Worlds of Cthulhu

by Robert M. Price

  Of what occurred amongst the Masons over the next decade is subject to much rumor and little fact. That each of the sisters became betrothed is well documented. That early in 1656 the Cordelia Chase set sail for Jamaica, bearing all three sisters, their parents, the three young men they were meant to marry, and the parents of those men, can also not be disputed. The arrival of the vessel at Port Royal and the marriages of Abigail, Hepzibah and Keziah Mason to Simon Prinn, Jeremiah Watkins, and Robert Cummings seem also well documented. What happened next is a mystery. For in the fall the Cordelia Chase failed to return to Kingsport, and no word was had from any port along the American coast.

  It was on the sixteenth of October 1658, that a black ship sailed into the harbor of Kingsport and a rowboat manned by a short dark-skinned man with wiry hair brought three cloaked figures to shore. Abigail, Hepzibah, and Keziah had returned, but the Cordelia Chase, her crew and all the rest had been lost. According to the sisters, the ship had encountered rough weather and been forced to seek refuge along the coast of Florida. What had happened there the Mason sisters would speak of only in the vaguest of details. Of the Xaeha Indians whom they claimed had seized the ship, and of the years they had dwelt amongst them, the sisters would say little. Indeed, when pressed on the issue, the Masons did nothing but turn stone-faced and render quiet thanks to the strange swarthy figure that had brought them to shore, a man whom they fondly called Brown John.

  Within weeks of their return, the Mason women sold off their properties in Kingsport and moved to Arkham to the house on Parsonage Street. Here they lived, the three of them; widows at the age of twenty-one, alone save for their man Brown John, a stocky fellow with brown skin and black eyes, who tended the house and modest garden. Brown John spoke only a little English, but the Masons seemed to speak some of his language, too. There was much speculation in the village about where Brown John had come from. Some thought him an African, others a Hindoo, but according to old Captain Holt, who had traveled some and seen more than others, Brown John was none of these. Holt said he was from a people called the Chau-Chaus, which were little better than savages, living deep in the wilds of Asia, on a mountain plateau called Liang.

  Brown John was not the only addition to the Mason household. In the parlor of their home the sisters had installed a small tree encased in a large masonry pot. Around the tree was erected a cage of thin wrought iron rod. Amongst the branches of the tree dwelt Brown John’s pet, a small grey-furred monkey that they claimed was from the distant land of Sumatra. Those few who saw it up close claimed it to be in many ways like a large rat or possum, though the hands, face and eyes were peculiarly like those of a man. The sisters affectionately called the beast Brown Jenkin and, when the weather was warmer, the beast could be seen traveling about the village playfully riding on Keziah’s shoulder.

  In the fall of the next year Eliza Abbott sent a letter to her sister detailing the public rebuke of the villagers by one of the town elders, Ambrose Abbott. The women of the village had noticed that the widows, who had always been slightly built, had all gained weight, and rumors abounded that they were each with child. Some went so far as to point fingers and suggest that Brown John was more than the servant he made out to be. Whether it was Abbott’s chiding, or the sudden onslaught of a bitter winter, little else was made of the Masons, and when May came and went with no birth, all rumors of illegitimate pregnancy were quelled.

  That said, there are some curious records that suggest some occurrence that still remains unexplained. That spring, James Anable recorded an agreement for a monthly standing order for a significant amount of meat and sundry items. The orders were to be paid by and delivered to Keziah Mason. Now this in itself is not unusual, but that same month, a similar arrangement was made with Harlan Fisher of Kingsport, to be paid for and received by Goody Watkins. Today, you wouldn’t know it, but Goody is short for Goodwife, and you would use it like we would use Misses or Ma’am. Thus it is with some assurance that Hepzibah Mason, known in Kingsport by her married name of Watkins, arranged a standing order for large quantities of fish and shellfish to be supplied on a monthly basis.

  Over the next years, the Mason sisters entrenched themselves with the citizens of Arkham, Kingsport and Innsmouth, not only as good neighbors and customers to the merchants of all three villages, but also as midwives, a profession they seemed to excel at. They were particularly sought after by some of the older families in Kingsport, the Courts and Fishers who seemed reluctant to seek medical attention under even the worse conditions. In 1660, much was made of their success in the birthing of Eliza Burke, whose mother had collapsed and gone into labor during Sunday services. The birth had been a breach, causing considerable injury to both mother and child, which caused some concern amongst the family. But both lived, and after several days their marked improvement seemed near miraculous, earning the Masons the deepest gratitude from both parents.

  Afterwards the sisters were much in demand, regularly servicing most of the more well to do families in the area including the Carters, Pickmans, Whateleys, Marshs, Gilmans, Potters, Latimers and Phillipses. By some estimates one out of every three children born in Arkham was brought into the world by the Masons who, despite the fine quality of their work, charged but little for their services. Twenty years would pass, and the Masons began serving as midwives to the very children they had brought into the world. The sisters were in their forties and had lost much of the weight they had gained so many years before. Brown John had left them the summer before, though when exactly, no one could or would say. When pressed on the issue the Masons would simply say that it was time for him to go; his services were no longer required.

  In the spring of 1685 the first sour note between the village and the sisters was raised. Arthur Marsh, owner of the Kingsport Mercantile Company, aged but still spry, had come to Arkham to visit family and, after a chance encounter with one of the Masons, related the most curious of tales. Around about 1670 he as captain of the Sandra D took shelter from rough weather along the coast of Florida and was attacked by natives of the area. Well armed, the crew of the Sandra D had fought off their attackers. After some discussion, a militia was formed and the surviving raiders were tracked back to their village. There the good captain was to behold such sights and acts of indecent barbarism and crimes against God that he quickly ordered the entire village slaughtered. That these natives were the same as those that had seized the Cordelia Chase so many years earlier, Marsh had no doubts, for scattered amongst the village were timbers, crates and sacks that still bore the marks of that ship. The villagers regularly feasted on human flesh, and that this had been the fate of those aboard the Cordelia Chase was a forgone conclusion. No one in his crew protested his bloody orders, it being their plain duty to see to it that these fiends no more preyed upon ships in distress. What they could not understand was why he had taken a sledgehammer to the crude shell rock temple and razed it to the ground. Nor could the crew understand why he had ordered the bodies, the village and the temple doused with kerosene and burned beyond recognition. They did not understand, for they had not entered the temple to see the tableau that decorated the walls within. They had not seen the crude but blasphemous paintings of the villagers carrying out their religious rites. They had not seen the image of the villagers kneeling before sanctified figures who were gleefully feasting upon human corpses. Marsh had seen these things and he shattered them and burned them in an attempt to blot them from his memory where they burned like a horrendous beacon. For the figures that feasted in that tableau were a black man and three women dressed in white gowns, all with eerily identical features, which, despite their crudeness, Marsh recognized as belonging to Abigail, Hepzibah and Keziah Mason, and the fare on the table was unmistakably the crew of the Cordelia Chase.

  The rumors of Marsh’s tale swept through Arkham like a cold wind turning the town bitter and mean. A summer drought hit the villages hard, crops withered, cows went dry and sows took
to eating their own. Food, particularly meat, grew scarce. Rumors spread about strange sounds and violet lights emanating from the Mason house. In September the Derby household woke to the screaming of young Matthew who had been roused from his sleep, he claimed, to find one of the Masons grabbing at his feet with her claw-like hands. When over the course of the next week Lucy Anable and Jeremiah Upton reported similar nightmares, the townsfolk became restless and there was much talk in the square. Farmers and shop keepers throughout Arkham refused to do business with them, and it was not unusual to see the three walking on the Innsmouth or Kingsport roads, their backs laden down with dry goods and fish. In late October tragedy struck when Lamar Holt, a boy of just seven years living with his family on the road to Kingsport, vanished. The boy’s parents had been called to the barn to attend to a sick horse for several hours, and when they returned, the boy was gone without a trace. A desperate search throughout the night and next day in the surrounding woods found nothing. The parents, fearful and desperate, demanded that the Masons be questioned. The search party quickly became a mob that marched toward Arkham with obvious intent. Only the sudden intervention of a dozen well-armed men prevented the mob from storming the house and forcibly seizing the sisters.

  The following years were quiet for the sisters. Whether out of fear or age, all three ceased to visit Innsmouth or Kingsport. By 1687 their presence on the streets of Arkham was rare, and most of their food and supplies were delivered by members of the Jeffison family who were employed by Ezekiel Chambers, a local man who had taken pity on the sisters. It was the Jeffisons who dismantled Brown Jenkin’s cage and sold it to the local smith. What had happened to the cage’s occupant was never specified, but it was assumed that the beast had died. Later that year, a wagon appeared in front of the Mason home, and the Jeffisons loaded it with a selection of furniture and crates. By noon Abigail Mason, the widow of Simon Prinn, had left Arkham and never returned.

  Thus began a most strange and rapid exodus that culminated in early 1692. By one accounting, between 1688 and 1692 fully fifteen percent of the villagers had left Arkham and with them the vast majority of the children delivered by the Masons. Many made clear their destinations as the more urban and civilized cities of Boston, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, or even Charleston. Others, such as the Whateleys and Bishops, left the village and traveled northwest along the Miskatonic River, settling wherever they could and founding the towns of Foxfield, Zoar, Duxbury and New Dunnich. With the Whateleys traveled Hepzibah Mason, widow of Jeremiah Watkins, who, like her sister Abigail, never again returned to Arkham.

  The departure of her sisters seemed to embolden Keziah who reportedly took to walking through the town and peeking through windows at all hours of day or night. Fisherman and dockworkers regularly reported seeing her on the marshy island in the middle of the Miskatonic River, though how she reached the island is not known. Children fled and mothers crossed themselves as she hobbled down the road, her days as a respected midwife long forgotten. The rumors of violet lights and strange noises proliferated. Tales were told, retold, and exaggerated beyond belief. Any foul turn or ill luck was attributed to Keziah Mason, whether lost livestock, a dry well, or a dead child.

  The rest of the story is well known. It was Matthew Derby who accused Keziah of witchcraft, and more than a dozen villagers would testify that they had been molested by her or her demon rat Brown Jenkin. That is a matter of public knowledge. That it took days of torture before Keziah Mason confessed, was sentenced to death, and mysteriously escaped, driving her guard mad, that, too, is generally accepted. Yet for all this knowledge, both common and uncommon, that Gilman and I had uncovered, more was yet to come.

  In mid-October of 1927 Gilman cajoled me into traveling out to the island in the river. He had become obsessed with tracking down the truth about Keziah. We had already been to Kingsport and gone through the files of the Kingsport Mercantile Company, and on that occasion Gilman took a rubbing from the gravestone that marked her eponymous stepsister. We had even traveled to that dark valley north of Meadow Hill and taken rubbings from the stone dolmens that lay scattered there. Unwilling to wait for more seasonable weather, Gilman and I made arrangements to borrow a small rowboat from one of the many wharves that dot the Arkham harbor, and on the morning of October seventeenth we made our way out to the low, swampy island. We spent the morning creeping through the underbrush, searching for the standing stones first mentioned in Puritan divine Ward Philips’s Thaumaturgical Prodigies in the New-English Canaan. Gilman felt sure these were what had interested Keziah in the island. It was difficult work, and we found ourselves assailed by vines, creepers and roots at every turn. Thankfully, no insects or snakes seemed evident on the island, and I assumed that such creatures had all taken to their winter habitats. Likewise, there were no birds, waterfowl or otherwise, on the island. This I took as curious, as in the last few weeks Arkham had seemed to be resplendent with the rustle of wings and harmonious twittering and calls of all sorts including pigeons, doves, whippoorwills, owls and thrushes. That such abundance was not present on the island was somewhat unnerving. Moving into the uplands of the island, we thankfully spied our first evidence of animal life on the island: in the bare mud bordering the swamp we could see the tracks of what could only be described as a raccoon or weasel of considerable size. Such a beast could easily and quickly depopulate an island of its resident beasts, while birds, particularly hatchlings, would be particularly easy prey. Indeed, given the size of the tracks, Gilman and I both noted that such an animal could do us bodily harm as well.

  We climbed up the muddy hillside to discover three irregularly spaced boulders springing up out of the earth, which we estimated at over seven feet tall and four feet wide. Each was covered from pinnacle to base with strange, shallow curves and angles, caked with a fowl-smelling brown crust that I could not identify. Were the upward-jutting tusks of stone separate shafts sunk into the loamy soil? Or were they exposed prongs of some more elaborate structure concealed beneath? As we cleared away mud from the base, so as to reveal partially concealed carvings, we laid bare yet more of them. Using some fallen branches as crude shovels, we dug for three or four inches and found no end to the carvings, although we did find that the worn smoothness of the upper portions did not extend to the lower sections. The muddy ground of the island concealed jagged outcroppings and shards of loose rock, upon which I was unfortunate enough to slip, suffering a short and shallow gash upon my ankle. Ill equipped to mount a serious excavation, we resigned ourselves to copying the glyphs as best we could. After several hours, the day turned cold and after some insistence on my part, Gilman finally agreed to return to the mainland. Our trip back was uneventful, and we agreed to meet at the docks again the next morning.

  We made two more such trips to the island before we resolved that we had to our satisfaction captured all of the stone inscriptions. Gilman carried these drawings and rubbings with him when in November he burst into Professor Upham’s office, disturbing a meeting with the university president, Dr. Wainscott. Despite pleas from both, Gilman proceeded to ramble on at length on the wildest of notions concerning Keziah Mason, the ancient markings, and certain things he had gleaned from the Necronomicon. What Gilman had said exactly he never did tell me, but whatever it was, it had earned him an unofficial rebuke from Upham and the department. His independent studies were suspended, all access to special holdings was revoked, and his course work was reduced. He was ordered to visit Doctor Waldron who, after a brief examination and discussion, suggested rest and prescribed a light sedative.

  At this point, in a disgruntled fit, Gilman tried to distance himself from the university by moving out of his dormitory and into the vacant garret room of the Witch House. The landlord Dombrowski had not wanted to rent the room to anyone, let alone a wild-eyed student, but he found himself eloquently persuaded to change his mind when Gilman offered to pay double the going rate. It was thus that we two tenants, sitting around
the common rooms of the house and discussing Keziah Mason, were joined by a third resident, Joe Mazurewicz, who oddly came armed with his own tales about Keziah Mason.

  Joe’s father had been Polish, but his mother had been of the old Burke family which had lived in Arkham since it was founded. Now according to Joe, the Burke family had long ago split between those that still lived in Arkham, and those that had, like so many others, left the village about 1690. The split had come between two brothers, the older Lemuel and the younger Thaddeus. Upon the death of their father, Lemuel had inherited the family estate and documents, and it was among these papers that he found a sealed envelope addressed to him from his grandmother Deborah Zellaby. The matron Zellaby wrote at length about certain things she had seen and grave concerns which, hitherto, she had, out of respect for her son and daughter, declined to discuss. However, in this letter, apparently written knowing her death was near, she made things plain to Lemuel, going into such detail on matters so strange that when he had finished reading he confronted Thaddeus and, under the threat of death, ordered him to leave Arkham forever.

  The old letter has since long been lost, but its gist has been passed down among the Burke family and forms the stuff of legend. Lemuel Burke had been born to Eliza and Thomas Burke in 1657, and, like his parents and all his relatives, he was a strapping blonde-haired, blue-eyed specimen of health. Thaddeus Burke had been born in 1660, and the Mason sisters had assisted with that skill that gained them such fame as midwives. Thaddeus was the opposite of his brother, with dark hair, dark violet eyes, a pale complexion, and a thin wiry build. At his birth, Deborah Zellaby had suspected something, but, lacking evidence, she said nothing. Through the course of years Zellaby watched what was happening in the village. She watched the Masons and noted which children they birthed, which children died, and which children lived. Children brought into the world by the Masons flourished, while an unusual number of the rest struggled to survive. This was particularly noticeable amongst the younger siblings of those children birthed by the Masons, who seemed prone to disease and the occasional lethal accident. All this Lemuel read in the fateful letter. Yet it was the other thing that Burke had noted that had so enraged Lemuel and driven him to banish his brother Thaddeus. For his brother bore no resemblance to his family, and yet bore strong resemblance to the hundreds that had been born and thrived in Arkham since 1660. A whole generation, regardless of family or name, possessed the same dark hair and dark violet eyes as the women who had helped to bring them into the world: Abigail, Hepzibah and Keziah Mason.