Message #3518

[Zodiac]

For one thing, we virtually decided that these morbidities and the
hellish Himalayan Mi-Go were one and the same order of incarnated
nightmare. There was also absorbing zoological conjectures, which I
would have referred to Professor Dexter in my own college but for
Akeley's imperative command to tell no one of the matter before us. If
I seem to disobey that command now, it is only because I think that at
this stage a warning about those farther Vermont hills--and about
those Himalayan peaks which bold explorers are more and more determined
to ascend--is more conducive to public safety than silence would be.
One specific thing we were leading up to was a deciphering of the
hieroglyphics on that infamous black stone--a deciphering which might
well place us in possession of secrets deeper and more dizzying than
any formerly known to man.


III

Toward the end of June the phonograph record came--shipped from
Brattleboro, since Akeley was unwilling to trust conditions on the
branch line north of there. He had begun to feel an increased sense of
espionage, aggravated by the loss of some of our letters; and said much
about the insidious deeds of certain men whom he considered tools and
agents of the hidden beings. Most of all he suspected the surly farmer
Walter Brown, who lived alone on a run-down hillside place near the
deep woods, and who was often seen loafing around corners in
Brattleboro, Bellows Falls, Newfane, and South Londonderry in the most
inexplicable and seemingly unmotivated way. Brown's voice, he felt
convinced, was one of those he had overheard on a certain occasion in a
very terrible conversation; and he had once found a footprint or
clawprint near Brown's house which might possess the most ominous
significance. It had been curiously near some of Brown's own footprints
--footprints that faced toward it.

So the record was shipped from Brattleboro, whither Akeley drove in
his Ford car along the lonely Vermont back roads. He confessed in an
accompanying note that he was beginning to be afraid of those roads,
and that he would not even go into Townshend for supplies now except in
broad daylight. It did not pay, he repeated again and again, to know
too much unless one were very remote from those silent and
problematical hills. He would be going to California pretty soon to
live with his son, though it was hard to leave a place where all one's
memories and ancestral feelings centered.

Before trying the record on the commercial machine which I borrowed
from the college administration building I carefully went over all the
explanatory matter in Akeley's various letters. This record, he had
said, was obtained about 1 A.M. on the 1st of May, 1915, near the
closed mouth of a cave where the wooded west slope of Dark Mountain
rises out of Lee's swamp. The place had always been unusually plagued
with strange voices, this being the reason he had brought the
phonograph, dictaphone, and blank in expectation of results. Former
experience had told him that May Eve--the hideous Sabbat-night of
underground European legend--would probably be more fruitful than any
other date, and he was not disappointed. It was noteworthy, though,
that he never again heard voices at that particular spot.

Unlike most of the overheard forest voices, the substance of the
record was quasi-ritualistic, and included one palpably human voice
which Akeley had never been able to place. It was not Brown's, but
seemed to be that of a man of greater cultivation. The second voice,
however, was the real crux of the thing--for this was the accursed
buzzing which had no likeness to humanity despite the human words which
it uttered in good English grammar and a scholarly accent.

The recording phonograph and dictaphone had not worked uniformly
well, and had of course been at a great disadvantage because of the
remote and muffled nature of the overheard ritual; so that the actual
speech secured was very fragmentary. Akeley had given me a transcript
of what he believed the spoken words to be, and I glanced through this
again as I prepared the machine for action. The text was darkly
mysterious rather than openly horrible, though a knowledge of its
origin and manner of gathering gave it all the associative horror which
any words could well possess. I will present it here in full as I
remember it--and I am fairly confident that I know it correctly by
heart, not only from reading the transcript, but from playing the
record itself over and over again. It is not a thing which one might
readily forget!
(Indistinguishable Sounds)

(A Cultivated Male Human Voice)

...is the Lord of the Wood, even to...and the gifts of the men of
Leng...so from the wells of night to the gulfs of space, and from the
gulfs of space to the wells of night, ever the praises of Great
Cthulhu, of Tsathoggua, and of Him Who is not to be Named. Ever Their
praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. Ia!
Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!

(A Buzzing Imitation of Human Speech)

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

(Human Voice)

And it has come to pass that the Lord of the Woods, being...seven
and nine, down the onyx steps...(tri)butes to Him in the Gulf,
Azathoth, He of Whom Thou has taught us marv(els)...on the wings of
night out beyond space, out beyond th...to That whereof Yuggoth is the
youngest child, rolling alone in black aether at the rim...

(Buzzing Voice)

...go out among men and find the ways thereof, that He in the Gulf
may know. To Nyarlathotep, Mighty Messenger, must all things be told.
And He shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe
that hides, and come down from the world of Seven Suns to mock...

(Human Voice)

(Nyarl)athotep, Great Messenger, bringer of strange joy to Yuggoth
through the void, Father of the Million Favoured Ones, Stalker among...

(Speech Cut Off by End of Record)

Such were the words for which I was to listen when I started the
phonograph. It was with a trace of genuine dread and reluctance that I
pressed the lever and heard the preliminary scratching of the sapphire
point, and I was glad that the first faint, fragmentary words were in a
human voice--a mellow, educated voice which seemed vaguely Bostonian
in accent, and which was certainly not that of any native of the
Vermont hills. As I listened to the tantalisingly feeble rendering, I
seemed to find the speech identical with Akeley's carefully prepared
transcript. On it chanted, in that mellow Bostonian voice..."Ia!
Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!..."

And then I heard the other voice. To this hour I shudder
retrospectively when I think of how it struck me, prepared though I was
by Akeley's accounts. Those to whom I have since described the record
profess to find nothing but cheap imposture or madness in it; but could
they have the accursed thing itself, or read the bulk of Akeley's
correspondence, (especially that terrible and encyclopaedic second
letter), I know they would think differently. It is, after all, a
tremendous pity that I did not disobey Akeley and play the record for
others--a tremendous pity, too, that all of his letters were lost. To
me, with my first-hand impression of the actual sounds, and with my
knowledge of the background and surrounding circumstances, the voice
was a monstrous thing. It swiftly followed the human voice in
ritualistic response, but in my imagination it was a morbid echo
winging its way across unimaginable abysses from unimaginable outer
hells. It is more than two years now since I last ran off that
blasphemous waxen cylinder; but at this moment, and at all other
moments, I can still hear that feeble, fiendish buzzing as it reached
me for the first time.