TEXT: file:///G|/rah/H.%20P.%20Lovecraft%20-%20The%20Whisperer%20in%20Darkness.txt
  The Whisperer in Darkness by H. P. LovecraftThe Whisperer in Darkness
  by H. P. Lovecraft
  Written 24 Feb-26 Sept 1930 
  Published August 1931 in Weird Tales, Vol. 18, No. 1, p. 32-73 
  I
  Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end. To 
  say that a mental shock was the cause of what I 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 
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  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 
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  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 
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  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 
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  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. 
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    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 
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    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 
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  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 
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  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 
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  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) 
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    ...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 
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  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 
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  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 
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    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 
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    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 
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    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 
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    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. 
  V
  Then, apparently crossing my incoherent note and reaching me Saturday afternoon, 
  September 8th, came that curiously different and calming letter neatly typed on 
  a new machine; that strange letter of reassurance and invitation which must have 
  marked so prodigious a transition in the whole nightmare drama of the lonely 
  hills. Again I will quote from 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 
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    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 
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    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 
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  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
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  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 
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  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 
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  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 
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  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
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  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 
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  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 
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  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 
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  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 
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  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. 
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  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 
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  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 
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  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) 
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    "...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. 
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  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 
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  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. 
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SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Call of Cthulhu/EXTRAS/Novel/The Whisperer in Darkness - H. P. Lovecraft.pdf