The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (Conto #72)

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The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
By H. P. Lovecraft

“The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an
ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an
Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane
Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour
from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated.”
BORELLUS

I. A Result and a 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 thought 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
voice failed and 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 stoop, 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, all 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 Shakespear’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 waterfront 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 liked 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 publick 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.

II. 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 the 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
practiced a simplicity of living which did not wear him out. 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 lean-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 rear 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 number 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 through 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. The bizarre collection, besides a host of standard works which
Mr. Merritt was not too alarmed to envy, embraced nearly all the cabbalists, daemonologists, and
magicians known to man; and was a treasure-house of lore in the doubtful realms of alchemy and
astrology. Hermes Trismegistus in Mesnard’s edition, the Turba Philosophorum,
Geber’s Liber Investigationis, and Artephius’ 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 Zetzner’s edition, Roger Bacon’s
Thesaurus Chemicus, Fludd’s Clavis Alchimiae, and Trithemius’ De
Lapide Philosophico crowding them close. Mediaeval Jews and Arabs were represented in
profusion, and Mr. Merritt turned pale when, upon taking down a fine volume conspicuously labelled
as the Qanoon-e-Islam, he found it was in truth the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad
Arab Abdul Alhazred, of which he had heard such monstrous things whispered some years previously
after the exposure of nameless rites at the strange little fishing village of Kingsport, in the
Province of the Massachusetts-Bay.

But oddly enough, the worthy gentleman owned himself most impalpably disquieted by
a mere minor detail. On the huge mahogany table there lay face downward a badly worn copy of
Borellus, bearing many cryptical marginalia and interlineations in 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 on the Pawtuxet Road, and that few of the sailors had ever been seen
to return from that place, was not forgotten; so that in time it became exceedingly difficult for
Curwen to keep his oddly assorted hands. Almost invariably several would desert soon after hearing
the gossip of the Providence wharves, and their replacement in the West Indies became an
increasingly great problem to the merchant.

In 1760 Joseph Curwen was virtually an outcast, suspected of vague horrors and
daemoniac alliances which seemed all the more menacing because they could not be named, understood,
or even proved to exist. The last straw may have come from the affair of the missing soldiers in
1758, for in March and April of that year two Royal regiments on their way to New France were
quartered in Providence, and depleted by an inexplicable process far beyond the average rate of
desertion. Rumour dwelt on the frequency with which Curwen was wont to be seen talking with the
red-coated strangers; and as several of them began to be missed, people thought of the odd
conditions among his own seamen. What would have happened if the regiments had not been ordered on,
no one can tell.

Meanwhile the 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 the New Coffee-House,
depended almost wholly upon him for their stock; and his arrangements with the local distillers,
the Narragansett dairymen and horse-breeders, and the Newport candle-makers, made him one of the
prime exporters of the Colony.

Ostracised though he was, he did not lack for civic spirit of a sort. When the
Colony House burned down, he subscribed handsomely to the lotteries by which the new brick
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. Judgment demanded that he patch up his relations with the
townsfolk of Providence, so that his presence might no longer be a signal for hushed conversation,
transparent excuses of errands elsewhere, and a general atmosphere of constraint and uneasiness.
His clerks, being now reduced to the shiftless and impecunious residue whom no one else would
employ, were giving him much worry; and he held to his sea-captains and mates only by shrewdness in
gaining some kind of ascendancy over 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 one of the most distinguished assemblages which the
town could boast; the ceremony being performed by the younger Samuel Winsor. The Gazette
mentioned the event very briefly, and in most surviving copies the item in question seems to be cut
or torn out. Ward found a single intact copy after much search in the archives of a private
collector of note, observing with amusement the meaningless urbanity of the language:

“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 worn down. In his treatment of his wife the strange bridegroom astonished
both her and the community by displaying an extreme graciousness and consideration. The new house
in Olney Court was now wholly free from disturbing manifestations, and although Curwen was much
absent at the Pawtuxet farm which his wife never visited, he seemed more like a normal citizen than
at any other time in his long years of residence. Only one person remained in open enmity with him,
this being the youthful 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 discovery 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, it was stated, in a condition of suppressed excitement or suspense; as if
expecting some phenomenal thing or on the brink of some strange discovery. Chemistry or alchemy
would appear to have played a great part, for he took from his house to the farm the greater number
of his volumes on that subject.

His affectation of civic interest did not diminish, and he lost no opportunities
for helping such leaders as Stephen Hopkins, Joseph Brown, and Benjamin West in their efforts to
raise the cultural tone of the town, which was then much below the level of Newport in its
patronage of the liberal arts. He had helped Daniel Jenckes found his bookshop in 1763, and was
thereafter his best customer; extending aid likewise to the struggling Gazette that appeared
each Wednesday at the Sign of Shakespear’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 Hacker’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 one thing to wear down the
prejudice against him. But Ezra Weeden, who watched him closely, sneered cynically at all this
outward activity; and freely swore it was no more than a mask for some nameless traffick with the
blackest gulfs of Tartarus. The revengeful youth began a systematic study of the man and his doings
whenever he was in port; spending hours at night by the wharves with a dory in readiness when he
saw lights in the Curwen warehouses, and following the small boat which would sometimes steal
quietly off and down the bay. He also kept as close a watch as possible on the Pawtuxet farm, and
was once severely bitten by the dogs the old Indian couple loosed upon him.

3.

In 1766 came the final change in Joseph Curwen. It was very sudden, and gained
wide notice amongst the curious townsfolk; for the air of suspense and expectancy dropped like an
old cloak, giving instant place to an ill-concealed exaltation of perfect triumph. Curwen seemed to
have difficulty in restraining himself from public harangues on what he had found or learned or
made; but apparently the need of secrecy was greater than the longing to share his rejoicing, for
no explanation was ever offered by him. It was after this transition, which appears to have come
early in July, that the sinister scholar began to astonish people by his possession of information
which only their long-dead ancestors would seem to be able to impart.

But 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; though there were rumours now and
then of his presence in places which, though not actually near graveyards, were yet so situated in
relation to graveyards that thoughtful people wondered just how thorough the old 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 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 absences; and between them the two could have set in motion some
extraordinary rumours. That they did not do so was only because they knew the effect of publicity
would be to warn their quarry and make further progress impossible. Instead, they wished to learn
something definite before taking any action. What they did learn must have been startling indeed,
and Charles Ward spoke many times to his parents of his regret at Weeden’s later burning of
his notebooks. All that can be told of their discoveries is what Eleazar Smith jotted down in a
none too coherent diary, and what other diarists and letter-writers have timidly repeated from the
statements which they finally 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 conversation and whines of
entreaty, pantings of eagerness and shouts of protest. They appeared to be in different languages,
all known to Curwen, whose rasping accents were frequently distinguishable in reply, reproof, or
threatening. Sometimes it seemed that several persons must be in the house; Curwen, certain
captives, and the guards of those captives. There were voices of a sort that neither Weeden nor
Smith had ever heard before despite their wide knowledge of foreign parts, and many that they did
seem to place as belonging to this or that nationality. The nature of the conversations seemed
always a kind of catechism, as if Curwen were extorting some sort of information from terrified or
rebellious prisoners.

Weeden had many verbatim reports of overheard scraps in his notebook, for English,
French, and Spanish, which he knew, were frequently used; but of these nothing has survived. He
did, however, say that besides a few ghoulish dialogues in which the past affairs of Providence
families were concerned, most of the questions and answers he could understand were historical or
scientific; occasionally pertaining to very remote places and ages. Once, for example, an
alternately raging and sullen figure was questioned in French about the Black 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 it 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 Coven had spoken the Three Words. Failing to obtain
replies, the inquisitor had seemingly resorted to extreme means; for there was a terrific shriek
followed by silence and muttering and a bumping sound.

None of these colloquies were ever ocularly witnessed, since the windows were
always heavily draped. Once, though, during a discourse in an unknown tongue, a shadow was seen on
the curtain which startled Weeden exceedingly; reminding him of one of the puppets in a show he had
seen in the autumn of 1764 in Hacker’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 Sufferings of Our Saviour from the Garden of Gethsemane to the Cross on the
Hill of Golgotha; an artful piece of Statuary, Worthy to be seen by the Curious.” It was on
this occasion that the listener, who had crept close to the window of the front room whence the
speaking proceeded, gave a start which roused the old Indian pair and caused them to loose the dogs
on him. After that no more conversations were ever heard in the house, and Weeden and Smith
concluded that Curwen had transferred his field of action to regions below.

That such regions in truth existed, seemed amply clear from many things. Faint
cries and groans unmistakably came up now and then from what appeared to be the solid earth in
places far from any structure; whilst hidden in the bushes along the river-bank in the rear, where
the high ground sloped steeply down to the valley of the Pawtuxet, there was found an arched oaken
door in a frame of heavy masonry, which was obviously an entrance to caverns within the hill. When
or how these catacombs could have been constructed, Weeden was unable to say; but he frequently
pointed out how easily the place might have been reached by bands of unseen workmen from the river.
Joseph Curwen put his mongrel seamen to diverse uses indeed! During the heavy spring rains of 1769
the two watchers kept a sharp eye on the steep river-bank to see if any subterrene secrets might be
washed to light, and were rewarded by the sight of a profusion of both human and animal bones in
places where deep gullies had been worn in the banks. Naturally there might be many explanations of
such things in the rear of a stock farm, and in a locality where old Indian burying-grounds were
common, but Weeden and Smith drew their own inferences.

It was in January 1770, whilst Weeden and Smith were still debating vainly on
what, if anything, to think or do about the whole bewildering business, that the incident of the
Fortaleza occurred. Exasperated by the burning of the revenue sloop Liberty at
Newport during the previous summer, the customs fleet under Admiral Wallace had adopted an
increased vigilance concerning strange vessels; and on this occasion His
Majesty’s armed schooner Cygnet, under Capt. Charles Leslie, captured
after a short pursuit one early morning the snow Fortaleza of Barcelona,
Spain, under Capt. Manuel Arruda, bound according to its log from Grand Cairo,
Egypt, to Providence. When searched for contraband material, this ship revealed
the astonishing fact that its cargo consisted exclusively of Egyptian mummies,
consigned to “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 Court at Newport, at a loss what to do
in view of the non-contraband nature of the cargo on the one hand and of the
unlawful secrecy of the entry on the other hand, compromised on Collector
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 the river-bank behind the Curwen farm. Large sections were washed
away, and a certain number of bones discovered; but no glimpse was afforded of any actual
subterranean chambers or burrows. Something was rumoured, however, at the village of Pawtuxet about
a mile below, where the river flows in falls over a rocky terrace to join the placid landlocked
cove. There, where quaint old cottages climbed the hill from the rustic bridge, and fishing-smacks
lay anchored at their sleepy docks, a vague report went round of things that were floating down the
river and flashing into sight for a minute as they went over the falls. Of course the Pawtuxet is a
long river which winds through many settled regions abounding in graveyards, and of course the
spring rains had been very heavy; but the fisherfolk about the bridge did not like the wild way
that one of the things stared as it shot down to the still water below, or the way that another
half cried out although its condition had greatly departed from that of objects which normally cry
out. That rumour sent Smith—for Weeden was just then at sea—in haste to the river-bank
behind the farm; where surely enough there remained the evidences of an extensive cave-in. There
was, however, no trace of a passage into the steep bank; for the miniature avalanche had left
behind a solid wall of mixed earth and shrubbery from aloft. Smith went to the extent of some
experimental digging, but was deterred by lack of 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 so of the most learned and prominent citizens of Providence; ascertaining
their views and following whatever advice they might have to offer. Secrecy would probably be
essential in any case, for this was no matter that the town constables or militia could cope with;
and above all else the excitable crowd must be kept in ignorance, lest there be enacted in these
already troublous times a repetition of that frightful Salem panic of less than a century before
which had first brought Curwen hither.

The right persons to tell, he believed, would be Dr. Benjamin West, whose pamphlet
on the late transit of Venus proved him a scholar and keen thinker; Rev. James Manning, President
of the College which had just moved up from Warren and was temporarily housed in the new King
Street schoolhouse awaiting the completion of its building on the hill above Presbyterian-Lane;
ex-Governor Stephen Hopkins, who had been a member of the Philosophical Society at Newport, and was
a man of very broad perceptions; John Carter, publisher of the Gazette; all four of the
Brown brothers, John, Joseph, Nicholas, and Moses, who formed the recognised local magnates, and of
whom Joseph was an amateur scientist of parts; old Dr. Jabez Bowen, whose erudition was
considerable, and who had much first-hand knowledge of 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 moonlight January night with heavy snow underfoot there resounded over the river
and up the hill a shocking series of cries which brought sleepy heads to every window; and people
around Weybosset Point saw a great white thing plunging frantically along the badly cleared space
in front of the 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 butt 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 tolde to us aboute tak’g
Care whom to calle up, 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 shall not wish to Answer, and shall
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 Blacke 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 shipper,
merchant, and farmer was openly or clandestinely raised. Whether the ruse was wholly believed by
neighbours who had seen so many queer things is not certain; but at any rate the Fenners were
willing to connect any evil with a man of such queer ways. To them Mr. Brown had entrusted the duty
of watching the Curwen farmhouse, and of regularly reporting every incident which took place
there.

5.

The probability that Curwen was on guard and attempting unusual things, as
suggested by the odd shaft of light, precipitated at last the action so carefully devised by the
band of serious citizens. According to the Smith diary a company of about 100 men met at 10 p.m. on
Friday, April 12th, 1771, in the great room of 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 into the sky, but
there were no lights in any visible windows. This was always the case of late. Even as this news
was given another great glare arose toward the south, and the party realised that they had indeed
come close to the scene of awesome and unnatural wonders. Capt. Whipple now ordered his force to
separate into three divisions; one of twenty men under Eleazar Smith to strike across to the shore
and guard the landing-place against possible reinforcements for Curwen until summoned by a
messenger for desperate service, a second of twenty men under Capt. Esek Hopkins to steal down into
the river valley behind the Curwen farm and demolish with axes or gunpowder the oaken door in the
high, steep bank, and the third to close in on the house and adjacent buildings themselves. Of this
division one third was to be led by Capt. Mathewson to the cryptical stone edifice with high narrow
windows, another third to follow Capt. Whipple himself to the main farmhouse, and the remaining
third to preserve a circle around the whole group of buildings until summoned by a final emergency
signal.

The river party would break down the hillside door at the sound of a single
whistle-blast, then waiting and capturing anything which might issue from the regions within. At
the sound of two whistle-blasts it would advance through the aperture to oppose the enemy or join
the rest of the raiding contingent. The party at the stone building would accept these respective
signals in an analogous manner; forcing an entrance at the first, and at the second descending
whatever passage into the ground might be discovered, and joining the general or focal warfare
expected to take place within the caverns. A third or emergency signal of three blasts would summon
the immediate reserve from its general guard duty; its twenty men dividing equally and entering the
unknown depths through both farmhouse and stone building. Capt. 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 the actual buildings of the Curwen
farm.

Eleazar Smith, who accompanied the shore-guarding party, records in his diary an
uneventful march and a long wait on the bluff by the bay; broken once by what seemed to be the
distant sound of the signal whistle and again by a peculiar muffled blend of roaring and crying and
a powder blast which seemed to come from the same direction. Later on one man thought he caught
some distant gunshots, and still later Smith himself felt the throb of titanic and thunderous words
resounding in upper air. It was just before dawn that a single haggard messenger with wild eyes and
a hideous unknown odour about his clothing appeared and told the detachment to disperse quietly to
their homes and never again think or speak of the 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 those which had preceded it; a
kind of throaty, nastily plastic cough or gurgle whose quality as a scream must have come more from
its continuity and psychological import than from its actual acoustic value.

Then the flaming thing burst into sight at a point where the Curwen farm ought to
lie, and the human cries of desperate and frightened men were heard. Muskets flashed and cracked,
and the flaming thing fell to the ground. A second flaming thing appeared, and a shriek of human
origin was plainly distinguished. Fenner wrote that he could even gather a few words belched in
frenzy: “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 such an
intolerable stench that only the strong freshness of the sea could have prevented its being noticed
by the shore party or by any wakeful souls in Pawtuxet village. This stench was nothing which any
of the Fenners had ever encountered before, and produced a kind of clutching, amorphous fear beyond
that of the tomb or the charnel-house. Close upon it came the awful voice which no hapless hearer
will ever be able to forget. It thundered out of the sky like a doom, and windows rattled as its
echoes died away. It was deep and musical; powerful as a bass organ, but evil as the forbidden
books of the Arabs. What it said no man can tell, for it spoke in an unknown tongue, but this is
the writing Luke Fenner set down to portray the daemoniac intonations:
“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 unmistakably human shout or deep chorused scream seemed to answer this malign
wonder from the Curwen farm, after which the unknown stench grew complex with an added odour
equally intolerable. A wailing distinctly different from the scream now burst out, and was
protracted ululantly in rising and falling paroxysms. At times it became almost articulate, though
no auditor could trace any definite words; and at one point it seemed to verge toward the confines
of diabolic and hysterical laughter. Then a yell of utter, ultimate fright and stark madness
wrenched from scores of human 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 her
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 shall not wish to
Answer, and shall 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 his 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 than anyone else ever gained respecting the end of the accused 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 ——— house.”

III. A Search and an Evocation

1.

Charles Ward, as we have seen, first learned in 1918 of his descent from Joseph Curwen. That he at
once took an intense interest in everything pertaining to the bygone mystery is not to be wondered
at; for every vague rumour that he had heard of Curwen now became something vital to himself, in
whom flowed Curwen’s blood. No spirited and imaginative genealogist could have done otherwise
than begin forthwith an avid and systematic collection of Curwen data.

In his first delvings there was not the slightest attempt at secrecy; so that even
Dr. Lyman hesitates to date the youth’s madness from any period before the close of 1919. He
talked freely with his family—though his mother was not particularly pleased to own an
ancestor like Curwen—and with the officials of the various museums and libraries he visited.
In applying to private families for records thought to be in their possession he made no
concealment of his object, and shared the somewhat amused scepticism with which the accounts of the
old diarists and letter-writers were regarded. He often expressed a keen wonder as to what really
had taken place a century and a half before at that Pawtuxet farmhouse whose site he vainly tried
to find, and what Joseph Curwen really had been.

When he came across the Smith diary and archives and encountered the letter from
Jedediah Orne he decided to visit Salem and look up 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 these strange characters were available at
the Essex Institute, the Court House, and the Registry of Deeds, and included both harmless
commonplaces such as land titles and bills of sale, and furtive fragments of a more provocative
nature. There were four or five unmistakable allusions to them on the witchcraft trial records; as
when one Hepzibah Lawson swore on July 10, 1692, at the Court of Oyer and Terminer under Judge
Hathorne, that ‘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 the greatest immediate interest was the Orne material. It took Ward only a
short time to prove from identity of penmanship a thing he had already considered established from
the text of the letter to Curwen; namely, that Simon Orne and his supposed son were one and the
same person. As Orne had said to his correspondent, it was hardly safe to live too long in Salem,
hence he resorted to a thirty-year sojourn abroad, and did not