The Sea of Ash (3 page)

In his journal he would note:
"Everything that I thought I knew of the world died in that instant.
Science shattered, and my sense of reality (which now seemed to me a zeppelin
plump with lies) was punctured; it sank to the ground and deflated." He
sat there for some time before returning to the thing on the table.

The second time the line was fixed
with a hook in the hopes that it might snag something from the bottom --
anything that could offer some explanation, as if any explanation would do.
Again the string sank and sank deep into the hollow, but this time something
even more startling occurred. Something yanked on the line.

Pond exclaimed and stepped back,
dropping the fishing line. He watched as it snaked several feet deeper into the
dead baby's face, then slackened. Several moments passed before he collected
himself, took it up and dragged it back out. Peering down he saw that something
had been attached to the hook.

It was a piece of yellowed paper
with words written on it. Wider than the opening in the face of the dead child,
the paper had crumpled somewhat on its way out, which, Pond later realized,
accounted for the smeared condition of certain freshly scrawled words. The
words were still damp and were composed in blood.

The paper might have been torn
from a journal, based on its size and texture, and one side was covered in
ink-writing that had blurred at some point in its history, most likely from
exposure to moisture. That part was entirely unreadable. The back of the page
showed the fresh letters, or what was left of them. It read:

FIND FRACTURED (smudged word))

GO TO SUMNER IN (smudged word)

AT LEXINGTON

SIMON BRINK (smudged)

I make the short drive from Powell
Street to the humble stretch of beach where Albert Pond discovered the naked
woman. I park the car by the road and climb down a steep grassy embankment that
hides the sand from the road. The tide is working its way in, the foamy edge
stealthy and sensuous, a drowning memory of primordial lace.

Wandering up and down the stretch,
I try to picture the scene. This is where he found her. It chills me to
imagine. Right here on this very beach, this ordinary-seeming beach.

I take photos of the area, of the
cold blue sea, sunny and flashing back at me like paparazzi, and of the pallid
grey sand strewn with shells and small stones.

I wonder if Arabella came back
here to the Atlantic after she vanished from Pond's Queen Anne? There was
nothing to indicate where she went, and the doctor did, in fact, come to this
spot when he finally realized that she was not up in his bedroom.

He had spent hours in his office
with the dead child, calling down the opening in its head, dangling the fishing
line, hoping to snare another clue. But it seemed that the hole, or tunnel, or
whatever it may have been, was holding on to its secrets for the time being.

Pond had wrapped the dead thing in
blankets and put it in his icebox (to preserve it) before going off to search
for Arabella. First he ran down to the shore. Then he climbed into his black
1918 Nash and drove around town, cruising up and down the major roads that led
in and out of Salisbury.

He was more than simply concerned
about her well-being, though that was certainly a motivation. She was crucial
to the mystery that his life had suddenly been inducted into. By nightfall he was
growing desperate, and he decided, finally, to go to the police.

The doctor revealed only a minimal
amount of information, a description of the missing "patient," to
start. He said that he had found her on the beach and speculated that she may
have suffered some kind of accident resulting in amnesia. He told them how he
had taken her in, how she had slipped off (with nothing but his robe) while he
was busy in his office.

Pond was not satisfied with the
degree of interest exhibited by the officers he spoke with, and he wondered if
he had wasted precious time by even going to the police station. He spent
several more hours driving in the dark.

"I had never felt so
alone," he wrote. "Never had the universe felt so vast, and I so
small within it. I had, through circumstance, been made aware of something, but
of what? Something either too horrible or too beautiful for humans to
know."

2. THE
GEORGIAN INN

A bit of background... I was laid
off from my position as a history teacher at the Eastborough Junior High School
following a respectable run of eight years. I wasn't alone on the chopping
block, however. Some other fine educators were dropped as well. Budget cuts,
you know.

Things turned out fairly well,
though, and hadn't I been tiring of trying to get the little wretches to learn,
or care about something other than video games, dreadful music, fashions, and
their insidious little hormones?

I bought a lottery ticket. Don't
ask me why, for I've only bought a handful of the things in all my forty-two
years. It was a whim, or fate, possibly. At any rate, shortly after I filed for
unemployment benefits, I won $500,000. Imagine that.

I bought myself a quaint village
colonial over in Grafton and took some time to indulge an interest that my
meager teacher's salary had barely allowed me to pursue...the collecting of
obscure esoteric books.

The combination of time and money
facilitated this secretive passion. I traveled about in search of dusty gems in
obscure book shops. I scoured the internet, contacted people who deal in rare
volumes and manuscripts. I spent money (I shy at divulging how much!) and quite
a bit of energy as well.

Such treasures I found! I came
across a copy of
A Book for Pale Eyes
, its cover marked with glistening
gilt symbols, and the saturnine grimoire
The Rhyming Goat
, also a
(coverless, sorry to say) edition of Justin Pearl's ghostly and evocative
Harvest
of Whispers
. I even secured an early ceremonial work by the infamous
Brothers Quince -- an untitled circular-shaped book containing odd calligraphy
and unsettling pen-and-ink nudes of a dead woman. Curiously, though, the book
that made the strongest impression on me was something other than these
mystical exercises. It was a battered, unpretentious little thing called
Dr.
Pond's Journal
.

I had heard of Pond, of course,
having grown up in the same town where he had grown up. I'd heard the
titillating local lore from when I was a child. I'd heard about his remarkable
deformity, and how he had been accused of murder, and how he had vanished in
1920. But his book, printed by a friend some years after he was gone, was not a
book of spells, or medium-conjured communications like
Mrs. Herring's
Recipes
(allegedly derived from a skeleton hand -- nailed to a board --
which tapped out Morse code as it received cooking tips from the dead). His was
a documentation of a journey into an unknown New England, into an unmapped
reality.

Nigel Wagner's small private
publishing outfit released a single printing of 1,000 copies of Pond's
adventure in 1925. It's become quite a collector's item and sells for several
thousand dollars in certain circles. I had made numerous inquiries and finally
was directed to a dealer in Vermont who specializes in antique volumes, a man
who is rumored to possess such rarities as Marotta's
Book of Awe
and one
of three existent copies of
The Coffin-shaped Book
. He had a single copy
of the doctor's journal up for sale. I was exuberant when at last I could hold
the thing and breathe its smell (like an eviscerated library). It is a slim
book, smallish, with plain black covers and moth-colored pages.

Pond's adventure became something
of an obsession with me. I spent months trying to track down everything else I
could find out about him, contacting people all over the globe, digging for old
articles and photographs. I even spoke with a number of folks in Salisbury who
had been treated by the doctor, and a woman whom he had delivered. Although she
couldn't honestly say that she remembered him, she claimed that she once had a
dream in which Doctor Pond (equipped by her imagination with numerous small
jointed limbs like a horseshoe crab, or a trilobite) went scurrying down the
outer length of her bedroom window in the middle of a blizzard.

Having read and reread Pond's
writings, and having done my share of research and investigation, I have set
out in the great man's tracks. A great man, you may wonder, how can he be
"great" if his name is not in history books, or if his life hasn't
been made into a movie (or at least a mini-series)? Well, greatness is subjective,
granted, but Pond was an explorer as much as Columbus was.

I lack his courage. I do not
intend to delve into the mysteries where he dove freely. I only seek to track
and marvel at his footsteps, to document, and to hover at the periphery of what
consumed him. Maybe I'm a pathetic creature in this way, but sometimes it is
safer merely to follow. I am, in this capacity, little more than a tourist.

There's something about old houses
at sunset...they are ghosts made of wood, softening in the dusk that comes upon
them like a tide. The Sumner Inn is such a place, sitting there like an
enormous brick in the angled light, comforted by the shadows of new green
leaves.

The inn, on the outskirts of
historic Lexington, was built in 1774. Both ponderous and homey, it is a colonial
from the Georgian period, though (ornamentally speaking) a glance informs me
that it is not a "High Georgian" -- it lacks the corner quoins,
dentil molding and roof balustrade that the more expensive homes of that time
boasted.

The clapboards of the house have
been painted a sober red, the sort of color it may have sported in its youth,
though the early pigment might have been fashioned from crushed bricks. Its
symmetry has much to do with its beauty; the door, set beneath a rectangular
entablature and a transom window, is positioned in the center, while the nine
front-facing windows are evenly spaced. Each window contains twenty-four small
panes -- they glow softly, mimicking sunset. The single chimney is an
impressive thing, a square cannon trained on Heaven.

I park my car and heft my luggage
out of the trunk. The air outside suggests lilacs, while the air inside smells
of bergamot. My hostess meets me at the door. She is pleasant, a tall, thin
woman. Her dress is decorous, as grey as her hair. She is a youthful seventy,
and she moves with an unaffected grace that I had feared was extinct.

Imogene Carlisle and her late
husband Steven bought the Sumner Inn back in the early sixties. Fond of
history, the pair spent a year restoring the place before opening it to the
public. Presently it ranks among the oldest functioning hostelries in the
States.

"I feel like I've stepped
into the eighteenth century," I say, as I take the tour.

"You have," Imogene
says, smiling.

The house has been adorned with
antiques and the appropriate colors. The east and west parlors both contain
paneled fireplace walls, wainscoting and corner beams. Fine wide-plank pine
floors are found throughout. The house virtually hums with history -- I expect
to round a corner and come face to face with a man in a powdered wig, or a
woman in a polonaise gown.

The stairs in the entry are
unconventionally steep and offer their share of creaks. They lead to an upper
hall which leads to my room, which is spacious, with a pencil-post bed and a
tall chest of drawers. There is a chair where one could spend an afternoon
reading, and a writing desk where one could spend an evening writing. I find
myself wishing I were staying more than one night. I had, of course, requested
the room that Pond had stayed in.

"It's lovely," I say,
"perfect."

The Sumner Inn is more of a bed
and breakfast these days, though this distinction detracts from the romance of
the place. I prefer to think of it as an inn. Imogene serves me and the other
two guests in the dining room. She is quite the cook! I'd stand on my head and
whistle Dixie for a good piece of salmon, so the proprietor certainly endears
herself to me with her choice of repast. Later, as we all settle over tea in
the west parlor with only candles and a twitchy log-fire for light, she
mentions that the salmon dish came from
Mrs. Herring's Recipes
. Mrs.
Carlisle, it turns out, is an interesting woman, no stranger to the sort of
books that I yearn for.

The Franks, a middle-aged couple
visiting from California, politely extricate themselves from the room once the
conversation turns to ghostly communications and a dead baby with a bottomless
face.

Imogene knows a great deal about
the inn and has taken a marked interest in those who have lived and visited here.
How exciting it is to be in a house where Albert Pond actually slept. Maybe he
sat in this very room, in front of this very fireplace.

Visiting and talking with another
who is familiar with the Pond case is such a rarity that I am actually
agitated, and I want to blurt out a stream of questions. Thankfully, the Earl Grey
is soothing, civilized, gives me something other than inquiries to put in my
mouth.

Half of Imogene's face transforms
into shifting copper, the light of the hearth blaze close. Her eyes are such a
pale blue that at times they almost look like they have no pupils. She sips her
tea, tells me things, sips some more.

"Some say Pond went
mad," she muses, "and that there never was a naked woman on the
beach, that he never recovered from the war, let alone losing his dear
Bethany."

"Yes, I've heard the
shell-shock theory. What do
you
think?"

"Well," Imogene sighs,
"he may have been mad, but he was mad in the best way. I find myself
wanting
to believe that his adventures were something more than delusional."

I too had been forced to question
the doctor's mental welfare. I suppose that's unavoidable. But, he was always a
precise man, from what I've read, and even after the episode with the baby, and
Arabella's disappearance, his mind remained sharp and orderly. “They” thought
Newton and Columbus were mad, after all.

Our conversation turns to the gory
missive that Pond pulled out of the hole in the newborn. Albert had studied the
note, determined to make sense of it, despite the unintelligible parts.

The note, you'll remember, said:

FIND FRACTURED (smudged word))

GO TO SUMNER IN (smudged word)

AT LEXINGTON

SIMON BRINK (smudged)

Imogene speaks, "While there
was no trace of Arabella, the note, at least, offered him some sense of
direction, providing he could decipher it. He went to Lexington and asked
around to see if there were a man named Sumner whose last name began with IN.
In no time he was directed here (to the Sumner Inn). The note was pointing him
to a place, rather than a person."

Logs pop in the firebox and orange
sparks drift up the flue like fireflies dressed for Halloween.

"The Inn belonged to The
Fairfields at the time. Pond assumed that he had been directed to their inn for
some reason or other, so naturally he asked if they knew anyone by the first
name Simon (with the last name being Brink, or something that began with
Brink). They did not."

So far my hostess is relating
things that I already know, though she is telling the tale well. I get the
impression that she loves seating her guests in this ancient room and filling
their imaginations with tales of the inn's past. Her achromatic eyes disclose a
master storyteller's sparkle. My questions must wait, however, for it would be
next to cruel for me to interrupt.

Imogene goes on to tell how the
Fairfields had adopted a stack of old inn registers when they purchased the
place, and how they allowed Pond, who'd rented a room, to pore over them. While
it took him hours, Pond finally found the signature of one Simon Brinklow, whom
had been a guest of the Sumner Inn on October 28th, 1862.

Imogene still owns the registers
and she shows me the one in question. The pages are brittle, a dusty citrine,
and they smell like an attic. The signature, while much more composed in style,
reminded Pond of the one found scrawled in blood on the note he fished out of
the dead baby.

With no internet at his disposal,
Pond turned to the local library. His instincts (or, some may speculate, his
intuition) paid off. He found a book called
Ghosts that Lie; Disproving the
Fashion of Spiritualism
, written by a man named Simon Brinklow, and
published by Wales and Rowe of London in 1859.