He did not comment on or even seem to notice my twisted right foot (something I hadn’t mentioned in my letters, though he may have recalled it from six years back) or imply its or my limp’s existence in any way, as by insisting on carrying the valise also. That warmed me toward him.
And before going into the house with me, he paused to praise its unusual architecture (another thing I hadn’t told him about) and seemed genuinely impressed when I admitted that my father had built it by himself. (I’d feared he’d find it overly eccentric and also question whether someone could work with his hands and be a gentleman.) He also commented favorably on my father’s stone carvings wherever they turned up and insisted on pausing to study them, whipping out his notebook to make some quick jottings. Nothing would do, but I must take him on a full tour of the house before he’d consent to rest or take refreshments. I left his valise in the bedroom I’d assigned him (my parents’, of course), but he kept lugging the black geo-scanner around with him. It was an odd case, taller than it was wide or long, and it had three adjustable stubby legs, so that it could be set up vertically anywhere.
Emboldened by his approval of my father’s carvings, I told him about Simon Rodia and the strangely beautiful towers he was building in Watts, whereupon the notebook came out again and there were more jottings. He seemed particularly impressed by the marine quality I found in Rodia’s work.
Down in the basement (he had to go there too) he was very much struck by my father’s floor-set “Gate of Dreams” stone carving and studied it longer than any of the others. (I’d been feeling embarrassed about its bold motto and odd placement.) Finally he indicated the octopus eyes staring over the castle and observed, “Cutlu, perchance?”
It was the first reference of any sort to the research project that either of us had made since our meeting and it shook me strangely, but he appeared not to notice and continued with, “You know, Mr. Fischer, I’m tempted to get a reading with Atwood and Pabodie’s infernal black box right here. Would you object?”
I told him certainly not and to go right ahead, but warned him there was only solid rock under the house (I had told him about my father’s dowsing and even had mentioned Harley Warren, whom it turned out Wilmarth had heard of through a Randolph Carter).
He nodded, but said, “I’ll take a shot at it nonetheless. We must start somewhere, you know,” and he proceeded to set up the geo-scanner carefully so it was standing vertically on its three stubby legs right in the middle of the carving. He took off his shoes first so as not to risk damaging the rather fine stonework.
Then he opened the top of the geo-scanner. I glimpsed two dials and a large eyepiece. He knelt and applied his eye to it, drawing out a black hood and draping it over his head, very much like an old-fashioned photographer focusing for a picture. “Pardon me, but the indications I must look for are difficult to see,” he said muffledly. “Hello, what’s this?”
There was a longish pause during which nothing happened except his shoulders shifted a bit and there were a few faint clicks. Then he emerged from under the hood, tucked it back in the black box, closed the latter, and began to put on and relace his shoes.
“The scanner’s gone crankish,” he explained in answer to my inquiry, “and is seeing ghost vacuities. But not to worry—it only needs new warm-up cells, I fancy, which I have with me, and will be right as rain for tomorrow’s expedition! That is, if—?” He rolled his eyes up at me in smiling inquiry.
“Of course I’ll be able to show you my pet trails in the hills,” I assured him. “In fact, I’m bursting to.”
“Capital!” he said heartily.
But as we left the basement, its rock floor rang out a bit hollowly, it sounded to me, under his high-laced leather-soled and -heeled shoes (I was wearing sneakers).
It was getting dark, so I started dinner after giving him some iced tea, which he took with lots of lemon and sugar. I cooked eggs and small beefsteaks, figuring from his haggard looks he needed the most restorative sort of food. I also built a fire in the big fireplace against the almost invariable chill of evening.
As we ate by its dancing, crackling flames, he regaled me with brief impressions of his trip west—the cold, primeval pine woods of southern New Jersey with their somberly clad inhabitants speaking an almost Elizabethan English; the very narrow dark roads of West Virginia; the freezing waters of the Ohio flooding unruffled, silent, battleship gray, and ineffably menacing under lowering skies; the profound silence of Mammoth Cave; the southern Midwest with its Depression-spawned, but already legendary, bank robbers; the nervous Creole charms of New Orleans’s restored French Quarter; the lonely, incredibly long stretches of road in Texas and Arizona that made one believe one was seeing infinity; the great, long, blue, mystery-freighted Pacific rollers (“so different from the Atlantic’s choppier, shorter-spaced waves”) which he’d watched with George Goodenough Akeley, who’d turned out to be a very solid chap and knowing more about his father’s frightening Vermont researches than Wilmarth had expected.
When I mentioned finding The Shadow Over Innsmouth he nodded and murmured, “The original of its youthful hero has disappeared and his cousin from the Canton asylum. Down to Y’ha-nthlei? Who knows?” But when I remembered his accumulated mail he merely nodded his thanks, wincing a little, as though reluctant to face it. He really did look shockingly tired.
When we’d finished dinner, however, and he’d taken his black coffee (also with lots of sugar) and the fire was dancing flickeringly, both yellow and blue now, he turned to me with a little, venturesomely friendly smile and a big, wonderingly wide lifting of his eyebrows, and said quietly, “And now you’ll quite rightly be expecting me to tell you, my dear Fischer, all the things about the project that I’ve been hesitant to write, the answers I’ve been reluctant to give to your cogent questions, the revelations I’ve been putting off making until we should meet in person. Really, you have been very patient, and I thank you.”
Then he shook his head thoughtfully, his eyes growing distant, as he slowly and rather sinuously and somehow unwillingly shrugged his shoulders, which paradoxically were both frail and wide, and grimaced slightly, as if tasting something strangely bitter, and said even more quietly, “if only I had more to tell you that’s been definitely proved. Somehow we always stop just short of that. Oh, the artifacts are real enough and certain—the Innsmouth jewelry, the Antarctic soapstones, Blake’s Shining Trapezohedron, though that’s lost in Narragansett Bay, the spiky baluster knob Walter Gilman brought back from his witchy dreamland (or the nontemporal fourth dimension, if you prefer), even the unknown elements, meteoric and otherwise, which defy all analysis, even the new magneto-optic probe which has given us virginium and alabamine. And it’s almost equally certain that all, or almost all, those weird extraterrestrial and extra-cosmic creatures have existed—that’s why I wanted you to read the Lovecraft stories, despite their lurid extravagances, so you’d have some picture of the entities that I’d be talking to you about. Except that they and the evidence for them do have a maddening way of vanishing upon extinction and from all records—Wilbur Whateley’s mangled remains, his brother’s vast invisible cadaver, the Plutonian old Akeley killed and couldn’t photograph, the June 1882 meteor itself which struck Nahum Gardner’s farm and which set old Armitage (young then) studying the Necronomicon (the start of everything at Miskatonic) and which Atwood’s father saw with his own eyes and tried to analyze, or what Danforth saw down in Antarctica when he looked back at the horrible higher mountains beyond the Mountains of Madness—he’s got amnesia for that now that he has regained his sanity…all, all gone!