The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack: Anthology Part 31

Masters worried about visiting the coffeehouse again. He'd never seen Toadface before, but perhaps the weirdo would start hanging out there, ready to make trouble.

He decided the best thing to do would be to start visiting a new coffeehouse for a little while. Surely another place would be able to make him a sugar-free caramel mocha latte. How hard could it be?

Later, with bedtime drawing near, he made sure all the doors and windows of his rented house were locked. After all, anybody who knew his name could look up his address in the phone book. As he double-checked the last window, which happened to be in the kitchen, he looked out to admire the ocean.

He was relatively new to Innsmouth. He'd moved to the city for the job a year ago, and he rather liked this quaint seaport community. His new place was on a hill with a nice view of the Atlantic from the rooms on the east side.

As he looked down at the rolling waters, he noticed a couple walking on the moonlit beach. The fact that they were down there at eleven-thirty didn't surprise him. People always seemed to be walking down there, no matter what the hour.

Did Toadface ever walk the beach? As he though about it, it occurred to him that he'd noticed other funny-looking folks around town. Some of them even had that same bulgy-eyed, puffy face-though most were not as extreme as Toadface's. Maybe it was some sort of disease or hereditary condition.

He went to bed and drifted off to sleep. He dreamed about following a cat through the mall-for some reason it was very important for him to catch that cat. Then the cat was gone, and he found himself speeding through murky ocean depths, teeming with purple and black eels.

He ended up in the corner of an underwater coffeehouse, where instead of mugs filled with java, the bulbous-eyed clerks gave their customers large sh.e.l.ls filled with squirming chunks of freshly minced sea-worms. And really, the business wasn't set in a house-it was in a cave, lit by ropy growths of luminous seaweed festooned upon the walls.

Everyone there was humanoid, and that was the most normal adjective anyone could apply to them. They were all naked, and covered with a variety of aquatic adornments-warts, gills, fleshy fringes, even tentacles. Some had hair, but most were bald, and a few heads were topped with finlike crests.

From out of a side corridor drifted Toadface, grinning hugely. He too was naked, revealing flapping gills in his armpits. The s.p.a.ce between his legs held a bizarre cl.u.s.ter of pulsing, elongated lumps.

"Okay," Masters said. "I'm ready to wake up. I'm willing myself to wake up right now. Right now. Right now. So how come I'm not waking up?" His words sounded impossibly clear-but then, this was a dream, wasn't it?

Toadface laughed. "You'll never wake up. Your soul is down in Innsmouth's most prestigious suburb. Lucky you!" The creature's mouth didn't move as he talked. The words seemed to be sounding in Master's mind.

"What are you telling me?" Masters said.

"I'm telling you that this is no dream." Toadface drifted closer. "The body loosens its grip on the soul during sleep. It was quite easy for me to draw your soul down to our lovely little grotto. It is a special talent of mine." His bulging eyes grew even wider with insane glee. "And you shall remain forever in this sunken realm, where the Silent Ones rest in eternal slumber."

"h.e.l.l, no!" Masters said. "I'm not staying down here! I'll just go back into my body."

"Not likely!" Toadface cried. "Your body is dead now. It has no soul. You are a ghost, a phantom, a spectre! I shall go and eat that delightful high-protein body of yours. I've decided to try out your diet." The creature winked at him. "How do you like this little adventure? Much more exciting than any movie. Of course, you made up that whole movie excuse, didn't you?" He waggled his fingers at Masters. "Time to go-dinner time!" Cackling uproariously, he turned and drifted down another corridor.

"Wait!" Masters shouted. Suddenly an eel swam near him, and he raised his hand to shield his face. He screamed with shock when he saw that his hand was composed of shimmering blue motes. He looked down-his body was now a man-shaped cl.u.s.ter of tiny lights.

He suddenly realized that Toadface was getting away. He flung himself forward through the water, and found that he could move quite fast. He zipped down the corridor and saw the flabby weirdo a short distance ahead of him. He followed him out onto the ocean floor. "Get your fat toad-a.s.s back here!" he cried. "You think you can just drag me to this underwater freakshow, laugh in my face, tell me you're going to eat my body, and then just leave me stranded at the bottom of the sea? Is that the deal, Toadface?"

The bug-eyed man stared back over his plump shoulder. "Don't call me that! Go away! I don't want you following me!"

"Oh, that's rich!" Masters said. "So now I'm bothering you? You sure didn't think this thing through!" He surged forward and leaped onto Toadface. But as soon as he touched the freak's skin, a curious sensation rippled through him. It felt like a sort of cold tingle-and it seemed to convey a message. It was like jiggling the handle of a locked restroom door: the message clearly indicated that the s.p.a.ce in question was OCCUPIED.

"Give it up!" Toadface crowed. "I'm awake, so you can't get into me!" He flapped his arms and swam away.

"Oh, is that the deal?" Master said, right behind him. "So I can get into somebody who's sleeping, right? You really are stupid, Toadface-you told me too much!"

"Maybe I did-but I'm still going to eat your body! And it's dead, so even if you follow me to it, you can't get back in!"

"Then I'll haunt you forever, you ugly b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" He continued to pursue Toadface, past slime-covered rocks and huge, pinkish-gray stone pillars etched with images of fish-headed people with tentacles for arms.

"Hey, what is this place?" Masters said.

Toadface didn't say anything, but he turned his head to shoot a frantic glance to the left. Masters followed his gaze, and saw that the freak had looked toward a ruined building made from pillars and cracked slabs of that pinkish-gray stone. It looked like some sort of temple from an old gladiator movie. Except the temples in those movies weren't covered with carvings of fish-people.

Then he remembered Toadface's words from that bizarre underwater coffeehouse: this sunken realm where the Silent Ones rest in eternal slumber.

He turned to the left and rushed toward the temple.

"Where are you going?" Toadface screamed. "Get away from there!"

"Not a chance!" Masters said. He entered the seaweed-shrouded maw that was the temple's entrance. He rushed through the curving halls of a strange stone maze, and was surprised to find that he could tell where he was going, even though he had to be in utter darkness. Apparently this new form of his didn't need light to see. It seemed to sense the contours of the world around him.

And he was able to sense something else: some being was indeed sleeping in this deep-sea maze. If what Toadface had said was correct, he could slip into a sleeping body. There might be someone or something else in that body, but so what? He wouldn't bother waking it up.

Toadface had said these Silent Ones were slumbering for eternity. Maybe he'd be able to borrow one of their bodies. It would be like driving a car with the owner sleeping in the backseat.

Suddenly he heard Toadface, not too far behind him. "You don't know what you're doing! Get out of here now! I'll find you a different body, I promise!"

Masters laughed. "Oh, yeah-like I'm going to make a deal with you!" He rounded a corner and suddenly found himself within a large chamber with a high vaulted ceiling. In the center of the chamber stood an enormous altar, upon which rested- h.e.l.l, what were those things? There were three of them, each about eighty feet long, with flat-topped, snakelike heads, fishy faces, blubbery lips, lacy gills, bloated bodies, sinewy tentacles for arms, and legs like those of a giant iguana on super-steroids.

Masters felt dizzy with an emotion that was hard to place. Exhilaration? Horror? A little of both? He used to think his old human body was too fat and unattractive. Now he was about to climb into something definitely worse-and yet infinitely better, because it was clearly powerful and quite alive. He could feel the life-force pulsing forth from it, like heatwaves from a glorious summer sun.

He looked over the selection of bodies, picked the biggest one, and slipped in with a tingle of delight.

Almost instantly he could sense the presence of another soul-the body's true inhabitant. But that soul was asleep, and as he studied that strange, cold ent.i.ty, gently prodding it, he realized that it was lost in dreams, embedded in some sort of cosmic coma, far deeper than any ocean.

"Get out of there!" Toadface shouted. "That is the hallowed body of G'hlaballa-you are perpetrating an unforgivable blasphemy!"

Masters willed the tentacles of his new body to move-he pictured them rising from the slab, swirling and flexing.

And they did. Some force or spell was compelling the body's true soul to sleep, but apparently that power only held sway over the soul-not the body. The driver was indeed asleep in the backseat. But the motor was still running.

He wrapped one of the tentacles tightly around Toadface.

"No! Stop!" the flabby pest squealed. "What are you going to do?"

Masters rose off of the slab. He battered at the wall with his free tentacle, pounding until he'd created a hole large enough to serve as an exit. He stepped out of the temple and began to walk across the ocean floor.

He walked aimlessly, carrying Toadface like a child toting a filthy old doll. He lost track of time as he admired the beautiful plants and interesting creatures of this strange realm. He felt remarkably at peace now that he had such a strong body. There was nothing in the world that could hurt him.

Eventually he found himself near the sh.o.r.e. He could discern the full moon through the water. He surfaced and saw that he was near an empty stretch of beach.

He looked at Toadface. The soggy, ugly thing wasn't moving. The little man still had a heartbeat, though, so he was simply unconscious. Perhaps Masters had been squeezing too tightly.

He thought about what to do with Toadface. The vicious freak had some kind of strange power over souls, and knew how to separate them from the flesh.

Masters could easily kill Toadface, but he didn't want that rotten b.a.s.t.a.r.d's soul to part from its corpse and start following him around like a rabid puppy.

He looked around and saw, in the distance, the lights of Innsmouth. He knew of a location on the outskirts of the city where he'd find the answer to his problem. He began walking.

Thirty minutes later, he stood at the edge of a warehouse construction site. He stuck Toadface's body into the thick, wet concrete of the building's foundation. He pushed the flabby form down deep, until it could go no further.

And there he left it-body and soul.

Suddenly he felt extremely hungry.

From where he stood, he could see both Innsmouth and the open sea. Both contained plenty of protein. But what sort of meat did he want?

Finally he began to trek back toward the sea. He didn't want to bother with little bites. That would only frustrate him. He needed real food and plenty of it. He felt utterly starved. Ravenous.

Hungry enough to eat a whale.

THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS (Part 1).

by H. P. Lovecraft.

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 extent to which I shared the information and speculations of Henry Akeley, the things I saw and heard, and the admitted vividness of the impression produced on me by these things, I cannot prove even now whether I was right or wrong in my hideous inference. For after all, 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, Ma.s.sachusetts, and an enthusiastic amateur student of New England folklore. Shortly after the flood, amidst the varied reports of hardship, suffering, and organised relief which filled the press, there appeared certain odd stories of things found floating in some of the swollen rivers; so that many of my friends embarked on curious discussions and appealed to me to shed what light I could on the subject. I felt flattered at having my folklore study taken so seriously, and did what I could to belittle the wild, vague tales which seemed so clearly an outgrowth of old rustic superst.i.tions. It amused me to find several persons of education who insisted that some stratum of obscure, distorted fact might underlie the rumours.

The tales thus brought to my notice came mostly through newspaper cuttings; though one yarn had an oral source and was repeated to a friend of mine in a letter from his mother in Hardwick, Vermont. The type of thing described was essentially the same in all cases, though there seemed to be three separate instances involved-one connected with the Winooski River near Montpelier, another attached to the West River in Windham County beyond Newfane, and a third centring in the Pa.s.sumpsic in Caledonia County above Lyndonville. Of course many of the stray items mentioned other instances, but on a.n.a.lysis they all seemed to boil down to these three. In each case country folk reported seeing one or more very bizarre and disturbing objects in the surging waters that poured down from the unfrequented hills, and there was a widespread tendency to connect these sights with a primitive, half-forgotten cycle of whispered legend which old people resurrected for the occasion.

What people thought they saw were organic shapes not quite like any they had ever seen before. Naturally, there were many human bodies washed along by the streams in that tragic period; but those who described these strange shapes felt quite sure that they were not human, despite some superficial resemblances in size and general outline. Nor, said the witnesses, could they have been any kind of animal known to Vermont. They were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with mult.i.tudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be. It was really remarkable how closely the reports from different sources tended to coincide; though the wonder was lessened by the fact that the old legends, shared at one time throughout the hill country, furnished a morbidly vivid picture which might well have coloured the imaginations of all the witnesses concerned. It was my conclusion that such witnesses-in every case naive and simple backwoods folk-had glimpsed the battered and bloated bodies of human beings or farm animals in the whirling currents; and had allowed the half-remembered folklore to invest these pitiful objects with fantastic attributes.

The ancient folklore, while cloudy, evasive, and largely forgotten by the present generation, was of a highly singular character, and obviously reflected the influence of still earlier Indian tales. I knew it well, though I had never been in Vermont, through the exceedingly rare monograph of Eli Davenport, which embraces material orally obtained prior to 1839 among the oldest people of the state. This material, moreover, closely coincided with tales which I had personally heard from elderly rustics in the mountains of New Hampshire. Briefly summarised, 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 gra.s.s 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 rumours had several points in common; averring that the creatures were a sort of huge, light-red crab with many pairs of legs and with two great bat-like wings in the middle of the back. They sometimes walked on all their legs, and sometimes on the hindmost pair only, using the others to convey large objects of indeterminate nature. On one occasion they were spied in considerable numbers, a detachment of them wading along a shallow woodland watercourse three abreast in evidently disciplined formation. Once a specimen was seen 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 trespa.s.sing on their privacy; there were later accounts of their curiosity respecting men, and of their attempts to establish secret outposts in the human world. There were tales of the queer claw-prints seen around farmhouse windows in the morning, and of occasional disappearances in regions outside the obviously haunted areas. Tales, besides, of buzzing voices in imitation of human speech which made surprising offers to lone travellers on roads and cart-paths in the deep woods, and of children frightened out of their wits by things seen or heard where the primal forest pressed close upon their dooryards. In the final layer of legends-the layer just preceding the decline of superst.i.tion and the abandonment of close contact with the dreaded places-there are shocked references to hermits and remote farmers who at some period of life appeared to have undergone a repellent mental change, and who were shunned and whispered about as mortals who had sold themselves to the strange beings. In one of the northeastern counties it seemed to be a fashion about 1800 to accuse eccentric and unpopular recluses of being allies or representatives of the abhorred things.

As to what the things were-explanations naturally varied. The common name applied to them was "those ones," or "the old ones," though other terms had a local and transient use. Perhaps the bulk of the Puritan settlers set them down bluntly as familiars of the devil, and made them a basis of awed theological speculation. Those with Celtic legendry in their heritage-mainly the Scotch-Irish element of New Hampshire, and their kindred who had settled in Vermont on Governor Wentworth's colonial grants-linked them vaguely with the malign fairies and "little people" of the bogs and raths, and protected themselves with sc.r.a.ps 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 whisperers admitted that there was not much to fear from those things now that they were used to the presence of houses and settlements, and now that human beings let their chosen territory severely alone.

All this I had known from my reading, and from certain folk-tales picked up in New Hampshire; hence when the flood-time rumours began to appear, I could easily guess what imaginative background had evolved them. I took great pains to explain this to my friends, and was correspondingly amused when several contentious souls continued to insist on a possible element of truth in the reports. Such persons tried to point out that the early legends had a significant persistence and uniformity, and that the virtually unexplored nature of the Vermont hills made it unwise to be dogmatic about what might or might not dwell among them; nor could they be silenced by my a.s.surance that all the myths were of a well-known pattern common to most of mankind and determined by early phases of imaginative experience which always produced the same type of delusion.

It was of no use to demonstrate to such opponents that the Vermont myths differed but little in essence from those universal legends of natural personification which filled the ancient world with fauns and dryads and satyrs, suggested the kallikanzari of modern Greece, and gave to wild Wales and Ireland their dark hints of strange, small, and terrible hidden races of troglodytes and burrowers. No use, either, to point out the even more startlingly similar belief of the Nepalese hill tribes in the dreaded Mi-Go or "Abominable Snow-Men" who lurk hideously amidst the ice and rock pinnacles of the Himalayan summits. When I brought up this evidence, my opponents turned it against me by claiming that it must imply some actual historicity for the ancient tales; that it must argue the real existence of some queer elder earth-race, driven to hiding after the advent and dominance of mankind, which might very conceivably have survived in reduced numbers to relatively recent times-or even to the present.

The more I laughed at such theories, the more these stubborn friends a.s.severated them; adding that even without the heritage of legend the recent reports were too clear, consistent, detailed, and sanely prosaic in manner of telling, to be completely ignored. Two or three fanatical extremists went so far as to hint at possible meanings in the ancient Indian tales which gave the hidden beings a non-terrestrial origin; citing the extravagant books of Charles Fort with their claims that voyagers from other worlds and outer s.p.a.ce have often visited earth. Most of my foes, however, were merely romanticists who insisted on trying to transfer to real life the fantastic lore of lurking "little people" made popular by the magnificent horror-fiction of Arthur Machen.

II.

As was only natural under the circ.u.mstances, 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 sceptical conclusions. By the spring of 1928 I was almost a well-known figure in Vermont, notwithstanding the fact that I had never set foot in the state. Then came the challenging letters from Henry Akeley which impressed me so profoundly, and which took me for the first and last time to that fascinating realm of crowded green precipices and muttering forest streams.

Most of what I now know of Henry Wentworth Akeley was gathered by correspondence with his neighbours, and with his only son in California, after my experience in his lonely farmhouse. He was, I discovered, the last representative on his home soil of a long, locally distinguished line of jurists, administrators, and gentlemen-agriculturists. In him, however, the family mentally had veered away from practical affairs to pure scholarship; so that he had been a notable student of mathematics, astronomy, biology, anthropology, and folklore at the University of Vermont. I had never previously heard of him, and he did not give many autobiographical details in his communications; but from the first I saw he was a man of character, education, and intelligence, albeit a recluse with very little worldly sophistication.

Despite the incredible nature of what he claimed, I could not help at once taking Akeley more seriously than I had taken any of the other challengers of my views. For one thing, he was really close to the actual phenomena-visible and tangible-that he speculated so grotesquely about; and for another thing, he was amazingly willing to leave his conclusions in a tentative state like a true man of science. He had no personal preferences to advance, and was always guided by what he took to be solid evidence. Of course I began by considering him mistaken, but gave him credit for being intelligently mistaken; and at no time did I emulate some of his friends in attributing his ideas, and his fear of the lonely green hills, to insanity. I could see that there was a great deal to the man, and knew that what he reported must surely come from strange circ.u.mstances deserving investigation, however little it might have to do with the fantastic causes he a.s.signed. Later on I received from him certain material proofs which placed the matter on a somewhat different and bewilderingly bizarre basis.

I cannot do better than transcribe in full, so far as is possible, the long letter in which Akeley introduced himself, and which formed such an important landmark in my own intellectual history. It is no longer in my possession, but my memory holds almost every word of its portentous message; and again I affirm my confidence in the sanity of the man who wrote it. Here is the text-a text which reached me in the cramped, archaic-looking scrawl of one who had obviously not mingled much with the world during his sedate, scholarly life.

R.F.D. #2,.

Townshend, Windham Co., Vermont.

May 5, 1928 Albert N. Wilmarth, Esq., 118 Saltonstall St., Arkham, Ma.s.s., 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 att.i.tude generally taken by educated persons both in and out of Vermont, and was my own att.i.tude 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, Quatref.a.ges, Murray, Osborn, Keith, Boule, G. Elliot Smith, and so on. It is no news to me that tales of hidden races are as old as all mankind. I have seen the reprints of letters from you, and those arguing with you, in the Rutland Herald, and guess I know about where your controversy stands at the present time.

What I desire to say now is, that I am afraid your adversaries are nearer right than yourself, even though all reason seems to be on your side. They are nearer right than they realise 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 not feel justified in believing as they do. I would be wholly on your side.

You can see that I am having a hard time getting to the point, probably because I really dread getting to the point; but the upshot of the matter is that I have certain evidence that monstrous things do indeed live in the woods on the high hills which n.o.body visits. I have not seen any of the things floating in the rivers, as reported, but I have seen things like them under circ.u.mstances 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 there-with a dictaphone attachment and wax blank-and I shall try to arrange to have you hear the record I got. I have run it on the machine for some of the old people up here, and one of the voices had nearly scared them paralysed by reason of its likeness to a certain voice (that buzzing voice in the woods which Davenport mentions) that their grandmothers have told about and mimicked for them. I know what most people think of a man who tells about "hearing voices"-but before you draw conclusions just listen to this record and ask some of the older backwoods people what they think of it. If you can account for it normally, very well; but there must be something behind it. Ex nihilo nihil fit, you know.

Now my object in writing you is not to start an argument, but to give you information which I think a man of your tastes will find deeply interesting. This is private. Publicly I am on your side, for certain things shew me that it does not do for people to know too much about these matters. My own studies are now wholly private, and I would not think of saying anything to attract 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 s.p.a.ce and fly through it on clumsy, powerful wings which have a way of resisting the ether but which are too poor at steering to be of much use in helping them about on earth. I will tell you about this later if you do not dismiss me at once as a madman. They come here to get metals from mines that go deep under the hills, and I think I know where they come from. They will not hurt us if we let them alone, but no one can say what will happen if we get too curious about them. Of course a good army of men could wipe out their mining colony. That is what they are afraid of. But if that happened, more would come from 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 shew much) by express if you are willing. I say "try" because I think those creatures have a way of tampering with things around here. There is a sullen, furtive fellow named Brown, on a farm near the village, who I think is their spy. Little by little they are trying to cut me off from our world because I know too much about their world.

They have the most amazing way of finding out what I do. You may not even get this letter. I think I shall have to leave this part of the country and go to live with my son in San Diego, Cal., if things get any worse, but it is not easy to give up the place you were born in, and where your family has lived for six generations. Also, I would hardly dare sell this house to anybody now that the creatures have taken notice of it. They seem to be trying to get the black stone back and destroy the phonograph record, but I shall not let them if I can help it. My great police dogs always hold them back, for there are very few here as yet, and they are clumsy in getting about. As I have said, their wings are not much use for short flights on earth. I am on the very brink of deciphering that stone-in a very terrible way-and with your knowledge of folklore you may be able to supply missing links enough to help me. I suppose you know all about the fearful myths antedating the coming of man to the earth-the Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu cycles-which are hinted at in the Necronomicon. I had access to a copy of that once, and hear that you have one in your college library under lock and key.

To conclude, Mr. Wilmarth, I think that with our respective studies we can be very useful to each other. I don't wish to put you in any peril, and suppose I ought to warn you that possession of the stone and the record won't be very safe; but I think you will find any risks worth running for the sake of knowledge. I will drive down to Newfane or Brattleboro to send whatever you authorise me to send, for the express offices there are more to be trusted. I might say that I live quite alone now, since I 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 doc.u.ment 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?