The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
by H. P. Lovecraft
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is a novella by H. P. Lovecraft written in early 1927. It
was first published in the May and July issues of Weird Tales in 1941 under the title The
Madness Out of Time. It is one of the few Lovecraft stories to take place in his hometown
of Providence, Rhode Island.
Ñ Excerpted from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward on Wikipedia, the free online
encyclopedia.
The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man
may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an
Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes
of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape
of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated.
- Borellus
I. A Result and a Prologue
1
From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island, there recently
disappeared an exceedingly singular person. He bore the name of Charles Dexter Ward,
and was placed under restraint most reluctantly by the grieving father who had watched
his aberration grow from a mere eccentricity to a dark mania involving both a possibility
of murderous tendencies and a profound and peculiar change in the apparent contents of
his mind. Doctors confess themselves quite baffled by his case, since it presented oddities
of a general physiological as well as psychological character.
In the first place, the patient seemed oddly older than his twenty-six years would warrant.
Mental disturbance, it is true, will age one rapidly; but the face of this young man had
taken on a subtle cast which only the very aged normally acquire. In the second place, his
organic processes shewed a certain queerness of proportion which nothing in medical
experience can parallel. Respiration and heart action had a baffling lack of symmetry; the
voice was lost, so that no sounds above a whisper were possible; digestion was incredibly
prolonged and minimised, and neural reactions to standard stimuli bore no relation at all
to anything heretofore recorded, either normal or pathological. The skin had a morbid
chill and dryness, and the cellular structure of the tissue seemed exaggeratedly coarse and
loosely knit. Even a large olive birthmark on the right hip had disappeared, whilst there
had formed on the chest a very peculiar mole or blackish spot of which no trace existed
before. In general, all physicians agree that in Ward the processes of metabolism had
become retarded to a degree beyond precedent.

Psychologically, too, Charles Ward was unique. His madness held no affinity to any sort
recorded in even the latest and most exhaustive of treatises, and was conjoined to a
mental force which would have made him a genius or a leader had it not been twisted into
strange and grotesque forms. Dr. Willett, who was Ward's family physician, affirms that
the patient's gross mental capacity, as gauged by his response to matters outside the
sphere of his insanity, had actually increased since the seizure. Ward, it is true, was
always a scholar and an antiquarian; but even his most brilliant early work did not shew
the prodigious grasp and insight displayed during his last examinations by the alienists. It
was, indeed, a difficult matter to obtain a legal commitment to the hospital, so powerful
and lucid did the youth's mind seem; and only on the evidence of others, and on the
strength of many abnormal gaps in his stock of information as distinguished from his
intelligence, was he finally placed in confinement. To the very moment of his vanishment
he was an omnivorous reader and as great a conversationalist as his poor voice permitted;
and shrewd observers, failing to foresee his escape, freely predicted that he would not be
long in gaining his discharge from custody.
Only Dr. Willett, who brought Charles Ward into the world and had watched his growth
of body and mind ever since, seemed frightened at the thought of his future freedom. He
had had a terrible experience and had made a terrible discovery which he dared not reveal
to his sceptical colleagues. Willett, indeed, presents a minor mystery all his own in his
connexion with the case. He was the last to see the patient before his flight, and emerged
from that final conversation in a state of mixed horror and relief which several recalled
when Ward's escape became known three hours later. That escape itself is one of the
unsolved wonders of Dr. Waite's hospital. A window open above a sheer drop of sixty
feet could hardly explain it, yet after that talk with Willett the youth was undeniably gone.