Calvin and I did so.
It was as if a rotten spectre of this dwelling’s sinister past had risen before us. A single chair stood in this alcove, and above it, fastened from a hook in one of the stout overhead beams, was a decayed noose of hemp.
“Then it was here that he hung himself,” Cal muttered. “God!”
“Yes…with the corpse of his daughter lying at the foot of the stairs behind him.”
Cal began to speak; then I saw his eyes jerked to a spot behind me; then his words became a scream.
How, Bones, can I describe the sight which fell upon our eyes? How can I tell you of the hideous tenants within our walls?
The far wall swung back, and from that darkness a face leered—a face with eyes as ebon as the Styx itself. Its mouth yawned in a toothless, agonized grin; one yellow, rotted hand stretched itself out to us. It made a hideous, mewling sound and took a shambling step forward. The light from my candle fell upon it—
And I saw the livid rope-burn about its neck!
From beyond it something else moved, something I shall dream of until the day when all dreams cease: a girl with a pallid, mouldering face and a corpse-grin; a girl whose head lolled at a lunatic angle.
They wanted us; I know it. And I know they would have drawn us into that darkness and made us their own, had I not thrown my candle directly at the thing in the partition, and followed it with the chair beneath that noose.
After that, all is confused darkness. My mind has drawn the curtain. I awoke, as I have said, in my room with Cal at my side.
If I could leave, I should fly from this house of horror with my night-dress flapping at my heels. But I cannot. I have become a pawn in a deeper, darker drama. Do not ask how I know; I only do. Mrs Cloris was right when she spoke of blood calling to blood; and how horribly right when she spoke of those who watchand those who guard. I fear that I have wakened a Force which has slept in the tenebrous village of Jerusalem’s Lot for half a century, a Force which has slain my ancestors and taken them in unholy bondage as nosferatu—the Undead. And I have greater fears than these, Bones, but I still see only in part. If I knew…if I only knew all!
CHARLES.
Postscriptum—And of course I write this only for myself; we are isolated from Preacher’s Corners. I daren’t carry my taint there to post this, and Calvin will not leave me. Perhaps, if God is good, this will reach you in some manner.
C.
(From the pocket journal of Calvin McCann)
Oct. 23, ’50
He is stronger to-day; we talked briefly of the apparitionsin the cellar; agreed they were neither hallucinations nor of an ectoplasmicorigin, but real. Does Mr Boone suspect, as I do, that they have gone? Perhaps; the noises are still; yet all is ominous yet, o’ercast with a dark pall. It seems we wait in the deceptive Eye of the Storm…
Have found a packet of papers in an upstairs bedroom, lying in the bottom drawer of an old roll-top desk. Some correspondence & receipted bills lead me to believe the room was Robert Boone’s. Yet the most interesting document is a few jottings on the back of an advertisement for gentlemen’s beaver hats. At the top is writ:
Blessed are the meek.
Below, the following apparent nonsense is writ:
b k e d s h d e r m t h e s e a k
e l m s o e r a r e s h a m d e d
I believe ’tis the key of the locked and coded book in the library. The cypher above is certainly a rustic one used in the War for Independence known as the Fence-Rail. When one removes the “nulls” from the second bit of scribble, the following is obtained:
b e s d r t e e k
l s e a e h m e
Read up and down rather than across, the result is the original quotation from the Beatitudes.
Before I dare show this to Mr Boone, I must be sure of the book’s contents…
Oct. 24, 1850.
DEAR BONES,
An amazing occurrence—Cal, always close-mouthed until absolutely sure of himself [a rare and admirable human trait!], has found the diary of my Grandfather Robert. The document was in a code which Cal himself has broken. He modestly declares that the discovery was an accident, but I suspect that perseverance and hard work had rather more to do with it.
At any rate, what a somber light it sheds on our mysteries here!
The first entry is dated June 1, 1789, the last October 27, 1789—four days before the cataclysmic disappearance of which Mrs Cloris spoke. It tells a tale of deepening obsession—nay, of madness—and makes hideously clear the relationship between Great-uncle Philip, the town of Jerusalem’s Lot, and the book which rests in that desecrated church.
The town itself, according to Robert Boone, pre-dates Chapelwaite [built in 1782] and Preacher’s Corners [known in those days as Preacher’s Rest and founded in 1741]; it was founded by a splinter group of the Puritan faith in 1710, a sect headed by a dour religious fanatic named James Boon. What a start that name gave me! That this Boon bore relation to my family can hardly be doubted, I believe. Mrs Cloris could not have been more right in her superstitious belief that familial bloodline is of crucial importance in this matter; and I recall with terror her answer to my question about Philip and hisrelationship to Jerusalem’s Lot. “Blood relation,” said she, and I fear that it is so.
The town became a settled community built around the church where Boon preached—or held court. My grandfather intimates that he also held commerce with any number of ladies from the town, assuring them that this was God’s way and will. As a result, the town became an anomaly which could only have existed in those isolated and queer days when belief in witches and the Virgin Birth existed hand in hand: an interbred, rather degenerate religious village controlled by a half-mad preacher whose twin gospels were the Bible and de Goudge’s sinister Demon Dwellings; a community in which rites of exorcism were held regularly; a community of incest and the insanity and physical defects which so often accompany that sin. I suspect [and believe Robert Boone must have also] that one of Boon’s bastard offspring must have left [or have been spirited away from] Jerusalem’s Lot to seek his fortune to the south—and thus founded our present lineage. I do know, by my own family reckoning, that our clan supposedly originated in that part of Massachusetts which has so lately become this Sovereign State of Maine. My great-grand-father, Kenneth Boone, became a rich man as a result of the then-flourishing fur trade. It was his money, increased by time and wise investment, which built this ancestral home long after his death in 1763. His sons, Philip and Robert, built Chapelwaite. Blood calls to blood, Mrs Cloris said. Could it be that Kenneth was born of James Boon, fled the madness of his father and his father’s town, only to have his sons, all-unknowing, build the Boone home not two miles from the Boon beginnings?If ’tis true, does it not seem that some huge and invisible Hand has guided us?
According to Robert’s diary, James Boon was ancient in 1789—and he must have been. Granting him an age of twenty-five in the year of the town’s founding, he would have been one hundred and four, a prodigious age. The following is quoted direct from Robert Boone’s diary:
August 4, 1789.
To-day for the first time I met this Man with whom my Brother has been so unhealthily taken; I must admit this Boon controls a strange Magnetism which upset me Greatly. He is a veritable Ancient, white-bearded, and dresses in a black Cassock which struck me as somehow obscene. More disturbing yet was the Fact that he was surrounded by Women, as a Sultan would be surrounded by his Harem; and P. assures me he is active yet, although at least an Octogenarian…