Message #3521

[Zodiac]

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

Had a letter from them yesterday--R.F.D. man brought it while I
was at Brattleboro. Typed and postmarked Bellows Falls. Tells what they
want to do with me--I can’t repeat it. Look out for yourself, too!
Smash that record. Cloudy nights keep up, and moon waning all the time.
Wish I dared to get help--it might brace up my will power--but
everyone who would dare to come at all would call me crazy unless there
happened to be some proof. Couldn’t ask people to come for no reason at
all--am all out of touch with everybody and have been for years.

But I haven’t told you the worst, Wilmarth. Brace up to read this,
for it will give you a shock. I am telling the truth, though. It is
this--I have seen and touched one of the things, or part of one of the
things. God, man, but it’s awful! It was dead, of course. One of the
dogs had it, and I found it near the kennel this morning. I tried to
save it in the woodshed to convince people of the whole thing, but it
all evaporated in a few hours. Nothing left. You know, all those things
in the rivers were seen only on the first morning after the flood. And
here’s the worst. I tried to photograph it for you, but when I
developed the film there wasn’t anything visible except the woodshed.
What can the thing have been made of? I saw it and felt it, and they
all leave footprints. It was surely made of matter--but what kind of
matter? The shape can’t be described. It was a great crab with a lot of
pyramided fleshy rings or knots of thick, ropy stuff covered with
feelers where a man’s head would be. That green sticky stuff is its
blood or juice. And there are more of them due on earth any minute.

Walter Brown is missing--hasn’t been seen loafing around any of
his usual corners in the villages hereabouts. I must have got him with
one of my shots, though the creatures always seem to try to take their
dead and wounded away.

Got into town this afternoon without any trouble, but am afraid
they’re beginning to hold off because they’re sure of me. Am writing
this in Brattleboro P. 0. This may be goodbye--if it is, write my son
George Goodenough Akeley, 176 Pleasant St., San Diego, Cal., but don’t
come up here. Write the boy if you don’t hear from me in a week, and
watch the papers for news.

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

Must try to have a state policeman spend a night here and see for
himself--though it would be just like the creatures to learn about it
and hold off that night. They cut my wires whenever I try to telephone
in the night--the linemen think it is very queer, and may testify for
me if they don’t go and imagine I cut them myself. I haven’t tried to
keep them repaired for over a week now.

I could get some of the ignorant people to testify for me about the
reality of the horrors, but everybody laughs at what they say, and
anyway, they have shunned my place for so long that they don’t know any
of the new events. You couldn’t get one of those rundown farmers to
come within a mile of my house for love or money. The mail-carrier
hears what they say and jokes me about it--God! If I only dared tell
him how real it is! I think I’ll try to get him to notice the prints,
but he comes in the afternoon and they’re usually about gone by that
time. If I kept one by setting a box or pan over it, he’d think surely
it was a fake or joke.

Wish I hadn’t gotten to be such a hermit, so folks don’t drop
around as they used to. I’ve never dared show the black stone or the
Kodak pictures, or play that record, to anybody but the ignorant
people. The others would say I faked the whole business and do nothing
but laugh. But I may yet try showing the pictures. They give those
claw-prints clearly, even if the things that made them can’t be
photographed. What a shame nobody else saw that thing this morning
before it went to nothing!

But I don’t know as I care. After what I’ve been through, a
madhouse is as good a place as any. The doctors can help me make up my
mind to get away from this house, and that is all that will save me.


Write my son George if you don’t hear soon. Goodbye, smash that record,
and don’t mix up in this.

Yrs--Akeley

This letter frankly plunged me into the blackest of terror. I did
not know what to say in answer, but scratched off some incoherent words
of advice and encouragement and sent them by registered mail. I recall
urging Akeley to move to Brattleboro at once, and place himself under
the protection of the authorities; adding that I would come to that
town with the phonograph record and help convince the courts of his
sanity. It was time, too, I think I wrote, to alarm the people
generally against this thing in their midst. It will be observed that
at this moment of stress my own belief in all Akeley had told and
claimed was virtually complete, though I did think his failure to get a
picture of the dead monster was due not to any freak of Nature but to
some excited slip of his own.