New Folks' Home : And Other Stories

The Questing of Foster Adams

There can be no denial that the hobby of Foster Adams was a strange one. One must bear in mind that Foster Adams was a strange man. Whether Adams, himself, considered his research as a hobby or an occupation no one can ever say. It may have been a hobby or an obsession—or it may have been no more than the misdirection of a brilliant mind.

How he had come to take up his research, what deep-laid motive drove him to carry it out to its logical and deadly conclusion, I have no idea. Come to think of it, there is very little that I do know of Foster Adams. There is very little anyone knows.

I do not know where he was born nor who his parents were nor what became of them, although I always took it for granted they had died many years ago. I know nothing of his education except that it must have been extensive. I have no knowledge as to how or when or why he came into possession of the old Smith farm. Nor why he sought an answer to a question to which no man of this day and age would give more than passing notice, although there was a time not too many centuries removed when men must have spent much thought upon the matter.

That some deep compelling motive lay within his mind there can be no doubt. Certainly toward the end, when he had reason to believe the solution he sought might be within his grasp, he must have realized the danger of such knowledge.

Perhaps Foster Adams counted himself of stouter fiber than he really was or it may have been that in his most considered judgment, or even in his wildest imaginings, he never once came close to guessing what the answer really was. And this would seem most strange, for his questing was bolstered by many years of study.

I first heard of Foster Adams from an acquaintance in the history department at State University.

“Foster Adams is your man,” he told me. “He lives down in your part of the country now. He probably has more historic insignificance packed inside his skull than any other living person.”

It seemed strange to me, and I said so, that a professor of English history could not tell me about the eating habits of the English middle class in the fifteenth century, but he shook his head.

“I can tell you in a general way,” he said, “but not down to the last crumb of barley bread as Foster Adams can.”

When I asked who Adams was he couldn’t tell me. He was not connected with any university, he had never published anything and he was not an authority, not a recognized authority, at any rate. But he did know what people had worn and eaten from Egypt down to the last century’s turn—what tools they had used, what crops they raised, how they traveled—all the little trivial things that went to make up daily living down through the centuries.

“It’s a hobby,” my acquaintance said. And that’s as close an explanation as I ever got from anyone.

The Smith farm is a stark weather-beaten place set upon a wind-scarred rocky ridge. It has no grace or character and no dignity. Notwithstanding what happened there of a late November night it even now fails to achieve a patina of terror or the somber greatness of dark happenings.

I still recall my first sight of it and the depression and melancholy that gripped me as I drove up the rocky road, winding up the hill to reach the ridge.

The house was grey, not with the greyness of old lumber, but with the flat, unhealthy grey of lumber that had known a coat of paint which long since has scaled and peeled and been dissolved in wind and weather. The barn’s ridgepole sagged in the middle, for all the world like a swaybacked horse, and another building, which may have been a hoghouse, had fallen completely in upon itself. Seeing it for the first time I had the distinct impression that it had grown tired one day and simply given up.

At one time there had been an extensive orchard back of the house but now there were only ghosts of trees, strange humped things that stood in the sun like gnarled old men. A windmill sporting a buckled tower stood with bowed head above the dying orchard and the wind that never ceased to blow across the ridge flapped the great metal vane back and forth in a futile and nerve-grating monotony.

As I stopped the car I saw that the ravages of neglect reached even to the smallest item. Flower-beds struggled with encroaching weeds. The sloping doors that covered the outside stairway to the cellar were half rotted away and part of them had fallen in.

A shutter hung canted at one window, at another both shutters were missing and I saw where they had fallen to the ground, with grass and weeds growing through the interstices. The porch sagged, its posts canted dangerously, and the floor creaked and shifted underneath my feet as I walked to the door.

An old man, wearing a uniform so ancient that its black was turning green, opened the door in answer to my knock and never in my life have I seen a sight so incongruous. For this was an old worn-out Wisconsin farm and the man who stood in the door was straight out of Dickens.

I asked for Adams and the man held the door a little wider and asked me to come in. His voice croaked harshly and sent echoes sounding through the old high-ceilinged rooms.

The house was almost bare of furniture. There was a woodstove in the kitchen and a few old chairs and a table covered with a piece of greasy oilcloth. In what had been the wainscoated dining-room packing boxes were lined against the wall and stacks of books were piled here and there, apparently at random. The windows gaped upon the world with empty eyes, without a curtain to their name.

In the front parlor green windowshades were drawn and the room was dark with a darkness that was deeper than the dusk.

Foster Adams heaved his bulky body from a leather chair standing in one corner and came across the room to shake my hand. His handclasp was cold and flabby, indifferent if not bored.

“Not many find their way here,” he said. “I am glad you came.”

But I am sure he wasn’t. I am sure he wished I hadn’t bothered him by coming.

We sat there in the dusk behind the drawn shades and we talked in hushed voices, for the very room whispered not to speak aloud. Foster Adams, if no more could be said for him, had perfect manners. Prim, precise, even a little fussy—and disquieting.

It was queer, I thought, to hear the thin, high, cold and hostile whining of the wind at August noon against the sides and around the corners of the house. For there was no friendliness in hill or house. Whatever warmth they may have held had been leached away with the ruin of the acres and the callous abandonment of the buildings to wind and rain and sun.

Yes, Adams said, he could tell me the things I wished to know. And he told them to me without recourse to note or book, speaking as if he were drawing upon personal observation, as if he were talking of a time that was contemporaneous, as if he himself had lived in fifteenth-century England.

“Such things,” he said, “have always interested me. What kind of petticoats a woman wore or the kind of herbs that went into the pot. And even more—” he lowered his voice a trifle—“even more, the way that men have died.”

He sat motionless in his chair and it was as if he might be listening for something that he knew was there—rats in the cellar, perhaps, or crickets in the drapes.

“Men,” he stated, “have died in many ways.” He made it sound as if he were the first man who had ever thought or said it.

In the silence I heard the clumping tread of the old manservant walking about in the dining-room just outside the door. Faintly from the orchard came the muted metallic thumping of the wind-tossed windmill vane.

Foster Adams rose abruptly from his chair. “It was nice seeing you,” he said. “I hope you come again.”

And that is exactly how it was. I was literally thrown out, told to go like a gawping schoolboy who has overstayed his welcome.

But I couldn’t get the man out of my mind. There was a fascination about him that kept tugging at me to go back to the old grey farmhouse atop the bleak unfriendly ridge. Like a man who keeps going back to a certain cage in a zoo, to stand and stare and shiver at the sight of the beast it houses.

I finished my book, using Adams’ information to good advantage, and sent it off to the publisher.

Then, one day, scarcely knowing what I was doing, never for a moment admitting to myself that I was doing it, I found myself once more among the tangled hills of the lower Wisconsin.

The old farmhouse looked just the same as it had before.

I had told myself that probably Adams had just moved in shortly before my visit and that, given time, he would fix up the place. A coat of paint most certainly would have helped. A fireplace would have done wonders to bring some cheer into the house. Flowers and rock gardens and some terracing would have given its gaunt lines a softer setting, while a poplar or two at the corners would have broken the stark dreariness that reared against the sky.

But Adams had done nothing. The house was just the way I remembered it.

He said that he was glad to see me but his handshake was still a flabby gesture and he was as prim and straight as ever.

He sat in his deep leather chair and talked and I knew that if he were glad to see me it was only because it gave him a chance to hear his own voice. For he didn’t talk to me, he didn’t even look at me. it was as if he were talking to himself and there were times when I caught a querulousness in his voice as though he were arguing with himself.

“There is a streak of cruelty,” he said, “that runs through the human race. You find it everywhere you look, on every page of recorded history. Man is not satisfied with inflicting death alone, he must inflict it with many painful frills.

“A boy pulls the wings off flies and ties tin cans to a dog’s tail. The Assyrians flayed screaming thousands while they were still alive.”

There was a feeling of mustiness in the house—a feeling, not a smell. A sense of dusty time that had long since run through the glass.

“The Aztecs,” said Foster Adams, “cut out the hearts of their living sacrifices with a blunt stone knife. The Saxons threw men into the serpent pits or flayed them living and rubbed salt into the quivering flesh as the pelt peeled off.”

The talk sickened me—not the things he told me but the way he talked of them, the smooth professional talk of a man who knows his subject and views it objectively as something to be probed and studied and catalogued as neatly as a merchant would invoice his stock.

For to him, I realize now, the flayed men and the men in the serpent pits and the men who hung on crosses along the Roman roads were not flesh and blood but certain facts that someday might fall into a pattern under the persistent probing of his mind.

Not that he was callous. His interest was real and alive and personal—that his interest became acutely personal in his last few hours of sanity and life there can be small doubt.

He must have seen that his monologue disturbed me for he suddenly changed the subject and we talked of other things, of the country and the view from the hill, of the pleasant weather, for it was late October, and of the irritating curiosity of the natives concerning his reason for living at the farm and what he might be doing. I could see that he was disturbed by their actions.

More than a year elapsed before I saw Foster Adams again and then only by accidental circumstance.

Driving home from a brief visit to Chicago, a violent autumn storm caught me on the road just as night was lowering. Rain turned into ice, ice to snow. As the storm grew worse and the car was reduced to a mere crawl I realized that I could not continue much further and must soon seek shelter. And with this realization came another, that I was at that moment no more than two miles or so from the old Smith farm.

I found the side road that turned off the main highway and half an hour later came to the foot of the hill that ran to the ridge above. Knowing the car had no chance to make the slope I got out and walked, floundering in the wet and heavy snow, guided by a feeble beam of light from one of the farmhouse windows.

By daylight the wind on the hill had been merely vicious, a thin-flanked wind with a snarl between its teeth. Now it was filled with a terrible anger as it howled across the ridge and went booming down into the hollow.

Pausing to get my breath, I listened to it and heard the howling of a pack of hellish hounds, the screams of hunted harried victims, the slow wet whimpering gurgle of a cornered creature that foundered in a deep ravine.

I hurried on, ridden by senseless terror, and it was not until I was almost at the house that I realized I was running, driven by the throng of imagined horrors that pressed up the slope behind me.

I reached the porch and hung onto a canted post to regain my breath and beat back the illogical fear that had gathered in the dark. I was almost myself again when I knocked upon the door—and had to knock a second and a third time because the howling of the storm drowned out the sound of knuckles.

The old manservant let me in and it seemed to me that he moved more slowly on feet that dragged a little more than I had remembered, that he talked more thickly, as if a hand were at his throat.

Adams had changed too. He still was stiff and formal, almost distant, but he was prim no longer. He had not shaved for a day or two and his eyes were haggard and there was a sly nervousness about him that put me on edge.

He did not seem surprised to see me and when I mentioned the storm that had driven me to cover he passed over it with agreement that it was a dirty night. It was as if I lived just across the way and had dropped in for an hour or two.

There was no mention of anything to eat, no indication that he even suspected I hoped to spend the night.

Awkwardly, or at least awkwardly on my part, we talked of inconsequential things. Adams seemed wholly at ease although his face and hands were nervous.

Shortly the talk veered to his studies and I gathered from his words that he had dropped all other phases of his research to concentrate upon the punishments and tortures man had inflicted upon his fellows from the advent of historic time.

Hunched in his chair, staring at the wall, he called up the bloody sadism that had left a trail of blood and pain across the centuries, linking the old Egyptian king whose proudest title had been the Cracker of Foreheads to the man whose smoking revolver piled the dead knee-deep in Russian cellars.

He knew in detail how men had been staked out for the ants, how others had been buried to the neck in desert sands, and he assured me most solemnly that the American Indian had been a past master at the art of burning, that the expert “questioners” of the Inquisition, in this respect at least, had been no more than quasi-efficient bunglers.

He talked of racks and quarterings, of hooks that ripped out a man’s insides—and behind the hard cold words of erudition that he spoke I smelled the smoke and blood and heard the screams and the creaking of the ropes and the clanking of the chains.

But he did not, I am sure, know anything of this.

Then it came, the topic he had been leading up to, the quicksilver problem that slid within his brain, waiting to be grasped and solved—the end product of all the things he knew.

“But they all fall short of perfect,” he said. “There is no such thing as a perfect torture, for always in the end the victim dies or gives in and the torture halts. There is no way of measuring what a man’s resistance is. Sometimes you overdo it and he dies, other times you allow the victim to escape the full rigor of the execution for fear that he has reached the limit of endurance, which he hasn’t.”

“A perfect torture!” I said and I know my words must have been both a question and an exclamation point. For even then I didn’t understand. Even then I couldn’t understand why a man should be interested, even academically, in a perfect torture. Such interest seemed to verge on madness.

It was fantastic—sitting there in that old Wisconsin farmhouse with the first winter’s storm raging against the windows, to hear a man talk calmly and learnedly about the technical problems of efficient torture past and present.

“Perhaps in hell,” said Foster Adams, “but certainly not on earth. For human beings are crude things and the things they do are crude.”

“Hell?” I asked him. “Do you believe in hell? A literal hell?”

He laughed at me and from the laugh I could not tell whether he did or not.

I looked at my watch and it was almost midnight. “I must be going now,” I said. “The storm seems to have slackened a bit.”

But I made no move to rise from my chair, for certainly, I thought, a hint as broad as that would get me an invitation for the night.

Adams said merely, “I’m sorry you must go. I had hoped you could stay another hour.”

I was so angry as I trudged down the hill, back to the car, that I did not hear the feet behind me for some time. They must, I am sure, have followed me from the house but I did not hear them.

The storm had slackened and the wind was dying down and here and there the stars were shining through the scudding clouds.

I was halfway down the hill before I heard the footsteps, although thinking back upon it, I am certain that I had been hearing them for some time before I became aware of them. And hearing them, I knew they were made not by man but by some animal, for I could hear the click of hoofs and the cracking of hocks as they skidded on the ice that lay beneath the snow.

I stopped and swung around but there was nothing on the road behind me, although the footsteps kept coming on. But when they had drawn close they stopped and waited, only to start up again as soon as I went on, following me down the hill, letting me set the pace, keeping just out of sight.

A cow, I thought, although that seemed strange, for I was sure that Adams had no cow and cows as a rule do not wander down a road on a stormy night. And the hoofbeats too were not those of a cow.

I stopped several times and once I shouted at the thing that followed and after the third or fourth time I realized it no longer followed me.

Somehow I got the car turned around. Before I reached the main highway the machine bogged down three times but by dint of good luck and some profanity I got moving again. The highway was easier traveling and I reached home shortly after dawn.

Three days later I had a letter from Adams that was a half apology. He had been overworked, he said, and not quite himself. He hoped that I would overlook any eccentricity. But he did not mention his lack of hospitality. I presume that came under the heading of “eccentricity.”

It was almost a year before I saw him again. By roundabout fashion I learned that his old manservant had died and that now he lived alone. I thought about him often, feeling that he must be lonely, for the servant had been, it seemed, his only human contact. But I was still a little put out by the snowstorm incident and I made no move to visit him again.

Then I got a second letter, really no more than a note. He indicated that he had something of interest to show me and that he would feel obliged if I would stop by the next time I happened to be in his section of the country. There was no word of the manservant’s death, no indication that Adams was lonely for human companionship, nothing to hint that his life was not exactly the same as it had been before. Terse, businesslike, the note made its point and that was all.

I waited a decent interval, for I was determined on two things—that I would demonstrate to my own satisfaction that the man had no hold upon me and that I would not rush off quickly at his summons. I felt the need to demonstrate toward him a certain degree of coolness for his shabby treatment of me that November night.

But finally I went and the house was the same as before except that it looked slightly shabbier and the cellar door had completely rotted and fallen in and another shutter or two had dropped from the windows.

Adams let me in and I was shocked at the change in him. He was unshaven and his beard was turning grey in spots. His hair hung down over his collar and his hands were unwashed with thick lines of black beneath broken fingernails. His collar and cuffs were ragged and his coat was threadbare. Splotches of dried egg had dribbled down his chin and spattered upon his shirt. He wore scuffed carpet slippers which made a swishing scraping noise as he walked along the hall.

He greeted me with the same aloofness as always and led me to the parlor, which seemed darker and mustier than ever before. Although his eyes were bright and his voice as firm as ever there was a fumbling attitude about him, a faint unsureness in his speech and manner.

He complimented me upon my novel and mentioned that he was gratified to see I had made good use of the information he had been able to supply me. But from the way he talked about it I felt sure he had not read the book.

“And now,” he said, “I was wondering if you would mind looking over something I have written.”

There was nothing I could do but indicate my willingness.

He shuffled to an old and battered rolltop desk. From it he took a heavy manuscript, tied with cord. “The facts are there,” he said, “but I am poor at the tricks of writing. I wonder if you …”

He waited for me to say it and I did. “I’ll look it over,” I told him. “If I can be of any help I’ll do it gladly.”

I was about to ask him about the subject matter when he asked me if I had heard about his servant. I told him I had heard that the old man had died.

“That’s all?” he asked.

“That’s all,” I said.

Adams sat down heavily in his chair. “He was found dead,” he told me, “and I understood there have been some lurid stories making the rounds of the neighborhood.”

I was about to reply when a sound froze me in the chair. Something was sniffing at the door that opened on the porch.

Adams must not have heard it—either that or he must have heard it so often on previous occasions that he no longer paid attention to it, for he went on talking. “They found him out in the north pasture, at the end of the ridge. He was rather badly mangled.”

“Mangled!” I whispered and I couldn’t have spoken another word nor uttered it aloud had I been paid for it, for the creature was back at the door again, sniffing and snorting. At any moment I expected to hear the sound of nails clawing at the wood.

“Some animal must have got to him before he was found,” said Adams.

I sat there, gooseflesh coming out on me, listening to the thing sniffing up and down the door crack. Once or twice it whined. But Adams still did not hear it or pretended not to hear it, for he went on talking, telling me about the manuscript.

“It’s not completed,” he said. “There is a final chapter, but I’ll have the information soon and then I can finish it. There’s just a little more research, just a little more. I am very, very close.”

Now, for the first time, I saw it although I must have been staring at it ever since I came into the room—the thing upon the wall that was not the way it should be.

Now, for the first time, I saw it plainly and knew it for what it was—a crucifix turned upside down—turned upside down and nailed to the wall.

I stumbled to my feet, clutching the manuscript beneath my arm, muttering that I must go, that I had forgotten something, that I must go at once.

Behind me, as I left the room, I heard the shrill whimpering eagerness of the animal whining at the door, the sound of claws ripping at the wood, trying to get in.

My scalp was crawling and I know I must have run. Even now, thinking back on it, I have no apology to make. For the sounds at the door were sounds of fear deep graven in Man’s soul, reaching back to the dim obscurity of the days when Man crouched in a cave and listened to the padding and snuffling and the whining of the things outside in the dark.

I reached the car and stood there, one hand on the door, ready to get in. Now that I had reached safety I suddenly was brave. I saw that the house was nothing more than an old farmhouse, that there was nothing in the world to be afraid of either in or out of it.

I opened the door, walked over and put one foot on the car’s running-board. As I did I glanced downward and it was then I saw the tracks. Tracks like those a cow would make but smaller, more like the tracks of a goat perhaps. I wondered for a moment if Adams might keep goats and I knew instinctively that he didn’t. Although it was entirely possible that some animals from adjoining farms might have broken through a fence and wandered here.

Now I saw that the barren trampled ground was a solid network of those cloven tracks and I remembered the night of the storm when something that sounded like a creature with hoofs had trailed me down the road.

I got into the car and slammed the door behind me and as if the sound of the slamming door were a signal a dog came around the corner of the house. He was big and black and sleek and as he walked I saw the muscles knotting and flowing beneath his shining hide. There was a sense of strength and speed about him as he slouched along.

He turned his head toward me and I saw his eyes. I shall not forget them—ever. They were filled with a terrible evil, an utter cynicism, and they were not a dog’s eyes.

I stepped on the starter and put the accelerator to the boards. Ten miles later I finally stopped my shaking.

Home at last, I broke out a bottle and sat in the late autumn sunlight on the porch, drinking steadily and by myself, something I had never done before but have done often since that day.

When darkness fell, I went indoors and looked through Adams’ manuscript, and it was the very thing that I had expected. It was a history of torture and of punishment, all the vast historic evidence of man’s inhumanity to man. There were sketches and drawings and minute specifications concerning the construction and operation of every infernal machine the mind of man had been able to invent. The development of torture was traced with studious exactitude and each method was discussed in its many variations, with all the little trivial details of procedure carefully annotated.

And there were tortures listed that are very little known and almost never spoken of and scarcely fit to print.

Skimming through the pages I came to Chapter XLVIII and I saw that the writing ended there, that there was only the beginning of a paragraph upon the page.

It read—

I laid the manuscript on the table and reached for the bottle. But the bottle was empty and I hurled it across the room and it struck the fireplace and was smashed into flying shards that twinkled in the lamplight. I sat hunched in my chair and felt the hairy hands of Hell stretch out for me and not quite reach me and the perspiration ran down my body and my heart was in my throat.

For Adams knew—he either knew or meant to know. He had said that there was just a little research needed for him to complete the book, just a little information he still must get. And I remembered the tracks out in the yard and the dog with eyes that were not a dog’s eyes and the creature, possibly the dog, that had been scratching at the door during my visit.

I sat there for a long time but finally I got out of the chair and went to my desk. From a drawer I took a gun that had been there for a long time and I checked its action and saw that it was loaded. Then I got out the car and drove like a madman down the night road toward a madman’s retreat.

Scudding clouds covered the dying moon that lay above the western ridges when I reached the Smith farmhouse and the house itself reared up like a ghostly creation in the pre-dawn silence that lay across the hills.

Nothing stirred and there were no lighted windows. The wind came fresh and cold across the river valley and there was frost upon the fields. The porch boards creaked as I crossed them and knocked at the door—but there was no answer. I knocked again and yet again and there was still no answer, so I turned the knob and the door came softly open.

The moaning had been too soft and faint to hear through the door but it was there, waiting for me, when I came into the entryway that led into the kitchen.

It was a mewling rather than a moan, as if the tongue that made it belonged to a mindless creature. It sounded as if it had been much louder only a little time before, but now had dwindled through sheer physical exhaustion.

I found the gun in my pocket and my hand was shaking as I pulled it out. I wanted to run, I wanted very much to run. But I couldn’t run, for I had to know. I had to know that whatever it might be was not as bad as I imagined it.

I slid into the kitchen and from there into the dining-room and the moaning began low and soared into a whimper, then rose to what would have been a scream if the creature that voiced it had had the strength to scream.

In the parlor I saw something on the floor and moved cautiously toward it. The thing upon the floor writhed and cowered and moaned and when it became aware of me it dragged itself toward me and I knew that it was begging, although it made no words, but begged with the heart-rending sounds that emanated from its mouth.

I backed against the wall, trying to get away, but it reached me and lifted up hooked claws and wrapped its arms around my knees. Its head tilted back to look at me and I saw the face of Foster Adams. The room was dark, for the blinds were tightly pulled as always and the first faint grey of dawn was just beginning to paint the dining-room windows.

I could not see the face too well and for that I always have been thankful. For the eyes were wider and whiter than I remembered them and the lips were pulled back in a frozen snarl of fear. There were flecks of foam upon the beard.

“Adams,” I shouted at him. “Adams, what has happened?”

But there was no need to ask. I knew. Not what Adams knew—not the mind-shattering hell-raw facts that Adams knew—only that he had found the thing he sought. By reversed crucifix, by nails clawing at the door, by goat-tracks in the yard he had found the answer.

Nor did he answer me. His arms slipped from my legs and he fell upon the floor and lay very still and I knew that Foster Adams was beyond all answering.

Then, for the first time, I became aware of another in the room, a motionless blackness that stood in the deepest shadow.

For a moment I stood there above the sprawled body of Foster Adams and looked at the other in the room, not seeing him too well, for it was still quite dark. And he looked back at me. Still silent, I put the gun back into my pocket and turned around and left.

Behind me I heard the other walking across the floor. Hoofs crackled and hocks snapped and the rhythm of the footsteps told me that he walked not on four legs but on two.