The Complete Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. H. P. Lovecraft

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      3.

      We have now reached the point from which the more academic school of alienists date Charles Ward’s madness.Upon his discovery the youth had looked immediately at a few of the inner pages of the book and manuscripts, and had evidently seen something which impressed him tremendously.Indeed, in shewing the titles to the workmen he appeared to guard the text itself with peculiar care, and to labour under a perturbation for which even the antiquarian and genealogical significance of the find could hardly account.Upon returning home he broke the news with an almost embarrassed air, as if he wished to convey an idea of its supreme importance without having to exhibit the evidence itself.He did not even shew the titles to his parents, but simply told them that he had found some documents in Joseph Curwen’s handwriting, “mostly in cipher”, which would have to be studied very carefully before yielding up their true meaning.It is unlikely that he would have shewn what he did to the workmen, had it not been for their unconcealed curiosity.As it was he doubtless wished to avoid any display of peculiar reticence which would increase their discussion of the matter.

      That night Charles Ward sat up in his room reading the new-found book and papers, and when day came he did not desist.His meals, on his urgent request when his mother called to see what was amiss, were sent up to him; and in the afternoon he appeared only briefly when the men came to install the Curwen picture and mantelpiece in his study.The next night he slept in snatches in his clothes, meanwhile wrestling feverishly with the unravelling of the cipher manuscript.In the morning his mother saw that he was at work on the photostatic copy of the Hutchinson cipher, which he had frequently shewn her before; but in response to her query he said that the Curwen key could not be applied to it.That afternoon he abandoned his work and watched the men fascinatedly as they finished their installation of the picture with its woodwork above a cleverly realistic electric log, setting the mock-fireplace and overmantel a little out from the north wall as if a chimney existed, and boxing in the sides with panelling to match the room’s.The front panel holding the picture was sawn and hinged to allow cupboard space behind it.After the workmen went he moved his work into the study and sat down before it with his eyes half on the cipher and half on the portrait which stared back at him like a year-adding and century-recalling mirror.

      His parents, subsequently recalling his conduct at this period, give interesting details anent the policy of concealment which he practiced.Before servants he seldom hid any paper which he might be studying, since he rightly assumed that Curwen’s intricate and archaic chirography would be too much for them.With his parents, however, he was more circumspect; and unless the manuscript in question were a cipher, or a mere mass of cryptic symbols and unknown ideographs (as that entitled “To Him Who Shal Come After etc.” seemed to be), he would cover it with some convenient paper until his caller had departed.At night he kept the papers under lock and key in an antique cabinet of his, where he also placed them whenever he left the room.He soon resumed fairly regular hours and habits, except that his long walks and other outside interests seemed to cease.The opening of school, where he now began his senior year, seemed a great bore to him; and he frequently asserted his determination never to bother with college.He had, he said, important special investigations to make, which would provide him with more avenues toward knowledge and the humanities than any university which the world could boast.

      Naturally, only one who had always been more or less studious, eccentric, and solitary could have pursued this course for many days without attracting notice.Ward, however, was constitutionally a scholar and a hermit; hence his parents were less surprised than regretful at the close confinement and secrecy he adopted.At the same time, both his father and mother thought it odd that he would shew them no scrap of his treasure-trove, nor give any connected account of such data as he had deciphered.This reticence he explained away as due to a wish to wait until he might announce some connected revelation, but as the weeks passed without further disclosures there began to grow up between the youth and his family a kind of constraint; intensified in his mother’s case by her manifest disapproval of all Curwen delvings.

      During October Ward began visiting the libraries again, but no longer for the antiquarian matter of his former days.Witchcraft and magic, occultism and daemonology, were what he sought now; and when Providence sources proved unfruitful he would take the train for Boston and tap the wealth of the great library in Copley Square, the Widener Library at Harvard, or the Zion Research Library in Brookline, where certain rare works on Biblical subjects are available.He bought extensively, and fitted up a whole additional set of shelves in his study for newly acquired works on uncanny subjects; while during the Christmas holidays he made a round of out-of-town trips including one to Salem to consult certain records at the Essex Institute.

      About the middle of January, 1920, there entered Ward’s bearing an element of triumph which he did not explain, and he was no more found at work upon the Hutchinson cipher.Instead, he inaugurated a dual policy of chemical research and record-scanning; fitting up for the one a laboratory in the unused attic of the house, and for the latter haunting all the sources of vital statistics in Providence.Local dealers in drugs and scientific supplies, later questioned, gave astonishingly queer and meaningless catalogues of the substances and instruments he purchased; but clerks at the State House, the City Hall, and the various libraries agree as to the definite object of his second interest.He was searching intensely and feverishly for the grave of Joseph Curwen, from whose slate slab an older generation had so wisely blotted the name.

      Little by little there grew upon the Ward family the conviction that something was wrong.Charles had had freaks and changes of minor interests before, but this growing secrecy and absorption in strange pursuits was unlike even him.His school work was the merest pretence; and although he failed in no test, it could be seen that the old application had all vanished.He had other concernments now; and when not in his new laboratory with a score of obsolete alchemical books, could be found either poring over old burial records down town or glued to his volumes of occult lore in his study, where the startlingly—one almost fancied increasingly—similar features of Joseph Curwen stared blandly at him from the great overmantel on the north wall.

      Late in March Ward added to his archive-searching a ghoulish series of rambles about the various ancient cemeteries of the city.The cause appeared later, when it was learned from City Hall clerks that he had probably found an important clue.His quest had suddenly shifted from the grave of Joseph Curwen to that of one Naphthali Field; and this shift was explained when, upon going over the files that he had been over, the investigators actually found a fragmentary record of Curwen’s burial which had escaped the general obliteration, and which stated that the curious leaden coffin had been interred “10 ft.S.and 5 ft.W.of Naphthali Field’s grave in ye—”.The lack of a specified burying-ground in the surviving entry greatly complicated the search, and Naphthali Field’s grave seemed as elusive as that of Curwen; but here no systematic effacement had existed, and one might reasonably be expected to stumble on the stone itself even if its record had perished.Hence the rambles—from which St.John’s (the former King’s) Churchyard and the ancient Congregational burying-ground in the midst of Swan Point Cemetery were excluded, since other statistics had shewn that the only Naphthali СКАЧАТЬ