The Whisperer in Darkness

H. P. Lovecraft

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 inferred - that 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 night - is to ignore the
plainest facts of my final experience. Notwithstanding the deep things I saw
and heard, and the admitted vividness 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 Akeley's 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 organized 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 rumors.

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 involved - one connected with the Winooski River near Montpelier,
another attached to the West River in Windham County beyond Newfane, and
a third centering 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 membranous
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 witnesses - in every
case naive and simple backwoods folk - had 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 summarized, it hinted at a hidden race of monstrous beings which
lurked somewhere among the remoter hills - in 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 them - if 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 rumors 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 batlike 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 flying - launching 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
individuals - especially 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 travelers 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
door-yards. In the final layer of legends - the layer just preceding the decline of
superstition and the abandonment of close contact with the dreaded places -
there 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 were - explanations 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 heritage - mainly the Scotch-
Irish element of New Hampshire, and their kindred who had settled in
Vermont on Governor Wentworth's colonial grants - linked 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
bee's that tried to be like the voices of men. They knew the speech of all kinds
of men - Pennacooks, Hurons, men of the Five Nations - but 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 whispers 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 long 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 kallikanzarai 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 times - or 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 nonterrestrial origin; citing the extravagant books of Charles
Fort with their claims that voyagers from other worlds and outer space have
often visited the 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
Pendrifter's" thoughtful column which supported and applauded my skeptical
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 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 phenomena - visible
and tangible - that he speculated so grotesquely about; and for another thing,
he was amazingly willing to leave his conclusions in a tenative 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
circumstance 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 text - a
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 Reformer's 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 Davenport's
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. Elliott
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 agreeing 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 themselves - for 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 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 blank - and 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
voices" - but 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 show 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
people's attention and cause them to visit the places I have explored. It is true -
terribly true - that 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 aether 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 outside
- any 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 you - namely, 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 don't
show 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 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
stone - in a very terrible way - and with your knowledge of folklore you may
be able to supply the missing links enough to help me. I suppose you know all
about the fearful myths antedating the coming of man to the earth - the Yog-
Sothoth and Cthulhu cycles - which 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 don't wish to put you in any peril, and suppose I
ought to warn you that possession of the stone and the record won't 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
authorize me to send, for the express offices there are more to be trusted. I
might say that I live quite alone now, since I can't keep hired help any more.
They won't 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 didn't 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 madman's
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 ways - and after all, his yarn
did fit in so perplexingly well with some of the old myths - even 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 made - inferences 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 Akeley - already
prepared for such things by his folklore studies - believe his tale. As for the
latest developments - it appeared from his inability to keep hired help that
Akeley's 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 Akeley's wild letter had brought
them up.
In the end I answered Akeley's 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 photographs -
actual 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 senous 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 footprint - a 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 grassblades
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 crablike, 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 man's foot. From a central pad, pairs of saw-toothed nippers
projected in opposite directions - quite baffling as to function, if indeed the
whole object were exclusively an organ of locomotion.

Another photograph - evidently a time-exposure taken in deep shadow - was 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
pictured showed 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
cutting - for artificially cut it surely was - I 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 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 Akeley's 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 himself - his 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 connections - Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu,
Tsathoggua, YogSothoth, R'lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng,
the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L'mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the
Magnum Innominandum - and 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 rivulets 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 Akeley - an attitude removed as far as imaginable from
the demented, the fanatical, the hysterical, or even the. extravagantly
speculative - had 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 Akeley's 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 now - and 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
was also absorbing zoological conjectures, which I would have referred to
Professor Dexter in my own college but for Akeley's 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
hills - and about those Himalayan peaks which bold explorers are more and
more determined to ascend - is 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 stone - a 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 came - shipped 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.
Brown's 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 clawprint near Brown's house which might possess the most
ominous significance. It had been curiously near some of Brown's own
footprints - footprints 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 one's memories and ancestral feelings centered.

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 Akeley's various letters. This record, he had said, was obtained about
1 A.M. on the 1st of May, 1915, near the closed mouth of a cave where the
wooded west slope of Dark Mountain rises out of Lee's 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 Eve - the hideous Sabbat-night of
underground European legend - would 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 Brown's, but seemed to be that of a man of
greater cultivation. The second voice, however, was the real crux of the thing -
for 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 it - and 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 Wood, 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. Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!

(A Buzzing Imitation of Human Speech)

Ia! 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 has 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 voice - a 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 Akeley's carefully
prepared transcript. On it chanted, in that mellow Bostonian voice. . . "Ia!
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 Akeley's 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 the accursed thing itself, or
read the bulk of Akeley's 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
others - a 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.

"Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!"

But though the 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 alliance; 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 Arkham - Akeley 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 country 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 time - the second week in July - another 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 loss - an argument with a very
curious-voiced man, lean, sandy, and rustic-looking, when the train was
waiting at Keene, N. H., shortly after one o’clock 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 company’s 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 stone’s 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 fulfillment 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 Akeley’s immediately 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 guess - but he never went out now without at least two of his faithful
and powerful pack. Other road experiences had occurred on August fifth and
sixth; a shot grazing his car on one occasion, and the barking of the dogs
telling of unholy woodland presences on the other.

On August fifteenth 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 happening 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 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
connection 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
showed him the original text as scrawled in pencil by the sender, but the
handwriting was wholly unfamiliar. It was noticeable that the signature was
misspelled - A-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.
Brown’s 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 intruders - especially 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 longer - long
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 28th 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 full - as 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 cloudy - though

no rain - and 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 I’ll 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 don’t know yet, but I’m 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, besides 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 killed - I’m
afraid I hit one myself 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 I’ll 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
morning - September 6th - still 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 didn’t break, so no moon again - and going into the wane anyhow. I’d
have the house wired for electricity and put in a searchlight if I didn’t know
they’d 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 night - talked in that cursed buzzing voice and told me things that I
dare not repeat to you. I heard them plainly above the barking of the dogs, and
once when they were drowned out a human voice helped them. Keep out of
this, Wilmarth - it is worse than either you or I ever suspected. They don’t
mean to let me get to California now - they want to take me off alive, or what
theoretically and mentally amounts to alive - not only to Yuggoth, but beyond
that - away outside the galaxy and possibly beyond the last curved rim of
space. I told them I wouldn’t go where they wish, or in the terrible way they
propose to take me, but I’m 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 it’s too late. Will drop
you another line tomorrow if I’m 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 couldn’t get much farther even if I
dropped everything and tried. It is horrible - don’t get mixed up in this.

Yrs - Akeley

I did not sleep at all the night after receiving this terrible thing, and was utterly
baffled as to Akeley’s remaining degree of sanity. The substance of the note
was wholly insane, yet the manner of expression - in view of all that had gone
before - had 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 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-

Your letter came, but it’s no use to discuss anything any more. I am fully
resigned. Wonder that I have even enough will power left to fight them off.
Can’t escape even if I were willing to give up everything and run. They’ll get
me.

Had a letter from them yesterday - R.F.D. man brought it while I was at
Brattleboro. Typed and postmarked Bellows Falls. Tells what they want to do
with me - I can’t 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 help
- it might brace up my will power - but everyone who would dare to come at
all would call me crazy unless there happened to be some proof. Couldn’t ask
people to come for no reason at all - am all out of touch with everybody and
have been for years.

But I haven’t 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 this - I have seen and
touched one of the things, or part of one of the things. God, man, but it’s
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 here’s the worst. I tried to photograph it for you, but when I developed the
film there wasn’t 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 matter - but what kind of matter? The shape can’t 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 man’s 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 missing - hasn’t 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 they’re
beginning to hold off because they’re sure of me. Am writing this in
Brattleboro P. 0. This may be goodbye - if it is, write my son George
Goodenough Akeley, 176 Pleasant St., San Diego, Cal., but don’t come up
here. Write the boy if you don’t hear from me in a week, and watch the papers
for news.

I’m going to play my last two cards now - if I have the will power left. First to
try poison gas on the things (I’ve got the right chemicals and have fixed up
masks for myself and the dogs) and then if that doesn’t work, tell the sheriff.
They can lock me in a madhouse if they want to - it’ll be better than what the
other creatures would do. Perhaps I can get them to pay attention to the prints
around the house - they are faint, but I can find them every morning. Suppose,
though, police would say I faked them somehow; for they all think I’m a queer
character.

Must try to have a state policeman spend a night here and see for himself -
though 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 night - the linemen
think it is very queer, and may testify for me if they don’t go and imagine I cut
them myself. I haven’t 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 don’t know any of the new events. You
couldn’t get one of those rundown farmers to come within a mile of my house
for love or money. The mail-carrier hears what they say and jokes me about it -
God! If I only dared tell him how real it is! I think I’ll try to get him to notice
the prints, but he comes in the afternoon and they’re usually about gone by that
time. If I kept one by setting a box or pan over it, he’d think surely it was a
fake or joke.

Wish I hadn’t gotten to be such a hermit, so folks don’t drop around as they
used to. I’ve never dared show 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 showing the
pictures. They give those claw-prints clearly, even if the things that made them
can’t be photographed. What a shame nobody else saw that thing this morning
before it went to nothing!

But I don’t know as I care. After what I’ve 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 don’t hear soon. Goodbye, smash that record, and
don’t mix up in this.

Yrs - Akeley

This 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.

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 memory - seeking 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 typed - as is frequent with beginners in typing. The text, though, was
marvellously accurate for a tyro’s work; and I concluded that Akeley must
have used a machine at some previous period - perhaps 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 Akeley’s
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 I’ve 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 outside - a fellow-human, let me hasten to say. He told
me much that neither you nor I had even begun to guess, and showed 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 connection with the earth, are wholly the result of an ignorant
misconception of allegorical speech - speech, 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 glorious - my previous estimate being merely a phase of man’s 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
specimens - the 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 aggressors - not against normal humanity -
that 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 mankind’s 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
me - whose knowledge of them is already so considerable - as their primary
interpreter on earth. Much was told me last night - facts of the most stupendous
and vista-opening nature - and 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 on - employing 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 time-members 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 space - with 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 we have rudimentary vocal
organs which, after a slight operation (for surgery is an incredibly expert and
everyday 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 system - beyond 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 become 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 organized abysses wholly beyond
the utmost reach of any human imagination. The space-time globule which we
recognize 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
won’t 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.

Can’t you make a trip up here before your college term opens? It would be
marvelously delightful if you could. Bring along the phonograph record and all
my letters to you as consultative data - we 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 material - and what a stupendous device I have to supplement my
additions!

Don’t hesitate - I 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 station - prepare to stay as long as you can, and expect many an
evening of discussion of things beyond all human conjecture. Don’t tell
anyone about it, of course - for this matter must not get to the promiscuous
public.

The train service to Brattleboro is not bad - you can get a timetable 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. - standard-from Boston.
This gets into Greenfield at 7:35, and at 9:19 a train leaves there which reaches
Brattleboro at 10:01. That is weekdays. Let me know the date and I’ll 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 don’t feel equal to long stretches of script. I got this new Corona
in Brattleboro yesterday - it seems to work very well.

Awaiting word, and hoping to see you shortly with the phonograph record and
all my letters - and 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 it - the 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 Akeley’s own manner, attitude, and language was so vastly beyond
the normal or the predictable. The man’s whole personality seemed to have
undergone an insidious mutation - a mutation so deep that one could scarcely
reconcile his two aspects with the supposition that both represented equal
sanity. Word-choice, spelling - all 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 infinity - the same old scholarly
inquisitiveness. I could not a moment - or more than a moment - credit the idea
of spuriousness or malign substitution. Did not the invitation - the willingness
to have me test the truth of the letter in person - prove 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 danger - real or fancied - and 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 law - to be linked with the vast
outside - to come close to the nighted and abysmal secrets of the infinite and
the ultimate - surely such a thing was worth the risk of one’s life, soul, and
sanity! And Akeley had said there was no longer any peril - he 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 me - there 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 Wednesday - September 12th - if 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 host’s
endorsement. His wire ran thus:

ARRANGEMENT SATISFACTORY WILL MEET ONE EIGHT 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 Akeley - and

necessarily delivered to his house from the Townshend station either by
official messenger or by a restored telephone service - removed any lingering
subconscious doubts I may have had about the authorship of the perplexing
letter. My relief was marked - indeed, it was greater than I could account for at
the 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 Akeley’s 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 at
Boston and began the long westward run out of familiar regions into those I
knew less thoroughly. Waltham - Concord - Ayer - Fitchburg - Gardner -
Athol -

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, bill-boards 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 landscape - the
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 showed 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 urbane 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 host’s 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. Noyes - as he announced himself - knew of
Akeley’s 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
Akeley’s descriptions, but a large and immaculate specimen of recent pattern -
apparently Noyes’s own, and bearing Massachusetts license 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 crablike 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 England’s virgin granite showing 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 Akeley’s 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 at me
all at once with a chill sensation that nearly over-balanced 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 so - and 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 centuries -
the 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 congenes
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 mailbox
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 Akeley’s 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 Akeley’s 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 Akeley’s 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
curiosity - but 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 Akeley’s
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 that this genial
friend knew nothing of Akeley’s 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 lasted - had 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 hall - the 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 Akeley’s 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 dogs? 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 noticed - though 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 Noyes’s

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 man’s 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, his 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
being - even 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 letter - there is so much to tell you
tomorrow when I shall feel better. I can’t 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 records? Noyes put your valise in the hall - I suppose you
saw it. For tonight I fear you’ll have to wait on yourself to a great extent. Your
room is upstairs - the one over this - and you’ll see the bathroom door open at
the head of the staircase. There’s a meal spread for you in the dining-room -
right through this door at your right - which you can take whenever you feel
like it. I’ll be a better host tomorrow - but just now weakness leaves me
helpless.

"Make yourself at home - you might take out the letters and pictures and
records and put them on the table here before you go upstairs with your bag. It
is here that we shall discuss them - you can see my phonograph on that corner
stand.

"No, thanks - there’s 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. I’ll rest right here - perhaps sleep here all night as I often do. In the
morning I’ll 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
or 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 can’t imagine the degree to which those beings
have carried science. There is nothing they can’t 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 system -
unknown 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 discovered - or perhaps let one of their human
allies give the scientists a hint.

"There are mighty cities on Yuggoth - great 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 mad - yet I am going
there. The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean
bridges - things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the
beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids - ought 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 remember - that dark world of fungoid gardens and windowless cities
isn’t 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 R’lyeh when it was above the waters.
They’ve been inside the earth, too - there are openings which human beings
know nothing of - some of them in these very Vermont hills - and great worlds
of unknown life down there; blue-litten K’n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black,
lightless N’kai. It’s from N’kai that frightful Tsathoggua came - you 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 o’clock 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, Akeley’s whispered paragraphs had affected me queerly; and the hints
of familiarity with this unknown world of fungous life - forbidden Yuggoth -
made my flesh creep more than I cared to own. I was tremendously sorry about
Akeley’s illness, but had to confess that his hoarse whisper had a hateful as
well as pitiful quality. If only he wouldn’t 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 elI
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
milk - all he ought to have that day.

After lunch I insisted on clearing the dishes away and washing them in the
kitchen sink - incidentally emptying the coffee which I had not been able to
appreciate. Then returning to the darkened study I drew up a chair near my
host’s 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 Akeley’s letters - especially the
second and most voluminous one - which 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
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 refused 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 entity -
never 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 guessed -
from hints which made even my informant pause timidly - the 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 Akeley’s
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 that 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 Mountain’s unvisited crest. With Akeley’s 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 host’s strained, immobile face and listless hands look damnably abnormal
and corpselike. He seemed half-incapable of motion, though I saw him nod
stiffly once in awhile.

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
beyond - and my own possible participation in it - was to be the next day’s
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
showed my fear. Subsequently he spoke very gently of how human beings
might accomplish - and several times had accomplished - the 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 life - albeit a bodiless and mechanical one - at 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
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 stiffly
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 before - cylinders 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 kinds - three faculties each - makes twelve pieces in all. You see there
are four different sorts of beings represented in those cylinders up there. Three
humans, six fungoid beings who can’t 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 you’ll now and then find more cylinders and machines - cylinders of
extra-cosmic brains with different senses from any we know - allies and
explorers from the uttermost Outside - and 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.

"Here - take the three machines I point to and set them on the table. That tall
one with the two glass lenses in front - then the box with the vacuum tubes and
sounding-board - and 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 number - B-67. Don’t
bother that fresh, shiny cylinder joined to the two testing instruments - the one
with my name on it. Set B-67 on the table near where you’ve put the machines
- and 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
cylinder - there! 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
machine over to the extreme right - first the lens one, then the disc one, and
then the tube one. That’s right. I might as well tell you that this is a human
being - just like any of us. I’ll 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 belief - yet 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 of the machines lately linked to the cylinder - a
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 watched 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 you - my 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. Akeley’s
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 bodies - planets, dark stars, and less definable objects - including
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 normal - and one’s 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
show 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, too - the man who
doubtless brought you up here in his car. He has been one of us for years - I
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 don’t mind, we might adjourn our session till tomorrow.
Good night - just 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. Akeley -
treat 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 Akeley’s 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 footprint 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 voyagings - these
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 corpselike - and 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 speaker’s
moustache-screened lips, it had a latent strength and carrying-power
remarkable for the wheezing 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 repression - for 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 Noyes’s 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 certain - I 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 strange cosmic linkages do exist - but 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 me - the 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 anomalous - interplanetary - and 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 awakened 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 me - after hours of jolting and winding through forest-threatened
labyrinths - in 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 hoax - that 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 ever yet’ been identified; that he was unknown at
any of the villages near Akeley’s place, though he must have been frequently
in the region. I wish I had stopped to memorize the license-number of his car -
or 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 hills - and 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 sheriff’s 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 house’s 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
foot-prints 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.’ Akeley’s queer purchase of dogs
and ammunition and chemicals, and the cutting of his telephone wires, are
matters of record; while all who knew him - including his son in California -
concede 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 showed 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 Akeley’s 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 district’s history were
well attested, and these now included the semi-vagabond Walter Brown, whom
Akeley’s 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 race - as 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 Yuggoth - and 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 begin 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 different - different in
pitch, accent, and tempo - but 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 voices - one 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 beings - many 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 clattering - as of the contact of ill-
coordinated 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. Of 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 words - including the names of Akeley and myself - now
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
Akeley’s assurances of the Outsider’s 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. Noyes’s 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 N’gah-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... Noyes’s 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 hills - lay
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 Akeley’s
penultimate and final letters. Something, my instinct told me, was terribly
wrong. All was not as it seemed. That acrid coffee which I refused - had 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 in Brattleboro. I had noticed it in the shed - the door being
left unlocked and open now that peril was deemed past - and 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 evening’s 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 flashlight’s
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 left - the
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 sleeper’s face. But in the next second I
hastily turned them away and commenced a catlike 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 awakening 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 favorite 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
Akeley’s 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 Akeley’s 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 Noyes’s still-unbroken snore,
are the last sounds I ever heard in that morbidity-choked farmhouse beneath
the black-wooded crest of haunted mountain - that focus of transcosmic 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 Dore, 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-doubt - moments 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 hope - devoutly hope-
that 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
resemblance - or identity - were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth
Akeley.