Albert N. Wilmarth and Henry Wentworth Akeley

The relationship between Albert N. Wilmarth and Henry Wentworth Akeley is built first through correspondence and then undone by a visit in which familiar signs of personhood become unreliable. Wilmarth arrives with an instinctive regard for Akeley, formed at a distance; in the farmhouse, the host’s physical stillness, the voices from a brain cylinder, and the apparent absence of Akeley’s body turn that regard into dread. Their connection matters not because it reaches a clear resolution, but because Wilmarth’s trust survives long enough to bring him close to a revelation he cannot verify.

Correspondence and Initial Trust

Before their meeting, Wilmarth had come to like Akeley through his letters. The affection was instinctive rather than the product of face-to-face familiarity, and its strength becomes clear only when the visit unsettles it: Wilmarth later contrasts the Akeley he had imagined through correspondence with the host who now repels him. Their exchange also provides a channel through which the strange events surrounding Akeley reach Wilmarth. The visitor speaking through the machinery knows of Wilmarth’s correspondence with Akeley and calls Akeley their mutual friend, making the relationship itself part of the outsiders’ knowledge.

That correspondence does not make Wilmarth immune to suspicion. Instead, it gives the encounter its emotional and interpretive stakes. He has come prepared to trust a man whose communications have invited his attention; he must now judge whether the figure before him, the voice in the study, and the name attached to the cylinder belong to the same person. The relationship moves from an exchange of letters into a test of identity that no ordinary evidence can settle.

A Shared Invitation and a Divided Response

During the conference in the study, a voice identifies itself as a human being whose brain is housed in a cylinder inside Round Hill, about a mile and a half east of the farmhouse. The speaker says that it sees, hears, and speaks through electronic vibrators, and describes journeys to thirty-seven celestial bodies, including places beyond the galaxy and beyond the curved cosmos of space and time. It presents these experiences as harmless and invites Wilmarth to travel with the speaker and Akeley. The invitation depends on a striking picture of companionship: Akeley is expected to make the journey, and Wilmarth, known by reputation and correspondence, is asked to join them.

The speaker also claims that Noyes, who brought Wilmarth to the house, has long been allied with the visitors and was the human voice on the phonograph record Akeley had sent him. That disclosure makes Akeley’s correspondence seem to have led Wilmarth into a circle more extensive than he understood. Yet Akeley himself does not explain or endorse the invitation. After Wilmarth shuts off the three switches, Akeley gives him no comment on what has occurred. He only tells him that the apparatus may remain on the table and offers him a lamp for his room. The gap between the expansive promise of a voyage and Akeley’s silence leaves Wilmarth with no clear assurance about what his host wants or what role Akeley has in the proposed journey.

From Affection to Repulsion

Outside the study, Wilmarth finds that his earlier liking for Akeley has given way to a physical and emotional recoil. Akeley’s illness might ordinarily have prompted pity, but Wilmarth instead registers him as rigid, inert, and corpse-like. The whispering voice intensifies that reaction: its apparent strength and carrying power seem at odds with the motionless lips and the weakness expected of an asthmatic. Wilmarth even senses in it an unsettling familiarity, much as he had felt an ominous familiarity in Noyes’s voice, though he cannot identify its source.

This change is not a simple discovery that Akeley has become an enemy. Wilmarth cannot separate his response to the host’s condition from his fear of the machinery, the surrounding events, and the possibility that the person he trusted is not what he appears to be. He leaves the conference exhausted by dread and no longer moved by scientific curiosity. The relationship’s earlier intimacy, conducted through letters, offers no protection against the suspicion that the familiar Akeley in the farmhouse may be only a bodily appearance—or that the true Akeley is present in a form Wilmarth cannot recognize.

The Empty Chair and the Name on the Cylinder

Later, moving through the dark house, Wilmarth finds Noyes asleep in the living room rather than Akeley. In the study, he sees a fresh, shiny brain cylinder bearing Akeley’s name, fitted with sight and hearing attachments and positioned beside a speech machine. He thinks the cylinder must be conscious of his presence, since its attachments could register his flashlight and the creaking floor. He considers connecting the speech machine, but does not dare. In retrospect, he regrets leaving it silent, wondering what questions about identity it might have answered while also allowing that his restraint may have spared him further horror.

The chair where he expected to find Akeley is empty. The familiar dressing gown trails from it to the floor, and the yellow scarf and large foot-bandages Wilmarth had previously found strange lie nearby. The queer odor and sense of vibration that had seemed strongest around Akeley are now absent. These details do not establish what happened to the host; they turn familiar sickroom objects into evidence of an unexplained departure and sharpen the question of whether the figure Wilmarth had encountered was Akeley at all.

Wilmarth then notices three ingenious constructions concealed by the folds of the dressing gown. Their metallic clamps appear designed to attach them to organic forms, and he hopes they are waxwork despite his fear that they are more than imitations. He identifies the face and hands as those of Henry Wentworth Akeley, made with minute detail that might amount to resemblance or identity. The name on the cylinder, the empty chair, the discarded clothing, and these artificial features converge without giving him a dependable account of who had spoken or where Akeley’s living body was. Wilmarth escapes the house, carrying an interpretation rather than a proof.

An Unresolved Bond

The relationship ends in flight, not reconciliation or explanation. Wilmarth’s scientific zeal disappears; he wants only to escape what he calls a net of morbidity and unnatural revelation. Even later, he retains moments of doubt about whether his experience was a dream, nervous delusion, or something real, while the constructions associated with Akeley remain the most disturbing clue. The investigators who later come to the house do not find those three objects, further separating Wilmarth’s account from evidence that could settle the matter for others.

That unresolved ending reshapes the original bond. Akeley’s letters had made him a trusted correspondent and a reason for Wilmarth to approach the mystery; the visit makes the same trust an exposure to doubt. The possibility of a journey together, offered through a voice claiming to speak for a brain in Round Hill, briefly imagines the men as companions. Instead, Wilmarth leaves without knowing whether Akeley had consented, whether the host was Akeley, or whether the face and hands in the chair were remnants of him or a device for impersonation. Their connection remains suspended between personal confidence and the fear that the person who inspired it has been replaced, transformed, or made inaccessible.