Читать книгу The Complete Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft - H. P. Lovecraft, W. H. Pugmire - Страница 21

And yet, after all, it was from no step of Mr.Ward’s or Dr.Willett’s that the next move in this singular case proceeded.The father and the physician, rebuffed and confused by a shadow too shapeless and intangible to combat, had rested uneasily on their oars while the typed notes of young Ward to his parents grew fewer and fewer.Then came the first of the month with its customary financial adjustments, and the clerks at certain banks began a peculiar shaking of heads and telephoning from one to the other.Officials who knew Charles Ward by sight went down to the bungalow to ask why every cheque of his appearing at this juncture was a clumsy forgery, and were reassurred less than they ought to have been when the youth hoarsely explained that his hand had lately been so much affected by a nervous shock as to make normal writing impossible.He could, he said, form no written characters at all except with great difficulty; and could prove it by the fact that he had been forced to type all his recent letters, even those to his father and mother, who would bear out the assertion.

What made the investigators pause in confusion was not this circumstance alone, for that was nothing unprecedented or fundamentally suspicious; nor even the Pawtuxet gossip, of which one or two of them had caught echoes.It was the muddled discourse of the young man which nonplussed them, implying as it did a virtually total loss of memory concerning important monetary matters which he had had at his fingertips only a month or two before.Something was wrong; for despite the apparent coherence and rationality of his speech, there could be no normal reason for this ill-concealed blankness on vital points.Moreover, although none of these men knew Ward well, they could not help observing the change in his language and manner.They had heard he was an antiquarian, but even the most hopeless antiquarians do not make daily use of obsolete phraseology and gestures.Altogether, this combination of hoarseness, palsied hands, bad memory, and altered speech and bearing must represent some disturbance or malady of genuine gravity, which no doubt formed the basis of the prevailing odd rumours; and after their departure the party of officials decided that a talk with the senior Ward was imperative.

So on the sixth of March, 1928, there was a long and serious conference in Mr.Ward’s office, after which the utterly bewildered father summoned Dr.Willett in a kind of helpless resignation.Willett looked over the strained and awkward signatures of the cheques, and compared them in his mind with the penmanship of that last frantic note.Certainly, the change was radical and profound, and yet there was something damnably familiar about the new writing.It had crabbed and archaic tendencies of a very curious sort, and seemed to result from a type of stroke utterly different from that which the youth had always used.It was strange—but where had he seen it before? On the whole, it was obvious that Charles was insane.Of that there could be no doubt.And since it appeared unlikely that he could handle his property or continue to deal with the outside world much longer, something must quickly be done toward his oversight and possible cure.It was then that the alienists were called in, Drs.Peck and Waite of Providence and Dr.Lyman of Boston, to whom Mr.Ward and Dr.Willett gave the most exhaustive possible history of the case, and who conferred at length in the now unused library of their young patient, examining what books and papers of his were left in order to gain some further notion of his habitual mental cast.After scanning this material and examining the ominous note to Willett they all agreed that Charles Ward’s studies had been enough to unseat or at least to warp any ordinary intellect, and wished most heartily that they could see his more intimate volumes and documents; but this latter they knew they could do, if at all, only after a scene at the bungalow itself.Willett now reviewed the whole case with febrile energy; it being at this time that he obtained the statements of the workmen who had seen Charles find the Curwen documents, and that he collated the incidents of the destroyed newspaper items, looking up the latter at the Journal office.

On Thursday, the eighth of March, Drs.Willett, Peck, Lyman, and Waite, accompanied by Mr.Ward, paid the youth their momentous call; making no concealment of their object and questioning the now acknowledged patient with extreme minuteness.Charles, though he was inordinately long in answering the summons and was still redolent of strange and noxious laboratory odours when he did finally make his agitated appearance, proved a far from recalcitrant subject; and admitted freely that his memory and balance had suffered somewhat from close application to abstruse studies.He offered no resistance when his removal to other quarters was insisted upon; and seemed, indeed, to display a high degree of intelligence as apart from mere memory.His conduct would have sent his interviewers away in bafflement had not the persistently archaic trend of his speech and unmistakable replacement of modern by ancient ideas in his consciousness marked him out as one definitely removed from the normal.Of his work he would say no more to the group of doctors than he had formerly said to his family and to Dr.Willett, and his frantic note of the previous month he dismissed as mere nerves and hysteria.He insisted that this shadowy bungalow possessed no library or laboratory beyond the visible ones, and waxed abstruse in explaining the absence from the house of such odours as now saturated all his clothing.Neighbourhood gossip he attributed to nothing more than the cheap inventiveness of baffled curiosity.Of the whereabouts of Dr.Allen he said he did not feel at liberty to speak definitely, but assured his inquisitors that the bearded and spectacled man would return when needed.In paying off the stolid Brava who resisted all questioning by the visitors, and in closing the bungalow which still seemed to hold such nighted secrets, Ward shewed no sign of nervousness save a barely noticed tendency to pause as though listening for something very faint.He was apparently animated by a calmly philosophic resignation, as if his removal were the merest transient incident which would cause the least trouble if facilitated and disposed of once and for all.It was clear that he trusted to his obviously unimpaired keenness of absolute mentality to overcome all the embarrassments into which his twisted memory, his lost voice and handwriting, and his secretive and eccentric behaviour had led him.His mother, it was agreed, was not to be told of the change; his father supplying typed notes in his name.Ward was taken to the restfully and picturesquely situated private hospital maintained by Dr.Waite on Conanicut Island in the bay, and subjected to the closest scrutiny and questioning by all the physicians connected with the case.It was then that the physical oddities were noticed; the slackened metabolism, the altered skin, and the disproportionate neural reactions.Dr.Willett was the most perturbed of the various examiners, for he had attended Ward all his life and could appreciate with terrible keenness the extent of his physical disorganisation.Even the familiar olive mark on his hip was gone, while on his chest was a great black mole or cicatrice which had never been there before, and which made Willett wonder whether the youth had ever submitted to any of the “witch markings” reputed to be inflicted at certain unwholesome nocturnal meetings in wild and lonely places.The doctor could not keep his mind off a certain transcribed witch-trial record from Salem which Charles had shewn him in the old non-secretive days, and which read: “Mr.G.B.on that Nighte putt ye Divell his Marke upon Bridget S., Jonathan A., Simon O., Deliverance W., Joseph C., Susan P., Mehitable C., and Deborah B.” Ward’s face, too, troubled him horribly, till at length he suddenly discovered why he was horrified.For above the young man’s right eye was something which he had never previously noticed—a small scar or pit precisely like that in the crumbled painting of old Joseph Curwen, and perhaps attesting some hideous ritualistic inoculation to which both had submitted at a certain stage of their occult careers.

While Ward himself was puzzling all the doctors at the hospital a very strict watch was kept on all mail addressed either to him or to Dr.Allen, which Mr.Ward had ordered delivered at the family home.Willett had predicted that very little would be found, since any communications of a vital nature would probably have been exchanged by messenger; but in the latter part of March there did come a letter from Prague for Dr.Allen which gave both the doctor and the father deep thought.It was in a very crabbed and archaic hand; and though clearly not the effort of a foreigner, shewed almost as singular a departure from modern English as the speech of young Ward himself.It read:

Kleinstrasse 11,

Altstadt, Prague,

11th Feby.1928.

Brother in Almousin-Metraton:—

I this day receiv’d yr mention of what came up from the Salts I sent you.It was wrong, and meanes clearly that ye Headstones had been chang’d when Barnabas gott me the Specimen.It is often so, as you must be sensible of from the Thing you gott from ye Kings Chapell ground in 1769 and what H.gott from Olde Bury’g Point in 1690, that was like to ende him.I gott such a Thing in Aegypt 75 yeares gone, from the which came that Scar ye Boy saw on me here in 1924.As I told you longe ago, do not calle up That which you can not put downe; either from dead Saltes or out of ye Spheres beyond.Have ye Wordes for laying at all times readie, and stopp not to be sure when there is any Doubte of Whom you have.Stones are all chang’d now in Nine groundes out of 10.You are never sure till you question.I this day heard from H., who has had Trouble with the Soldiers.He is like to be sorry Transylvania is pass’d from Hungary to Roumania, and wou’d change his Seat if the Castel weren’t so fulle of What we Knowe.But of this he hath doubtless writ you.In my next Send’g there will be Somewhat from a Hill tomb from ye East that will delight you greatly.Meanwhile forget not I am desirous of B.F.if you can possibly get him for me.You know G.in Philada.better than I.Have him up firste if you will, but doe not use him soe hard he will be Difficult, for I must speake to him in ye End.

Yogg-Sothoth Neblod Zin

Simon O.

To Mr.J.C.in

Providence.

Mr.Ward and Dr.Willett paused in utter chaos before this apparent bit of unrelieved insanity.Only by degrees did they absorb what it seemed to imply.So the absent Dr.Allen, and not Charles Ward, had come to be the leading spirit at Pawtuxet? That must explain the wild reference and denunciation in the youth’s last frantic letter.And what of this addressing of the bearded and spectacled stranger as “Mr.J.C.”? There was no escaping the inference, but there are limits to possible monstrosity.Who was “Simon O.”; the old man Ward had visited in Prague four years previously? Perhaps, but in the centuries behind there had been another Simon O.—Simon Orne, alias Jedediah, of Salem, who vanished in 1771, and whose peculiar handwriting Dr.Willett now unmistakably recognised from the photostatic copies of the Orne formulae which Charles had once shewn him.What horrors and mysteries, what contradictions and contraventions of Nature, had come back after a century and a half to harass Old Providence with her clustered spires and domes?

The father and the old physician, virtually at a loss what to do or think, went to see Charles at the hospital and questioned him as delicately as they could about Dr.Allen, about the Prague visit, and about what he had learned of Simon or Jedediah Orne of Salem.To all these inquiries the youth was politely non-committal, merely barking in his hoarse whisper that he had found Dr.Allen to have a remarkable spiritual rapport with certain souls from the past, and that any correspondent the bearded man might have in Prague would probably be similarly gifted.When they left, Mr.Ward and Dr.Willett realised to their chagrin that they had really been the ones under catechism; and that without imparting anything vital himself, the confined youth had adroitly pumped them of everything the Prague letter had contained.

Drs.Peck, Waite, and Lyman were not inclined to attach much importance to the strange correspondence of young Ward’s companion; for they knew the tendency of kindred eccentrics and monomaniacs to band together, and believed that Charles or Allen had merely unearthed an expatriated counterpart—perhaps one who had seen Orne’s handwriting and copied it in an attempt to pose as the bygone character’s reincarnation.Allen himself was perhaps a similar case, and may have persuaded the youth into accepting him as an avatar of the long-dead Curwen.Such things had been known before, and on the same basis the hard-headed doctors disposed of Willett’s growing disquiet about Charles Ward’s present handwriting, as studied from unpremeditated specimens obtained by various ruses.Willett thought he had placed its odd familiarity at last, and that what it vaguely resembled was the bygone penmanship of old Joseph Curwen himself; but this the other physicians regarded as a phase of imitativeness only to be expected in a mania of this sort, and refused to grant it any importance either favourable or unfavourable.Recognising this prosaic attitude in his colleagues, Willett advised Mr.Ward to keep to himself the letter which arrived for Dr.Allen on the second of April from Rakus, Transylvania, in a handwriting so intensely and fundamentally like that of the Hutchinson cipher that both father and physician paused in awe before breaking the seal.This read as follows:

Castle Ferenczy

7 March 1928.

Dear C.:—Hadd a Squad of 20 Militia up to talk about what the Country Folk say.Must digg deeper and have less Hearde.These Roumanians plague me damnably, being officious and particular where you cou’d buy a Magyar off with a Drinke and ffood.Last monthe M.got me ye Sarcophagus of ye Five Sphinxes from ye Acropolis where He whome I call’d up say’d it wou’d be, and I have hadde 3 Talkes with What was therein inhum’d.It will go to S.O.in Prague directly, and thence to you.It is stubborn but you know ye Way with Such.You shew Wisdom in having lesse about than Before; for there was no Neede to keep the Guards in Shape and eat’g off their Heads, and it made Much to be founde in Case of Trouble, as you too welle knowe.You can now move and worke elsewhere with no Kill’g Trouble if needful, tho’ I hope no Thing will soon force you to so Bothersome a Course.I rejoice that you traffick not so much with Those Outside; for there was ever a Mortall Peril in it, and you are sensible what it did when you ask’d Protection of One not dispos’d to give it.You excel me in gett’g ye fformulae so another may saye them with Success, but Borellus fancy’d it wou’d be so if just ye right Wordes were hadd.Does ye Boy use ’em often? I regret that he growes squeamish, as I fear’d he wou’d when I hadde him here nigh 15 Monthes, but am sensible you knowe how to deal with him.You can’t saye him down with ye fformula, for that will Worke only upon such as ye other fformula hath call’d up from Saltes; but you still have strong Handes and Knife and Pistol, and Graves are not harde to digg, nor Acids loth to burne.O.sayes you have promis’d him B.F.I must have him after.B.goes to you soone, and may he give you what you wishe of that Darke Thing belowe Memphis.Imploy care in what you calle up, and beware of ye Boy.It will be ripe in a yeare’s time to have up ye Legions from Underneath, and then there are no Boundes to what shal be oures.Have Confidence in what I saye, for you knowe O.and I have hadd these 150 yeares more than you to consulte these Matters in.

Nephren-Ka nai Hadoth

Edw: H.

For J.Curwen, Esq.

Providence.

But if Willett and Mr.Ward refrained from shewing this letter to the alienists, they did not refrain from acting upon it themselves.No amount of learned sophistry could controvert the fact that the strangely bearded and spectacled Dr.Allen, of whom Charles’s frantic letter had spoken as such a monstrous menace, was in close and sinister correspondence with two inexplicable creatures whom Ward had visited in his travels and who plainly claimed to be survivals or avatars of Curwen’s old Salem colleagues; that he was regarding himself as the reincarnation of Joseph Curwen, and that he entertained—or was at least advised to entertain—murderous designs against a “boy” who could scarcely be other than Charles Ward.There was organised horror afoot; and no matter who had started it, the missing Allen was by this time at the bottom of it.Therefore, thanking heaven that Charles was now safe in the hospital, Mr.Ward lost no time in engaging detectives to learn all they could of the cryptic bearded doctor; finding whence he had come and what Pawtuxet knew of him, and if possible discovering his current whereabouts.Supplying the men with one of the bungalow keys which Charles yielded up, he urged them to explore Allen’s vacant room which had been identified when the patient’s belongings had been packed; obtaining what clues they could from any effects he might have left about.Mr.Ward talked with the detectives in his son’s old library, and they felt a marked relief when they left it at last; for there seemed to hover about the place a vague aura of evil.Perhaps it was what they had heard of the infamous old wizard whose picture had once stared from the panelled overmantel, and perhaps it was something different and irrelevant; but in any case they all half sensed an intangible miasma which centred in that carven vestige of an older dwelling and which at times almost rose to the intensity of a material emanation.