 
                          '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 

                                          CHAPTER ONE 

                                      A Result and a Prologue 

                                                   

                                                 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. 
                                                                          

 
                                          CHAPTER TWO 

                                    An Antecedent and a Horror 

                                                   

                                                 1 

                          Joseph Curwen, as revealed by the rambling legends
                          embodied in what Ward heard and unearthed, was a very
                          astonishing, enigmatic, and obscurely horrible individual. He
                          had fled from Salem to Providence - that universal haven of
                          the odd, the free, and the dissenting - at the beginning of the
                          great witchcraft panic; being in fear of accusation because of
                          his solitary ways and queer chemical or alchemical
                          experiments. He was a colourless-looking man of about
                          thirty, and was soon found qualified to become a freeman of
                          Providence; thereafter buying a home lot just north of
                          Gregory Dexter's at about the foot of Olney Street. His house
                          was built on Stampers' Hill west of the Town Street, in what
                          later became Olney Court; and in 1761 he replaced this with
                          a larger one, on the same site, which is still standing.

                          Now the first odd thing about Joseph Curwen was that he did
                          not seem to grow much older than he had been on his arrival.
                          He engaged in shipping enterprises, purchased wharfage near
                          Mile-End Cove, helped rebuild the Great Bridge in 1713,
                          and in 1723 was one of the founders of the Congregational
                          Church on the hill; but always did he retain his nondescript
                          aspect of a man not greatly over thirty or thirty-five. As
                          decades mounted up, this singular quality began to excite
                          wide notice; but Curwen always explained it by saying that he
                          came of hardy forefathers, and practised a simplicity of living
                          which did not wear him our. How such simplicity could be
                          reconciled with the inexplicable comings and goings of the
                          secretive merchant, and with the queer gleaming of his
                          windows at all hours of night, was not very clear to the
                          townsfolk; and they were prone to assign other reasons for
                          his continued youth and longevity. It was held, for the most
                          part, that Curwen's incessant mixings and boilings of
                          chemicals had much to do with his condition. Gossip spoke
                          of the strange substances he brought from London and the
                          Indies on his ships or purchased in Newport, Boston, and
                          New York; and when old Dr. Jabez Bowen came from
                          Rehoboth and opened his apothecary shop across the Great
                          Bridge at the Sign of the Unicorn and Mortar, there was
                          ceaseless talk of the drugs, acids, and metals that the taciturn
                          recluse incessantly bought or ordered from him. Acting on the
                          assumption that Curwen possessed a wondrous and secret
                          medical skill, many sufferers of various sorts applied to him
                          for aid; but though he appeared to encourage their belief in a
                          non-committal way, and always gave them odd-coloured
                          potions in response to their requests, it was observed that his
                          ministrations to others seldom proved of benefit. At length,
                          when over fifty years had passed since the stranger's advent,
                          and without producing more than five years' apparent change
                          in his face and physique, the people began to whisper more
                          darkly; and to meet more than half way that desire for
                          isolation which he had always shewn.

                          Private letters and diaries of the period reveal, too, a
                          multitude of other reasons why Joseph Curwen was
                          marvelled at, feared, and finally shunned like a plague. His
                          passion for graveyards, in which he was glimpsed at all hours,
                          and under all conditions, was notorious; though no one had
                          witnessed any deed on his part which could actually be
                          termed ghoulish. On the Pawtuxet Road he had a farm, at
                          which he generally lived during the summer, and to which he
                          would frequently be seen riding at various odd times of the
                          day or night. Here his only visible servants, farmers, and
                          caretakers were a sullen pair of aged Narragansett Indians;
                          the husband dumb and curiously scarred, and the wife of a
                          very repulsive cast of countenance, probably due to a mixture
                          of negro blood. In the lead-to of this house was the
                          laboratory where most of the chemical experiments were
                          conducted. Curious porters and teamers who delivered
                          bottles, bags, or boxes at the small read door would
                          exchange accounts of the fantastic flasks, crucibles, alembics,
                          and furnaces they saw in the low shelved room; and
                          prophesied in whispers that the close-mouthed "chymist" - by
                          which they meant alchemist - would not be long in finding the
                          Philosopher's Stone. The nearest neighbours to this farm - the
                          Fenners, a quarter of a mile away - had still queerer things to
                          tell of certain sounds which they insisted came from the
                          Curwen place in the night. There were cries, they said, and
                          sustained howlings; and they did not like the large numbers of
                          livestock which thronged the pastures, for no such amount
                          was needed to keep a lone old man and a very few servants
                          in meat, milk, and wool. The identity of the stock seemed to
                          change from week to week as new droves were purchased
                          from the Kingstown farmers. Then, too, there was something
                          very obnoxious about a certain great stone outbuilding with
                          only high narrow slits for windows.

                          Great Bridge idlers likewise had much to say of Curwen's
                          town house in Olney Court; not so much the fine new one
                          built in 1761, when the man must have been nearly a century
                          old, but the first low gambrel-roofed one with the windowless
                          attic and shingled sides, whose timbers he took the peculiar
                          precaution of burning after its demolition. Here there was less
                          mystery, it is true; but the hours at which lights were seen, the
                          secretiveness of the two swarthy foreigners who comprised
                          the only menservants, the hideous indistinct mumbling of the
                          incredibly aged French housekeeper, the large amounts of
                          food seen to enter a door within which only four persons
                          lived, and the quality of certain voices often heard in muffled
                          conversation at highly unseasonable times, all combined with
                          what was known of the Pawtuxet farm to give the place a
                          bad name.

                          In choicer circles, too, the Curwen home was by no means
                          undiscussed; for as the newcomer had gradually worked into
                          the church and trading life of the town, he had naturally made
                          acquaintances of the better sort, whose company and
                          conversation he was well fitted by education to enjoy. His
                          birth was known to be good, since the Curwens or Corwins
                          of Salem needed no introduction in New England. It
                          developed that Joseph Curwen had travelled much in very
                          early life, living for a time in England and making at least two
                          voyages to the Orient; and his speech, when he deigned to
                          use it, was that of a learned and cultivated Englishman. But
                          for some reason or other Curwen did not care for society.
                          Whilst never actually rebuffing a visitor, he always reared
                          such a wall of reserve that few could think of anything to say
                          to him which would not sound inane.

                          There seemed to lurk in his bearing some cryptic, sardonic
                          arrogance, as if he had come to find all human beings dull
                          though having moved among stranger and more potent
                          entities. When Dr. Checkley the famous wit came from
                          Boston in 1738 to be rector of King's Church, he did not
                          neglect calling on one of whom he soon heard so much; but
                          left in a very short while because of some sinister
                          undercurrent he detected in his host's discourse. 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. Checkley's 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 host's 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.
                          Merritt's 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. This 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 Mesnard's edition, the
                          Turba Philosophorum, Geber's Liber Investigationis, and
                          Artephius's Key of Wisdom all were there; with the
                          cabbalistic Zohar, Peter Jammy's set of Albertus Magnus,
                          Raymond Lully's Ars Magna et Ultima in Zetsner's edition,
                          Roger Bacon's Thesaurus Chemicus, Fludd's Clavis
                          Alchimiae, and Trithemius's 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
                          Massachussetts-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 downwards a badly worn copy
                          of Borellus, bearing many cryptical marginalia and
                          interlineations in Curwen's 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: 

                            

                          '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.' 

                            

                          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. Curwen's 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
                          of 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.

                          By 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 merchant's worldly affairs were prospering.
                          He had a virtual monopoly of the town's 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 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 one - still
                          standing at the head of its parade in the old main street - was
                          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 "causey" 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. Cotton's
                          hill church in 1743 and founded Deacon Snow's 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 person - save one
                          embittered youth, perhaps - to 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. Judgement 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 or 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 them - a 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 tongue's 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 Power's
                          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 Jackson's
                          school opposite the Court-House Parade; and had been
                          diligently instructed by her mother, before the latter's 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 mother's 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 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: 

                            

                          'Monday 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.' 

                            

                          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 torn 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 ship's 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, Curwen's only child Ann was
                          born; and was christened by the Rev. John Graves of King's
                          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 discover of the widow's 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, as 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 Shakespeare's Head. In politics he ardently
                          supported Governor Hopkins against the Ward party whose
                          prime strength was in Newport, and his really eloquent
                          speech at Hacher's 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 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 Curwen's 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; although 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 merchant's 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 Curwen's
                          affairs to a scrutiny such as they had never had before.

                          Many of the odd manoeuvres of the strange merchant's
                          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 Majesty's 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 five 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. Curwen's 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 absence; 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 Weeden's later burning of his
                          notebooks. All that can be told of their discoveries is what
                          Eleazar Smith jotted down in a non too coherent diary, and
                          what other diarists and letter-writers have timidly repeated
                          from the statements which they finally made - and 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 conversations 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 Prince's massacre at
                          Limoges in 1370, as if there were some hidden reason which
                          he ought to know. Curwen asked the prisoner - if prisoner he
                          were - whether 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 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 was 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 Hacher's Hall, when a man from
                          Germantown, Pennsylvania, had given a clever mechanical
                          spectacle advertised as 

                          'A View 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 Suffering 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.' 

                          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 a
                          locality where old Indian bury-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
                          Majesty's armed schooner Cygnet, under Capt. Charles
                          Leslie, captured after a short pursuit one early morning the
                          scow 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 "Sailor A. B.
                          C.", 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 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
                          Robinson's 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 teh 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 placed 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 in 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
                          waters below, or the way that another half cried out although
                          its condition had greatly departed from that of objects which
                          normally cried out. That rumour sent Smith - for Weeden was
                          just then at sea - in haste to the river-bank behind the farm;
                          where surely enough there remained the evidence 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 success - or 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 Sabin's 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 son 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 Curwen's 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 Weeden's tale, there was not one who did not think it
                          necessary to take some sort of secret and coördinated 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. Weeden's 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. Whipple's 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
                          King's 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 moon-light 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 Turk's 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 Abbott's 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
                          identity - and 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 body's likeness to the long-dead blacksmith Daniel
                          Green, whose great-grandson Aaron Hoppin was a
                          supercargo in Curwen's 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
                          Herrenden's 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 Curwen's mail, and shortly before the
                          incident of the naked body there was found a letter from one
                          Jedediah Orne of Salem which made the coöperating 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. 

                          I delight that you continue in ye Gett'g at Olde Matters in your Way,
                          and doe not think better was done at Mr. Hutchinson's in
                          Salem-Village. Certainely, there was Noth'g but ye liveliest Awfulness
                          in that which H. rais'd upp from What he cou'd gather onlie a part of.
                          What you sente, did not Worke, whether because of Any Thing
                          miss'g, or because ye Wordes were not Righte from my Speak'g or yr
                          Copy'g. I alone am at a Loss. I have not ye Chymicall art to followe
                          Borellus, and owne my Self confounded by ye VII. Booke of ye
                          Necronomicon that you recommende. But I wou'd have you Observe
                          what was told to us aboute tak'g Care whom to calle upp, for you are
                          Sensible what Mr. Mather writ in ye Magnalia of ------, 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 shal not wish to Answer, and shal commande
                          more than you. I was frighted when I read of your know'g 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 ye Black Man learnt from Sylvanus
                          Cocidius in ye Vault, under ye Roman Wall, and will be oblig'd for ye
                          lend'g of ye MS. you speak of.

                          Another and unsigned letter from Philadelphia provoked
                          equal thought, especially for the following passage: 

                          I will observe what you say respecting the sending of Accounts only
                          by yr 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. Peter's, St. Paul's, St. Mary's
                          or Christ Church) it can scarce be done at all. But I know what
                          Imperfections were in the one I rais'd up October last, and how many
                          live Specimens you were forc'd 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 yr Brig, and inquire daily at Mr. Biddle's Wharf.

                          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 Weeden's disclosures. Slowly and surely a plan of
                          campaign was under development which would leave no
                          trace of Joseph Curwen's 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 town's 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
                          Curwen's 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 skipper,
                          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 Thurston's 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 Snow's 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 more 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 wait and capture 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. Whipple's 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
                          whistle's 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. Whipple's
                          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 party's
                          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 teh 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 night's 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 Smith's 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 'Waaaahrrrrr-R'waaahrrr.'

                          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
                          Fenner's 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 the 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. S 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: Almighty, protect thy lamb!
                          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, Luke's brother,
                          exclaimed that he saw "a red fog" 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 an intolerable stench that only the strong
                          freshness of the sea could have prevented its being notice by
                          the shore party or by any wakeful souls in the 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: 'DEESMEES JESHET BONE DOSEFE
                          DUVEMA ENITEMOSS.' 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 magic's incantations.

                          An unmistakable 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
                          throats - a 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 he husband's
                          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 Curwen's end, and
                          Charles Ward had only a single hint wherewith to construct a
                          theory. This hint was the merest thread - a shaky
                          underscoring of a passage in Jedediah Orne's confiscated
                          letter to Curwen, as partly copied in Ezra Weeden's
                          handwriting. The copy was found in the possession of Smith's
                          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: 

                          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 shal not wish to Answer, and shal
                          commande more than you.

                          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 he daughter and granddaughter change their name, burn
                          the library and all remaining papers, and chisel the inscription
                          from the slate slab above Joseph Curwen's grave. He knew
                          Capt. Whipple well, and probably extracted more hints from
                          that bluff mariner and anyone else ever gained repecting the
                          end of the accursed sorcerer.

                          From that time on the obliteration of Curwen's 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
                          Wilde's name for a decade after his disgrace, and in extent
                          only to the fate of that sinful King of Runazar in Lord
                          Dunsany's 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
                          Power's 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, "Pox on that ------, but he
                          had no business to laugh while he screamed. 'Twas as though
                          the damn'd ------ had some'at up his sleeve. For half a crown
                          I'd burn his ------ home." 
                                                                          

 
                                          CHAPTER THREE 

                                     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 February (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. 
                                                                          

 

                                          CHAPTER FOUR 

                                     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 'must have it red for three months', 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 despair's
                          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. This 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 heart 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: 'I will not,' he says, 'state 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
                          now - I don't like to think. A change came, and I'm content
                          to believe that the old Charles Ward died with it. His soul
                          did, anyhow, for that mad flesh that vanished from Waite's
                          hospital had another.' 

                          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 concerning 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 mother's 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 curiousity 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 butcher's and of the muffled shouting,
                          declamation, rhythmic chanting, and screaming supposed to
                          come from some very 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 father's 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 father's
                          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 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 waylaying of trucks
                          by "hi-jackers" 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 arrived 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 national - or
                          even the international - sense of decorum if the public were
                          ever to know what was uncovered by that awestruck party.
                          There was no mistaking it, even by those 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 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 Ward's own. The text in full is as
                          follows: 

                                                              100 Prospect St.
                                                              Providence, R.I.,
                                                             February 8, 1928. 

                          Dear Dr. Willett:- 

                          I 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. 

                          And now that I am ready to speak, I must own with humiliation that
                          no triumph such as I dreamed of can ever by 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 words - all 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. 

                          I 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
                          long - and 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. 

                          I 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 don't 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. 

                          Any time will do - I shall not be out of the house. Don't 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. 

                          In utmost gravity and desperation, 

                                                          Charles Dexter Ward. 

                             P.S. Shoot Dr. Allen on sight and dissolve his body in acid. Don't
                                                                   burn it. 

                          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 o'clock, 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 Ward's 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 Ward's 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 'I am very tired and
                          must rest a while', 'I can't receive anyone for some time',
                          'you'll have to excuse me', 'Please postpone decisive action
                          till we can arrange some sort of compromise', or 'I am very
                          sorry, but I must take a complete vacation from everything;
                          I'll talk with you later.' 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 o'clock 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 no none. The butler seemed queerly disturbed
                          about something in Charles's 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
                          Ward's 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 son's absence
                          after all the pains which had been taken to guard him. He had
                          not known of Charles's appointment, and promised to notify
                          Willett when the youth returned. In bidding the doctor
                          goodnight he expressed his utter perplexity at his son's
                          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 Charles's constant oversight.
                          Charles sent his best wishes, and regretted any bother his
                          abrupt change of plans might have caused. It listening to this
                          message Mr. Ward heard Dr. Allen's 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
                          Charles's note was not to be denied, yet what could one think
                          of its writer's 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 curiousity,
                          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 city's 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. 'Let him in, Tony,' it said, 'we may as
                          well talk now as ever.' But disturbing as was the whisper, the
                          greater fear was that which immediately followed. The floor
                          creaked and the speaker hove in sight - and 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 Ward's 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 Ward's 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 writer's 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 Ward's 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. 

                          'I am grown phthisical,' he began, 'from 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.' 

                          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 the blind be opened. Instead, he merely asked Ward
                          why he had so belied the frantic note of little more than a
                          week before. 

                          'I was coming to that,' the host replied. 'You 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 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 I'll shew you what will pay your patience well.' 

                          'You may as well know I have a way of learning old matters
                          from things surer than books, and I'll 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 though 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 own 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.' 

                          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 Ward's 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 youth's 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
                          sheriff's wig fell off as he leaned over at the play in Mr.
                          Douglass's 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 Steele's Conscious
                          Lover so badly that one was almost glad the Baptist-ridden
                          legislature closed the theatre a fortnight later. That Thomas
                          Sabin's Boston coach was "damn'd uncomfortable" old letters
                          may well have told; but what healthy antiquarian could recall
                          how the creaking of Epenetus Olney's 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 to
                          have ever filled the wide gaps on Ward's shelves at home,
                          and that the meagre so-called "laboratory" 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 son's
                          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
                          Willett's, 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 youth's 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 Ward's
                          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 speculations.
                          Local tradesmen spoke of the queerness of the orders
                          brought them by the evil-looking mulatto, and in particular of
                          the inordinate amounts of mean 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 point 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
                          Curwen's 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 of 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 bungalow's 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 degree. 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 Charles's 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 youth's 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. Ward's or Dr.
                          Willett's 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 reassured less than they ought to
                          have been when the youth hoarsely explained that he hand
                          had lately been so much affected by a nervous shock as to
                          make normal writing impossible. He could, he said, from 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. Ward's 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 cheque, 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 strange - but 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 Ward's 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, although 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 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
                          curiousity. 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
                          signs 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
                          he 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 witch markings 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: 'Mr. G. B. 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.'
                          Ward's face, too, troubled him horribly, till at length he
                          suddenly discovered why he was horrified. For above the
                          young man's right eye was something which he had never
                          previously noticed - a 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 Almonsin-Metraton:- 

                          I this day receiv'd yr mention of what came up from the Saltes I sent
                          you. It was wrong, and meanes clearly that ye Headstones had been
                          chang'd when Barnabas gott me the Specimen. It is often so, as you
                          must be sensible of from the Thing you gott from ye Kings Chapell
                          ground in 1769 and what H. gott from Olde Bury'g 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 ye 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 ye Spheres beyond. Have ye
                          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 chang'd 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 pass't from Hungary to Roumania,
                          and wou'd change his Seat if the Castel weren't so fulle of What we
                          Knowe. But of this he hath doubtless writ you. In my next Send'g
                          there will be Somewhat from a Hill tomb from ye 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 upp firste if you will, but doe not use him soe hard he will be
                          Difficult, for I must speake to him in ye 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 youth's last frantic letter. And what of this
                          addressing of the bearded and spectacled stranger as "Mr. J.
                          C."? There was no escaping the inference, but there are limits
                          to possible monstrosity. Who was "Simon O."; the old man
                          Ward had visited in Prague four years previously? Perhaps,
                          but in the centuries behind there had been another Simon O. -
                          Simon 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 shown 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 enquiries 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
                          Ward's 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
                          counterpart - perhaps one who had seen Orne's handwriting
                          and copied it in an attempt to pose as the bygone character's
                          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 Willett's growing disquiet about Charles
                          Ward's 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.:- 

                          Hadd 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 cou'd
                          buy a Magyar off with a Drinke and Food. 

                          Last monthe M. got me ye Sarcophagus of ye Five Sphinxes from ye
                          Acropolis where He whome I call'd up say'd it wou'd be, and I have
                          hadde 3 Talkes with What was therein inhum'd. It will go to S. O. in
                          Prague directly, and thence to you. It is stubborn but you know ye
                          Way with Such. 

                          You shew Wisdom in having lesse about than Before; for there was
                          no Neede to keep the Guards in Shape and eat'g 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 Kill'g
                          Trouble if needful, tho' 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 ask'd Protection of One not dispos'd to give it. 

                          You excel me in gett'g ye Formulae so another may saye them with
                          Success, but Borellus fancy'd it wou'd be so if just ye right Wordes
                          were hadd. Does ye Boy use 'em often? I regret that he growes
                          squeamish, as I fear'd he wou'd when I hadde him here nigh 15
                          Monthes, but am sensible you knowe how to deal with him. You can't
                          saye him down with ye Formula, for that will Worke only upon such
                          as ye other Formula hath call'd 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 promis'd 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 ye
                          Boy. 

                          It will be ripe in a yeare's time to have up ye 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. 

                                                        Nephreu - 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 Charles's 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
                          Curwen's old Salem colleagues; that he was regarding himself
                          as the reincarnation of Joseph Curwen, and that he
                          entertained - or was at least advised to entertain - murderous
                          designs against a "boy" 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 present
                          whereabouts. Supplying the men with one of the bungalow
                          keys which Charles yielded up, he urged them to explore
                          Allen's vacant room which had been identified when the
                          patient's 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 son's 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.
                                                                          

 

                                          CHAPTER FIVE 

                                   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 men - and one other of
                          whom they dared not think - were 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 creatures
                          - and Charles Ward as well - were 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 world's 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 traffic 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 concentred 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 "Essential Saltes" 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. Things - presences or voices of
                          some sort - could 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 Charles - what might one think of
                          him? What forces "outside the spheres" had reached him from
                          Joseph Curwen's 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 man - if man it were -
                          over the telephone! 

                          What hellish consciousness or voice, what morbid shade or
                          presence, had come to answer Charles Ward's secret rites
                          behind that locked door? Those voices heard in argument -
                          "must have it red for three months" - Good God! Was not
                          that just before the vampirism broke out? The rifling of Ezra
                          Weeden's ancient grave, and the cries later at Pawtuxet -
                          whose 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 man's 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 o'clock. Mr. Ward had the key,
                          and an entry and cursory survey were made. From the
                          disordered condition of Dr. Allen's 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 yearning
                          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 Charles's 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 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
                          hold. 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 Like
                          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
                          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 in the
                          middle of the vaulting and ten or twelve feet broad. Its
                          pavement was of large chipped flagstone, 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 used. 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 Curwen's 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 noisomness 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 search 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 three large packets of letters with Prague and Rakus
                          postmarks, and in writing clearly recognisable as Orne's and
                          Hutchinson's; 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 Ward's 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
                          Charles's 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 wizard's writing, which Charles seemed to have carried to
                          a marvellous state of perfection. Of any third hand which
                          might have been Allen's 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 "Dragon's Head" and used in almanacs to indicate the
                          ascending node, and the right-hand one headed by a
                          corresponding sign of "Dragon's Tail" 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 follows - exactly so,
                          as Willett is abundantly able to testify - and 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. 



                                   Y'AI 'NG'NGAH,
                                   YOG-SOTHOTH
                                     H'EE-L'GEB
                                   F'AI THRODOG
                                      UAAAH
                                                   OGTHROD AI'F
                                                    GEB'L-EE'H
                                                   YOG-SOTHOTH
                                                   'NGAH'NG AI'Y
                                                       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 ceaseless 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 Curwen's 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 outbuildings - perhaps the
                          famous stone edifice with the high slit-like windows -
                          provided 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 time by a sort of slippery
                          thumping. 

                                                 3 

                          From that frightful smell and that uncanny noise Willett's
                          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 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 unnameable now rose
                          up from below, and the doctor's 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 arm's 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 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 measurable
                          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 thinker's perspective and whispers terrible hints of
                          obscure cosmic relationships and unnameable 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 raving mad as any
                          inmate of Dr. Waite's private hospital. He dropped the
                          electric torch from a hand drained of muscular power or
                          nervous coördination, 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 from 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 those 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 stone - but 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: 

                          'Certainely, there was Noth'g but ye liveliest Awfulness in that
                          which H. rais'd upp from What he cou'd gather onlie a part
                          of.' 

                          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 doctor's mind as he rocked to
                          and fro, squatting on the nitrous stone floor. He tried to drive
                          them out, and repeated the Lord's 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 Ward's underground library: 'Y'ai 'ng'ngah, Yog-Sothoth'
                          and so on till the final underlined Zhro. 

                          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 Willett's 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 Ward's 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 Ward's
                          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 noisomness 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 Ward - and 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 the appurtenances with
                          the keenest interest; noting from the relative quantities of
                          various reagents on the shelves that young Ward's 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 in Curwen's farmhouse
                          more than a century and half before. That old copy, of
                          course, must have perished along with the rest of Curwen's
                          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
                          Curwen's 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 'Custodes' above
                          them, and all the Phalerons on the other, correspondingly
                          labelled with a sign reading 'Materia'. 

                          Each of the jars of 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 his 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.
                          "Custodes", "Materia"; that was the Latin for "Guards" and
                          "Materials", respectively - and then there came a flash of
                          memory as to where he had seen that word "Guards" before
                          in connexion with this dreadful mystery. It was, of course, in
                          the recent letter to Dr. Allen purporting to be from old Edwin
                          Hutchinson; and the phrase had read: 'There was no Neede
                          to keep the Guards in Shape and eat'g off their Heads, and it
                          made Much to be founde in Case of Trouble, as you too
                          welle knowe.' What did this signify? But wait - was there not
                          still another reference to "guards" 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 "eaten their heads off", so that
                          now Dr. Allen did not keep them in shape. And if not in
                          shape, how save as the "salts" 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
                          "Materia" - in the myriad Phaleron jugs on the other side of
                          the room. Salts too - and if not the salts of "guards", 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, "all civilisation, all natural law, perhaps even
                          the fate of the solar system and the universe"? And Marinus
                          Bicknell Willett had sifted their dust through his hands! 

                          Then he noticed a small door at the further 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 twilight - and 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 Ward's 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 that 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 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: 

                          'B. dy'd not. Escap'd into walls and founde Place below.'
                          'Sawe olde V. saye ye Sabaoth and learnt yee Way.'
                          'Rais'd Yog-Sothoth thrice and was ye nexte Day deliver'd.'
                          'F. soughte to wipe out all know'g howe to raise Those from
                          Outside.' 

                          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
                          "Materia", the two lekythoi from the "Custodes" 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 Ward - all 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 Curwen's 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 "Eliphas Levi"; but its identity was
                          unmistakable, and such words as Sabaoth, Metraton,
                          Almonsin, and Zariatnatmik sent a shudder of fright through
                          the search 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 when he came up 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
                          "Dragon's Head" and "Dragon's Tail" heading them as in
                          Ward's 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 "Y'ai 'ng'ngah, Yog-Sothoth", this epigraph
                          started out as "Aye, engengah, Yogge-Sothotha"; 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. 

                                          Y'AI 'NG'NGAH,
                                           YOG-SOTHOTH
                                            H'EE-L'GEB
                                           F'AI THRODOG                                            UAAAH! 

                          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 powder - Great God!
                          it had come from the shelf of "Materia" - what was it doing
                          now, and what had started it? The formula he had been
                          chanting - the first of the pair - Dragon's Head, ascending
                          node - Blessed 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. "I
                          say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put
                          downe ... Have ye Wordes for laying at all times readie, and
                          stopp not to be sure when there is any Doubte of Whom you
                          have ... 3 Talkes with What was therein inhum'd ..." Mercy of
                          Heaven, what is that shape behind the parting smoke? 

                                                 5 

                          Marinus Bicknell Willett has not 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 o'clock 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, 'That beard ... those
                          eyes ... God, who are you?' A very strange thing to say to a
                          trim, blue-eyed, clean-shaven gentleman whom he had
                          known from the latter's boyhood. 

                          In the bright noon sunlight the bungalow was unchanged since
                          the previous morning. Willett's 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 doctor's 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 planks -
                          no 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.
                          'Yesterday,' he asked softly, 'did you see it here ... and smell
                          it?' 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.
                          'Then I will tell you', 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, 'Do you suppose it would be of any use to dig?'
                          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, 'But where did it go? It brought you
                          here, you know, and it sealed up the hole somehow.' 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.
                          Willett's 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 pencil - doubtless 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
                          Hadrian's crumbling wall. The words were in such Latin as a
                          barbarous age might remember - 'Corvinus necandus est.
                          Cadaver aq(ua) forti dissolvendum, nec aliq(ui)d
                          retinendum. Tace ut potes.' - which may roughly be
                          translated, "Curwen must be killed. The body must be
                          dissolved in aqua fortis, nor must anything be retained. Keep
                          silence as best you are able." 

                          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 the "Curwen"
                          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 "Curwen" 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 "squeamish". 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 Charles's
                          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 chucked hoarsely at something which amused
                          him. Then he whispered, in accents doubly terrible because of
                          the cracked voice he used, 'Damn 'em, they do eat, but they
                          don't need to! That's the rare part! A month, you say,
                          without food? Lud, Sir, you be modest! D'ye 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 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 gone!' 

                          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 youth's 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. But, he
                          added, 'had 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.
                          'Twas Number 118, and I conceive you would have shook
                          had you looked it up in my list in t'other room. 'Twas never
                          raised by me, but I meant to have it up that day you came to
                          invite me hither.' 

                          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 Ward's face.
                          'It came, and you be here alive?' 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. 'No. 118, you say? But don't forget that stones
                          are all changed now in nine grounds out of ten. You are
                          never sure till you question! 'And then, without warning, he
                          drew forth the minuscule message and flashed it before the
                          patient's 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
                          outré-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. If 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. Allen's
                          destruction or imprisonment - or Curwen's if one might
                          regard the tacit claim to reincarnation as valid - he 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
                          particular nauseousness which hung indefinitely about; a
                          nauseousness which the older servants connected with some
                          curse left by the vanished Curwen portrait. 

                          At nine o'clock 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. Allen's
                          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 a
                          universal belief that his thick sandy beard was either dyed or
                          false - a 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 glanced
                          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
                          detectives' search of Allen's 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 glasses - the crabbed Curwen
                          penmanship - the old portrait and its tiny scar - and the
                          altered youth in the hospital with such a scar - that deep,
                          hollow voice on the telephone - was 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? Curwen - Allen - Ward - in what blasphemous
                          and abominable fusion had two ages and two persons
                          become involved? That damnable resemblance of the picture
                          to Charles - had 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 Curwen's handwriting, even when
                          alone and off guard? And then the frightful work of those
                          people - the lost crypt of horrors that had aged the doctor
                          overnight; the starving monsters in the noisome pits; the awful
                          formula which had yielded such nameless results; the message
                          in minuscules found in Willett's pocket; the papers and the
                          letters and all the talk of graves and "salts" and discoveries -
                          whither 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
                          Allen's 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. Yes. 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. Allen - Ward -
                          Curwen - it 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
                          "squeamish", 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 "Curwen" must be
                          likewise obliterated? What was the change, and when had
                          the final stage occurred? That day when his frantic note was
                          received - he 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 no - had he not cried out in terror as he
                          entered his study - this very room? What had he found there?
                          Or wait - what had found him? That simulacrum which
                          brushed boldly in without having been seen to go - was 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 noises - a 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 Curwen's
                          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 Willett's 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. Ward's 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 lighted, 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 appearance - sad, 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, 'I 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.' 

                                                 7 

                          That Dr. Willett's "purgation" 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. Servants'
                          imaginations, fortunately, are limited, else comment might
                          have been excited by an item in Thursday's Evening Bulletin
                          which ran as follows: 

                                      North End Ghouls Again Active 

                          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 teh 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 "purgation", but he found
                          something calming about the doctor's letter in spite of the
                          despair it seemed to promise and the fresh mysteries it
                          seemed to evoke. 

                                                                10 Barnes St.,
                                                             Providence, R. I., 

                          April 12, 1928. 

                          Dear Theodore:- 

                          I feel that I must say a word to you before doing what I am going to
                          do tomorrow. It will conclude the terrible business we have been
                          going through (for I feel that no spade is ever likely to reach that
                          monstrous place we know of), but I'm afraid it won't set your mind at
                          rest unless I expressly assure you how very conclusive it is. 

                          You have known me ever since you were a small boy, so I think you
                          will not distrust me when I hint that some matters are best left
                          undecided and unexplored. It is better that you attempt no further
                          speculation as to Charles's case, and almost imperative that you tell
                          his mother nothing more than she already suspects. When I call on
                          you tomorrow Charles will have escaped. That is all which need
                          remain in anyone's mind. He was mad, and he escaped. You can tell
                          his mother gently and gradually about the mad part when you stop
                          sending the typed notes in his name. I'd 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. 

                          So don't ask me any questions when I call. It may be that something
                          will go wrong, but I'll tell you if it does. I don't think it will. There will
                          be nothing more to worry about, for Charles will be very, very safe.
                          He is now - safer than you dream. You need hold no fears about
                          Allen, and who or what he is. He forms as much a part of the past as
                          Joseph Curwen's picture, and when I ring your doorbell you may feel
                          certain that there is no such person. And what wrote that minuscule
                          message will never trouble you or yours. 

                          But you must steel yourself to melancholy, and prepare your wife to
                          do the same. I must tell you frankly that Charles's escape will not
                          mean his restoration to you. He has been afflicted with a peculiar
                          disease, as you must realise from the subtle physical as well as
                          mental changes in him, and you must not hope to see him again.
                          Have only this consolation - that 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. 

                          And now comes the matter in which I must ask you to trust me most
                          of all. For there will be, indeed, no uncertainty about Charles's fate. In
                          about a year, say, you can if you wish devise a suitable account of
                          the end; for the boy will be no more. You can put up a stone in your
                          lot at the North Burial Ground exactly ten feet west of your father's
                          and facing the same way, and that will mark the true resting-place of
                          your son. Nor need you fear that it will mark any abnormality or
                          changeling. The ashes in that grave will be those of your own
                          unaltered bone and sinew - of the real Charles Dexter Ward whose
                          mind you watched from infancy - the real Charles with the olive-mark
                          on his hip and without the black witch-mark on his chest or the pit on
                          his forehead. The Charles who never did actual evil, and who will
                          have paid with his life for his "squeamishness". 

                          That is all. Charles will have escaped, and a year from now you can
                          put up his stone. Do not question me tomorrow. And believe that the
                          honour of your ancient family remains untainted now, as it has been
                          at all times in the past. 

                          With profoundest sympathy, and exhortations to fortitude, calmness,
                          and resignation, I am ever 

                                                          Sincerely your friend,
                                                           Marinus B. Willett. 

                          So on the morning of Friday, April 13, 1928, Marinus
                          Bicknell Willett visited the room of Charles Dexter Ward at
                          Dr. Waite's private hospital on Conanicut Island. 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 doctor's 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 doctor's 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. 'More,' he said, 'has been found out, and I must warn
                          you fairly that a reckoning is due.' 

                          'Digging again, and coming upon more poor starving pets?'
                          was the ironic reply. It was evident that the youth meant to
                          shew bravado to the last. 

                          'No,' Willett slowly rejoined, 'this time I did not have to dig.
                          We have had men looking up Dr. Allen, and they found the
                          false beard and spectacles in the bungalow.' 

                          'Excellent,' commented the disquieted host in an effort to be
                          wittily insulting, 'and I trust they proved more becoming than
                          the beard and glasses you now have on!' 

                          'They would become you very well,' came the even and
                          studied response, 'as indeed they seem to have done.' 

                          As Willett said this, it almost seemed as though a cloud
                          passed over the sun; though there was no change in the
                          shadows on the floor. Then Ward ventured: 

                          'And is this what asks so hotly for a reckoning? Suppose a
                          man does find it now and then useful to be twofold?' 

                          'No', said Willett gravely, 'again you are wrong. It is no
                          business of mine if any man seeks duality; provided he has
                          any right to exist at all, and provided he does not destroy
                          what called him out of space.' 

                          Ward now started violently. 'Well, Sir, what have ye found,
                          and what d'ye want of me?' 

                          The doctor let a little time elapse before replying, as if
                          choosing his words for an effective answer. 

                          'I have found', he finally intoned, 'something in a cupboard
                          behind an ancient overmantel where a picture once was, and
                          I have burned it and buried the ashes where the grave of
                          Charles Dexter Ward ought to be.' 

                          The madman choked and sprang from the chair in which he
                          had been sitting: 

                          'Damn ye, who did ye tell - and who'll believe it was he after
                          these two full months, with me alive? What d'ye mean to do?'

                          Willett, though a small man, actually took on a kind of judicial
                          majesty as he calmed the patient with a gesture. 

                          'I have told no one. This is no common case - it is a madness
                          out of time and a horror from beyond the spheres which no
                          police or lawyers or courts or alienists could ever fathom or
                          grapple with. 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!' 

                          'I know how you wove the spell that brooded outside the
                          years and fastened on your double and descendant; I know
                          how you drew him into the past and got him to raise you up
                          from your detestable grave; I know how he kept you hidden
                          in his laboratory while you studied modern things and roved
                          abroad as a vampire by night, and how you later shewed
                          yourself in beard and glasses that no one might wonder at
                          your godless likeness to him; I know what you resolved to do
                          when he balked at your monstrous rifling of the world's
                          tombs, and at what you planned afterward , and I know
                          how you did it.' 

                          'You left off your beard and glasses and fooled the guards
                          around the house. They thought it was he who went in, and
                          they thought it was he who came out when you had strangled
                          and hidden him. But you hadn't reckoned on the different
                          contents of two minds. You were a fool, Joseph Curwen, to
                          fancy that a mere visual identity would be enough. Why didn't
                          you think of the speech and the voice and the handwriting? It
                          hasn't worked, you see, after all. You know better than I who
                          or what wrote that message in minuscules, but I will warn you
                          it was not written in vain. There are abominations and
                          blasphemies which must be stamped out, and I believe that
                          the writer of those words will attend to Orne and Hutchinson.
                          One of those creatures wrote you once, "do not call up any
                          that you can not put down". 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 can't tamper
                          with Nature beyond certain limits, and every horror you have
                          woven will rise up to wipe you out.' 

                          But here the doctor was cut short by a convulsive cry from
                          the creature before him. Hopelessly at bay, weaponless, and
                          knowing that any show of physical violence would bring a
                          score of attendants to the doctor's rescue, Joseph Curwen
                          had recourse to his one ancient ally, and began a series of
                          cabbalistic motions with his forefingers as his deep, hollow
                          voice, now unconcealed by feigned hoarseness, bellowed out
                          the opening words of a terrible formula. 

                          'PER ADONAI ELOIM, ADONAI JEHOVA, ADONAI
                          SABAOTH, METRATON ...' 

                          But Willett was too quick for him. Even as the dogs in the
                          yard outside began to howl, and even as a chill wind sprang
                          suddenly up from the bay, the doctor commenced the solemn
                          and measured intonation of that which he had meant all along
                          to recite. An eye for an eye - magic for magic - let the
                          outcome shew how well the lesson of the abyss had been
                          learned! So in a clear voice Marinus Bicknell Willett began
                          the second of that pair of formulae whose first had raised the
                          writer of those minuscules - the cryptic invocation whose
                          heading was the Dragon's Tail, sign of the descending node -

                                           OGTHROD AI'F
                                            GEB'L-EE'H
                                           YOG-SOTHOTH
                                           'NGAH'NG AI'Y
                                              ZHRO! 

                          At the very first word from Willett's mouth the previously
                          commenced formula of the patient stopped short. Unable to
                          speak, the monster made wild motions with his arms until they
                          too were arrested. When the awful name of Yog-Sothoth
                          was uttered, the hideous change began. It was not merely a
                          dissolution, but rather a transformation or recapitulation;
                          and Willett shut his eyes lest he faint before the rest of the
                          incantation could be pronounced. 

                          But he did not faint, and that man of unholy centuries and
                          forbidden secrets never troubled the world again. The
                          madness out of time had subsided, and the case of Charles
                          Dexter Ward was closed. Opening his eyes before staggering
                          out of that room of horror, Dr. Willett saw that what he had
                          kept in memory had not been kept amiss. There had, as he
                          had predicted, been no need for acids. For like his accursed
                          picture a year before, Joseph Curwen now lay scattered on
                          the floor as a thin coating of fine bluish-grey dust.
                                                                          

