Simon Orne

Simon Orne is a character in H. P. Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, an associate and collaborator of the book's main villain, Joseph Curwen; over the course of the novel, Orne also goes by the names Jedidiah Orne and Joseph Nadek.
== Character Biography ==
Simon Orne was born in the mid-17th century, and lives in Salem, Massachusetts. His close friends were two disreputable characters, Joseph Curwen and Edward Hutchinson. While his associates left the area around the time of the witchcraft panic of 1692, Orne stayed in Salem until 1720, "when his failure to grow visibly old began to excite attention." He reappeared about 30 years later, using the name Jedidiah Orne and claiming to be his own son; it was remarked that the supposed son was the "precise counterpart" of the father. He left Salem for good in 1771, when "when certain letters from Providence citizens...brought about his quiet removal to parts unknown."
The intervention from Providence was the result of an intercepted letter from Orne to Curwen, who had been living in that city. The letter alludes to the necromantic efforts to raise the dead that the three associates had engaged in in Salem, and which Curwen was continuing in Rhode Island. Orne urges Curwen to "write me as Jedediah and not Simon," referring to his "Plan by which I came back as my Son," as "In this Community a Man may not live too long."
The letter also suggests that Orne's necromantic skills are not as great as Curwen's, as he confesses that I have not ye Chymicall art to followe Borellus," and pronounces himself "confounded by ye VII. Booke of ye Necronomicon that you recommende."
More than a century and a half later, in 1924, Charles Dexter Ward travelled to Prague to visit "a certain very aged man supposed to be the last living possessor of some very curious mediaeval information." This was Orne, living in "in the oldest quarter of Prague" under the name Josef Nadek, "an evil old man" who had dwelt there "alone ever since anyone could remember." He had been keeping up his necromantic studies, as he later wrote a letter to the resurrected Curwen referring to something he had raised from Egypt that gave him a scar that he still had 75 years later.
In 1928, Nadek disappears--this time for good, as far as the novel is concerned--after a being raised by Marinus Willett (referred to as Number 118) destroys his house in Prague.
Category:Characters Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works
Category:Magic Users