The Place Called Dagon

Doctor Dreeme

Dreeme arrives in Marlborough as an outsider, and his medical curiosity hardens into obsession once a body, a goat's-head scrap, and a brooch begin to rhyme. He is impatient with the town's evasions and reckless in his pursuit of the truth, a flaw that draws him toward people and places he should avoid. His stubborn refusal to let the mystery rest is what forces the story out of rumor and into open confrontation.

Humphrey Lathrop

Lathrop is the elder physician whose bulk, three chins, and wheedling manner mask a long and deliberate silence about the town's history. He warns Dreeme away from the subject, then capitulates, pulling down a dusty Cotton Mather and admitting he has carried suspicions for years. His reluctant testimony is the hinge on which the early mystery swings from local gossip into something older and darker.

Walden Slater

Walden Slater is the still center of the town's taciturn surface, a man whose opaque eyes and mild 'Umph' deflect every inquiry Dreeme makes. Yet he is the one who wakes Dreeme in a downpour and leads him into the storm, armed and wordless, toward whatever waits. His silence is not ignorance but discipline, and his willingness to act marks him as one of the few villagers Dreeme can trust.

Jeffrey Westcott

Westcott occupies the farm at the end of the path, a man whose property and person are bound up with the town's older, uglier business. Dreeme's approach to his land is shadowed by an ominous recognition, and the farmhouse itself is a hive of malevolence, books, and a sacrilegious altar. He is the human face of the will Dreeme must eventually confront, and the fire that consumes his house is the story's turning point.

Deborah Morton

Deborah is the childlike, trusting figure Dreeme meets and kisses within a day, whose helplessness stirs his protective instinct and his sentimentality. Her cameo, an heirloom passed down through the Morton family, is the exact replica of the drawing found in Wagner's hand, tying her lineage to the mystery she does not understand. She is the story's emotional anchor and its most unsettling clue, a girl whose innocence and inheritance cannot be separated.

Martha Westcott

Martha Westcott is the woman Dreeme suspects wears an invisible chain of complicity, and whose rendezvous at the burned mill he cannot quite resist. She offers to tell him 'a great many things,' and the word Dagon springs from her orbit into his mind, half snare and half key. Her ambiguous hold on Dreeme is what keeps him in Marlborough when every instinct tells him to leave, making her the story's most dangerous intimacy.