object:1f.lovecraft - The Whisperer in Darkness
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
I.
Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the
end. To say that a mental shock was the cause of what I inferredthat
last straw which sent me racing out of the lonely Akeley farmhouse and
through the wild domed hills of Vermont in a commandeered motor at
nightis to ignore the plainest facts of my final experience.
Notwithstanding the deep extent to which I shared the information and
speculations of Henry Akeley, the things I saw and heard, and the
admitted vividness of the impression produced on me by these things, I
cannot prove even now whether I was right or wrong in my hideous
inference. For after all, Akeleys disappearance establishes nothing.
People found nothing amiss in his house despite the bullet-marks on the
outside and inside. It was just as though he had walked out casually
for a ramble in the hills and failed to return. There was not even a
sign that a guest had been there, or that those horrible cylinders and
machines had been stored in the study. That he had mortally feared the
crowded green hills and endless trickle of brooks among which he had
been born and reared, means nothing at all, either; for thousands are
subject to just such morbid fears. Eccentricity, moreover, could easily
account for his strange acts and apprehensions toward the last.
The whole matter began, so far as I am concerned, with the historic and
unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3, 1927. I was then, as now,
an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham,
Massachusetts, and an enthusiastic amateur student of New England
folklore. Shortly after the flood, amidst the varied reports of
hardship, suffering, and organised relief which filled the press, there
appeared certain odd stories of things found floating in some of the
swollen rivers; so that many of my friends embarked on curious
discussions and appealed to me to shed what light I could on the
subject. I felt flattered at having my folklore study taken so
seriously, and did what I could to belittle the wild, vague tales which
seemed so clearly an outgrowth of old rustic superstitions. It amused
me to find several persons of education who insisted that some stratum
of obscure, distorted fact might underlie the rumours.
The tales thus brought to my notice came mostly through newspaper
cuttings; though one yarn had an oral source and was repeated to a
friend of mine in a letter from his mother in Hardwick, Vermont. The
type of thing described was essentially the same in all cases, though
there seemed to be three separate instances involvedone connected with
the Winooski River near Montpelier, another attached to the West River
in Windham County beyond Newfane, and a third centring in the
Passumpsic in Caledonia County above Lyndonville. Of course many of the
stray items mentioned other instances, but on analysis they all seemed
to boil down to these three. In each case country folk reported seeing
one or more very bizarre and disturbing objects in the surging waters
that poured down from the unfrequented hills, and there was a
widespread tendency to connect these sights with a primitive,
half-forgotten cycle of whispered legend which old people resurrected
for the occasion.
What people thought they saw were organic shapes not quite like any
they had ever seen before. Naturally, there were many human bodies
washed along by the streams in that tragic period; but those who
described these strange shapes felt quite sure that they were not
human, despite some superficial resemblances in size and general
outline. Nor, said the witnesses, could they have been any kind of
animal known to Vermont. They were pinkish things about five feet long;
with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or
membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a
sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short
antennae, where a head would ordinarily be. It was really remarkable
how closely the reports from different sources tended to coincide;
though the wonder was lessened by the fact that the old legends, shared
at one time throughout the hill country, furnished a morbidly vivid
picture which might well have coloured the imaginations of all the
witnesses concerned. It was my conclusion that such witnessesin every
case naive and simple backwoods folkhad glimpsed the battered and
bloated bodies of human beings or farm animals in the whirling
currents; and had allowed the half-remembered folklore to invest these
pitiful objects with fantastic attributes.
The ancient folklore, while cloudy, evasive, and largely forgotten by
the present generation, was of a highly singular character, and
obviously reflected the influence of still earlier Indian tales. I knew
it well, though I had never been in Vermont, through the exceedingly
rare monograph of Eli Davenport, which embraces material orally
obtained prior to 1839 among the oldest people of the state. This
material, moreover, closely coincided with tales which I had personally
heard from elderly rustics in the mountains of New Hampshire. Briefly
summarised, it hinted at a hidden race of monstrous beings which lurked
somewhere among the remoter hillsin the deep woods of the highest
peaks, and the dark valleys where streams trickle from unknown sources.
These beings were seldom glimpsed, but evidences of their presence were
reported by those who had ventured farther than usual up the slopes of
certain mountains or into certain deep, steep-sided gorges that even
the wolves shunned.
There were queer footprints or claw-prints in the mud of brook-margins
and barren patches, and curious circles of stones, with the grass
around them worn away, which did not seem to have been placed or
entirely shaped by Nature. There were, too, certain caves of
problematical depth in the sides of the hills; with mouths closed by
boulders in a manner scarcely accidental, and with more than an average
quota of the queer prints leading both toward and away from themif
indeed the direction of these prints could be justly estimated. And
worst of all, there were the things which adventurous people had seen
very rarely in the twilight of the remotest valleys and the dense
perpendicular woods above the limits of normal hill-climbing.
It would have been less uncomfortable if the stray accounts of these
things had not agreed so well. As it was, nearly all the rumours had
several points in common; averring that the creatures were a sort of
huge, light-red crab with many pairs of legs and with two great
bat-like wings in the middle of the back. They sometimes walked on all
their legs, and sometimes on the hindmost pair only, using the others
to convey large objects of indeterminate nature. On one occasion they
were spied in considerable numbers, a detachment of them wading along a
shallow woodland watercourse three abreast in evidently disciplined
formation. Once a specimen was seen flyinglaunching itself from the
top of a bald, lonely hill at night and vanishing in the sky after its
great flapping wings had been silhouetted an instant against the full
moon.
These things seemed content, on the whole, to let mankind alone; though
they were at times held responsible for the disappearance of
venturesome individualsespecially persons who built houses too close
to certain valleys or too high up on certain mountains. Many localities
came to be known as inadvisable to settle in, the feeling persisting
long after the cause was forgotten. People would look up at some of the
neighbouring mountain-precipices with a shudder, even when not
recalling how many settlers had been lost, and how many farmhouses
burnt to ashes, on the lower slopes of those grim, green sentinels.
But while according to the earliest legends the creatures would appear
to have harmed only those trespassing on their privacy; there were
later accounts of their curiosity respecting men, and of their attempts
to establish secret outposts in the human world. There were tales of
the queer claw-prints seen around farmhouse windows in the morning, and
of occasional disappearances in regions outside the obviously haunted
areas. Tales, besides, of buzzing voices in imitation of human speech
which made surprising offers to lone travellers on roads and cart-paths
in the deep woods, and of children frightened out of their wits by
things seen or heard where the primal forest pressed close upon their
dooryards. In the final layer of legendsthe layer just preceding the
decline of superstition and the abandonment of close contact with the
dreaded placesthere are shocked references to hermits and remote
farmers who at some period of life appeared to have undergone a
repellent mental change, and who were shunned and whispered about as
mortals who had sold themselves to the strange beings. In one of the
northeastern counties it seemed to be a fashion about 1800 to accuse
eccentric and unpopular recluses of being allies or representatives of
the abhorred things.
As to what the things wereexplanations naturally varied. The common
name applied to them was those ones, or the old ones, though other
terms had a local and transient use. Perhaps the bulk of the Puritan
settlers set them down bluntly as familiars of the devil, and made them
a basis of awed theological speculation. Those with Celtic legendry in
their heritagemainly the Scotch-Irish element of New Hampshire, and
their kindred who had settled in Vermont on Governor Wentworths
colonial grantslinked them vaguely with the malign fairies and little
people of the bogs and raths, and protected themselves with scraps of
incantation handed down through many generations. But the Indians had
the most fantastic theories of all. While different tribal legends
differed, there was a marked consensus of belief in certain vital
particulars; it being unanimously agreed that the creatures were not
native to this earth.
The Pennacook myths, which were the most consistent and picturesque,
taught that the Winged Ones came from the Great Bear in the sky, and
had mines in our earthly hills whence they took a kind of stone they
could not get on any other world. They did not live here, said the
myths, but merely maintained outposts and flew back with vast cargoes
of stone to their own stars in the north. They harmed only those
earth-people who got too near them or spied upon them. Animals shunned
them through instinctive hatred, not because of being hunted. They
could not eat the things and animals of earth, but brought their own
food from the stars. It was bad to get near them, and sometimes young
hunters who went into their hills never came back. It was not good,
either, to listen to what they whispered at night in the forest with
voices like a bees that tried to be like the voices of men. They knew
the speech of all kinds of menPennacooks, Hurons, men of the Five
Nationsbut did not seem to have or need any speech of their own. They
talked with their heads, which changed colour in different ways to mean
different things.
All the legendry, of course, white and Indian alike, died down during
the nineteenth century, except for occasional atavistical flareups. The
ways of the Vermonters became settled; and once their habitual paths
and dwellings were established according to a certain fixed plan, they
remembered less and less what fears and avoidances had determined that
plan, and even that there had been any fears or avoidances. Most people
simply knew that certain hilly regions were considered as highly
unhealthy, unprofitable, and generally unlucky to live in, and that the
farther one kept from them the better off one usually was. In time the
ruts of custom and economic interest became so deeply cut in approved
places that there was no longer any reason for going outside them, and
the haunted hills were left deserted by accident rather than by design.
Save during infrequent local scares, only wonder-loving grandmothers
and retrospective nonagenarians ever whispered of beings dwelling in
those hills; and even such whisperers admitted that there was not much
to fear from those things now that they were used to the presence of
houses and settlements, and now that human beings let their chosen
territory severely alone.
All this I had known from my reading, and from certain folk-tales
picked up in New Hampshire; hence when the flood-time rumours began to
appear, I could easily guess what imaginative background had evolved
them. I took great pains to explain this to my friends, and was
correspondingly amused when several contentious souls continued to
insist on a possible element of truth in the reports. Such persons
tried to point out that the early legends had a significant persistence
and uniformity, and that the virtually unexplored nature of the Vermont
hills made it unwise to be dogmatic about what might or might not dwell
among them; nor could they be silenced by my assurance that all the
myths were of a well-known pattern common to most of mankind and
determined by early phases of imaginative experience which always
produced the same type of delusion.
It was of no use to demonstrate to such opponents that the Vermont
myths differed but little in essence from those universal legends of
natural personification which filled the ancient world with fauns and
dryads and satyrs, suggested the kallikanzari of modern Greece, and
gave to wild Wales and Ireland their dark hints of strange, small, and
terrible hidden races of troglodytes and burrowers. No use, either, to
point out the even more startlingly similar belief of the Nepalese hill
tribes in the dreaded Mi-Go or Abominable Snow-Men who lurk hideously
amidst the ice and rock pinnacles of the Himalayan summits. When I
brought up this evidence, my opponents turned it against me by claiming
that it must imply some actual historicity for the ancient tales; that
it must argue the real existence of some queer elder earth-race, driven
to hiding after the advent and dominance of mankind, which might very
conceivably have survived in reduced numbers to relatively recent
timesor even to the present.
The more I laughed at such theories, the more these stubborn friends
asseverated them; adding that even without the heritage of legend the
recent reports were too clear, consistent, detailed, and sanely prosaic
in manner of telling, to be completely ignored. Two or three fanatical
extremists went so far as to hint at possible meanings in the ancient
Indian tales which gave the hidden beings a non-terrestrial origin;
citing the extravagant books of Charles Fort with their claims that
voyagers from other worlds and outer space have often visited earth.
Most of my foes, however, were merely romanticists who insisted on
trying to transfer to real life the fantastic lore of lurking little
people made popular by the magnificent horror-fiction of Arthur
Machen.
II.
As was only natural under the circumstances, this piquant debating
finally got into print in the form of letters to the Arkham Advertiser;
some of which were copied in the press of those Vermont regions whence
the flood-stories came. The Rutland Herald gave half a page of extracts
from the letters on both sides, while the Brattleboro Reformer
reprinted one of my long historical and mythological summaries in full,
with some accompanying comments in The Pendrifters thoughtful column
which supported and applauded my sceptical conclusions. By the spring
of 1928 I was almost a well-known figure in Vermont, notwithstanding
the fact that I had never set foot in the state. Then came the
challenging letters from Henry Akeley which impressed me so profoundly,
and which took me for the first and last time to that fascinating realm
of crowded green precipices and muttering forest streams.
Most of what I now know of Henry Wentworth Akeley was gathered by
correspondence with his neighbours, and with his only son in
California, after my experience in his lonely farmhouse. He was, I
discovered, the last representative on his home soil of a long, locally
distinguished line of jurists, administrators, and
gentlemen-agriculturists. In him, however, the family mentally had
veered away from practical affairs to pure scholarship; so that he had
been a notable student of mathematics, astronomy, biology,
anthropology, and folklore at the University of Vermont. I had never
previously heard of him, and he did not give many autobiographical
details in his communications; but from the first I saw he was a man of
character, education, and intelligence, albeit a recluse with very
little worldly sophistication.
Despite the incredible nature of what he claimed, I could not help at
once taking Akeley more seriously than I had taken any of the other
challengers of my views. For one thing, he was really close to the
actual phenomenavisible and tangiblethat he speculated so grotesquely
about; and for another thing, he was amazingly willing to leave his
conclusions in a tentative state like a true man of science. He had no
personal preferences to advance, and was always guided by what he took
to be solid evidence. Of course I began by considering him mistaken,
but gave him credit for being intelligently mistaken; and at no time
did I emulate some of his friends in attributing his ideas, and his
fear of the lonely green hills, to insanity. I could see that there was
a great deal to the man, and knew that what he reported must surely
come from strange circumstances deserving investigation, however little
it might have to do with the fantastic causes he assigned. Later on I
received from him certain material proofs which placed the matter on a
somewhat different and bewilderingly bizarre basis.
I cannot do better than transcribe in full, so far as is possible, the
long letter in which Akeley introduced himself, and which formed such
an important landmark in my own intellectual history. It is no longer
in my possession, but my memory holds almost every word of its
portentous message; and again I affirm my confidence in the sanity of
the man who wrote it. Here is the texta text which reached me in the
cramped, archaic-looking scrawl of one who had obviously not mingled
much with the world during his sedate, scholarly life.
R.F.D. #2,
Townshend, Windham Co.,
Vermont.
May 5, 1928.
Albert N. Wilmarth, Esq.,
118 Saltonstall St.,
Arkham, Mass.,
My dear Sir:
I have read with great interest the Brattleboro Reformers reprint
(Apr. 23, 28) of your letter on the recent stories of strange
bodies seen floating in our flooded streams last fall, and on the
curious folklore they so well agree with. It is easy to see why an
outlander would take the position you take, and even why
Pendrifter agrees with you. That is the attitude generally taken
by educated persons both in and out of Vermont, and was my own
attitude as a young man (I am now 57) before my studies, both
general and in Davenports book, led me to do some exploring in
parts of the hills hereabouts not usually visited.
I was directed toward such studies by the queer old tales I used to
hear from elderly farmers of the more ignorant sort, but now I wish
I had let the whole matter alone. I might say, with all proper
modesty, that the subject of anthropology and folklore is by no
means strange to me. I took a good deal of it at college, and am
familiar with most of the standard authorities such as Tylor,
Lubbock, Frazer, Quatrefages, Murray, Osborn, Keith, Boule, G.
Elliot Smith, and so on. It is no news to me that tales of hidden
races are as old as all mankind. I have seen the reprints of letters
from you, and those arguing with you, in the Rutland Herald, and
guess I know about where your controversy stands at the present
time.
What I desire to say now is, that I am afraid your adversaries are
nearer right than yourself, even though all reason seems to be on
your side. They are nearer right than they realise themselvesfor of
course they go only by theory, and cannot know what I know. If I
knew as little of the matter as they, I would not feel justified in
believing as they do. I would be wholly on your side.
You can see that I am having a hard time getting to the point,
probably because I really dread getting to the point; but the upshot
of the matter is that I have certain evidence that monstrous things
do indeed live in the woods on the high hills which nobody visits. I
have not seen any of the things floating in the rivers, as reported,
but I have seen things like them under circumstances I dread to
repeat. I have seen footprints, and of late have seen them nearer my
own home (I live in the old Akeley place south of Townshend Village,
on the side of Dark Mountain) than I dare tell you now. And I have
overheard voices in the woods at certain points that I will not even
begin to describe on paper.
At one place I heard them so much that I took a phonograph
therewith a dictaphone attachment and wax blankand I shall try to
arrange to have you hear the record I got. I have run it on the
machine for some of the old people up here, and one of the voices
had nearly scared them paralysed by reason of its likeness to a
certain voice (that buzzing voice in the woods which Davenport
mentions) that their grandmothers have told about and mimicked for
them. I know what most people think of a man who tells about
hearing voicesbut before you draw conclusions just listen to this
record and ask some of the older backwoods people what they think of
it. If you can account for it normally, very well; but there must be
something behind it. Ex nihilo nihil fit, you know.
Now my object in writing you is not to start an argument, but to
give you information which I think a man of your tastes will find
deeply interesting. This is private. Publicly I am on your side, for
certain things shew me that it does not do for people to know too
much about these matters. My own studies are now wholly private, and
I would not think of saying anything to attract peoples attention
and cause them to visit the places I have explored. It is
trueterribly truethat there are non-human creatures watching us
all the time; with spies among us gathering information. It is from
a wretched man who, if he was sane (as I think he was), was one of
those spies, that I got a large part of my clues to the matter. He
later killed himself, but I have reason to think there are others
now.
The things come from another planet, being able to live in
interstellar space and fly through it on clumsy, powerful wings
which have a way of resisting the ether but which are too poor at
steering to be of much use in helping them about on earth. I will
tell you about this later if you do not dismiss me at once as a
madman. They come here to get metals from mines that go deep under
the hills, and I think I know where they come from. They will not
hurt us if we let them alone, but no one can say what will happen if
we get too curious about them. Of course a good army of men could
wipe out their mining colony. That is what they are afraid of. But
if that happened, more would come from outsideany number of them.
They could easily conquer the earth, but have not tried so far
because they have not needed to. They would rather leave things as
they are to save bother.
I think they mean to get rid of me because of what I have
discovered. There is a great black stone with unknown hieroglyphics
half worn away which I found in the woods on Round Hill, east of
here; and after I took it home everything became different. If they
think I suspect too much they will either kill me or take me off the
earth to where they come from. They like to take away men of
learning once in a while, to keep informed on the state of things in
the human world.
This leads me to my secondary purpose in addressing younamely, to
urge you to hush up the present debate rather than give it more
publicity. People must be kept away from these hills, and in order
to effect this, their curiosity ought not to be aroused any further.
Heaven knows there is peril enough anyway, with promoters and real
estate men flooding Vermont with herds of summer people to overrun
the wild places and cover the hills with cheap bungalows.
I shall welcome further communication with you, and shall try to
send you that phonograph record and black stone (which is so worn
that photographs dont shew much) by express if you are willing. I
say try because I think those creatures have a way of tampering
with things around here. There is a sullen, furtive fellow named
Brown, on a farm near the village, who I think is their spy. Little
by little they are trying to cut me off from our world because I
know too much about their world.
They have the most amazing way of finding out what I do. You may not
even get this letter. I think I shall have to leave this part of the
country and go to live with my son in San Diego, Cal., if things get
any worse, but it is not easy to give up the place you were born in,
and where your family has lived for six generations. Also, I would
hardly dare sell this house to anybody now that the creatures have
taken notice of it. They seem to be trying to get the black stone
back and destroy the phonograph record, but I shall not let them if
I can help it. My great police dogs always hold them back, for there
are very few here as yet, and they are clumsy in getting about. As I
have said, their wings are not much use for short flights on earth.
I am on the very brink of deciphering that stonein a very terrible
wayand with your knowledge of folklore you may be able to supply
missing links enough to help me. I suppose you know all about the
fearful myths antedating the coming of man to the earththe
Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu cycleswhich are hinted at in the
Necronomicon. I had access to a copy of that once, and hear that you
have one in your college library under lock and key.
To conclude, Mr. Wilmarth, I think that with our respective studies
we can be very useful to each other. I dont wish to put you in any
peril, and suppose I ought to warn you that possession of the stone
and the record wont be very safe; but I think you will find any
risks worth running for the sake of knowledge. I will drive down to
Newfane or Brattleboro to send whatever you authorise me to send,
for the express offices there are more to be trusted. I might say
that I live quite alone now, since I cant keep hired help any more.
They wont stay because of the things that try to get near the house
at night, and that keep the dogs barking continually. I am glad I
didnt get as deep as this into the business while my wife was
alive, for it would have driven her mad.
Hoping that I am not bothering you unduly, and that you will decide
to get in touch with me rather than throw this letter into the waste
basket as a madmans raving, I am
Yrs. very truly,
HENRY W. AKELEY
P.S. I am making some extra prints of certain photographs taken by
me, which I think will help to prove a number of the points I have
touched on. The old people think they are monstrously true. I shall
send you these very soon if you are interested. H.W.A.
It would be difficult to describe my sentiments upon reading this
strange document for the first time. By all ordinary rules, I ought to
have laughed more loudly at these extravagances than at the far milder
theories which had previously moved me to mirth; yet something in the
tone of the letter made me take it with paradoxical seriousness. Not
that I believed for a moment in the hidden race from the stars which my
correspondent spoke of; but that, after some grave preliminary doubts,
I grew to feel oddly sure of his sanity and sincerity, and of his
confrontation by some genuine though singular and abnormal phenomenon
which he could not explain except in this imaginative way. It could not
be as he thought it, I reflected, yet on the other hand it could not be
otherwise than worthy of investigation. The man seemed unduly excited
and alarmed about something, but it was hard to think that all cause
was lacking. He was so specific and logical in certain waysand after
all, his yarn did fit in so perplexingly well with some of the old
mythseven the wildest Indian legends.
That he had really overheard disturbing voices in the hills, and had
really found the black stone he spoke about, was wholly possible
despite the crazy inferences he had madeinferences probably suggested
by the man who had claimed to be a spy of the outer beings and had
later killed himself. It was easy to deduce that this man must have
been wholly insane, but that he probably had a streak of perverse
outward logic which made the naive Akeleyalready prepared for such
things by his folklore studiesbelieve his tale. As for the latest
developmentsit appeared from his inability to keep hired help that
Akeleys humbler rustic neighbours were as convinced as he that his
house was besieged by uncanny things at night. The dogs really barked,
too.
And then the matter of that phonograph record, which I could not but
believe he had obtained in the way he said. It must mean something;
whether animal noises deceptively like human speech, or the speech of
some hidden, night-haunting human being decayed to a state not much
above that of lower animals. From this my thoughts went back to the
black hieroglyphed stone, and to speculations upon what it might mean.
Then, too, what of the photographs which Akeley said he was about to
send, and which the old people had found so convincingly terrible?
As I re-read the cramped handwriting I felt as never before that my
credulous opponents might have more on their side than I had conceded.
After all, there might be some queer and perhaps hereditarily misshapen
outcasts in those shunned hills, even though no such race of star-born
monsters as folklore claimed. And if there were, then the presence of
strange bodies in the flooded streams would not be wholly beyond
belief. Was it too presumptuous to suppose that both the old legends
and the recent reports had this much of reality behind them? But even
as I harboured these doubts I felt ashamed that so fantastic a piece of
bizarrerie as Henry Akeleys wild letter had brought them up.
In the end I answered Akeleys letter, adopting a tone of friendly
interest and soliciting further particulars. His reply came almost by
return mail; and contained, true to promise, a number of kodak views of
scenes and objects illustrating what he had to tell. Glancing at these
pictures as I took them from the envelope, I felt a curious sense of
fright and nearness to forbidden things; for in spite of the vagueness
of most of them, they had a damnably suggestive power which was
intensified by the fact of their being genuine photographsactual
optical links with what they portrayed, and the product of an
impersonal transmitting process without prejudice, fallibility, or
mendacity.
The more I looked at them, the more I saw that my serious estimate of
Akeley and his story had not been unjustified. Certainly, these
pictures carried conclusive evidence of something in the Vermont hills
which was at least vastly outside the radius of our common knowledge
and belief. The worst thing of all was the footprinta view taken where
the sun shone on a mud patch somewhere in a deserted upland. This was
no cheaply counterfeited thing, I could see at a glance; for the
sharply defined pebbles and grass-blades in the field of vision gave a
clear index of scale and left no possibility of a tricky double
exposure. I have called the thing a footprint, but claw-print would
be a better term. Even now I can scarcely describe it save to say that
it was hideously crab-like, and that there seemed to be some ambiguity
about its direction. It was not a very deep or fresh print, but seemed
to be about the size of an average mans foot. From a central pad,
pairs of saw-toothed nippers projected in opposite directionsquite
baffling as to function, if indeed the whole object were exclusively an
organ of locomotion.
Another photographevidently a time-exposure taken in deep shadowwas
of the mouth of a woodland cave, with a boulder of rounded regularity
choking the aperture. On the bare ground in front of it one could just
discern a dense network of curious tracks, and when I studied the
picture with a magnifier I felt uneasily sure that the tracks were like
the one in the other view. A third picture shewed a druid-like circle
of standing stones on the summit of a wild hill. Around the cryptic
circle the grass was very much beaten down and worn away, though I
could not detect any footprints even with the glass. The extreme
remoteness of the place was apparent from the veritable sea of
tenantless mountains which formed the background and stretched away
toward a misty horizon.
But if the most disturbing of all the views was that of the footprint,
the most curiously suggestive was that of the great black stone found
in the Round Hill woods. Akeley had photographed it on what was
evidently his study table, for I could see rows of books and a bust of
Milton in the background. The thing, as nearly as one might guess, had
faced the camera vertically with a somewhat irregularly curved surface
of one by two feet; but to say anything definite about that surface, or
about the general shape of the whole mass, almost defies the power of
language. What outlandish geometrical principles had guided its
cuttingfor artificially cut it surely wasI could not even begin to
guess; and never before had I seen anything which struck me as so
strangely and unmistakably alien to this world. Of the hieroglyphics on
the surface I could discern very few, but one or two that I did see
gave me rather a shock. Of course they might be fraudulent, for others
besides myself had read the monstrous and abhorred Necronomicon of the
mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; but it nevertheless made me shiver to
recognise certain ideographs which study had taught me to link with the
most blood-curdling and blasphemous whispers of things that had had a
kind of mad half-existence before the earth and the other inner worlds
of the solar system were made.
Of the five remaining pictures, three were of swamp and hill scenes
which seemed to bear traces of hidden and unwholesome tenancy. Another
was of a queer mark in the ground very near Akeleys house, which he
said he had photographed the morning after a night on which the dogs
had barked more violently than usual. It was very blurred, and one
could really draw no certain conclusions from it; but it did seem
fiendishly like that other mark or claw-print photographed on the
deserted upland. The final picture was of the Akeley place itself; a
trim white house of two stories and attic, about a century and a
quarter old, and with a well-kept lawn and stone-bordered path leading
up to a tastefully carved Georgian doorway. There were several huge
police dogs on the lawn, squatting near a pleasant-faced man with a
close-cropped grey beard whom I took to be Akeley himselfhis own
photographer, one might infer from the tube-connected bulb in his right
hand.
From the pictures I turned to the bulky, closely written letter itself;
and for the next three hours was immersed in a gulf of unutterable
horror. Where Akeley had given only outlines before, he now entered
into minute details; presenting long transcripts of words overheard in
the woods at night, long accounts of monstrous pinkish forms spied in
thickets at twilight on the hills, and a terrible cosmic narrative
derived from the application of profound and varied scholarship to the
endless bygone discourses of the mad self-styled spy who had killed
himself. I found myself faced by names and terms that I had heard
elsewhere in the most hideous of connexionsYuggoth, Great Cthulhu,
Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, Rlyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian,
Leng, the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, Lmur-Kathulos,
Bran, and the Magnum Innominandumand was drawn back through nameless
aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at
which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the
vaguest way. I was told of the pits of primal life, and of the streams
that had trickled down therefrom; and finally, of the tiny rivulet from
one of those streams which had become entangled with the destinies of
our own earth.
My brain whirled; and where before I had attempted to explain things
away, I now began to believe in the most abnormal and incredible
wonders. The array of vital evidence was damnably vast and
overwhelming; and the cool, scientific attitude of Akeleyan attitude
removed as far as imaginable from the demented, the fanatical, the
hysterical, or even the extravagantly speculativehad a tremendous
effect on my thought and judgment. By the time I laid the frightful
letter aside I could understand the fears he had come to entertain, and
was ready to do anything in my power to keep people away from those
wild, haunted hills. Even now, when time has dulled the impression and
made me half question my own experience and horrible doubts, there are
things in that letter of Akeleys which I would not quote, or even form
into words on paper. I am almost glad that the letter and record and
photographs are gone nowand I wish, for reasons I shall soon make
clear, that the new planet beyond Neptune had not been discovered.
With the reading of that letter my public debating about the Vermont
horror permanently ended. Arguments from opponents remained unanswered
or put off with promises, and eventually the controversy petered out
into oblivion. During late May and June I was in constant
correspondence with Akeley; though once in a while a letter would be
lost, so that we would have to retrace our ground and perform
considerable laborious copying. What we were trying to do, as a whole,
was to compare notes in matters of obscure mythological scholarship and
arrive at a clearer correlation of the Vermont horrors with the general
body of primitive world legend.
For one thing, we virtually decided that these morbidities and the
hellish Himalayan Mi-Go were one and the same order of incarnated
nightmare. There were also absorbing zological conjectures, which I
would have referred to Professor Dexter in my own college but for
Akeleys imperative command to tell no one of the matter before us. If
I seem to disobey that command now, it is only because I think that at
this stage a warning about those farther Vermont hillsand about those
Himalayan peaks which bold explorers are more and more determined to
ascendis more conducive to public safety than silence would be. One
specific thing we were leading up to was a deciphering of the
hieroglyphics on that infamous black stonea deciphering which might
well place us in possession of secrets deeper and more dizzying than
any formerly known to man.
III.
Toward the end of June the phonograph record cameshipped from
Brattleboro, since Akeley was unwilling to trust conditions on the
branch line north of there. He had begun to feel an increased sense of
espionage, aggravated by the loss of some of our letters; and said much
about the insidious deeds of certain men whom he considered tools and
agents of the hidden beings. Most of all he suspected the surly farmer
Walter Brown, who lived alone on a run-down hillside place near the
deep woods, and who was often seen loafing around corners in
Brattleboro, Bellows Falls, Newfane, and South Londonderry in the most
inexplicable and seemingly unmotivated way. Browns voice, he felt
convinced, was one of those he had overheard on a certain occasion in a
very terrible conversation; and he had once found a footprint or
claw-print near Browns house which might possess the most ominous
significance. It had been curiously near some of Browns own
footprintsfootprints that faced toward it.
So the record was shipped from Brattleboro, whither Akeley drove in his
Ford car along the lonely Vermont back roads. He confessed in an
accompanying note that he was beginning to be afraid of those roads,
and that he would not even go into Townshend for supplies now except in
broad daylight. It did not pay, he repeated again and again, to know
too much unless one were very remote from those silent and
problematical hills. He would be going to California pretty soon to
live with his son, though it was hard to leave a place where all ones
memories and ancestral feelings centred.
Before trying the record on the commercial machine which I borrowed
from the college administration building I carefully went over all the
explanatory matter in Akeleys various letters. This record, he had
said, was obtained about 1 a.m. on the first of May, 1915, near the
closed mouth of a cave where the wooded west slope of Dark Mountain
rises out of Lees Swamp. The place had always been unusually plagued
with strange voices, this being the reason he had brought the
phonograph, dictaphone, and blank in expectation of results. Former
experience had told him that May-Evethe hideous Sabbat-night of
underground European legendwould probably be more fruitful than any
other date, and he was not disappointed. It was noteworthy, though,
that he never again heard voices at that particular spot.
Unlike most of the overheard forest voices, the substance of the record
was quasi-ritualistic, and included one palpably human voice which
Akeley had never been able to place. It was not Browns, but seemed to
be that of a man of greater cultivation. The second voice, however, was
the real crux of the thingfor this was the accursed buzzing which had
no likeness to humanity despite the human words which it uttered in
good English grammar and a scholarly accent.
The recording phonograph and dictaphone had not worked uniformly well,
and had of course been at a great disadvantage because of the remote
and muffled nature of the overheard ritual; so that the actual speech
secured was very fragmentary. Akeley had given me a transcript of what
he believed the spoken words to be, and I glanced through this again as
I prepared the machine for action. The text was darkly mysterious
rather than openly horrible, though a knowledge of its origin and
manner of gathering gave it all the associative horror which any words
could well possess. I will present it here in full as I remember itand
I am fairly confident that I know it correctly by heart, not only from
reading the transcript, but from playing the record itself over and
over again. It is not a thing which one might readily forget!
(INDISTINGUISHABLE SOUNDS)
(A CULTIVATED MALE HUMAN VOICE)
. . . is the Lord of the Woods, even to . . . and the gifts of the
men of Leng . . . so from the wells of night to the gulfs of space,
and from the gulfs of space to the wells of night, ever the praises
of Great Cthulhu, of Tsathoggua, and of Him Who is not to be Named.
Ever Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods.
I! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!
(A BUZZING IMITATION OF HUMAN SPEECH)
I! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand
Young!
(HUMAN VOICE)
And it has come to pass that the Lord of the Woods, being . . .
seven and nine, down the onyx steps . . . (tri)butes to Him in the
Gulf, Azathoth, He of Whom Thou hast taught us marv(els) . . . on
the wings of night out beyond space, out beyond th . . . to That
whereof Yuggoth is the youngest child, rolling alone in black aether
at the rim. . . .
(BUZZING VOICE)
. . . go out among men and find the ways thereof, that He in the
Gulf may know. To Nyarlathotep, Mighty Messenger, must all things be
told. And He shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and
the robe that hides, and come down from the world of Seven Suns to
mock. . . .
(HUMAN VOICE)
. . . (Nyarl)athotep, Great Messenger, bringer of strange joy to
Yuggoth through the void, Father of the Million Favoured Ones,
Stalker among. . . .
(SPEECH CUT OFF BY END OF RECORD)
Such were the words for which I was to listen when I started the
phonograph. It was with a trace of genuine dread and reluctance that I
pressed the lever and heard the preliminary scratching of the sapphire
point, and I was glad that the first faint, fragmentary words were in a
human voicea mellow, educated voice which seemed vaguely Bostonian in
accent, and which was certainly not that of any native of the Vermont
hills. As I listened to the tantalisingly feeble rendering, I seemed to
find the speech identical with Akeleys carefully prepared transcript.
On it chanted, in that mellow Bostonian voice . . . I!
Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young! . . .
And then I heard the other voice. To this hour I shudder
retrospectively when I think of how it struck me, prepared though I was
by Akeleys accounts. Those to whom I have since described the record
profess to find nothing but cheap imposture or madness in it; but could
they have heard the accursed thing itself, or read the bulk of Akeleys
correspondence (especially that terrible and encyclopaedic second
letter), I know they would think differently. It is, after all, a
tremendous pity that I did not disobey Akeley and play the record for
othersa tremendous pity, too, that all of his letters were lost. To
me, with my first-hand impression of the actual sounds, and with my
knowledge of the background and surrounding circumstances, the voice
was a monstrous thing. It swiftly followed the human voice in
ritualistic response, but in my imagination it was a morbid echo
winging its way across unimaginable abysses from unimaginable outer
hells. It is more than two years now since I last ran off that
blasphemous waxen cylinder; but at this moment, and at all other
moments, I can still hear that feeble, fiendish buzzing as it reached
me for the first time.
I! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand
Young!
But though that voice is always in my ears, I have not even yet been
able to analyse it well enough for a graphic description. It was like
the drone of some loathsome, gigantic insect ponderously shaped into
the articulate speech of an alien species, and I am perfectly certain
that the organs producing it can have no resemblance to the vocal
organs of man, or indeed to those of any of the mammalia. There were
singularities in timbre, range, and overtones which placed this
phenomenon wholly outside the sphere of humanity and earth-life. Its
sudden advent that first time almost stunned me, and I heard the rest
of the record through in a sort of abstracted daze. When the longer
passage of buzzing came, there was a sharp intensification of that
feeling of blasphemous infinity which had struck me during the shorter
and earlier passage. At last the record ended abruptly, during an
unusually clear speech of the human and Bostonian voice; but I sat
stupidly staring long after the machine had automatically stopped.
I hardly need say that I gave that shocking record many another
playing, and that I made exhaustive attempts at analysis and comment in
comparing notes with Akeley. It would be both useless and disturbing to
repeat here all that we concluded; but I may hint that we agreed in
believing we had secured a clue to the source of some of the most
repulsive primordial customs in the cryptic elder religions of mankind.
It seemed plain to us, also, that there were ancient and elaborate
alliances between the hidden outer creatures and certain members of the
human race. How extensive these alliances were, and how their state
today might compare with their state in earlier ages, we had no means
of guessing; yet at best there was room for a limitless amount of
horrified speculation. There seemed to be an awful, immemorial linkage
in several definite stages betwixt man and nameless infinity. The
blasphemies which appeared on earth, it was hinted, came from the dark
planet Yuggoth, at the rim of the solar system; but this was itself
merely the populous outpost of a frightful interstellar race whose
ultimate source must lie far outside even the Einsteinian space-time
continuum or greatest known cosmos.
Meanwhile we continued to discuss the black stone and the best way of
getting it to ArkhamAkeley deeming it inadvisable to have me visit him
at the scene of his nightmare studies. For some reason or other, Akeley
was afraid to trust the thing to any ordinary or expected
transportation route. His final idea was to take it across county to
Bellows Falls and ship it on the Boston and Maine system through Keene
and Winchendon and Fitchburg, even though this would necessitate his
driving along somewhat lonelier and more forest-traversing hill roads
than the main highway to Brattleboro. He said he had noticed a man
around the express office at Brattleboro when he had sent the
phonograph record, whose actions and expression had been far from
reassuring. This man had seemed too anxious to talk with the clerks,
and had taken the train on which the record was shipped. Akeley
confessed that he had not felt strictly at ease about that record until
he heard from me of its safe receipt.
About this timethe second week in Julyanother letter of mine went
astray, as I learned through an anxious communication from Akeley.
After that he told me to address him no more at Townshend, but to send
all mail in care of the General Delivery at Brattleboro; whither he
would make frequent trips either in his car or on the motor-coach line
which had lately replaced passenger service on the lagging branch
railway. I could see that he was getting more and more anxious, for he
went into much detail about the increased barking of the dogs on
moonless nights, and about the fresh claw-prints he sometimes found in
the road and in the mud at the back of his farmyard when morning came.
Once he told about a veritable army of prints drawn up in a line facing
an equally thick and resolute line of dog-tracks, and sent a
loathsomely disturbing kodak picture to prove it. That was after a
night on which the dogs had outdone themselves in barking and howling.
On the morning of Wednesday, July 18, I received a telegram from
Bellows Falls, in which Akeley said he was expressing the black stone
over the B. & M. on Train No. 5508, leaving Bellows Falls at 12:15
p.m., standard time, and due at the North Station in Boston at 4:12
p.m. It ought, I calculated, to get up to Arkham at least by the next
noon; and accordingly I stayed in all Thursday morning to receive it.
But noon came and went without its advent, and when I telephoned down
to the express office I was informed that no shipment for me had
arrived. My next act, performed amidst a growing alarm, was to give a
long-distance call to the express agent at the Boston North Station;
and I was scarcely surprised to learn that my consignment had not
appeared. Train No. 5508 had pulled in only 35 minutes late on the day
before, but had contained no box addressed to me. The agent promised,
however, to institute a searching inquiry; and I ended the day by
sending Akeley a night-letter outlining the situation.
With commendable promptness a report came from the Boston office on the
following afternoon, the agent telephoning as soon as he learned the
facts. It seemed that the railway express clerk on No. 5508 had been
able to recall an incident which might have much bearing on my lossan
argument with a very curious-voiced man, lean, sandy, and
rustic-looking, when the train was waiting at Keene, N.H., shortly
after one oclock standard time.
The man, he said, was greatly excited about a heavy box which he
claimed to expect, but which was neither on the train nor entered on
the companys books. He had given the name of Stanley Adams, and had
had such a queerly thick droning voice, that it made the clerk
abnormally dizzy and sleepy to listen to him. The clerk could not
remember quite how the conversation had ended, but recalled starting
into a fuller awakeness when the train began to move. The Boston agent
added that this clerk was a young man of wholly unquestioned veracity
and reliability, of known antecedents and long with the company.
That evening I went to Boston to interview the clerk in person, having
obtained his name and address from the office. He was a frank,
prepossessing fellow, but I saw that he could add nothing to his
original account. Oddly, he was scarcely sure that he could even
recognise the strange inquirer again. Realising that he had no more to
tell, I returned to Arkham and sat up till morning writing letters to
Akeley, to the express company, and to the police department and
station agent in Keene. I felt that the strange-voiced man who had so
queerly affected the clerk must have a pivotal place in the ominous
business, and hoped that Keene station employees and telegraph-office
records might tell something about him and about how he happened to
make his inquiry when and where he did.
I must admit, however, that all my investigations came to nothing. The
queer-voiced man had indeed been noticed around the Keene station in
the early afternoon of July 18, and one lounger seemed to couple him
vaguely with a heavy box; but he was altogether unknown, and had not
been seen before or since. He had not visited the telegraph office or
received any message so far as could be learned, nor had any message
which might justly be considered a notice of the black stones presence
on No. 5508 come through the office for anyone. Naturally Akeley joined
with me in conducting these inquiries, and even made a personal trip to
Keene to question the people around the station; but his attitude
toward the matter was more fatalistic than mine. He seemed to find the
loss of the box a portentous and menacing fulfilment of inevitable
tendencies, and had no real hope at all of its recovery. He spoke of
the undoubted telepathic and hypnotic powers of the hill creatures and
their agents, and in one letter hinted that he did not believe the
stone was on this earth any longer. For my part, I was duly enraged,
for I had felt there was at least a chance of learning profound and
astonishing things from the old, blurred hieroglyphs. The matter would
have rankled bitterly in my mind had not Akeleys immediate subsequent
letters brought up a new phase of the whole horrible hill problem which
at once seized all my attention.
IV.
The unknown things, Akeley wrote in a script grown pitifully tremulous,
had begun to close in on him with a wholly new degree of determination.
The nocturnal barking of the dogs whenever the moon was dim or absent
was hideous now, and there had been attempts to molest him on the
lonely roads he had to traverse by day. On the second of August, while
bound for the village in his car, he had found a tree-trunk laid in his
path at a point where the highway ran through a deep patch of woods;
while the savage barking of the two great dogs he had with him told all
too well of the things which must have been lurking near. What would
have happened had the dogs not been there, he did not dare guessbut he
never went out now without at least two of his faithful and powerful
pack. Other road experiences had occurred on August 5th and 6th; a shot
grazing his car on one occasion, and the barking of the dogs telling of
unholy woodland presences on the other.
On August 15th I received a frantic letter which disturbed me greatly,
and which made me wish Akeley could put aside his lonely reticence and
call in the aid of the law. There had been frightful happenings on the
night of the 12-13th, bullets flying outside the farmhouse, and three
of the twelve great dogs being found shot dead in the morning. There
were myriads of claw-prints in the road, with the human prints of
Walter Brown among them. Akeley had started to telephone to Brattleboro
for more dogs, but the wire had gone dead before he had a chance to say
much. Later he went to Brattleboro in his car, and learned there that
linemen had found the main telephone cable neatly cut at a point where
it ran through the deserted hills north of Newfane. But he was about to
start home with four fine new dogs, and several cases of ammunition for
his big-game repeating rifle. The letter was written at the post office
in Brattleboro, and came through to me without delay.
My attitude toward the matter was by this time quickly slipping from a
scientific to an alarmedly personal one. I was afraid for Akeley in his
remote, lonely farmhouse, and half afraid for myself because of my now
definite connexion with the strange hill problem. The thing was
reaching out so. Would it suck me in and engulf me? In replying to his
letter I urged him to seek help, and hinted that I might take action
myself if he did not. I spoke of visiting Vermont in person in spite of
his wishes, and of helping him explain the situation to the proper
authorities. In return, however, I received only a telegram from
Bellows Falls which read thus:
APPRECIATE YOUR POSITION BUT CAN DO NOTHING. TAKE NO ACTION YOURSELF
FOR IT COULD ONLY HARM BOTH. WAIT FOR EXPLANATION.
HENRY AKELY
But the affair was steadily deepening. Upon my replying to the telegram
I received a shaky note from Akeley with the astonishing news that he
had not only never sent the wire, but had not received the letter from
me to which it was an obvious reply. Hasty inquiries by him at Bellows
Falls had brought out that the message was deposited by a strange
sandy-haired man with a curiously thick, droning voice, though more
than this he could not learn. The clerk shewed him the original text as
scrawled in pencil by the sender, but the handwriting was wholly
unfamiliar. It was noticeable that the signature was
misspelledA-K-E-L-Y, without the second E. Certain conjectures were
inevitable, but amidst the obvious crisis he did not stop to elaborate
upon them.
He spoke of the death of more dogs and the purchase of still others,
and of the exchange of gunfire which had become a settled feature each
moonless night. Browns prints, and the prints of at least one or two
more shod human figures, were now found regularly among the claw-prints
in the road, and at the back of the farmyard. It was, Akeley admitted,
a pretty bad business; and before long he would probably have to go to
live with his California son whether or not he could sell the old
place. But it was not easy to leave the only spot one could really
think of as home. He must try to hang on a little longer; perhaps he
could scare off the intrudersespecially if he openly gave up all
further attempts to penetrate their secrets.
Writing Akeley at once, I renewed my offers of aid, and spoke again of
visiting him and helping him convince the authorities of his dire
peril. In his reply he seemed less set against that plan than his past
attitude would have led one to predict, but said he would like to hold
off a little while longerlong enough to get his things in order and
reconcile himself to the idea of leaving an almost morbidly cherished
birthplace. People looked askance at his studies and speculations, and
it would be better to get quietly off without setting the countryside
in a turmoil and creating widespread doubts of his own sanity. He had
had enough, he admitted, but he wanted to make a dignified exit if he
could.
This letter reached me on the twenty-eighth of August, and I prepared
and mailed as encouraging a reply as I could. Apparently the
encouragement had effect, for Akeley had fewer terrors to report when
he acknowledged my note. He was not very optimistic, though, and
expressed the belief that it was only the full moon season which was
holding the creatures off. He hoped there would not be many densely
cloudy nights, and talked vaguely of boarding in Brattleboro when the
moon waned. Again I wrote him encouragingly, but on September 5th there
came a fresh communication which had obviously crossed my letter in the
mails; and to this I could not give any such hopeful response. In view
of its importance I believe I had better give it in fullas best I can
do from memory of the shaky script. It ran substantially as follows:
Monday.
Dear Wilmarth
A rather discouraging P.S. to my last. Last night was thickly
cloudythough no rainand not a bit of moonlight got through. Things
were pretty bad, and I think the end is getting near, in spite of
all we have hoped. After midnight something landed on the roof of
the house, and the dogs all rushed up to see what it was. I could
hear them snapping and tearing around, and then one managed to get
on the roof by jumping from the low ell. There was a terrible fight
up there, and I heard a frightful buzzing which Ill never forget.
And then there was a shocking smell. About the same time bullets
came through the window and nearly grazed me. I think the main line
of the hill creatures had got close to the house when the dogs
divided because of the roof business. What was up there I dont know
yet, but Im afraid the creatures are learning to steer better with
their space wings. I put out the light and used the windows for
loopholes, and raked all around the house with rifle fire aimed just
high enough not to hit the dogs. That seemed to end the business,
but in the morning I found great pools of blood in the yard, beside
pools of a green sticky stuff that had the worst odour I have ever
smelled. I climbed up on the roof and found more of the sticky stuff
there. Five of the dogs were killedIm afraid I hit one by aiming
too low, for he was shot in the back. Now I am setting the panes the
shots broke, and am going to Brattleboro for more dogs. I guess the
men at the kennels think I am crazy. Will drop another note later.
Suppose Ill be ready for moving in a week or two, though it nearly
kills me to think of it.
Hastily
AKELEY
But this was not the only letter from Akeley to cross mine. On the next
morningSeptember 6thstill another came; this time a frantic scrawl
which utterly unnerved me and put me at a loss what to say or do next.
Again I cannot do better than quote the text as faithfully as memory
will let me.
Tuesday.
Clouds didnt break, so no moon againand going into the wane
anyhow. Id have the house wired for electricity and put in a
searchlight if I didnt know theyd cut the cables as fast as they
could be mended.
I think I am going crazy. It may be that all I have ever written you
is a dream or madness. It was bad enough before, but this time it is
too much. They talked to me last nighttalked in that cursed buzzing
voice and told me things that I dare not repeat to you. I heard them
plainly over the barking of the dogs, and once when they were
drowned out a human voice helped them. Keep out of this, Wilmarthit
is worse than either you or I ever suspected. They dont mean to let
me get to California nowthey want to take me off alive, or what
theoretically and mentally amounts to alivenot only to Yuggoth, but
beyond thataway outside the galaxy and possibly beyond the last
curved rim of space. I told them I wouldnt go where they wish, or
in the terrible way they propose to take me, but Im afraid it will
be no use. My place is so far out that they may come by day as well
as by night before long. Six more dogs killed, and I felt presences
all along the wooded parts of the road when I drove to Brattleboro
today.
It was a mistake for me to try to send you that phonograph record
and black stone. Better smash the record before its too late. Will
drop you another line tomorrow if Im still here. Wish I could
arrange to get my books and things to Brattleboro and board there. I
would run off without anything if I could, but something inside my
mind holds me back. I can slip out to Brattleboro, where I ought to
be safe, but I feel just as much a prisoner there as at the house.
And I seem to know that I couldnt get much farther even if I
dropped everything and tried. It is horribledont get mixed up in
this.
YrsAKELEY
I did not sleep at all the night after receiving this terrible thing,
and was utterly baffled as to Akeleys remaining degree of sanity. The
substance of the note was wholly insane, yet the manner of
expressionin view of all that had gone beforehad a grimly potent
quality of convincingness. I made no attempt to answer it, thinking it
better to wait until Akeley might have time to reply to my latest
communication. Such a reply indeed came on the following day, though
the fresh material in it quite overshadowed any of the points brought
up by the letter it nominally answered. Here is what I recall of the
text, scrawled and blotted as it was in the course of a plainly frantic
and hurried composition.
Wednesday.
W
Yr letter came, but its no use to discuss anything any more. I am
fully resigned. Wonder that I have even enough will power left to
fight them off. Cant escape even if I were willing to give up
everything and run. Theyll get me.
Had a letter from them yesterdayR.F.D. man brought it while I was
at Brattleboro. Typed and postmarked Bellows Falls. Tells what they
want to do with meI cant repeat it. Look out for yourself, too!
Smash that record. Cloudy nights keep up, and moon waning all the
time. Wish I dared to get helpit might brace up my will powerbut
everyone who would dare to come at all would call me crazy unless
there happened to be some proof. Couldnt ask people to come for no
reason at allam all out of touch with everybody and have been for
years.
But I havent told you the worst, Wilmarth. Brace up to read this,
for it will give you a shock. I am telling the truth, though. It is
thisI have seen and touched one of the things, or part of one of
the things. God, man, but its awful! It was dead, of course. One of
the dogs had it, and I found it near the kennel this morning. I
tried to save it in the woodshed to convince people of the whole
thing, but it all evaporated in a few hours. Nothing left. You know,
all those things in the rivers were seen only on the first morning
after the flood. And heres the worst. I tried to photograph it for
you, but when I developed the film there wasnt anything visible
except the woodshed. What can the thing have been made of? I saw it
and felt it, and they all leave footprints. It was surely made of
matterbut what kind of matter? The shape cant be described. It was
a great crab with a lot of pyramided fleshy rings or knots of thick,
ropy stuff covered with feelers where a mans head would be. That
green sticky stuff is its blood or juice. And there are more of them
due on earth any minute.
Walter Brown is missinghasnt been seen loafing around any of his
usual corners in the villages hereabouts. I must have got him with
one of my shots, though the creatures always seem to try to take
their dead and wounded away.
Got into town this afternoon without any trouble, but am afraid
theyre beginning to hold off because theyre sure of me. Am writing
this in Brattleboro P.O. This may be goodbyeif it is, write my son
George Goodenough Akeley, 176 Pleasant St., San Diego, Cal., but
dont come up here. Write the boy if you dont hear from me in a
week, and watch the papers for news.
Im going to play my last two cards nowif I have the will power
left. First to try poison gas on the things (Ive got the right
chemicals and have fixed up masks for myself and the dogs) and then
if that doesnt work, tell the sheriff. They can lock me in a
madhouse if they want toitll be better than what the other
creatures would do. Perhaps I can get them to pay attention to the
prints around the housethey are faint, but I can find them every
morning. Suppose, though, police would say I faked them somehow; for
they all think Im a queer character.
Must try to have a state policeman spend a night here and see for
himselfthough it would be just like the creatures to learn about it
and hold off that night. They cut my wires whenever I try to
telephone in the nightthe linemen think it is very queer, and may
testify for me if they dont go and imagine I cut them myself. I
havent tried to keep them repaired for over a week now.
I could get some of the ignorant people to testify for me about the
reality of the horrors, but everybody laughs at what they say, and
anyway, they have shunned my place for so long that they dont know
any of the new events. You couldnt get one of those run-down
farmers to come within a mile of my house for love or money. The
mail-carrier hears what they say and jokes me about itGod! If I
only dared tell him how real it is! I think Ill try to get him to
notice the prints, but he comes in the afternoon and theyre usually
about gone by that time. If I kept one by setting a box or pan over
it, hed think surely it was a fake or joke.
Wish I hadnt gotten to be such a hermit, so folks dont drop around
as they used to. Ive never dared shew the black stone or the kodak
pictures, or play that record, to anybody but the ignorant people.
The others would say I faked the whole business and do nothing but
laugh. But I may yet try shewing the pictures. They give those
claw-prints clearly, even if the things that made them cant be
photographed. What a shame nobody else saw that thing this morning
before it went to nothing!
But I dont know as I care. After what Ive been through, a madhouse
is as good a place as any. The doctors can help me make up my mind
to get away from this house, and that is all that will save me.
Write my son George if you dont hear soon. Goodbye, smash that
record, and dont mix up in this.
YrsAKELEY
The letter frankly plunged me into the blackest of terror. I did not
know what to say in answer, but scratched off some incoherent words of
advice and encouragement and sent them by registered mail. I recall
urging Akeley to move to Brattleboro at once, and place himself under
the protection of the authorities; adding that I would come to that
town with the phonograph record and help convince the courts of his
sanity. It was time, too, I think I wrote, to alarm the people
generally against this thing in their midst. It will be observed that
at this moment of stress my own belief in all Akeley had told and
claimed was virtually complete, though I did think his failure to get a
picture of the dead monster was due not to any freak of Nature but to
some excited slip of his own.
V.
Then, apparently crossing my incoherent note and reaching me Saturday
afternoon, September 8th, came that curiously different and calming
letter neatly typed on a new machine; that strange letter of
reassurance and invitation which must have marked so prodigious a
transition in the whole nightmare drama of the lonely hills. Again I
will quote from memoryseeking for special reasons to preserve as much
of the flavour of the style as I can. It was postmarked Bellows Falls,
and the signature as well as the body of the letter was typedas is
frequent with beginners in typing. The text, though, was marvellously
accurate for a tyros work; and I concluded that Akeley must have used
a machine at some previous periodperhaps in college. To say that the
letter relieved me would be only fair, yet beneath my relief lay a
substratum of uneasiness. If Akeley had been sane in his terror, was he
now sane in his deliverance? And the sort of improved rapport
mentioned . . . what was it? The entire thing implied such a
diametrical reversal of Akeleys previous attitude! But here is the
substance of the text, carefully transcribed from a memory in which I
take some pride.
Townshend, Vermont,
Thursday, Sept. 6, 1928.
My dear Wilmarth:
It gives me great pleasure to be able to set you at rest regarding
all the silly things Ive been writing you. I say silly, although
by that I mean my frightened attitude rather than my descriptions of
certain phenomena. Those phenomena are real and important enough; my
mistake had been in establishing an anomalous attitude toward them.
I think I mentioned that my strange visitors were beginning to
communicate with me, and to attempt such communication. Last night
this exchange of speech became actual. In response to certain
signals I admitted to the house a messenger from those outsidea
fellow-human, let me hasten to say. He told me much that neither you
nor I had even begun to guess, and shewed clearly how totally we had
misjudged and misinterpreted the purpose of the Outer Ones in
maintaining their secret colony on this planet.
It seems that the evil legends about what they have offered to men,
and what they wish in connexion with the earth, are wholly the
result of an ignorant misconception of allegorical speechspeech, of
course, moulded by cultural backgrounds and thought-habits vastly
different from anything we dream of. My own conjectures, I freely
own, shot as widely past the mark as any of the guesses of
illiterate farmers and savage Indians. What I had thought morbid and
shameful and ignominious is in reality awesome and mind-expanding
and even gloriousmy previous estimate being merely a phase of mans
eternal tendency to hate and fear and shrink from the utterly
different.
Now I regret the harm I have inflicted upon these alien and
incredible beings in the course of our nightly skirmishes. If only I
had consented to talk peacefully and reasonably with them in the
first place! But they bear me no grudge, their emotions being
organised very differently from ours. It is their misfortune to have
had as their human agents in Vermont some very inferior
specimensthe late Walter Brown, for example. He prejudiced me
vastly against them. Actually, they have never knowingly harmed men,
but have often been cruelly wronged and spied upon by our species.
There is a whole secret cult of evil men (a man of your mystical
erudition will understand me when I link them with Hastur and the
Yellow Sign) devoted to the purpose of tracking them down and
injuring them on behalf of monstrous powers from other dimensions.
It is against these aggressorsnot against normal humanitythat the
drastic precautions of the Outer Ones are directed. Incidentally, I
learned that many of our lost letters were stolen not by the Outer
Ones but by the emissaries of this malign cult.
All that the Outer Ones wish of man is peace and non-molestation and
an increasing intellectual rapport. This latter is absolutely
necessary now that our inventions and devices are expanding our
knowledge and motions, and making it more and more impossible for
the Outer Ones necessary outposts to exist secretly on this planet.
The alien beings desire to know mankind more fully, and to have a
few of mankinds philosophic and scientific leaders know more about
them. With such an exchange of knowledge all perils will pass, and a
satisfactory modus vivendi be established. The very idea of any
attempt to enslave or degrade mankind is ridiculous.
As a beginning of this improved rapport, the Outer Ones have
naturally chosen mewhose knowledge of them is already so
considerableas their primary interpreter on earth. Much was told me
last nightfacts of the most stupendous and vista-opening natureand
more will be subsequently communicated to me both orally and in
writing. I shall not be called upon to make any trip outside just
yet, though I shall probably wish to do so later onemploying
special means and transcending everything which we have hitherto
been accustomed to regard as human experience. My house will be
besieged no longer. Everything has reverted to normal, and the dogs
will have no further occupation. In place of terror I have been
given a rich boon of knowledge and intellectual adventure which few
other mortals have ever shared.
The Outer Beings are perhaps the most marvellous organic things in
or beyond all space and timemembers of a cosmos-wide race of which
all other life-forms are merely degenerate variants. They are more
vegetable than animal, if these terms can be applied to the sort of
matter composing them, and have a somewhat fungoid structure; though
the presence of a chlorophyll-like substance and a very singular
nutritive system differentiate them altogether from true cormophytic
fungi. Indeed, the type is composed of a form of matter totally
alien to our part of spacewith electrons having a wholly different
vibration-rate. That is why the beings cannot be photographed on the
ordinary camera films and plates of our known universe, even though
our eyes can see them. With proper knowledge, however, any good
chemist could make a photographic emulsion which would record their
images.
The genus is unique in its ability to traverse the heatless and
airless interstellar void in full corporeal form, and some of its
variants cannot do this without mechanical aid or curious surgical
transpositions. Only a few species have the ether-resisting wings
characteristic of the Vermont variety. Those inhabiting certain
remote peaks in the Old World were brought in other ways. Their
external resemblance to animal life, and to the sort of structure we
understand as material, is a matter of parallel evolution rather
than of close kinship. Their brain-capacity exceeds that of any
other surviving life-form, although the winged types of our hill
country are by no means the most highly developed. Telepathy is
their usual means of discourse, though they have rudimentary vocal
organs which, after a slight operation (for surgery is an incredibly
expert and every-day thing among them), can roughly duplicate the
speech of such types of organism as still use speech.
Their main immediate abode is a still undiscovered and almost
lightless planet at the very edge of our solar systembeyond
Neptune, and the ninth in distance from the sun. It is, as we have
inferred, the object mystically hinted at as Yuggoth in certain
ancient and forbidden writings; and it will soon be the scene of a
strange focussing of thought upon our world in an effort to
facilitate mental rapport. I would not be surprised if astronomers
became sufficiently sensitive to these thought-currents to discover
Yuggoth when the Outer Ones wish them to do so. But Yuggoth, of
course, is only the stepping-stone. The main body of the beings
inhabits strangely organised abysses wholly beyond the utmost reach
of any human imagination. The space-time globule which we recognise
as the totality of all cosmic entity is only an atom in the genuine
infinity which is theirs. And as much of this infinity as any human
brain can hold is eventually to be opened up to me, as it has been
to not more than fifty other men since the human race has existed.
You will probably call this raving at first, Wilmarth, but in time
you will appreciate the titanic opportunity I have stumbled upon. I
want you to share as much of it as is possible, and to that end must
tell you thousands of things that wont go on paper. In the past I
have warned you not to come to see me. Now that all is safe, I take
pleasure in rescinding that warning and inviting you.
Cant you make a trip up here before your college term opens? It
would be marvellously delightful if you could. Bring along the
phonograph record and all my letters to you as consultative datawe
shall need them in piecing together the whole tremendous story. You
might bring the kodak prints, too, since I seem to have mislaid the
negatives and my own prints in all this recent excitement. But what
a wealth of facts I have to add to all this groping and tentative
materialand what a stupendous device I have to supplement my
additions!
Dont hesitateI am free from espionage now, and you will not meet
anything unnatural or disturbing. Just come along and let my car
meet you at the Brattleboro stationprepare to stay as long as you
can, and expect many an evening of discussion of things beyond all
human conjecture. Dont tell anyone about it, of coursefor this
matter must not get to the promiscuous public.
The train service to Brattleboro is not badyou can get a time-table
in Boston. Take the B. & M. to Greenfield, and then change for the
brief remainder of the way. I suggest your taking the convenient
4:10 p.m.standardfrom Boston. This gets into Greenfield at 7:35,
and at 9:19 a train leaves there which reaches Brattleboro at 10:01.
That is week-days. Let me know the date and Ill have my car on hand
at the station.
Pardon this typed letter, but my handwriting has grown shaky of
late, as you know, and I dont feel equal to long stretches of
script. I got this new Corona in Brattleboro yesterdayit seems to
work very well.
Awaiting word, and hoping to see you shortly with the phonograph
record and all my lettersand the kodak prints
I am
Yours in anticipation,
HENRY W. AKELEY.
To Albert N. Wilmarth, Esq.,
Miskatonic University,
Arkham, Mass.
The complexity of my emotions upon reading, re-reading, and pondering
over this strange and unlooked-for letter is past adequate description.
I have said that I was at once relieved and made uneasy, but this
expresses only crudely the overtones of diverse and largely
subconscious feelings which comprised both the relief and the
uneasiness. To begin with, the thing was so antipodally at variance
with the whole chain of horrors preceding itthe change of mood from
stark terror to cool complacency and even exultation was so unheralded,
lightning-like, and complete! I could scarcely believe that a single
day could so alter the psychological perspective of one who had written
that final frenzied bulletin of Wednesday, no matter what relieving
disclosures that day might have brought. At certain moments a sense of
conflicting unrealities made me wonder whether this whole distantly
reported drama of fantastic forces were not a kind of half-illusory
dream created largely within my own mind. Then I thought of the
phonograph record and gave way to still greater bewilderment.
The letter seemed so unlike anything which could have been expected! As
I analysed my impression, I saw that it consisted of two distinct
phases. First, granting that Akeley had been sane before and was still
sane, the indicated change in the situation itself was so swift and
unthinkable. And secondly, the change in Akeleys own manner, attitude,
and language was so vastly beyond the normal or the predictable. The
mans whole personality seemed to have undergone an insidious
mutationa mutation so deep that one could scarcely reconcile his two
aspects with the supposition that both represented equal sanity.
Word-choice, spellingall were subtly different. And with my academic
sensitiveness to prose style, I could trace profound divergences in his
commonest reactions and rhythm-responses. Certainly, the emotional
cataclysm or revelation which could produce so radical an overturn must
be an extreme one indeed! Yet in another way the letter seemed quite
characteristic of Akeley. The same old passion for infinitythe same
old scholarly inquisitiveness. I could not a momentor more than a
momentcredit the idea of spuriousness or malign substitution. Did not
the invitationthe willingness to have me test the truth of the letter
in personprove its genuineness?
I did not retire Saturday night, but sat up thinking of the shadows and
marvels behind the letter I had received. My mind, aching from the
quick succession of monstrous conceptions it had been forced to
confront during the last four months, worked upon this startling new
material in a cycle of doubt and acceptance which repeated most of the
steps experienced in facing the earlier wonders; till long before dawn
a burning interest and curiosity had begun to replace the original
storm of perplexity and uneasiness. Mad or sane, metamorphosed or
merely relieved, the chances were that Akeley had actually encountered
some stupendous change of perspective in his hazardous research; some
change at once diminishing his dangerreal or fanciedand opening dizzy
new vistas of cosmic and superhuman knowledge. My own zeal for the
unknown flared up to meet his, and I felt myself touched by the
contagion of the morbid barrier-breaking. To shake off the maddening
and wearying limitations of time and space and natural lawto be linked
with the vast outsideto come close to the nighted and abysmal secrets
of the infinite and the ultimatesurely such a thing was worth the risk
of ones life, soul, and sanity! And Akeley had said there was no
longer any perilhe had invited me to visit him instead of warning me
away as before. I tingled at the thought of what he might now have to
tell methere was an almost paralysing fascination in the thought of
sitting in that lonely and lately beleaguered farmhouse with a man who
had talked with actual emissaries from outer space; sitting there with
the terrible record and the pile of letters in which Akeley had
summarised his earlier conclusions.
So late Sunday morning I telegraphed Akeley that I would meet him in
Brattleboro on the following WednesdaySeptember 12thif that date were
convenient for him. In only one respect did I depart from his
suggestions, and that concerned the choice of a train. Frankly, I did
not feel like arriving in that haunted Vermont region late at night; so
instead of accepting the train he chose I telephoned the station and
devised another arrangement. By rising early and taking the 8:07 a.m.
(standard) into Boston, I could catch the 9:25 for Greenfield; arriving
there at 12:22 noon. This connected exactly with a train reaching
Brattleboro at 1:08 p.m.a much more comfortable hour than 10:01 for
meeting Akeley and riding with him into the close-packed,
secret-guarding hills.
I mentioned this choice in my telegram, and was glad to learn in the
reply which came toward evening that it had met with my prospective
hosts endorsement. His wire ran thus:
ARRANGEMENT SATISFACTORY. WILL MEET 1:08 TRAIN WEDNESDAY. DONT
FORGET RECORD AND LETTERS AND PRINTS. KEEP DESTINATION QUIET. EXPECT
GREAT REVELATIONS.
AKELEY.
Receipt of this message in direct response to one sent to Akeleyand
necessarily delivered to his house from the Townshend station either by
official messenger or by a restored telephone serviceremoved any
lingering subconscious doubts I may have had about the authorship of
the perplexing letter. My relief was markedindeed, it was greater than
I could account for at that time; since all such doubts had been rather
deeply buried. But I slept soundly and long that night, and was eagerly
busy with preparations during the ensuing two days.
VI.
On Wednesday I started as agreed, taking with me a valise full of
simple necessities and scientific data, including the hideous
phonograph record, the kodak prints, and the entire file of Akeleys
correspondence. As requested, I had told no one where I was going; for
I could see that the matter demanded utmost privacy, even allowing for
its most favourable turns. The thought of actual mental contact with
alien, outside entities was stupefying enough to my trained and
somewhat prepared mind; and this being so, what might one think of its
effect on the vast masses of uninformed laymen? I do not know whether
dread or adventurous expectancy was uppermost in me as I changed trains
in Boston and began the long westward run out of familiar regions into
those I knew less thoroughly.
WalthamConcordAyerFitchburgGardnerAthol
My train reached Greenfield seven minutes late, but the northbound
connecting express had been held. Transferring in haste, I felt a
curious breathlessness as the cars rumbled on through the early
afternoon sunlight into territories I had always read of but had never
before visited. I knew I was entering an altogether older-fashioned and
more primitive New England than the mechanised, urbanised coastal and
southern areas where all my life had been spent; an unspoiled,
ancestral New England without the foreigners and factory-smoke,
billboards and concrete roads, of the sections which modernity has
touched. There would be odd survivals of that continuous native life
whose deep roots make it the one authentic outgrowth of the
landscapethe continuous native life which keeps alive strange ancient
memories, and fertilises the soil for shadowy, marvellous, and
seldom-mentioned beliefs.
Now and then I saw the blue Connecticut River gleaming in the sun, and
after leaving Northfield we crossed it. Ahead loomed green and
cryptical hills, and when the conductor came around I learned that I
was at last in Vermont. He told me to set my watch back an hour, since
the northern hill country will have no dealings with new-fangled
daylight time schemes. As I did so it seemed to me that I was likewise
turning the calendar back a century.
The train kept close to the river, and across in New Hampshire I could
see the approaching slope of steep Wantastiquet, about which singular
old legends cluster. Then streets appeared on my left, and a green
island shewed in the stream on my right. People rose and filed to the
door, and I followed them. The car stopped, and I alighted beneath the
long train-shed of the Brattleboro station.
Looking over the line of waiting motors I hesitated a moment to see
which one might turn out to be the Akeley Ford, but my identity was
divined before I could take the initiative. And yet it was clearly not
Akeley himself who advanced to meet me with an outstretched hand and a
mellowly phrased query as to whether I was indeed Mr. Albert N.
Wilmarth of Arkham. This man bore no resemblance to the bearded,
grizzled Akeley of the snapshot; but was a younger and more urban
person, fashionably dressed, and wearing only a small, dark moustache.
His cultivated voice held an odd and almost disturbing hint of vague
familiarity, though I could not definitely place it in my memory.
As I surveyed him I heard him explaining that he was a friend of my
prospective hosts who had come down from Townshend in his stead.
Akeley, he declared, had suffered a sudden attack of some asthmatic
trouble, and did not feel equal to making a trip in the outdoor air. It
was not serious, however, and there was to be no change in plans
regarding my visit. I could not make out just how much this Mr.
Noyesas he announced himselfknew of Akeleys researches and
discoveries, though it seemed to me that his casual manner stamped him
as a comparative outsider. Remembering what a hermit Akeley had been, I
was a trifle surprised at the ready availability of such a friend; but
did not let my puzzlement deter me from entering the motor to which he
gestured me. It was not the small ancient car I had expected from
Akeleys descriptions, but a large and immaculate specimen of recent
patternapparently Noyess own, and bearing Massachusetts licence
plates with the amusing sacred codfish device of that year. My guide,
I concluded, must be a summer transient in the Townshend region.
Noyes climbed into the car beside me and started it at once. I was glad
that he did not overflow with conversation, for some peculiar
atmospheric tensity made me feel disinclined to talk. The town seemed
very attractive in the afternoon sunlight as we swept up an incline and
turned to the right into the main street. It drowsed like the older New
England cities which one remembers from boyhood, and something in the
collocation of roofs and steeples and chimneys and brick walls formed
contours touching deep viol-strings of ancestral emotion. I could tell
that I was at the gateway of a region half-bewitched through the
piling-up of unbroken time-accumulations; a region where old, strange
things have had a chance to grow and linger because they have never
been stirred up.
As we passed out of Brattleboro my sense of constraint and foreboding
increased, for a vague quality in the hill-crowded countryside with its
towering, threatening, close-pressing green and granite slopes hinted
at obscure secrets and immemorial survivals which might or might not be
hostile to mankind. For a time our course followed a broad, shallow
river which flowed down from unknown hills in the north, and I shivered
when my companion told me it was the West River. It was in this stream,
I recalled from newspaper items, that one of the morbid crab-like
beings had been seen floating after the floods.
Gradually the country around us grew wilder and more deserted. Archaic
covered bridges lingered fearsomely out of the past in pockets of the
hills, and the half-abandoned railway track paralleling the river
seemed to exhale a nebulously visible air of desolation. There were
awesome sweeps of vivid valley where great cliffs rose, New Englands
virgin granite shewing grey and austere through the verdure that scaled
the crests. There were gorges where untamed streams leaped, bearing
down toward the river the unimagined secrets of a thousand pathless
peaks. Branching away now and then were narrow, half-concealed roads
that bored their way through solid, luxuriant masses of forest among
whose primal trees whole armies of elemental spirits might well lurk.
As I saw these I thought of how Akeley had been molested by unseen
agencies on his drives along this very route, and did not wonder that
such things could be.
The quaint, sightly village of Newfane, reached in less than an hour,
was our last link with that world which man can definitely call his own
by virtue of conquest and complete occupancy. After that we cast off
all allegiance to immediate, tangible, and time-touched things, and
entered a fantastic world of hushed unreality in which the narrow,
ribbon-like road rose and fell and curved with an almost sentient and
purposeful caprice amidst the tenantless green peaks and half-deserted
valleys. Except for the sound of the motor, and the faint stir of the
few lonely farms we passed at infrequent intervals, the only thing that
reached my ears was the gurgling, insidious trickle of strange waters
from numberless hidden fountains in the shadowy woods.
The nearness and intimacy of the dwarfed, domed hills now became
veritably breath-taking. Their steepness and abruptness were even
greater than I had imagined from hearsay, and suggested nothing in
common with the prosaic objective world we know. The dense, unvisited
woods on those inaccessible slopes seemed to harbour alien and
incredible things, and I felt that the very outline of the hills
themselves held some strange and aeon-forgotten meaning, as if they
were vast hieroglyphs left by a rumoured titan race whose glories live
only in rare, deep dreams. All the legends of the past, and all the
stupefying imputations of Henry Akeleys letters and exhibits, welled
up in my memory to heighten the atmosphere of tension and growing
menace. The purpose of my visit, and the frightful abnormalities it
postulated, struck me all at once with a chill sensation that nearly
overbalanced my ardour for strange delvings.
My guide must have noticed my disturbed attitude; for as the road grew
wilder and more irregular, and our motion slower and more jolting, his
occasional pleasant comments expanded into a steadier flow of
discourse. He spoke of the beauty and weirdness of the country, and
revealed some acquaintance with the folklore studies of my prospective
host. From his polite questions it was obvious that he knew I had come
for a scientific purpose, and that I was bringing data of some
importance; but he gave no sign of appreciating the depth and awfulness
of the knowledge which Akeley had finally reached.
His manner was so cheerful, normal, and urbane that his remarks ought
to have calmed and reassured me; but oddly enough, I felt only the more
disturbed as we bumped and veered onward into the unknown wilderness of
hills and woods. At times it seemed as if he were pumping me to see
what I knew of the monstrous secrets of the place, and with every fresh
utterance that vague, teasing, baffling familiarity in his voice
increased. It was not an ordinary or healthy familiarity despite the
thoroughly wholesome and cultivated nature of the voice. I somehow
linked it with forgotten nightmares, and felt that I might go mad if I
recognised it. If any good excuse had existed, I think I would have
turned back from my visit. As it was, I could not well do soand it
occurred to me that a cool, scientific conversation with Akeley himself
after my arrival would help greatly to pull me together.
Besides, there was a strangely calming element of cosmic beauty in the
hypnotic landscape through which we climbed and plunged fantastically.
Time had lost itself in the labyrinths behind, and around us stretched
only the flowering waves of faery and the recaptured loveliness of
vanished centuriesthe hoary groves, the untainted pastures edged with
gay autumnal blossoms, and at vast intervals the small brown farmsteads
nestling amidst huge trees beneath vertical precipices of fragrant
brier and meadow-grass. Even the sunlight assumed a supernal glamour,
as if some special atmosphere or exhalation mantled the whole region. I
had seen nothing like it before save in the magic vistas that sometimes
form the backgrounds of Italian primitives. Sodoma and Leonardo
conceived such expanses, but only in the distance, and through the
vaultings of Renaissance arcades. We were now burrowing bodily through
the midst of the picture, and I seemed to find in its necromancy a
thing I had innately known or inherited, and for which I had always
been vainly searching.
Suddenly, after rounding an obtuse angle at the top of a sharp ascent,
the car came to a standstill. On my left, across a well-kept lawn which
stretched to the road and flaunted a border of whitewashed stones, rose
a white, two-and-a-half-story house of unusual size and elegance for
the region, with a congeries of contiguous or arcade-linked barns,
sheds, and windmill behind and to the right. I recognised it at once
from the snapshot I had received, and was not surprised to see the name
of Henry Akeley on the galvanised-iron mail-box near the road. For some
distance back of the house a level stretch of marshy and sparsely
wooded land extended, beyond which soared a steep, thickly forested
hillside ending in a jagged leafy crest. This latter, I knew, was the
summit of Dark Mountain, half way up which we must have climbed
already.
Alighting from the car and taking my valise, Noyes asked me to wait
while he went in and notified Akeley of my advent. He himself, he
added, had important business elsewhere, and could not stop for more
than a moment. As he briskly walked up the path to the house I climbed
out of the car myself, wishing to stretch my legs a little before
settling down to a sedentary conversation. My feeling of nervousness
and tension had risen to a maximum again now that I was on the actual
scene of the morbid beleaguering described so hauntingly in Akeleys
letters, and I honestly dreaded the coming discussions which were to
link me with such alien and forbidden worlds.
Close contact with the utterly bizarre is often more terrifying than
inspiring, and it did not cheer me to think that this very bit of dusty
road was the place where those monstrous tracks and that foetid green
ichor had been found after moonless nights of fear and death. Idly I
noticed that none of Akeleys dogs seemed to be about. Had he sold them
all as soon as the Outer Ones made peace with him? Try as I might, I
could not have the same confidence in the depth and sincerity of that
peace which appeared in Akeleys final and queerly different letter.
After all, he was a man of much simplicity and with little worldly
experience. Was there not, perhaps, some deep and sinister undercurrent
beneath the surface of the new alliance?
Led by my thoughts, my eyes turned downward to the powdery road surface
which had held such hideous testimonies. The last few days had been
dry, and tracks of all sorts cluttered the rutted, irregular highway
despite the unfrequented nature of the district. With a vague curiosity
I began to trace the outline of some of the heterogeneous impressions,
trying meanwhile to curb the flights of macabre fancy which the place
and its memories suggested. There was something menacing and
uncomfortable in the funereal stillness, in the muffled, subtle trickle
of distant brooks, and in the crowding green peaks and black-wooded
precipices that choked the narrow horizon.
And then an image shot into my consciousness which made those vague
menaces and flights of fancy seem mild and insignificant indeed. I have
said that I was scanning the miscellaneous prints in the road with a
kind of idle curiositybut all at once that curiosity was shockingly
snuffed out by a sudden and paralysing gust of active terror. For
though the dust tracks were in general confused and overlapping, and
unlikely to arrest any casual gaze, my restless vision had caught
certain details near the spot where the path to the house joined the
highway; and had recognised beyond doubt or hope the frightful
significance of those details. It was not for nothing, alas, that I had
pored for hours over the kodak views of the Outer Ones claw-prints
which Akeley had sent. Too well did I know the marks of those loathsome
nippers, and that hint of ambiguous direction which stamped the horrors
as no creatures of this planet. No chance had been left me for merciful
mistake. Here, indeed, in objective form before my own eyes, and surely
made not many hours ago, were at least three marks which stood out
blasphemously among the surprising plethora of blurred footprints
leading to and from the Akeley farmhouse. They were the hellish tracks
of the living fungi from Yuggoth.
I pulled myself together in time to stifle a scream. After all, what
more was there than I might have expected, assuming that I had really
believed Akeleys letters? He had spoken of making peace with the
things. Why, then, was it strange that some of them had visited his
house? But the terror was stronger than the reassurance. Could any man
be expected to look unmoved for the first time upon the claw-marks of
animate beings from outer depths of space? Just then I saw Noyes emerge
from the door and approach with a brisk step. I must, I reflected, keep
command of myself, for the chances were this genial friend knew nothing
of Akeleys profoundest and most stupendous probings into the
forbidden.
Akeley, Noyes hastened to inform me, was glad and ready to see me;
although his sudden attack of asthma would prevent him from being a
very competent host for a day or two. These spells hit him hard when
they came, and were always accompanied by a debilitating fever and
general weakness. He never was good for much while they lastedhad to
talk in a whisper, and was very clumsy and feeble in getting about. His
feet and ankles swelled, too, so that he had to bandage them like a
gouty old beef-eater. Today he was in rather bad shape, so that I would
have to attend very largely to my own needs; but he was none the less
eager for conversation. I would find him in the study at the left of
the front hallthe room where the blinds were shut. He had to keep the
sunlight out when he was ill, for his eyes were very sensitive.
As Noyes bade me adieu and rode off northward in his car I began to
walk slowly toward the house. The door had been left ajar for me; but
before approaching and entering I cast a searching glance around the
whole place, trying to decide what had struck me as so intangibly queer
about it. The barns and sheds looked trimly prosaic enough, and I
noticed Akeleys battered Ford in its capacious, unguarded shelter.
Then the secret of the queerness reached me. It was the total silence.
Ordinarily a farm is at least moderately murmurous from its various
kinds of livestock, but here all signs of life were missing. What of
the hens and the hogs? The cows, of which Akeley had said he possessed
several, might conceivably be out to pasture, and the dogs might
possibly have been sold; but the absence of any trace of cackling or
grunting was truly singular.
I did not pause long on the path, but resolutely entered the open house
door and closed it behind me. It had cost me a distinct psychological
effort to do so, and now that I was shut inside I had a momentary
longing for precipitate retreat. Not that the place was in the least
sinister in visual suggestion; on the contrary, I thought the graceful
late-colonial hallway very tasteful and wholesome, and admired the
evident breeding of the man who had furnished it. What made me wish to
flee was something very attenuated and indefinable. Perhaps it was a
certain odd odour which I thought I noticedthough I well knew how
common musty odours are in even the best of ancient farmhouses.
VII.
Refusing to let these cloudy qualms overmaster me, I recalled Noyess
instructions and pushed open the six-panelled, brass-latched white door
on my left. The room beyond was darkened, as I had known before; and as
I entered it I noticed that the queer odour was stronger there. There
likewise appeared to be some faint, half-imaginary rhythm or vibration
in the air. For a moment the closed blinds allowed me to see very
little, but then a kind of apologetic hacking or whispering sound drew
my attention to a great easy-chair in the farther, darker corner of the
room. Within its shadowy depths I saw the white blur of a mans face
and hands; and in a moment I had crossed to greet the figure who had
tried to speak. Dim though the light was, I perceived that this was
indeed my host. I had studied the kodak picture repeatedly, and there
could be no mistake about this firm, weather-beaten face with the
cropped, grizzled beard.
But as I looked again my recognition was mixed with sadness and
anxiety; for certainly, this face was that of a very sick man. I felt
that there must be something more than asthma behind that strained,
rigid, immobile expression and unwinking glassy stare; and realised how
terribly the strain of his frightful experiences must have told on him.
Was it not enough to break any human beingeven a younger man than this
intrepid delver into the forbidden? The strange and sudden relief, I
feared, had come too late to save him from something like a general
breakdown. There was a touch of the pitiful in the limp, lifeless way
his lean hands rested in his lap. He had on a loose dressing-gown, and
was swathed around the head and high around the neck with a vivid
yellow scarf or hood.
And then I saw that he was trying to talk in the same hacking whisper
with which he had greeted me. It was a hard whisper to catch at first,
since the grey moustache concealed all movements of the lips, and
something in its timbre disturbed me greatly; but by concentrating my
attention I could soon make out its purport surprisingly well. The
accent was by no means a rustic one, and the language was even more
polished than correspondence had led me to expect.
Mr. Wilmarth, I presume? You must pardon my not rising. I am quite
ill, as Mr. Noyes must have told you; but I could not resist having you
come just the same. You know what I wrote in my last letterthere is so
much to tell you tomorrow when I shall feel better. I cant say how
glad I am to see you in person after all our many letters. You have the
file with you, of course? And the kodak prints and record? Noyes put
your valise in the hallI suppose you saw it. For tonight I fear youll
have to wait on yourself to a great extent. Your room is upstairsthe
one over thisand youll see the bathroom door open at the head of the
staircase. Theres a meal spread for you in the dining-roomright
through this door at your rightwhich you can take whenever you feel
like it. Ill be a better host tomorrowbut just now weakness leaves me
helpless.
Make yourself at homeyou might take out the letters and pictures and
record and put them on the table here before you go upstairs with your
bag. It is here that we shall discuss themyou can see my phonograph on
that corner stand.
No, thankstheres nothing you can do for me. I know these spells of
old. Just come back for a little quiet visiting before night, and then
go to bed when you please. Ill rest right hereperhaps sleep here all
night as I often do. In the morning Ill be far better able to go into
the things we must go into. You realise, of course, the utterly
stupendous nature of the matter before us. To us, as to only a few men
on this earth, there will be opened up gulfs of time and space and
knowledge beyond anything within the conception of human science and
philosophy.
Do you know that Einstein is wrong, and that certain objects and
forces can move with a velocity greater than that of light? With proper
aid I expect to go backward and forward in time, and actually see and
feel the earth of remote past and future epochs. You cant imagine the
degree to which those beings have carried science. There is nothing
they cant do with the mind and body of living organisms. I expect to
visit other planets, and even other stars and galaxies. The first trip
will be to Yuggoth, the nearest world fully peopled by the beings. It
is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar systemunknown to
earthly astronomers as yet. But I must have written you about this. At
the proper time, you know, the beings there will direct
thought-currents toward us and cause it to be discoveredor perhaps let
one of their human allies give the scientists a hint.
There are mighty cities on Yuggothgreat tiers of terraced towers
built of black stone like the specimen I tried to send you. That came
from Yuggoth. The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the
beings need no light. They have other, subtler senses, and put no
windows in their great houses and temples. Light even hurts and hampers
and confuses them, for it does not exist at all in the black cosmos
outside time and space where they came from originally. To visit
Yuggoth would drive any weak man madyet I am going there. The black
rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious Cyclopean
bridgesthings built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before
the things came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voidsought to be enough
to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell
what he has seen.
But rememberthat dark world of fungoid gardens and windowless cities
isnt really terrible. It is only to us that it would seem so. Probably
this world seemed just as terrible to the beings when they first
explored it in the primal age. You know they were here long before the
fabulous epoch of Cthulhu was over, and remember all about sunken
Rlyeh when it was above the waters. Theyve been inside the earth,
toothere are openings which human beings know nothing ofsome of them
in these very Vermont hillsand great worlds of unknown life down
there; blue-litten Kn-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black, lightless
Nkai. Its from Nkai that frightful Tsathoggua cameyou know, the
amorphous, toad-like god-creature mentioned in the Pnakotic Manuscripts
and the Necronomicon and the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by the
Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton.
But we will talk of all this later on. It must be four or five oclock
by this time. Better bring the stuff from your bag, take a bite, and
then come back for a comfortable chat.
Very slowly I turned and began to obey my host; fetching my valise,
extracting and depositing the desired articles, and finally ascending
to the room designated as mine. With the memory of that roadside
claw-print fresh in my mind, Akeleys whispered paragraphs had affected
me queerly; and the hints of familiarity with this unknown world of
fungous lifeforbidden Yuggothmade my flesh creep more than I cared to
own. I was tremendously sorry about Akeleys illness, but had to
confess that his hoarse whisper had a hateful as well as pitiful
quality. If only he wouldnt gloat so about Yuggoth and its black
secrets!
My room proved a very pleasant and well-furnished one, devoid alike of
the musty odour and disturbing sense of vibration; and after leaving my
valise there I descended again to greet Akeley and take the lunch he
had set out for me. The dining-room was just beyond the study, and I
saw that a kitchen ell extended still farther in the same direction. On
the dining-table an ample array of sandwiches, cake, and cheese awaited
me, and a Thermos-bottle beside a cup and saucer testified that hot
coffee had not been forgotten. After a well-relished meal I poured
myself a liberal cup of coffee, but found that the culinary standard
had suffered a lapse in this one detail. My first spoonful revealed a
faintly unpleasant acrid taste, so that I did not take more. Throughout
the lunch I thought of Akeley sitting silently in the great chair in
the darkened next room. Once I went in to beg him to share the repast,
but he whispered that he could eat nothing as yet. Later on, just
before he slept, he would take some malted milkall he ought to have
that day.
After lunch I insisted on clearing the dishes away and washing them in
the kitchen sinkincidentally emptying the coffee which I had not been
able to appreciate. Then returning to the darkened study I drew up a
chair near my hosts corner and prepared for such conversation as he
might feel inclined to conduct. The letters, pictures, and record were
still on the large centre-table, but for the nonce we did not have to
draw upon them. Before long I forgot even the bizarre odour and curious
suggestions of vibration.
I have said that there were things in some of Akeleys
lettersespecially the second and most voluminous onewhich I would not
dare to quote or even form into words on paper. This hesitancy applies
with still greater force to the things I heard whispered that evening
in the darkened room among the lonely haunted hills. Of the extent of
the cosmic horrors unfolded by that raucous voice I cannot even hint.
He had known hideous things before, but what he had learned since
making his pact with the Outside Things was almost too much for sanity
to bear. Even now I absolutely refuse to believe what he implied about
the constitution of ultimate infinity, the juxtaposition of dimensions,
and the frightful position of our known cosmos of space and time in the
unending chain of linked cosmos-atoms which makes up the immediate
super-cosmos of curves, angles, and material and semi-material
electronic organisation.
Never was a sane man more dangerously close to the arcana of basic
entitynever was an organic brain nearer to utter annihilation in the
chaos that transcends form and force and symmetry. I learned whence
Cthulhu first came, and why half the great temporary stars of history
had flared forth. I guessedfrom hints which made even my informant
pause timidlythe secret behind the Magellanic Clouds and globular
nebulae, and the black truth veiled by the immemorial allegory of Tao.
The nature of the Doels was plainly revealed, and I was told the
essence (though not the source) of the Hounds of Tindalos. The legend
of Yig, Father of Serpents, remained figurative no longer, and I
started with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond
angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the
name of Azathoth. It was shocking to have the foulest nightmares of
secret myth cleared up in concrete terms whose stark, morbid
hatefulness exceeded the boldest hints of ancient and mediaeval
mystics. Ineluctably I was led to believe that the first whisperers of
these accursed tales must have had discourse with Akeleys Outer Ones,
and perhaps have visited outer cosmic realms as Akeley now proposed
visiting them.
I was told of the Black Stone and what it implied, and was glad that it
had not reached me. My guesses about those hieroglyphics had been all
too correct! And yet Akeley now seemed reconciled to the whole fiendish
system he had stumbled upon; reconciled and eager to probe farther into
the monstrous abyss. I wondered what beings he had talked with since
his last letter to me, and whether many of them had been as human as
that first emissary he had mentioned. The tension in my head grew
insufferable, and I built up all sorts of wild theories about the
queer, persistent odour and those insidious hints of vibration in the
darkened room.
Night was falling now, and as I recalled what Akeley had written me
about those earlier nights I shuddered to think there would be no moon.
Nor did I like the way the farmhouse nestled in the lee of that
colossal forested slope leading up to Dark Mountains unvisited crest.
With Akeleys permission I lighted a small oil lamp, turned it low, and
set it on a distant bookcase beside the ghostly bust of Milton; but
afterward I was sorry I had done so, for it made my hosts strained,
immobile face and listless hands look damnably abnormal and
corpse-like. He seemed half-incapable of motion, though I saw him nod
stiffly once in a while.
After what he had told, I could scarcely imagine what profounder
secrets he was saving for the morrow; but at last it developed that his
trip to Yuggoth and beyondand my own possible participation in itwas
to be the next days topic. He must have been amused by the start of
horror I gave at hearing a cosmic voyage on my part proposed, for his
head wabbled violently when I shewed my fear. Subsequently he spoke
very gently of how human beings might accomplishand several times had
accomplishedthe seemingly impossible flight across the interstellar
void. It seemed that complete human bodies did not indeed make the
trip, but that the prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and
mechanical skill of the Outer Ones had found a way to convey human
brains without their concomitant physical structure.
There was a harmless way to extract a brain, and a way to keep the
organic residue alive during its absence. The bare, compact cerebral
matter was then immersed in an occasionally replenished fluid within an
ether-tight cylinder of a metal mined in Yuggoth, certain electrodes
reaching through and connecting at will with elaborate instruments
capable of duplicating the three vital faculties of sight, hearing, and
speech. For the winged fungus-beings to carry the brain-cylinders
intact through space was an easy matter. Then, on every planet covered
by their civilisation, they would find plenty of adjustable
faculty-instruments capable of being connected with the encased brains;
so that after a little fitting these travelling intelligences could be
given a full sensory and articulate lifealbeit a bodiless and
mechanical oneat each stage of their journeying through and beyond the
space-time continuum. It was as simple as carrying a phonograph record
about and playing it wherever a phonograph of the corresponding make
exists. Of its success there could be no question. Akeley was not
afraid. Had it not been brilliantly accomplished again and again?
For the first time one of the inert, wasted hands raised itself and
pointed to a high shelf on the farther side of the room. There, in a
neat row, stood more than a dozen cylinders of a metal I had never seen
beforecylinders about a foot high and somewhat less in diameter, with
three curious sockets set in an isosceles triangle over the front
convex surface of each. One of them was linked at two of the sockets to
a pair of singular-looking machines that stood in the background. Of
their purport I did not need to be told, and I shivered as with ague.
Then I saw the hand point to a much nearer corner where some intricate
instruments with attached cords and plugs, several of them much like
the two devices on the shelf behind the cylinders, were huddled
together.
There are four kinds of instruments here, Wilmarth, whispered the
voice. Four kindsthree faculties eachmakes twelve pieces in all. You
see there are four different sorts of beings presented in those
cylinders up there. Three humans, six fungoid beings who cant navigate
space corporeally, two beings from Neptune (God! if you could see the
body this type has on its own planet!), and the rest entities from the
central caverns of an especially interesting dark star beyond the
galaxy. In the principal outpost inside Round Hill youll now and then
find more cylinders and machinescylinders of extra-cosmic brains with
different senses from any we knowallies and explorers from the
uttermost Outsideand special machines for giving them impressions and
expression in the several ways suited at once to them and to the
comprehensions of different types of listeners. Round Hill, like most
of the beings main outposts all through the various universes, is a
very cosmopolitan place! Of course, only the more common types have
been lent to me for experiment.
Heretake the three machines I point to and set them on the table.
That tall one with the two glass lenses in frontthen the box with the
vacuum tubes and sounding-boardand now the one with the metal disc on
top. Now for the cylinder with the label B-67 pasted on it. Just
stand in that Windsor chair to reach the shelf. Heavy? Never mind! Be
sure of the numberB-67. Dont bother that fresh, shiny cylinder joined
to the two testing instrumentsthe one with my name on it. Set B-67 on
the table near where youve put the machinesand see that the dial
switch on all three machines is jammed over to the extreme left.
Now connect the cord of the lens machine with the upper socket on the
cylinderthere! Join the tube machine to the lower left-hand socket,
and the disc apparatus to the outer socket. Now move all the dial
switches on the machines over to the extreme rightfirst the lens one,
then the disc one, and then the tube one. Thats right. I might as well
tell you that this is a human beingjust like any of us. Ill give you
a taste of some of the others tomorrow.
To this day I do not know why I obeyed those whispers so slavishly, or
whether I thought Akeley was mad or sane. After what had gone before, I
ought to have been prepared for anything; but this mechanical mummery
seemed so like the typical vagaries of crazed inventors and scientists
that it struck a chord of doubt which even the preceding discourse had
not excited. What the whisperer implied was beyond all human beliefyet
were not the other things still farther beyond, and less preposterous
only because of their remoteness from tangible concrete proof?
As my mind reeled amidst this chaos, I became conscious of a mixed
grating and whirring from all three machines lately linked to the
cylindera grating and whirring which soon subsided into a virtual
noiselessness. What was about to happen? Was I to hear a voice? And if
so, what proof would I have that it was not some cleverly concocted
radio device talked into by a concealed but closely watching speaker?
Even now I am unwilling to swear just what I heard, or just what
phenomenon really took place before me. But something certainly seemed
to take place.
To be brief and plain, the machine with the tubes and sound-box began
to speak, and with a point and intelligence which left no doubt that
the speaker was actually present and observing us. The voice was loud,
metallic, lifeless, and plainly mechanical in every detail of its
production. It was incapable of inflection or expressiveness, but
scraped and rattled on with a deadly precision and deliberation.
Mr. Wilmarth, it said, I hope I do not startle you. I am a human
being like yourself, though my body is now resting safely under proper
vitalising treatment inside Round Hill, about a mile and a half east of
here. I myself am here with youmy brain is in that cylinder and I see,
hear, and speak through these electronic vibrators. In a week I am
going across the void as I have been many times before, and I expect to
have the pleasure of Mr. Akeleys company. I wish I might have yours as
well; for I know you by sight and reputation, and have kept close track
of your correspondence with our friend. I am, of course, one of the men
who have become allied with the outside beings visiting our planet. I
met them first in the Himalayas, and have helped them in various ways.
In return they have given me experiences such as few men have ever had.
Do you realise what it means when I say I have been on thirty-seven
different celestial bodiesplanets, dark stars, and less definable
objectsincluding eight outside our galaxy and two outside the curved
cosmos of space and time? All this has not harmed me in the least. My
brain has been removed from my body by fissions so adroit that it would
be crude to call the operation surgery. The visiting beings have
methods which make these extractions easy and almost normaland ones
body never ages when the brain is out of it. The brain, I may add, is
virtually immortal with its mechanical faculties and a limited
nourishment supplied by occasional changes of the preserving fluid.
Altogether, I hope most heartily that you will decide to come with Mr.
Akeley and me. The visitors are eager to know men of knowledge like
yourself, and to shew them the great abysses that most of us have had
to dream about in fanciful ignorance. It may seem strange at first to
meet them, but I know you will be above minding that. I think Mr. Noyes
will go along, toothe man who doubtless brought you up here in his
car. He has been one of us for yearsI suppose you recognised his voice
as one of those on the record Mr. Akeley sent you.
At my violent start the speaker paused a moment before concluding.
So, Mr. Wilmarth, I will leave the matter to you; merely adding that a
man with your love of strangeness and folklore ought never to miss such
a chance as this. There is nothing to fear. All transitions are
painless, and there is much to enjoy in a wholly mechanised state of
sensation. When the electrodes are disconnected, one merely drops off
into a sleep of especially vivid and fantastic dreams.
And now, if you dont mind, we might adjourn our session till
tomorrow. Good nightjust turn all the switches back to the left; never
mind the exact order, though you might let the lens machine be last.
Good night, Mr. Akeleytreat our guest well! Ready now with those
switches?
That was all. I obeyed mechanically and shut off all three switches,
though dazed with doubt of everything that had occurred. My head was
still reeling as I heard Akeleys whispering voice telling me that I
might leave all the apparatus on the table just as it was. He did not
essay any comment on what had happened, and indeed no comment could
have conveyed much to my burdened faculties. I heard him telling me I
could take the lamp to use in my room, and deduced that he wished to
rest alone in the dark. It was surely time he rested, for his discourse
of the afternoon and evening had been such as to exhaust even a
vigorous man. Still dazed, I bade my host good night and went upstairs
with the lamp, although I had an excellent pocket flashlight with me.
I was glad to be out of that downstairs study with the queer odour and
vague suggestions of vibration, yet could not of course escape a
hideous sense of dread and peril and cosmic abnormality as I thought of
the place I was in and the forces I was meeting. The wild, lonely
region, the black, mysteriously forested slope towering so close behind
the house, the footprints in the road, the sick, motionless whisperer
in the dark, the hellish cylinders and machines, and above all the
invitations to strange surgery and stranger voyagingsthese things, all
so new and in such sudden succession, rushed in on me with a cumulative
force which sapped my will and almost undermined my physical strength.
To discover that my guide Noyes was the human celebrant in that
monstrous bygone Sabbat-ritual on the phonograph record was a
particular shock, though I had previously sensed a dim, repellent
familiarity in his voice. Another special shock came from my own
attitude toward my host whenever I paused to analyse it; for much as I
had instinctively liked Akeley as revealed in his correspondence, I now
found that he filled me with a distinct repulsion. His illness ought to
have excited my pity; but instead, it gave me a kind of shudder. He was
so rigid and inert and corpse-likeand that incessant whispering was so
hateful and unhuman!
It occurred to me that this whispering was different from anything else
of the kind I had ever heard; that, despite the curious motionlessness
of the speakers moustache-screened lips, it had a latent strength and
carrying-power remarkable for the wheezings of an asthmatic. I had been
able to understand the speaker when wholly across the room, and once or
twice it had seemed to me that the faint but penetrant sounds
represented not so much weakness as deliberate repressionfor what
reason I could not guess. From the first I had felt a disturbing
quality in their timbre. Now, when I tried to weigh the matter, I
thought I could trace this impression to a kind of subconscious
familiarity like that which had made Noyess voice so hazily ominous.
But when or where I had encountered the thing it hinted at, was more
than I could tell.
One thing was certainI would not spend another night here. My
scientific zeal had vanished amidst fear and loathing, and I felt
nothing now but a wish to escape from this net of morbidity and
unnatural revelation. I knew enough now. It must indeed be true that
cosmic linkages do existbut such things are surely not meant for
normal human beings to meddle with.
Blasphemous influences seemed to surround me and press chokingly upon
my senses. Sleep, I decided, would be out of the question; so I merely
extinguished the lamp and threw myself on the bed fully dressed. No
doubt it was absurd, but I kept ready for some unknown emergency;
gripping in my right hand the revolver I had brought along, and holding
the pocket flashlight in my left. Not a sound came from below, and I
could imagine how my host was sitting there with cadaverous stiffness
in the dark.
Somewhere I heard a clock ticking, and was vaguely grateful for the
normality of the sound. It reminded me, though, of another thing about
the region which disturbed methe total absence of animal life. There
were certainly no farm beasts about, and now I realised that even the
accustomed night-noises of wild living things were absent. Except for
the sinister trickle of distant unseen waters, that stillness was
anomalousinterplanetaryand I wondered what star-spawned, intangible
blight could be hanging over the region. I recalled from old legends
that dogs and other beasts had always hated the Outer Ones, and thought
of what those tracks in the road might mean.
VIII.
Do not ask me how long my unexpected lapse into slumber lasted, or how
much of what ensued was sheer dream. If I tell you that I awaked at a
certain time, and heard and saw certain things, you will merely answer
that I did not wake then; and that everything was a dream until the
moment when I rushed out of the house, stumbled to the shed where I had
seen the old Ford, and seized that ancient vehicle for a mad, aimless
race over the haunted hills which at last landed meafter hours of
jolting and winding through forest-threatened labyrinthsin a village
which turned out to be Townshend.
You will also, of course, discount everything else in my report; and
declare that all the pictures, record-sounds, cylinder-and-machine
sounds, and kindred evidences were bits of pure deception practiced on
me by the missing Henry Akeley. You will even hint that he conspired
with other eccentrics to carry out a silly and elaborate hoaxthat he
had the express shipment removed at Keene, and that he had Noyes make
that terrifying wax record. It is odd, though, that Noyes has not even
yet been identified; that he was unknown at any of the villages near
Akeleys place, though he must have been frequently in the region. I
wish I had stopped to memorise the licence-number of his caror perhaps
it is better after all that I did not. For I, despite all you can say,
and despite all I sometimes try to say to myself, know that loathsome
outside influences must be lurking there in the half-unknown hillsand
that those influences have spies and emissaries in the world of men. To
keep as far as possible from such influences and such emissaries is all
that I ask of life in future.
When my frantic story sent a sheriffs posse out to the farmhouse,
Akeley was gone without leaving a trace. His loose dressing-gown,
yellow scarf, and foot-bandages lay on the study floor near his corner
easy-chair, and it could not be decided whether any of his other
apparel had vanished with him. The dogs and livestock were indeed
missing, and there were some curious bullet-holes both on the houses
exterior and on some of the walls within; but beyond this nothing
unusual could be detected. No cylinders or machines, none of the
evidences I had brought in my valise, no queer odour or
vibration-sense, no footprints in the road, and none of the
problematical things I glimpsed at the very last.
I stayed a week in Brattleboro after my escape, making inquiries among
people of every kind who had known Akeley; and the results convince me
that the matter is no figment of dream or delusion. Akeleys queer
purchases of dogs and ammunition and chemicals, and the cutting of his
telephone wires, are matters of record; while all who knew
himincluding his son in Californiaconcede that his occasional remarks
on strange studies had a certain consistency. Solid citizens believe he
was mad, and unhesitatingly pronounce all reported evidences mere
hoaxes devised with insane cunning and perhaps abetted by eccentric
associates; but the lowlier country folk sustain his statements in
every detail. He had shewed some of these rustics his photographs and
black stone, and had played the hideous record for them; and they all
said the footprints and buzzing voice were like those described in
ancestral legends.
They said, too, that suspicious sights and sounds had been noticed
increasingly around Akeleys house after he found the black stone, and
that the place was now avoided by everybody except the mail man and
other casual, tough-minded people. Dark Mountain and Round Hill were
both notoriously haunted spots, and I could find no one who had ever
closely explored either. Occasional disappearances of natives
throughout the districts history were well attested, and these now
included the semi-vagabond Walter Brown, whom Akeleys letters had
mentioned. I even came upon one farmer who thought he had personally
glimpsed one of the queer bodies at flood-time in the swollen West
River, but his tale was too confused to be really valuable.
When I left Brattleboro I resolved never to go back to Vermont, and I
feel quite certain I shall keep my resolution. Those wild hills are
surely the outpost of a frightful cosmic raceas I doubt all the less
since reading that a new ninth planet has been glimpsed beyond Neptune,
just as those influences had said it would be glimpsed. Astronomers,
with a hideous appropriateness they little suspect, have named this
thing Pluto. I feel, beyond question, that it is nothing less than
nighted Yuggothand I shiver when I try to figure out the real reason
why its monstrous denizens wish it to be known in this way at this
especial time. I vainly try to assure myself that these daemoniac
creatures are not gradually leading up to some new policy hurtful to
the earth and its normal inhabitants.
But I have still to tell of the ending of that terrible night in the
farmhouse. As I have said, I did finally drop into a troubled doze; a
doze filled with bits of dream which involved monstrous
landscape-glimpses. Just what awaked me I cannot yet say, but that I
did indeed awake at this given point I feel very certain. My first
confused impression was of stealthily creaking floor-boards in the hall
outside my door, and of a clumsy, muffled fumbling at the latch. This,
however, ceased almost at once; so that my really clear impressions
began with the voices heard from the study below. There seemed to be
several speakers, and I judged that they were controversially engaged.
By the time I had listened a few seconds I was broad awake, for the
nature of the voices was such as to make all thought of sleep
ridiculous. The tones were curiously varied, and no one who had
listened to that accursed phonograph record could harbour any doubts
about the nature of at least two of them. Hideous though the idea was,
I knew that I was under the same roof with nameless things from abysmal
space; for those two voices were unmistakably the blasphemous buzzings
which the Outside Beings used in their communication with men. The two
were individually differentdifferent in pitch, accent, and tempobut
they were both of the same damnable general kind.
A third voice was indubitably that of a mechanical utterance-machine
connected with one of the detached brains in the cylinders. There was
as little doubt about that as about the buzzings; for the loud,
metallic, lifeless voice of the previous evening, with its
inflectionless, expressionless scraping and rattling, and its
impersonal precision and deliberation, had been utterly unforgettable.
For a time I did not pause to question whether the intelligence behind
the scraping was the identical one which had formerly talked to me; but
shortly afterward I reflected that any brain would emit vocal sounds of
the same quality if linked to the same mechanical speech-producer; the
only possible differences being in language, rhythm, speed, and
pronunciation. To complete the eldritch colloquy there were two
actually human voicesone the crude speech of an unknown and evidently
rustic man, and the other the suave Bostonian tones of my erstwhile
guide Noyes.
As I tried to catch the words which the stoutly fashioned floor so
bafflingly intercepted, I was also conscious of a great deal of
stirring and scratching and shuffling in the room below; so that I
could not escape the impression that it was full of living beingsmany
more than the few whose speech I could single out. The exact nature of
this stirring is extremely hard to describe, for very few good bases of
comparison exist. Objects seemed now and then to move across the room
like conscious entities; the sound of their footfalls having something
about it like a loose, hard-surfaced clatteringas of the contact of
ill-cordinated surfaces of horn or hard rubber. It was, to use a more
concrete but less accurate comparison, as if people with loose,
splintery wooden shoes were shambling and rattling about on the
polished board floor. On the nature and appearance of those responsible
for the sounds, I did not care to speculate.
Before long I saw that it would be impossible to distinguish any
connected discourse. Isolated wordsincluding the names of Akeley and
myselfnow and then floated up, especially when uttered by the
mechanical speech-producer; but their true significance was lost for
want of continuous context. Today I refuse to form any definite
deductions from them, and even their frightful effect on me was one of
suggestion rather than of revelation. A terrible and abnormal conclave,
I felt certain, was assembled below me; but for what shocking
deliberations I could not tell. It was curious how this unquestioned
sense of the malign and the blasphemous pervaded me despite Akeleys
assurances of the Outsiders friendliness.
With patient listening I began to distinguish clearly between voices,
even though I could not grasp much of what any of the voices said. I
seemed to catch certain typical emotions behind some of the speakers.
One of the buzzing voices, for example, held an unmistakable note of
authority; whilst the mechanical voice, notwithstanding its artificial
loudness and regularity, seemed to be in a position of subordination
and pleading. Noyess tones exuded a kind of conciliatory atmosphere.
The others I could make no attempt to interpret. I did not hear the
familiar whisper of Akeley, but well knew that such a sound could never
penetrate the solid flooring of my room.
I will try to set down some of the few disjointed words and other
sounds I caught, labelling the speakers of the words as best I know
how. It was from the speech-machine that I first picked up a few
recognisable phrases.
(THE SPEECH-MACHINE)
. . . brought it on myself . . . sent back the letters and the
record . . . end on it . . . taken in . . . seeing and hearing . . .
damn you . . . impersonal force, after all . . . fresh, shiny
cylinder . . . great God. . . .
(FIRST BUZZING VOICE)
. . . time we stopped . . . small and human . . . Akeley . . .
brain . . . saying . . .
(SECOND BUZZING VOICE)
. . . Nyarlathotep . . . Wilmarth . . . records and letters . . .
cheap imposture. . . .
(NOYES)
. . . (an unpronounceable word or name, possibly Ngah-Kthun) . . .
harmless . . . peace . . . couple of weeks . . . theatrical . . .
told you that before. . . .
(FIRST BUZZING VOICE)
. . . no reason . . . original plan . . . effects . . . Noyes can
watch . . . Round Hill . . . fresh cylinder . . . Noyess
car. . . .
(NOYES)
. . . well . . . all yours . . . down here . . . rest . . .
place. . . .
(SEVERAL VOICES AT ONCE IN INDISTINGUISHABLE SPEECH)
(MANY FOOTSTEPS, INCLUDING THE PECULIAR LOOSE STIRRING OR CLATTERING)
(A CURIOUS SORT OF FLAPPING SOUND)
(THE SOUND OF AN AUTOMOBILE STARTING AND RECEDING)
(SILENCE)
That is the substance of what my ears brought me as I lay rigid upon
that strange upstairs bed in the haunted farmhouse among the daemoniac
hillslay there fully dressed, with a revolver clenched in my right
hand and a pocket flashlight gripped in my left. I became, as I have
said, broad awake; but a kind of obscure paralysis nevertheless kept me
inert till long after the last echoes of the sounds had died away. I
heard the wooden, deliberate ticking of the ancient Connecticut clock
somewhere far below, and at last made out the irregular snoring of a
sleeper. Akeley must have dozed off after the strange session, and I
could well believe that he needed to do so.
Just what to think or what to do was more than I could decide. After
all, what had I heard beyond things which previous information might
have led me to expect? Had I not known that the nameless Outsiders were
now freely admitted to the farmhouse? No doubt Akeley had been
surprised by an unexpected visit from them. Yet something in that
fragmentary discourse had chilled me immeasurably, raised the most
grotesque and horrible doubts, and made me wish fervently that I might
wake up and prove everything a dream. I think my subconscious mind must
have caught something which my consciousness has not yet recognised.
But what of Akeley? Was he not my friend, and would he not have
protested if any harm were meant me? The peaceful snoring below seemed
to cast ridicule on all my suddenly intensified fears.
Was it possible that Akeley had been imposed upon and used as a lure to
draw me into the hills with the letters and pictures and phonograph
record? Did those beings mean to engulf us both in a common destruction
because we had come to know too much? Again I thought of the abruptness
and unnaturalness of that change in the situation which must have
occurred between Akeleys penultimate and final letters. Something, my
instinct told me, was terribly wrong. All was not as it seemed. That
acrid coffee which I refusedhad there not been an attempt by some
hidden, unknown entity to drug it? I must talk to Akeley at once, and
restore his sense of proportion. They had hypnotised him with their
promises of cosmic revelations, but now he must listen to reason. We
must get out of this before it would be too late. If he lacked the will
power to make the break for liberty, I would supply it. Or if I could
not persuade him to go, I could at least go myself. Surely he would let
me take his Ford and leave it in a garage at Brattleboro. I had noticed
it in the shedthe door being left unlocked and open now that peril was
deemed pastand I believed there was a good chance of its being ready
for instant use. That momentary dislike of Akeley which I had felt
during and after the evenings conversation was all gone now. He was in
a position much like my own, and we must stick together. Knowing his
indisposed condition, I hated to wake him at this juncture, but I knew
that I must. I could not stay in this place till morning as matters
stood.
At last I felt able to act, and stretched myself vigorously to regain
command of my muscles. Arising with a caution more impulsive than
deliberate, I found and donned my hat, took my valise, and started
downstairs with the flashlights aid. In my nervousness I kept the
revolver clutched in my right hand, being able to take care of both
valise and flashlight with my left. Why I exerted these precautions I
do not really know, since I was even then on my way to awaken the only
other occupant of the house.
As I half tiptoed down the creaking stairs to the lower hall I could
hear the sleeper more plainly, and noticed that he must be in the room
on my leftthe living-room I had not entered. On my right was the
gaping blackness of the study in which I had heard the voices. Pushing
open the unlatched door of the living-room I traced a path with the
flashlight toward the source of the snoring, and finally turned the
beams on the sleepers face. But in the next second I hastily turned
them away and commenced a cat-like retreat to the hall, my caution this
time springing from reason as well as from instinct. For the sleeper on
the couch was not Akeley at all, but my quondam guide Noyes.
Just what the real situation was, I could not guess; but common sense
told me that the safest thing was to find out as much as possible
before arousing anybody. Regaining the hall, I silently closed and
latched the living-room door after me; thereby lessening the chances of
awaking Noyes. I now cautiously entered the dark study, where I
expected to find Akeley, whether asleep or awake, in the great corner
chair which was evidently his favourite resting-place. As I advanced,
the beams of my flashlight caught the great centre-table, revealing one
of the hellish cylinders with sight and hearing machines attached, and
with a speech-machine standing close by, ready to be connected at any
moment. This, I reflected, must be the encased brain I had heard
talking during the frightful conference; and for a second I had a
perverse impulse to attach the speech-machine and see what it would
say.
It must, I thought, be conscious of my presence even now; since the
sight and hearing attachments could not fail to disclose the rays of my
flashlight and the faint creaking of the floor beneath my feet. But in
the end I did not dare meddle with the thing. I idly saw that it was
the fresh, shiny cylinder with Akeleys name on it, which I had noticed
on the shelf earlier in the evening and which my host had told me not
to bother. Looking back at that moment, I can only regret my timidity
and wish that I had boldly caused the apparatus to speak. God knows
what mysteries and horrible doubts and questions of identity it might
have cleared up! But then, it may be merciful that I let it alone.
From the table I turned my flashlight to the corner where I thought
Akeley was, but found to my perplexity that the great easy-chair was
empty of any human occupant asleep or awake. From the seat to the floor
there trailed voluminously the familiar old dressing-gown, and near it
on the floor lay the yellow scarf and the huge foot-bandages I had
thought so odd. As I hesitated, striving to conjecture where Akeley
might be, and why he had so suddenly discarded his necessary sick-room
garments, I observed that the queer odour and sense of vibration were
no longer in the room. What had been their cause? Curiously it occurred
to me that I had noticed them only in Akeleys vicinity. They had been
strongest where he sat, and wholly absent except in the room with him
or just outside the doors of that room. I paused, letting the
flashlight wander about the dark study and racking my brain for
explanations of the turn affairs had taken.
Would to heaven I had quietly left the place before allowing that light
to rest again on the vacant chair. As it turned out, I did not leave
quietly; but with a muffled shriek which must have disturbed, though it
did not quite awake, the sleeping sentinel across the hall. That
shriek, and Noyess still-unbroken snore, are the last sounds I ever
heard in that morbidity-choked farmhouse beneath the black-wooded crest
of a haunted mountainthat focus of trans-cosmic horror amidst the
lonely green hills and curse-muttering brooks of a spectral rustic
land.
It is a wonder that I did not drop flashlight, valise, and revolver in
my wild scramble, but somehow I failed to lose any of these. I actually
managed to get out of that room and that house without making any
further noise, to drag myself and my belongings safely into the old
Ford in the shed, and to set that archaic vehicle in motion toward some
unknown point of safety in the black, moonless night. The ride that
followed was a piece of delirium out of Poe or Rimbaud or the drawings
of Dor, but finally I reached Townshend. That is all. If my sanity is
still unshaken, I am lucky. Sometimes I fear what the years will bring,
especially since that new planet Pluto has been so curiously
discovered.
As I have implied, I let my flashlight return to the vacant easy-chair
after its circuit of the room; then noticing for the first time the
presence of certain objects in the seat, made inconspicuous by the
adjacent loose folds of the empty dressing-gown. These are the objects,
three in number, which the investigators did not find when they came
later on. As I said at the outset, there was nothing of actual visual
horror about them. The trouble was in what they led one to infer. Even
now I have my moments of half-doubtmoments in which I half accept the
scepticism of those who attribute my whole experience to dream and
nerves and delusion.
The three things were damnably clever constructions of their kind, and
were furnished with ingenious metallic clamps to attach them to organic
developments of which I dare not form any conjecture. I hopedevoutly
hopethat they were the waxen products of a master artist, despite what
my inmost fears tell me. Great God! That whisperer in darkness with its
morbid odour and vibrations! Sorcerer, emissary, changeling,
outsider . . . that hideous repressed buzzing . . . and all the time in
that fresh, shiny cylinder on the shelf . . . poor devil . . .
prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill. . .
For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of
microscopic resemblanceor identitywere the face and hands of Henry
Wentworth Akeley.
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