The cabin my cousin had left me in his will was small enough, but it seemed livable, despite the fact that the clapboard walls could have used a few coats of paint, it stood amid a small clearing, on a patch of naked earth, and again I could not help noticing (with slight revulsion, even dismay) how disturbingly close the edge of the woods shouldered about the forlorn habitation. These feelings I resolutely dismissed from my mind: I have always been unusually sensitive to the atmosphere of lonely, wooded places.
Once within, the bars removed and shutters opened, I found the interior dry and clean. There was a small Army cot, neatly made, a rickety table with a hoop-back wooden chair drawn up before it, and even a hooked rug before the old iron stove. These, and an empty woodbox, were the sum total of the furnishings: "lacking certain of the civilized amenities of life", even as lawyer Harding had dryly remarked.
Still, I thought I could be comfortable here, even in the depths of winter. There were shelves on the wall with tin plates and cups, sparse tableware, cheap and worn, a coffee pot and two or three pots and a frying pan. I even discovered a dime-store can-opener hung from a hook on the shelf. In a corner of the one-room cabin I found a hurricane lamp in serviceable condition, although the can of kerosene which fueled it proved empty.
Unpacking my clothing and books and papers, which latter took occupation of the table, I went outside and found the well-water fresh and clean, and in the woodshed a good supply of cut and stacked firewood in fine, dry condition, as Harding had promised, together with a rusty axe for cutting more when needed.
That afternoon, I went down the Aylesbury Pike to the little general store I had noticed from the bus. It stood on the outskirts of Dean's Corners, and the proprietor was happy to sell me supplies. As I must be frugal—my funds being low, and the bequest from my cousin Jared containing no cash worth speaking of—I settled on canned pork and beans, home-bottled peaches, boxed crackers, ground coffee, ketchup, salt, and a few other things, together with some pipe tobacco.
The storekeeper, an old, withered, wiry backwoodsman named Perkins, proved helpful but very inquisitive as to what I was doing “in this neck o' th' woods.” When I told him I was a cousin of Jared Fuller, and had inherited his cabin in the woods a mile or two north, he stared at me incredulously.
"Fuller, y’say? Not in th’ Deep Woods?"
"Yes, I'm afraid so.” I smiled. He gave me a strange, almost frightened look.
"Why, daoun’t y'know they be even wust than Billington’s Woods, saouth o’ here?" he inquired in a whisper, as if fearful of being overheard, although there was no one else in the general store save him and me.
I shook my head. " 'Billington’s Woods' rings a bell somewhere, but I can’t quite place it," I had to admit.
"Ever hear tell of a feller named Ambrose Dewart? Another one, name of Stephen Bates—Boston-man, like y’rself, I figger?” he breathed.
A slight chill passed through me. Dewart ... Bates ... surely, I had read about them in some sensational newspaper items eleven or twelve years ago ....
I shook my head reluctantly, not quite able to recall the details. When I asked what Perkins knew about these two individuals, he became as closemouthed as the incommunicative bus driver. All I could get out of him was that my “goods” would be delivered "long abaout sundown-time."
THAT afternoon, rather late, it became chill and dank, so I carried some armloads of wood into the cabin and built a fire. While I was loading up my arms with logs and kindling, I noticed a shelf built against the back of the shed and a dilapidated old suitcase of scabbed and peeling leather which stood upon it. I wondered if this might not contain Cousin Jared’s "books and papers", to which Silas Harding had alluded. Since I had not found these in the cabin anywhere, this was probably the fact of the matter. I resolved to look at the contents of the suitcase later.
About sundown I became aware of a persistent honking from the Pike. I went to investigate, and found a battered old Model T Ford parked before the entrance to the path, with a leathery, gaunt driver in worn overalls behind the wheel.
“Name of Hoag?" he grunted. When I replied in the affirmative, he gestured behind him with a calloused thumb.
“Groc'rics in th’ rumbleseat,'' he snapped. Which meant I had to carry them in by myself.
I had expected the inhabitants of these rural backwoods to be a suspicious, unfriendly lot, and thus far my expectations were certainly fulfilled.
Returning to the cabin, where my fire was burning cheerily in the stove, I cleaned and filled the lamp, trimmed the wick, and lighted it, for twilight fell quickly this time of year and the darkness was not far behind. I had scrubbed clean the pots and dishes with water from my well, and began heating my meal atop the stove. After dinner I settled down with a mug of hot black coffee and my pipe and began sorting out my notes and references by the yellow light of the hissing lamp. It was a cozy, rustic scene, like something out of Colonial times, almost, and the cabin was warm and comfortable, although, with darkness, the wind rose and moaned eerily through the stiff black boughs where the last gaudy tatters of foliage clung stubbornly against the autumnal chill.
When my fire collapsed to burning coals, I donned my heavy jacket and went to get more wood from the shed. This time I made another trip to drag forth the old suitcase. I was weary of my work and desired to turn my mind to other matters for a while; also, I was getting a bit curious to see what "old, rare" books my cousin had bequeathed to me.
Inside the suitcase I found about a dozen volumes, mostly leather-bound, flaking with age, the pages yellowed with the years. They were certainly old enough, but as most of them were in French or German or Latin, I could make little of them, not being proficient in those languages. Anyway, they looked foreboding and not particularly of interest to me, with titles like Unaussprechlichen Kulten and De Vermis Mysteriis and Cultes des Goules.
Two of them, however, proved to be in English. One of these was a slender brochure bound in leatherette, privately published in 1916 by a commercial printer in San Francisco; it contained Professor Harold Hadley Copeland’s “disturbing and conjectural" translation of the Zanthu Tablets which he had reputedly discovered in the tomb of a "prehistoric" shaman somewhere in the black and secret heart of Asia. I had heard of the Zanthu Tablets, for the book had been much notorious in my boyhood and was denounced by press and pulpit and was finally, as I recall, officially suppressed.
Knowing what little I knew about the Zanthu Tablets, I assumed (correctly, as it turned out) that the other books were concerned with occultism and demonology—subjects which have never interested me in the slightest.
Opening the other book in English served but to confirm my supposition, for it was a bound manuscript, written with a quill pen, apparently, in a narrow. crabbed hand, and bore the quaint but ominous title, Of Evill Sorceries Done in New-England of Daemons in no Humane Shape. It had no date nor the name of its author, and the manuscript had apparently been clumsily bound by the hands of an amateur bookbinder. I leafed through it, finding nothing but the ugly, superstitious village gossip of a diseased mind—another Cotton Mather, you might say. Arkham and Salem had a lot of these "Godfearing" (so called) witch-hunters back in the bad old days. I tossed it aside.
At the very bottom of the suitcase I found a dog-eared, scribbled bundle of foolscap, written in my cousin’s dear, bold hand. It was entitled Diary of Jared Fuller: 1929.