Albert N. Wilmarth and Noyes

The relationship between Albert N. Wilmarth and Noyes is built around a concealed allegiance: Noyes first appears as Wilmarth’s human guide into the Vermont farmhouse, but a disembodied speaker identifies him as a long-standing associate of the Outside Beings. Wilmarth recognizes the voice, hears it again amid a nocturnal conference, and ultimately finds Noyes asleep in the house as he searches for Henry Wentworth Akeley. Their connection is therefore less a developed friendship than a chain of compromised hospitality, recognition, and doubt. Noyes helps bring Wilmarth into the very circle from which Wilmarth will try to escape.

Guide and concealed affiliation

Noyes enters the relationship through practical assistance. The brain-cylinder speaker supposes that he was the man who brought Wilmarth to the farmhouse in his car, making him the visitor’s guide before Wilmarth understands what that guidance may mean. The same speaker says that Noyes has belonged to the allied human group for years and expects him to join the planned journey. This disclosure recasts the journey to the farmhouse: the person who conveyed Wilmarth there was not simply an intermediary but, according to the speaker, someone already connected to the Outside Beings.

The claim reaches Wilmarth through a mechanical voice, not from Noyes himself. The speaker presents Noyes’s membership as established and points to the voice on Akeley’s phonograph recording as something Wilmarth might have recognized. That indirect disclosure matters: Wilmarth is asked to revise his understanding of his guide while sitting among unfamiliar machinery and listening to a speaker whose own relation to the human body is radically altered. Noyes’s association is revealed as part of a larger, partly hidden network, rather than explained through a private conversation between the two men.

Recognition through the recording

The revelation strikes Wilmarth with particular force because he has already heard Noyes’s voice on the phonograph recording. He recalls Noyes as the human celebrant in its monstrous, bygone ritual, and recognizes that this voice had seemed vaguely familiar and repellent even before he could place it. The later identification converts an earlier impression into evidence: the voice that accompanied his arrival belongs to the same hidden world evoked by the recording.

Wilmarth’s reaction is not merely intellectual. The discovery is a particular shock among the evening’s accumulating revelations, and it deepens his sense that the farmhouse is an unsafe place. Noyes’s polished, familiar manner does not cancel the association; it makes the contrast more unsettling. The recording has preserved a voice without giving Wilmarth a clear account of the speaker’s role, while the brain-cylinder speaker supplies a connection that Wilmarth had not knowingly accepted. Their relationship is thus mediated twice—first through the recorded voice, then through another speaker’s explanation—before Noyes is heard directly in the house.

The voices in the farmhouse

During the night, Wilmarth wakes to voices from the study below. He identifies two of them as the characteristic buzzing speech of the Outside Beings and another as the metallic voice of a mechanical speech machine attached to a brain in a cylinder. Among the human speakers, one voice is Noyes’s, recognizable by its smooth Bostonian tones. This places Noyes in the same nocturnal conversation as the beings and the mechanical speaker, confirming the practical force of the earlier claim that he is allied with them.

Wilmarth cannot make out the whole discussion through the floor. A fragment attributed to Noyes includes assurances of harmlessness and peace, a reference to a couple of weeks, and the suggestion that something is theatrical and has been said before. The broken exchange gives evidence of Noyes speaking in the gathering, but not enough to establish the full subject or the precise purpose of his remarks. That partial audibility preserves the imbalance in their relationship: Noyes appears to participate in a conversation whose terms Wilmarth can only overhear, while Wilmarth remains upstairs, trying to infer what is happening from voices and movement.

The discovery and the escape

When Wilmarth decides he cannot remain until morning, he goes downstairs intending to find Akeley. He first opens the living-room door and directs his flashlight toward the source of the snoring. The man on the couch is Noyes, not Akeley. Wilmarth turns the light away and retreats, choosing not to wake him; instead, he latches the door and enters the dark study. The encounter makes Noyes’s presence immediate and concrete, but offers no exchange between them. Noyes is asleep while Wilmarth, armed and carrying his valise, tries to understand the house’s danger.

Later, after discovering the empty chair and the garments associated with Akeley, Wilmarth escapes in the old Ford. His muffled scream and Noyes’s still-unbroken snore are the last sounds he hears in the farmhouse. The juxtaposition is decisive but not explanatory: Noyes does not awaken or intervene, and the text does not establish whether his sleep is genuine, whether he knows Wilmarth is leaving, or what he understands about Akeley’s absence. The guide who brought Wilmarth into the farmhouse remains behind as the visitor flees, a silent presence at the edge of the escape.

An alliance seen from outside

Because the relationship is presented through Wilmarth’s limited observations, Noyes is never fully explained from within. The brain-cylinder speaker’s account, the voice on the recording, the audible conference, and the sleeping figure reinforce one another, but they do not disclose everything Noyes knows or intends. Wilmarth’s evidence supports a connection between Noyes and the Outside Beings; it does not provide a complete account of their dealings or of Noyes’s private motives.

This restricted knowledge gives the relationship its narrative force. Wilmarth’s first dependence on Noyes as a guide becomes inseparable from the possibility that the guide has led him into danger knowingly. Yet the final image is not a confrontation or confession: it is Noyes snoring while Wilmarth escapes. Their connection ends in unequal knowledge and unresolved suspicion, with the familiar human voice functioning as the clearest sign that the farmhouse’s hidden alliance extends beyond its machines and its nonhuman visitors.