The Sea of Ash Read online

  "Ever so carefully I parted her lips with my fingers and there found the most curious anomaly. Her teeth, both upper and lower, were neat rows of small white petrified trilobites."

  Trilobites, for those unfamiliar, were prehistoric arthropods that populated the oceans of the Paleozoic Period. Like crabs and insects, they sported exoskeletons, their shape roughly evoking an oval with multiple small legs ranked beneath, as with a horseshoe crab. The bodies were rather flat, segmented, with furrows that divided the back armor into three distinct lobes. Many fossilized examples still exist.

  Pond stared until the woman's eyes began to flicker, then he backed away. He paced for what must have been hours, his mind racing, speculating, reaching for the comforting scientific explanation that would not come.

  Perhaps she was of North African origin and the fossils were some form of ritual embellishment that had been hammered into her gums. Yes, that seemed reasonable enough, after all, there were various tribes on that continent that indulged in body modification, elongated necks, tattoos, pierced cheeks and nostrils, raised scarring, and lips manipulated to hold decorative disks in place. Maybe some enterprising sideshow entrepreneur was bringing her to America to dazzle audiences -- COME SEE THE FOSSIL-MOUTHED GIRL -- but lost her to the waves and currents.

  It still did not seem to add up. If she were in fact from Africa, even the North, or the Middle East, then how could her skin be so uncommonly pale? He had never seen Irish flesh or Scandinavian flesh so white.

  Exhausted from pacing, from thinking, and from the long, eventful day, Albert returned to the rocking chair and eventually dozed off.

  Dr. Pond dreamt of a rising grey temple, older than the Parthenon, younger than trilobites. It came up through the mist, dripping, dangling slippery black sea-wrack like remnants of a net that failed to confine it. Water gurgled down the stone steps out of the great stone orifice. Moonlight shone within.

  He woke in the morning half-light of his chamber and immediately looked to the bed. Arabella was gone, the covers disrupted. Alarmed, the man got up from the noisy rocker and walked out into the hall. He saw that the bathroom door was ajar and his robe, which Arabella had been wearing, was flopped on the floor.

  "Hello," he called.

  He moved to the door, gave an obligatory knock, then peered in at a startling scene. The woman was reclining in a tub full of water, asleep or dead, her legs open and crooked over opposite sides of the tub. A newborn child, pale as its mother, floated face down and motionless.

  Pond dashed to the tub and grabbed the baby out of the water -- both the water and the small body were cold. He gasped when he flipped the baby over and saw what it had for a face.

  To quote his journal: "A seashell was set in place where the child's features ought to have been. It was a scallop shell, evenly ribbed, dull white in color, but for a slight mossy hue. It measured three and a half inches by three and three-eighths inches. The shell was embedded. Flesh framed the outermost edges fastening the mask in place."

  The baby was dead, obviously, and while stunned, Pond had the presence of mind to place it on the floor and turn his attention to Arabella. She was alive. Her eyes had opened, and she was watching him impassively. He fired questions at her. Was she all right? Where had the baby come from? Had she left the house to retrieve it from somewhere? Was the baby hers?

  She actually nodded in response to the last inquiry.

  The man was more than perplexed. While the babe looked newly born, the mother, if she were indeed the mother, had shown no obvious signs of being pregnant. Certainly he'd seen patients whose pregnancies were nearly undetectable to the eye, but they tended to be heavier specimens than this. Besides, there was no blood in the water, no placenta, no umbilical cord.

  Albert helped Arabella out of the cold tub, dried her and again put her in his robe before leading her back to bed. She allowed him to examine her, and still there were none of the expected indications that she had given birth.

  "I'd like you to remain in bed, if you would," he told her. "Do you understand?"

  No response.

  Arabella closed her dark eyes. So far she had exhibited no interest in the child. Then again, he had no idea how much time she had spent with it, not knowing when she had vacated the bed. It was possible that she had passed hours with the corpse. Satisfied that she was content to stay put, Pond hurried back to the bathroom, wrapped the baby in a blanket, and took it downstairs to his examination office, placing it on the table.

  He weighed, measured and photographed the body. But for the seashell, it was a conventionally formed infant male with a trace of fine dark hair spiraling out from the crown of its head. Eager to see the features beneath the shell, he took up a scalpel and bent in close.

  "It made no sense to me how the rim of flesh could have formed around the edges of the shell...it certainly appeared to be a natural growth of skin, but the child would have had to be alive for such a thing to occur. Flesh does not regenerate in the dead, after all. Even upon close inspection I noted no air holes in the shell, so the poor creature would have been suffocated by the mask; again, suffocation equals death, and death precludes skin growth. Had someone stitched the border? Not likely. While I'd once seen a sideshow mermaid which was created by stitching together the upper body of a mummified monkey and the tail end of a dried fish, this phenomenon struck me as genuine."

  Pond carefully cut the thin connecting membrane and pried the scallop shell free. He found no features underneath. No eyes, no nose, no mouth, only a circular black hole. The orifice was smooth and bloodless and deep. It was so deep that even with his face pressed to the maw he could see no bottom...no brain, no muscle, no bones.

  "Impossible," he said.

  Albert took a ruler and lowered it into the darkness. It met no resistance. He took up his flashlight and shone it down, but the darkness stretched farther than the beam. He dropped in a coin and waited for it to hit the end of the tunnel, which it did, eventually, making a soft distant splashing sound.

  Normally a steady man, Dr. Pond was trembling when he hurried down to his workshop in the cellar. He tore tins off shelves, scattering nails and tools, fumbling and cursing until at last he found a reel of neglected fishing line and a sinker weight.

  Back in the exam room, he stood above the baby with its crater and lowered the line in. "It seemed to go forever," he wrote, "and I was aware of a briny clamminess that rose up against my face."

  The line struck bottom at last. Pond marked a point on the line indicating where the opening began and then pulled up the rest and measured it. The hole in the baby's face had a depth of sixty feet.

  Pond collapsed in a chair and held his head in his hands. His heart raced at a dizzying rate, and cold sweat beaded his forehead.

  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 rectang
ular 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.