The 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.'
- Borellus
I. A Result and a Prologe
1
From a private hospital for the insane near Providence,
Rhode Island, there recently disappeared an exceedingly singular person.
He bore the name of Charles Dexter Ward, and was placed under restraint
most reluctantly by the grieving father who had watched his aberration
grow from a mere eccentricity to a dark mania involving both a possibility
of murderous tendencies and a profound and peculiar change in the apparent
contents of his mind. Doctors confess themselves quite baffled by his case,
since it presented oddities of a general physiological as well as psychological
character.
In the first place, the patient seemed oddly older than
his twenty-six years would warrant. Mental disturbance, it is true, will
age one rapidly; but the face of this young man had taken on a subtle cast
which only the very aged normally acquire. In the second place, his organic
processes shewed a certain queerness of proportion which nothing in medical
experience can parallel. Respiration and heart action had a baffling
lack of symmetry; the voice was lost, so that no sounds above a whisper
were possible; digestion was incredibly prolonged and minimised, and neural
reactions to standard stimuli bore no relation at all to anything heretofore
recorded, either normal or pathological. The skin had a morbid chill and
dryness, and the cellular structure of the tissue seemed exaggeratedly
coarse and loosely knit. Even a large olive birthmark on the right hip
had disappeared, whilst there had formed on the chest a very peculiar mole
or blackish spot of which no trace existed before. In general, all physicians
agree that in Ward the processes of metabolism had become retarded to a
degree beyond precedent.
Psychologically, too, Charles Ward was unique. His madness
held no affinity to any sort recorded in even the latest and most exhaustive
of treatises, and was conjoined to a mental force which would have made
him a genius or a leader had it not been twisted into strange and grotesque
forms. Dr. Willett, who was Ward's family physician, affirms that the patient's
gross mental
capacity, as gauged by his response to matters outside
the sphere of his insanity, had actually increased since the seizure. Ward,
it is true, was always a scholar and an antiquarian; but even his most
brilliant early work did not shew the prodigious grasp and insight displayed
during his last examinations by the alienists. It was, indeed, a difficult
matter to obtain a legal commitment to
the hospital, so powerful and lucid did the youth's mind
seem; and only on the evidence of others, and on the strength of many abnormal
gaps in his stock of information as distinguished from his intelligence,
was he finally placed in confinement. To the very moment of his vanishment
he was an omnivorous reader and as great a conversationalist as his poor
voice permitted; and
shrewd observers, failing to foresee his escape, freely
predicted that he would not be long in gaining his discharge from custody.
Only Dr. Willett, who brought Charles Ward into the world
and had watched his growth of body and mind ever since, seemed frightened
at the thought of his future freedom. He had had a terrible experience
and had made a terrible discovery which he dared not reveal to his sceptical
colleagues. Willett, indeed, presents a minor mystery all his own in his
connexion with the case. He was the last to see the patient before his
flight, and emerged from that final conversation in a state of mixed horror
and relief which several recalled when Ward's escape became known three
hours later. That escape itself is one of the unsolved wonders of Dr. Waite's
hospital. A window open above a sheer drop of sixty feet could hardly explain
it, yet after that talk with Willett the
youth was undeniably gone. Willett himself has no public
explanations to offer, though he seems strangely easier in mind than before
the escape. Many, indeed, feel that he would like to say more if he thought
any considerable number would believe him. He had found Ward in his room,
but shortly after his departure the attendants knocked in vain. When they
opened the door the
patient was not there, and all they found was the open
window with a chill April breeze blowing in a cloud of fine bluish-grey
dust that almost choked them. True, the dogs howled some time before; but
that was while Willett was still present, and they had caught nothing and
shewn no disturbance later on. Ward's father was told at once over the
telephone, but he seemed more
saddened than surprised. By the time Dr. Waite called
in person, Dr. Willett had been talking with him, and both disavowed any
knowledge or complicity in the escape. Only from certain closely confidential
friends of Willett and the senior Ward have any clues been gained, and
even these are too wildly fantastic for general credence. The one fact
which remains is that up to the
present time no trace of the missing madman has been
unearthed.
Charles Ward was an antiquarian from infancy, no doubt
gaining his taste from the venerable town around him, and from the relics
of the past which filled every corner of his parents' old mansion in Prospect
Street on the crest of the hill. With the years his devotion to ancient
things increased; so that history, genealogy, and the study of colonial
architecture, furniture, and
craftsmanship at length crowded everything else from
his sphere of interests. These tastes are important to remember in considering
his madness; for although they do not form its absolute nucleus, they play
a prominent part in its superficial form. The gaps of information which
the alienists noticed were all related to modern matters, and were invariably
offset by a correspondingly
excessive though outwardly concealed knowledge of bygone
matters as brought out by adroit questioning; so that one would have fancied
the patient literally transferred to a former age through some obscure
sort of auto-hypnosis. The odd thing was that Ward seemed no longer interested
in the antiquities he knew so well. He had, it appears, lost his regard
for them through sheer familiarity; and all his final efforts were obviously
bent toward mastering those common facts of the modern world which had
been so totally and unmistakably expunged from his brain. That this wholesale
deletion had occurred, he did his best to hide; but it was clear to all
who watched him that his whole programme of reading and conversation was
determined by a frantic wish to imbibe such knowledge of his own life and
of the ordinary practical and cultural background of the twentieth century
as ought to have been his by virtue of his birth in 1902 and his education
in the schools of our own time. Alienists are now wondering how, in view
of his vitally impaired range of data, the escaped patient manages to cope
with the complicated world of today; the
dominant opinion being that he is "lying low" in some
humble and unexacting position till his stock of modern information can
be brought up to the normal.
The beginning of Ward's madness is a matter of dispute
among alienists. Dr. Lyman, the eminent Boston authority, places it in
1919 or 1920, during the boy's last year at the Moses Brown School, when
he suddenly turned from the study of the past to the study of the occult,
and refused to qualify for college on the ground that he had individual
researches of much greater
importance to make. This is certainly borne out by Ward's
altered habits at the time, especially by his continual search through
town records and among old burying-grounds for a certain grave dug in 1771;
the grave of an ancestor named Joseph Curwen, some of whose papers he professed
to have found behind the panelling of a very old house in Olney Court,
on Stampers' Hill,
which Curwen was known to have built and occupied. It
is, broadly speaking, undeniable that the winter of 1919-20 saw a great
change in Ward; whereby he abruptly stopped his general antiquarian pursuits
and embarked on a desperate delving into occult subjects both at home and
abroad, varied only by this strangely persistent search for his forefather's
grave.
From this opinion, however, Dr. Willett substantially
dissents; basing his verdict on his close and continuous knowledge of the
patient, and on certain frightful investigations and discoveries which
he made toward the last. Those investigations and discoveries have left
their mark upon him; so that his voice trembles when he tells them, and
his hand trembles when he tries to write of
them. Willett admits that the change of 1919-20 would
ordinarily appear to mark the beginning of a progressive decadence which
culminated in the horrible and uncanny alienation of 1928; but believes
from personal observation that a finer distinction must be made. Granting
freely that the boy was always ill-balanced temperamentally, and prone
to be unduly susceptible and enthusiastic in his responses to phenomena
around him, he refuses to concede that the early alteration marked the
actual passage from sanity to madness; crediting instead Ward's own statement
that he had discovered or rediscovered something whose effect on human
though was likely to be marvellous and profound. The true madness, he is
certain, came with a later change; after the Curwen portrait and the ancient
papers had been unearthed; after a trip to strange foreign places had been
made, and some terrible invocations chanted under strange and secret circumstances;
after certain answers to these invocations had been plainly indicated,
and a frantic letter penned under agonising and inexplicable conditions;
after the wave of vampirism and the ominous Pawtuxet gossip; and after
the patient's memory commenced to exclude contemporary images whilst his
physical aspect underwent the subtle modification so many subsequently
noticed.
It was only about this time, Willett points out with much
acuteness, that the nightmare qualities became indubitably linked with
Ward; and the doctor feels shudderingly sure that enough solid evidence
exists to sustain the youth's claim regarding his crucial discovery. In
the first place, two workmen of high intelligence saw Joseph Curwen's ancient
papers found. Secondly, the boy
once shewed Dr. Willett those papers and a page of the
Curwen diary, and each of the documents had every appearance of genuineness.
The hole where Ward claimed to have found them was long a visible reality,
and Willett had a very convincing final glimpse of them in surroundings
which can scarcely be believed and can never perhaps be proved. Then there
were the mysteries
and coincidences of the Orne and Hutchinson letters,
and the problem of the Curwen penmanship and of what the detectives brought
to light about Dr. Allen; these things, and the terrible message in mediaeval
minuscules found in Willett's pocket when he gained consciousness after
his shocking experience.
And most conclusive of all, there are the two hideous
results which the doctor obtained from a certain pair of formulae during
his final investigations; results which virtually proved the authenticity
of the papers and of their monstrous implications at the same time that
those papers were borne forever from human knowledge.
2
One must look back at Charles Ward's earlier life as at
something belonging as much to the past as the antiquities he loved so
keenly. In the autumn of 1918, and with a considerable show of zest in
the military training of the period, he had begun his junior year at the
Moses Brown School, which lies very near his home. The old main building,
erected in 1819, had always charmed
his youthful antiquarian sense; and the spacious park
in which the academy is set appealed to his sharp eye for landscape. His
social activities were few; and his hours were spent mainly at home, in
rambling walks, in his classes and drills, and in pursuit of antiquarian
and genealogical data at the City Hall, the State House, the Public Library,
the Athenaeum, the Historical Society,
the John Carter Brown and John Hay Libraries of Brown
University, and the newly opened Shepley Library in Benefit Street. One
may picture him yet as he was in those days; tall, slim, and blond, with
studious eyes and a slight droop, dressed somewhat carelessly, and giving
a dominant impression of harmless awkwardness rather than attractiveness.
His walks were always adventures in antiquity, during
which he managed to recapture from the myriad relics of a glamorous old
city a vivid and connected picture of the centuries before. His home was
a great Georgian mansion atop the well-nigh precipitous hill that rises
just east of the river; and from the rear windows of its rambling wings
he could look dizzily out over all the
clustered spires, domes, roofs, and skyscraper summits
of the lower town to the purple hills of the countryside beyond. Here he
was born, and from the lovely classic porch of the double-bayed brick facade
his nurse had first wheeled him in his carriage; past the little white
farmhouse of two hundred years before that the town had long ago overtaken,
and on toward the stately
colleges along the shady, sumptuous street, whose old
square brick mansions and smaller wooden houses with narrow, heavy-columned
Doric porches dreamed solid and exclusive amidst their generous yards and
gardens.
He had been wheeled, too, along sleepy Congdon Street,
one tier lower down on the steep hill, and with all its eastern homes on
high terraces. The small wooden houses averaged a greater age here, for
it was up this hill that the growing town had climbed; and in these rides
he had imbibed something of the colour of a quaint colonial village. The
nurse used to stop and sit on the
benches of Prospect Terrace to chat with policemen; and
one of the child's first memories was of the great westward sea of hazy
roofs and domes and steeples and far hills which he saw one winter afternoon
from that great railed embankment, and violet and mystic against a fevered,
apocalyptic sunset of reds and golds and purples and curious greens. The
vast marble dome of the
State House stood out in massive silhouette, its crowning
statue haloed fantastically by a break in one of the tinted stratus clouds
that barred the flaming sky.
When he was larger his famous walks began; first with
his impatiently dragged nurse, and then alone in dreamy meditation. Farther
and farther down that almost perpendicular hill he would venture, each
time reaching older and quainter levels of the ancient city. He would hesitate
gingerly down vertical Jenckes Street with its bank walls and colonial
gables to the shady Benefit
Street corner, where before him was a wooden antique
with an Ionic-pilastered pair of doorways, and beside him a prehistoric
gambrel-roofer with a bit of primal farmyard remaining, and the great Judge
Durfee house with its fallen vestiges of Georgian grandeur. It was getting
to be a slum here; but the titan elms cast a restoring shadow over the
place, and the boy used to stroll south past the long lines of the pre-Revolutionary
homes with their great central chimneys and classic portals. On the eastern
side they were set high over basements with railed double flights of stone
steps, and the young Charles could picture them as they were when the street
was new, and red heels and periwigs set off the painted pediments whose
signs of wear were now becoming so visible.
Westward the hill dropped almost as steeply as above,
down to the old "Town Street" that the founders had laid out at the river's
edge in 1636. Here ran innumerable little lanes with leaning, huddled houses
of immense antiquity; and fascinated though he was, it was long before
he dared to thread their archaic verticality for fear they would turn out
a dream or a gateway to unknown terrors. He found it much less formidable
to continue along Benefit Street past the iron fence of St. John's hidden
churchyard and the rear of the 1761 Colony House and the mouldering bulk
of the Golden Ball Inn where Washington stopped. At Meeting Street - the
successive Gaol Lane and King Street of other periods - he would look upward
to the east and see the arched flight of steps to which the highway had
to resort in climbing the slope, and downward to the west, glimpsing the
old brick colonial schoolhouse that smiles across the road at the ancient
Sign of Shakespeare's Head where the Providence Gazette and Country-Journal
was printed before the Revolution. Then came the exquisite First Baptist
Church of 1775, luxurious with its matchless Gibbs steeple, and the Georgian
roofs and cupolas hovering by. Here and to the southward the neighbourhood
became better, flowering at last into a marvellous group of early mansions;
but still the little ancient lanes led off down the precipice to the west,
spectral in their many-gabled archaism and dipping to a riot of iridescent
decay where the wicked old water-front recalls its proud East India days
amidst polyglot vice and squalor, rotting wharves, and blear-eyed ship-chandleries,
with such surviving alley names as Packet, Bullion, Gold, Silver, Coin,
Doubloon, Sovereign, Guilder, Dollar, Dime, and Cent.
Sometimes, as he grew taller and more adventurous, young
Ward would venture down into this maelstrom of tottering houses, broken
transoms, tumbling steps, twisted balustrades, swarthy faces, and nameless
odours; winding from South Main to South Water, searching out the docks
where the bay and sound steamers still touched, and returning northward
at this lower level past the steep-roofed 1816 warehouses and the broad
square at the Great Bridge, where the 1773 Market House still stands firm
on its ancient arches. In that square he would pause to drink in the bewildering
beauty of the old town as it rises on its eastward bluff, decked with its
two Georgian spires and crowned by the vast new Christian Science dome
as London is crowned by St. Paul's. He like mostly to reach this point
in the late afternoon, when the slanting sunlight touches the Market House
and the ancient hill roofs and belfries with gold, and throws magic around
the dreaming wharves where Providence Indiamen used to ride at anchor.
After a long look he would grow almost dizzy with a poet's love for the
sight, and then he would scale the slope
homeward in the dusk past the old white church and up
the narrow precipitous ways where yellow gleams would begin to peep out
in small-paned windows and through fanlights set high over double flights
of steps with curious wrought-iron railings.
At other times, and in later years, he would seek for
vivid contrasts; spending half a walk in the crumbling colonial regions
northwest of his home, where the hill drops to the lower eminence of Stampers'
Hill with its ghetto and negro quarter clustering round the place where
the Boston stage coach used to start before the Revolution, and the other
half in the gracious southerly realm about George, Benevolent, Power, and
Williams Streets, where the old slope holds unchanged the fine estates
and bits of walled garden and steep green lane in which so many fragrant
memories linger. These rambles, together with the diligent studies which
accompanied them, certainly account for a large amount of the antiquarian
lore which at last crowded the modern world from Charles Ward's mind; and
illustrate the mental soil upon which fell, in that fateful winter of 1919-20,
the seeds that came to such strange and terrible fruition.
Dr. Willett is certain that, up to this ill-omened winter
of first change, Charles Ward's antiquarianism was free from every trace
of the morbid. Graveyards held for him no particular attraction beyond
their quaintness and historic value, and of anything like violence or savage
instinct he was utterly devoid. Then, by insidious degrees, there appeared
to develop a curious sequel to one of his genealogical triumphs of the
year before; when he had discovered among his maternal ancestors a certain
very long-lived man named Joseph Curwen, who had come from Salem in March
of 1692, and about whom a whispered series of highly peculiar and disquieting
stories clustered.
Ward's great-great-grandfather Welcome Potter had in 1785
married a certain 'Ann Tillinghast, daughter of Mrs. Eliza, daughter to
Capt. James Tillinghast,' of whose paternity the family had preserved no
trace. Late in 1918, whilst examining a volume of original town records
in manuscript, the young genealogist encountered an entry describing a
legal change of name, by which in 1772 a Mrs. Eliza Curwen, widow of Joseph
Curwen, resumed, along with her seven-year-old daughter Ann, her maiden
name of Tillinghast; on the ground 'that her Husband's name was become
a public Reproach by Reason of what was knowne after his Decease; the which
confirming an antient common Rumour, tho' not to be credited by a loyall
Wife till so proven as to be wholely past Doubting.'
This entry came to light upon the accidental separation
of two leaves which had been carefully pasted together and treated as one
by a laboured revision of the page numbers.
It was at once clear to Charles Ward that he had indeed
discovered a hitherto unknown great-great-great-grandfather. The discovery
doubly excited him because he had already heard vague reports and seen
scattered allusions relating to this person; about whom there remained
so few publicly available records, aside from those becoming public only
in modern times, that it almost seemed as if a conspiracy had existed to
blot him from memory. What did appear, moreover, was of such a singular
and provocative nature that one could not fail to imagine curiously what
it was that the colonial recorders were so anxious to conceal and forget;
or to suspect that the deletion had reasons all too valid.
Before this, Ward had been content to let his romancing
about old Joseph Curwen remain in the idle stage; but having discovered
his own relationship to this apparently "hushed-up" character, he proceeded
to hunt out as systematically as possible whatever he might find concerning
him. In this excited quest he eventually succeeded beyond his highest expectations;
for old letters, diaries, and sheaves of unpublished memoirs in cobwebbed
Providence garrets and elsewhere yielded many illuminating passages which
their writers had not thought it worth their while to destroy. One important
sidelight came from a point as remote as New York, where some Rhode Island
colonial correspondence was stored in the Museum at Fraunces' Tavern. The
really crucial thing, though, and what in Dr, Willett's opinion formed
the definite source of Ward's undoing, was the matter found in August 1919
behind the panelling of the crumbling house in Olney Court. It was that,
beyond a doubt, which opened up those black vistas whose end was deeper
than the pit.
