Noyes

Noyes is the polished intermediary who brings Albert N. Wilmarth to Henry Wentworth Akeley’s farmhouse, but his casual cover as a friend from Townshend gives way to more disturbing evidence: he has been allied with the Outside Beings for years and is present at a clandestine gathering in the house. His role is defined by a carefully managed contrast between an ordinary, sociable guide and a figure whose voice and movements place him within the farmhouse’s hidden, inhuman world.

Arrival and Assumed Role

When Wilmarth reaches the Brattleboro station, Noyes recognizes him before he can identify which waiting car belongs to Henry Wentworth Akeley. Noyes is plainly not the bearded, grizzled man in Akeley’s photograph. He is younger and more urban in appearance, fashionably dressed, with a small dark moustache. His cultivated voice carries an unsettling suggestion of familiarity, although Wilmarth cannot initially place it.

Noyes explains that he is a friend of Henry Wentworth Akeley’s and has come down from Townshend in Akeley’s stead. According to him, Akeley has suffered an attack of asthma and cannot travel in the open air, but the illness is not serious enough to alter Wilmarth’s visit. Noyes describes the attacks as debilitating: they bring fever and weakness, leave Akeley whispering and clumsy, and swell his feet and ankles. He adds that the sick man needs to keep sunlight from his sensitive eyes and directs Wilmarth to the study, where the blinds are shut. This detailed account gives the substitution a plausible domestic explanation even as Wilmarth wonders how a supposed hermit has such a readily available friend.

The car itself complicates Noyes’s explanation. Rather than the small, old vehicle Wilmarth expected from Akeley’s descriptions, Noyes drives a large, immaculate recent model bearing Massachusetts plates. Wilmarth takes him for a summer visitor to the Townshend region. Noyes says he has important business elsewhere and cannot stay, then drives north after leaving Wilmarth at the farmhouse. His brief appearance is efficient: he supplies the explanation for Akeley’s absence, delivers the visitor to the house, and withdraws before Wilmarth can learn much about him.

A Guide at the Threshold

Noyes brings Wilmarth to the house at a moment when the visit is already burdened by the account of the siege described in Akeley’s letters. The farmhouse stands beneath Dark Mountain, beyond marshy and sparsely wooded ground. As Wilmarth waits, he sees fresh tracks among the many marks on the road, including prints he recognizes as those of living fungi from Yuggoth. Noyes’s reassuring account of Akeley’s illness and the apparent peace with the visitors therefore sits beside evidence that the strange presence around the property has not simply vanished.

Noyes does not remain to address that tension. After he has gone, Wilmarth notices that the farm is unnaturally silent: there is no sign of the hens, hogs, or cows, and none of Akeley’s dogs is about. The absence of the dogs gives particular force to Wilmarth’s suspicion that they may have been sold after the reported reconciliation with the Outside Beings. These details do not establish what Noyes knows about the farm or its occupants, but they make his role as a reassuring escort feel less secure. He has delivered Wilmarth to a place whose ordinary explanations are already failing.

The Voice Behind the Courtesy

That evening, a voice from the apparatus in the study explains that its speaker’s brain is housed in a cylinder at Round Hill and can see, hear, and speak through electronic devices. The speaker describes journeys across celestial bodies and invites Wilmarth to travel with Henry Wentworth Akeley. In doing so, the speaker says that Noyes has been one of their group for years and may join the journey. The invitation also identifies the voice of Noyes as one Wilmarth should recognize from the phonograph record Akeley sent him.

The recognition changes the meaning of Noyes’s earlier manner. Wilmarth recalls that Noyes’s voice had seemed vaguely familiar at the station; he now identifies him as the human celebrant in the monstrous ritual recorded on the phonograph. The cultivated, welcoming guide and the voice associated with that ritual are the same person. Noyes’s smoothness has not been proof of safety; it has helped carry Wilmarth across the threshold into a network of human collaboration with the visitors.

Later, Wilmarth hears a conversation below. Among the voices are the characteristic buzzings of the Outside Beings, a mechanical speech machine connected to a brain cylinder, an unknown rustic man, and Noyes’s suave Bostonian tones. The surrounding shuffling and clattering suggest that the room contains more beings than the few whose voices Wilmarth can distinguish. Noyes is no longer merely the absent driver who brought him to the house: his voice places him among those participating in the secret meeting.

The House and the Unresolved Identity

When Wilmarth decides he cannot remain until morning, he plans to wake Henry Wentworth Akeley and leave in Akeley’s Ford. Moving through the lower hall, he first follows the sound of a sleeper into the living room. He turns his flashlight on the man’s face, then quickly turns away: the sleeper is Noyes, not the person Wilmarth expected to find. Noyes’s presence there, after he had said he had business elsewhere and driven north, further unsettles the arrangement Wilmarth thought he understood.

In the dark study, Wilmarth finds a brain cylinder bearing Henry Wentworth Akeley’s name, with sight and hearing attachments and a speech machine nearby. He does not connect the machine, and so does not ask the cylinder to speak or learn what it might clarify. Noyes’s presence asleep in another room and the cylinder labeled with Akeley’s name sharpen the question of who, exactly, occupies the farmhouse in the role of host. The evidence establishes Noyes’s alliance, his participation in the gathering, and his unexpected presence in the house; it does not by itself resolve the identity of the whispering figure Wilmarth has met.

Noyes’s narrative function lies in that controlled gap between explanation and revelation. He appears first as a practical, courteous guide whose account makes Akeley’s absence seem manageable. His distinctive voice then links him to the phonograph’s ritual and to the meeting with the Outside Beings, while his presence in the living room makes the farmhouse’s domestic roles harder to trust. Wilmarth receives enough clues to distrust the surface story, but not enough to settle the deeper mystery before he must act.