The Place Called Dagon

licentious scarlet into the gray cloth of the old New England. You can imagine that carousing colony near enough to Boston to cause the good Puritans a prodigious loss of sleep. It was something that they hated and feared because it stirred in them the covered embers of their own suppressed excesses, I suppose. Uncommitted sins that are buried in the blood and brain are fearful things, Daniel. I imagine that most of the Puritans sublimated their fleshly longings into a religious ardor but this would make them fear the downright honesty of openly committed sin more than ever. Anyway, when news reached Boston that the Morton colonists had reared a huge May pole and were dancing about it with their skins full of good liquor and debauching all the likely squaws they could lay hands on, they decided that something drastic should be done. So a body of armed men (crusaders of the Lord, Daniel) marched to Merry Mount, cut the May Pole down, strewed the place with ashes, cursed it and called it Dagon (you see how the name crops up?), and scattered the befuddled revelers. What was more natural than that some of these topers and lechers should push westward into the wilderness, having, so to speak, their bellies full of Puritanical oppression? To the west they came, then, following an old trail that led north of Springfield and across the Connecticut River, and eventually they found themselves in this valley. Leeminster was the town settled by them. So there you have the two towns, Daniel. I don’t know which was settled first. It doesn’t make any difference. They were near enough for daily intercourse, and I suppose there was some intermarriage. Whether the witch-fever spread to Leeminster or not is a mystery. I am on dubious ground now, for most of the opinions I have arrived at are the result of deduction and there is no documentary proof to bolster me up. That is why I am chary at giving vent to them. Some of the things that you have told me seem to substantiate a few of the suspicions I have had. My voice, Daniel, is getting awfully hoarse.”

He paused and finished his tumbler of applejack.

“You are going to be reeling in a minute,” said Dreeme impatiently.

Lathrop wheezed and chuckled.

“No, sir,” he said. “When you see me reel you’ll see a sight.”

He chuckled again. Dreeme observed an apoplectic glow on his fat cheeks, however, and it made him uneasy. He was afraid that the old doctor’s head would loll to one side, and that the continuation of the story would be a series of stertorous snores. He had seen it happen before for Lathrop plied the applejack not wisely but too well.

“Where was I?” inquired Lathrop mildly. He rolled his blue eyes at the ceiling in thought.

“Oh!” he said in faint surprise as he unexpectedly lighted on the thread of his conversation. “Oh, yes!”

“Marlborough and Leeminster proceeded on their solitary way while the land developed,” he declared. “Towns sprang up on all sides of them, but they were protected by their valley and the fact that no large artery of travel cut through them. They were in a cul-de-sac. They accepted the modernities of living suspiciously and in a gingerly manner. Being farmers, the natives subsisted by themselves and without too much aid from the outside world. As time passed on I imagine the witch practices ceased, although the memories of them were handed down from father to son, and mother to daughter. They were not so much ashamed of these practices, at first, as they were reticently jealous. The very fact of them made them different from other men and women. When I came here I found no signs of secret practices. I did find a dour reticence, perhaps a more antagonistic one than you have run up against. But I paid no attention to it, and I minded my own business. I did not ask questions. I did not watch people. I admit that I thought a lot. I read a great deal of history, and tried to orientate these people. It was from old Captain Uriah Carrier himself that I got my clue, for, thinking me no more than a mere boy and being a boastful old scoundrel, he told me that he was the last Black Man, and he even, in a burst of drunken recklessness one night, showed me the book that had been in his family for generations. It was easy enough for me to put two and two together after that. Being wise though I put them together by myself and kept my convictions to myself. I.⁠ ⁠…”

Lathrop developed a choking fit and sputtered for a few minutes while Dreeme waited impatiently. The old doctor made a half-gesture toward the applejack bottle, thought better of it, and withdrew his hand reluctantly.

“You see Marlborough today,” he said wearily, leaning back in his chair, “and you see a community that has hugged a secret to its bosom for centuries. These men and women are alive to the past, to the terrible heritage which they possess, and they desire to eradicate it from common knowledge, to bury it, as it were, in the dust-heap of gone things. That is their first impulse. They do not want strangers to know that they have descended from condemned witches. Now there’s Jeffrey Westcott.”

He paused and blinked his blue eyes.

“Who is he?” he proceeded. “I don’t know. You don’t know. But we can guess what his purpose is. You’ve told me all about his maunderings about the mightiness of the will, the theory he hinted at to you in the burned mill that night. Now this is what I see, Daniel. Westcott fell in with Peleg Carrier in Germany, learned from him about the witch-cult that had existed here, and came to find out more about it. He had a theory of his own, a theory in an inchoate state, and he fancied that witch practices