Message #3517

[Zodiac]

It would be difficult to describe my sentiments upon reading this
strange document for the first time. By all ordinary rules, I ought to
have laughed more loudly at these extravagances than at the far milder
theories which had previously moved me to mirth; yet something in the
tone of the letter made me take it with paradoxical seriousness. Not
that I believed for a moment in the hidden race from the stars which my
correspondent spoke of; but that, after some grave preliminary doubts,
I grew to feel oddly sure of his sanity and sincerity, and of his
confrontation by some genuine though singular and abnormal phenomenon
which he could not explain except in this imaginative way. It could not
be as he thought it, I reflected, yet on the other hand, it could not
be otherwise than worthy of investigation. The man seemed unduly
excited and alarmed about something, but it was hard to think that all
cause was lacking. He was so specific and logical in certain ways--and
after all, his yarn did fit in so perplexingly well with some of the
old myths--even the wildest Indian legends.

That he had really overheard disturbing voices in the hills, and had
really found the black stone he spoke about, was wholly possible
despite the crazy inferences he had made--inferences probably
suggested by the man who had claimed to be a spy of the outer beings
and had later killed himself. It was easy to deduce that this man must
have been wholly insane, but that he probably had a streak of perverse
outward logic which made the naive Akeley--already prepared for such
things by his folklore studies--believe his tale. As for the latest
developments--it appeared from his inability to keep hired help that
Akeley's humbler rustic neighbours were as convinced as he that his
house was besieged by uncanny things at night. The dogs really barked,
too.

And then the matter of that phonograph record, which I could not but
believe he had obtained in the way he said. It must mean something;
whether animal noises deceptively like human speech, or the speech of
some hidden, night-haunting human being decayed to a state not much
above that of lower animals. From this my thoughts went back to the
black hieroglyphed stone, and to speculations upon what it might mean.
Then, too, what of the photographs which Akeley said he was about to
send, and which the old people had found so convincingly terrible?

As I re-read the cramped handwriting I felt as never before that my
credulous opponents might have more on their side than I had conceded.
After all, there might be some queer and perhaps hereditarily misshapen
outcasts in those shunned hills, even though no such race of star-born
monsters as folklore claimed. And if there were, then the presence of
strange bodies in the flooded streams would not be wholly beyond
belief. Was it too presumptuous to suppose that both the old legends
and the recent reports had this much of reality behind them? But even
as I harboured these doubts I felt ashamed that so fantastic a piece of
bizarrerie as Henry Akeley's wild letter had brought them up.

In the end I answered Akeley's letter, adopting a tone of friendly
interest and soliciting further particulars. His reply came almost by
return mail; and contained, true to promise, a number of Kodak views of
scenes and objects illustrating what he had to tell. Glancing at these
pictures as I took them from the envelope, I felt a curious sense of
fright and nearness to forbidden things; for in spite of the vagueness
of most of them, they had a damnably suggestive power which was
intensified by the fact of their being genuine photographs--actual
optical links with what they portrayed, and the product of an
impersonal transmitting process without prejudice, fallibility, or
mendacity.

The more I looked at them, the more I saw that my senous estimate of
Akeley and his story had not been unjustified. Certainly, these
pictures carried conclusive evidence of something in the Vermont hills
which was at least vastly outside the radius of our common knowledge
and belief. The worst thing of all was the footprint--a view taken
where the sun shone on a mud patch somewhere in a deserted upland. This
was no cheaply counterfeited thing, I could see at a glance; for the
sharply defined pebbles and grassblades in the field of vision gave a
clear index of scale and left no possibility of a tricky double
exposure. I have called the thing a "footprint," but "claw-print" would
be a better term. Even now I can scarcely describe it save to say that
it was hideously crablike, and that there seemed to be some ambiguity
about its direction. It was not a very deep or fresh print, but seemed
to be about the size of an average man's foot. From a central pad,
pairs of saw-toothed nippers projected in opposite directions--quite
baffling as to function, if indeed the whole object were exclusively an
organ of locomotion.

Another photograph--evidently a time-exposure taken in deep shadow
--was of the mouth of a woodland cave, with a boulder of, rounded
regularity choking the aperture. On the bare ground in front of, it one
could just discern a dense network of curious tracks, and when I
studied the picture with a magnifier I felt uneasily sure that the
tracks were like the one in the other view. A third pictured showed a
druid-like circle of standing stones on the summit of a wild hill.
Around the cryptic circle the grass was very much beaten down and worn
away, though I could not detect any footprints even with the glass. The
extreme remoteness of the place was apparent from the veritable sea of
tenantless: mountains which formed the background and stretched away
toward a. misty horizon.

But if the most disturbing of all the views was that of the
footprint, the' most curiously suggestive was that of the great black
stone found in the Round Hill woods. Akeley had photographed it on what
was evidently his study table, for I could see rows of books and a bust
of Milton in the background. The thing, as nearly as one might guess,
had faced the camera vertically with a somewhat irregularly curved
surface of one by two feet; but to say anything definite about that
surface, or about the general shape of the whole mass, almost defies
the power of language. What outlandish geometrical principles had
guided its cutting--for artificially cut it surely was--I could not
even begin to guess; and never before had I seen anything which struck
me as so strangely and unmistakably alien to this world. Of the
hieroglyphics on the surface I could discern very few, but one or two
that I did see gave rather a shock. Of course they might be fraudulent,
for others besides myself had read the monstrous and abhorred
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; but it nevertheless made
me shiver to recognise certain ideographs which study had taught me to
link with the most blood-curdling and blasphemous whispers of things
that had had a kind of mad half-existence before the earth and the
other inner worlds of the solar system were made.

Of the five remaining pictures, three were of swamp and hill scenes
which seemed to bear traces of hidden and unwholesome tenancy. Another
was of a queer mark in the ground very near Akeley's house, which he
said he had photographed the morning after a night on which the dogs
had barked more violently than usual. It was very blurred, and one
could really draw no certain conclusions from it; but it did seem
fiendishly like that other mark or claw-print photographed on the
deserted upland. The final picture was of the Akeley place itself; a
trim white house of two stories and attic, about a century and a
quarter old, and with a well-kept lawn and stone-bordered path leading
up to a tastefully carved Georgian doorway. There were several huge
police dogs on the lawn, squatting near a pleasant-faced man with a
close-cropped grey beard whom I took to be Akeley himself--his own
photographer, one might infer from the tube-connected bulb in his right
hand.

From the pictures I turned to the bulky, closely-written letter
itself; and for the next three hours was immersed in a gulf of
unutterable horror. Where Akeley had given only outlines before, he now
entered into minute details; presenting long transcripts of words
overheard in the woods at night, long accounts of monstrous pinkish
forms spied in thickets at twilight on the hills, and a terrible cosmic
narrative derived from the application of profound and varied
scholarship to the endless bygone discourses of the mad self-styled spy
who had killed himself. I found myself faced by names and terms that I
had heard elsewhere in the most hideous of connections--Yuggoth, Great
Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, YogSothoth, R'lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth,
Hastur, Yian, Leng, the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign,
L'mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the Magnum Innominandum--and was drawn back
through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder,
outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only
guessed in the vaguest way. I was told of the pits of primal life, and
of the streams that had trickled down therefrom; and finally, of the
tiny rivulets from one of those streams which had become entangled with
the destinies of our own earth.

My brain whirled; and where before I had attempted to explain things
away, I now began to believe in the most abnormal and incredible
wonders. The array of vital evidence was damnably vast and
overwhelming; and the cool, scientific attitude of Akeley--an attitude
removed as far as imaginable from the demented, the fanatical, the
hysterical, or even the. extravagantly speculative--had a tremendous
effect on my thought and judgment. By the time I laid the frightful
letter aside I could understand the fears he had come to entertain, and
was ready to do anything in my power to keep people away from those
wild, haunted hills. Even now, when time has dulled the impression and
made me half-question my own experience and horrible doubts, there are
things in that letter of Akeley's which I would not quote, or even form
into words on paper. I am almost glad that the letter and record and
photographs are gone now--and I wish, for reasons I shall soon make
clear, that the new planet beyond Neptune had not been discovered.

With the reading of that letter my public debating about the Vermont
horror permanently ended. Arguments from opponents remained unanswered
or put off with promises, and eventually the controversy petered out
into oblivion. During late May and June I was in constant
correspondence with Akeley; though once in a while a letter would be
lost, so that we would have to retrace our ground and perform
considerable laborious copying. What we were trying to do, as a whole,
was to compare notes in matters of obscure mythological scholarship and
arrive at a clearer correlation of the Vermont horrors with the general
body of primitive world legend.