Otherworldly Maine (7 page)

He turned to look at me, with a sickly triumph, a grimace of disgust and of justification, too. He touched his nose and then I got it also, a rankness from down ahead of us, a musky foulness with an ammoniacal tang and some smell of decay. Then on the other side of the gorge, off in the woods, but not far, I heard Longtooth.

A bark, not loud. Throaty, like talk.

Harp suppressed an answering growl. He moved on until he could point down to a black cave-mouth on the opposite side. The breeze blew the stench across to us. Harp whispered, “See, he's got like a path. Jumps down to that flat rock, then to the cave. We'll see him in a minute.” Yes, there were sounds in the brush. “You keep back.” His left palm lightly stroked the underside of his rifle barrel.

So intent was he on the opening where Longtooth would appear, I may have been first to see the other who came then to the cave mouth and stared up at us with animal eyes. Longtooth had called again, a rather gentle sound. The woman wrapped in filthy hides may have been drawn by that call or by the noise of our approach.

Then Harp saw her.

He knew her. In spite of the tangled hair, scratched face, dirt, and the shapeless deer-pelt she clutched around herself against the cold, I am sure he knew her. I don't think she knew him, or me. An inner blindness, a look of a beast wholly centered on its own needs. I think human memories had drained away. She knew Longtooth was coming. I think she wanted his warmth and protection, but there were no words in the whimper she made before Harp's bullet took her between the eyes.

Longtooth shoved through the bushes. He dropped the rabbit he was carrying and jumped down to that flat rock, snarling, glancing sidelong at the dead woman who was still twitching. If he understood the fact of death, he had no time for it. I saw the massive overdevelopment of thigh and leg muscles, their springy motions of preparation. The distance from the flat rock to the place where Harp stood must have been fifteen feet. One spear of sunlight touched him in that blue-green shade, touched his thick red fur and his fearful face.

Harp could have shot him. Twenty seconds for it, maybe more. But he flung his rifle aside and drew out his hunting knife, his own long tooth, and had it waiting when the enemy jumped.

So could I have shot him. No one needs to tell me I ought to have done so.

Longtooth launched himself, clawed fingers out, fangs exposed. I felt the meeting as if the impact had struck my own flesh. They tumbled roaring into the gorge, and I was cold, detached, an instrument for watching.

It ended soon. The heavy brownish teeth clenched in at the base of Harp's neck. He made no more motion except the thrust that sent his blade into Longtooth's left side. Then they were quiet in that embrace, quiet all three. I heard the water flowing under the ice.

I remember a roaring in my ears, and I was moving with slow care, one difficult step after another, along the lip of the gorge and through mighty corridors of white and green. With my hard-won detachment I supposed this might be the region where I had recently followed poor Harp Ryder to some destination or other, but not (I thought) one of those we talked about when we were boys. A band of iron had closed around my forehead, and breathing was an enterprise needing great effort and caution, in order not to worsen the indecent pain that clung as another band around my diaphragm. I leaned against a tree for thirty seconds or thirty minutes, I don't know where. I knew I mustn't take off my pack in spite of the pain, because it carried provisions for three days. I said once: “Ben, you are lost.”

I had my carbine, a golden bough, staff of life, and I recall the shrewd management and planning that enabled me to send three shots into the air. Twice.

It seems I did not want to die, and so hung on the cliff-edge of death with a mad stubbornness. They tell me it could not have been the second day that I fired the second burst, the one that was heard and answered—because, they say, a man can't suffer the kind of attack I was having and then survive a whole night of exposure. They say that when a search party reached me from Wyndham Village (eighteen miles from Darkfield), I made some garbled speech and fell flat on my face.

I woke immobilized, without power of speech or any motion except for a little life in my left hand, and for a long time memory was only a jarring of irrelevancies. When that cleared I still couldn't talk for another long deadly while. I recall someone saying with exasperated admiration that with cerebral hemorrhage on top of coronary infarction, I had no damn right to be alive; this was the first sound that gave me any pleasure. I remember recognizing Adelaide and being unable to thank her for her presence. None of this matters to the story, except the fact that for months I had no bridge of communication with the world; and yet I loved the world and did not want to leave it.

One can always ask: What will happen next?

Some time in what they said was June my memory was (I think) clear. I scrawled a little, with the nurse supporting the deadened part of my arm. But in response to what I wrote, the doctor, the nurses, Sheriff Robart, even Adelaide Simmons and Bill Hastings, looked—sympathetic. I was not believed. I am not believed now, in the most important part of what I wish I might say: that there are things in our world that we do not understand, and that this ignorance ought to generate humility. People find this obvious, bromidic—oh, they always have!—and therefore they do not listen, retaining the pride of their ignorance intact.

Remnants of the three bodies were found in late August, small thanks to my efforts, for I had no notion what compass direction we took after the cut-over area, and there are so many such areas of desolation I couldn't tell them where to look. Forest scavengers, including a pack of dogs, had found the bodies first.

Water had moved them, too, for the last of the big snow melted suddenly, and for a couple of days at least there must have been a small river raging through that gorge. The head of what they are calling the “lunatic” got rolled downstream, bashed against rocks, partly buried in silt. Dogs had chewed and scattered what they speak of as “the man's fur coat.”

It will remain a lunatic in a fur coat, for they won't have it any other way. So far as I know, no scientist ever got a look at the wreckage, unless you glorify the coroner by that title. I believe he was a good vet before he got the job. When my speech was more or less regained, I was already through trying to talk about it. A statement of mine was read at the inquest—that was before I could talk or leave the hospital. At this ceremony society officially decided that Harper Harrison Ryder, of this township, shot to death his wife Leda and an individual, male, of unknown identity, while himself temporarily of unsound mind, and died of knife injuries received in a struggle with the said individual of unknown, and so forth.

I don't talk about it because that only makes people more sorry for me, to think a man's mind should fail so, and he not yet sixty.

I cannot even ask them: “What is truth?” They would only look more saddened, and I suppose shocked, and perhaps find reasons for not coming to see me again.

They are kind. They will do anything for me, except think about it.

WARNING: This exclusive report is fully protected by copyright and appears in this magazine for the first time anywhere.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The documents, tape recordings, articles, and investigative accounts herein represent, to our knowledge, the first published effort to draw into an intelligible whole the emerging story of Griswold Masterson, popularly known as “The Hermit Genius of Marshville.” While admittedly incomplete, these materials provide a framework through which our readers may gain an impression of the ideas and life of the secretive, eccentric, self-made philosopher/scientist.

EQMM
(
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
) became aware of the Hermit Genius the way many scientific discoveries are made—by chance. Last summer an editorial assistant, on vacation in Maine, went fishing in a ten-foot powerboat near the mouth of the Peace River. The young man got caught in a squall, and it looked as though he was going to be swamped, when a returning lobster boat spotted him and pulled his craft to safety. Afterwards, the assistant insisted the lobsterman join him for something to eat and drink. In a local tavern the two men had their tongues loosened by several mugs of ale, and that's when the strange doings at Marshville first came up.

When the story of the Hermit Genius got back to us, naturally we were highly skeptical. But having let more than one major story get away from us over the years, we reluctantly decided to send a reporter
^†
up to Maine to check it out. The decision proved to be well worth the investment, for she uncovered a story of international—we might even say, universal—implications.

At a very early age—three or four—legend has it that Griswold Masterson got hold of several science fiction magazines and within a period of months had taught himself to read. By five or six, it is said, he had gone through much of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells at a local lending library outside Marshville. Masterson apparently was greatly moved by the realization that each of us is stuck in our own time—that our finiteness precludes our partaking of the scientific advantages of succeeding ages. And at some point he must have made a childhood pledge to himself that one day he would overcome such limitations in his own life.

Before attaining maturity, Masterson began conducting experiments in the basement of the house in which he was born. He worked fifteen to twenty hours a day in what turned out to be a lifelong attempt to find a means by which he could experience firsthand the technological promises of ages to come. Late in his career, he apparently made a discovery that enabled him to realize his childhood dream.

In the years to come, as the world gradually pieces together more of Masterson's remarkable adventure, all human beings may find their lives altered for the better. In the meantime, we must content ourselves with having at least begun to study and, hopefully, learn from this one solitary life.

Wanda Pierce

Editor

EQMM
's reporter began her investigation by visiting the local elementary school, on the road between Machias and Marshville, in the township of Harrington, Maine. Requesting access to school records, she was turned down summarily by school officials. But the reporter followed the school secretary home, explained her mission, and, finally, managed to elicit her aid. Griswold Masterson's grades turned out to be rather poor, and the only noteworthy entry in school records was that he had been expelled on May 17, 1946, at the age of eleven. Mrs. Martha Tuttle, the principal, wrote the following comments in her report of this incident:

“The student is totally uncooperative. He never raises his hand, never erases the blackboard, never recites in class, never does his homework . . . . His teacher, Maryanne Wilson, reports that all he does is read formulas on desk top . . . . Elsie and Josiah Masterson were called up to school, and they indicated he was the same way at home . . . . ‘Doesn't seem to hear a thing we say,' according to Mrs. Masterson . . . . ‘That boy's head is in the clouds,' said Mr. Masterson.”

Our reporter visited Washington County High School outside Marshville. There she found one instructor—physics teacher Groden Catlege—who was willing to discuss Griswold. Nearly eighty years old and weighing about the same, Catlege was feisty, fearless, but forgetful:

“Wasn't he the kid who tried to burn down the post office 'cause he didn't receive a package of books? Or was he the one who quit school at sixteen to study astrophysics on his own? One of those rascals in my class trapped stray cats for experiments. Could that have been Masterson?” (
Editor's Note: Masterson may have been all three
.) “Well, sir, whichever of those things he did, he was no weirdo the way people tried to make out. Hell, it was the town that drove him to shut himself away. . . . Yes, sir, he had a grasp of the physical and theoretical sciences that defied normal capacities for knowledge. Uncanny it was, the way he could join opposing elements in his mind. And his curiosity was insatiable—climbed a tree in a storm to study lightning and sure enough got struck to the ground! . . . Yes, sir, I laughed it off at the time, but now, who knows, maybe the feller was right when he said to me, one day after school: ‘Einstein is interesting, but he misses the point.'”

If young “Grist,” as the town called him, was advanced mentally beyond most of us, physically he was a poor specimen. The only photograph of him known to exist, snapped by a local, now-deceased shutterbug, shows Masterson passing the general store, attempting to cover his face with his hands. He was probably in his early twenties and, obviously, had not yet entirely shut himself away. The photo, judging from its faded sepia, was taken with an old box camera—and under far from cooperative conditions. But it did provide a glimpse of his stubby teeth and drastically receding hair, along with the bony slabs that served for shoulders. Accounts of Masterson's a height differ greatly—some say over six feet, others say under five feet. (Judging from the size of his shoes, the latter seems more likely.) Whatever the truth, that disagreement dramatizes the misunderstanding and mythmaking that surrounded him all his life.
EQMM
's attempt to obtain that photograph to publish with these materials was thwarted by Butch White, who oversees the community's grange hall. White “accidentally” dropped it into a lighted potbelly stove moments after our reporter—who had discovered it tacked under a wad of announcements on the hall's bulletin board—asked White who it was. The snapshot must've been put up as a joke so long ago that people had stopped seeing it. Our reporter protested, but White told her:

“You better clear out of here if you know what's good for that pretty neck of yours.”