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THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS

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Zodiac
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« on: February 27, 2007, 01:07:39 am »

VI

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 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 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 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.


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