Wilmarth visits Akeley’s farmhouse

Wilmarth’s visit to Henry Wentworth Akeley’s farmhouse begins as a journey toward an expected explanation and becomes an encounter with evidence that exceeds even the extraordinary claims in their correspondence. A newly reassuring letter draws Wilmarth into the Vermont hills; there, unfamiliar tracks, Akeley’s altered appearance, and a voice speaking through machinery transform his uncertainty into a direct confrontation with the Outside Beings’ hidden presence and their human allies.

The Reversal in the Correspondence

On Saturday, September 8, 1928, a neatly typed letter reached Wilmarth, apparently crossing the alarmed reply he had sent to Henry Wentworth Akeley. The new message, postmarked Bellows Falls and dated September 6 in Townshend, overturned the fear that had governed their previous exchanges. Henry Wentworth Akeley did not retract the existence of the strange phenomena; instead, he claimed that his terror had caused him to misread their purpose. A messenger from the Outside Beings, he wrote, had spoken with him in the farmhouse, and the beings now sought peaceful contact and greater intellectual understanding rather than human enslavement or degradation.

The letter supplied a new account of the danger. Henry Wentworth Akeley alleged that a malign human cult, linked in his telling to Hastur and the Yellow Sign, pursued the aliens, and that cult emissaries—not the Outside Beings—had stolen many of the missing letters. He presented the beings’ precautions as protection against those aggressors, and himself as their chosen interpreter on Earth. Their desired exchange of knowledge, he argued, would allow them to understand humanity and help both sides establish a workable coexistence as human inventions made secret outposts harder to maintain. This was a sweeping reversal: the former hermit who had described a siege now claimed that the danger had passed and that the beings had offered him an unprecedented intellectual opportunity.

Henry Wentworth Akeley invited Wilmarth to visit, bring the letters, phonograph record, and Kodak prints, and help assemble the evidence. He said that the beings’ immediate abode was Yuggoth, a dim, undiscovered planet beyond Neptune, though he described that world as only a stepping-stone to immensities beyond human imagination. Wilmarth was relieved, but not entirely reassured. He considered whether Henry Wentworth Akeley’s new confidence was as sound as his earlier terror, yet curiosity gradually overcame doubt. The invitation promised access not merely to an explanation of the farmhouse’s ordeal but to a wider account of cosmic knowledge.

The Journey and Arrival

Wilmarth telegraphed that he would arrive in Brattleboro on Wednesday, September 12. He altered the proposed train arrangements so he would not have to reach the region late at night: his route took him through Boston and Greenfield, arriving in Brattleboro at 1:08 p.m. Henry Wentworth Akeley approved the plan by wire, reminding him to bring the record, letters, and prints and to keep the destination secret. The practical care of the arrangements sat uneasily beside the promise of revelations beyond ordinary human experience.

At the station, however, Henry Wentworth Akeley was not there to meet him. Instead, a fashionably dressed younger man with a small dark moustache introduced himself as Noyes, a friend who had come from Townshend in Henry Wentworth Akeley’s place. Noyes explained that Henry Wentworth Akeley had suffered an attack of asthma but remained eager to receive his visitor. He drove Wilmarth in a large, immaculate modern car, unlike the small, old vehicle Wilmarth had expected from Henry Wentworth Akeley’s descriptions. Noyes’s cultivated voice seemed vaguely familiar, though Wilmarth could not yet identify why; his casual manner also left Wilmarth unsure how much he knew about the research that had brought them together.

Tracks on the Road

The approach to the farmhouse brought an abrupt check to the reassurance of the letter. On the dusty road, where many overlapping tracks marked the way toward and away from the house, Wilmarth recognized at least three impressions as the claw-marks he had studied in Henry Wentworth Akeley’s Kodak photographs. Their direction and shape had already seemed unlike the traces of earthly creatures. Now he saw what he took to be fresh marks of living fungi from Yuggoth, near the path joining the road to the farmhouse.

The sight revived the fear that the letter had temporarily quieted. Henry Wentworth Akeley had claimed to have made peace with the beings, so their presence was not, by itself, proof that his account was false. But the marks were physical evidence in a landscape Wilmarth associated with the earlier siege, and he had to master his immediate terror before Noyes approached. Noyes again described Henry Wentworth Akeley’s illness: fever, weakness, a whispering voice, difficulty moving, and swollen feet and ankles. He directed Wilmarth to the study, whose blinds were shut because Henry Wentworth Akeley’s eyes were sensitive to sunlight.

Henry Wentworth Akeley in the Study

The man Wilmarth found in the study looked profoundly ill. He sat in a dressing-gown with a vivid yellow scarf or hood wrapped around his head and neck; his lean hands rested limply in his lap, and his face seemed rigid and unwinking. Wilmarth suspected that the condition involved more than asthma and feared that the strain of Henry Wentworth Akeley’s experiences had left him near collapse. The voice that greeted him was a hacking whisper, polished in diction and difficult to reconcile with the outward appearance of a sick, weakened host.

Henry Wentworth Akeley nevertheless spoke as though their visit were the beginning of a planned exchange. He asked after the file, photographs, and phonograph record, which Noyes had placed in the hall, and directed Wilmarth to set them beside the phonograph in the study. He said that the two could discuss the material more fully the next day, when he expected to feel better. His helplessness and his insistence on the immense importance of what lay ahead existed side by side: he could not rise to receive his guest, but he could present the meeting as a threshold to knowledge beyond human science and philosophy.

The Brain Cylinders and the Mechanical Voice

The study’s equipment gave physical form to the extraordinary account. Henry Wentworth Akeley described how a brain could be removed while the body’s organic residue was kept alive, then preserved in fluid inside an airtight metal cylinder made from material mined on Yuggoth. Electrodes connected the brain to instruments that reproduced sight, hearing, and speech. Carried intact through space, such a brain could be connected to suitable devices on other worlds and given a bodiless but sensory and articulate existence there.

At a gesture from one of Henry Wentworth Akeley’s otherwise motionless hands, Wilmarth saw more than a dozen cylinders on a high shelf. Each was about a foot high, with three sockets arranged across its convex front; one was connected to two unusual machines. Other instruments, cords, and plugs stood nearby. Henry Wentworth Akeley described four kinds of devices, corresponding to the three faculties of sight, hearing, and speech, and said the cylinders held three human brains, six fungoid beings, two beings from Neptune, and other entities from a dark star beyond the galaxy. He added that the outpost inside Round Hill contained further cylinders and specialized machines for communicating with beings whose senses differed from human ones.

One linked machine began to speak in a loud, metallic, mechanically precise voice. The speaker identified himself as human, said his brain was in a cylinder at Round Hill about a mile and a half away, and explained that the apparatus let him see, hear, and speak in the study. He claimed to have visited thirty-seven celestial bodies—including eight beyond the galaxy and two beyond the space-time cosmos—without harm, and described the brain as virtually immortal while maintained by the apparatus and preserving fluid. He was due to travel again with Henry Wentworth Akeley and invited Wilmarth to join them. The voice also explained the familiarity Wilmarth had noticed in Noyes: Noyes had long been allied with the Outside Beings, and his voice was one Wilmarth had heard on the phonograph record. The visit thus opened not with the expected reunion between two correspondents, but with a machine-mediated witness who made the alien alliance—and its means of crossing cosmic distances—impossible to dismiss as mere theory.