the Curwen farm, and in that dreadful chronicle there had been a mention of conversations overheard before the old wizard betook himself wholly beneath the earth. There had been, Smith and Weeden insisted, terrible colloquies wherein figured Curwen, certain captives of his, and the guards of those captives . Those guards, according to Hutchinson or his avatar, had “eaten their heads off,” so that now Dr. Allen did not keep them in shape . And if not in shape , how save as the “salts” to which it appears this wizard band was engaged in reducing as many human bodies or skeletons as they could?
So that was what these lekythoi contained; the monstrous fruit of unhallowed rites and deeds, presumably won or cowed to such submission as to help when called up by some hellish incantation, in the defense of their blasphemous master or the questioning of those who were not so willing? Willett shuddered at the thought of what he had been pouring in and out of his hands, and for a moment felt an impulse to flee in panic from that cavern of hideous shelves with their silent and perhaps watching sentinels. Then he thought of the “ Custodes ”—in the myriad Phaleron jugs on the other side of the room. Salts too—and if not the salts of “guards,” then the salts of what? God! Could it be possible that here lay the mortal relics of half the titan thinkers of all the ages; snatched by supreme ghouls from crypts where the world thought them safe, and subject to the beck 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; for a morbid, dreaming friend of his had once drawn it on paper and told