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 Curwen's 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 youth's madness
from any period before the close of 1919. He talked freely with his family
- though his mother was not particularly pleased to own an ancestor like
Curwen - and 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 the 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 Curwen's
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 ebruary (O.S.)
1662-3; 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.
Curwen's 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
Orne's 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 the strange characters
were available at teh 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: 'fortie Witches and the
Blacke Man were wont to meete in the Woodes behind Mr. Hutchinson's house',
and one Amity How declared at a session of August 8th before Judge Gedney
that:'Mr. G. B. (Rev. George Burroughs) on that Nighte putt ye Divell his
Marke upon Bridget S., Jonathan A., Simon O., Deliverance W., Joseph C.,
Susan P., Mehitable C., and Deborah B.'
Then there was a catalogue of Hutchinson's 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 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 Curwen's.
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 "Simon", but a line (whether drawn by Curwen or Orne Ward could not
tell) is run through the word.
Providence, 1. May
Brother:-
My honour'd Antient Friende, due Respects and earnest
Wishes to Him whom we serue for yr eternall Power. I am just come upon
That which you ought to knowe, concern'g the Matter of the Laste Extremitie
and what to doe regard'g yt. I am not dispos'd to followe you in go'g Away
on acct. of my Yeares, for Prouidence hath not ye Sharpeness of ye Bay
in hunt'g oute uncommon Things and bringinge to Tryall. I am ty'd up in
Shippes and Goodes, and cou'd not doe as you did, besides the Whiche my
Farme at Patuxet hath under it What you Knowe, and wou'd not waite for
my com'g Backe as an Other.
But I am unreadie for harde Fortunes, as I haue tolde
you, and haue longe work'd upon ye Way of get'g Backe after ye Laste. I
laste Night strucke on ye Wordes that bringe up YOGGE-SOTHOTHE, and sawe
for ye first Time that Face spoke of by Ibn Schacabao in ye ------. And
IT said, that ye III Psalme in ye Liber-Damnatus holdes ye Clauicle. With
Sunne in V House, Saturne
in Trine, drawe ye Pentagram of Fire, and saye ye ninth
Uerse thrice. This Uerse repeate eache Roodemas and Hallow's Eue; and ye
Thing will breede in ye Outside Spheres.
And of ye Seede of Olde shal One be borne who shal looke
Backe, tho' know'g not what he seekes.
Yett will this auaile 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 haue not taken needed Stepps nor founde Much. Ye
Process is plaguy harde to come neare; and it used up such a Store of Specimens,
I am harde putte to it to get Enough, notwithstand'g the Sailors I haue
from ye Indies. Ye People
aboute are become curious, but I can stande them off.
Ye Gentry are worse that the Populace, be'g more Circumstantiall in their
Accts. and more belieu'd in what they tell. That Parson and Mr. Merritt
haue talk'd Some, I am fearfull, but no Thing soe far is Dangerous. Ye
Chymical Substances are easie of get'g, there be'g II. goode Chymists in
Towne, Dr, Bowen and Sam: Carew. I
am foll'g oute what Borellus saith, and haue Helpe in
Abdool Al-Hazred his VII. Booke. Whateuer I gette, you shal haue. And in
ye meane while, do not neglect to make use of ye Wordes I haue here giuen.
I haue them Righte, but if you Desire to see HIM, imploy the Writings on
ye Piece of ------ that I am putt'g in this Packet. Saye ye Uerses euery
Roodmas and Hallow's Eue;
and if ye Line runn out not, one shal 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 haue a goode Stallion, and am think'g of get'g a Coach,
there be'g one (Mr. Merritt's) in Prouidence already, tho' ye Roades are
bad. If you are dispos'd to Trauel, doe not pass me bye. From Boston take
ye Post Rd. thro' Dedham, Wrentham, and Attleborough, goode Tauerns be'g
at all these Townes. Stop
at Mr. Balcom's in Wrentham, where ye Beddes are finer
than Mr. Hatch's, but eate at ye other House for their Cooke is better.
Turne into Prou. by Patucket Falls, and ye Rd. past Mr. Sayles's Tauern.
My House opp. Mr. Epenetus Olney's Tauern off ye Towne Street, Ist on ye
N. side of Olney's Court. Distance from Boston Stone abt. XLIV Miles.
Sir, I am ye olde and true Friend and Serut. in Almonsin-Metraton.
Josephus C.
To Mr. Simon Orne, William's-Lane, in Salem.
This letter, oddly enough, was what first gave Ward the
exact location of Curwen's 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 Stampers' Hill. The place
was indeed only a few squares from his own home on the great hill's 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 curiousity that the
Biblical passage referred to - Job 14,14 - was the familiar verse, 'If
a man die, shall he live again? All the days of my appointed time will
I wait, until my change come.'
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 most 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 been, 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 the 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 grasp
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 great 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. Ward's 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 affairs
- a cotton manufacturer with extensive mills at Riverpoint in the Pawtuxet
Valley - and 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 house
- a small rodent-featured person with a guttural accent - and obtained
the whole mantel and overmantel bearing the picture at a curtly fixed price
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 Charles's 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 company's motor truck. There was left
a space of exposed brickwork marking the chimney's 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 'Journall and
Notes of Jos: Curwen, Gent. of Prouidence-Plantations, Late of Salem.'
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 Curwen's
handwriting, and one of
them seemed especially portentous because of its inscription:
'To Him Who Shal Come After, & How He May Gett Beyonde Time & Ye
Spheres.'
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:'Edw: Hutchinson, Armiger' and
Jedediah Orne, esq.', 'or Their Heir or Heirs, or Those Represent'g Them.'
The sixth and last was inscribed:
'Joseph Curwen his Life and Travells Bet'n ye yeares
1678 and 1687: Of Whither He Voyag'd, Where He Stay'd, Whom He Sawe, and
What He Learnt.'
3
We have now reached the point from which the more academic
school of alienists date Charles Ward's 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 Curwen's handwriting, 'mostly in cipher', 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 curiousity. 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
room's. 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 practised. Before servants he seldom hid any paper which he might by
studying, since he rightly assumed that Curwen's 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 'To Him Who
Shal Come After, etc.' 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 mother's 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 Ward's
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 older 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 startlingly - one almost fancied increasingly -
similar 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 Curwen's burial which
had escaped the general obliteration, and which stated that the curious
leaden coffin had been interred '10 ft. S. and 5 ft. W. of Naphthali Field's
grave in y-.' The lack of a specified burying-ground in the surviving entry
greatly complicated the search, and
Naphthali Field's 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 rambles - from which St. John's (the former King's) 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 thorough master of himself and in touch
with matters of real importance;
but it at least force 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 made 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 Curwen's mutilated headstone bore certain mystic symbols
- carved from directions in his will and ignorantly spared by those who
had effaced the name - which were absolutely essential to the final solution
of his cryptic system. Curwen, he believed, had wish 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 finds -
the 'Journall and Notes', the cipher (title in cipher also), and the formula-filled
message 'To Him Who Shal Come After' - and 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 Curwen's 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 writer's 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:
'Wedn. 16 Octr. 1754. My Sloope the Wakeful this Day putt
in from London with XX newe Men pick'd up in ye Indies, Spaniards from
Martineco and 2 Dutch Men from Surinam. Ye Dutch Men are like to Desert
from have'g hearde Somewhat ill of these Ventures, but I will see to ye
Inducing of them to Staye. For Mr. Knight Dexter of ye Bay 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. For Mr. Green at ye Elephant 50 Gallon Cyttles, 20 Warm'g
Pannes, 15 Bake Cyttles, 10 pr. Smoke'g Tonges. For Mr. Perrigo 1 Sett
of Awles. For Mr. Nightingale 50 Reames prime Foolscap. Say'd ye SABAOTH
thrice last Nighte but None appear'd. I must heare more from Mr. H. in
Transylvania, tho' it is Harde reach'g him and exceeding strange he can
not give me the Use of What he hath so well us'd these hundred Yeares.
Simon hath not writ these V. Weekes, but I expecte soon hear'g from Him.'
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 tenacious
in his memory. They ran: 'Ye Verse from Liber-Damnatus be'g spoke V Roodmasses
and IV
Hallows-Eves, I am Hopeful ye Thing is breed'g Outside
ye Spheres. It will drawe One who is to Come, if I can make sure he shal
Bee, and he shal think on Past Thinges and look back thro' all ye Yeares,
against ye Which I must have ready ye Saltes or That to make 'em with.'
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. Even after that he entertained the odd
fancy - which his medical skill of course assured him was only a fancy
- that the eyes of the portrait had a sort of wish, if not an actual tendency,
to follow young Charles
Ward as he move 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 Charles's 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 family's 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 to a strange mulatto who dwelt in a swamp and
about whom a newspaper hand 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 by 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 Bibliothèque 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 Ward's 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 host's 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 reply to his parents' 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 to Europe. His researches, he said, were such that he
could not leave his present quarters; while the situation of Baron Ferenczy's
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, and 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 to 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 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 may 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 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.
Lyman's assign to Ward's 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 concede. There was, he insists, something later; and
the queerness of the youth at this stage he attributes to the practice
of rituals learned abroad - odd 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 Dr. Willett displayed a balance which no madman
- even an incipient one - could feign continuously for long. What elicited
the notion of insanity at this period were the sounds heard at all hours
from Ward's 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 Ward's own voice, there
was something in the quality of that voice, and in the accents of the formulae
it pronounced, which could not by 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 picture's right
eye now remained to differentiate the long-dead wizard from the living
youth. These calls of Willett's, undertaken at the request of teh senior
Wards, were curious affairs. Ward at no time repulsed the doctor, but the
latter saw that he could never reach the young man's 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 Charles's 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 Ward's 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 inquires 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 Charles's 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 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 inviolable 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 o'clock, when Hart's
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 noise 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 hold 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 though the escaping truck
had headed up Rochambeau Avenue, though he could not be sure.
During the next few days Charles 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. Willett's
request. It ran as follows, and experts have told Dr. Willett that its
very close analogue can be found in the mystic writings of "Eliphas Levi",
that cryptic soul who crept through a crack in the forbidden door and glimpsed
the frightful vistas of the void beyond:
'Per Adonai Eloim, Adonai Jehova, Adonai Sabaoth, Metraton
On Agla Mathon, verbum pythonicum, mysterium salamandrae, conventus sylvorum,
antra gnomorum, daemonia Coeli God, Almonsin, Gibor, Jehosua, Evam, Zariatnatmik,
veni, veni, veni.'
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 non 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
Ward's 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 son's locked laboratory, shivered
as she recognised its hellish imports; for Charles had told of its evil
fame in dark books, and of the manner in which it had thundered, according
to the Fenner letter, above the
doomed Pawtuxet farmhouse on the night of Joseph Curwen's
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: 'DIES MIES JESCHET BOENE DOESEF DOUVEMA ENITEMAUS.'
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 'Yi nash Yog Sothoth he lgeb throdag' - ending in a 'Yah!'
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 Charles's door, from which the
sounds had been far stranger than ever before. Mounting the stairs at once,
he saw Mrs. Ward stretched out 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 youth's
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. Ward's cry had evidently
been heard by others than he, and there had come in response to it from
behind the locked door the first distinguishable words which that masked
and terrible colloquy had yielded. They were merely an excited caution
in Charles's own voice, but somehow their implications held a nameless
fright for the father who overheard them. The phrase was just this: 'Sshh!-write!'
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 Charles's 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. Charles's aspect
was very drawn and haggard, and he dropped his entire load with a start
at the sound of his father's voice. At the elder man's 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 great 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 youth's 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 Ward's 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 room's 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 blue-grey dust.
