CW: death, mental health.
Ought Be Sequestered: A History of the White Stone
Introduction by J. M. Harris
Typically, we editors do not write our own introductions for our books. But this one, we felt, had a sufficiently intriguing provenance that the story was worth the telling. What we present is not so much a typical introduction but, rather, an explanation of how we came across Ought Be Sequestered and why we chose to publish it.
• • • •
There is something uniquely squalid and sad about estate sales. To traipse through a cluttered house, one of a teeming crowd here to bear witness to the end of a life and all that it held, not to pay respect but instead to lunge for whatever goodies you can find and pull them close, hoard them, adding to your own overfull lot, which will continue to burgeon until death claims you and you yourself are a corpse in the ground, your house open to strangers, to rinse and repeat—to engage with all of that is, I have come to think, to come face-to-face with our own sorry natures. We live in a fallen world. Nevertheless, there I was, just another magpie, eager to find more junk to add to my swollen nest.
Yet I had a reason to be there: it was, in a sense, my job. Nearly a decade ago, I cofounded Obscurantist Press and have worked as coeditor. As many of those reading this introduction already know, our professional specialty lies in the bizarre and transgressive, in—as we like very proudly to declare—cult books that never earned a cult of their own. It was we who brought back into print, for the first time in centuries, John Webb’s rather crackpot tome about the origins of human language, An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability That the Language of the Empire of China Is the Primitive Language, and we who revived Ingeborg Nilsen’s monumental and singularly unpleasant philosophical treatise A Metaphysics of the Unreal, and we, too, who brought out new collections of Mary Elizabeth Counselman’s strange stories, our biggest sellers. (And by that I do not of course wish to imply that they help us to keep the lights on—not really. Even they do not earn much more than what it costs to print them.) Stubborn and perverse by nature and by choice, we make very little money on the whole enterprise. And yet we continue to drag into the light all that is too weird and distasteful for other publishers of so-called neglected or forgotten or lost classics.
Some things are not and will never be classics, were rightfully neglected or lost for good reasons. Still, we resuscitate our little bastards and mutants, barely breaking even in the process, on top of our full-time jobs. And why? Once, I visited a certain bookstore in Omaha, Nebraska—an excellent place, dingy and crowded, with bare bulbs illuminating crowded, dusty shelves and knee-high piles on the floor, with more than one half-drunk mug of tea forgotten beside them—and ran into one of the owners. We literally ran into each other, as I was browsing and she was speeding through the aisle with an armful of books to shelve. I with my armful and she with hers collided, neither paying attention, and our piles fell to the floor. She, very short with a sharp gray bob and thick-framed glasses, laughed and began to retrieve her casualties. She said, with a look of fondness in her bagged eyes, “It’s damned crowded in here. I wish this place would just burn to the ground.” Then we both laughed and moved on. Anyway, I can’t say why I continue to do what I do, but I suppose it’s for the same reason she does.
All this is to say that I had gone to yet another estate sale to trawl through dead people’s things in search of lost treasures. Often the results are pretty sad; usually, and especially here in the Midwest, all I see are jumbles of exercise and diet books, endless editions of the Bible, and junky grocery store paperbacks. But I cannot help but look; after all, the spirit of Mary Elizabeth Counselman called to me in a thrift store in Louisville. This particular house was immense, and the pictures in the listing looked rather impressive, and thus my curiosity compelled me to drive forty-five minutes if only to get a glimpse of its no-doubt-lavish interior.
Up close, the house was in fact quite ugly, the product of too much money and too little taste. It was no Winchester-style monstrosity, just an average Victorian onto which had been glued another story and then a whole new wing, just as tall, not to mention a two-car garage. I will forego any detailed description of the troublingly tacky innards, the clash of styles and patterns and the sheer glut of the Heyerdahls’ stuff. Mr. Wilton Heyerdahl, a business executive, made far more money than life requires of anyone in West Eye, Indiana, and he and his wife, Trudy, appeared to have funneled it all into their house.
Time melted away as I shuffled through the rooms: dining room and kitchen and living room and home gym and home theater and so on. The one that caught my eye was Mrs. Heyerdahl’s home office. This room was relatively elegant, covered in a dark green wallpaper festooned with roses, lined with bookshelves, and prominently featuring a large, heavy desk in the center of the room. The books and the dated computer on the desk raised my suspicions; when I discreetly pulled open the desk drawers and found stacks of notebooks in the deepest ones—and provoked scowls from a couple nearby—I thought she must have been a writer of some kind. But the name of Trudy Heyerdahl rang no bells.
I continued to nose around, looking to the shelves for further evidence. Here were many leatherbound editions of classics, mostly, and many books of history, specifically on ancient civilizations. I would like to say that a collection of heavy tomes on occult matters, an array of fearsome and indescribable objects, alerted me to my precise predicament, but I have never had any such luck: in other words, the good fortune to know when I have landed myself in a hopeless, if diverting, situation (cf. Obscurantist Press). What luck I did have followed from the temptation to dig myself further in. I noticed a long line of titles on a low shelf, a set that looked nothing like its nearest shelf-mates. These books bore the name T. R. Rudleigh, along with somewhat garish covers, depicting women in flowing dresses, and in one case a man in a suit, against a backdrop of dark violet skies, moonlight, and enormous domiciles, not unlike the one in which I then stood. The novels’ identical, photo-less author pages revealed that T. R. Rudleigh was an amateur historian who lives (lived, I silently corrected) in Indiana. There was one other book, too, the only hardcover, faded and worn, whose beige cover consisted of the title and author’s name in large maroon serif letters: Ought Be Sequestered: A History of the White Stone by Trudy Heyerdahl.
On a whim, I grabbed the lot and dumped them into a canvas bag I had brought with me. As I stood in the doorway, it seemed that the room looked newly menacing. The flowers on the wallpaper seemed to crawl and twitch. The air had turned a little sour. I looked at the books in my bag, the heavy hardcover on top, and felt uneasy. But all that—I told myself—was insipid superstition.
I sped through the rest of the house and returned to the vast porch, where two older women sat at a table, guarding a cashbox and fanning themselves in the August heat. I had nabbed the books illicitly, yet I felt I should pay something—an offering to the dead.
One of the women, sweaty precipitation gathering around the cloud of her gray perm, inspected me and my bag and said, “Quite the haul.” I agreed, smiling. She painstakingly noted each item on a large receipt—making up the prices, I suppose, since the items were naturally not tagged—and took just as much care counting out the cash I proffered.
She said, thumping the hardcover with one finger, “Trudy Heyerdahl. That’s her. It’s really too bad.”
“What was that?” I asked her, hoping not to seem too eager.
“Her death was such a tragedy. His, too.” The woman shook her head. “I didn’t know she wrote any books.” She held onto Ought Be Sequestered, staring at the cover for some seconds before handing it back to me.
Both women offered lazy waves as I departed the porch.
I hied my way away from West Eye, eager to dive into my discoveries. It seemed great fortune—of the kind I do occasionally enjoy—to have these odd books land in my lap, quite close to my own home. Of course, a story like this would not be worth telling unless my fortune proved less ideal, and less typical, and far more bizarre.
At home, I moved immediately to my office and dumped my acquisitions onto the long table that served as my desk.
T. R. Rudleigh’s oeuvre, arranged in a fan before me, seemed sufficiently enticing, though I was most drawn to the imposing cover of Ought Be Sequestered. Skimming the novels more or less at random gave me a feel for her schtick, which on the whole held little appeal for me: young lady or, in that one case, young man, arrives in remote location, meets peculiar locals, harbors assorted strange suspicions about the manse where she is staying, or the manse near to the inn where she is staying, and intrigue, chaos, and apparently (but most often not actually) supernatural events ensue. (I had a long phase in my youth in which this sort of thing was all I read, granting me an unusually comprehensive knowledge of the genre, from Ann Radcliffe to Daphne du Maurier to Louisa Bronte. On my deathbed, demented, I shall sputter out a plot summary to some poor nurse’s confusion before giving up the ghost.) For the most part they seemed not right for Obscurantist Press—not out there enough.
Ought Be Sequestered, however, prompted further digging. The book provides an account of the stone of the title, dredged up in the nineteenth century from a shipwreck near the Baltic Sea, which occurred several centuries prior. The stone itself, Heyerdahl claims, is far, far older, though of unclear provenance. As Heyerdahl explained, certain scholars claim that the stone was associated with a now-forgotten culture, which regarded it as the permanent home of a goddess; others hold it to have been enchanted by so-called ancient magicks—the superfluous letter K letting us know they mean business—to serve as the involuntary domicile of a demon.
The book’s title derives from a letter by one of the men who discovered it—Peter Rudleigh, her great-great grandfather: “The stone ought be sequestered forever, and not given to any who may fall under its influence.” Heyerdahl marshals details from various obscure grimoires and books of ancient history, knitting together references (possibly spurious) to such a stone to provide a disturbing patchwork history of its long life. As she explains, the stone has passed among many owners through the centuries, all of whom seem to meet ends Heyerdahl describes as “cosmically malevolent”: gruesome accidents, mysterious ailments, suicides, and more. The stone, we learn, is an object of evil with no clear function other than the furtherance of harm. It bears the ill will of the being that resides within it; despite her stony prison, she can torture those who find themselves its, or her, bearers.
Ought Be Sequestered is startlingly, vividly weird—fragmentary, digressive, perverse. It is also quite bonkers, knitting together various items and events—a book published in the eighteenth century about a talking stone, an account of a shipwreck similar to the inciting incident, which took place about fifty years ago, personal anecdotes about the author’s own relatives—into a tapestry about the long life and malign intent of the stone and the deity it houses. It surprised me that it had been published by a university press, based not far from the author’s home—though the university had shuttered decades ago.
Whatever its veracity, and however it got published in the first place, I immediately wanted it for the press. But, at the same time, a strange feeling began to descend on me. Perhaps it was only some vague anxiety driven by the book itself. But it was also the whole dense tangle of events running through my mind: the estate sale, the paucity of information about the author, her mysterious death, the books I’d bought and spent hours perusing. I knew I’d gotten myself stuck in something, which is usually an exciting feeling. But in this case the prospect left me uneasy.
A peculiar book that appears to have made little impact, somewhat inexplicably brought out by some long-defunct publisher, is not unusual; indeed, it is my bread and butter. Further, to account for the dead and the nature of oblivion is part of the job. Most books are not very successful, and nearly all of them, along with their authors, end up forgotten, grist for the mill of the great gray void that will eventually swallow us all. And it does not bother me much. What we do is to fish around in the void and pull out what we find, staving off oblivion for just a little bit longer, for both the authors and ourselves. We offer these void-touched things to others: the books that are just too defiant to be allowed to sink away just yet. And here was another—a deranged book that was the product, it seemed to me, of a mind gone sour, belonging to someone who was gone, having pipped us and her book to the post. Perhaps that remark about Trudy Heyerdahl’s death by the woman at the estate sale was what really troubled me.
I grabbed my phone and googled both Trudy Heyerdahl and T. R. Rudleigh. No Wikipedia page existed for either name. Rudleigh’s books showed up on Goodreads, but there were no reviews of any of them. A few people had marked them as to-reads. I also found a Twitter thread that mentioned Rudleigh, listing House of Disquietude as one entry in a line called the Diabolical Gothics; I recognized a few of the names of the other authors in the line. According to the rare book dealer who wrote the thread, the novel was highly scarce.
In subsequent days, I continued my research on Heyerdahl/Rudleigh. (When I write “continued my research,” it may conjure a picturesque scholarly scene, long days spent immersed in matters deep and heady. What I mean is that I spent mornings hunched over my tablet, downing cereal and coffee while I frantically googled.) A few obscure blogs and rare booksellers’ pages discussed Rudleigh and/or the Diabolical Gothics line. As for Ought Be Sequestered, it is held in exactly three libraries in the entire world. I found one bookseller listing for it, too, as I continued to dig. But it provided little information; I was surprised not just that the dealer tried to sell it but that it was listed as sold.
As for my searches on the Heyerdahls, they yielded little of interest. Wilton Heyerdahl’s obituary mentioned his marriage, of course—“a long and happy union of fifty-four years, beginning soon after they graduated from high school”—but very little about Trudy except that she had preceded him in death.
In the face of so little information, my desire to go back to the house incubated. The plan arrived fully formed in my head about a week later. And so, impulsively, I returned, hoping that the house did indeed have more to tell me.
It did, at any rate, have more junk to push off on the greedy and curious. I was aware that the estate sale took place again the following weekend. Upon my arrival, I noticed that even more people wandered in the yard, milled in and out of the front door, or scuttled away with hands and bags full.
The same two women sat with their cashbox, and one of them—the one I had spoken with—made eye contact with me. Her impassive face could have betokened bewilderment, suspicion, or perhaps utter ignorance of who I was. Who knows? It did not much matter to me as I walked inside, sidling past fellow townspeople clutching glassware or outdated knickknacks. I made my way back to the study, where few loitered. Indeed, after a middle-aged man departed the room empty-handed, I stood alone with the remains of the writer’s professional life. Of course, I’d come prepared to take some indiscreet photos of notebooks and other sundries.
I only admit my intent because it did not happen that way; I did not get to pry as I wished (as, in fact, I rarely have the opportunity to do). Part of me felt dismayed by my previous visit. I began to imagine a spectral Trudy Heyerdahl, come to see who was interested in her secrets.
My approach was quite brazen. I opened desk drawers and shifted clutter around—dried-out pens, thin slices of sticky notes, nubbly erasers—but nothing caught my eye. I moved to the shelves, peeking behind books, shifting things around.
At one point, I heard a noise—the scuffle of feet on plush carpet. Someone stood behind me: the permed woman who had been watching the cashbox. I continued my work, albeit more subtly. It seemed to me that the air had grown thick, more humid. An odd metallic smell became distinct. My nose wrinkled. The woman gave no sign of her awareness of anything odd.
The room had undergone a shift: something about the air, thick enough to be carved, and the light in the room’s sole window, gray but gleaming. The metallic smell was overpowering. An object on the desk caught my eye: it flickered, glinted, as though the gray light bounced off it. It looked like it might have been a stone. Such an object had not been there last time; I felt sure I would have seen it. It had not even been there a few minutes ago. As I approached, I confirmed that it was a stone, as white as chalk.
I picked it up and felt an immediate sense of menace—a thousand howling souls clamored in rage and despair, separately and together chattering their endless sequence of miseries, their incomprehensible tales of betrayal and regret and sorrow. And beneath that chorus of misery, a low droning sound—a deep voice in counterpoint. The stone felt too heavy and seemed far too brightly white, its composition something unknown to me, if known to any. On the side that faced down, I saw an icon carved into it. I quickly put it down, backing away from the stone and moving toward the corner.
Meanwhile, the woman behind me continued to browse, oblivious. I did feel that she might have been watching me; perhaps she had formed some suspicion of me or my motivations. Yet the stone, or my own anxiety, had wrapped me within a separate realm. I felt as though I were moving through a space apart. Soon I left the room, pausing in the doorway, from which vantage I saw that the stone remained on the desk. Then I left the house.
Fortunately, I remained sufficiently coolheaded to remember my other goal.
I approached the table outside and waited my turn in line. I smiled at the woman sitting, while the woman with the perm soon approached us both and retook her seat. I said, “Can you give me the name of the estate’s executor?”
The woman with the perm frowned and glared at the other one. They appeared to confer nonverbally, and then she said, turning back to me, “Well, Mr. Heyerdahl, he’s—he’s dead.”
“And Mrs. Heyerdahl, too,” the other one chimed in. “As you may remember.”
“Yes,” I said. “There wouldn’t be an estate sale otherwise.”
Both stared at me blankly. I tried again.
“Can you tell me who is behind the estate sale? Who hired you?”
“Maybe you should talk to their lawyer.”
“Yes, that would be great,” I said. I watched the permed one as she pulled a pen from her purse and wrote something down on a scrap of paper.
“How did Mr. Heyerdahl die, anyway?” I asked.
“It was a car accident,” the other woman said—the first time she ever spoke to me. “A nasty, horrible accident.” Leaning forward, she whispered, “He was beheaded.”
I shook my head and mumbled something in reply. Then I thanked the women and went on my way.
At home, with a fresh sense of focus, I smoothed out the scrap of paper bearing the name of the Heyerdahls’ lawyer, William Alford. Today, a Saturday, may have been a bad time to call, but determination compelled me to try. I found the phone number for his office online—located, of course, in West Eye—and dialed it.
He answered on the third ring. I felt taken aback to hear him announce himself, having expected a secretary along with a brief moment to collect myself. I gave him my name and explained who I was, mentioning the books and my interest in publishing one of them. “I’m trying to find out who has the rights,” I explained.
He sounded cagey. “Look,” he said. “I’d much rather discuss this in person. This isn’t the kind of conversation you have over the phone.” He suggested a time to meet—in about a week’s time—and I agreed.
While there was plenty to occupy my time—my day job, my work with the press—I devoted what time I could to reading Ought Be Sequestered again, more carefully. The second read struck me as even stranger. The book was a mad howl, a fractured, fractious account of the legends of the stone. Not an account but a battle, beginning, per at least one account, in an ancient grave site in which nails stuck out of coffins, there to keep the dead in place, arranged around a mound in which lay buried that horrible stone. The object itself continued to wage its endless battle against the many mystics, fraudsters, and ordinary schmucks who had crossed its path—of which I might now count myself one. Reading it, I felt mad myself, and again I felt a desperate hunger to publish it, to usher it again into the world.
Thus, here came the crucial moment. Despite my interests, I have never had truck with belief in the occult, preternatural, or otherwise peculiar. I am staunchly rational and an atheist. But one morning I woke and drifted to my office and found, on top of the book, the same white stone I had seen at the house. Let me repeat that I saw the stone in the house, on Trudy Heyerdahl’s desk, where I had left it behind. But now it was here, in my home, resting on the book and showing its face to me. I do not know how to account for this, but it happened. I left the room and came back, and the stone was gone. And the feeling it left me with was not fear or anxiety but a fresh determination to republish the book.
The following Saturday, I drove once more to West Eye to meet Mr. Alford. He was a large man, tall and broad, with a red face and dark, thinning hair. I followed him into his small office, where he gestured to a chair across from his desk. Before I could even take my seat, immediately he launched into a capsule history of the author, his tone admonitory. “I don’t think you fully understand the situation,” he said. “Trudy was a driven and passionate woman. Perhaps too much so. I didn’t know her well. But she didn’t disappear. She—well, she destroyed herself. Her husband blamed that damned book and the stone, whatever it is.”
I sat silent, unsure what to say. When I began to stammer a weak response, he waved his hand. “You didn’t know, did you? But you can see why the family wanted to keep things quiet. The thing about her death, about that kind of death . . .” he continued, crossing his arms—it was evident that this was something he had developed, even rehearsed—“is that it rearranges everything else before it. People would have seen it as though it were inevitable. Her destiny. Or doom. As though her whole life had been leading up to it. And it’s not true. She was a warm and imaginative woman—at least, in all my interactions with her. A successful writer. She had a big family. That beautiful home. What happened is that her life was destroyed by that book she wrote. The way I see it, it was basically an accident. After it happened the family tried not to talk about it much. And they blamed the book, too.”
Here he stopped, his speech concluded. He rubbed his eyes and looked at me. “Now why would you want to publish such a thing?”
Here—presumably—I needed to make my case. I fumbled through an explanation, describing it as an astounding book, a testament to her ability and creativity, and exactly the sort of thing my press specializes in. I do not know if he bought it, but he did provide me with what I needed. He gave me the name of the estate’s executor, Trudy’s sister. He flashed an unpleasant smirk and then leaned over to shake my hand.
As I left, with yet another name, another step along the way—some bizarre details aside, all this was really not so out of the ordinary—I mulled over his words. In principle, I agreed with him. Part of me could see how it might happen: how the stone consumed her mind and energy. Nothing diabolical, necessarily; her book had captivated me in the same way. Might I further propagate such strange and fearsome energies by granting the book wider availability? Did that disturb me?
The rest of the story is rather less exciting. To offer tedious details of my reaching out to Trudy’s sister, Joanne, and of our several conversations in her small kitchen, her own skepticism and simultaneous desire that her sister get her due, and our mutual resolution to publish the book—well, that would make for a less engaging tale because it was so very routine, a dull contrast to all that had preceded it. Instead, just two more items remain for me to note.
The first is another peculiar experience I had during my final visit to the Heyerdahl home. Because I had been so persistent and patient in my ongoing conversations with Joanne, she felt little hesitation in asking me to help her in clearing out some things that remained at her sister’s home. As she led me into the study, where someone, perhaps she herself, had already packed up towers of boxes, I braced and then chided myself. Joanne bustled ahead of me, moving briskly toward the boxes. She stopped at the desk and glanced at it, though, from my position in the doorway, I could see that its surface was totally bare. I watched, and the stone appeared once more on the surface of the desk. It was not there, and then it was. I called out to Joanne, asking her if she’d seen it, and she turned to me and said, “Seen what, dear?”
This was also the last time I saw her. Though she signed the contract, she did not live to see the republication of her sister’s work. Shortly after signing the contract, she received a diagnosis of a very rare form of cancer and died three months later. I do not know what became of the stone. After my one sighting of it in my home—if it was a sighting—it did not appear to me again.
The second thing is to acknowledge that I have reached the end of a somewhat protracted introduction. This is a dangerous book about a dangerous object. Or, the book that follows and that you hold in your hands is the best and strangest and most unsettling of the author’s work—arguably, the best and strangest and most unsettling of anything in our catalogue. The book’s undertaking consumed Trudy Heyerdahl; how literally depends on one’s propensity to believe in the esoteric. I believe, as I suppose I must, that there is value in this literary artifact, which is also in the truest sense occult. My rationality remains intact, but even so I cannot help but admit that I have had some strange experiences in my attempt to bring this book back into the world. Perhaps it is folly on my part to do so and to grant the stone any sort of power: the mystically inclined among you may wish to stop here. Nonetheless, one might say I have done its will. Whatever the stone has in store for me—I write with a smirk and perhaps a bit of trepidation—I shall end this introduction here and let at least some of its secrets be drawn out into the light.
