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jotting down when interrupted; but found nothing more intelligible than the following
disjointed fragments in that crabbed Curwen chirography, which shed no light on the case
as a whole:
'B. dy'd not. Escap'd into walls and founde Place below.'
'Sawe olde V. saye ye Sabaoth and learnt yee Way.'
'Rais'd Yog-Sothoth thrice and was ye nexte Day deliver'd.'
'F. soughte to wipe out all know'g howe to raise Those from Outside.'
As the strong Argand blaze lit up the entire chamber the doctor saw that the wall opposite
the door, between the two groups of torturing appliances in the corners, was covered with
pegs from which hung a set of shapeless-looking robes of a rather dismal yellowish-
white. But far more interesting were the two vacant walls, both of which were thickly
covered with mystic symbols and formulae roughly chiselled in the smooth dressed stone.
The damp floor also bore marks of carving; and with but little difficulty Willett
deciphered a huge pentagram in the centre, with a plain circle about three feet wide half
way between this and each corner. In one of these four circles, near where a yellowish
robe had been flung carelessly down, there stood a shallow kylix of the sort found on the
shelves above the whip-rack; and just outside the periphery was one of the Phaleron jugs
from the shelves in the other room, its tag numbered 118. This was unstoppered, and
proved upon inspection to be empty; but the explorer saw with a shiver that the kylix was
not. Within its shallow area, and saved from scattering only by the absence of wind in
this sequestered cavern, lay a small amount of a dry, dull-greenish efflorescent powder
which must have belonged in the jug; and Willett almost reeled at the implications that
came sweeping over him as he correlated little by little the several elements and
antecedents of the scene. The whips and the instruments of torture, the dust or salts from
the jug of "Materia", the two lekythoi from the "Custodes" shelf, the robes, the formulae
on the walls, the notes on the pad, the hints from letters and legends, and the thousand
glimpses, doubts, and suppositions which had come to torment the friends and parents of
Charles Ward - all these engulfed the doctor in a tidal wave of horror as he looked at that
dry greenish powder outspread in the pedestalled leaden kylix on the floor.
With an effort, however, Willett pulled himself together and began studying the formulae
chiselled on the walls. From the stained and incrusted letters it was obvious that they
were carved in Joseph Curwen's time, and their text was such as to be vaguely familiar to
one who had read much Curwen material or delved extensively into the history of magic.
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
One the doctor clearly recognised as what Mrs. Ward heard her son chanting on that
ominous Good Friday a year before, and what an authority had told him was a very
terrible invocation addressed to secret gods outside the normal spheres. It was not spelled
here exactly as Mrs. Ward had set it down from memory, nor yet as the authority had
shewn it to him in the forbidden pages of "Eliphas Levi"; but its identity was
unmistakable, and such words as Sabaoth, Metraton, Almonsin, and Zariatnatmik sent a
shudder of fright through the search who had seen and felt so much of cosmic
abomination just around the corner.
This was on the left-hand wall as one entered the room. The right-hand wall was no less
thickly inscribed, and Willett felt a start of recognition when he came up the pair of
formulae so frequently occurring in the recent notes in the library. They were, roughly
speaking, the same; with the ancient symbols of "Dragon's Head" and "Dragon's Tail"
heading them as in Ward's scribblings. But the spelling differed quite widely from that of
the modern versions, as if old Curwen had had a different way of recording sound, or as
if later study had evolved more powerful and perfected variants of the invocations in
question. The doctor tried to reconcile the chiselled version with the one which still ran
persistently in his head, and found it hard to do. Where the script he had memorised
began "Y'ai 'ng'ngah, Yog-Sothoth", this epigraph started out as "Aye, engengah, Yogge-
Sothotha"; which to his mind would seriously interfere with the syllabification of the
second word.
Ground as the later text was into his consciousness, the discrepancy disturbed him; and
he found himself chanting the first of the formulae aloud in an effort to square the sound
he conceived with the letters he found carved. Weird and menacing in that abyss of
antique blasphemy rang his voice; its accents keyed to a droning sing-song either through
the spell of the past and the unknown, or through the hellish example of that dull, godless
wail from the pits whose inhuman cadences rose and fell rhythmically in the distance
through the stench and the darkness.
Y'AI 'NG'NGAH,
YOG-SOTHOTH
H'EE-L'GEB
F'AI THRODOG
UAAAH!
But what was this cold wind which had sprung into life at the very outset of the chant?
The lamps were sputtering woefully, and the gloom grew so dense that the letters on the
wall nearly faded from sight. There was smoke, too, and an acrid odour which quite
drowned out the stench from the far-away wells; an odour like that he had smelt before,
yet infinitely stronger and more pungent. He turned from the inscriptions to face the room
with its bizarre contents, and saw that the kylix on the floor, in which the ominous
efflorescent powder had lain, was giving forth a cloud of thick, greenish-black vapour of
surprising volume and opacity. That powder - Great God! it had come from the shelf of
"Materia" - what was it doing now, and what had started it? The formula he had been
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
chanting - the first of the pair - Dragon's Head, ascending node - Blessed Saviour, could
it be ...
The doctor reeled, and through his head raced wildly disjointed scraps from all he had
seen, heard, and read of the frightful case of Joseph Curwen and Charles Dexter Ward. "I
say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe ... Have ye Wordes for
laying at all times readie, and stopp not to be sure when there is any Doubte of Whom
you have ... 3 Talkes with What was therein inhum'd ..." Mercy of Heaven, what is that
shape behind the parting smoke?
5
Marinus Bicknell Willett has not hope that any part of his tale will be believed except by
certain sympathetic friends, hence he has made no attempt to tell it beyond his most
intimate circle. Only a few outsiders have ever heard it repeated, and of these the
majority laugh and remark that the doctor surely is getting old. He has been advised to
take a long vacation and to shun future cases dealing with mental disturbance. But Mr.
Ward knows that the veteran physician speaks only a horrible truth. Did not he himself
see the noisome aperture in the bungalow cellar? Did not Willett send him home
overcome and ill at eleven o'clock that portentous morning? Did he not telephone the
doctor in vain that evening, and again the next day, and had he not driven to the
bungalow itself on that following noon, finding his friend unconscious but unharmed on [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]