Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 112, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 684 & 685, September/October 1998

The Hermit Genius of Marshville by Tom Tolnay

© 1998 by Tom Tolnay

A former editor of Backstage magazine and currently the owner of a small press that publishes books on fly-fishing, poetry, art, and literature, Tom Tolnay is also a short story writer with credits in many national magazines. Mr. Tolnay has previously placed four stories with EQMM. His fascination with all aspects of the publishing process is evident in his new story for us, in which even EQMM assumes a role...

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 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 sceptical. But having let more than one major story get away from us over the years, we reluctantly decided to send a reporter[1] up to Maine to check it out. That 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 books on astronomy and destroy school property — scribbling crazy formulas on desk tops... 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 shutter-bug, 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 height differ greatly — some say over six feet, others say under five feet. (Judging from the size of his shoe, the latter seems more likely.) Whatever the truth, that disagreement dramatizes the misunderstanding and mythmaking that surrounded him all his life. EQMMs 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 outta here if you know what’s good for that pretty neck of yours.”

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 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 behind 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 had 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 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 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 got really 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 which 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:

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 which 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... 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 straightjacket, kicking and screaming. That night, the house went up in flames.

In the aftermath of these events — the disappearance of Griswold Masterson, the discovery of the cylinder, the loss of Miss Ward’s grip on reality, the destruction of the house — and as news spread out into the world, scientists and sociologists and theologians hastily began postulating theories. A few of these ideas were incorporated in the summary presented at a recent meeting of the American Board of Science in Washington, D.C.:

“Due to the absence of conclusive data, and the seclusion and secrecy in which Griswold Masterson chose to work throughout his life, and because so much of his research was destroyed, our inquiry, though arduous, has been, in many ways, unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, it is our shared opinion that Mr. Masterson achieved the ability to project himself into the physical form and mental development of his own infancy, and that he used this means to renew his future. That is to say, he opened the door to what he called the “Theoretical Future” not by achieving longevity, but by reducing his age as the framework of life around him progressed at its usual rate. This means that Masterson, who was sixty-three years old at the time of this experiment, by regressing, made available to himself another seventy-two years (based on current life expectancy for a male in this country)... The idea seems to have been to enable himself to observe the future at least seventy years hence, with his records of his first sixty-three years meant to serve as the link between his lifetimes. Of course, this would leave open the possibility of his regressing to infancy again and again — a capability he may not have originally anticipated... Tragically, however, we will probably never know precisely how he accomplished this, for the machine Beryl Ward found has disappeared, and the baby Griswold is dead.”

While the theory of the American Board of Science has the weight of evidence behind it, the editors of this magazine must point out that there is an important consideration that has not yet been addressed: the human element. Beryl Ward had apparently fallen desperately in love with Griswold Masterson. And faced with the prospect of having to watch the man she loved slowly bloom into a youngster — and then into a young man — while she grew shriveled and weak (unaware of the universal implications of his experiments), she may have placed a pillow over the child’s mouth until it wailed and clawed no longer. (Miss Ward is locked behind bars in an institution for the criminally insane.) Thus a basic human emotion may have been responsible for our being separated forever from the full implications of Masterson’s experiments. This, as we see it, is the ultimate irony, the ultimate tragedy of the life and times of Griswold Masterson.

The sheriff’s office is much too close to the real world to bend to the hypotheses of the intellectual community, so they have simply listed Griswold Masterson as a missing person. The child in the cylinder? From the pulpit Rev. Leopold Ossip has rendered the opinion, on more than one occasion, that the infant was the illegitimate offspring of Mr. Masterson and Miss Ward, and that in her madness she murdered her own son. The story she told the sheriff, Ossip proclaimed, was the invention of an unholy “and therefore diseased” mind. While much of Marshville seems to have accepted the reverend’s view, the rest of the world does not agree — judging from the many interpretations which have surfaced on the significance of the child. The most remarkable aspect of the entire affair, however, may be the steel cylinder. While its whereabouts has never been firmly established, a newspaper article (no date was indicated) clipped from the Battleboro Gazette, published in Saskatchewan, Canada, and sent to our offices by an anonymous reader, could well have some bearing on that mystery:

A curious postscript to that newspaper item and, indeed, to this entire investigation, is that the editorial assistant who first heard about the Hermit Genius of Marshville, and the reporter who covered the story for EQMM, have resigned. Reportedly she left her husband and children and he left his fiancée and friends behind to join the cave people. But this has not been confirmed.