Reanimators (27 page)

At first I thought that perhaps the Fisher boys had a bit of that weird Innsmouth taint to them, that perhaps their father or mother or even grandparents had been thus afflicted and passed the condition down to the triplets. But I soon dismissed such a possibility, for I had years before performed a thorough examination upon the men, including a review for blood-borne parasites, and could not recall seeing anything like the spindle-shaped cells I was now seeing.

Confused, I pushed away from the microscope and ran my hand through my hair. The door opening in the dim light of the room startled me, but I recovered once I saw that it was Elwood who was standing there. He seemed strangely subdued, almost on the verge of tears, and I pressed him to tell me what was wrong. He shook his head in a childish manner and in a stuttering voice announced sadly, “Mrs. Armitage is dead.” I was myself stunned for a moment, but was quickly brought back as Elwood handed me a large bundle of handwritten papers. “She was helping me with this. She said that I should give it to you, that you had understood the things that Professors Morgan and Rice had told you, and that you would understand this as well.” He left me then, turned and nearly ran down the hall, leaving me with his manuscript and nothing to do but read it.

Chapter 24.

THE STATEMENT
OF FRANK ELWOOD

My name, though it damns me, is Frank Elwood, and I am a resident of Kingsport, where my family has lived since Thaddeus Elwood first came to that village in 1691. It is true that I was part of the events that led up to the death of Walter Gilman on May the first, 1928. It’s true also that the source for the lurid tabloid account of those last days, and of Gilman’s possible involvement in the disappearance of Ladislas Wolejko, were my own statements to the police. There seems no point in denying these things. The tale of those first months of 1928, as it has been written, is accurate enough, and I can point to no portion of it and call it fiction. Still, it is only a portion of the whole truth, and it but touches on things that came before. People, particularly city folk, have a strange inclination to say that such a thing begins here and ends there. It is a comfort I suppose, but the truth is that all events can trace their roots beyond the obvious beginnings to seeds and origins that may have once seemed innocuous. I think this is as true in the countryside as it is in the city, but the maddening crowd of urban blight may simply weigh too heavy for such memories and details to be retained for too long. To know the truth, to understand the end, you must know the beginning, but where to begin?

It has been suggested that my relationship with Gilman began in September of 1927 when he moved into the crumbling edifice on Parsonage Street, but I knew of him before then, for like myself, Gilman worked for Professor Upham, delving deep into theoretical physics and mathematics. Our research, as directed by Upham, was equal to that of the latest theories emerging from the laboratories of Einstein, Planck and Schrodinger. Upham regularly corresponded and published with the premier minds of the age. Indeed, his paper providing mathematical proof refuting the Bohr-Heisenberg theory of quantum mechanics won high praise from both Bose and Szilard, and formed the base for Einstein’s own later assault on the concept. The paper, published in the summer of 1927, even garnered a note from famed inventor Nikola Tesla, who invited Upham to co-author a paper.

It was this joint paper, between Tesla and Upham, which changed the direction of the work that Gilman had been pursuing. To my knowledge, the manuscript bearing both their names and which bore the title “Historical Evidence for Non-Linear Motion through Fourth Dimensional Space” never saw publication, but I presume that it was for this treatise that in the fall of 1927 Upham redirected Gilman to investigate the linkages between various quantum theories and certain schools of elder magic. Upham invoked his academic standing to gain Gilman access to the medieval metaphysics collection, an act that annoyed a score of history and philosophy students and drew protests from several other faculty members and at least two department chairs. Upham dealt with these distractions, ordering Gilman to wade through the vast holdings in search of evidence that some of the forbidden and secret knowledge of old may have been hidden examples of current breakthroughs in modern math and physics. Gilman took to the work with glee, and by the end of October had filled several notebooks with possible linkages between modern spatial theories and several branches of mystical teachings, particularly those related by John Dee in his treatise Monas Hieroglyphica, and to a lesser extent in Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis. Upham was pleased and urged Gilman to delve deeper into the morass of ancient and foreboding texts.

Gilman’s studies were not without obstacles. Armitage, the old librarian, put limits on Gilman’s access to the rarer texts, particularly Dee’s translation of the Necronomicon, to which he was limited to but an hour each day. Here then is the irony of the situation, for it is in the limitations placed on his use of the Necronomicon that drove poor Gilman to peruse other sources. Sources such as the trial journals of Judge John Hathorne, whose details on his encounters with a number of the accused witches would lead Gilman to an obsession with Keziah Mason that would in the end cost him his life.

From Hathorne’s papers Gilman learned how in 1692, at the height of the witch panic, court officers seized Keziah Mason on the road from Innsmouth and brought her bound and shackled before the court. It was three days of torture before she admitted to being a witch and revealed to Judge Hathorne her secret name of Nahab. There were places like the desolate island in the Miskatonic River and the dark valley beyond Meadow Hill where she would meet with the Black Man and draw curves and lines that would open doors to spaces beyond space and between space, and to the planets seen in the sky, and beyond. She was, she claimed, a vessel for the Black Goat, and through her had passed the dark hundred, and from them would arise the thousand young, and then the million favored ones. Here Mason broke into a strange quote that Gilman recognized as a translation from Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis: “For the Black Goat Mother doth favor her servants with such fruitfulness that would shame even the most fertile of pestilent flies, breeding in the secret wounds of man’s misery and pain, like maggots in a slaughter yard.”

Hathorne was so disturbed by Mason’s testimony that he ordered her to await execution in a windowless underground chamber, chained to a wall, her mouth gagged, her hands and fingers bound. Despite all such precautions, the next morning Hathorne found the prison guard mad, babbling about a horrid rat-thing that had scurried out of her cell. Of Keziah Mason there was no trace; only a series of strange devices, of angled lines and broken curves, painted onto the cell wall using a viscous red fluid Hathorne refused to identify, remained to mark her passage. As astounding a story as it was, it was Hathorne’s skilled renderings of the symbols found in Mason’s cell that so intrigued Gilman. Although primitive, and whether that was a result of Hathorne’s sketch, or of the original state of the symbols themselves, they bore striking resemblances to the recent geometrically recursive works of Helge von Koch and Waclaw Sierpiński, exactly the kind of thing Upham had been looking for.

Gilman pursued this direction, poring through the antiquated library catalogs for days, but to little avail. The little old ladies who formed the core of the library reference staff, to whom he posed his questions and begged for assistance, would only shake their heads and wander away to attend to other duties. That Walter Gilman was not from Arkham may have had some part in this gentle rebuff. True, he had some family in the area; there were still Gilmans in Innsmouth, where Walter’s grandparents had left in 1846, but this relationship provided no advantage, for the residents of Arkham have no fondness for those of Innsmouth. Possibly, it was not the taciturn nature of Arkhamites, nor their native prejudice against those of Innsmouth that stalled Gilman’s researches into Keziah Mason; rather it may have been being from Haverhill itself, easily noticed from the particular accent that Gilman spoke with, that was itself the cause for many to avoid him. For many of the residents of Arkham could not help but blame those from Haverhill for the sickness that had started in that small town in 1926, and which had spread, carried by careless farmers and less than reputable dairy men. The sickness that had swept through the town, an illness of aching joints and low fevers accompanied by strange and horrid hallucinations, was born of unsanitary practices, and claimed a dozen or so lives amongst the Haverhill farms, but that was a fraction of the number it killed in Arkham before it burned itself out. They called it the Haverhill Fever, which was a polite term used by polite people. The older doctors and the less genteel folk who lived and worked amongst the slaughterhouses, factories and wharves of Arkham called it by another, more common name, rat-bite madness.

It was in September of 1927 that Gilman had a breakthrough, and learned that the home of Keziah Mason was still extant. His plodding through local history had turned up a rare and somewhat forgotten treatise, A History of Miskatonic Valley by Pr. Everet L. Watkins of the small but respected Arkham College, located mere blocks from the hallowed halls of Miskatonic University itself. Here then was a compendium, not only of the general history of the city, but of its scandals, secrets and rumors. Watkins had succumbed to the 1905 typhoid plague, but before that he had worked for the Historical Society, and before that for the Arkham Bulletin. He knew things about Arkham, and the people in it, that most would rather have forgotten. He wrote about the Panic of 1869, during which some of the finer homes in the city were burned down, and also of the young Latimer girl was killed by wild dogs in 1884. Watkins had taken photographs of the man who had built the University observatory, and had filed notice twelve years later when the same man had died in the local madhouse. To him, those dark days of witch hunts and trials weren’t just history; to him they were vital occurrences, which still lingered, permeating the landscape and molding events in Arkham even into the beginning of the twentieth century. He had known Arkham like some men know their wives; he knew her joys and beauties, her mercies and loves; but he knew her faults, her weaknesses, her dirty secrets, and the lies she liked to tell herself; and for all of it, Watkins had loved Arkham, her stately homes, her dockside warehouses, her crumbling alleyways, just the same.

It was from Watkins’ book that Gilman learned that the old house was just a block away from the University on Parsonage Street. The house itself was nothing of note, a great box of a building with a gambrel roof, and the limited amount of charm that such examples of early colonial architecture hold. Years of neglect had not improved its appeal, and the entire neighborhood seemed blighted by its presence. Finding the exterior of the Witch House wholly unremarkable, Gilman had actually paid the landlord to allow him to explore several of the vacant rooms, and had even gone so far as to crawl up into the attic. It was during this exploration that Gilman inadvertently discovered that I resided in the moldering old edifice, and enlisted, one could even say forced, my aid in researching the legends surrounding the house and its original owner.

Our principal source was Watkins’ text, which itself used a variety of older sources, including diaries, journals, and various village and private records to build a brief biography of Keziah Mason. Most of the stories of Keziah begin with the end, with the accusations, the trial and her mysterious escape, but in 1692 Keziah was some fifty years old, and few people tell or even know who she was or what she did prior to the scenario that ended her life. She is remembered as the witch of Arkham, but in those days Arkham was a much smaller place and still in the shadow of Kingsport. Like many of the time, Keziah wasn’t even from Arkham, and you can’t tell the tale of how Keziah came to Arkham without telling of her sisters as well.

The Mason triplets, Abigail, Hepzibah and Keziah, were born August the twentieth, 1637, in Kingsport, to Elizabeth Talbye and her husband Roger Mason, captain and owner of the brig Cordelia Ys. Much is known of the Masons, for they were an active family and well respected throughout the village. A year after the birth of his daughters, Roger Mason met with Arthur Marsh and Benjamin Corey; together the three formed the Kingsport Mercantile Company, which by 1639 maintained a fleet of seven ships plying the Caribbean trade. Even today Kingsport Mercantile maintains vast brick warehouses along the river downstream of Arkham.

In 1640, tragedy struck Kingsport and the Masons in particular, when a great storm blew in from the south, sinking three ships in the harbor, destroying sixteen homes and killing twelve men, women and children. The death of these poor souls, including Keziah Mason, is an established fact documented in municipal and church records. By all accounts, and by my own investigation, the grave of the child Keziah Mason can be found in the old burying ground near the center of Kingsport. There is no doubt that the girl born to Elizabeth and Roger Mason died that day in 1640.

It is from the diary of Dr. Joseph Hillstrom, in an entry dated April the twelfth, 1652, that the story of Keziah Mason begins again. For it was on the morning of this date that a frantic Hepzibah Mason appeared on Hillstrom’s doorstep. A violent storm had lashed the coast the previous night, and in the morning the shoreline had been littered with the wreckage of some unknown ship. Combing the beach, the Masons had found, clinging to the debris, the body of a young girl, chilled to the bone, but still alive. Hillstrom found the girl unconscious, cold to the touch and obviously suffering from long exposure to the icy waters of the bay and beach. That she had survived some terrible ordeal was obvious, yet how she had survived was what puzzled Hillstrom the most, for even now, after being wrapped in blankets and set next to the fire, the girl was colder than the doctor thought a breathing person could be. Still, it was the girls Abigail and Hepzibah who noticed the most startling thing about the child, and thus Dr. Hillstrom went about making silhouettes of all three girls to confirm the observation. For the strange unconscious girl that the Mason children had found on the beach had the same features and profile as the Mason twins themselves; indeed, had he not known it to be otherwise, the strange girl could easily have passed for either one of the twins.

It was on the second day that the foundling began to stir and slowly regained consciousness and opened her eyes. It was immediately plain that although she understood the words spoken to her, she herself was unable to speak. Likewise, while she could read, any attempts to have the child write ended in failure. At a loss of what to call the girl, but recognizing that the child needed a name, Elizabeth Mason declared that God had in His mercy returned to them their Keziah. In the village, a meeting was held to discuss the girl’s welfare, and whether it was proper to commit her to the Masons’ care. While much was made of the burden already carried by the Captain and his wife, none would step forward to oppose Elizabeth Mason’s claim on the child.

While her ability to speak and even write words remained lost, she seemed to possess an uncanny skill with numbers and reading. This talent first manifested as she watched Roger balance books and write out missives to those who owed the Kingsport Mercantile Company money. Without the benefit of pen or paper, it seemed the girl was able to carry out complex arithmetic tasks, and even calculate interest in her head. On many occasion she would point to calculations in which Roger had made simple or even complex errors, and then gesture towards numbers that formed the correct answer. It was in this manner that Keziah first learned to write, not with the alphabet, but with numbers. By the end of June, Roger Mason had moved the girl beyond numbers, and by August she had mastered the Masons’ entire meager library, including three volumes in Latin and one in Greek.