CHAPTER 19

“A Promise to Mary Czanek”

From the Journal of Robert Peaslee May 3 1928

It was just after dawn on the first of May that the phone rang and my self-imposed sabbatical was brought to an end. I had spent weeks going through the papers and belongings of Megan Halsey-Griffith, though she preferred to leave off the hyphenated surname of her stepfather. I had found much to give me an idea of what she had been involved in, and the terrifying truth of her origin, but I was still collating facts in the case of her death. I had meant to spend those first few days in May retracing some of her steps, particularly in Dunwich, where she had encountered those terrifying semi-human things that had chased her from a long-forgotten necropolis to the Whateley home, where something else, something monstrous, had dealt with those ghoulish pursuers. Megan Halsey had not described the thing that had come down the stairs, but for some reason a nerve had been touched. A road trip to Dunwich and then a visit to Griffith and Son were in order.

The phone call ended all that, and slowed my investigation of the death of Halsey-Griffith to a crawl. The Arkham cops were all riled up—there had been a kidnapping. A child of a laundry worker had vanished and the locals were pointing the figure at the local boogeyman, the legendary witch, Keziah Mason. Normally this was the exact kind of thing the Chief would pawn off on me, or another member of the State Police, but the local papers had gotten wind of things and were forcing Nichols to act directly. He had sent a force on a predawn raid to the ravine beyond Meadow Hill, where they encountered a curious gathering of revelers who had gathered around the ancient white stone that had long been the subject of regional superstitions. The officers on site had been unable to capture any of the group, but they had glimpsed one suspect, a huge negro whom they described as easily seven or eight feet tall. The Chief himself had driven out to take charge of the search, and had taken a half dozen bloodhounds with him in hopes of finding little Ladislas Wolejko, or the men who had taken him. They needed me to do some busy work, talk to the mother again, and her boyfriend— the two of them had been cagey with the local detectives. There was a level of distrust between the Polish immigrants and the Arkham police force, and the thought was that maybe they might trust the State Police, meaning me, a little bit more.

Orne’s Gangway is a seedy alleyway that runs through a series of dilapidated tenements that house some of the poorest and least-educated residents of Arkham, men and women who labor at the most menial of tasks. Anastasia Wolejko was one of the lowest of these, a washwoman who worked ten hours a day, whose husband had disappeared before the boy was even born. Her boyfriend, Pete Stowacki, had been less than cooperative and had apparently wanted the child out of the way anyway. She kept the child with a neighbor, Mary Czanek, during the day. Rumor had it that Czanek was a gypsy and that Anastasia had wanted Mary to sleep in the child’s room, to protect it from being taken by Keziah Mason. Czanek had refused.

All this I learned from the notes provided by the officers who had carried out the previous interviews. But I knew something that they didn’t, that it wasn’t Wolejko or Stowacki who needed a second look, but rather the woman who watched the child, Mary Czanek. I found her where I expected, at home with ten children of various ages, none of them hers, crying and playing in the crumbling sty that she called an apartment. Something in the kitchen smelled like rotting cabbage and the stench wafted out and permeated not only the apartment, but the alley as well. She was friendly enough, meaning she let me in and pretended to want to talk with me, but her answers in broken English and nonsensical Polish made things difficult. I let it go on for a few minutes and then put a stop to it.

“Mrs. Mary Czanek,” I said forcefully, “husband Joseph deceased, body found on the beach in Kingsport back in April of 1920.” She was suddenly quiet. “That was your husband, Mrs. Czanek, correct?” She nodded. “That would make you Mary Fowler, Mary Elizabeth Fowler, born in Aylesbury, which is you, correct?”

Suddenly the whole immigrant demeanor was gone. “You know it is.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest.

“So, let me get this straight. You’re what, the five-times great granddaughter of the witch Goody Fowler, the sister of Keziah Mason and Abigail Prinn, the three hags that give Arkham the epitaph ‘witch-haunted,’ is that right?”

“Something like that.”

“Do the people round here know that? Do they know you’re related to Keziah? Do they know that her blood flows through your veins?”

There was a panicked look in her eyes. “No.”

“But you’ve told them you have powers, you sell them hexes and charms, little bags of bullshit, right.” She nodded reluctantly.

“Mary, this is what’s going to happen now.” I closed my notebook. “You are going to tell me exactly why you’re down here, why you’ve been down here for more than a decade. You’re going to tell me what happened to your husband, Joe, and then you’re going to tell me what happened to little Ladislas Wolejko.” There were tears welling up in her eyes. “If you don’t, Mary, if you dick me around and try any more of this crap I will let everyone down here know exactly who you are, and then, when they come after you, and trust me they will come after you, I’m going to have a front row seat as they take you out and string you up, just like they did to witches back in the day.”

She was sobbing, choking on her own gasping breath. “You promise you won’t tell?”

I nodded. “I promise. You tell me what I’ve asked and I’ll make sure no one in Arkham knows who you are or what you’ve done, no one but me.”

I just stood there and let her work through it, but finally she told me. She told me everything. She told me about how she had been caught making little spirit bags and how her paternal grandmother had banished her from the family home at sixteen. How she had met Joe Czanek while walking down the Pike on her way to Arkham, and how he took her in and gave her a place to stay, and then a week later turned her out to any guy with five bucks. How Joe had married her just so that he could rape her and not be charged. How she had told him all about the family secrets and the legends of Arkham and Kingsport, and how one night she made sure that he went after a man in Kingsport, one she knew would never let him come home. Then she told me how she began taking care of kids from the neighborhood and how once a year a request was made of her, a request she couldn’t refuse. She didn’t actually do anything, she just picked the child, marked him or her. That was all. Then she told me where the child had been taken, and what had been done to it. When she had finished she looked at me with those big brown cow eyes full of tears and reminded me of my promise. “You promised you wouldn’t tell them, you promised.”

And I had, damn me, I had. I didn’t believe her, didn’t believe it was possible, but it all made sense, twisted, sick sense. I left her and wandered the streets in a daze, reeling from what had been said, and the promise I had made. I walked until nightfall, until the sun had set and the moon had risen. I walked until the only things I could sense were the vague blurs of obstacles in my path and the feel of my shoes beating on the sidewalk. I walked in circles, weaving my way through the city, but not seeing any of it. I crossed bridges and streets and then crossed back. I roamed the town like an accursed spirit searching for a place to haunt. Then, as if I had suddenly realized the truth, I stopped my aimless walking and instead set myself on a distinct path, with a very clear destination. I had a purpose, a goal, an objective, and a course of action. Yet in the short time it took me to reach my destination I discovered I had been thwarted. There were cops outside the Witch House, and the patrolman in charge told me that the college kid that Mary Czanek had named as a suspect, Walter Gilman, was already dead; a rat had eaten its way in through his back and then through his heart. It had burrowed straight through him. He had died screaming in agony.

That’s when I knew that Mary Czanek had been telling the truth, and I knew I would have to do something about it.

They found me around midnight, on a hill outside the city. I was sitting there beneath a tree, the body of Mary Czanek smoldering amongst the garbage I had piled around her. They had to carry me away from there before they could put the fire out; even then the gasoline I had doused her in kept things going for a while. The fire department finally had to come and smother the whole thing. There wasn’t enough to positively identify the body, and there was no evidence to connect me to her murder. I had made sure of that. They asked me about that, asked me if I knew who she was and what had happened.

“You have any idea what this is about, Peaslee?” the chief asked me point blank.

“No, sir,” I whispered, “I’ve no idea at all.” It was a lie, of course, but if I had told the truth they wouldn’t have believed me anyhow. Besides, I couldn’t tell them the truth, couldn’t tell anyone the truth. I had made a promise, a promise that I wouldn’t tell anyone what she said or who she was, that no one would hang her like they had hanged witches in the old days. No one knows what she said, no one knows who she was, and she certainly wasn’t hanged.

I’ve kept my promise.

I think I can live with that.