Wilmarth

Wilmarth is the central human witness to the crisis at the Akeley farmhouse, caught between a promise of cosmic discovery and the conviction that he has been drawn into a trap. His account makes uncertainty part of his character: he tries to explain what he hears, yet cannot dismiss the suspicion that Akeley and the Outside Beings have concealed the truth from him.

The invitation and its promises

A disembodied speaker addresses Wilmarth through electronic vibrators, explaining that his brain is housed in a Brain cylinder while his body rests under treatment inside Round Hill. The speaker presents this condition not as a misfortune but as the means to extraordinary experience, claiming to have visited thirty-seven celestial bodies, including places beyond the galaxy and beyond the cosmos of space and time. The account is the speaker’s, not independently verified knowledge, but it brings the scale of the offer into sharp focus.

The speaker invites Wilmarth to travel with him and Akeley, promising painless transitions and sensations made possible by a wholly mechanized state. He also says that Noyes, who brought Wilmarth to the farmhouse, has been allied with the Outside Beings for years and was one of the voices on the record Akeley sent. The revelation recasts Noyes’s apparently ordinary role as a possible part of a longer, hidden association. The speaker appeals directly to Wilmarth’s reported love of strangeness and folklore, framing the journey as a chance to see what he has previously known only through speculation.

Fear in the farmhouse

After the strange session, Wilmarth lies fully dressed on an upstairs bed, a revolver in one hand and a pocket flashlight in the other. Though awake, he remains inert for a time, listening to the Connecticut clock below and then to what sounds like Akeley snoring. That ordinary domestic sound seems to contradict his growing alarm, but does not settle it. He wonders whether Akeley has been surprised by visitors or whether the apparent calm is masking danger.

Wilmarth’s suspicions gather around details whose meaning he cannot establish. He considers whether Akeley was used as a lure, whether the beings intend to destroy them because they know too much, and whether the acrid coffee he refused was meant to drug him. He also connects his unease to the abrupt change between Akeley’s penultimate and final letters. These are questions and instincts, not confirmed explanations; the gap between what Wilmarth senses and what he can prove drives his response. He resolves that he must speak to Akeley and get them out of the hills, even if he has to supply the will to escape himself.

Flight and contested testimony

Wilmarth later recounts that he woke—or believed he woke—to a sequence of sights and sounds whose status he cannot confidently distinguish from dream. His report culminates in a sudden flight from the farmhouse: he reaches the shed, takes the old Ford, and drives through winding, forest-threatened hills until he reaches Townshend. He anticipates that others will dismiss the pictures, records, and mechanical sounds as deception, perhaps even an elaborate hoax involving Akeley, an express shipment removed at Keene, and Noyes making the frightening record. Yet Noyes remains unidentified and unknown in the neighboring villages, a discrepancy that strengthens rather than resolves Wilmarth’s suspicion.

When Wilmarth’s story brings a sheriff’s posse to the farmhouse, Akeley has disappeared. His dressing-gown, yellow scarf, and foot-bandages are left near his study chair, while the dogs and livestock are gone. Bullet-holes mark the outside and some interior walls, but the cylinders and machines, the evidence Wilmarth says he brought in his valise, and other traces he expected to find are absent. The search yields no decisive confirmation of his account. Wilmarth ends with the conviction that hostile influences and their human emissaries remain in the hills, and with the narrower hope of keeping away from them.