Free Otherworldly Maine by Noreen Doyle Page A

reporter asked him: “What exactly was the nature of Griswold Masterson’s experiments?” The God-fearing man, a “well-dried pastorly type,” stared at the reporter as if she’d spoken a dead language, then turned on his heel and moved down the aisle, kneeling at the altar to pray.
    Griswold Masterson was not entirely successful in escaping human involvement. By sheer perversity of personality, and an overpowering loneliness, Beryl Ward of Columbia Falls managed to gain access to his house, if not his heart. Having been abandoned by her husband after one year of marriage, and having spent the subsequent decade growing grim and frustrated—having lost both her parents, too—Miss Ward, at well past forty, decided that a life alone was no life at all. At the very least she needed someone to look after. And since there were no other prospects within reach, she set her cap on Griswold Masterson—sight unseen, though with plenty of tales about him in her head: His isolation constituted a local legend. If nothing else, she could be sure he wouldn’t pack up and run off on her.
    A former neighbor of Miss Ward’s, whom the editors tracked down in Boston, apparently felt far enough removed from the scene to speak to us over the phone (though not far enough to authorize us to use her name) on the unusual courtship of Griswold and Beryl:
    â€œI mean that Beryl Ward was always sniffing ‘round Mr. Masterson’s house. And even though he fired off a shotgun on the roof one night to scare her off, that hussy just kept on going back. All the way down on Main Street, we could hear her calling to him—she was going to wait forever, she’d shout loud as a loon, so he might as well open up. But he didn’t; so what does she do?—that hussy starts sleeping out on an old sofa on the porch. I mean the town really got upset with her, but what could we do? Then one morning the door of the house opened, just like that, and Beryl Ward moseyed inside. Nothing but a rusty-headed hussy! After that there sure was plenty of talk about what they were doing up there on Cobalt Hill, if you know what I mean. Personally I doubt it very much—he was all mind and no body. Besides, what would any man see in Beryl Ward?”
    EQMM ’s theory is that Mr. Masterson gave in to Miss Ward for two reasons: (1) It gave him more time and energy for his work, rather than expending physical and mental resources worrying about what she was doing out on the porch; (2) There were probably many items he needed on a continual basis for his experiments, goods she could procure from the local general store while he worked: candles, jars, nails, copper tubing, alcohol, matches, wire, batteries, welding rods, and who knows what else? How Beryl Ward reacted upon setting eyes on him for the first time is not known, and what she found inside the huge, unpainted, crumbling place is open to speculation. But the large shopping list she turned over to the store clerk that first month—including ammonia, detergent, scouring pads, and a mop—confirmed what most believed to be the case: Griswold Masterson, already being referred to as one of the great unheralded minds of this century, apparently lived like a farm animal. Probably the biggest housekeeping problem Beryl Ward had were the science fiction magazines, the technical books, and the philosophical tracts he’d collected over the decades. According to our Boston source:
    â€œHe had so many books you could see them from the footpath—stacked up every which way; I mean, they just blocked out the living room windows; I mean, you could smell the moldiness all the way down to Jill’s beauty shop! . . . Thousands of rats and mice must’ve been nesting in that house. Ugh!”
    It did not occur to Miss Ward’s former neighbor that the Hermit Genius may have been consciously attempting to attract those rodents, for they might have served an