Wilmarth visits Akeley’s farmhouse expecting a conversation about the Outside Beings and instead finds physical signs of their presence, a row of preserved brains, and a mechanical demonstration that turns speculation about cosmic travel into an unsettlingly concrete possibility. The visit is a decisive reversal in his understanding: the claims he had weighed against folklore now appear connected to a working system of interstellar communication and travel.

Flood Reports and the Folklore Behind Them

The chain of events began with the Vermont floods of November 3, 1927. Reports of strange objects in swollen rivers reached Wilmarth, an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham and an amateur student of New England folklore. The stories came mainly from newspaper clippings, with one passed along in a letter from a woman in Hardwick. They clustered around three waterways: the Winooski River near Montpelier, the West River beyond Newfane, and the Passumpsic above Lyndonville. Witnesses described pinkish, roughly five-foot forms with crustacean bodies, large fins or wings, articulated limbs, and a many-antennaed ellipsoid where a head would be.

Wilmarth initially explained the reports as misidentified human or farm-animal remains, transformed in witnesses’ imaginations by inherited stories. The older Vermont legends, collected in Eli Davenport’s rare monograph from oral accounts recorded before 1839, told of hidden beings in remote hills and steep ravines. Accounts associated them with strange prints, circles of stones, caves blocked by boulders, and rare sightings in dense woods. Some described huge, light-red crablike creatures with batlike wings, said to carry objects in their forelimbs or fly from lonely hills at night.

The stories also recorded a shift in how people understood the beings. Earlier traditions said they harmed only those who intruded on their territory; later ones told of claw-prints near farmhouses, disappearances beyond the most notorious regions, and buzzing voices imitating human speech. Some tales accused isolated farmers and hermits of becoming their allies. Pennacook traditions described winged visitors from the Great Bear who mined earthly hills for a special stone, avoided people unless approached, and spoke in human languages without seeming to need a language of their own. Over the nineteenth century, the legends faded as settlement patterns and custom kept people away from the hills, though the reasons for avoiding particular places were gradually forgotten. Wilmarth regarded the stories as a recurring form of folklore rather than evidence of a surviving hidden race.

Akeley’s Evidence and the Decision to Visit

Henry Akeley’s letters unsettled that confidence. He wrote that he had heard voices in the woods, recorded one near a cave on the west slope of Dark Mountain, and would let Wilmarth hear the phonograph record. The recording had been made around one o’clock on May-Eve in 1915, near a cave mouth at Lee’s Swamp. Its fragmentary, quasi-ritualistic speech included a human voice Akeley could not identify and a second voice whose buzzing sound seemed profoundly unlike a human voice, despite its grammatical English and scholarly accent.

Photographs Akeley later sent included a sharply defined claw-print in an upland mud patch. The image’s pebbles and grass blades gave it a persuasive scale, and the print’s opposing, saw-toothed projections resembled the marks described in the old accounts. In another letter, Akeley said that a dog had found a dead creature near the kennel. He tried to preserve it as evidence, but it evaporated within hours; a photograph of it showed only the woodshed. He described its crablike shape and green fluid, and reported that Walter Brown had disappeared. The failure of the photograph and the creature’s disappearance left the evidence strange and incomplete, but the accumulated letters and images persuaded Wilmarth to answer Akeley and ask for more information.

By the time Akeley invited him to visit, Wilmarth’s scepticism had given way to a mixture of fear and curiosity. He telegraphed that he would meet Akeley in Brattleboro on Wednesday, and arranged a daytime journey rather than the later train Akeley had suggested. He planned an early connection through Boston and Greenfield, arriving in Brattleboro at 1:08 p.m. Akeley’s reply endorsed the plan, urged him to bring the record, letters, and prints, and asked him to keep his destination quiet.

Arrival at the Farmhouse

Akeley was not waiting at Brattleboro station. Instead, a younger, fashionably dressed man introduced himself as Noyes, a friend who had come from Townshend because Akeley had suffered an asthmatic attack. Noyes’s cultivated voice struck Wilmarth as oddly familiar, though he could not place it. The large, immaculate motor that carried him toward the farm was unlike the old car Akeley had described. Noyes said he had other business and would not stay long after bringing Wilmarth to his host.

The farmhouse stood on Dark Mountain’s slope: a large white house behind a lawn bordered with whitewashed stones, with barns, sheds, and a windmill grouped behind it. Marshy, sparsely wooded ground stretched toward the steep forested rise. As Noyes went inside to announce him, Wilmarth noticed that none of Akeley’s dogs appeared to be about. He could not reconcile the apparent peace between Akeley and the Outside Beings with the earlier reports of danger, and the silent setting made him question whether the alliance was as safe as Akeley’s latest letter suggested.

Dust on the road supplied a more immediate answer. Near the path to the house, Wilmarth recognised at least three fresh marks among the overlapping tracks: claw-prints like those in Akeley’s photographs, with the same disconcerting ambiguity about their direction. He identified them as tracks of beings from Yuggoth. Their presence outside the farmhouse made the peaceful account difficult to accept at face value, even as Wilmarth reminded himself that a visit by the beings was consistent with Akeley’s claim that they had made terms with him.

The Brain Cylinders and the Mechanical Voice

After nightfall, Akeley explained how human minds could travel without their bodies. The Outside Beings, he said, could remove a brain while keeping the body alive, then place the brain in preserving fluid inside a sealed metal cylinder. Electrodes connected it to instruments that reproduced sight, hearing, and speech. The cylinder could be carried through space, then linked to suitable sensory equipment elsewhere, giving its occupant a limited but articulate life at each destination.

Akeley pointed to more than a dozen cylinders on a high shelf. Each was about a foot high, with three sockets arranged across its front. One was connected to two machines. He said the collection represented four kinds of beings, with three faculties each: three humans, six fungoid beings, two beings from Neptune, and other entities from a dark star beyond the galaxy. At a principal outpost inside Round Hill, he added, there were additional cylinders belonging to beings with senses unlike those familiar to humans.

Akeley directed Wilmarth to connect three instruments to cylinder B-67: a tall device with glass lenses, a box containing vacuum tubes and a sounding board, and a machine with a metal disc. After Wilmarth connected the cords to the indicated sockets and moved the switches, the tube machine began to speak. Its voice was metallic, lifeless, and mechanically precise. The speaker identified himself as a human being whose brain was inside the cylinder while his body rested under treatment at Round Hill, about a mile and a half away.

The speaker said he had visited thirty-seven celestial bodies, including eight outside the galaxy and two beyond the curved cosmos of space and time. He described his brain’s removal as an operation that did not age the body and said the brain could be sustained in its cylinder. He had first met the visiting beings in the Himalayas and had become their ally. He had also followed Wilmarth’s correspondence with Akeley and knew him by sight and reputation. Finally, he recognised Noyes as one of the voices on Akeley’s record and identified him as another long-standing human ally of the beings.

Significance of the Visit

The farmhouse visit brings several strands of evidence into the same room. The claw-prints connect Akeley’s photographs to the beings’ presence at his home; the cylinders and instruments give physical form to the process he has described; and the speaking brain verifies that a human ally can participate in interstellar journeys without travelling in a complete body. The demonstration does not resolve every doubt Wilmarth has brought with him, but it makes ordinary explanations increasingly difficult to maintain.

The revelation also changes the meaning of the journey to the farmhouse. Noyes is not merely an unexpected driver, and the strange voice on the record is not simply an obscure sound from the woods: both belong to a network of human collaboration with the visitors. Akeley’s invitation has brought Wilmarth face to face with that alliance, and with a choice he had previously encountered only as a frightening prospect—the possibility of joining the beings on a journey beyond Earth.