The Sea of Ash Read online

  "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.

  Pond spent the night reading the book, expecting to find some mention of the Sumner Inn, but no reference existed. Ghosts that Lie documented Brinklow's uncovering of cheats who used clever tricks like doctored photographs, fake body parts and pseudo-ectoplasm to bilk people seeking to communicate with loved ones who had died. However, all of the cases the author had catalogued had taken place in Britain.

  Pond wrote: "I waited for the inn to offer me some manner of sign to justify my being directed there, but no sign was forthcoming. Had I failed this poor soul Brinklow, or was the explanation for his present predicament, his seeming interment in a realm accessible through a dead infant's face, hidden there in the inn, waiting as if an undiscovered key?"

  Finally, after staying three days at the Sumner Inn, a discouraged Pond returned home without experiencing anything like a revelation. Not to say that he was defeated. He searched several other libraries and, in Salem, found a second book by Simon Brinklow. This work, called The Path by Moonlight, an Investigation into Disbelieved Realms, published in 1865, was a complete turnaround from Ghosts that Lie. Intrigued, Pond went on to find out all that he could about the man who wrote it.

  Who was Simon Brinklow? He was a British fellow, a portly and headstrong banker who, in 1855, lost his wife and three daughters in a fire. When he learned of the growing spiritualism craze that was sweeping Europe and America, his grief got the best of him, and he began attending seances and paying large sums to mediums who claimed they could put him in touch with his loved ones.

  A disillusioned Brinklow soon came to believe that the masses were being duped by charlatans, as was largely the case. Infuriated, he set out on a personal mission to expose the fakes who preyed on the heartsick (himself included). In 1862 his crusade took him across the Atlantic to New York and Boston. But something ironic happened. While meaning to discredit yet another so-called haunting, Brinklow traveled to Lexington's Sumner Inn, where he had an experience that converted him in a sense, and set him out on an exploration of fantastic mysteries.

  Though he still recognized the numerous frauds for what they were, he realized that there was indeed another side of things, an unexplored world here on Earth. He wrote and published his second book, but it was entirely dismissed by the scientific community, scoffed at by the religious legions, and resented by the spiritualists he had spent so much energy debunking. Brinklow vanished in 1870 at the age of fifty-five.

  Hours passed there in the Georgian parlor with the fireplace snapping and the candles reducing. A small mantel clock rang twelve.

  "Midnight," Imogene said, grinning, "That calls for brandy."

  We had been oblivious of the time, trading conjecture. She fetched an ambery bottle and two glasses, and we drank a toast to Dr. Pond, and another to Simon Brinklow.

  We talked about the event that had inspired Brinklow's change of heart. He had heard stories about a certain spirit known to pay visit to the Sumner Inn. Fractured Harry, as the spirit was known, had been encountered as far back as 1799. Somewhere in his travels, Simon had learned a way to (allegedly) summon the odd spirit, and he gave it a try.

  Brinklow whispered a curious little song into an empty glass bottle, corked it, then took it to a cemetery about a half-mile away from the inn. The burial yard was neglected, crowded with pitched slates and high grass, tangled in the shadow of leafless boughs. He set the bottle down beneath a tree, returned to his room at t
he inn and waited, expecting nothing more to happen.

  Sometime in the late hours the man heard odd rhythmic sounds in the hallway outside his room. It sounded to him as if someone were letting sopping, bunched-up towels fall to the floor, repeatedly. The noises came up to the opposite side of his door and stopped. Then came a faint knock. A very faint knock.

  Brinklow opened the door. He describes the visitor in his second book: "It gave me the impression of a ghastly puppet, this queer figure thrown together from odd bits. The head was a tea kettle, steaming at the spout, impossibly balanced on the main body which, in all candor, seemed no more than a man's baggy overcoat with nothing like a frame to support it. Fantastically enough, the legs which propelled the creature were fashioned from mop handles, while the damp, stringy heads of those very mops comprised its feet."

  When Fractured Harry wobbled into his room and sat down at the little table, Brinklow determined that this ghost -- or whatever it was -- could not be a hoax. "The resultant terror at this realization," Simon wrote, "was complete."

  The creature placed its hands on top of the table. They were old gardening gloves of battered grey, and they twitched irregularly, emitted the restless buzzing of what could only be bees. True to rumor, Harry, with no corporeal vehicle to call his own, made do with whatever was on hand.

  Despite his shock, the hardy investigator maintained composure. The visitor leaned its warm kettle head toward him and a voice hissed out of the steam.

  "The words which were spoken by the specter defied the conventions of communication. Certainly they were words, but as for what language, I cannot be bound to say. Thus, I remain incapable of repeating them. Indeed, they were strange to me in the instant that I heard them, and yet, their meaning was without ambiguity. They directed me to a particular location, that and nothing more."

  Pond recognized that this passage from Brinklow's second book was informing him about what the first line of the scrawled Brinklow note was about...FIND FRACTURED...no doubt Fractured Harry. Without hesitation, the doctor returned to the inn and, following Brinklow's instructions, performed the conjuration.

  Fractured Harry, so local lore would have us believe, appears to everyone in a different form. The figure that Brinklow encountered, for instance, was quite different from what came knocking when Pond did the summoning.

  The head was an inverted milk bottle containing a strobing number of fireflies (a bit early in the season for them, but Harry had procured some nonetheless). In this instance, Fractured Harrietta might have served as a better title, for the peculiar conglomeration of items featured a woman's pale slip slunk over a guitar, which gave the figure a shapely cast. A coat hanger mocked shoulders, birch branches passed for arms, and the legs were walking canes with a base of winter boots.

  Harry clomped jerkily into the room. Pond stepped back hastily to make room for its entry. A rushing mix of terror and wonder momentarily derailed his ability to think, or as he puts it...

  "I could do no more than stand and stare as this impossible figure closed the distance between us, its encased green eyes winking their luminosity, fidgeting in the glass skull."

  Then, above the sound of insects clicking against glass, came a series of wispy words. While the language was foreign to the ear, Dr. Pond understood. Fractured Harry, before limping out of the room, down the inn's steep stairs and to who-knows-where, told the man to "Go to the house of Arcangelo Banchini."

  Is it any wonder I find it hard to sleep, lying here in the old Georgian room where Pond, and perhaps Brinklow before him, slept? I reflect on my delightful visit with Imogene, and how I am inspired more than ever.

  Following our brandies, she had asked if I had any intention of trying the ritual to contact Fractured Harry. She herself had never attempted it, and I told her, "Oh, no...I'm happy just to sit in the bleachers, thank you."

  I have now left the Sumner Inn for my next destination, though I have made a brief stop at a small overgrown cemetery a short distance down the road. The grave markers are thin slates, tilted, tired from standing so long. Some bare simple portraits and winged heads produced by colonial carvers, others offer the urn and willow motif. None mention anyone named Harry. There are bottles in the high grass, but they are beer bottles, and it's doubtful that they were used to conjure anything other than inebriation. I take photos of the site, then head on my way.

  3. A VISIT FROM WAKEFIELD

  Following the encounter with Fractured Harry, Pond discovered something distressing. Upon returning to his house in Salisbury, he opened the icebox to check on the condition of the dead baby and found that the body had reduced to a resinous mass.

  "It was completely irregular, so far as decomposition goes. The body seemed to be melting, rather than rotting. While still roughly shaped like a human, the consistency was something else entirely. It was slick and brown and translucent -- the translucency revealing neither organs nor bones. In fact, part of it stuck to the door of the ice box and stretched like taffy when that compartment was opened."

  This turn of events forced Dr. Pond to do something that he had thus far resisted. He told someone else about Arabella and the baby. He telephoned his good friend Nigel Wagner (who would later go on to publish Dr. Pond's Journal) and shared all. He knew he could trust Wagner, and someone other than himself had to witness the baby, for the only proof of its existence, besides his words, were the photographs that he had taken, and some would disregard those, if he ever chose to make public his strange experiences.

  Nigel suggested that a third party be allowed to view the child, someone who might be sympathetic to such mysteries. He suggested Professor Earl Wakefield of Pawtucket University in Rhode Island. Wagner had read a paper called Overlaps, written by Wakefield, which had to do with the theory that other dimensions existed alongside our own. Further, Wakefield put forth the proposition that there were spots where various dimensions actually overlapped each other, some being natural formations, and others which were created. Nigel speculated that the baby was a corporeal overlap.

  "In my desperation, I agreed," wrote Pond.

  "Despite the fact that the icebox was maintaining its cold, the condition of the corpse appeared to be worsening by the hour," Pond noted. "By the time Nigel arrived in the evening, it was growing softer and darker, and the stench had gotten noticeably worse. I cursed myself, for any chance of performing an autopsy had long passed."

  Shortly after ten o'clock that night a car rattled up and coughed outside the Queen Anne. A tall, wiry silhouette moved jauntily along the walk, but there was a pause before the men waiting inside heard a knock. When they opened the door the old professor stood there grinning, sniffing a sprig of lily-of-the-valley that he had plucked from the yard.

  "I hope you don't mind," the fellow said. "It's my favorite. Is there any other scent so sweet?"

  Wakefield was a horsy-faced creature with a red tempest of hair and ill-fitting spectacles. He was well dressed in a suit and bowtie. He stuck the sprig, with its delicate blooms like tiny white bells, into the buttonhole of his jacket and strode in.

  Albert introduced himself and Nigel Wagner. The professor stooped to put his face close to Pond's (Albert had been warned that the professor was an eccentric sort) and remarked, "You were in the war. Only men who were in the war have eyes like that."

  The three went into Pond's examination office, where the icebox crouched against a wall. There were shelves lined with jars, file cabinets piled with manuals, and the expected tools of the trade. The professor paused to study the eye chart, both with and without his spectacles.

  Wakefield exhibited an enthusiasm and sprightliness that defied his age. He lit a pipe and paced while asking Pond some preliminary questions before viewing the baby. He wanted to hear more about Arabella, the birth and the note from Simon Brinklow. Fascinated by the responses, Wakefield mentioned that he too had experienced the wonders of an overlap point.

  "Twelve years ago I received communications from a Wampanoag Indi
an woman. The overlap in that case was a two-foot-wide circle in the center of a pond over in Plymouth."

  Albert was eager to hear more about Wakefield's story, and the man's speculations about the nature of these other dimensions, but he knew that the baby was deteriorating by the minute and so he urged the professor to have a look.

  "Yes, yes -- let's have a look, why don't we?" Wakefield said, turning to the ice box. He rubbed his hands together, knelt down in front of the thing and handed his glasses up to Pond. "Would you hold these a moment, my boy?"

  Wakefield opened the door and peered in. "Oh, my..." he breathed, "Amazing! look how it's-"

  The professor reeled back, his scream muffled by a mask of gummy black. What was left of the dead child -- little more than a glistening black cannonball -- had fastened itself to him. His arms flailed as he struggled to his feet and staggered blindly across the room. The other two men rushed to his aid, but all they could do was to cling to his thrashing arms as the dark mass on his face flattened, then shaped itself into a lumpy approximation of features. Steam was seeping out from under the muck and one could hear hissing, as if something were being seared.

  A voice other than the professor's came bellowing out of the newly formed face -- it was guttural, garbled as it repeated a single phrase over and over. "Six oceans...six oceans...six oceans..."

  The black substance rearranged itself further, taking on a loosely ovular shape with rib-like striations that, for a moment, made it look like an obsidian trilobite. Then, it melted straight into the center of Professor Wakefield's face. The two men who had tried to help him suddenly backed away.

  The penetrating mass shaped a vacuous, smoothbore crater. Pond was close enough to get a look into the hole which, he would assert in his journal, appeared to reach deeper than the circumference of a human head would allow.

  "All at once a great sucking wind took up," Pond wrote. "Papers flew to the hole, books were drawn violently to it and swallowed, even myself and Nigel had to fight against the force of the vacuum."