The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft

by H. P. Lovecraft

  Before long I saw that it would be impossible to distinguish any connected discourse. Isolated words—including the names of Akeley and myself—now and then floated up, especially when uttered by the mechanical speech-producer; but their true significance was lost for want of continuous context. Today I refuse to form any definite deductions from them, and even their frightful effect on me was one of suggestion rather than of revelation. A terrible and abnormal conclave, I felt certain, was assembled below me; but for what shocking deliberations I could not tell. It was curious how this unquestioned sense of the malign and the blasphemous pervaded me despite Akeley’s assurances of the Outsiders’ friendliness.

  With patient listening I began to distinguish clearly between voices, even though I could not grasp much of what any of the voices said. I seemed to catch certain typical emotions behind some of the speakers. One of the buzzing voices, for example, held an unmistakable note of authority; whilst the mechanical voice, notwithstanding its artificial loudness and regularity, seemed to be in a position of subordination and pleading. Noyes’s tones exuded a kind of conciliatory atmosphere. The others I could make no attempt to interpret. I did not hear the familiar whisper of Akeley, but well knew that such a sound could never penetrate the solid flooring of my room.

  I will try to set down some of the few disjointed words and other sounds I caught, labelling the speakers of the words as best I know how. It was from the speech-machine that I first picked up a few recognisable phrases.

  (THE SPEECH-MACHINE)

  “. . . brought it on myself . . . sent back the letters and the record . . . end on it . . . taken in . . . seeing and hearing . . . damn you . . . impersonal force, after all . . . fresh, shiny cylinder . . . great God . . .”74

  (FIRST BUZZING VOICE)

  “. . . time we stopped . . . small and human . . . Akeley . . . brain . . . saying . . .”

  (SECOND BUZZING VOICE)

  “Nyarlathotep . . . Wilmarth . . . records and letters . . . cheap imposture. . . .”75

  (NOYES)

  “. . . (an unpronounceable word or name, possibly N’gah-Kthun) . . . harmless . . . peace . . . couple of weeks . . . theatrical . . . told you that before. . . .”

  (FIRST BUZZING VOICE)

  “. . . no reason . . . original plan . . . effects . . . Noyes can watch . . . Round Hill . . . fresh cylinder . . . Noyes’s car. . . .”

  (NOYES)

  “. . . well . . . all yours . . . down here . . . rest . . . place. . . .”

  (SEVERAL VOICES AT ONCE IN INDISTINGUISHABLE SPEECH)

  (MANY FOOTSTEPS, INCLUDING THE PECULIAR LOOSE STIRRING OR CLATTERING)

  (A CURIOUS SORT OF FLAPPING SOUND)

  (THE SOUND OF AN AUTOMOBILE STARTING AND RECEDING)

  (SILENCE)

  That is the substance of what my ears brought me as I lay rigid upon that strange upstairs bed in the haunted farmhouse among the dæmoniac hills—lay there fully dressed, with a revolver clenched in my right hand and a pocket flashlight gripped in my left. I became, as I have said, broad awake; but a kind of obscure paralysis nevertheless kept me inert till long after the last echoes of the sounds had died away. I heard the wooden, deliberate ticking of the ancient Connecticut clock somewhere far below, and at last made out the irregular snoring of a sleeper. Akeley must have dozed off after the strange session, and I could well believe that he needed to do so.

  Just what to think or what to do was more than I could decide. After all, what had I heard beyond things which previous information might have led me to expect? Had I not known that the nameless Outsiders were now freely admitted to the farmhouse? No doubt Akeley had been surprised by an unexpected visit from them. Yet something in that fragmentary discourse had chilled me immeasurably, raised the most grotesque and horrible doubts, and made me wish fervently that I might wake up and prove everything a dream. I think my subconscious mind must have caught something which my consciousness has not yet recognised. But what of Akeley? Was he not my friend, and would he not have protested if any harm were meant me? The peaceful snoring below seemed to cast ridicule on all my suddenly intensified fears.

  Was it possible that Akeley had been imposed upon and used as a lure to draw me into the hills with the letters and pictures and phonograph record? Did those beings mean to engulf us both in a common destruction because we had come to know too much? Again I thought of the abruptness and unnaturalness of that change in the situation which must have occurred between Akeley’s penultimate and final letters. Something, my instinct told me, was terribly wrong. All was not as it seemed. That acrid coffee which I refused—had there not been an attempt by some hidden, unknown entity to drug it? I must talk to Akeley at once, and restore his sense of proportion. They had hypnotised him with their promises of cosmic revelations, but now he must listen to reason. We must get out of this before it would be too late. If he lacked the will power to make the break for liberty, I would supply it. Or if I could not persuade him to go, I could at least go myself. Surely he would let me take his Ford and leave it in a garage at Brattleboro. I had noticed it in the shed—the door being left unlocked and open now that peril was deemed past—and I believed there was a good chance of its being ready for instant use. That momentary dislike of Akeley which I had felt during and after the evening’s conversation was all gone now. He was in a position much like my own, and we must stick together. Knowing his indisposed condition, I hated to wake him at this juncture, but I knew that I must. I could not stay in this place till morning as matters stood.

  At last I felt able to act, and stretched myself vigorously to regain command of my muscles. Arising with a caution more impulsive than deliberate, I found and donned my hat, took my valise, and started downstairs with the flashlight’s aid. In my nervousness I kept the revolver clutched in my right hand, being able to take care of both valise and flashlight with my left. Why I exerted these precautions I do not really know, since I was even then on my way to awaken the only other occupant of the house.

  As I half tiptoed down the creaking stairs to the lower hall I could hear the sleeper more plainly, and noticed that he must be in the room on my left—the living-room I had not entered. On my right was the gaping blackness of the study in which I had heard the voices. Pushing open the unlatched door of the living-room I traced a path with the flashlight toward the source of the snoring, and finally turned the beams on the sleeper’s face. But in the next second I hastily turned them away and commenced a cat-like retreat to the hall, my caution this time springing from reason as well as from instinct. For the sleeper on the couch was not Akeley at all, but my quondam guide Noyes.

  Just what the real situation was, I could not guess; but common sense told me that the safest thing was to find out as much as possible before arousing anybody. Regaining the hall, I silently closed and latched the living-room door after me; thereby lessening the chances of awaking Noyes. I now cautiously entered the dark study, where I expected to find Akeley, whether asleep or awake, in the great corner chair which was evidently his favourite resting-place. As I advanced, the beams of my flashlight caught the great centre-table, revealing one of the hellish cylinders with sight and hearing machines attached, and with a speech-machine standing close by, ready to be connected at any moment. This, I reflected, must be the encased brain I had heard talking during the frightful conference; and for a second I had a perverse impulse to attach the speech machine and see what it would say.

  It must, I thought, be conscious of my presence even now; since the sight and hearing attachments could not fail to disclose the rays of my flashlight and the faint creaking of the floor beneath my feet. But in the end I did not dare meddle with the thing. I idly saw that it was the fresh, shiny cylinder with Akeley’s name on it, which I had noticed on the shelf earlier in the evening and which my host had told me not to bother. Looking back at that moment, I can only regret my timidity and wish that I had boldly caused the apparatus to speak. God knows what mysteries and horrible doubts and qu
estions of identity it might have cleared up! But then, it may be merciful that I let it alone.

  From the table I turned my flashlight to the corner where I thought Akeley was, but found to my perplexity that the great easy-chair was empty of any human occupant asleep or awake. From the seat to the floor there trailed voluminously the familiar old dressing-gown, and near it on the floor lay the yellow scarf and the huge foot-bandages I had thought so odd. As I hesitated, striving to conjecture where Akeley might be, and why he had so suddenly discarded his necessary sick-room garments, I observed that the queer odour and sense of vibration were no longer in the room. What had been their cause? Curiously it occurred to me that I had noticed them only in Akeley’s vicinity. They had been strongest where he sat, and wholly absent except in the room with him or just outside the doors of that room. I paused, letting the flashlight wander about the dark study and racking my brain for explanations of the turn affairs had taken.

  “I let my flashlight return to the vacant easy-chair, then noticed for the first time the presence of certain objects in the seat.” Weird Tales 18, no. 1 (August 1931) (artist: Curtis C. Senf)

  Would to heaven I had quietly left the place before allowing that light to rest again on the vacant chair. As it turned out, I did not leave quietly; but with a muffled shriek which must have disturbed, though it did not quite awake, the sleeping sentinel across the hall. That shriek, and Noyes’s still-unbroken snore, are the last sounds I ever heard in that morbidity-choked farmhouse beneath the black-wooded crest of a haunted mountain—that focus of trans-cosmic horror amidst the lonely green hills and curse-muttering brooks of a spectral rustic land.

  It is a wonder that I did not drop flashlight, valise, and revolver in my wild scramble, but somehow I failed to lose any of these. I actually managed to get out of that room and that house without making any further noise, to drag myself and my belongings safely into the old Ford in the shed, and to set that archaic vehicle in motion toward some unknown point of safety in the black, moonless night. The ride that followed was a piece of delirium out of Poe or Rimbaud or the drawings of Doré, but finally I reached Townshend. That is all. If my sanity is still unshaken, I am lucky. Sometimes I fear what the years will bring, especially since that new planet Pluto has been so curiously discovered.76

  As I have implied, I let my flashlight return to the vacant easy-chair after its circuit of the room; then noticing for the first time the presence of certain objects in the seat, made inconspicuous by the adjacent loose folds of the empty dressing-gown. These are the objects, three in number, which the investigators did not find when they came later on. As I said at the outset, there was nothing of actual visual horror about them. The trouble was in what they led one to infer. Even now I have my moments of half-doubt—moments in which I half-accept the scepticism of those who attribute my whole experience to dream and nerves and delusion.

  The three things were damnably clever constructions of their kind, and were furnished with ingenious metallic clamps to attach them to organic developments of which I dare not form any conjecture. I hope—devoutly hope—that they were the waxen products of a master artist, despite what my inmost fears tell me. Great God! That whisperer in darkness with its morbid odour and vibrations! Sorcerer, emissary, changeling, outsider . . . that hideous repressed buzzing . . . and all the time in that fresh, shiny cylinder on the shelf . . . poor devil . . . “Prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill . . .”

  For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance—or identity—were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.77

  1. Written between February and September 1930, the story first appeared in Weird Tales 18, no. 1 (August 1931), 32–73, with this reading line: “Wild horror stalked the Vermont hills—a story of weird fungi from the newly discovered ninth planet.” Steven J. Mariconda has described in some detail Lovecraft’s composition and revision of the tale in “Tightening the Coil: The Revision of ‘The Whisperer in Darkness.’” Robert M. Price has reconstructed an ur-version of the tale and published it as “The Vermont Horror.”

  Springfield, Vermont, in November 1927.

  2. Called by many Vermont’s “greatest natural disaster,” the flood wrought ruin on many parts of Vermont. The Vermont Historical Society wrote, “It had already been a wet October and rivers were swollen and the ground saturated. Nine inches of rain fell in a thirty-six hour period and horrendous flooding began. Though all of New England was affected, Vermont was devastated. The state flooded from Newport to Bennington, with the Winooski River Valley the hardest hit. Eighty-five people died and 9,000 were left homeless” (http://freedomandunity.org/1800s/natural_disaster.html). President Calvin Coolidge, traveling to Vermont a year after the flood, on September 21, 1928, in a speech thereafter known as the “Brave Little State of Vermont,” expressed his admiration for the self-reliance of Vermonters in recovering from the disaster: “I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who have almost beggared themselves to serve others. If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the Union, and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_Little_State_of_Vermont_speech). The speech is also inscribed at the President Calvin Coolidge Homestead in Plymouth Notch, Vermont.

  3. All are within ninety miles of each other, certainly within the range of a central water source.

  4. Something like John Tenniel’s Mock Turtle and Gryphon combined! In any case, such a creature would have eight legs (including two front legs like the turtle), a shell, and wings.

  John Tenniel’s 1865 illustration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland shows Alice sitting between the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle.

  5. Vermont was not one of the original thirteen colonies, and from 1777 to 1791, it existed as the Vermont Republic; the colonies of New York and New Hampshire sought the land. Benning Wentworth (1696–1770), the royal governor of New Hampshire, made extensive land grants west of the Connecticut River in defiance of the ruling of the English privy council that the land belonged to New York. In 1791, Vermont became the fourteenth state of the Union.

  6. In Ireland, ráths (Anglicized as “raths”) are enclosed circular fortifications, or ringforts, also called rounds, that are surrounded by stone walls. Most were built during the Iron Age.

  7. The Pennacooks, or western Abnakis (also spelled Abenakis; the name means People of the Dawn Land), have a legend of a flying creature named the bmola (also P-mol-a, Pamola, and Pomola), or “wind bird,” which “takes prisoners to Alomkik, near Mt. Katahdin” (http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Abenaki_mythology.html), Maine’s highest mountain (elevation 5,268 feet), and freezes the wind of the north. For a description of the terrain and the mood of Mt. Katahdin, see Henry David Thoreau’s “Ktaadn,” in The Maine Woods, 1–111.

  8. There is little in the way of consistent Greek legendry about the kallikantzaroi or kallikanzari, any more than there is consistent Western folklore about goblins or Irish tales of leprechauns, fairies, boggles, and the like. In Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, Carlo Ginzburg describes kallikantzoroi (spellings vary) as “groups of young men masquerading as animals” (see part 2, chap. 3). However, Leo Allatius in his influential 1645 treatise De Græcorum hodie quorundam opinationibus (one of the earliest documents to assert that vampires were creatures of the devil), names kallikantzoroi as vampires active only during the period from Christmas Day to Twelfth Night, with manic behavior and long fingernails or talons that enabled them to tear their victims to pieces.

  9. “Mi-go” means “man-wild” (or wild man) in Tibetan. It is possible that the narrator encountered the word “mi-gou,” another Tibetan name for the yeti or “Abominable Snowman” of the Himalayas. The term Abo
minable Snowman did not appear in print until 1922, when Lieutenant Colonel Charles K. Howard-Bury published his account Mount Everest: The Reconnaissance, 1921 and reported seeing footprints that his coolies concluded were those of “‘The Wild Man of the Snows,’ to which they gave the name of Metohkangmi, ‘the abominable snow man’” (141). The Mi-Go are mentioned again in At the Mountains of Madness (here, below), and in Lovecraft’s sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth.

  10. Charles Fort (1874–1932), regarded by some as the father of paranormal studies, was an American writer who took notes on anomalous phenomena. It is difficult to say whether he believed many of the stories he researched on topics such as teleportation, alien abductions, unidentified flying objects, spontaneous fires, and strange objects or creatures falling from the skies. Fort collected his data from hundreds of newspapers, scientific journals, magazines, and other published sources found in his beloved New York Public Library and in London at the British Museum, and he particularly focused on phenomena that were either on the borders of science and “pseudoscience” or that were subject to multiple interpretations. The author of four books, The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932), his work spawned international Fortean societies and led to a widening of the boundaries of “proper” scientific investigation. In The Book of the Damned, Fort expressed his views on alien contact cautiously: “If other worlds have ever in the past had relations with this earth, they were attempted positivizations: to extend themselves, by colonies, upon this earth; to convert, or assimilate, indigenous inhabitants of this earth” (172). In New Lands, sounding a slightly less sceptical note, he seemed to endorse the existentially cleansing effects of alien visitation: “If there be nearby lands in the sky and beings from foreign worlds that visit this earth, that is a great subject, and the trash that is clogging an epoch must be cleared away” (321).