The Case of Charles Dexter Ward quotes

The patient seemed oddly older than his twenty-six years would warrant; his face had taken on a subtle cast which only the very aged usually acquire. While his organic processes showed a certain queerness of proportion which nothing in medical experience can parallel.

Respiration and heart action had a baffling lack of symmetry, the voice was lost, so that no sounds above a whisper were possible, digestion was incredibly prolonged and minimized.

The skin had a morbid chill and dryness, and the cellular structure of the tissue seemed exaggeratedly coarse and loosely-knit.

Psychologically, too, Charles Ward was unique.

His madness held no affinity to any sort recorded in even the latest and most exhaustive of treatises, and was conjoined to a mental force which would have made him a genius or a leader had it not been twisted into strange and grotesque forms.

Only Dr. Willett, who brought Charles Ward into the world and watched his growth of body and mind ever since, seemed frightened at the thought of his future freedom.

It developed that Joseph Curwen had traveled much in very early life, living for a time in England and making at least two voyages to the Orient; and his speech, when he deigned to use it, was that of a learned and cultivated Englishman.

There seemed to lurk in his bearing some cryptic, sardonic arrogance, as if he had come to find all human beings dull through having moved among stranger and more potent entities.

In 1746 Mr.

It was near the docks along the southerly part of the Town Street, however, that the worst things were muttered about Joseph Curwen.

Sailors are superstitious folk; and all made strange furtive signs of protection when they saw the slim, deceptively young-looking figure with its yellow hair and slight stoop entering the Curwen warehouse in Doubloon Street

or talking with captains and supercargos on the long quay where the Curwen ships rode restlessly. Curwen’s own clerks and captains hated and feared him, and all his sailors were mongrel riffraff from Martinique, St. Eustatius, Havana, or Port Royal.

It was the same later on when they met other old companions who had gone into that zone of horror. Most of them had lost or gained something imponderable and indescribable.

They had seen or heard or felt something which was not for human creatures, and could not forget it.

From them there was never any gossip, for to even the commonest of mortal instincts there are terrible boundaries. And from that single messenger the party at the shore caught a nameless awe which almost sealed their own lips.

Close upon it came the awful voice which no hapless hearer will ever be able to forget.

It thundered out of the sky like a doom, and windows rattled as its echoes died away. It was deep and musical; powerful as a bass organ, but evil as the forbidden books of the Arabs.

What it said no man can tell, for it spoke in an unknown tongue, but this is the writing Luke Fenner set down to portray the demoniac intonations: “Deesmees—Jeshet—Bonedosefeduvema—Enitemoss.”

From that time on the obliteration of Curwen’s memory became increasingly rigid, extending at last by common consent even to the town records and files of the Gazette.

It can be compared in spirit only to the hush that lay on Oscar Wilde’s name for a decade after his disgrace, and in extent only to the fate of that sinful King of Runagur in Lord Dunsany’s tale, whom the gods decided must not only cease to be, but must cease ever to have been.

Mrs. Tillinghast, as the widow became known after 1772, sold the house in Olney Court and resided with her father in Power’s Lane till her death in 1817. The farm at Pawtuxet, shunned by every living soul, remained to molder through the years;

Only robust old Captain Whipple was heard by alert listeners to mutter once in awhile to himself, “

Pox on that ⸻, but he had no business to laugh while he screamed.

’Twas as though the damn’d ⸻ had some ’at up his sleeve. For half a crown I’d burn his ⸻ house.”

The more mystical phases of the letter, which he took to be some extravagant kind of symbolism, frankly baffled him; though he noted with a thrill of curiosity that the Biblical passage referred to—Job 14, 14—was the familiar verse,

“If a man die, shall he live again? All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come.”

Young Ward came home in a state of pleasant excitement, and spent the following Saturday in a long and exhaustive study of the house in Olney Court. The place, now crumbling with age, had never been a mansion;

And at last the little white overtaken farmhouse on the right, and on the left the classic Adam porch and stately bayed façade of the great brick house where he was born.

It was twilight, and Charles Dexter Ward had come home.

Ward was now visibly aged and hardened, but was still normal in his general reactions; and in several talks with Willett displayed a balance which no madman—even an incipient one—could feign continuously for long.

Presently she fainted, although she is still unable to recall the precise and immediate cause.

Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.

Mr. Ward returned from the business section at about quarter past six; and not finding his wife downstairs, was told by the frightened servants that she was probably watching at Charles’ door, from which the sounds had been far stranger than ever before.

There was a formula for evoking such a shade, and another for putting it down; and it had now been so perfected that it could be taught successfully.

One must be careful about evocations, for the markers of old graves are not always accurate.

Willett and Mr. Ward shivered as they passed from conclusion to conclusion. Things—presences or voices of some sort—could be drawn down from unknown places as well as from the grave, and in this process also one must be careful.

not spirally, but in three abrupt turns; and with such narrowness that two men could have passed only with difficulty. He had counted about thirty when a sound reached him very faintly; and after that he did not feel disposed to count any more.

It was a godless sound; one of those low-keyed, insidious outrages of nature which are not meant to be.

To call it a dull wail, a doom-dragged whine, or a hopeless howl of chorused anguish and stricken flesh without mind would be to miss its most quintessential loathesomeness and soul-sickening overtones.

He was drenched with perspiration and without means of producing a light; stricken and unnerved in the abysmal blackness and horror, and crushed with a memory he never could efface.

Beneath him dozens of those things still lived, and from one of the shafts the cover was removed.

He knew that what he had seen could never climb up the slippery walls, yet shuddered at the thought that some obscure foothold might exist.

… and call of madmen who sought to drain their knowledge for some still wilder end whose ultimate effect would concern, as poor Charles had hinted in his frantic note, “all civilization, all natural law, perhaps even the fate of the solar system and the universe?”

And Marinus Bicknell Willett had sifted their dust through his hands!

Then he noticed a small door at the farther end of the room, and calmed himself enough to approach it and examine the crude sign chiseled above. It was only a symbol, but it filled him with vague spiritual dread;

Willett had been breathing stertorously, and opened his eyes slowly when Mr. Ward gave him some brandy fetched from the car. Then he shuddered and screamed, crying out, “That beard—those eyes—God, who are you?”

A very strange thing to say to a trim, blue-eyed, clean-shaven gentleman whom he had known from the latter’s boyhood.

In the bright noon sunlight the bungalow was unchanged since the previous morning. Willett’s clothing bore no disarrangement beyond certain smudges and worn places at the knees, and only a faint acrid odor reminded Mr.

and chuckled hoarsely at something which amused him. Then he whispered, in accents doubly terrible because of the cracked voice he used, “

Damn ’em, they do eat, but they don’t need to! That’s the rare part!

A month, you say, without food? Lud, Sir, you be modest! D’ye know, that was the joke on poor old Whipple with his virtuous bluster! Kill everything off, would he?

And Mr. Charles was not the same when he stalked out without a word. The butler shivered as he spoke, and sniffed at the heavy air that blew down from some open window upstairs.

Terror had settled definitely upon the house, and only the businesslike detectives failed to imbibe a full measure of it.

Even they were restless, for this case had held vague elements in the background which pleased them not at all. Dr. Willett was thinking deeply and rapidly, and his thoughts were terrible ones.

The ancient overmantel still lingered; but it seemed robbed of malignity now, and rose as calm and stately in its white paneling as if it had never borne the picture of Joseph Curwen.

Night was coming on, yet this time its shadows held no latent fright, but only a gentle melancholy.

Of what he had done the doctor would never speak. To Mr. Ward he said, “I can answer no questions, but I will say that there are different kinds of magic. I have made a great purgation.

Night was coming on, yet this time its shadows held no latent fright, but only a gentle melancholy. Of what he had done the doctor would never speak. To Mr. Ward he said, “

I can answer no questions, but I will say that there are different kinds of magic.

I have made a great purgation. Those in this house will sleep the better for it.”