Otherworldly Maine (8 page)

Why would the people of Marshville want to suppress information about a man who had no contact with (or interest in) them? From the cold shoulders and slammed doors and outright threats aimed at her, our reporter suspected that people in this solemn, oak-locked town were afraid of drawing attention to themselves—of disrupting their simple way of life. But as she found out more about Masterson, she thought it more likely that the townspeople were behaving peculiarly out of an irrational terror they felt toward the secret experiments that had been conducted in the sagging house on Cobalt Hill (a name that may come from its steely hue at dusk). They seemed to think that if the reporter stirred up the strange dust of Masterson's work, it might contaminate them all.

One person who seemed anxious to speak out cast a more specific focus on the nature of the town's fear. The pastor of the First Presbyterian (and only) Church, Rev. Leopold Ossip, suggested that being mentally ahead and physically less appealing than the “local folks” made it impossible for Grist to make friends or even casual connections. Ossip decided this had led Masterson to seek out and establish an unholy alliance with “dark supernatural forces.” Here is his statement, slightly edited, as taped by our reporter:

“Facts all point in that direction. Grist came into town less and less, barricading himself in the broken-down house left by his folks—Josiah and Elsie died more or less simultaneously some years back, you know. (By the way, no one's been able to figure out how it happened. And I would not entirely discount the talk that Grist's ma and pa perished in one of his mad experiments.) Living off his folks' savings, and on vegetables he grew in vats in the house, under heat lamps, using kerosene for heat and power (he'd welded himself a huge tank and has it filled once a year, you know), Grist was more or less self-sufficient. Near as anyone in the congregation can figure, he never did anything but read, perform experiments in that fiendish cellar, and tend his indoor garden. (They say he grew tomatoes the size of cantaloupes!) God knows he didn't come to church! Queer thing is, you know, people passing near his place some nights could hear him reciting the Bible loud and clear, like he was committing it to memory. That gave me hope that there was an ounce of religion left in him, so one afternoon I walked up Cobalt Hill, stepped onto the Masterson porch bold as you please, and knocked—hard. But he wouldn't open the door. When it comes to saving souls I can be pretty stubborn, though, so I stood there and called out in the name of the Lord: ‘Now, Grist,' I said, ‘you know darn well that business you're engaged in is contrary to a moral life, contrary to the laws of God.' And you know what he said to me? With his door still locked, mind you, he said in that scratchy hiss of his: ‘The secret of all that was, all that is, and all that will be lies in my experiments.' I never tried to save him again, you know, for he'd convinced me I'd been right all along: He was in cahoots with the devil!”

When Rev. Ossip had said all he was going to say, our 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:

“I 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:

“He 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 important function in his work. In any case, she indicated further that sometimes there were empty packing cartons scattered on the porch. The local postmaster/general store proprietor confirmed that a few times each year Griswold Masterson received shipments from laboratory supply companies around the country. But when our reporter asked the gray-faced postmaster what he could tell us about the weight and size of those boxes, and about what might have been inside them, his voice hardened:

“Didn't pay attention, and I wouldn't want to know. And
stop
coming around here botherin' me! I got work to do.”

The fire that destroyed the two-story, stick-built house on Cobalt Hill may indeed have gotten started through spontaneous combustion, as Marshville residents contended—those dried-out magazines springing into flames. Or maybe a bolt of lightning set it off. Or a kerosene lamp left lit by mistake may have been knocked over by the wind. An act of nature may well have been the cause. But with the attitude the town maintained toward Masterson and his work, one had to wonder. Certainly our reporter did. However, she was unable to come up with any evidence of arson, conspiratorial or otherwise. Of course, Rev. Ossip saw it as neither an act of nature nor man:

“God was righting a grievous wrong.”

Sifting through the ashy remains in the Masterson basement,
EQMM
's reporter made an important find: a few fragments of yellow, lined manuscript pages, written in what is undoubtedly the hand of Griswold Masterson. Tragically, most of Masterson's papers must have been destroyed by flames, and even sections of the fragments salvaged—preserved by mere chance under a slab of fallen boilerplate—were damaged by heat and water. In attempting to piece together a skeleton of Masterson's thoughts, the editors have bracketed words that were obliterated or not entirely readable, corrected misspellings and obvious grammatical oversights, and are publishing the fragments in the order that seems to offer the greatest continuity. But the total sense of these elements will probably never be known:

. . . in the Practical Future—a psychological response to immediate human needs, the second is the Theoretical Future—a cry for more time to experience Man's potential. In pursuing the Practical Future we are expressing a [desire to preview particular] events so that we might alter their outcome in some way that is meaningful to our existence. In pondering the Theoretical [Future], we are attempting to break out of the [limitations of our flesh]—to participate in a time beyond our physical life span . . . .

After countless attempts to discard faulty reasoning, it became clear that bridging the Practical and Theoretical would have to be accomplished not entirely physically, not entirely spiritually, but through a journey involving mind and body . . . .

. . . and still another discipline, that of philosophy. Specifically the question of an immortal presence in the universe. If the world as we know it was indeed shaped through a process of evolution, certainly that development had to be set into motion. It needed a Prime Mover. But how events are shaped in the future will depend on Man . . . .

There is no more. While we suspect hundreds of these handwritten sheets were destroyed (bear in mind the technical aspects of his experiments have barely been alluded to in these fragments), who can say for sure?

In searching the ruins of the house, our reporter came across the remains of jars and test tubes—apparently smashed by the volunteer firemen. She also recovered a charred corner of a schematic drawing that seems to correspond to the stainless-steel cylinder the sheriff and his deputy reputedly found in Masterson's basement the morning before the fire. That was the day Beryl Ward reported the Hermit Genius missing. The reporter didn't get to see the cylinder itself, and there was much too little of the schematic to infer anything meaningful. (This was confirmed by the International Institute of Scientific Phenomena in New York, to whom we later turned it over.) So the editors of this magazine contacted the Washington County sheriff's office by telephone, requesting permission to inspect the cylinder in person. Deputy Durham Stone told us:

“Save yourself the trip. Thing's missing. Me and the sheriff, we went back to the office to get the pickup truck, so's we could haul it to the compound, but when we got back up to the house it was gone. Plain disappeared! . . . Say, how come you city folks want to come all the way out to these parts to see that thing anyway? It's just an old liquid propane gas tank, if you ask me.”

The deputy's comments made us all the more curious—not to mention suspicious—so our managing editor drove up anyway. And while he could not locate the cylinder at the compound, or at the ruins, or even in the nearby woods, the trip was amply rewarded. Through certain inducements,
EQMM
managed to borrow (and re-record) the tape of the official statement made to Sheriff Joe Bartheme by Beryl Ward the day she reported Masterson missing. In a quavering voice that frequently broke down (as indicated by ellipses), here's what she said:

“When Grist didn't come upstairs for the dinner I left by the door—did that every day for him—I called but he didn't answer. That got me worried . . . . He kept the basement door locked, so I went round to the side of the house to look in a window—but they were painted black. I'd never noticed that before. I knocked and knocked on the glass; still there was no answer. That really got me upset; I thought he'd had a heart attack or something so I got an axe out of the shed and started hitting the lock on the storm-shelter door. Finally the lock fell apart and I went in . . . . Didn't see Griswold anywhere. All I found were a bunch of tubes and wires and gadgets, plus some weird charts on the wall . . . What really amazed me was the big Bible on the stand: It was opened to Genesis.” (
Editor's note: no trace of a Bible was ever found
.) “In the back room of the basement I found this . . . kind of a cylinder, I guess . . . set up on a log-cutting horse. And it was glowing. So help me! . . . Top and bottom were rounded off; looked like a huge vitamin pill, or a miniature rocket ship . . . . I did what I knew would've made Griswold very angry, but I couldn't help myself. Guess I wanted to know once and for all what he was up to—why he stayed up night after night—why his work was more important to him than . . . anything else in the world. I started unscrewing the cap . . . . All of a sudden there was a tremendous
whoosh
and I heard this weird, high-pitched squeal: Scared the daylights out of me, but I looked inside and saw . . . I couldn't believe it—I found a baby . . . . Just a few months old—a naked baby! It looked up at me as if I were its mother. I was confused, I was frightened . . . . First I wanted to run away, but instincts much deeper took hold of me, I guess. I reached in and pulled the baby out. A fine child, with purplish eyes and silky skin. It didn't even cry. Just looked at me—poor thing!—and stopped breathing . . . . I wondered where Griswold had gotten the baby, what he was doing with it—all sorts of weird things I wondered until I spotted, off in a black corner. . . I saw Griswold's gray trousers and lab smock, his underwear and socks all neatly folded on a bench . . . .”

At this point Miss Ward became silent, and when Sheriff Bartheme asked (more than once) what she did next, she broke down and cried hysterically. Nothing else on the tape was coherent. Later that afternoon Beryl Ward had to be removed from the house in a state police straight-jacket, kicking and screaming. That night, the house went up in flames.