, and hoped in time to make a full announcement and presentation of the utmost interest to mankind and to the world of thought. Not even Einstein, he declared, could more profoundly revolutionise the current conception of things. As to his graveyard search, whose object he freely admitted, but the details of whose progress he did not relate, he said he had reason to think that Joseph Curwenrsquos mutilated headstone bore certain mystic symbolsmdashcarved from directions in his will and ignorantly spared by those who had effaced the namemdashwhich 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 photostatic copies of the Hutchinson cipher and Orne formulae and diagrams but finally shewed him the exteriors of some of the real Curwen findsmdashthe ldquoJournall and Notesrdquo, the cipher (title in cipher also), and the formula-filled message ldquoTo Him Who Shal Come Afterrdquo mdashand 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 Curwenrsquos 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 writerrsquos 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: ldquoWedn. 16 Octr. 1754. My Sloope the Wakeful this Day putt in from London with XX newe Men pickrsquod up in y e Indies, Spaniards from Martineco and 2 Dutch Men from Surinam. Y e Dutch Men are like to Desert from haversquog hearde Somewhat ill of these Ventures, but I will see to y e Inducing of them to Staye. ffor Mr. Knight Dexter of y e Boy and Book 120 Pieces Camblets, 100 Pieces Assrtd. Cambleteens, 20 Pieces blue Duffles, 100 Pieces Shalloons, 50 Pieces Calamancoes, 300 Pieces each, Shendsoy and Humhums. ffor Mr. Green at y e Elephant 50 Gallon Cyttles, 20 Warmrsquog Pannes, 15 Bake Cyttles, 10 pr. Smokersquog Tonges. ffor Mr. Perrigo 1 Sett of Awles, ffor Mr. Nightingale 50 Reames prime Foolscap. Sayrsquod y e SABAOTH thrice last Nighte but None appearrsquod. I must heare more from Mr. H. in Transylvania, thorsquo it is Harde reachrsquog him and exceeding strange he can not give me the Use of what he hath so well usrsquod these hundred yeares. Simon hath not Writ these V. Weekes, but I expecte soon hearrsquog from him. rdquo When upon reaching this point Dr. Willett turned the leaf he was quickly checked by Ward, who almost snatched the book from his grasp. All that the doctor had a chance to see on the newly opened page was a brief pair of sentences but these, strangely enough, lingered tenaciously in his memory. They ran: ldquoYe Verse from Liber-Damnatus bersquog spoke V Roodmasses and IV Hallows-Eves, I am Hopeful y e Thing is breedrsquog Outside y e 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 look back throrsquo all y e yeares, against y e which I must have ready y e Saltes or That to make rsquoem with. rdquo 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 fancymdashwhich his medical skill of course assured him was only a fancymdashthat the eyes of the portrait had a sort of wish, if not an actual tendency, to follow young Charles Ward as he moved about the room. He stopped before leaving to study the picture closely, marvelling at its resemblance to Charles and memorising every minute detail of the cryptical, colourless face, even down to a slight scar or pit in the smooth brow above the right eye. Cosmo Alexander, he decided, was a painter worthy of the Scotland that produced Raeburn, and a teacher worthy of his illustrious pupil Gilbert Stuart. Assured by the doctor that Charlesrsquos mental health was in no danger, but that on the other hand he was engaged in researches which might prove of real importance, the Wards were more lenient than they might otherwise have been when during the following June the youth made positive his refusal to attend college. He had, he declared, studies of much more vital importance to pursue and intimated a wish to go abroad the following year in order to avail himself of certain sources of data not existing in America. The senior Ward, while denying this latter wish as absurd for a boy of only eighteen, acquiesced regarding the university so that after a none too brilliant graduation from the Moses Brown School there ensued for Charles a three-year period of intensive occult study and graveyard searching. He became recognised as an eccentric, and dropped even more completely from the sight of his familyrsquos friends than he had been before keeping close to his work and only occasionally making trips to other cities to consult obscure records. Once he went south to talk with a strange old mulatto who dwelt in a swamp and about whom a newspaper had printed a curious article. Again he sought a small village in the Adirondacks whence reports of certain odd ceremonial practices had come. But still his parents forbade him the trip to the Old World which he desired. Coming of age in April, 1923, and having previously inherited a small competence from his maternal grandfather, Ward determined at last to take the European trip hitherto denied him. Of his proposed itinerary he would say nothing save that the needs of his studies would carry him to many places, but he promised to write his parents fully and faithfully. When they saw he could not be dissuaded, they ceased all opposition and helped as best they could so that in June the young man sailed for Liverpool with the farewell blessings of his father and mother, who accompanied him to Boston and waved him out of sight from the White Star pier in Charlestown. Letters soon told of his safe arrival, and of his securing good quarters in Great Russell Street, London where he proposed to stay, shunning all family friends, till he had exhausted the resources of the British Museum in a certain direction. Of his daily life he wrote 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 Bibliothegraveque Nationale. For three months thereafter he sent only postal cards, giving an address in the Rue St. Jacques and referring to a special search among rare manuscripts in the library of an unnamed private collector. He avoided acquaintances, and no tourists brought back reports of having seen him. Then came a silence, and in October the Wards received a picture card from Prague, Czecho-Slovakia, stating that Charles was in that ancient town for the purpose of conferring with a certain very aged man supposed to be the last living possessor of some very curious mediaeval information. He gave an address in the Neustadt, and announced no move till the following January when he dropped several cards from Vienna telling of his passage through that city on the way toward a more easterly region whither one of his correspondents and fellow-delvers into the occult had invited him. The next card was from Klausenburg in Transylvania, and told of Wardrsquos 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 hostrsquos 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 parentsrsquo 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 Ferenczyrsquos castle did not favour visits. It was on a crag in the dark wooded mountains, and the region was so shunned by the country folk that normal people could not help feeling ill at ease. Moreover, the Baron was not a person likely to appeal to correct and conservative New England gentlefolk. His aspect and manners had idiosyncrasies, and his age was so great as to be disquieting. It would be better, Charles said, if his parents would wait for his return to Providence which could scarcely be far distant. That return did not, however, take place until May, 1926, when after a few heralding cards the young wanderer quietly slipped into New York on the Homeric and traversed the long miles to Providence by motor-coach, eagerly drinking in the green rolling hills, the fragrant, blossoming orchards, and the white steepled towns of vernal Connecticut his first taste of ancient New England in nearly four years. When the coach crossed the Pawcatuck and entered Rhode Island amidst the faery goldenness of a late spring afternoon his heart beat with quickened force, and the entry to Providence along Reservoir and Elmwood avenues was a breathless and wonderful thing despite the depths of forbidden lore to which he had delved. At the high square where Broad, Weybosset, and Empire Streets join, he saw before and below him in the fire of sunset the pleasant, remembered houses and domes and steeples of the old town and his head swam curiously as the vehicle rolled down the terminal behind the Biltmore, bringing into view the great dome and soft, roof-pierced greenery of the ancient hill across the river, and the tall colonial spire of the First Baptist Church limned pink in the magic evening light against the fresh springtime verdure of its precipitous background. Old Providence It was this place and the mysterious forces of its long, continuous history which had brought him into being, and which had drawn him back toward marvels and secrets whose boundaries no prophet might fix. Here lay the arcana, wondrous or dreadful as the case 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, the old Market House, and the head of the bay, and up the steep curved slope of Waterman Street to Prospect, where the vast gleaming dome and sunset-flushed Ionic columns of the Christian Science Church beckoned northward. Then eight squares past the fine old estates his childish eyes had known, and the quaint brick sidewalks so often trodden by his youthful feet. And at last the little white overtaken farmhouse on the right, on the left the classic Adam porch and stately bayed facade of the great brick house where he was born. It was twilight, and Charles Dexter Ward had come home. 5. A school of alienists slightly less academic than Dr. Lymanrsquos assign to Wardrsquos European trip the beginning of his true madness. Admitting that he was sane when he started, they believe that his conduct upon returning implies a disastrous change. But even to this claim Dr. Willett refuses to accede. There was, he insists, something later and the queernesses of the youth at this stage he attributes to the practice of rituals learned abroadmdashodd enough things, to be sure, but by no means implying mental aberration on the part of their celebrant. Ward himself, though visibly aged and hardened, was still normal in his general reactions and in several talks with Willett displayed a balance which no madmanmdasheven an incipient onemdashcould feign continuously for long. What elicited the notion of insanity at this period were the sounds heard at all hours from Wardrsquos 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 Wardrsquos 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 odours occasionally wafted from the laboratory were likewise exceedingly strange. Sometimes they were very noxious, but more often they were aromatic, with a haunting, elusive quality which seemed to have the power of inducing fantastic images. People who smelled them had a tendency to glimpse momentary mirages of enormous vistas, with strange hills or endless avenues of sphinxes and hippogriffs stretching off into infinite distance. Ward did not resume his old-time rambles, but applied himself diligently to the strange books he had brought home, and to equally strange delvings within his quarters explaining that European sources had greatly enlarged the possibilities of his work, and promising great revelations in the years to come. His older aspect increased to a startling degree his resemblance to the Curwen portrait in his library and Dr. Willett would often pause by the latter after a call, marvelling at the virtual identity, and reflecting that only the small pit above the picturersquos right eye now remained to differentiate the long-dead wizard from the living youth. These calls of Willettrsquos, undertaken at the request of the senior Wards, were curious affairs. Ward at no time repulsed the doctor, but the latter saw that he could never reach the young manrsquos inner psychology. Frequently he noted peculiar things about little wax images of grotesque design on the shelves or tables, and the half-erased remnants of circles, triangles, and pentagrams in chalk or charcoal on the cleared central space of the large room. And always in the night those rhythms and incantations thundered, till it became very difficult to keep servants or suppress furtive talk of Charlesrsquos madness. In January, 1927, a peculiar incident occurred. One night about midnight, as Charles was chanting a ritual whose weird cadence echoed unpleasantly through the house below, there came a sudden gust of chill wind from the bay, and a faint, obscure trembling of the earth which everyone in the neighbourhood noted. At the same time the cat exhibited phenomenal traces of fright, while dogs bayed for as much as a mile around. This was the prelude to a sharp thunderstorm, anomalous for the season, which brought with it such a crash that Mr. and Mrs. Ward believed the house had been struck. They rushed upstairs to see what damage had been done, but Charles met them at the door to the attic pale, resolute, and portentous, with an almost fearsome combination of triumph and seriousness on his face. He assured them that the house had not really been struck, and that the storm would soon be over. They paused, and looking through a window saw that he was indeed right for the lightning flashed farther and farther off, whilst the trees ceased to bend in the strange frigid gust from the water. The thunder sank to a sort of dull mumbling chuckle and finally died away. Stars came out, and the stamp of triumph on Charles Wardrsquos face crystallised into a very singular expression. For two months or more after this incident Ward was less confined than usual to his laboratory. He exhibited a curious interest in the weather, and made odd 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 to the carriage entrance. Muffled oaths could be distinguished, and Mrs. Ward, rising and going to the window, saw four dark figures removing a long, heavy box from a truck at Charlesrsquos direction and carrying it within by the side door. She heard laboured breathing and ponderous footfalls on the stairs, and finally a dull thumping in the attic after which the footfalls descended again, and the four 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 cleaned 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: Nocturnal Diggers Surprised in North Burial Ground Robert Hart, night watchman at the North Burial Ground, this morning discovered a party of several men with a motor truck in the oldest part of the cemetery, but apparently frightened them off before they had accomplished whatever their object may have been. The discovery took place at about four orsquoclock, when Hartrsquos attention was attracted by the sound of a motor outside his shelter. Investigating, he saw a large truck on the main drive several rods away but could not reach it before the sound of his feet on the gravel had revealed his approach. The men hastily placed a large box in the truck and drove away toward the street before they could be overtaken and since no known grave was disturbed, Hart believes that this box was an object which they wished to bury. The diggers must have been at work for a long while before detection, for Hart found an enormous hole dug at a considerable distance back from the roadway in the lot of Amasa Field, where most of the old stones have long ago disappeared. The hole, a place as large and deep as a grave, was empty and did not coincide with any interment mentioned in the cemetery records. Sergt. Riley of the Second Station viewed the spot and gave the opinion that the hole was dug by bootleggers rather gruesomely and ingeniously seeking a safe cache for liquor in a place not likely to be disturbed. In reply to questions Hart said he thought the escaping truck had headed up Rochambeau Avenue, though he could not be sure. During the next few days Ward was seldom seen by his family. Having added sleeping quarters to his attic realm, he kept closely to himself there, ordering food brought to the door and not taking it in until after the servant had gone away. The droning of monotonous formulae and the chanting of bizarre rhythms recurred at intervals, while at other times occasional listeners could detect the sound of tinkling glass, hissing chemicals, running water, or roaring gas flames. Odours of the most unplaceable quality, wholly unlike any before noted, hung at times around the door and the air of tension observable in the young recluse whenever he did venture briefly forth was such as to excite the keenest speculation. Once he made a hasty trip to the Athenaeum for a book he required, and again he hired a messenger to fetch him a highly obscure volume from Boston. Suspense was written portentously over the whole situation, and both the family and Dr. Willett confessed themselves wholly at a loss what to do or think about it. 6. Then on the fifteenth of April a strange development occurred. While nothing appeared to grow different in kind, there was certainly a very terrible difference in degree and Dr. Willett somehow attaches great significance to the change. The day was Good Friday, a circumstance of which the servants made much, but which others quite naturally dismiss as an irrelevant coincidence. Late in the afternoon young Ward began repeating a certain formula in a singularly loud voice, at the same time burning some substance so pungent that its fumes escaped over the entire house. The formula was so plainly audible in the hall outside the locked door that Mrs. Ward could not help memorising it as she waited and listened anxiously, and later on she was able to write it down at Dr. Willettrsquos request. It ran as follows, and experts have told Dr. Willett that its very close analogue can be found in the mystic writings of ldquoEliphas Levirdquo, that cryptic soul who crept through a crack in the forbidden door and glimpsed the frightful vistas of the void beyond: ldquoPer Adonai Eloim, Adonai Jehova, Adonai Sabaoth, Metraton On Agla Mathon, verbum pythonicum, mysterium salamandrae, conventus sylvorum, antra gnomorum, daemonia Coeli Gad, Almousin, Gibor, Jehosua, Evam, Zariatnatmik, veni, veni, veni. rdquo This had been going on for two hours without change or intermission when over all the neighbourhood a pandaemoniac howling of dogs set in. The extent of this howling can be judged from the space it received in the papers the next day, but to those in the Ward household it was overshadowed by the odour which instantly followed it a hideous, all-pervasive odour which none of them had ever smelt before or have ever smelt since. In the midst of this mephitic flood there came a very perceptible flash like that of lightning, which would have been blinding and impressive but for the daylight around and then was heard the voice that no listener can ever forget because of its thunderous remoteness, its incredible depth, and its eldritch dissimilarity to Charles Wardrsquos voice. It shook the house, and was clearly heard by at least two neighbours above the howling of the dogs. Mrs. Ward, who had been listening in despair outside her sonrsquos locked laboratory, shivered as she recognised its hellish import for Charles had told her of its evil fame in dark books, and of the manner in which it had thundered, according to the Fenner letters, above the doomed Pawtuxet farmhouse on the night of Joseph Curwenrsquos annihilation. There was no mistaking that nightmare phrase, for Charles had described it too vividly in the old days when he had talked frankly of his Curwen investigations. And yet it was only this fragment of an archaic and forgotten language: ldquoDIES MIES JESCHET BOENE DOESEF DOUVEMA ENITEMAUSrdquo. Close upon this thundering there came a momentary darkening of the daylight, though sunset was still an hour distant, and then a puff of added odour different from the first but equally unknown and intolerable. Charles was chanting again now and his mother could hear syllables that sounded like ldquoYi-nash-Yog-Sothoth-he-lgeb-fi-throdogrdquomdashending in a ldquoYahrdquo whose maniacal force mounted in an ear-splitting crescendo. A second later all previous memories were effaced by the wailing scream which burst out with frantic explosiveness and gradually changed form to a paroxysm of diabolic and hysterical laughter. Mrs. Ward, with the mingled fear and blind courage of maternity, advanced and knocked affrightedly at the concealing panels, but obtained no sign of recognition. She knocked again, but paused nervelessly as a second shriek arose, this one unmistakably in the familiar voice of her son, and sounding concurrently with the still bursting cachinnations of that other voice. Presently she fainted, although she is still unable to recall the precise and immediate cause. Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions. Mr. Ward returned from the business section at about quarter past six and not finding his wife downstairs, was told by the frightened servants that she was probably watching at Charlesrsquos door, from which the sounds had been far stranger than ever before. Mounting the stairs at once, he saw Mrs. Ward stretched at full length on the floor of the corridor outside the laboratory and realising that she had fainted, hastened to fetch a glass of water from a set bowl in a neighbouring alcove. Dashing the cold fluid in her face, he was heartened to observe an immediate response on her part, and was watching the bewildered opening of her eyes when a chill shot through him and threatened to reduce him to the very state from which she was emerging. For the seemingly silent laboratory was not as silent as it had appeared to be, but held the murmurs of a tense, muffled conversation in tones too low for comprehension, yet of a quality profoundly disturbing to the soul. It was not, of course, new for Charles to mutter formulae but this muttering was definitely different. It was so palpably a dialogue, or imitation of a dialogue, with the regular alteration of inflections suggesting question and answer, statement and response. One voice was undisguisedly that of Charles, but the other had a depth and hollowness which the youthrsquos best powers of ceremonial mimicry had scarcely approached before. There was something hideous, blasphemous, and abnormal about it, and but for a cry from his recovering wife which cleared his mind by arousing his protective instincts it is not likely that Theodore Howland Ward could have maintained for nearly a year more his old boast that he had never fainted. As it was, he seized his wife in his arms and bore her quickly downstairs before she could notice the voices which had so horribly disturbed him. Even so, however, he was not quick enough to escape catching something himself which caused him to stagger dangerously with his burden. For Mrs. Wardrsquos cry had evidently been heard by others than he, and there had come from behind the locked door the first distinguishable words which that masked and terrible colloquy had yielded. They were merely an excited caution in Charlesrsquos own voice, but somehow their implications held a nameless fright for the father who overheard them. The phrase was just this: ldquoSshhmdashwriterdquo Mr. and Mrs. Ward conferred at some length after dinner, and the former resolved to have a firm and serious talk with Charles that very night. No matter how important the object, such conduct could no longer be permitted for these latest developments transcended every limit of sanity and formed a menace to the order and nervous well-being of the entire household. The youth must indeed have taken complete leave of his senses, since only downright madness could have prompted the wild screams and imaginary conversations in assumed voices which the present day had brought forth. All this must be stopped, or Mrs. Ward would be made ill and the keeping of servants become an impossibility. Mr. Ward rose at the close of the meal and started upstairs for Charlesrsquos laboratory. On the third floor, however, he paused at the sounds which he heard proceeding from the now disused library of his son. Books were apparently being flung about and papers wildly rustled, and upon stepping to the door Mr. Ward beheld the youth within, excitedly assembling a vast armful of literary matter of every size and shape. Charlesrsquos aspect was very drawn and haggard, and he dropped his entire load with a start at the sound of his fatherrsquos voice. At the elder manrsquos command he sat down, and for some time listened to the admonitions he had so long deserved. There was no scene. At the end of the lecture he agreed that his father was right, and that his noises, mutterings, incantations, and chemical odours were indeed inexcusable nuisances. He agreed to a policy of greater quiet, though insisting on a prolongation of his extreme privacy. Much of his future work, he said, was in any case purely book research and he could obtain quarters elsewhere for any such vocal rituals as might be necessary at a later stage. For the fright and fainting of his mother he expressed the keenest contrition, and explained that the conversation later heard was part of an elaborate symbolism designed to create a certain mental atmosphere. His use of abstruse technical terms somewhat bewildered Mr. Ward, but the parting impression was one of undeniable sanity and poise despite a mysterious tension of the utmost gravity. The interview was really quite inconclusive, and as Charles picked up his armful and left the room Mr. Ward hardly knew what to make of the entire business. It was as mysterious as the death of poor old Nig, whose stiffening form had been found an hour before in the basement, with staring eyes and fear-distorted mouth. Driven by some vague detective instinct, the bewildered parent now glanced curiously at the vacant shelves to see what his son had taken up to the attic. The youthrsquos library was plainly and rigidly classified, so that one might tell at a glance the books or at least the kind of books which had been withdrawn. On this occasion Mr. Ward was astonished to find that nothing of the occult or the antiquarian, beyond what had been previously removed, was missing. These new withdrawals were all modern items histories, scientific treatises, geographies, manuals of literature, philosophic works, and certain contemporary newspapers and magazines. It was a very curious shift from Charles Wardrsquos recent run of reading, and the father paused in a growing vortex of perplexity and an engulfing sense of strangeness. The strangeness was a very poignant sensation, and almost clawed at his chest as he strove to see just what was wrong around him. Something was indeed wrong, and tangibly as well as spiritually so. Ever since he had been in this room he had known that something was amiss, and at last it dawned upon him what it was. On the north wall rose still the ancient carved overmantel from the house in Olney Court, but to the cracked and precariously restored oils of the large Curwen portrait disaster had come. Time and unequal heating had done their work at last, and at some time since the roomrsquos last cleaning the worst had happened. Peeling clear of the wood, curling tighter and tighter, and finally crumbling into small bits with what must have been malignly silent suddenness, the portrait of Joseph Curwen had resigned forever its staring surveillance of the youth it so strangely resembled, and now lay scattered on the floor as a thin coating of fine bluish-grey dust. IV. A Mutation and a Madness 1. In the week following that memorable Good Friday Charles Ward was seen more often than usual, and was continually carrying books between his library and the attic laboratory. His actions were quiet and rational, but he had a furtive, hunted look which his mother did not like, and developed an incredibly ravenous appetite as gauged by his demands upon the cook. Dr. Willett had been told of those Friday noises and happenings, and on the following Tuesday had a long conversation with the youth in the library where the picture stared no more. The interview was, as always, inconclusive but Willett is still ready to swear that the youth was sane and himself at the time. He held out promises of an early revelation, and spoke of the need of securing a laboratory elsewhere. At the loss of the portrait he grieved singularly little considering his first enthusiasm over it, but seemed to find something of positive humour in its sudden crumbling. About the second week Charles began to be absent from the house for long periods, and one day when good old black Hannah came to help with the spring cleaning she mentioned his frequent visits to the old house in Olney Court, where he would come with a large valise and perform curious delvings in the cellar. He was always very liberal to her and to old Asa, but seemed more worried than he used to be which grieved her very much, since she had watched him grow up from birth. Another report of his doings came from Pawtuxet, where some friends of the family saw him at a distance a surprising number of times. He seemed to haunt the resort and canoe-house of Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet, and subsequent inquiries by Dr. Willett at that place brought out the fact that his purpose was always to secure access to the rather hedged-in river-bank, along which he would walk toward the north, usually not reappearing for a very long while. Late in May came a momentary revival of ritualistic sounds in the attic laboratory which brought a stern reproof from Mr. Ward and a somewhat distracted promise of amendment from Charles. It occurred one morning, and seemed to form a resumption of the imaginary conversation noted on that turbulent Good Friday. The youth was arguing or remonstrating hotly with himself, for there suddenly burst forth a perfectly distinguishable series of clashing shouts in differentiated tones like alternate demands and denials which caused Mrs. Ward to run upstairs and listen at the door. She could hear no more than a fragment whose only plain words were ldquomust have it red for three monthsrdquo, and upon her knocking all sounds ceased at once. When Charles was later questioned by his father he said that there were certain conflicts of spheres of consciousness which only great skill could avoid, but which he would try to transfer to other realms. About the middle of June a queer nocturnal incident occurred. In the early evening there had been some noise and thumping in the laboratory upstairs, and Mr. Ward was on the point of investigating when it suddenly quieted down. That midnight, after the family had retired, the butler was nightlocking the front door when according to his statement Charles appeared somewhat blunderingly and uncertainly at the foot of the stairs with a large suitcase and made signs that he wished egress. The youth spoke no word, but the worthy Yorkshireman caught one sight of his fevered eyes and trembled causelessly. He opened the door and young Ward went out, but in the morning he presented his resignation to Mrs. Ward. There was, he said, something unholy in the glance Charles had fixed on him. It was no way for a young gentleman to look at an honest person, and he could not possibly stay another night. Mrs. Ward allowed the man to depart, but she did not value his statement highly. To fancy Charles in a savage state that night was quite ridiculous, for as long as she had remained awake she had heard faint sounds from the laboratory above sounds as if of sobbing and pacing, and of a sighing which told only of despairrsquos profoundest depths. Mrs. Ward had grown used to listening for sounds in the night, for the mystery of her son was fast driving all else from her mind. The next evening, much as on another evening nearly three months before, Charles Ward seized the newspaper very early and accidentally lost the main section. The matter was not recalled till later, when Dr. Willett began checking up loose ends and searching out missing links here and there. In the Journal office he found the section which Charles had lost, and marked two items as of possible significance. They were as follows: More Cemetery Delving It was this morning discovered by Robert Hart, night watchman at the North Burial Ground, that ghouls were again at work in the ancient portion of the cemetery. The grave of Ezra Weeden, who was born in 1740 and died in 1824, according to his uprooted and savagely splintered slate headstone, was found excavated and rifled, the work being evidently done with a spade stolen from an adjacent tool-shed. Whatever the contents may have been after more than a century of burial, all was gone except a few slivers of decayed wood. There were no wheel tracks, but the police have measured a single set of footprints which they found in the vicinity, and which indicate the boots of a man of refinement. Hart is inclined to link this incident with the digging discovered last March, when a party in a motor truck were frightened away after making a deep excavation but Sergt. Riley of the Second Station discounts this theory and points to vital differences in the two cases. In March the digging had been in a spot where no grave was known but this time a well-marked and cared-for grave had been rifled with every evidence of deliberate purpose, and with a conscious malignity expressed in the splintering of the slab which had been intact up to the day before. Members of the Weeden family, notified of the happening, expressed their astonishment and regret and were wholly unable to think of any enemy who would care to violate the grave of their ancestor. Hazard Weeden of 598 Angell Street recalls a family legend according to which Ezra Weeden was involved in some very peculiar circumstances, not dishonourable to himself, shortly before the Revolution but of any modern feud or mystery he is frankly ignorant. Inspector Cunningham has been assigned to the case, and hopes to uncover some valuable clues in the near future. Dogs Noisy in Pawtuxet Residents of Pawtuxet were aroused about 3 a. m. today by a phenomenal baying of dogs which seemed to centre near the river just north of Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet. The volume and quality of the howling were unusually odd, according to most who heard it and Fred Lemdin, night watchman at Rhodes, declares it was mixed with something very like the shrieks of a man in mortal terror and agony. A sharp and very brief thunderstorm, which seemed to strike somewhere near the bank of the river, put an end to the disturbance. Strange and unpleasant odours, probably from the oil tanks along the bay, are popularly linked with this incident and may have had their share in exciting the dogs. The aspect of Charles now became very haggard and hunted, and all agreed in retrospect that he may have wished at this period to make some statement or confession from which sheer terror withheld him. The morbid listening of his mother in the night brought out the fact that he made frequent sallies abroad under cover of darkness, and most of the more academic alienists unite at present in charging him with the revolting cases of vampirism which the press so sensationally reported about this time, but which have not yet been definitely traced to any known perpetrator. These cases, too recent and celebrated to need detailed mention, involved victims of every age and type and seemed to cluster around two distinct localities the residential hill and the North End, near the Ward home, and the suburban districts across the Cranston line near Pawtuxet. Both late wayfarers and sleepers with open windows were attacked, and those who lived to tell the tale spoke unanimously of a lean, lithe, leaping monster with burning eyes which fastened its teeth in the throat or upper arm and feasted ravenously. Dr. Willett, who refuses to date the madness of Charles Ward as far back as even this, is cautious in attempting to explain these horrors. He has, he declares, certain theories of his own and limits his positive statements to a peculiar kind of negation. ldquoI will not, rdquo he says, ldquostate who or what I believe perpetrated these attacks and murders, but I will declare that Charles Ward was innocent of them. I have reason to be sure he was ignorant of the taste of blood, as indeed his continued anaemic decline and increasing pallor prove better than any verbal argument. Ward meddled with terrible things, but he has paid for it, and he was never a monster or a villain. As for nowmdashI donrsquot like to think. A change came, and Irsquom content to believe that the old Charles Ward died with it. His soul did, anyhow, for that mad flesh that vanished from Waitersquos hospital had another. rdquo Willett speaks with authority, for he was often at the Ward home attending Mrs. Ward, whose nerves had begun to snap under the strain. Her nocturnal listening had bred some morbid hallucinations which she confided to the doctor with hesitancy, and which he ridiculed in talking to her, although they made him ponder deeply when alone. These delusions always concerned the faint sounds which she fancied she heard in the attic laboratory and bedroom, and emphasised the occurrence of muffled sighs and sobbings at the most impossible times. Early in July Willett ordered Mrs. Ward to Atlantic City for an indefinite recuperative sojourn, and cautioned both Mr. Ward and the haggard and elusive Charles to write her only cheering letters. It is probably to this enforced and reluctant escape that she owes her life and continued sanity. 2. Not long after his motherrsquos departure Charles Ward began negotiating for the Pawtuxet bungalow. It was a squalid little wooden edifice with a concrete garage, perched high on the sparsely settled bank of the river slightly above Rhodes, but for some odd reason the youth would have nothing else. He gave the real-estate agencies no peace till one of them secured it for him at an exorbitant price from a somewhat reluctant owner, and as soon as it was vacant he took possession under cover of darkness, transporting in a great closed van the entire contents of his attic laboratory, including the books both weird and modern which he had borrowed from his study. He had this van loaded in the black small hours, and his father recalls only a drowsy realisation of stifled oaths and stamping feet on the night the goods were taken away. After that Charles moved back to his own old quarters on the third floor, and never haunted the attic again. To the Pawtuxet bungalow Charles transferred all the secrecy with which he had surrounded his attic realm, save that he now appeared to have two sharers of his mysteries a villainous-looking Portuguese half-caste from the South Main St. waterfront who acted as a servant, and a thin, scholarly stranger with dark glasses and a stubbly full beard of dyed aspect whose status was evidently that of a colleague. Neighbours vainly tried to engage these odd persons in conversation. The mulatto Gomes spoke very little English, and the bearded man, who gave his name as Dr. Allen, voluntarily followed his example. Ward himself tried to be more affable, but succeeded only in provoking curiosity with his rambling accounts of chemical research. Before long queer tales began to circulate regarding the all-night burning of lights and somewhat later, after this burning had suddenly ceased, there rose still queerer tales of disproportionate orders of meat from the butcherrsquos and of the muffled shouting, declamation, rhythmic chanting, and screaming supposed to come from some very deep cellar below the place. Most distinctly the new and strange household was bitterly disliked by the honest bourgeoisie of the vicinity, and it is not remarkable that dark hints were advanced connecting the hated establishment with the current epidemic of vampiristic attacks and murders especially since the radius of that plague seemed now confined wholly to Pawtuxet and the adjacent streets of Edgewood. Ward spent most of his time at the bungalow, but slept occasionally at home and was still reckoned a dweller beneath his fatherrsquos roof. Twice he was absent from the city on week-long trips, whose destinations have not yet been discovered. He grew steadily paler and more emaciated even than before, and lacked some of his former assurance when repeating to Dr. Willett his old, old story of vital research and future revelations. Willett often waylaid him at his fatherrsquos house, for the elder Ward was deeply worried and perplexed, and wished his son to get as much sound oversight as could be managed in the case of so secretive and independent an adult. The doctor still insists that the youth was sane even as late as this, and adduces many a conversation to prove his point. About September the vampirism declined, but in the following January Ward almost became involved in serious trouble. For some time the nocturnal arrival and departure of motor trucks at the Pawtuxet bungalow had been commented upon, and at this juncture an unforeseen hitch exposed the nature of at least one item of their contents. In a lonely spot near Hope Valley had occurred one of the frequent sordid waylayings of trucks by ldquohi-jackersrdquo in quest of liquor shipments, but this time the robbers had been destined to receive the greater shock. For the long cases they seized proved upon opening to contain some exceedingly gruesome things so gruesome, in fact, that the matter could not be kept quiet amongst the denizens of the underworld. The thieves had hastily buried what they discovered, but when the State Police got wind of the matter a careful search was made. A recently arrested vagrant, under promise of immunity from prosecution on any additional charge, at last consented to guide a party of troopers to the spot and there was found in that hasty cache a very hideous and shameful thing. It would not be well for the nationalmdashor even the internationalmdashsense of decorum if the public were ever to know what was uncovered by that awestruck party. There was no mistaking it, even by these far from studious officers and telegrams to Washington ensued with feverish rapidity. The cases were addressed to Charles Ward at his Pawtuxet bungalow, and State and Federal officials at once paid him a very forceful and serious call. They found him pallid and worried with his two odd companions, and received from him what seemed to be a valid explanation and evidence of innocence. He had needed certain anatomical specimens as part of a programme of research whose depth and genuineness anyone who had known him in the last decade could prove, and had ordered the required kind and number from agencies which he had thought as reasonably legitimate as such things can be. Of the identity of the specimens he had known absolutely nothing, and was properly shocked when the inspectors hinted at the monstrous effect on public sentiment and national dignity which a knowledge of the matter would produce. In this statement he was firmly sustained by his bearded colleague Dr. Allen, whose oddly hollow voice carried even more conviction than his own nervous tones so that in the end the officials took no action, but carefully set down the New York name and address which Ward gave them as a basis for a search which came to nothing. It is only fair to add that the specimens were quickly and quietly restored to their proper places, and that the general public will never know of their blasphemous disturbance. On February 9, 1928, Dr. Willett received a letter from Charles Ward which he considers of extraordinary importance, and about which he has frequently quarrelled with Dr. Lyman. Lyman believes that this note contains positive proof of a well-developed case of dementia praecox, but Willett on the other hand regards it as the last perfectly sane utterance of the hapless youth. He calls especial attention to the normal character of the penmanship which though shewing traces of shattered nerves, is nevertheless distinctly Wardrsquos own. The text in full is as follows: ldquo100 Prospect St. Providence, R. I., February 8, 1928. ldquoDear Dr. Willett:mdash ldquoI 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. ldquoAnd 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 wordsmdashall 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. ldquoI 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 longmdashand 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. ldquoI 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 donrsquot 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. ldquoAny time will domdashI shall not be out of the house. Donrsquot 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. ldquoIn utmost gravity and desperation, ldquoCharles Dexter Ward. rdquo ldquoP. S. Shoot Dr. Allen on sight and dissolve his body in acid. Donrsquot burn it. rdquo Dr. Willett received this note about 10:30 a. m. and immediately arranged to spare the whole late afternoon and evening for the momentous talk, letting it extend on into the night as long as might be necessary. He planned to arrive about four orsquoclock, 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 Wardrsquos 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 Wardrsquos 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 ldquoI am very tired and must rest a whilerdquo, ldquoI canrsquot receive anyone for some time, yoursquoll have to excuse merdquo, ldquoPlease postpone decisive action till we can arrange some sort of compromiserdquo, or ldquoI am very sorry, but I must take a complete vacation from everything Irsquoll talk with you laterrdquo. 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 orsquoclock and entered the house without a word. He had gone upstairs, where a bit of his fear must have surged back for he was heard to cry out in a highly terrified fashion upon entering his library, afterward trailing off into a kind of choking gasp. When, however, the butler had gone to inquire what the trouble was, he had appeared at the door with a great show of boldness, and had silently gestured the man away in a manner that terrified him unaccountably. Then he had evidently done some rearranging of his shelves, for a great clattering and thumping and creaking ensued after which he had reappeared and left at once. Willett inquired whether or not any message had been left, but was told that there was none. The butler seemed queerly disturbed about something in Charlesrsquos 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 Wardrsquos library, watching the dusty shelves with their wide gaps where books had been removed, and smiling grimly at the panelled overmantel on the north wall, whence a year before the suave features of old Joseph Curwen had looked mildly down. After a time the shadows began to gather, and the sunset cheer gave place to a vague growing terror which flew shadow-like before the night. Mr. Ward finally arrived, and shewed much surprise and anger at his sonrsquos absence after all the pains which had been taken to guard him. He had not known of Charlesrsquos appointment, and promised to notify Willett when the youth returned. In bidding the doctor goodnight he expressed his utter perplexity at his sonrsquos condition, and urged his caller to do all he could to restore the boy to normal poise. Willett was glad to escape from that library, for something frightful and unholy seemed to haunt it as if the vanished picture had left behind a legacy of evil. He had never liked that picture and even now, strong-nerved though he was, there lurked a quality in its vacant panel which made him feel an urgent need to get out into the pure air as soon as possible. 3. The next morning Willett received a message from the senior Ward, saying that Charles was still absent. Mr. Ward mentioned that Dr. Allen had telephoned him to say that Charles would remain at Pawtuxet for some time, and that he must not be disturbed. This was necessary because Allen himself was suddenly called away for an indefinite period, leaving the researches in need of Charlesrsquos 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. Allenrsquos 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 Charlesrsquos note was not to be denied, yet what could one think of its writerrsquos 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 cityrsquos 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. ldquoLet him in, Tony, rdquo it said, ldquowe may as well talk now as ever. rdquo But disturbing as was the whisper, the greater fear was that which immediately followed. The floor creaked and the speaker hove in sightmdashand 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 Wardrsquos 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 Wardrsquos 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 writerrsquos 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 Wardrsquos 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. ldquoI am grown phthisical, rdquo he began, ldquofrom 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. rdquo 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. ldquoI was coming to that, rdquo the host replied. ldquoYou 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 neighbours, and perhaps I was led by weakness to believe myself what they say of me. There is no evil to any in what I do, so long as I do it rightly. Have the goodness to wait six months, and Irsquoll shew you what will pay your patience well. ldquoYou may as well know I have a way of learning old matters from things surer than books, and Irsquoll 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. rdquo 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 Wardrsquos store of mental images, mainly those touching modern times and his own personal life, had been unaccountably expunged whilst all the massed antiquarianism of his youth had welled up from some profound subconsciousness to engulf the contemporary and the individual. The youthrsquos intimate knowledge of elder things was abnormal and unholy, and he tried his best to hide it. When Willett would mention some favourite object of his boyhood archaistic studies he often shed by pure accident such a light as no normal mortal could conceivably be expected to possess, and the doctor shuddered as the glib allusion glided by. It was not wholesome to know so much about the way the fat sheriffrsquos wig fell off as he leaned over at the play in Mr. Douglassrsquo Histrionick Academy in King Street on the eleventh of February, 1762, which fell on a Thursday or about how the actors cut the text of Steelersquos Conscious Lovers so badly that one was almost glad the Baptist-ridden legislature closed the theatre a fortnight later. That Thomas Sabinrsquos Boston coach was ldquodamnrsquod uncomfortablerdquo old letters may well have told but what healthy antiquarian could recall how the creaking of Epenetus Olneyrsquos 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 Wardrsquos shelves at home, and that the meagre so-called ldquolaboratoryrdquo 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 sonrsquos 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 Willettrsquos, save that Charles had been an excessively long time in appearing after the visitor had forced his way into the hall and sent the Portuguese away with an imperative demand and in the bearing of the altered son there was no trace of filial affection. The lights had been dim, yet even so the youth had complained that they dazzled him outrageously. He had not spoken out loud at all, averring that his throat was in very poor condition but in his hoarse whisper there was a quality so vaguely disturbing that Mr. Ward could not banish it from his mind. Now definitely leagued together to do all they could toward the youthrsquos mental salvation, Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett set about collecting every scrap of data which the case might afford. Pawtuxet gossip was the first item they studied, and this was relatively easy to glean since both had friends in that region. Dr. Willett obtained the most rumours because people talked more frankly to him than to a parent of the central figure, and from all he heard he could tell that young Wardrsquos 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 neighbourhood. For a household of only three, these quantities were quite absurd. Then there was the matter of the sounds beneath the earth. Reports of these things were harder to 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 rumour insisted that there were deeper and more spreading crypts. Recalling the ancient tales of Joseph Curwenrsquos 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 bungalowrsquos 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 Charlesrsquos later life, including the frantic letter which the doctor now shewed the father, with the meagre documentary evidence available concerning old Joseph Curwen. They would have given much for a glimpse of the papers Charles had found, for very clearly the key to the youthrsquos madness lay in what he had learned of the ancient wizard and his doings. 4. And yet, after all, it was from no step of Mr. Wardrsquos or Dr. Willettrsquos 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 reassurred 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 rumours and after their departure the party of officials decided that a talk with the senior Ward was imperative. So on the sixth of March, 1928, there was a long and serious conference in Mr. Wardrsquos 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 strangemdashbut where had he seen it before On the whole, it was obvious that Charles was insane. Of that there could be no doubt. And since it appeared unlikely that he could handle his property or continue to deal with the outside world much longer, something must quickly be done toward his oversight and possible cure. It was then that the alienists were called in, Drs. Peck and Waite of Providence and Dr. Lyman of Boston, to whom Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett gave the most exhaustive possible history of the case, and who conferred at length in the now unused library of their young patient, examining what books and papers of his were left in order to gain some further notion of his habitual mental cast. After scanning this material and examining the ominous note to Willett they all agreed that Charles Wardrsquos 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 inordinately long in answering the summons and was still redolent of strange and noxious laboratory odours when he did finally make his agitated appearance, proved a far from recalcitrant subject and admitted freely that his memory and balance had suffered somewhat from close application to abstruse studies. He offered no resistance when his removal to other quarters was insisted upon and seemed, indeed, to display a high degree of intelligence as apart from mere memory. His conduct would have sent his interviewers away in bafflement had not the persistently archaic trend of his speech and unmistakable replacement of modern by ancient ideas in his consciousness marked him out as one definitely removed from the normal. Of his work he would say no more to the group of doctors than he had formerly said to his family and to Dr. Willett, and his frantic note of the previous month he dismissed as mere nerves and hysteria. He insisted that this shadowy bungalow possessed no library or laboratory beyond the visible ones, and waxed abstruse in explaining the absence from the house of such odours as now saturated all his clothing. Neighbourhood gossip he attributed to nothing more than the cheap inventiveness of baffled 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 behaviour had led him. His mother, it was agreed, was not to be told of the change his father supplying typed notes in his name. Ward was taken to the restfully and picturesquely situated private hospital maintained by Dr. Waite on Conanicut Island in the bay, and subjected to the closest scrutiny and questioning by all the physicians connected with the case. It was then that the physical oddities were noticed the slackened metabolism, the altered skin, and the disproportionate neural reactions. Dr. Willett was the most perturbed of the various examiners, for he had attended Ward all his life and could appreciate with terrible keenness the extent of his physical disorganisation. Even the familiar olive mark on his hip was gone, while on his chest was a great black mole or cicatrice which had never been there before, and which made Willett wonder whether the youth had ever submitted to any of the ldquowitch markingsrdquo 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: ldquoMr. G. B. on that Nighte putt y e Divell his Marke upon Bridget S. Jonathan A. Simon O. Deliverance W. Joseph C. Susan P. Mehitable C. and Deborah B. rdquo Wardrsquos face, too, troubled him horribly, till at length he suddenly discovered why he was horrified. For above the young manrsquos right eye was something which he had never previously noticedmdasha small scar or pit precisely like that in the crumbled painting of old Joseph Curwen, and perhaps attesting some hideous ritualistic inoculation to which both had submitted at a certain stage of their occult careers. While Ward himself was puzzling all the doctors at the hospital a very strict watch was kept on all mail addressed either to him or to Dr. Allen, which Mr. Ward had ordered delivered at the family home. Willett had predicted that very little would be found, since any communications of a vital nature would probably have been exchanged by messenger but in the latter part of March there did come a letter from Prague for Dr. Allen which gave both the doctor and the father deep thought. It was in a very crabbed and archaic hand and though clearly not the effort of a foreigner, shewed almost as singular a departure from modern English as the speech of young Ward himself. It read: Kleinstrasse 11, Altstadt, Prague, 11th Feby. 1928. Brother in Almousin-Metraton:mdash I this day receivrsquod y r mention of what came up from the Salts I sent you. It was wrong, and meanes clearly that y e Headstones had been changrsquod when Barnabas gott me the Specimen. It is often so, as you must be sensible of from the Thing you gott from y e Kings Chapell ground in 1769 and what H. gott from Olde Buryrsquog Point in 1690, that was like to ende him. I gott such a Thing in Aegypt 75 yeares gone, from the which came that Scar y e Boy saw on me here in 1924. As I told you longe ago, do not calle up That which you can not put downe either from dead Saltes or out of y e Spheres beyond. Have y e Wordes for laying at all times readie, and stopp not to be sure when there is any Doubte of Whom you have. Stones are all changrsquod now in Nine groundes out of 10. You are never sure till you question. I this day heard from H. who has had Trouble with the Soldiers. He is like to be sorry Transylvania is passrsquod from Hungary to Roumania, and woursquod change his Seat if the Castel werenrsquot so fulle of What we Knowe. But of this he hath doubtless writ you. In my next Sendrsquog there will be Somewhat from a Hill tomb from y e East that will delight you greatly. Meanwhile forget not I am desirous of B. F. if you can possibly get him for me. You know G. in Philada. better than I. Have him up firste if you will, but doe not use him soe hard he will be Difficult, for I must speake to him in y e End. Yogg-Sothoth Neblod Zin Simon O. To Mr. J. C. in Providence. Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett paused in utter chaos before this apparent bit of unrelieved insanity. Only by degrees did they absorb what it seemed to imply. So the absent Dr. Allen, and not Charles Ward, had come to be the leading spirit at Pawtuxet That must explain the wild reference and denunciation in the youthrsquos last frantic letter. And what of this addressing of the bearded and spectacled stranger as ldquoMr. J. C. rdquo There was no escaping the inference, but there are limits to possible monstrosity. Who was ldquoSimon O. rdquo the old man Ward had visited in Prague four years previously Perhaps, but in the centuries behind there had been another Simon O. mdashSimon Orne, alias Jedediah, of Salem, who vanished in 1771, and whose peculiar handwriting Dr. Willett now unmistakably recognised from the photostatic copies of the Orne formulae which Charles had once shewn him. What horrors and mysteries, what contradictions and contraventions of Nature, had come back after a century and a half to harass Old Providence with her clustered spires and domes The father and the old physician, virtually at a loss what to do or think, went to see Charles at the hospital and questioned him as delicately as they could about Dr. Allen, about the Prague visit, and about what he had learned of Simon or Jedediah Orne of Salem. To all these inquiries the youth was politely non-committal, merely barking in his hoarse whisper that he had found Dr. Allen to have a remarkable spiritual rapport with certain souls from the past, and that any correspondent the bearded man might have in Prague would probably be similarly gifted. When they left, Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett realised to their chagrin that they had really been the ones under catechism and that without imparting anything vital himself, the confined youth had adroitly pumped them of everything the Prague letter had contained. Drs. Peck, Waite, and Lyman were not inclined to attach much importance to the strange correspondence of young Wardrsquos companion for they knew the tendency of kindred eccentrics and monomaniacs to band together, and believed that Charles or Allen had merely unearthed an expatriated counterpartmdashperhaps one who had seen Ornersquos handwriting and copied it in an attempt to pose as the bygone characterrsquos reincarnation. Allen himself was perhaps a similar case, and may have persuaded the youth into accepting him as an avatar of the long-dead Curwen. Such things had been known before, and on the same basis the hard-headed doctors disposed of Willettrsquos growing disquiet about Charles Wardrsquos present handwriting, as studied from unpremeditated specimens obtained by various ruses. Willett thought he had placed its odd familiarity at last, and that what it vaguely resembled was the bygone penmanship of old Joseph Curwen himself but this the other physicians regarded as a phase of imitativeness only to be expected in a mania of this sort, and refused to grant it any importance either favourable or unfavourable. Recognising this prosaic attitude in his colleagues, Willett advised Mr. Ward to keep to himself the letter which arrived for Dr. Allen on the second of April from Rakus, Transylvania, in a handwriting so intensely and fundamentally like that of the Hutchinson cipher that both father and physician paused in awe before breaking the seal. This read as follows: Castle Ferenczy 7 March 1928. Dear C.:mdashHadd a Squad of 20 Militia up to talk about what the Country Folk say. Must digg deeper and have less Hearde. These Roumanians plague me damnably, being officious and particular where you coursquod buy a Magyar off with a Drinke and ffood. Last monthe M. got me y e Sarcophagus of y e Five Sphinxes from y e Acropolis where He whome I callrsquod up sayrsquod it woursquod be, and I have hadde 3 Talkes with What was therein inhumrsquod. It will go to S. O. in Prague directly, and thence to you. It is stubborn but you know y e Way with Such. You shew Wisdom in having lesse about than Before for there was no Neede to keep the Guards in Shape and eatrsquog off their Heads, and it made Much to be founde in Case of Trouble, as you too welle knowe. You can now move and worke elsewhere with no Killrsquog Trouble if needful, thorsquo I hope no Thing will soon force you to so Bothersome a Course. I rejoice that you traffick not so much with Those Outside for there was ever a Mortall Peril in it, and you are sensible what it did when you askrsquod Protection of One not disposrsquod to give it. You excel me in gettrsquog y e fformulae so another may saye them with Success, but Borellus fancyrsquod it woursquod be so if just y e right Wordes were hadd. Does y e Boy use rsquoem often I regret that he growes squeamish, as I fearrsquod he woursquod when I hadde him here nigh 15 Monthes, but am sensible you knowe how to deal with him. You canrsquot saye him down with y e fformula, for that will Worke only upon such as y e other fformula hath callrsquod up from Saltes but you still have strong Handes and Knife and Pistol, and Graves are not harde to digg, nor Acids loth to burne. O. sayes you have promisrsquod him B. F. I must have him after. B. goes to you soone, and may he give you what you wishe of that Darke Thing belowe Memphis. Imploy care in what you calle up, and beware of y e Boy. It will be ripe in a yearersquos time to have up y e Legions from Underneath, and then there are no Boundes to what shal be oures. Have Confidence in what I saye, for you knowe O. and I have hadd these 150 yeares more than you to consulte these Matters in. Nephren-Ka nai Hadoth Edw: H. For J. Curwen, Esq. Providence. But if Willett and Mr. Ward refrained from shewing this letter to the alienists, they did not refrain from acting upon it themselves. No amount of learned sophistry could controvert the fact that the strangely bearded and spectacled Dr. Allen, of whom Charlesrsquos frantic letter had spoken as such a monstrous menace, was in close and sinister correspondence with two inexplicable creatures whom Ward had visited in his travels and who plainly claimed to be survivals or avatars of Curwenrsquos old Salem colleagues that he was regarding himself as the reincarnation of Joseph Curwen, and that he entertainedmdashor was at least advised to entertainmdashmurderous designs against a ldquoboyrdquo who could scarcely be other than Charles Ward. There was organised horror afoot and no matter who had started it, the missing Allen was by this time at the bottom of it. Therefore, thanking heaven that Charles was now safe in the hospital, Mr. Ward lost no time in engaging detectives to learn all they could of the cryptic bearded doctor finding whence he had come and what Pawtuxet knew of him, and if possible discovering his current whereabouts. Supplying the men with one of the bungalow keys which Charles yielded up, he urged them to explore Allenrsquos vacant room which had been identified when the patientrsquos belongings had been packed obtaining what clues they could from any effects he might have left about. Mr. Ward talked with the detectives in his sonrsquos old library, and they felt a marked relief when they left it at last for there seemed to hover about the place a vague aura of evil. Perhaps it was what they had heard of the infamous old wizard whose picture had once stared from the panelled overmantel, and perhaps it was something different and irrelevant but in any case they all half sensed an intangible miasma which centred in that carven vestige of an older dwelling and which at times almost rose to the intensity of a material emanation. V. A Nightmare and a Cataclysm 1. And now swiftly followed that hideous experience which has left its indelible mark of fear on the soul of Marinus Bicknell Willett, and has added a decade to the visible age of one whose youth was even then far behind. Dr. Willett had conferred at length with Mr. Ward, and had come to an agreement with him on several points which both felt the alienists would ridicule. There was, they conceded, a terrible movement alive in the world, whose direct connexion with a necromancy even older than the Salem witchcraft could not be doubted. That at least two living menmdashand one other of whom they dared not thinkmdashwere in absolute possession of minds or personalities which had functioned as early as 1690 or before was likewise almost unassailably proved even in the face of all known natural laws. What these horrible creaturesmdashand Charles Ward as wellmdashwere doing or trying to do seemed fairly clear from their letters and from every bit of light both old and new which had filtered in upon the case. They were robbing the tombs of all the ages, including those of the worldrsquos wisest and greatest men, in the hope of recovering from the bygone ashes some vestige of the consciousness and lore which had once animated and informed them. A hideous traffick was going on among these nightmare ghouls, whereby illustrious bones were bartered with the calm calculativeness of schoolboys swapping books and from what was extorted from this centuried dust there was anticipated a power and a wisdom beyond anything which the cosmos had ever seen concentrated in one man or group. They had found unholy ways to keep their brains alive, either in the same body or different bodies and had evidently achieved a way of tapping the consciousness of the dead whom they gathered together. There had, it seems, been some truth in chimerical old Borellus when he wrote of preparing from even the most antique remains certain ldquoEssential Saltesrdquo from which the shade of a long-dead living thing might be raised up. There was a formula for evoking such a shade, and another for putting it down and it had now been so perfected that it could be taught successfully. One must be careful about evocations, for the markers of old graves are not always accurate. Willett and Mr. Ward shivered as they passed from conclusion to conclusion. Thingsmdashpresences or voices of some sortmdashcould be drawn down from unknown places as well as from the grave, and in this process also one must be careful. Joseph Curwen had indubitably evoked many forbidden things, and as for Charlesmdashwhat might one think of him What forces ldquooutside the spheresrdquo had reached him from Joseph Curwenrsquos day and turned his mind on forgotten things He had been led to find certain directions, and he had used them. He had talked with the man of horror in Prague and stayed long with the creature in the mountains of Transylvania. And he must have found the grave of Joseph Curwen at last. That newspaper item and what his mother had heard in the night were too significant to overlook. Then he had summoned something, and it must have come. That mighty voice aloft on Good Friday, and those different tones in the locked attic laboratory. What were they like, with their depth and hollowness Was there not here some awful foreshadowing of the dreaded stranger Dr. Allen with his spectral bass Yes, that was what Mr. Ward had felt with vague horror in his single talk with the manmdashif man it weremdashover the telephone What hellish consciousness or voice, what morbid shade or presence, had come to answer Charles Wardrsquos secret rites behind that locked door Those voices heard in argumentmdashldquomust have it red for three monthsrdquomdashGood God Was not that just before the vampirism broke out The rifling of Ezra Weedenrsquos ancient grave, and the cries later at Pawtuxetmdashwhose mind had planned the vengeance and rediscovered the shunned seat of elder blasphemies And then the bungalow and the bearded stranger, and the gossip, and the fear. The final madness of Charles neither father nor doctor could attempt to explain, but they did feel sure that the mind of Joseph Curwen had come to earth again and was following its ancient morbidities. Was daemoniac possession in truth a possibility Allen had something to do with it, and the detectives must find out more about one whose existence menaced the young manrsquos life. In the meantime, since the existence of some vast crypt beneath the bungalow seemed virtually beyond dispute, some effort must be made to find it. Willett and Mr. Ward, conscious of the sceptical attitude of the alienists, resolved during their final conference to undertake a joint secret exploration of unparalleled thoroughness and agreed to meet at the bungalow on the following morning with valises and with certain tools and accessories suited to architectural search and underground exploration. The morning of April 6th dawned clear, and both explorers were at the bungalow by ten orsquoclock. Mr. Ward had the key, and an entry and cursory survey were made. From the disordered condition of Dr. Allenrsquos room it was obvious that the detectives had been there before, and the later searchers hoped that they had found some clue which might prove of value. Of course the main business lay in the cellar so thither they descended without much delay, again making the circuit which each had vainly made before in the presence of the mad young owner. For a time everything seemed baffling, each inch of the earthen floor and stone walls having so solid and innocuous an aspect that the thought of a yawning aperture was scarcely to be entertained. Willett reflected that since the original cellar was dug without knowledge of any catacombs beneath, the beginning of the passage would represent the strictly modern delving of young Ward and his associates, where they had probed for the ancient vaults whose rumour could have reached them by no wholesome means. The doctor tried to put himself in Charlesrsquos place to see how a delver would be likely to start, but could not gain much inspiration from this method. Then he decided on elimination as a policy, and went carefully over the whole subterranean surface both vertical and horizontal, trying to account for every inch separately. He was soon substantially narrowed down, and at last had nothing left but the small platform before the washtubs, which he had tried once before in vain. Now experimenting in every possible way, and exerting a double strength, he finally found that the top did indeed turn and slide horizontally on a corner pivot. Beneath it lay a trim concrete surface with an iron manhole, to which Mr. Ward at once rushed with excited zeal. The cover was not hard to lift, and the father had quite removed it when Willett noticed the queerness of his aspect. He was swaying and nodding dizzily, and in the gust of noxious air which swept up from the black pit beneath the doctor soon recognised ample cause. In a moment Dr. Willett had his fainting companion on the floor above and was reviving him with cold water. Mr. Ward responded feebly, but it could be seen that the mephitic blast from the crypt had in some way gravely sickened him. Wishing to take no chances, Willett hastened out to Broad Street for a taxicab and had soon dispatched the sufferer home despite his weak-voiced protests after which he produced an electric torch, covered his nostrils with a band of sterile gauze, and descended once more to peer into the new-found depths. The foul air had now slightly abated, and Willett was able to send a beam of light down the Stygian hole. For about ten feet, he saw, it was a sheer cylindrical drop with concrete walls and an iron ladder after which the hole appeared to strike a flight of old stone steps which must originally have emerged to earth somewhat southwest of the present building. 2. Willett freely admits that for a moment the memory of the old Curwen legends kept him from climbing down alone into that malodorous gulf. He could not help thinking of what Luke Fenner had reported on that last monstrous night. Then duty asserted itself and he made the plunge, carrying a great valise for the removal of whatever papers might prove of supreme importance. Slowly, as befitted one of his years, he descended the ladder and reached the slimy steps below. This was ancient masonry, his torch told him and upon the dripping walls he saw the unwholesome moss of centuries. Down, down, ran the steps not spirally, but in three abrupt turns and with such narrowness that two men could have passed only with difficulty. He had counted about thirty when a sound reached him very faintly and after that he did not feel disposed to count any more. It was a godless sound one of those low-keyed, insidious outrages of Nature which are not meant to be. To call it a dull wail, a doom-dragged whine, or a hopeless howl of chorused anguish and stricken flesh without mind would be to miss its most quintessential loathsomeness and soul-sickening overtones. Was it for this that Ward had seemed to listen on that day he was removed It was the most shocking thing that Willett had ever heard, and it continued from no determinate point as the doctor reached the bottom of the steps and cast his torchlight around on lofty corridor walls surmounted by Cyclopean vaulting and pierced by numberless black archways. The hall in which he stood was perhaps fourteen feet high to the middle of the vaulting and ten or twelve feet broad. Its pavement was of large chipped flagstones, and its walls and roof were of dressed masonry. Its length he could not imagine, for it stretched ahead indefinitely into the blackness. Of the archways, some had doors of the old six-panelled colonial type, whilst others had none. Overcoming the dread induced by the smell and the howling, Willett began to explore these archways one by one finding beyond them rooms with groined stone ceilings, each of medium size and apparently of bizarre uses. Most of them had fireplaces, the upper courses of whose chimneys would have formed an interesting study in engineering. Never before or since had he seen such instruments or suggestions of instruments as here loomed up on every hand through the burying dust and cobwebs of a century and a half, in many cases evidently shattered as if by the ancient raiders. For many of the chambers seemed wholly untrodden by modern feet, and must have represented the earliest and most obsolete phases of Joseph Curwenrsquos experimentation. Finally there came a room of obvious modernity, or at least of recent occupancy. There were oil heaters, bookshelves and tables, chairs and cabinets, and a desk piled high with papers of varying antiquity and contemporaneousness. Candlesticks and oil lamps stood about in several places and finding a match-safe handy, Willett lighted such as were ready for use. In the fuller gleam it appeared that this apartment was nothing less than the latest study or library of Charles Ward. Of the books the doctor had seen many before, and a good part of the furniture had plainly come from the Prospect Street mansion. Here and there was a piece well known to Willett, and the sense of familiarity became so great that he half forgot the noisomeness and the wailing, both of which were plainer here than they had been at the foot of the steps. His first duty, as planned long ahead, was to find and seize any papers which might seem of vital importance especially those portentous documents found by Charles so long ago behind the picture in Olney Court. As he searched he perceived how stupendous a task the final unravelling would be for file on file was stuffed with papers in curious hands and bearing curious designs, so that months or even years might be needed for a thorough deciphering and editing. Once he found large packets of letters with Prague and Rakus postmarks, and in writing clearly recognisable as Ornersquos and Hutchinsonrsquos all of which he took with him as part of the bundle to be removed in his valise. At last, in a locked mahogany cabinet once gracing the Ward home, Willett found the batch of old Curwen papers recognising them from the reluctant glimpse Charles had granted him so many years ago. The youth had evidently kept them together very much as they had been when first he found them, since all the titles recalled by the workmen were present except the papers addressed to Orne and Hutchinson, and the cipher with its key. Willett placed the entire lot in his valise and continued his examination of the files. Since young Wardrsquos immediate condition was the greatest matter at stake, the closest searching was done among the most obviously recent matter and in this abundance of contemporary manuscript one very baffling oddity was noted. The oddity was the slight amount in Charlesrsquos normal writing, which indeed included nothing more recent than two months before. On the other hand, there were literally reams of symbols and formulae, historical notes and philosophical comment, in a crabbed penmanship absolutely identical with the ancient script of Joseph Curwen, though of undeniably modern dating. Plainly, a part of the latter-day programme had been a sedulous imitation of the old wizardrsquos writing, which Charles seemed to have carried to a marvellous state of perfection. Of any third hand which might have been Allenrsquos there was not a trace. If he had indeed come to be the leader, he must have forced young Ward to act as his amanuensis. In this new material one mystic formula, or rather pair of formulae, recurred so often that Willett had it by heart before he had half finished his quest. It consisted of two parallel columns, the left-hand one surmounted by the archaic symbol called ldquoDragonrsquos Headrdquo and used in almanacks to indicate the ascending node, and the right-hand one headed by a corresponding sign of ldquoDragonrsquos Tailrdquo or descending node. The appearance of the whole was something like this, and almost unconsciously the doctor realised that the second half was no more than the first written syllabically backward with the exception of the final monosyllables and of the odd name Yog-Sothoth, which he had come to recognise under various spellings from other things he had seen in connexion with this horrible matter. The formulae were as followsmdash exactly so, as Willett is abundantly able to testifymdashand the first one struck an odd note of uncomfortable latent memory in his brain, which he recognised later when reviewing the events of that horrible Good Friday of the previous year. YrsquoAI rsquoNGrsquoNGAH, YOG-SOTHOTH HrsquoEEmdashLrsquoGEB FrsquoAI THRODOG UAAAH OGTHROD AIrsquoF GEBrsquoLmdashEErsquoH YOG-SOTHOTH rsquoNGAHrsquoNG AIrsquoY ZHRO So haunting were these formulae, and so frequently did he come upon them, that before the doctor knew it he was repeating them under his breath. Eventually, however, he felt he had secured all the papers he could digest to advantage for the present hence resolved to examine no more till he could bring the sceptical alienists en masse for an ampler and more systematic raid. He had still to find the hidden laboratory, so leaving his valise in the lighted room he emerged again into the black noisome corridor whose vaulting echoed ceaselessly with that dull and hideous whine. The next few rooms he tried were all abandoned, or filled only with crumbling boxes and ominous-looking leaden coffins but impressed him deeply with the magnitude of Joseph Curwenrsquos original operations. He thought of the slaves and seamen who had disappeared, of the graves which had been violated in every part of the world, and of what that final raiding party must have seen and then he decided it was better not to think any more. Once a great stone staircase mounted at his right, and he deduced that this must have reached to one of the Curwen outbuildingsmdashperhaps the famous stone edifice with the high slit-like windowsmdashprovided the steps he had descended had led from the steep-roofed farmhouse. Suddenly the walls seemed to fall away ahead, and the stench and the wailing grew stronger. Willett saw that he had come upon a vast open space, so great that his torchlight would not carry across it and as he advanced he encountered occasional stout pillars supporting the arches of the roof. After a time he reached a circle of pillars grouped like the monoliths of Stonehenge, with a large carved altar on a base of three steps in the centre and so curious were the carvings on that altar that he approached to study them with his electric light. But when he saw what they were he shrank away shuddering, and did not stop to investigate the dark stains which discoloured the upper surface and had spread down the sides in occasional thin lines. Instead, he found the distant wall and traced it as it swept round in a gigantic circle perforated by occasional black doorways and indented by a myriad of shallow cells with iron gratings and wrist and ankle bonds on chains fastened to the stone of the concave rear masonry. These cells were empty, but still the horrible odour and the dismal moaning continued, more insistent now than ever, and seemingly varied at times by a sort of slippery thumping. 3. From that frightful smell and that uncanny noise Willettrsquos attention could no longer be diverted. Both were plainer and more hideous in the great pillared hall than anywhere else, and carried a vague impression of being far below, even in this dark nether world of subterrene mystery. Before trying any of the black archways for steps leading further down, the doctor cast his beam of light about the stone-flagged floor. It was very loosely paved, and at irregular intervals there would occur a slab curiously pierced by small holes in no definite arrangement, while at one point there lay a very long ladder carelessly flung down. To this ladder, singularly enough, appeared to cling a particularly large amount of the frightful odour which encompassed everything. As he walked slowly about it suddenly occurred to Willett that both the noise and the odour seemed strongest directly above the oddly pierced slabs, as if they might be crude trap-doors leading down to some still deeper region of horror. Kneeling by one, he worked at it with his hands, and found that with extreme difficulty he could budge it. At his touch the moaning beneath ascended to a louder key, and only with vast trepidation did he persevere in the lifting of the heavy stone. A stench unnamable now rose up from below, and the doctorrsquos head reeled dizzily as he laid back the slab and turned his torch upon the exposed square yard of gaping blackness. If he had expected a flight of steps to some wide gulf of ultimate abomination, Willett was destined to be disappointed for amidst that foetor and cracked whining he discerned only the brick-faced top of a cylindrical well perhaps a yard and a half in diameter and devoid of any ladder or other means of descent. As the light shone down, the wailing changed suddenly to a series of horrible yelps in conjunction with which there came again that sound of blind, futile scrambling and slippery thumping. The explorer trembled, unwilling even to imagine what noxious thing might be lurking in that abyss, but in a moment mustered up the courage to peer over the rough-hewn brink lying at full length and holding the torch downward at armrsquos length to see what might lie below. For a second he could distinguish nothing but the slimy, moss-grown brick walls sinking illimitably into that half-tangible miasma of murk and foulness and anguished frenzy and then he saw that something dark was leaping clumsily and frantically up and down at the bottom of the narrow shaft, which must have been from twenty to twenty-five feet below the stone floor where he lay. The torch shook in his hand, but he looked again to see what manner of living creature might be immured there in the darkness of that unnatural well left starving by young Ward through all the long month since the doctors had taken him away, and clearly only one of a vast number prisoned in the kindred wells whose pierced stone covers so thickly studded in the floor of the great vaulted cavern. Whatever the things were, they could not lie down in their cramped spaces but must have crouched and whined and waited and feebly leaped all those hideous weeks since their master had abandoned them unheeded. But Marinus Bicknell Willett was sorry that he looked again for surgeon and veteran of the dissecting-room though he was, he has not been the same since. It is hard to explain just how a single sight of a tangible object with measureable dimensions could so shake and change a man and we may only say that there is about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts frightfully on a sensitive thinkerrsquos perspective and whispers terrible hints of obscure cosmic relationships and unnamable realities behind the protective illusions of common vision. In that second look Willett saw such an outline or entity, for during the next few instants he was undoubtedly as stark mad as any inmate of Dr. Waitersquos private hospital. He dropped the electric torch from a hand drained of muscular power or nervous cooumlrdination, nor heeded the sound of crunching teeth which told of its fate at the bottom of the pit. He screamed and screamed and screamed in a voice whose falsetto panic no acquaintance of his would ever have recognised and though he could not rise to his feet he crawled and rolled desperately away over the damp pavement where dozens of Tartarean wells poured forth their exhausted whining and yelping to answer his own insane cries. He tore his hands on the rough, loose stones, and many times bruised his head against the frequent pillars, but still he kept on. Then at last he slowly came to himself in the utter blackness and stench, and stopped his ears against the droning wail into which the burst of yelping had subsided. He was drenched with perspiration and without means of producing a light stricken and unnerved in the abysmal blackness and horror, and crushed with a memory he never could efface. Beneath him dozens of those things still lived, and from one of the shafts the cover was removed. He knew that what he had seen could never climb up the slippery walls, yet shuddered at the thought that some obscure foot-hold might exist. What the thing was, he would never tell. It was like some of the carvings on the hellish altar, but it was alive. Nature had never made it in this form, for it was too palpably unfinished. The deficiencies were of the most surprising sort, and the abnormalities of proportion could not be described. Willett consents only to say that this type of thing must have represented entities which Ward called up from imperfect salts, and which he kept for servile or ritualistic purposes. If it had not had a certain significance, its image would not have been carved on that damnable stone. It was not the worst thing depicted on that stonemdashbut Willett never opened the other pits. At the time, the first connected idea in his mind was an idle paragraph from some of the old Curwen data he had digested long before a phrase used by Simon or Jedediah Orne in that portentous confiscated letter to the bygone sorcerer: ldquoCertainely, there was Nothrsquog butt y e liveliest Awfulness in that which H. raisrsquod upp from What he coursquod gather onlie a part of. rdquo Then, horribly supplementing rather than displacing this image, there came a recollection of those ancient lingering rumours anent the burned, twisted thing found in the fields a week after the Curwen raid. Charles Ward had once told the doctor what old Slocum said of that object that it was neither thoroughly human, nor wholly allied to any animal which Pawtuxet folk had ever seen or read about. These words hummed in the doctorrsquos mind as he rocked to and fro, squatting on the nitrous stone floor. He tried to drive them out, and repeated the Lordrsquos Prayer to himself eventually trailing off into a mnemonic hodge-podge like the modernistic Waste Land of Mr. T. S. Eliot and finally reverting to the oft-repeated dual formula he had lately found in Wardrsquos underground library: ldquoYrsquoai rsquongrsquongah, Yog-Sothothrdquo, and so on till the final underlined ldquoZhrordquo. It seemed to soothe him, and he staggered to his feet after a time lamenting bitterly his fright-lost torch and looking wildly about for any gleam of light in the clutching inkiness of the chilly air. Think he would not but he strained his eyes in every direction for some faint glint or reflection of the bright illumination he had left in the library. After a while he thought he detected a suspicion of a glow infinitely far away, and toward this he crawled in agonised caution on hands and knees amidst the stench and howling, always feeling ahead lest he collide with the numerous great pillars or stumble into the abominable pit he had uncovered. Once his shaking fingers touched something which he knew must be the steps leading to the hellish altar, and from this spot he recoiled in loathing. At another time he encountered the pierced slab he had removed, and here his caution became almost pitiful. But he did not come upon the dread aperture after all, nor did anything issue from that aperture to detain him. What had been down there made no sound nor stir. Evidently its crunching of the fallen electric torch had not been good for it. Each time Willettrsquos fingers felt a perforated slab he trembled. His passage over it would sometimes increase the groaning below, but generally it would produce no effect at all, since he moved very noiselessly. Several times during his progress the glow ahead diminished perceptibly, and he realised that the various candles and lamps he had left must be expiring one by one. The thought of being lost in utter darkness without matches amidst this underground world of nightmare labyrinths impelled him to rise to his feet and run, which he could safely do now that he had passed the open pit for he knew that once the light failed, his only hope of rescue and survival would lie in whatever relief party Mr. Ward might send after missing him for a sufficient period. Presently, however, he emerged from the open space into the narrower corridor and definitely located the glow as coming from a door on his right. In a moment he had reached it and was standing once more in young Wardrsquos secret library, trembling with relief, and watching the sputterings of that last lamp which had brought him to safety. 4. In another moment he was hastily filling the burned-out lamps from an oil supply he had previously noticed, and when the room was bright again he looked about to see if he might find a lantern for further exploration. For racked though he was with horror, his sense of grim purpose was still uppermost and he was firmly determined to leave no stone unturned in his search for the hideous facts behind Charles Wardrsquos bizarre madness. Failing to find a lantern, he chose the smallest of the lamps to carry also filling his pockets with candles and matches, and taking with him a gallon can of oil, which he proposed to keep for reserve use in whatever hidden laboratory he might uncover beyond the terrible open space with its unclean altar and nameless covered wells. To traverse that space again would require his utmost fortitude, but he knew it must be done. Fortunately neither the frightful altar nor the opened shaft was near the vast cell-indented wall which bounded the cavern area, and whose black mysterious archways would form the next goals of a logical search. So Willett went back to that great pillared hall of stench and anguished howling turning down his lamp to avoid any distant glimpse of the hellish altar, or of the uncovered pit with the pierced stone slab beside it. Most of the black doorways led merely to small chambers, some vacant and some evidently used as storerooms and in several of the latter he saw some very curious accumulations of various objects. One was packed with rotting and dust-draped bales of spare clothing, and the explorer thrilled when he saw that it was unmistakably the clothing of a century and a half before. In another room he found numerous odds and ends of modern clothing, as if gradual provisions were being made to equip a large body of men. But what he disliked most of all were the huge copper vats which occasionally appeared these, and the sinister incrustations upon them. He liked them even less than the weirdly figured leaden bowls whose rims retained such obnoxious deposits and around which clung repellent odours perceptible above even the general noisomeness of the crypt. When he had completed about half the entire circuit of the wall he found another corridor like that from which he had come, and out of which many doors opened. This he proceeded to investigate and after entering three rooms of medium size and of no significant contents, he came at last to a large oblong apartment whose business-like tanks and tables, furnaces and modern instruments, occasional books and endless shelves of jars and bottles proclaimed it indeed the long-sought laboratory of Charles Wardmdashand no doubt of old Joseph Curwen before him. After lighting the three lamps which he found filled and ready, Dr. Willett examined the place and all its appurtenances with the keenest interest noting from the relative quantities of various reagents on the shelves that young Wardrsquos dominant concern must have been with some branch of organic chemistry. On the whole, little could be learned from the scientific ensemble, which included a gruesome-looking dissecting table so that the room was really rather a disappointment. Among the books was a tattered old copy of Borellus in black-letter, and it was weirdly interesting to note that Ward had underlined the same passage whose marking had so perturbed good Mr. Merritt at Curwenrsquos farmhouse more than a century and a half before. That older copy, of course, must have perished along with the rest of Curwenrsquos occult library in the final raid. Three archways opened off the laboratory, and these the doctor proceeded to sample in turn. From his cursory survey he saw that two led merely to small storerooms but these he canvassed with care, remarking the piles of coffins in various stages of damage and shuddering violently at two or three of the few coffin-plates he could decipher. There was much clothing also stored in these rooms, and several new and tightly nailed boxes which he did not stop to investigate. Most interesting of all, perhaps, were some odd bits which he judged to be fragments of old Joseph Curwenrsquos laboratory appliances. These had suffered damage at the hands of the raiders, but were still partly recognisable as the chemical paraphernalia of the Georgian period. The third archway led to a very sizeable chamber entirely lined with shelves and having in the centre a table bearing two lamps. These lamps Willett lighted, and in their brilliant glow studied the endless shelving which surrounded him. Some of the upper levels were wholly vacant, but most of the space was filled with small odd-looking leaden jars of two general types one tall and without handles like a Grecian lekythos or oil-jug, and the other with a single handle and proportioned like a Phaleron jug. All had metal stoppers, and were covered with peculiar-looking symbols moulded in low relief. In a moment the doctor noticed that these jugs were classified with great rigidity all the lekythoi being on one side of the room with a large wooden sign reading ldquoCustodesrdquo above them, and all the Phalerons on the other, correspondingly labelled with a sign reading ldquoMateriardquo. Each of the jars or jugs, except some on the upper shelves that turned out to be vacant, bore a cardboard tag with a number apparently referring to a catalogue and Willett resolved to look for the latter presently. For the moment, however, he was more interested in the nature of the array as a whole and experimentally opened several of the lekythoi and Phalerons at random with a view to a rough generalisation. The result was invariable. Both types of jar contained a small quantity of a single kind of substance a fine dusty powder of very light weight and of many shades of dull, neutral colour. To the colours which formed the only point of variation there was no apparent method of disposal and no distinction between what occurred in the lekythoi and what occurred in the Phalerons. A bluish-grey powder might be by the side of a pinkish-white one, and any one in a Phaleron might have its exact counterpart in a lekythos. The most individual feature about the powders was their non-adhesiveness. Willett would pour one into his hand, and upon returning it to its jug would find that no residue whatever remained on its palm. The meaning of the two signs puzzled him, and he wondered why this battery of chemicals was separated so radically from those in glass jars on the shelves of the laboratory proper. ldquoCustodesrdquo, ldquoMateriardquo that was the Latin for ldquoGuardsrdquo and ldquoMaterialsrdquo, respectivelymdashand then there came a flash of memory as to where he had seen that word ldquoGuardsrdquo before in connexion with this dreadful mystery. It was, of course, in the recent letter to Dr. Allen purporting to be from old Edward Hutchinson and the phrase had read: ldquoThere was no Neede to keep the Guards in Shape and eatrsquog off their Heads, and it made Much to be founde in Case of Trouble, as you too welle knowe. rdquo What did this signify But waitmdashwas there not still another reference to ldquoguardsrdquo in this matter which he had failed wholly to recall when reading the Hutchinson letter Back in the old non-secretive days Ward had told him of the Eleazar Smith diary recording the spying of Smith and Weeden on the Curwen farm, and in that dreadful chronicle there had been a mention of conversations overheard before the old wizard betook himself wholly beneath the earth. There had been, Smith and Weeden insisted, terrible colloquies wherein figured Curwen, certain captives of his, and the guards of those captives. Those guards, according to Hutchinson or his avatar, had lsquoeaten their heads offrsquo, so that now Dr. Allen did not keep them in shape. And if not in shape, how save as the ldquosaltsrdquo to which it appears this wizard band was engaged in reducing as many human bodies or skeletons as they could So that was what these lekythoi contained the monstrous fruit of unhallowed rites and deeds, presumably won or cowed to such submission as to help, when called up by some hellish incantation, in the defence of their blasphemous master or the questioning of those who were not so willing Willett shuddered at the thought of what he had been pouring in and out of his hands, and for a moment felt an impulse to flee in panic from that cavern of hideous shelves with their silent and perhaps watching sentinels. Then he thought of the ldquoMateriardquomdashin the myriad Phaleron jugs on the other side of the room. Salts toomdashand if not the salts of ldquoguardsrdquo, then the salts of what God Could it be possible that here lay the mortal relics of half the titan thinkers of all the ages snatched by supreme ghouls from crypts where the world thought them safe, and subject to the beck and call of madmen who sought to drain their knowledge for some still wilder end whose ultimate effect would concern, as poor Charles had hinted in his frantic note, lsquoall civilisation, all natural law, perhaps even the fate of the solar system and the universersquo And Marinus Bicknell Willett had sifted their dust through his hands Then he noticed a small door at the farther end of the room, and calmed himself enough to approach it and examine the crude sign chiselled above. It was only a symbol, but it filled him with vague spiritual dread for a morbid, dreaming friend of his had once drawn it on paper and told him a few of the things it means in the dark abyss of sleep. It was the sign of Koth, that dreamers see fixed above the archway of a certain black tower standing alone in twilightmdashand Willett did not like what his friend Randolph Carter had said of its powers. But a moment later he forgot the sign as he recognised a new acrid odour in the stench-filled air. This was a chemical rather than animal smell, and came clearly from the room beyond the door. And it was, unmistakably, the same odour which had saturated Charles Wardrsquos clothing on the day the doctors had taken him away. So it was here that the youth had been interrupted by the final summons He was wiser than old Joseph Curwen, for he had not resisted. Willett, boldly determined to penetrate every wonder and nightmare this nether realm might contain, seized the small lamp and crossed the threshold. A wave of nameless fright rolled out to meet him, but he yielded to no whim and deferred to no intuition. There was nothing alive here to harm him, and he would not be stayed in his piercing of the eldritch cloud which engulfed his patient. The room beyond the door was of medium size, and had no furniture save a table, a single chair, and two groups of curious machines with clamps and wheels, which Willett recognised after a moment as mediaeval instruments of torture. On one side of the door stood a rack of savage whips, above which were some shelves bearing empty rows of shallow pedestalled cups of lead shaped like Grecian kylikes. On the other side was the table with a powerful Argand lamp, a pad and pencil, and two of the stoppered lekythoi from the shelves outside set down at irregular places as if temporarily or in haste. Willett lighted the lamp and looked carefully at the pad, to see what notes young Ward might have been jotting down when interrupted but found nothing more intelligible than the following disjointed fragments in that crabbed Curwen chirography, which shed no light on the case as a whole: ldquoB. dyrsquod not. Escaprsquod into walls and founde Place below. ldquoSaw olde V. saye y e Sabaoth and learnt y e Way. ldquoRaisrsquod Yog-Sothoth thrice and was y e nexte Day deliverrsquod. ldquoF. soughte to wipe out all knowrsquog howe to raise Those from Outside. rdquo As the strong Argand blaze lit up the entire chamber the doctor saw that the wall opposite the door, between the two groups of torturing appliances in the corners, was covered with pegs from which hung a set of shapeless-looking robes of a rather dismal yellowish-white. But far more interesting were the two vacant walls, both of which were thickly covered with mystic symbols and formulae roughly chiselled in the smooth dressed stone. The damp floor also bore marks of carving and with but little difficulty Willett deciphered a huge pentagram in the centre, with a plain circle about three feet wide half way between this and each corner. In one of these four circles, near where a yellowish robe had been flung carelessly down, there stood a shallow kylix of the sort found on the shelves above the whip-rack and just outside the periphery was one of the Phaleron jugs from the shelves in the other room, its tag numbered 118. This was unstoppered, and proved upon inspection to be empty but the explorer saw with a shiver that the kylix was not. Within its shallow area, and saved from scattering only by the absence of wind in this sequestered cavern, lay a small amount of a dry, dull-greenish efflorescent powder which must have belonged in the jug and Willett almost reeled at the implications that came sweeping over him as he correlated little by little the several elements and antecedents of the scene. The whips and the instruments of torture, the dust or salts from the jug of ldquoMateriardquo, the two lekythoi from the ldquoCustodesrdquo shelf, the robes, the formulae on the walls, the notes on the pad, the hints from letters and legends, and the thousand glimpses, doubts, and suppositions which had come to torment the friends and parents of Charles Wardmdashall these engulfed the doctor in a tidal wave of horror as he looked at that dry greenish powder outspread in the pedestalled leaden kylix on the floor. With an effort, however, Willett pulled himself together and began studying the formulae chiselled on the walls. From the stained and incrusted letters it was obvious that they were carved in Joseph Curwenrsquos time, and their text was such as to be vaguely familiar to one who had read much Curwen material or delved extensively into the history of magic. One the doctor clearly recognised as what Mrs. Ward heard her son chanting on that ominous Good Friday a year before, and what an authority had told him was a very terrible invocation addressed to secret gods outside the normal spheres. It was not spelled here exactly as Mrs. Ward had set it down from memory, nor yet as the authority had shewn it to him in the forbidden pages of ldquoEliphas Levirdquo but its identity was unmistakable, and such words as Sabaoth, Metraton, Almousin, and Zariatnatmik sent a shudder of fright through the searcher who had seen and felt so much of cosmic abomination just around the corner. This was on the left-hand wall as one entered the room. The right-hand wall was no less thickly inscribed, and Willett felt a start of recognition as he came upon the pair of formulae so frequently occurring in the recent notes in the library. They were, roughly speaking, the same with the ancient symbols of ldquoDragonrsquos Headrdquo and ldquoDragonrsquos Tailrdquo heading them as in Wardrsquos scribblings. But the spelling differed quite widely from that of the modern versions, as if old Curwen had had a different way of recording sound, or as if later study had evolved more powerful and perfected variants of the invocations in question. The doctor tried to reconcile the chiselled version with the one which still ran persistently in his head, and found it hard to do. Where the script he had memorised began ldquoYrsquoai rsquongrsquongah, Yog-Sothothrdquo, this epigraph started out as ldquoAye, engengah, Yogge-Sothothardquo which to his mind would seriously interfere with the syllabification of the second word. Ground as the later text was into his consciousness, the discrepancy disturbed him and he found himself chanting the first of the formulae aloud in an effort to square the sound he conceived with the letters he found carved. Weird and menacing in that abyss of antique blasphemy rang his voice its accents keyed to a droning sing-song either through the spell of the past and the unknown, or through the hellish example of that dull, godless wail from the pits whose inhuman cadences rose and fell rhythmically in the distance through the stench and the darkness. ldquoYrsquoAI rsquoNGrsquoNGAH, YOG-SOTHOTH HrsquoEEmdashLrsquoGEB FrsquoAI THRODOG UAAAHrdquo But what was this cold wind which had sprung into life at the very outset of the chant The lamps were sputtering woefully, and the gloom grew so dense that the letters on the wall nearly faded from sight. There was smoke, too, and an acrid odour which quite drowned out the stench from the far-away wells an odour like that he had smelt before, yet infinitely stronger and more pungent. He turned from the inscriptions to face the room with its bizarre contents, and saw that the kylix on the floor, in which the ominous efflorescent powder had lain, was giving forth a cloud of thick, greenish-black vapour of surprising volume and opacity. That powdermdashGreat God it had come from the shelf of ldquoMateriardquomdashwhat was it doing now, and what had started it The formula he had been chantingmdashthe first of the pairmdashDragonrsquos Head, ascending node mdashBlessed Saviour, could it be. The doctor reeled, and through his head raced wildly disjointed scraps from all he had seen, heard, and read of the frightful case of Joseph Curwen and Charles Dexter Ward. ldquoI say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe. Have y e Wordes for laying at all times readie, and stopp not to be sure when there is any Doubte of Whom you have. Three Talkes with What was therein inhumrsquod. . rdquo Mercy of Heaven, what is that shape behind the parting smoke 5. Marinus Bicknell Willett has no hope that any part of his tale will be believed except by certain sympathetic friends, hence he has made no attempt to tell it beyond his most intimate circle. Only a few outsiders have ever heard it repeated, and of these the majority laugh and remark that the doctor surely is getting old. He has been advised to take a long vacation and to shun future cases dealing with mental disturbance. But Mr. Ward knows that the veteran physician speaks only a horrible truth. Did not he himself see the noisome aperture in the bungalow cellar Did not Willett send him home overcome and ill at eleven orsquoclock that portentous morning Did he not telephone the doctor in vain that evening, and again the next day, and had he not driven to the bungalow itself on that following noon, finding his friend unconscious but unharmed on one of the beds upstairs Willett had been breathing stertorously, and opened his eyes slowly when Mr. Ward gave him some brandy fetched from the car. Then he shuddered and screamed, crying out, ldquoThat beard. those eyes. God, who are yourdquo A very strange thing to say to a trim, blue-eyed, clean-shaven gentleman whom he had known from the latterrsquos boyhood. In the bright noon sunlight the bungalow was unchanged since the previous morning. Willettrsquos clothing bore no disarrangement beyond certain smudges and worn places at the knees, and only a faint acrid odour reminded Mr. Ward of what he had smelt on his son that day he was taken to the hospital. The doctorrsquos flashlight was missing, but his valise was safely there, as empty as when he had brought it. Before indulging in any explanations, and obviously with great moral effort, Willett staggered dizzily down to the cellar and tried the fateful platform before the tubs. It was unyielding. Crossing to where he had left his yet unused tool satchel the day before, he obtained a chisel and began to pry up the stubborn planks one by one. Underneath the smooth concrete was still visible, but of any opening or perforation there was no longer a trace. Nothing yawned this time to sicken the mystified father who had followed the doctor downstairs only the smooth concrete underneath the planksmdashno noisome well, no world of subterrene horrors, no secret library, no Curwen papers, no nightmare pits of stench and howling, no laboratory or shelves or chiselled formulae, no. Dr. Willett turned pale, and clutched at the younger man. ldquoYesterday, rdquo he asked softly, ldquodid you see it here. and smell itrdquo And when Mr. Ward, himself transfixed with dread and wonder, found strength to nod an affirmative, the physician gave a sound half a sigh and half a gasp, and nodded in turn. ldquoThen I will tell you, rdquo he said. So for an hour, in the sunniest room they could find upstairs, the physician whispered his frightful tale to the wondering father. There was nothing to relate beyond the looming up of that form when the greenish-black vapour from the kylix parted, and Willett was too tired to ask himself what had really occurred. There were futile, bewildered head-shakings from both men, and once Mr. Ward ventured a hushed suggestion, ldquoDo you suppose it would be of any use to digrdquo The doctor was silent, for it seemed hardly fitting for any human brain to answer when powers of unknown spheres had so vitally encroached on this side of the Great Abyss. Again Mr. Ward asked, ldquoBut where did it go It brought you here, you know, and it sealed up the hole somehow. rdquo And Willett again let silence answer for him. But after all, this was not the final phase of the matter. Reaching for his handkerchief before rising to leave, Dr. Willettrsquos fingers closed upon a piece of paper in his pocket which had not been there before, and which was companioned by the candles and matches he had seized in the vanished vault. It was a common sheet, torn obviously from the cheap pad in that fabulous room of horror somewhere underground, and the writing upon it was that of an ordinary lead pencilmdashdoubtless the one which had lain beside the pad. It was folded very carelessly, and beyond the faint acrid scent of the cryptic chamber bore no print or mark of any world but this. But in the text itself it did indeed reek with wonder for here was no script of any wholesome age, but the laboured strokes of mediaeval darkness, scarcely legible to the laymen who now strained over it, yet having combinations of symbols which seemed vaguely familiar. The briefly scrawled message was this, and its mystery lent purpose to the shaken pair, who forthwith walked steadily out to the Ward car and gave orders to be driven first to a quiet dining place and then to the John Hay Library on the hill. At the library it was easy to find good manuals of palaeography, and over these the two men puzzled till the lights of evening shone out from the great chandelier. In the end they found what was needed. The letters were indeed no fantastic invention, but the normal script of a very dark period. They were the pointed Saxon minuscules of the eighth or ninth century A. D. and brought with them memories of an uncouth time when under a fresh Christian veneer ancient faiths and ancient rites stirred stealthily, and the pale moon of Britain looked sometimes on strange deeds in the Roman ruins of Caerleon and Hexham, and by the towers along Hadrianrsquos crumbling wall. The words were in such Latin as a barbarous age might remembermdashldquo Corvinus necandus est. Cadaver aq(ua) forti dissolvendum, nec aliq(ui)d retinendum. Tace ut potes. rdquo mdashwhich may roughly be translated, ldquoCurwen must be killed. The body must be dissolved in aqua fortis, nor must anything be retained. Keep silence as best you are able. rdquo Willett and Mr. Ward were mute and baffled. They had met the unknown, and found that they lacked emotions to respond to it as they vaguely believed they ought. With Willett, especially, the capacity for receiving fresh impressions of awe was well-nigh exhausted and both men sat still and helpless till the closing of the library forced them to leave. Then they drove listlessly to the Ward mansion in Prospect Street, and talked to no purpose into the night. The doctor rested toward morning, but did not go home. And he was still there Sunday noon when a telephone message came from the detectives who had been assigned to look up Dr. Allen. Mr. Ward, who was pacing nervously about in a dressing-gown, answered the call in person and told the men to come up early the next day when he heard their report was almost ready. Both Willett and he were glad that this phase of the matter was taking form, for whatever the origin of the strange minuscule message, it seemed certain that the ldquoCurwenrdquo who must be destroyed could be no other than the bearded and spectacled stranger. Charles had feared this man, and had said in the frantic note that he must be killed and dissolved in acid. Allen, moreover, had been receiving letters from the strange wizards in Europe under the name of Curwen, and palpably regarded himself as an avatar of the bygone necromancer. And now from a fresh and unknown source had come a message saying that ldquoCurwenrdquo must be killed and dissolved in acid. The linkage was too unmistakable to be factitious and besides, was not Allen planning to murder young Ward upon the advice of the creature called Hutchinson Of course, the letter they had seen had never reached the bearded stranger but from its text they could see that Allen had already formed plans for dealing with the youth if he grew too lsquosqueamishrsquo. Without doubt, Allen must be apprehended and even if the most drastic directions were not carried out, he must be placed where he could inflict no harm upon Charles Ward. That afternoon, hoping against hope to extract some gleam of information anent the inmost mysteries from the only available one capable of giving it, the father and the doctor went down the bay and called on young Charles at the hospital. Simply and gravely Willett told him all he had found, and noticed how pale he turned as each description made certain the truth of the discovery. The physician employed as much dramatic effect as he could, and watched for a wincing on Charlesrsquos part when he approached the matter of the covered pits and the nameless hybrids within. But Ward did not wince. Willett paused, and his voice grew indignant as he spoke of how the things were starving. He taxed the youth with shocking inhumanity, and shivered when only a sardonic laugh came in reply. For Charles, having dropped as useless his pretence that the crypt did not exist, seemed to see some ghastly jest in this affair and chuckled hoarsely at something which amused him. Then he whispered, in accents doubly terrible because of the cracked voice he used, ldquoDamn rsquoem, they do eat, but they donrsquot need to Thatrsquos the rare part A month, you say, without food Lud, Sir, you be modest Drsquoye know, that was the joke on poor old Whipple with his virtuous bluster Kill everything off, would he Why, damme, he was half-deaf with the noise from Outside and never saw or heard aught from the wells He never dreamed they were there at all Devil take ye, those cursed things have been howling down there ever since Curwen was done for a hundred and fifty-seven years gonerdquo But no more than this could Willett get from the youth. Horrified, yet almost convinced against his will, he went on with his tale in the hope that some incident might startle his auditor out of the mad composure he maintained. Looking at the youthrsquos face, the doctor could not but feel a kind of terror at the changes which recent months had wrought. Truly, the boy had drawn down nameless horrors from the skies. When the room with the formulae and the greenish dust was mentioned, Charles shewed his first sign of animation. A quizzical look overspread his face as he heard what Willett had read on the pad, and he ventured the mild statement that those notes were old ones, of no possible significance to anyone not deeply initiated in the history of magic. ldquoBut, rdquo he added, ldquohad you but known the words to bring up that which I had out in the cup, you had not been here to tell me this. rsquoTwas Number 118, and I conceive you would have shook had you looked it up in my list in trsquoother room. rsquoTwas never raised by me, but I meant to have it up that day you came to invite me hither. rdquo Then Willett told of the formula he had spoken and of the greenish-black smoke which had arisen and as he did so he saw true fear dawn for the first time on Charles Wardrsquos face. ldquoIt came, and you be here aliverdquo As Ward croaked the words his voice seemed almost to burst free of its trammels and sink to cavernous abysses of uncanny resonance. Willett, gifted with a flash of inspiration, believed he saw the situation, and wove into his reply a caution from a letter he remembered. ldquoNo. 118, you say But donrsquot forget that stones are all changed now in nine grounds out of ten. You are never sure till you questionrdquo And then, without warning, he drew forth the minuscule message and flashed it before the patientrsquos eyes. He could have wished no stronger result, for Charles Ward fainted forthwith. All this conversation, of course, had been conducted with the greatest secrecy lest the resident alienists accuse the father and the physician of encouraging a madman in his delusions. Unaided, too, Dr. Willett and Mr. Ward picked up the stricken youth and placed him on the couch. In reviving, the patient mumbled many times of some word which he must get to Orne and Hutchinson at once so when his consciousness seemed fully back the doctor told him that of those strange creatures at least one was his bitter enemy, and had given Dr. Allen advice for his assassination. This revelation produced no visible effect, and before it was made the visitors could see that their host had already the look of a hunted man. After that he would converse no more, so Willett and the father departed presently leaving behind a caution against the bearded Allen, to which the youth only replied that this individual was very safely taken care of, and could do no one any harm even if he wished. This was said with an almost evil chuckle very painful to hear. They did not worry about any communications Charles might indite to that monstrous pair in Europe, since they knew that the hospital authorities seized all outgoing mail for censorship and would pass no wild or outreacute-looking missive. There is, however, a curious sequel to the matter of Orne and Hutchinson, if such indeed the exiled wizards were. Moved by some vague presentiment amidst the horrors of that period, Willett arranged with an international press-cutting bureau for accounts of notable current crimes and accidents in Prague and in eastern Transylvania and after six months believed that he had found two very significant things amongst the multifarious items he received and had translated. One was the total wrecking of a house by night in the oldest quarter of Prague, and the disappearance of the evil old man called Josef Nadek, who had dwelt in it alone ever since anyone could remember. The other was a titan explosion in the Transylvanian mountains east of Rakus, and the utter extirpation with all its inmates of the ill-regarded Castle Ferenczy, whose master was so badly spoken of by peasants and soldiery alike that he would shortly have been summoned to Bucharest for serious questioning had not this incident cut off a career already so long as to antedate all common memory. Willett maintains that the hand which wrote those minuscules was able to wield stronger weapons as well and that while Curwen was left to him to dispose of, the writer felt able to find and deal with Orne and Hutchinson itself. Of what their fate may have been the doctor strives sedulously not to think. 6. The following morning Dr. Willett hastened to the Ward home to be present when the detectives arrived. Allenrsquos destruction or imprisonmentmdashor Curwenrsquos, if one might regard the tacit claim to reincarnation as validmdashhe felt must be accomplished at any cost, and he communicated this conviction to Mr. Ward as they sat waiting for the men to come. They were downstairs this time, for the upper parts of the house were beginning to be shunned because of a peculiar nauseousness which hung indefinitely about a nauseousness which the older servants connected with some curse left by the vanished Curwen portrait. At nine orsquoclock the three detectives presented themselves and immediately delivered all that they had to say. They had not, regrettably enough, located the Brava Tony Gomes as they had wished, nor had they found the least trace of Dr. Allenrsquos source or present whereabouts but they had managed to unearth a considerable number of local impressions and facts concerning the reticent stranger. Allen had struck Pawtuxet people as a vaguely unnatural being, and there was an universal belief that his thick sandy beard was either dyed or falsemdasha belief conclusively upheld by the finding of such a false beard, together with a pair of dark glasses, in his room at the fateful bungalow. His voice, Mr. Ward could well testify from his one telephone conversation, had a depth and hollowness that could not be forgotten and his glance seemed malign even through his smoked and horn-rimmed glasses. One shopkeeper, in the course of negotiations, had seen a specimen of his handwriting and declared it was very queer and crabbed this being confirmed by pencilled notes of no clear meaning found in his room and identified by the merchant. In connexion with the vampirism rumours of the preceding summer, a majority of the gossips believed that Allen rather than Ward was the actual vampire. Statements were also obtained from the officials who had visited the bungalow after the unpleasant incident of the motor truck robbery. They had felt less of the sinister in Dr. Allen, but had recognised him as the dominant figure in the queer shadowy cottage. The place had been too dark for them to observe him clearly, but they would know him again if they saw him. His beard had looked odd, and they thought he had some slight scar above his dark spectacled right eye. As for the detectivesrsquo search of Allenrsquos room, it yielded nothing definite save the beard and glasses, and several pencilled notes in a crabbed writing which Willett at once saw was identical with that shared by the old Curwen manuscripts and by the voluminous recent notes of young Ward found in the vanished catacombs of horror. Dr. Willett and Mr. Ward caught something of a profound, subtle, and insidious cosmic fear from this data as it was gradually unfolded, and almost trembled in following up the vague, mad thought which had simultaneously reached their minds. The false beard and glassesmdashthe crabbed Curwen penmanshipmdashthe old portrait and its tiny scarmdash and the altered youth in the hospital with such a scar mdashthat deep, hollow voice on the telephonemdashwas it not of this that Mr. Ward was reminded when his son barked forth those pitiable tones to which he now claimed to be reduced Who had ever seen Charles and Allen together Yes, the officials had once, but who later on Was it not when Allen left that Charles suddenly lost his growing fright and began to live wholly at the bungalow CurwenmdashAllenmdashWardmdashin what blasphemous and abominable fusion had two ages and two persons become involved That damnable resemblance of the picture to Charlesmdashhad it not used to stare and stare, and follow the boy around the room with its eyes Why, too, did both Allen and Charles copy Joseph Curwenrsquos handwriting, even when alone and off guard And then the frightful work of those peoplemdashthe lost crypt of horrors that had aged th e doctor overnight the starved monsters in the noisome pits the awful formula which had yielded such nameless results the message in minuscules found in Willettrsquos pocket the papers and the letters and all the talk of graves and ldquosaltsrdquo and discoveriesmdashwhither did everything lead In the end Mr. Ward did the most sensible thing. Steeling himself against any realisation of why he did it, he gave the detectives an article to be shewn to such Pawtuxet shopkeepers as had seen the portentous Dr. Allen. That article was a photograph of his luckless son, on which he now carefully drew in ink the pair of heavy glasses and the black pointed beard which the men had brought from Allenrsquos room. For two hours he waited with the doctor in the oppressive house where fear and miasma were slowly gathering as the empty panel in the upstairs library leered and leered and leered. Then the men returned. Ja. The altered photograph was a very passable likeness of Dr. Allen. Mr. Ward turned pale, and Willett wiped a suddenly dampened brow with his handkerchief. AllenmdashWardmdashCurwenmdashit was becoming too hideous for coherent thought. What had the boy called out of the void, and what had it done to him What, really, had happened from first to last Who was this Allen who sought to kill Charles as too lsquosqueamishrsquo, and why had his destined victim said in the postscript to that frantic letter that he must be so completely obliterated in acid Why, too, had the minuscule message, of whose origin no one dared think, said that ldquoCurwenrdquo must be likewise obliterated What was the change, and when had the final stage occurred That day when his frantic note was receivedmdashhe had been nervous all the morning, then there was an alteration. He had slipped out unseen and swaggered boldly in past the men hired to guard him. That was the time, when he was out. But nomdashhad he not cried out in terror as he entered his studymdashthis very room What had he found there Or waitmdash what had found him That simulacrum which brushed boldly in without having been seen to gomdashwas that an alien shadow and a horror forcing itself upon a trembling figure which had never gone out at all Had not the butler spoken of queer noises Willett rang for the man and asked him some low-toned questions. It had, surely enough, been a bad business. There had been noisesmdasha cry, a gasp, a choking, and a sort of clattering or creaking or thumping, or all of these. And Mr. Charles was not the same when he stalked out without a word. The butler shivered as he spoke, and sniffed at the heavy air that blew down from some open window upstairs. Terror had settled definitely upon the house, and only the business-like detectives failed to imbibe a full measure of it. Even they were restless, for this case had held vague elements in the background which pleased them not at all. Dr. Willett was thinking deeply and rapidly, and his thoughts were terrible ones. Now and then he would almost break into muttering as he ran over in his head a new, appalling, and increasingly conclusive chain of nightmare happenings. Then Mr. Ward made a sign that the conference was over, and everyone save him and the doctor left the room. It was noon now, but shadows as of coming night seemed to engulf the phantom-haunted mansion. Willett began talking very seriously to his host, and urged that he leave a great deal of the future investigation to him. There would be, he predicted, certain obnoxious elements which a friend could bear better than a relative. As family physician he must have a free hand, and the first thing he required was a period alone and undisturbed in the abandoned library upstairs, where the ancient overmantel had gathered about itself an aura of noisome horror more intense than when Joseph Curwenrsquos features themselves glanced slyly down from the painted panel. Mr. Ward, dazed by the flood of grotesque morbidities and unthinkably maddening suggestions that poured in upon him from every side, could only acquiesce and half an hour later the doctor was locked in the shunned room with the panelling from Olney Court. The father, listening outside, heard fumbling sounds of moving and rummaging as the moments passed and finally a wrench and a creak, as if a tight cupboard door were being opened. Then there was a muffled cry, a kind of snorting choke, and a hasty slamming of whatever had been opened. Almost at once the key rattled and Willett appeared in the hall, haggard and ghastly, and demanding wood for the real fireplace on the south wall of the room. The furnace was not enough, he said and the electric log had little practical use. Longing yet not daring to ask questions, Mr. Ward gave the requisite orders and a man brought some stout pine logs, shuddering as he entered the tainted air of the library to place them in the grate. Willett meanwhile had gone up to the dismantled laboratory and brought down a few odds and ends not included in the moving of the July before. They were in a covered basket, and Mr. Ward never saw what they were. Then the doctor locked himself in the library once more, and by the clouds of smoke which rolled down past the windows from the chimney it was known that he had lighted the fire. Later, after a great rustling of newspapers, that odd wrench and creaking were heard again followed by a thumping which none of the eavesdroppers liked. Thereafter two suppressed cries of Willettrsquos were heard, and hard upon these came a swishing rustle of indefinable hatefulness. Finally the smoke that the wind beat down from the chimney grew very dark and acrid, and everyone wished that the weather had spared them this choking and venomous inundation of peculiar fumes. Mr. Wardrsquos head reeled, and the servants all clustered together in a knot to watch the horrible black smoke swoop down. After an age of waiting the vapours seemed to lighten, and half-formless sounds of scraping, sweeping, and other minor operations were heard behind the bolted door. And at last, after the slamming of some cupboard within, Willett made his appearancemdashsad, pale, and haggard, and bearing the cloth-draped basket he had taken from the upstairs laboratory. He had left the window open, and into that once accursed room was pouring a wealth of pure, wholesome air to mix with a queer new smell of disinfectants. The ancient overmantel still lingered but it seemed robbed of malignity now, and rose as calm and stately in its white panelling as if it had never borne the picture of Joseph Curwen. Night was coming on, yet this time its shadows held no latent fright, but only a gentle melancholy. Of what he had done the doctor would never speak. To Mr. Ward he said, ldquoI can answer no questions, but I will say that there are different kinds of magic. I have made a great purgation, and those in this house will sleep the better for it. rdquo 7. That Dr. Willettrsquos ldquopurgationrdquo had been an ordeal almost as nerve-racking in its way as his hideous wandering in the vanished crypt is shewn by the fact that the elderly physician gave out completely as soon as he reached home that evening. For three days he rested constantly in his room, though servants later muttered something about having heard him after midnight on Wednesday, when the outer door softly opened and closed with phenomenal softness. Servantsrsquo imaginations, fortunately, are limited, else comment might have been excited by an item in Thursdayrsquos Evening Bulletin which ran as follows: North End Ghouls Active Again After a lull of ten months since the dastardly vandalism in the Weeden lot at the North Burial Ground, a nocturnal prowler was glimpsed early this morning in the same cemetery by Robert Hart, the night watchman. Happening to glance for a moment from his shelter at about 2 a. m. Hart observed the glow of a lantern or pocket torch not far to the northwest, and upon opening the door detected the figure of a man with a trowel very plainly silhouetted against a nearby electric light. At once starting in pursuit, he saw the figure dart hurriedly toward the main entrance, gaining the street and losing himself among the shadows before approach or capture was possible. Like the first of the ghouls active during the past year, this intruder had done no real damage before detection. A vacant part of the Ward lot shewed signs of a little superficial digging, but nothing even nearly the size of a grave had been attempted, and no previous grave had been disturbed. Hart, who cannot describe the prowler except as a small man probably having a full beard, inclines to the view that all three of the digging incidents have a common source but police from the Second Station think otherwise on account of the savage nature of 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 Sergt. Riley, that this third affair is of similar nature. Officers at the Second Station are taking especial pains to capture the gang of miscreants responsible for these repeated outrages. All day Thursday Dr. Willett rested as if recuperating from something past or nerving himself for something to come. In the evening he wrote a note to Mr. Ward, which was delivered the next morning and which caused the half-dazed parent to ponder long and deeply. Mr. Ward had not been able to go down to business since the shock of Monday with its baffling reports and its sinister ldquopurgationrdquo, but he found something calming about the doctorrsquos letter in spite of the despair it seemed to promise and the fresh mysteries it seemed to evoke. ldquo10 Barnes St., Providence, R. I., April 12, 1928. ldquoDear Theodore:mdashI 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 Irsquom afraid it wonrsquot set your mind at rest unless I expressly assure you how very conclusive it is. ldquoYou 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 Charlesrsquos 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 anyonersquos mind. He was mad, and he escaped. You can tell his mother gently and gradually about the mad part when you stop sending the typed notes in his name. Irsquod advise you to join her in Atlantic City and take a rest yourself. God knows you need one after this shock, as I do myself. I am going South for a while to calm down and brace up. ldquoSo donrsquot ask me any questions when I call. It may be that something will go wrong, but Irsquoll tell you if it does. I donrsquot think it will. There will be nothing more to worry about, for Charles will be very, very safe. He is nowmdashsafer 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 Curwenrsquos 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. ldquoBut you must steel yourself to melancholy, and prepare your wife to do the same. I must tell you frankly that Charlesrsquos escape will not mean his restoration to you. He has been afflicted with a peculiar disease, as you must realise from the subtle physical as well as mental changes in him, and you must not hope to see him again. Have only this consolationmdashthat he was never a fiend or even truly a madman, but only an eager, studious, and curious boy whose love of mystery and of the past was his undoing. He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back through the years as no one ever should reach and something came out of those years to engulf him. ldquoAnd now comes the matter in which I must ask you to trust me most of all. For there will be, indeed, no uncertainty about Charlesrsquos 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 fatherrsquos 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 sinewmdashof the real Charles Dexter Ward whose mind you watched from infancymdashthe 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 lsquosqueamishnessrsquo. ldquoThat 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. ldquoWith profoundest sympathy, and exhortations to fortitude, calmness, and resignation, I am ever Sincerely your friend, Marinus B. Willettrdquo So on the morning of Friday, April 13, 1928, Marinus Bicknell Willett visited the room of Charles Dexter Ward at Dr. Waitersquos private hospital on Conanicut Island. The youth, though making no attempt to evade his caller, was in a sullen mood and seemed disinclined to open the conversation which Willett obviously desired. The doctorrsquos discovery of the crypt and his monstrous experience therein had of course created a new source of embarrassment, so that both hesitated perceptibly after the interchange of a few strained formalities. Then a new element of constraint crept in, as Ward seemed to read behind the doctorrsquos mask-like face a terrible purpose which had never been there before. The patient quailed, conscious that since the last visit there had been a change whereby the solicitous family physician had given place to the ruthless and implacable avenger. Ward actually turned pale, and the doctor was the first to speak. ldquoMore, rdquo he said, ldquohas been found out, and I must warn you fairly that a reckoning is due. rdquo ldquoDigging again, and coming upon more poor starving petsrdquo was the ironic reply. It was evident that the youth meant to shew bravado to the last. ldquoNo, rdquo Willett slowly rejoined, ldquothis 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. rdquo ldquoExcellent, rdquo commented the disquieted host in an effort to be wittily insulting, ldquoand I trust they proved more becoming than the beard and glasses you now have onrdquo ldquoThey would become you very well, rdquo came the even and studied response, ldquoas indeed they seem to have done. rdquo 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: ldquoAnd is this what asks so hotly for a reckoning Suppose a man does find it now and then useful to be twofoldrdquo ldquoNo, rdquo said Willett gravely, ldquoagain 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. rdquo Ward now started violently. ldquoWell, Sir, what have ye found, and what drsquoye want with merdquo The doctor let a little time elapse before replying, as if choosing his words for an effective answer. ldquoI have found, rdquo he finally intoned, ldquosomething 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. rdquo The madman choked and sprang from the chair in which he had been sitting: ldquoDamn ye, who did ye tellmdashand whorsquoll believe it was he after these full two months, with me alive What drsquoye mean to dordquo Willett, though a small man, actually took on a kind of judicial majesty as he calmed the patient with a gesture. ldquoI have told no one. This is no common casemdashit is a madness out of time and a horror from beyond the spheres which no police or lawyers or courts or alienists could ever fathom or grapple with. Thank God some chance has left inside me the spark of imagination, that I might not go astray in thinking out this thing. You cannot deceive me, Joseph Curwen, for I know that your accursed magic is true ldquoI 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 worldrsquos tombs, and at what you planned afterward, and I know how you did it. ldquoYou 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 hadnrsquot reckoned on the different contents of two minds. You were a fool, Curwen, to fancy that a mere visual identity would be enough. Why didnrsquot you think of the speech and the voice and the handwriting It hasnrsquot 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, lsquodo not call up any that you can not put downrsquo. You were undone once before, perhaps in that very way, and it may be that your own evil magic will undo you all again. Curwen, a man canrsquot tamper with Nature beyond certain limits, and every horror you have woven will rise up to wipe you out. rdquo 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 doctorrsquos rescue, Joseph Curwen had recourse to his one ancient ally, and began a series of cabbalistic motions with his forefingers as his deep, hollow voice, now unconcealed by feigned hoarseness, bellowed out the opening words of a terrible formula. ldquoPER ADONAI ELOIM, ADONAI JEHOVA, ADONAI SABAOTH, METRATON. rdquo 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 eyemdashmagic for magicmdashlet 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 minusculesmdashthe cryptic invocation whose heading was the Dragonrsquos Tail, sign of the descending node mdash ldquoOGTHROD AIrsquoF GEBrsquoLmdashEErsquoH YOG-SOTHOTH lsquoNGAHrsquoNG AIrsquoY ZHROrdquo At the very first word from Willettrsquos mouth the previously commenced formula of the patient stopped short. Unable to speak, the monster made wild motions with his arms until they too were arrested. When the awful name of Yog-Sothoth was uttered, the hideous change began. It was not merely a dissolution, but rather a transformation or recapitulation and Willett shut his eyes lest he faint before the rest of the incantation could be pronounced. But he did not faint, and that man of unholy centuries and forbidden secrets never troubled the world again. The madness out of time had subsided, and the case of Charles Dexter Ward was closed. Opening his eyes before staggering out of that room of horror, Dr. Willett saw that what he had kept in memory had not been kept amiss. There had, as he had predicted, been no need for acids. For like his accursed picture a year before, Joseph Curwen now lay scattered on the floor as a thin coating of fine bluish-grey dustmand one of six types of giants and claim the right to rule over all giantkind in, Assault of the Giants - Available Now Work together with other players to force the undead back through the void in the new card game, The Banishing Pre-Order Today The Mind Flayer Trophy Plaque is sure to grab everyones attention (no mind control necessary). -- Pre-Order Today Marvel Dice Masters: Iron Man and War Machine reveals versions of Iron Mans armor NEVER BEFORE SEEN in Dice Masters Get it Now Play amazing games, win convention exclusive prizes, and support local game stores Events begin February 4, 2017 - Register for WKO Winter 2017 Today The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Dice Masters: Heroes in a Half Shell Box Set has even MORE of the turtle action youll love Available Now Decorate your castle, throne room or living quarters with this stunning recreation of the Dungeons Dragons Red Dragon -- Available Now The heroes, villains, and monsters from the Forgotten Realms are returning with DD Icons of the Realms: Monster Menagerie II - Available Now WizKids brings more dice-rolling fun to the tabletop with new release, Dice Stars -- Available Now Cast spells and compete against other wizards in an epic race for loot Rock Paper Wizard is an exciting party game for 3-6 players - Available Now Burkes Gambit Available Now Get Ready for A n Edge of Your Seat Thriller Set in Space Click This Banner to Learn More Blank White Dice, designed by Jonathan Leistiko, is a thrilling new take on dice games Available Now Score your official WizKids shirts, hoodies, merchandise and more Collect your heroes, build your teams and defeat your enemies in the many realms of the HeroClix world. In HeroClix you can be the hero youve dreamed of or the villain of your nightmares. With thousands of characters to choose from and maps of terrain from all over the universe, who knows where HeroClix will take you. Attack Wing is a fast-paced tactical combat miniatures game, featuring collectible figures based on the Star Trek Universe and the Dungeons Dragons Forgotten Realms. Utilizing the FlightPath maneuver system, command your army in epic combat customize your army with equipment, weapons, special abilities and more Dice Masters is a smash-hit cross-brand offering utilizing WizKids proprietary Dice Building Game platform where players collect and assemble their team of character dice and battle in head-to-head game play. As with Quarriors, the game that kicked off Dice Building Games, Michael Elliott and Eric M. Lang are leading the design work for what will certainly be on most peoples watch list. Hillside, NJ February 17, 2017 WizKids is pleased to announce the release of the Marvel Dice Masters: Iron Man and War Machine Starter Set at friendly local game stores in the U. S. Designed by Mike Elliott and Eric M. Lang, the Marvel Dice Masters: Iron Man and War Machine Starter Set expands on the hit dice-building game, Dice Masters, and is sure to lead to blazing dice battles on the tabletop. HILLSIDE, NJ February 16, 2017 The upcoming board game The Expanse, based on the Syfy hit television series by the same name, will be released this June as announced by WizKids president Justin Ziran. HILLSIDE, NJ February 15, 2017 WizKids, the industry leader in quality pre-painted plastic miniatures and publisher of premium tabletop games and accessories, is pleased to announce that the Assault of the Giants Board Game is now available throughout North America. NEW RELEASE Assault of the Giants Assault of the Giants is a new Dungeons amp Dragons board game designed by Andrew Parks that challenges players to command one of six types of giants and claim the right to rule over all giantkind. CURRENT EVENT Play Anywhere
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