Terrors

by Richard A. Lupoff

Elizabeth Akeley telephoned Marc Feinman from the Noyes house in Dark Mountain. A message had been transmitted surreptitiously by agent Whiteside in time for monitoring arrangements to be made. Neither Akeley nor Feinman was aware of the monitoring system.

  Excerpts from the call follow:

  August 9, 1979 (Outgoing)

  Voice #2 (Sara Feinman): Yes.

  Voice #5 (Elizabeth Akeley): Mrs. Feinman?

  Voice #2: Yes, who is this?

  Voice #5: Mrs. Feinman, this is Elizabeth Akeley speaking. I’m a friend of Marc’s from San Diego. Is Marc there, please?

  Voice #2: I know all about Marc’s friend, Elizabeth darling. Don’t you know Marc’s father is in the hospital? Should you be bothering Marc at such a time?

  Voice #5: I’m very sorry about Mr. Feinman, Mrs. Feinman. Marc told me before he left California. Is he all right?

  Voice #2: Don’t ask.

  (Pause)

  Voice #5: Could I speak with Marc? Please?

  Voice #2: (Off-line, pick-up is very faint) Marc, here, it’s your little goyishe priestess. Yes. On the telephone. No, she didn’t say where. No, she didn’t say.

  Voice #1 (Marc Feinman): Lizzy? Lizzy baby, are you okay?

  Voice #5: Yes, I’m okay. Is your father –

  Voice #1: (Interrupting) They operated this morning. I saw him after. He’s very weak, Liz. But I think he’s going to make it. Lizzy, where are you? Pleasant Street?

  Voice #5: Vermont.

  Voice #1: What? Vermont?

  Voice #5: I couldn’t wait, Marc. You were on the road, and there was another trance. I couldn’t wait till you arrived in New York. Vernon came with me. We’re staying with a family in Dark Mountain. Marc, I met my great-grandfather. Yesterday. I tried to call you last night but –

  Voice #1: I was at the hospital with Ma, visiting my father. We couldn’t just –

  Voice #5: Of course, Marc. You did the right thing. (Pause) How soon can you get here?

  Voice #1: I can’t leave now. My father is still—they’re not sure. (Lowering voice) I don’t want to talk too loud. The doctor said it’s going to be touch and go for at least forty-eight hours. I can’t leave Ma.

  Voice #5: (Sobs) I understand, Marc. But—but—my great-grandfather….

  Voice #1: How old is the old coot? He must be at least ninety.

  Voice #5: He was born in 1871. He’s 108.

  Voice #1: My God! Talk about tough old Yankee stock!

  Voice #5: It isn’t that, Marc! It has to do with the trance messages. Don’t you understand? All of that strange material about alien beings, and other galaxies? That was no sci-fi trip –

  Voice #1: I never said you were making it up, Lizzy! Your subconscious, though, I mean, you see some TV show or a movie and –

  Voice #5: But that’s just it, Marc! Those are real messages. Not from my subconscious. My great-grandpa was sending, oh, call them spirit messages or telepathic radiations or anything you like. He’s here. He’s back. Aliens took him away, they took his brain in a metal cylinder and he’s been travelling in outer space for fifty years and now he’s back here in Vermont and –

  Voice #1: Okay, Lizzy, enough! Look, I’ll drive up there as soon as I can get away. As soon as my father’s out of danger. I can’t leave my ma now but as soon as I can. What’s this place….

  Late on the afternoon of August 9th Ezra Noyes rapped on the door of Elizabeth Akeley’s room. She admitted him and he stood in the center of the room, nervously wondering whether it would be proper to sit in her presence. Akeley urged him to sit. The conversation which ensued was recalled by young Noyes in a deposition taken later at an Agency field office. Excerpts from the deposition follow.

  “Well, you see, I told her that I was really serious about UFOs and all that stuff. She didn’t know much about Ufology. She’d never heard about the men in black, even, so I told her all about them so she’d be on the lookout. I asked her who this Vernon Whiteside was, and she said he was the sexton of her church and completely reliable and I shouldn’t worry about him.

  “I showed her some copies of the Intelligencer and she said she liked the mag a lot and asked if she could keep them. I said sure. Anyway, she wanted to know how long the Moth Man sightings had been going on. I told her, only about six months ago over at Townshend or around here. Then she asked me what I knew about a rash of similar sightings about fifty years ago.

  “That was right up my alley. You know, I did a lot of research. I went down and read a lot of old newspaper files. They have the old papers on microfilm now, it kills your eyes to crouch over a reader all day looking at the old stuff, but it’s really interesting.

  “Anyway, there were some odd sightings back in the ’20s, and then when they had those floods around here in November of ’27, there were some really strange things. They found some bodies, parts of bodies that is, carried downstream in the flood. There were some in the Winooski River over near Montpelier, and some right in the streets of Passumpsic. The town was flooded, you know.

  “Strange bodies. Things like big wings. Not like moth wings, though. More like bat wings. And there seems to have been some odd goings on with Miss Akeley’s great-grandfather, Henry Akeley. He was a retired prof, you know. And something about a friend of his, a guy called Al Wilmarth. But it was all hushed up.

  “Well, I told Miss Akeley everything I knew and then I asked her who was in the cabin over at that dirt road near Lyndonville. I think she must have got mixed up, because she said it was Henry Akeley. He disappeared in 1927 or ’28. Even if he turned up, he couldn’t be alive by now. She said he said something to her about love, and about wanting a young man’s body and a young woman’s body so he could make love with some woman from outer space, he said from Aldebaran. I guess you have to be a sci-fi nut to know about Aldebaran. I’m a sci-fi nut. I don’t say too much about it in UFO circles—they don’t like sci-fi, they think the sci-fi crowd put down UFOs. They’re scared of ’em. They want to keep it all nice and safe and imaginary, you ought to read Sanderson and Earley on that some time.

  “Well, how could a human and an alien make love? I guess old Akeley must have thought something like mind-transfer, like one partner could take over the body of a member of the other partner’s species, you know. Only be careful, don’t try it with spiders where the female eats the male after they mate. Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha!

  “But Miss Akeley kept asking about lovemaking, you know, and I started to wonder if maybe she wasn’t hinting at something, you know. I mean, there we were in this room. And it was my own parents’ house and all, but it was a bedroom, and I didn’t want her to think that she could just walk in there and, uh, well, you know.

  “So I excused myself then. But she seemed upset. She kept running her hand through her hair. Pulling it down, those strips, what do women call them, bangs, over her forehead. I told her I had to get to work on the next ish of my mag, you know, and she’d have to excuse me but the last ish had been late and I was trying to get the mag back on schedule. But I told her, if she wanted a lift over to Passumpsic again, I’d be glad to give her a ride over there any time, and I’d like to meet her great-grandfather if he was living in that old shack. Then she said he wasn’t exactly living in the shack, but he sort of was, sort of was there and sort of was living there. It didn’t make any sense to me, so I went and started laying out the next issue of the Intelligencer ’cause I wanted to get it out on time for once, and show those guys that I can get a mag out on time when I get a chance.

  “Anyway, Miss Akeley said her great-grandfather’s girlfriend was named something like Sheera from Aldebaran. I told her that sounded like something out of a bad 50s sci-fi flick on the TV. There’s a great channel in Montreal, we get it on the cable, they show sci-fi flicks every week. And that sure sounded like a sci-fi flick to me.

  “Sheera from Aldebaran! Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha!”

  Marc Feinman wheeled his Ferrari up to the Noyes home. His sporty driving-cap was cocked over one ear. Suede jacket,
silk shirt, Gucci jeans and Frye boots completed his outfit.

  The front door swung in as Feinman’s boot struck the bottom wooden step. Elizabeth Akeley was across the whitewashed porch and in Feinman’s arms before he reached the top of the flight. Without releasing his embrace of Akeley, Feinman extended one hand to grasp that of Vernon Whiteside.

  They entered the house. Ezra Noyes greeted them in the front parlor. Elizabeth and Vernon briefed Marc on the events since their arrival in Vermont. When the narrative was brought up to date, Feinman asked simply, “What do you want to do?”

  Ezra started to blurt out an ambitious plan for gaining the confidence of the aliens and arranging a ride in their saucer, but Whiteside, still maintaining the role of sexton of the Spiritual Light Church, cut him off. “We will do whatever the Radiant Mother asks us to do.”

  All eyes turned to Akeley.

  After an uncomfortable interval she said, “I was—hoping that Marc could help. It’s so strange, Marc. I know that I’m the one who always believed in—in the spirit world. The beyond. What you always call the supernormal.”

  Feinman nodded.

  “But somehow,” Elizabeth went on, “this seems more like your ideas than mine. It’s so—I mean, this is the kind of thing that I’ve always looked for, believed in. And you haven’t. And now that it’s true, it doesn’t seem to have any spiritual meaning. It’s just—something that you could explain with your logic and your computers.”

  Feinman rubbed his slightly blue chin with his free hand. “This great-grandpa of yours, this Henry Akeley….”

  He looked into her eyes.

  “You say, he was talking about some kind of mating ritual?”

  Liz nodded.

  Feinman said, “What did he look like? Did you ever see your great-grandfather before? Even a picture? Maybe one that your grandfather had in San Diego?”

  She shook her head. “No. At least, I don’t remember ever seeing a photo at home. There might have been one. But I hardly saw anything in the shack, Marc.”

  Ezra Noyes was jumping up and down in his chair. “Yes, you never told us, Lizzy—Miss Akeley. What did you see? What did he look like?”

  “I hardly saw anything!” Liz covered her face with her hands, dropped one to her lap, tugged nervously at her bangs with the other. “It was pitch dark in there. Just a little faint light seeping between the cracks in the walls, through those broken windows. The windows that weren’t broken were so filthy they wouldn’t let any light in.”

  “So you couldn’t tell if it was really Henry Akeley.”

  “It was the same voice,” Vernon Whiteside volunteered. “We, ah, we bugged the meeting, Mr. Feinman. The voice was the same as the one on the trance tapes from the church.”

  Feinman’s eyes widened. “The same? But the trance tapes are in Lizzy’s voice!”

  Whiteside back-pedaled. “No, you’re right. I don’t suppose they were the same vocal chords. But the timbre. And the enunciation. Everything. Same person speaking. I’d stake my reputation on it!”

  Feinman stroked his chin again. “All right. Here’s what I’d like to do. Lizzy, Henry Akeley said he’d see you again, right? Okay, let’s surprise him. Suppose Whiteside and I head out there. Can you find the shack again, Vernon? Good! Okay, we’ll take the Ferrari out there.”

  “But it’s nearly dark out.”

  “No difference if it’s so damned dark inside the shack! I’ve got a good five-cell torch in the emergency kit in the Ferrari.”

  “I ought to come along,” Ezra Noyes put in. “I do represent the Vermont UFO Intelligence Bureau, you know!”

  “Right,” Feinman nodded. “And we’ll need your help later. No, we’ll need you, Ezra, but not right now. Whiteside and I will visit Henry Akeley—or whoever or whatever is out there claiming to be Henry Akeley. Give us a couple of hours’ head start. And then, you come ahead.”

  “Can I get into the shack this time?” Ezra jumped up and paced nervously, almost danced, back and forth. “The other time, I had to wait at the car. If I can get into the shack, I can get some photos. I’ll rig up a flash on my Instamatic. I want to get some shots of the inside of that cabin for the Intelligencer.”

  “Yes, sure.” Feinman turned from Ezra Noyes and took Elizabeth Akeley’s hand. “You don’t mind, do you, Lizzy? I’m worried that your ancestor there—or whoever it is—has some kind of control over you. Those trances—what if he puts you under some kind of hypnotic influence while we’re all out there together?”

  “How do you know he’s evil? You seem to—just assume that Henry Akeley wants to harm me.”

  “I don’t know that at all.” Feinman frowned. “I just have a nasty feeling about it. I want to get there first. I think Whiteside and I can handle things, and then you can arrive in a while. Please, Lizzy. You did call me to help. You didn’t have to, you could just have gone back and never said anything to me until it was over.”

  Elizabeth looked very worried. “Maybe I should have.”

  “Well, but you didn’t. Now, can we do it my way? Please?”

  “All right, Marc.”

  Feinman turned to Vernon Whiteside. “Let’s go. How long a ride is it out there?”

  Whiteside paused. “Little less than an hour.”

  Feinman grunted. “Okay. Vernon and I will start now. We’ll need about another hour once we’re there, I suppose—call it two to be on the safe side. Lizzy and Ezra, if you’ll follow us out to the shack in two hours, just come ahead in, we’ll be there.”

  Ezra departed to check his camera. Vernon accompanied Marc. Shortly the Ferrari Boxer disappeared in a cloud of yellow Vermont dust, headed for Passumpsic.

  As soon as they had pulled out of sight of the house, Vernon spoke. “Mr. Feinman, I’ve been helping Radiant Mother on this trip.”

  “I know that, Vernon. Lizzy mentioned it several times. I really appreciate it.”

  “Mr. Feinman, you know how concerned Radiant Mother is about Church archives. The way she records her sermons and the message services. Well, she was worried about her meeting with old Mr. Akeley. So I helped her to rig a wireless mike on her jacket, so we got a microcassette of the meeting.”

  Feinman said he knew that.

  “Well, if you don’t mind, I’d like to do the same again.” Whiteside held the tiny microcassette recorder for Feinman to see. The Ferrari’s V-12 purred throatily, loafing along the Passumpsic road in third gear.

  “Sure. That’s a good idea. But you needn’t rig me up.

  I want you along. You can just mike yourself.”

  Vernon Whiteside considered. “Tell you what….” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pair of enamel ladybugs. “I’ll mike us both. If we happen to pick up the same sounds there’ll be no harm. In fact, it’ll give us a redundancy check. If we get separated –”

  “I don’t see why we should.”

  “Just in case.” He pinned a ladybug to Feinman’s suede jacket, attached the second bug to his own. He made a minor adjustment to the recorder.

  “There.” He slipped the recorder back into his pocket. “I separated the input circuits. Now we’ll record on two channels. We can mix the sound if we record the same events or keep it separate if we pick up different events. In fact, just to be on the safe side, suppose I leave the recorder here in the car when you and I go to the shack.”

  Feinman assented and Whiteside peeled the sealers from a dime-sized disk of double-adhesive foam. He stuck it to the recorder and stuck the recorder to the bottom of the Ferrari’s dashboard.

  “You’re the sexton of the Spiritual Light Church,” Feinman said. “You know a hell of a lot about electronics.”

  “My sister’s boy, Mr. Feinman. Bright youngster. It’s his hobby. Started out with a broken Victrola. Got his science teacher to helping. Going to San Diego State next term. I couldn’t be prouder if he was my own boy. He builds all sorts of gadgets.”

  Feinman tooled the Ferrari around the dome-topped hill and pulled
to a halt where the Noyes station wagon had parked on the earlier visit. The sun was setting and the somehow too-lush glade was filled with murk.

  Vernon Whiteside reached under the dashboard and flicked the microcassette recorder to automatic mode. He climbed from the car.

  Feinman went to the rear of the Ferrari and extracted a long-handled electric torch. He pulled his sports cap down over his eyes and touched Whiteside’s elbow. The men advanced.

  The events that transpired following this entrance to the sycamore copse were captured on the microcassette recorder, and a transcript of these sounds appears later in the report.

  In the meanwhile, Elizabeth Akeley and Ezra Noyes waited at the Noyes home in Dark Mountain.

  Two hours to the minute after the departure of Marc Feinman and Vernon Whiteside in Feinman’s Ferrari Boxer, the Noyes station wagon, its aged suspension creaking, pulled out of the driveway.

  Ezra pushed the Nash to the limit of its tired ability, chattering the while to Elizabeth. Preoccupied, she responded with low monosyllables. At the turning-point from the Passumpsic-Lyndonville road onto the old farm track, she waited in the station wagon while Ezra climbed down and opened the fence gate.

  The Nash’s headlights picked a narrow path for the car, circling the dome-topped hill that blocked the copse of lush vegetation from the sight of passers-by. The Ferrari Boxer stood silently at the edge of the copse.

  Ezra lifted his camera-bag from the floor and slung it over his shoulder. Elizabeth waited in the car until Ezra walked to her side, opened the door and offered his hand.

  They started through the copse. Noyes testified later that this was his first experience with the unusual vegetation. He claimed that, even as he set foot beneath the overhanging branches of the first sycamore a strange sensation passed through him. The day had been hot and even in the hours of darkness the temperature did not drop drastically. Even so, with his entry into the copse Noyes felt an unnatural and debilitating heat, as if the trees were adapted to a different climate than that of northern Vermont and were actually emitting heat of their own.

  He began to perspire.