Free The Watchers Out of Time by H.P. Lovecraft Page B

more of this, and turned to Sinistrari.
    Almost at once my eye fell upon this disturbing passage—
“Promittunt Diabolo statis temporibus sacrificia, et oblationes; singulis quindecim diebus, vel singulo mense saltem, necem alicujus infantis, aut mortale veneficium, et singulis hebdomadis alia mala in damnum
humani generis, ut grandines, tempestates, incendia, mortem animalium…”
setting forth how warlocks and witches must bring about, at stated intervals, the murder of a child, or some other homicidal act of sorcery, the mere reading of which filled me with an indescribable sense of alarm, as a result of which I did no more than glance at the other books I had brought down, the
Vitae sophistrarum
of Eunapius, Anania’s
De Natura Daemonum,
Stampa’s
Fuga Satanae,
Bouget’s
Discours des Sorciers,
and that untitled work by Olaus Magnus, bound in a smooth black leather, which only later I realized was human skin.
    The mere possession of these books betokened a more than ordinary interest in the lore of witchcraft and wizardry; indeed, it was such manifest explanation for the superstitious beliefs about my great-grandfather which abounded in and about Wilbraham, that I understood at once why they should have persisted for so long. Yet there must have been something more, for few people could have known about these books. What more? The bones in the wall beneath the hidden chamber spoke damningly for some hideous connection between the Peabody house and the unsolved crimes of other years. Even so, this was surely not a public one. There must have been some overt feature of my great-grandfather’s life which established the connection in their minds, other than his reclusiveness and his reputation for parsimony, of which I knew. There was not likely to be any key to the riddle among these things from the hidden room, but there might well be some clue in the files of the Wilbraham
Gazette,
which were available in the public library.
    Accordingly, half an hour later found me in the stacks of that institution, searching through the back issues of the
Gazette.
This was a time-consuming effort, since it involved a blind search of issue after issue during the later years of my great-grandfather’s life, and not at all certain to be rewarding, though the newspapers of this day were less hampered and bound by legal restrictions than those of my own time. I searched for over an hour without coming upon a single reference to Asaph Peabody, though I did pause to read accounts of the “outrages” perpetrated upon people—primarily children—of the countryside in the vicinity of the Peabody place, invariably accompanied by editorial queries about the “animal” which was “said to be a large black creature of some kind, and it has been reported to be of different sizes—sometimes as large as a cat, and sometimes as big as a lion”—which was a circumstance no doubt due solely to the imagination of the reporting witnesses, who were principally children under ten, victims of mauling or biting, from which they had made their escape, happily more fortunate in this than younger children who had vanished without trace at intervals during the year in which I read: 1905. But throughout all this, there was no mention of my great-grandfather; and, indeed, there was nothing until the year of his death.
    Then, and only then, did the editor of the
Gazette
put into print what must have represented the current belief about Asaph Peabody. “Asaph Peabody is gone. He will be long remembered. There are those among us who have attributed to him powers which belonged rather more to an era in the past than to our own time. There was a Peabody among those charged at Salem; indeed, it was from Salem that Jedediah Peabody removed when he came to build his home near Wilbraham. The pattern of superstition knows no reason. It is perhaps mere coincidence that Asaph Peabody’s old black cat has not been seen since his death, and it is undoubtedly mere