The Sea of Ash (8 page)

10. THE HOUSE OF 12 WHISPERS

Albert Pond hadn't felt quite
right since his visit to the Banchini machine. His chest ached where he had
received the blow from an unseen force, and he experienced vivid dreams of
Victorian London, episodes that felt more like memories than dreams.

He had driven his Nash to a
peculiar old house high in piney Maine. It was the place that Arcangelo
Banchini had told him about -- The House of 12 Whispers.

The owner at that time was Abigail
Winters, a reclusive old woman, relative of the man who had built the big brick
Federal in Searsport, Maine.

Pond described the home: "The
height and grandeur of the structure were emphasized by four tall chimneys
which marked the corners of a hipped roof."

Captain Thomas Winters first
occupied the building in the spring of 1798. He was as eccentric as he was
wealthy, and given to obscure interests which included mummification. Winters
possessed some degree of architectural ability and designed a unique room on
the first floor of his dwelling.

"Miss Winters had consented
to my visit, though I never did set eye upon her. She remained elsewhere in the
house for the duration of my time there," Pond said.

The doctor was met by a grave and
silvered male servant who escorted him to the strange chamber at the center of
the first floor. The door was fitted with heavy locks, which the butler worked,
one after the other, to allow the guest entry.

Pond addressed the older man.
"I was told that I need not bother to ask any particular
questions..."

"That's correct, sir. He'll
tell you what you need to know," the butler said, swinging the door open.

The chamber is described in Pond's
journal: "The room was circular and domed, an impressive example of
brickwork that made me think of an oversized beehive oven. The floor, but for a
raised brick path that led to the central feature, was entirely covered in all
manner of seashells.

"A platform sat in the middle
of the shells and on this stood an elongated upright dome of glass. A figure
sat in a wing chair within the dome, facing me, its hands resting on its
thighs. It was Captain Winters, dressed darkly and neatly, as a gentleman of
his day would have dressed. He had been dead for many years, yet he was well
preserved -- the result of some sort of mummification process.

"The skin on the face and
hands was dark and leathery, with a slight sheen. It held tightly to the bones,
making the corpus all the more ghastly. Wispy grey hair still clung to the
head; combed back, it hung down to the top of his shirt collar."

 
Pond walked carefully along the brick
path and stopped just short of the dome. Glass, and a matter of feet, stood
between him and the cadaver. Its eyes were squinted shut and the mouth was
wrapped around the small end of a copper funnel. The wide trumpet-mouth was
pressed up against the glass.

The whole thing took only moments.
Pond pressed his ear to the cool exterior of the dome, and a voice like
rustling paper breathed from the funnel. Twelve words only. Each visitor
received only twelve words.

"The sixth ocean lives -- go to
The Garden of Guns -- save Earth"

11. GOOSEFLESH AND COAL SMOKE

Pond spent the night in Searsport,
his rented room blurred by the haze of many cigarettes. His mind was too busy
to tolerate sleep, so he paced and smoked late into the night.

He remembered how back in his home
office the resinous baby had gotten onto Professor Wakefield's face and shaped
an animated mask. The crude features had shown some resemblance to Simon
Brinklow, and it had repeated "six oceans" over and over.

"Six oceans," Pond muttered
to himself. There were only five oceans on the Earth. What was all this about
six oceans, he wondered? He was particularly distressed by the way Captain
Winters’ message had ended with "save Earth."

"Save it from
what
?"
The doctor asked no one.

 
Pond knew intuitively that the message
referred to the planet, rather than earth, as in soil.

At least there was one piece of
concise information sandwiched between the enigmatic bits... "The Garden
of Guns" was clearly a place name; he determined to seek it out.

Meanwhile, the aching above
Albert's solar plexus accentuated his inability to asleep. It was even
beginning to distract him from his contemplation. At one point he went to a
mirror, unbuttoned his shirt and had a look. Imagine his surprise when he saw a
small fleshy protrusion crooking out from the center of his ribcage.

"It made me think of a
plucked chicken wing," he wrote in his journal. And... "It twitched a
little when I examined it."

The doctor had seen patients born
with anomalies -- too few or too many fingers and other minor abnormalities,
but he had never seen anything like this. Whatever it was, it did not appear to
be wired into his nervous system, for it registered no feeling that he was
aware of, even when he pinched it with his fingers.

Pond was terribly disturbed by his
discovery, and more so over the next few days as the nubby thing continued to
grow and shape. "By the third evening it had reached a length of thirteen
inches, and the mass at the end bore five blunt knobs that caused me to think
of nipples."

The new appendage was pale and
contained bones. It grew longer and more distinct -- all the while, a city of
damp coal smoke and horse-drawn carriages dominated Pond's dreams.

The man got very little done that
week. He was exhausted and feverish, and not until the new arm had finished
forming did his vigor and sharp-mindedness return. The curious dreams, and the
pain, dissipated.

There was no mistaking what the
thing was, for while it was thin and poorly colored, it was indeed a human arm
and hand. A right hand. Pond thought that it looked frail, malnourished,
stunted; either that or it was the limb of a child, for it reached only as far
down as his navel.

 
"I have witnessed only a few
demonstrations of animation," Pond recorded in his journal. "Every so
often it shudders or twitches, and one chill evening I saw that the hairless
forearm exhibited gooseflesh."

Pond tried poking the thing with a
pin to see what sort of reaction he might get. He himself felt nothing, but the
arm jerked appropriately and Pond spoke an apology aloud, though he felt rather
foolish afterward. When his initial terror receded, he found himself both
intrigued and befuddled. Had it been me, I'd have made a dash for the nearest
hospital. I wish I possessed half the courage that Albert Pond had.

Obviously something
had
taken place back in Banchini's underground room, and the proof was that arm,
hanging there limply, a bloodless lamprey fastened to his chest.

12. BULLETS AND BLOSSOMS

The Garden of Guns was tucked at
the end of a winding dirt road on the tightrope between West Boylston and
Worcester, in Massachusetts. Bordering vegetation encroached upon the path to
the point where Pond eventually had to park his Nash and walk. The day was
clear and bright, and before long he found himself standing in a wild garden of
bees and blooms and misty summer heat.

Pond's observations: "I could
not tell for certain if human hands had shaped the place, though it was
distinct from the surrounding wood, a maze of wild rose bushes and early
goldenrod, grape vines like winged nets cast over skeletons of birch."

A mossy path wound through clumps
of shrubbery and patches of skulking thyme, browning spears of mullein and
barbed thistle. There were daisies and coneflowers and Queen Anne's Lace with
flowers like disks of foam.

Pond walked slowly amongst the
scented brambles, his arms slack at his side, the third arm limp beneath his
shirt. He would later write that he felt as if he were sleepwalking, and
somehow knew just where to go. He stopped in front of a dense waist-high bush
and waited.

The bush rustled as if a hidden
bird had startled. Metallic light winked through the shadows and leaves --
something began to emerge from the foliage.

"I watched as a hand came up
through the leaves like the head of a cobra. It was a pale hand, and its
slender fingers were wrapped around a silvery antique pistol, offering it to me
butt-first. I reached down and accepted the smooth ivory handle as the fingers
released. The hand slid back into the shade, whispering through the foliage.

"I examined the weapon; it
was gracefully primitive, a nickel-plated pocket revolver from the late
eighteen-seventies. The cylinder was loaded -- the bullets poking out from
their shell casings were cast from a strange coppery metal, and imprinted with
a vague texture that made me think of fish scales. I held the pistol up in the
sunlight. It gleamed like Excalibur."

13. THE PUZZLING JOURNAL

It was at about that time, nearing
the end of summer in 1920, that Pond's journal became convoluted. The entries
from then are often spotty, descriptively speaking, and less frequent overall.
When the handwritten original made its way into the hands of his friend, Nigel
Wagner (who later published it), entire pages were missing.

This final section of the journal
has always compelled me the most, even though I find it unnerving. The fact
that there are missing parts to the story just adds to the appeal for me. His travels
are like the Loch Ness Monster in that they dip down into dark waters, so to
speak, tantalizing, making us eager to learn more, or to get a better look. I
suppose it's like burlesque in that sense. How interested would we really be in
Nessie if she were stuffed, stretched out in a glass case at a Scottish museum,
her mystery expunged by genetic science?

The journal
does inform us that Pond did quite a bit of traveling in late August and early
September, putting many miles on his trustworthy Nash. The old-fashioned pistol
accompanied him, tucked in his waistband. He only shares glimpses of some
places; for instance, the site called Burnt Stream. The preceding page was
gone, so I have no way of knowing what New England state Burnt Stream was (or
is) in. In the published version of the journal Wagner inserted blank pages to
signify where leaves in the original were absent.

At any rate, Pond wrote: " --
detected a certain charred smell by the banks of the fast, ash-colored water.
On the night in question, the farmer heard strange noises coming from the wood
that encloses the stream. He imitated the high, hollow sound, and I was put in
mind of coyotes, which, he insisted, were not responsible for the cries.

 
"Back at his house, I examined the
dark lengths of seemingly human hair, and the photographs of other things he
had fished from the water...the small copper fish, and the larger oddity, like
the emaciated grey torso of a two-year-old child, all ribs and slick tendrils.
It looked as if it never had possessed a head. The creature had survived for
several days, the old man told me; it lay there on his sofa with its multiple
limbs whipping, slowing in their movements as it darkened and died and
eventually turned into what he called tar."

Pond's host took a photograph of
him, the last known picture ever taken of the doctor. It is the picture I now
possess, along with the burnt image of Arabella's baby. I purchased them for a
hefty price at the annual auction held by the little-known Society of Esoteric
Antiquities.

The photograph shows a man who had
seen much, a man who had suffered war and loss. Yet his eyes revealed an
unflinching determination. Turning back was not a consideration.

 
Pond was in New Hampshire on the sixth of
September. He stayed at a Concord hotel which, he suspected, contained a
speakeasy in its cellar. His amazing new protuberance, secreted beneath his
garments, had remained inactive throughout his recent travels, spare the
occasional tremor.

He had contemplated the arm
thoroughly. It was fairly obvious that he had picked up an internal passenger,
or part of one, from Banchini's machinery. It had proven harmless so far. He
was thankful for that, for there was little chance of getting away from it but
for amputation, the possibility of which he had discarded early on. He wondered
if the dreams of London were an indication of the arm's identity.

Of his night in Concord, his
journal entry goes as follows... "At some point in my sleep I was vaguely
aware of fingers delicately exploring my face, as if a blind person were trying
to recognize me."

The journal goes on to show that
Pond had encounters with wondrous beauty, as well as things unsettling. Pausing
at the home of Brady Cushing Lodge, amidst the coloring hills of Glastenbury,
Vermont, he had the opportunity to listen to the Ring of Masks.

Brady was a man of many interests,
ranging from astronomy and archaeology to anthropology and necromancy. He had
spent a great deal of time digging along the Green Mountain range -- an area
popular with treasure hunters, despite the fact that Vermont is not by the sea
and thus would be an unlikely source of pirate's gold. Burrowing under the
shadows and stones of South Mountain, Lodge made a fascinating discovery. He
unearthed a circular stone-lined pit containing seven clay masks of
undeterminable age.

The masks were not quite like
anything he had seen before, and, considering his anthropological expertise, he
was familiar with the stylistic particulars of masks found worldwide. These
artifacts certainly did not appear to be the work of indigenous peoples.

The masks all looked alike,
although some were better preserved than others. They were pale, smooth but for
chips and cracks, with no mouths indicated. The noses were understated, and the
eyes were dark mussel shells, apparently pressed into the clay faces while they
were still soft.

Rather than simply hoard his find,
Lodge sought guidance through necromantic communications (automatic writing)
and constructed a curious device which integrated the clay faces... The Ring of
Masks resembled a chandelier in a way; it was a skeletal thing of dark metal
arms, suspended from a rotating mechanism which nestled under the ceiling of a
small dark room no bigger than a pantry. The masks were attached to the thin
arms, facing inward, facing each other.

Dr. Pond sat in a chair as this
bizarre contraption was lowered down to encircle his head. He found himself eye
to eye with one of the inscrutably gazing masks, then with another as they
gradually began to rotate. Less than a foot from his face, they continued to
spin faster, the speed increasing as the device dictated until they were
whirling dizzily, the pale faces blurring, the dark shell eyes smudging upon
the air like an unbroken bar of black.

"Mesmerizing as the imagery
was," Pond wrote, "it was the
sound
that I heard which made
the greatest impression on me. Hushed at first, it increased in volume as the
faces moved faster around my head. Their whispers merged into something that I
have never heard before, and I am haunted by the memory...

 
"It was a million drowning
heartbeats swept along in a single note -- a river, a wind -- the song of dark
seas dreaming. A dirge of moonlight reborn in a sunken temple.

“I feel that I would be insulting
this music if I were to try and confine it further with human language, so I
will only say this: it was the most beautiful sound ever to enter my ears.

"While there was no actual
information for me to take away and decipher from this experience, on some
level I suddenly knew that I was approaching the end of my quest."

The journal pages marking the
first week of October are missing -- a blank sheet represents them. A series of
brief entries follow...

"Oct. 9th, 1920: Tunnels
under old brick church in Hancock, New Hampshire."

Pond lists no particular state for
the site he visited on Oct. 12th. I have not been able to locate the spot on
contemporary or archaic maps. The entry reads: "Oct. 12th, 1920:
Oddmeadow, where the moon is seen to move in reverse."

By mid-month he was in
Massachusetts... "Oct. 16th, 1920: Old Burying Ground, Barnstable. Knox
grave. Read epitaph backward by moonlight. It spelled END OF THE WORLD."

It's likely that Pond is referring
to the grave of Capt. Duncan Knox, whose schooner, the Catherine Hope, went
down off Block Island in the spring of 1856. Incredibly, the Captain's body
washed up on the distant Cape Cod Bay not two hours later, his mouth filled
with clumps of long white hair.

Pond was obviously employing some
kind of mysterious technique at the cemetery, for the epitaph when read in
reverse is actually a nonsensical jumble.

In the journal the publisher noted
that part of one page from the late October section was torn away, thus the
following entry appears incomplete: "--decrepit, abandoned for many years.
House sits amidst overgrown fields of dull autumn grass and weeds. Upstairs,
northern bedchamber -- looking out window saw a vast expanse of stormy grey
water. Lowering sky above a horizon of milky luminescence. Water came up to the
edge of second-floor panes. Small boat tossed on waves, passed window just feet
away. Lone occupant was naked old man, crouched or half-standing. Grey skin,
emaciated. Dark screeching birds fastened to him head to foot by rusty spikes.

"When I opened the sash of
the window the view appeared ordinary -- nothing but the overgrown
fields."

It's been speculated that Pond was
writing of the Parson Ezekiel Littlefield House in Middleborough, Massachusetts
(no longer standing) where the cleric was rumored to keep a mysterious young
woman captive in an upstairs chamber. Then, toward the end of the month, the name
Arabella reappears. Pond had visited an art show featuring the work of a
promising Boston portrait artist who had recently gone missing. One image in
particular caught Pond's attention... Norris Sarde had painted a naked woman
with dark hair lying on a damp grey beach at the base of a looming stone
temple. It was entitled The Sixth Ocean.

None of Sarde's acquaintances
could offer Pond much information regarding the woman who had posed for the
artist. Only one of them had met her, and that individual could not recall the
woman uttering a single word. "She never smiled either," the witness
reflected. He was sure that Sarde had mentioned his model's name at the time,
but he could not remember what it was.

We can only wonder about some of
the adventures Pond experienced and what he might have learned from them. He
certainly had his reasons for going to Oddmeadow, the graveyard, the parson's
house and the tunnels under an old New Hampshire church (and who knows where
else). We are also left to speculate as to how he came across the exhibition of
Norris Sarde's work. Somewhere along the way he uncovered an odd way of
locating individuals. He made use of the procedure at Nantasket Beach on
October 20th.

In preparation for the ritual,
Pond procured two handfuls of black sunflower seeds. These were placed inside a
hollowed-out turnip. He replaced the lid of the organic vessel, sealed it with
wax, then placed it in a pot of milk. He slept with the pot under his bed.