The Sea of Ash (4 page)

Pond spent the night reading the
book, expecting to find some mention of the Sumner Inn, but no reference
existed.
Ghosts that Lie
documented Brinklow's uncovering of cheats who
used clever tricks like doctored photographs, fake body parts and
pseudo-ectoplasm to bilk people seeking to communicate with loved ones who had
died. However, all of the cases the author had catalogued had taken place in
Britain.

Pond wrote: "I waited for the
inn to offer me some manner of sign to justify my being directed there, but no
sign was forthcoming. Had I failed this poor soul Brinklow, or was the
explanation for his present predicament, his seeming interment in a realm
accessible through a dead infant's face, hidden there in the inn, waiting as if
an undiscovered key?"

Finally, after staying three days
at the Sumner Inn, a discouraged Pond returned home without experiencing
anything like a revelation. Not to say that he was defeated. He searched
several other libraries and, in Salem, found a second book by Simon Brinklow.
This work, called
The Path by Moonlight, an Investigation into Disbelieved
Realms
, published in 1865, was a complete turnaround from
Ghosts that
Lie
. Intrigued, Pond went on to find out all that he could about the man
who wrote it.

Who was Simon Brinklow? He was a
British fellow, a portly and headstrong banker who, in 1855, lost his wife and
three daughters in a fire. When he learned of the growing spiritualism craze
that was sweeping Europe and America, his grief got the best of him, and he
began attending seances and paying large sums to mediums who claimed they could
put him in touch with his loved ones.

A disillusioned Brinklow soon came
to believe that the masses were being duped by charlatans, as was largely the
case. Infuriated, he set out on a personal mission to expose the fakes who
preyed on the heartsick (himself included). In 1862 his crusade took him across
the Atlantic to New York and Boston. But something ironic happened. While
meaning to discredit yet another so-called haunting, Brinklow traveled to
Lexington's Sumner Inn, where he had an experience that converted him in a
sense, and set him out on an exploration of fantastic mysteries.

Though he still recognized the
numerous frauds for what they were, he realized that there was indeed another
side of things, an unexplored world here on Earth. He wrote and published his
second book, but it was entirely dismissed by the scientific community, scoffed
at by the religious legions, and resented by the spiritualists he had spent so
much energy debunking. Brinklow vanished in 1870 at the age of fifty-five.

Hours passed there in the Georgian
parlor with the fireplace snapping and the candles reducing. A small mantel
clock rang twelve.

"Midnight," Imogene
said, grinning, "That calls for brandy."

We had been oblivious of the time,
trading conjecture. She fetched an ambery bottle and two glasses, and we drank
a toast to Dr. Pond, and another to Simon Brinklow.

We talked about the event that had
inspired Brinklow's change of heart. He had heard stories about a certain
spirit known to pay visit to the Sumner Inn. Fractured Harry, as the spirit was
known, had been encountered as far back as 1799. Somewhere in his travels,
Simon had learned a way to (allegedly) summon the odd spirit, and he gave it a
try.

Brinklow whispered a curious
little song into an empty glass bottle, corked it, then took it to a cemetery
about a half-mile away from the inn. The burial yard was neglected, crowded
with pitched slates and high grass, tangled in the shadow of leafless boughs.
He set the bottle down beneath a tree, returned to his room at the inn and
waited, expecting nothing more to happen.

Sometime in the late hours the man
heard odd rhythmic sounds in the hallway outside his room. It sounded to him as
if someone were letting sopping, bunched-up towels fall to the floor,
repeatedly. The noises came up to the opposite side of his door and stopped.
Then came a faint knock. A very faint knock.

Brinklow opened the door. He
describes the visitor in his second book: "It gave me the impression of a
ghastly puppet, this queer figure thrown together from odd bits. The head was a
tea kettle, steaming at the spout, impossibly balanced on the main body which,
in all candor, seemed no more than a man's baggy overcoat with nothing like a
frame to support it. Fantastically enough, the legs which propelled the
creature were fashioned from mop handles, while the damp, stringy heads of
those very mops comprised its feet."

When Fractured Harry wobbled into
his room and sat down at the little table, Brinklow determined that
this
ghost -- or whatever it was -- could not be a hoax. "The resultant terror
at this realization," Simon wrote, "was complete."

The creature placed its hands on
top of the table. They were old gardening gloves of battered grey, and they
twitched irregularly, emitted the restless buzzing of what could only be bees.
True to rumor, Harry, with no corporeal vehicle to call his own, made do with
whatever was on hand.

Despite his shock, the hardy
investigator maintained composure. The visitor leaned its warm kettle head
toward him and a voice hissed out of the steam.

"The words which were spoken
by the specter defied the conventions of communication. Certainly they were
words, but as for what language, I cannot be bound to say. Thus, I remain
incapable of repeating them. Indeed, they were strange to me in the instant
that I heard them, and yet, their meaning was without ambiguity. They directed
me to a particular location, that and nothing more."

Pond recognized that this passage
from Brinklow's second book was informing him about what the first line of the
scrawled Brinklow note was about...FIND FRACTURED...no doubt Fractured Harry.
Without hesitation, the doctor returned to the inn and, following Brinklow's
instructions, performed the conjuration.

Fractured Harry, so local lore
would have us believe, appears to everyone in a different form. The figure that
Brinklow encountered, for instance, was quite different from what came knocking
when Pond did the summoning.

The head was an inverted milk
bottle containing a strobing number of fireflies (a bit early in the season for
them, but Harry had procured some nonetheless). In this instance, Fractured
Harrietta might have served as a better title, for the peculiar conglomeration
of items featured a woman's pale slip slunk over a guitar, which gave the
figure a shapely cast. A coat hanger mocked shoulders, birch branches passed for
arms, and the legs were walking canes with a base of winter boots.

Harry clomped jerkily into the
room. Pond stepped back hastily to make room for its entry. A rushing mix of
terror and wonder momentarily derailed his ability to think, or as he puts
it...

"I could do no more than
stand and stare as this impossible figure closed the distance between us, its
encased green eyes winking their luminosity, fidgeting in the glass
skull."

Then, above the sound of insects
clicking against glass, came a series of wispy words. While the language was
foreign to the ear, Dr. Pond understood. Fractured Harry, before limping out of
the room, down the inn's steep stairs and to who-knows-where, told the man to
"Go to the house of Arcangelo Banchini."

Is it any wonder I find it hard to
sleep, lying here in the old Georgian room where Pond, and perhaps Brinklow
before him, slept? I reflect on my delightful visit with Imogene, and how I am
inspired more than ever.

Following our brandies, she had
asked if I had any intention of trying the ritual to contact Fractured Harry.
She herself had never attempted it, and I told her, "Oh, no...I'm happy
just to sit in the bleachers, thank you."

I have now left the Sumner Inn for
my next destination, though I have made a brief stop at a small overgrown
cemetery a short distance down the road. The grave markers are thin slates,
tilted, tired from standing so long. Some bare simple portraits and winged
heads produced by colonial carvers, others offer the urn and willow motif. None
mention anyone named Harry. There are bottles in the high grass, but they are
beer bottles, and it's doubtful that they were used to conjure anything other
than inebriation. I take photos of the site, then head on my way.

3. A VISIT FROM WAKEFIELD

Following the encounter with
Fractured Harry, Pond discovered something distressing. Upon returning to his
house in Salisbury, he opened the icebox to check on the condition of the dead
baby and found that the body had reduced to a resinous mass.

"It was completely irregular,
so far as decomposition goes. The body seemed to be melting, rather than
rotting. While still roughly shaped like a human, the consistency was something
else entirely. It was slick and brown and translucent -- the translucency
revealing neither organs nor bones. In fact, part of it stuck to the door of
the ice box and stretched like taffy when that compartment was opened."

This turn of events forced Dr.
Pond to do something that he had thus far resisted. He told someone else about
Arabella and the baby. He telephoned his good friend Nigel Wagner (who would
later go on to publish
Dr. Pond's Journal
) and shared all. He knew he
could trust Wagner, and someone other than himself
had
to witness the
baby, for the only proof of its existence, besides his words, were the
photographs that he had taken, and some would disregard those, if he ever chose
to make public his strange experiences.

Nigel suggested that a third party
be allowed to view the child, someone who might be sympathetic to such
mysteries. He suggested Professor Earl Wakefield of Pawtucket University in
Rhode Island. Wagner had read a paper called
Overlaps
, written by
Wakefield, which had to do with the theory that other dimensions existed
alongside our own. Further, Wakefield put forth the proposition that there were
spots where various dimensions actually overlapped each other, some being
natural formations, and others which were
created
. Nigel speculated that
the baby was a corporeal overlap.

"In my desperation, I
agreed," wrote Pond.

"Despite the fact that the
icebox was maintaining its cold, the condition of the corpse appeared to be
worsening by the hour," Pond noted. "By the time Nigel arrived in the
evening, it was growing softer and darker, and the stench had gotten noticeably
worse. I cursed myself, for any chance of performing an autopsy had long
passed."

Shortly after ten o'clock that
night a car rattled up and coughed outside the Queen Anne. A tall, wiry
silhouette moved jauntily along the walk, but there was a pause before the men waiting
inside heard a knock. When they opened the door the old professor stood there
grinning, sniffing a sprig of lily-of-the-valley that he had plucked from the
yard.

 
"I hope you don't mind," the
fellow said. "It's my favorite. Is there any other scent so sweet?"

Wakefield was a horsy-faced
creature with a red tempest of hair and ill-fitting spectacles. He was well
dressed in a suit and bowtie. He stuck the sprig, with its delicate blooms like
tiny white bells, into the buttonhole of his jacket and strode in.

Albert introduced himself and
Nigel Wagner. The professor stooped to put his face close to Pond's (Albert had
been warned that the professor was an eccentric sort) and remarked, "You
were in the war. Only men who were in the war have eyes like
that
."

The three went into Pond's
examination office, where the icebox crouched against a wall. There were
shelves lined with jars, file cabinets piled with manuals, and the expected
tools of the trade. The professor paused to study the eye chart, both with and
without his spectacles.

Wakefield exhibited an enthusiasm
and sprightliness that defied his age. He lit a pipe and paced while asking
Pond some preliminary questions before viewing the baby. He wanted to hear more
about Arabella, the birth and the note from Simon Brinklow. Fascinated by the
responses, Wakefield mentioned that he too had experienced the wonders of an
overlap point.

"Twelve years ago I received
communications from a Wampanoag Indian woman. The overlap in that case was a
two-foot-wide circle in the center of a pond over in Plymouth."

Albert was eager to hear more
about Wakefield's story, and the man's speculations about the nature of these
other dimensions, but he knew that the baby was deteriorating by the minute and
so he urged the professor to have a look.

"Yes, yes -- let's have a
look, why don't we?" Wakefield said, turning to the ice box. He rubbed his
hands together, knelt down in front of the thing and handed his glasses up to
Pond. "Would you hold these a moment, my boy?"

Wakefield opened the door and
peered in. "Oh, my..." he breathed, "Amazing! look how
it's-"

The professor reeled back, his
scream muffled by a mask of gummy black. What was left of the dead child --
little more than a glistening black cannonball -- had fastened itself to him.
His arms flailed as he struggled to his feet and staggered blindly across the
room. The other two men rushed to his aid, but all they could do was to cling
to his thrashing arms as the dark mass on his face flattened, then shaped
itself into a lumpy approximation of features. Steam was seeping out from under
the muck and one could hear hissing, as if something were being seared.

A voice other than the professor's
came bellowing out of the newly formed face -- it was guttural, garbled as it
repeated a single phrase over and over. "Six oceans...six oceans...six
oceans..."

The black substance rearranged
itself further, taking on a loosely ovular shape with rib-like striations that,
for a moment, made it look like an obsidian trilobite. Then, it melted straight
into the center of Professor Wakefield's face. The two men who had tried to
help him suddenly backed away.

The penetrating mass shaped a
vacuous, smoothbore crater. Pond was close enough to get a look into the hole
which, he would assert in his journal, appeared to reach deeper than the
circumference of a human head would allow.

"All at once a great sucking
wind took up," Pond wrote. "Papers flew to the hole, books were drawn
violently to it and swallowed, even myself and Nigel had to fight against the
force of the vacuum."

The professor had ceased his
flailing at this point, and took several resolute steps toward the other men.
Wagner managed to get a hold of the door frame and called for Pond to follow,
but Pond was determined to remain. He pawed at his shelves even as their
bottles flew off and disappeared into Wakefield's face.

The gangly figure stepped closer
and closer to Pond, thrusting its orifice forward. It was a horrid sight,
bending down as if to kiss Albert, its wild red hair dancing in the wind. The
blaring vacuum increased its intensity and Pond started to slide across the
floor toward it.

Wagner saw Pond's hands come up --
one let go of a small open bottle of ether, the other a lit cigarette lighter.
Both items were drawn into the hollow.

There was a flash and a thunderous
roar that could not have simply come from a small bottle of ignited ether.
Professor Wakefield was tossed in one direction, Pond in the other. Nigel
grabbed his friend and pulled him to safety as the examination room was
suffused with flame.

Appalling screams came from the
burning chamber, a multitude of voices echoing away as if Pond and Wagner were
listening to a string of mountain climbers falling into a cavernous chasm.

Firemen arrived in time to save
the Queen Anne, although the examination room and part of Pond's study were
destroyed. Professor Wakefield's charred remains were dragged from the rubble;
they had been obliterated from the neck up. All traces of the enigmatic
infant's body were lost, as were most of the photographs that Pond had taken of
it. The only one that remained was burnt along one side so that the
seashell-face was no longer visible.

Nana was a collector as well as a
naturalist. When she died the attic of her house was filled with treasures stored
in boxes of yellowed cardboard. There were shed snake skins like coils of
brittle brown lace, shriveled horse chestnuts that once were dark and polished
as mahogany; there were stones and pine cones and dead insects she had found
and delicately interred in beds formed from cotton balls. These things were as
valuable to her as jewelry might be to another.

There were shells, of course, all
manner of shells. They were scalloped and spiraled, smooth, textured, colorful
and dark. She even had a pair of ponderous conches with shiny pink mouths and
pale petrified horns. They were like the skulls of demons or some
unclassifiable prehistoric thing.

On the subject of shells... Dr.
Pond writes of the shell that he removed from the child. "While the
remains of the infant were lost, I was thankful that the shell had survived
unscathed. It was safe in my jacket pocket, where it remained at all times. At
least I could claim that as tangible evidence.

"I must admit that I had not
fully contemplated the potential dangers that might be involved in the kind of
exploration I was about. Frankly, I was not even sure just what my purpose was.
Proof, in a number of astonishing forms, had forced me onto a road that might
take me anywhere.

"On the eve of my leaving, I
was tempted to turn away and try to pretend that things were only what I once
knew them to be, but it was much too late for that. How could I deny what I had
experienced? It was all real; Arabella, the infant, the note from Brinklow,
Fractured Harry, and poor Wakefield's demise. To say nothing of the mysterious
hollows I had seen in not one, but two human heads.

"I spent that night at Nigel
Wagner's home, where I was plagued by strange dreams. Mind you, I had seen
atrocities in the Argonne, but the professor's violent end disquieted me to my
core. In my sleep I imagined him with that wide open darkness where his
features had been.

"Another troubling image was
that of the pulpy mass that seemed to mock a face as it covered that of the old
gent. In my slumber it loomed like a sky, and I heard it repeating that
particular phrase again and again. 'Six oceans...' Whatever could it have meant
by that? Previously I had seen a photographic portrait of Simon Brinklow. Only
in retrospect did I liken his image to that dark one that took shape and spoke.

"In the morning, following
tea and Telegram, I thanked Nigel for all his help, and because he agreed to
tend my dog Rooney in my absence. Not one for tears, I made an exception as I
bade farewell to my two dearest friends. I shook the man's hand and then bent
down so that the dog could give me his paw."