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Other documents randomly have
different content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The case of
Charles Dexter Ward
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
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Title: The case of Charles Dexter Ward

Author: H. P. Lovecraft

Illustrator: Harry Ferman

Release date: May 5, 2024 [eBook #73547]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Weird Tales, 1941

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CASE OF

CHARLES DEXTER WARD ***
The Case of Charles Dexter
Ward

By H. P. LOVECRAFT

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Weird Tales May, July 1941
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Here is THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD—the last, and many
think the best, the most exciting—of all H. P. Lovecraft's superb
weird fantasies.
Discovered after years of difficult search—and pieced together with
as much careful patience as Charles Ward puts into his terrifying
researches in the story—August Derleth and Donald Wandrei at long
last had all the scattered pages of Lovecraft's novel complete.
The manuscript, gathered over the course of many years from attics,
forgotten strong boxes and old bureaus, is published now—in Weird
Tales.
In it you are going to read again of Cthulhu and the fearful
Necronomicon; in these pages you will also find a perfect wealth of
new thrills. In Charles Ward you will read ... but why go on, when
you're just raring to get ahead with the story?
So just turn the page—and on with the show!

The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved,

that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his owne
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.
 CONTENTS
1. A Result and a Prologue
2. An Antecedent and a Horror
3. A Search and an Evocation
4. A Mutation and a Madness
5. A Nightmare and a Cataclysm
 1. A Result and a Prologue
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 his grieving father.
The patient seemed oddly older than his twenty-six years would
warrant; his face had taken on a subtle cast which only the very
aged usually acquire. While his organic processes showed 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 minimized.
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 his right hip had disappeared, whilst there
had formed on his chest a very peculiar mole or blackish spot of
which no trace existed before.
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.
Only Dr. Willett, who brought Charles Ward into the world and
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 skeptical colleagues. Willett, indeed, presents a minor
mystery all his own in his connection 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.
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-gray dust that almost
choked them. True, the dogs had howled some time before; but that
was while Willett was still present, and they had caught nothing and
shown 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 parent's 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. 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. His whole program 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 of the dominant opinion that the escaped
patient 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.
It is, broadly speaking, undeniable that the winter of 1919-20 saw a
great change in Ward; whereby he abruptly dropped 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 fore-father'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.
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 agonizing 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.
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 for ever from human knowledge.

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.
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
façade 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 houses on high
terraces. The small wooden houses averaged a greater age here, for
it was up this hill that the growing town had climbed. One of the
child's first memories is 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.
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.
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
stagecoach 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.
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 to Mrs. Eliza, daughter to Capt.
James Tillinghast," of whose paternity the family had preserved no
trace. Late in 1918, whilst examining a volume of original town
records in manuscript, the young genealogist encountered an entry
describing a legal change of name, by which in 1772 a Mrs. Eliza
Curwen, widow of Joseph Curwen, resumed, along with her seven-
year-old daughter Ann, her maiden name of Tillinghast; on the
ground "that her Husband's name was become a public Reproach by
Reason of what was knowne after his Decease; the which confirming
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 labored 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. Having discovered
his own relationship to this apparently "hushed-up" character, he at
once 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.
 2. An Antecedent and a Horror
Joseph Curwen, as revealed by the rambling legends embodied in
what Ward heard and unearthed, was a very astonishing, enigmatic,
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 colorless-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 the 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 gleamings 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. 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 halfway that desire for isolation which he had always
shown.
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 neighbors 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. 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 manservants, 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 Carwens of
Salem needed no introduction in New England. It developed that
Joseph Curwen had traveled 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. 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.
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 where
he lived in considerable style and comfort. 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. Curwen suggested 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 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. This bizarre collection, besides a host of standard
works which Mr. Merritt was not too alarmed to envy, embraced
nearly all the cabalists, demonologists, 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
Artephous' Key of Wisdom all were there; with the cabalistic 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 labeled as the Qunoon-e-Islam, he found
it was in truth the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul
Al-hazred, 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 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-letters that the visitor could not resist scanning it
through. 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 that 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 owne
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 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 supercargos 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, and in time it became
exceedingly difficult for Curwen to keep his oddly assorted hands.
By 1760 Joseph Curwen was virtually an outcast, suspected of vague
horrors and daemoniac alliances which seemed all the more
menacing because they could not be named, understood, or even
proved to exist.
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. Curwen
was, in fact, one of the prime exporters of the Colony.
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 analyze, 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 rumors of
uncanny sounds and maneuvers at his Pawtuxet farm diminished in
proportion.
But 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. So 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 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
Dutie Tillinghast, whose only daughter Eliza seemed dowered with
every conceivable advantage save prospects as an heiress. Captain
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. 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 youngest
Samuel Winson. 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 Captain Dutie
Tillinghast, a young Lady who has real Merit, added to a beautiful
Person, to grace the connubial State and perpetuate its Felicity.
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 originally 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 Reverend 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 fervor 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.
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. 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 rumors
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.
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. The
lighters were wont to put out from the black silent docks, and 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. 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 rumors. 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.

It is gathered that Weeden and Smith became early convinced that a

great series of tunnels and catacombs, inhabited by a very sizable
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 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.
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 was ever ocularly witnessed, since the
windows were always heavily draped. Later, 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.

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 Captain Charles Leshe, captured after a short pursuit one
early morning the scow Fortaleza of Barcelona, Spain, under Captain
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 Captain Arruda felt himself in honor 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 rumors
of its having been seen in Boston Harbor, 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
connection between the cargo of mummies and the sinister Joseph
Curwen; 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. 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 labors.
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 rumored,
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. 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 rumor 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. 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.

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 Captain 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
Captain 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.
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; Reverend James Manning, President of the
College; 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
recognized local magnates; old Dr. Jabez Bowen, whose erudition
was considerable, and who had much first-hand knowledge of
Curwen's odd purchases; and Captain Abraham Whipple, a
privateersman of phenomenal boldness and energy who could be
counted on to lead in any active measures needed.
The mission of Captain Mathewson prospered beyond his highest
expectations; for whilst he found one or two of the chosen
confidants somewhat skeptical of the possible ghostly 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 Captain 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 Captain 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. He 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 shrieked 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 moonlit
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 clamor 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
marvelous 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