“‘I cannot continue… The witching hour approaches, “When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out / Contagion.” Though I am sickened to the depths of my marrow, I must answer the dreaded summons. The bell rings, the hour comes, and Christ himself is mocked…’”
Warthrop stopped reading and closed the book upon his finger. Something dark passed over his lean face. He sighed, raised his eyes toward the ceiling, and gently scratched beneath his chin.
“It goes on. More tiresome drivel, more gnawing upon the bone of self-recrimination and blame. In his prime my father had few equals, Will Henry. His intellect was exceeded only by his restless curiosity, his relentless quest for knowledge and truth. Our discipline owes much to the work of his younger years, but as he grew older and the fear of his own mortality began to overwhelm him, he fell farther and farther into the pit of silly superstition and useless guilt. He died a frightened and foolish man, a stranger to the brilliant scientist he once was, consumed by fear, maddened by guilt, borne to his reward upon an ark of fabricated shame.”
He sighed again, a much longer, sadder exhalation. “And he died quite alone. My mother had succumbed to consumption twenty years before; I was in Prague; and one by one his colleagues had abandoned him over the years, as he’d slipped into doddering senility and religious mania. I returned to America to settle his affairs, in the course of which I discovered this”-he held up the old journal-“a startling record of my father’s slow descent into madness, evidently merely one of many volumes, though this is the only one he did not, for reasons I still do not fathom, choose to destroy. I’ve long puzzled over the meaning of this particular entry, and until now I was not entirely convinced that it, like many that precede and follow it, might not be the ravings of a once-fine mind crumbling from the onslaught of regret and the debilitating disease called doubt.
“He never mentions Dedham, Motley Hill, or this mysterious V again in this diary, and I have not seen it in any of his published treatises or reports to the Society.” He picked up a newspaper from the top of the stack before him. “I’ve seen no reference to it anywhere, until today, here, in this paper, in my possession for more than three years. Three years, Will Henry! And now I fear the father’s sin has come to rest upon the shoulders of the son.”
He dropped the newspaper onto the pile and pressed hard his knuckles into his eyes. “If one could call it ‘sin,”’ he murmured. “A concept foreign to science, though not so much to scientists! For here is the critical, scientific question, Will Henry: How many Anthropophagi immigrated to these shores? The answer to that is the key to everything, for without it we cannot know how many there now may be, not just here in New Jerusalem, but throughout all of New England. The infestation easily could be more extensive than our encounter in the cemetery indicates.”
He studied the map for a few seconds more, then whirled from the table, kicking over the old trunk as he flung himself away, as if he had perceived the Gorgon’s eyes in the lines he had plotted, in the article unnoticed for three years, in the tormented calligraphy of a dead man from an autumn long since gone, and was forced to look away lest he be turned to stone.
“The hour grows late,” said the monstrumologist. “We have no more than two, perhaps three, days before they strike again. Go now, Will Henry, quickly, and post the letters. Stop for nothing and speak to no one. Straight there and back again. We leave tonight for Dedham.”
FIVE.“I Am Quite Lonely at Times”
Less than an hour later, having followed his orders to a T-straight to the post office and back, making no stops along the way, although my route took me past the bakery, where the odors of muffins and fresh bread tempted me with their succulent perfume-I returned to the house on Harrington Lane, where I made straight for the library, expecting to find my master, but finding him not. There was the worktable littered with his research, the tipped-over trunk, its lid yawning like an open mouth, its contents strewn around it, the regurgitated effluvia of his father’s life, and the shrunken head resting on its side, its mouth frozen open in the apogee of a scream-but no Pellinore Warthrop. I had entered through the back door, passing through the kitchen on my way to the library, and had not seen him. To the kitchen I returned, hesitated before the half-closed basement door, but no light burned below and no sound rose from its black bowels. Just in case, I softly called his name. No answer returned. Perhaps he had given into the same bone-aching fatigue that now plagued his assistant and had retreated upstairs to his bed, though that possibility seemed ridiculously remote. As I have recorded, the doctor, when spurred to action, seemed unwilling or unable to indulge in the normal human needs for respite and rations. He lived off some hidden reserve unsuspected by a casual observer of his rather lean and angular frame. Nevertheless I trooped upstairs to his room. The bed was empty.
Remembering my irrational dread earlier upon the basement steps-had some spawn of the monster hanging below somehow survived?-I returned hastily downstairs to the half-opened door and again called his name.
“Doctor Warthrop? Doctor Warthrop, sir, are you down there?”
Silence. I turned and trotted down the hall, bypassing the library and entering the study. That favored retreat in times of crisis too was deserted, as was the drawing room and every other room downstairs. Surely if he had left the house, he would have left a note to explain his absence. I returned to the library. As I stood before his worktable, my eyes fell upon the article he had circled, the same article that had sparked his remarkable memory-I knew I had seen it before!-and I picked it up to read:
CAPT. VARNER RETURNED TO THE ASYLUM
Yesterday, nearly twenty years to the day of his incarceration, the General Court of Appeals handed down its decision in the final clemency hearing of Capt. Hezekiah Varner. Capt. Varner was convicted in March of 1865 of blockade-running and dereliction of duty on the high seas when his ship, the cargo vessel Feronia, foundered off the coast near Swampscott. At his original trial, Capt. Varner gave testimony he had been employed by certain Confederate sympathizers to supply the Rebellion with “goods and chattel” and that his entire cargo and crew had been overcome at sea by “creatures not of this Earth but from the very Bowels of Hell.” At his hearing Capt. Varner, now seventy-two years old and in poor physical health, spoke on his own behalf, repudiating his earlier testimony and stating the two days lost at sea after abandoning his vessel had afflicted him with a severe case of sunstroke. Capt. Varner produced no other witnesses on his behalf. Dr. J. F. Starr spoke for the State, giving testimony that in his opinion Capt. Varner was not in his right mind. “He was insane twenty years ago, and he is insane today,” said Dr. Starr. Upon the conclusion of the Court, Capt. Varner was returned to Motley Hill Sanatorium, Dr. Starr’s private asylum, in Dedham, where he has been confined since the conclusion of his original trial.