![]() It was not Brown's, but seemed to be that of a man of greater cultivation. Unlike most of the overheard forest voices, the substance of the record was quasi-ritualistic, and included one palpably human voice which Akeley had never been able to place. It was noteworthy, though, that he never again heard voices at that particular spot. Former experience had told him that May Eve-the hideous Sabbat-night of underground European legend-would probably be more fruitful than any other date, and he was not disappointed. ![]() The place had always been unusually plagued with strange voices, this being the reason he had brought the phonograph, dictaphone, and blank in expectation of results. on the 1st of May, 1915, near the closed mouth of a cave where the wooded west slope of Dark Mountain rises out of Lee's swamp. This record, he had said, was obtained about 1 A.M. He would be going to California pretty soon to live with his son, though it was hard to leave a place where all one's memories and ancestral feelings centered.īefore trying the record on the commercial machine which I borrowed from the college administration building I carefully went over all the explanatory matter in Akeley's various letters. It did not pay, he repeated again and again, to know too much unless one were very remote from those silent and problematical hills. He confessed in an accompanying note that he was beginning to be afraid of those roads, and that he would not even go into Townshend for supplies now except in broad daylight. So the record was shipped from Brattleboro, whither Akeley drove in his Ford car along the lonely Vermont back roads. It had been curiously near some of Brown's own footprints-footprints that faced toward it. ![]() ![]() Brown's voice, he felt convinced, was one of those he had overheard on a certain occasion in a very terrible conversation and he had once found a footprint or clawprint near Brown's house which might possess the most ominous significance. Most of all he suspected the surly farmer Walter Brown, who lived alone on a run-down hillside place near the deep woods, and who was often seen loafing around corners in Brattleboro, Bellows Falls, Newfane, and South Londonderry in the most inexplicable and seemingly unmotivated way. He had begun to feel an increased sense of espionage, aggravated by the loss of some of our letters and said much about the insidious deeds of certain men whom he considered tools and agents of the hidden beings. Toward the end of June the phonograph record came-shipped from Brattleboro, since Akeley was unwilling to trust conditions on the branch line north of there. 40531 The Whisperer in Darkness - Chapter 3 H.P. ![]()
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