At that point in my reading of the letter I thought he’d hit me with everything he possibly could, but the next section managed to mine a still deeper source of horror and one most disturbingly close to everyday reality. That he should know, somehow deduce, all about my paths in the hills and my odd daydreams about them and about tunnels I’d fancied underlying them—that was truly staggering. And that he should ask and even warn me about venomous snakes, so that the very letter my mother was carrying unopened when she got her death sting contained a vital reference to it—really, for a moment and more then, I did wonder if I were going insane.
And finally when despite all his jaunty “fancied’s” and “long shot’s” and “hypothetical’s” and English-professor witticisms, he began to talk as if he assumed my imaginary tunnels were real and to refer lightly to a scientific instrument that would prove it…well, by the time I’d finished his letter, I fully expected him to turn up the next minute—turn in sharply at our drive with a flourish of wheels and brakes in his Model T (no, Austin) and draw up in a cloud of dust at our door, the geo-scanner sitting on the front seat beside him like a fat black telescope directed downward!
And yet he’d been so damnably breezy about it all! I simply didn’t know what to think.
(I’ve been down in the basement again, checking things out. This writing stirs me up and makes me frightfully restless. I went out front, and there was a rattlesnake crossing the path in the hot slanting sunlight from the west. More evidence, if any were needed, that what I fear is true. Or do I hope for it? At all events, I killed the brute. The voices vibrate with, “The half-born worlds, the alien orbs, the stirrings in blackness, the hooded forms, the nighted depths, the shimmering vortices, the purple haze…”)
When I’d calmed down somewhat next day, I wrote Wilmarth a long letter, confirming all his hints, confessing my utter astonishment at them, and begging him to explain how he’d made them. I volunteered to assist the interdepartmental project in any way I could and invited him to be my guest when he came west. I gave him a brief history of my life and my sleep anomalies, mentioning my mother’s death. I had a strange feeling of unreality as I posted the letter and waited with mixed feelings of impatience and lingering (and also regathering) incredulity for his reply.
When it came, quite a fat one, it rekindled all my first excitement, though without satisfying all my curiosity by any means. Wilmarth was still inclined to write off his and his colleagues’ deductions about my word choices, dreams, and fantasies as lucky guesses, though he told me enough about the project to keep my curiosity in a fever—especially about its discoveries of obscure linkages between the life of the imagination and archaeological discoveries in far-off places. He seemed particularly interested in the fact that I generally never dreamed and that I slept for very long hours. He overflowed with thanks for my cooperation and my invitation, promising to include me on his itinerary when he drove west. And he had a lot more questions for me.
The next months were strange ones. I lived my normal life, if it can be called that, keeping up my reading and studies and library visits, even writing a little new poetry from time to time. I continued my hill-ramblings, though with a new wariness. Sometimes during them I’d stop and stare at the dry earth beneath my feet, as if expecting to trace the outlines of a trapdoor in it. And sometimes I’d be consumed by sudden, wildly passionate feelings of grief and guilt at the thought of my father locked down there and at my mother’s horrible death too; I’d feel I must somehow go to them at all costs.
And yet at the same time I was living only for Wilmarth’s letters and the moods of wonder, fantastic speculation, and panic—yet almost delicious terror—they evoked in me. He’d write about all sorts of things besides the project—my poetry and new readings and my ideas (he’d play the professorial mentor here from time to time), world events, the weather, astronomy, submarines, his pet cats, faculty politics at Miskatonic, town meetings at Arkham, his lectures, and the local trips he’d make. He made it all extremely interesting. Clearly he was an inveterate letter-writer and under his influence I became one too.
But most of all, of course, I was fascinated by what he’d write from time to time about the project. He told me some very interesting things about the Miskatonic Antarctic expedition of 1930–31, with its five great Dornier airplanes, and last year’s somewhat abortive Australian one in which the psychologist Peaslee and his father, a one-time economist, had been involved. I remembered having read about them both in the newspapers, though the reports there had been curiously fragmentary and unsatisfying, almost as if the press were prejudiced against Miskatonic.
I got the strong impression that Wilmarth would have liked very much to have accompanied both expeditions and was very much put out at not having been able (or allowed) to, though most of the time bravely concealing his disappointment. More than once he referred to his “unfortunate nervousness,” sensitivity to cold, fierce migraine attacks, and “bouts of ill health” which would put him to bed for a few days. And sometimes he’d speak with wistful admiration of the prodigious energy and stalwart constitutions of several of his colleagues, such as Professors Atwood and Pabodie, the geo-scanner’s inventors, Dr. Morgan, who was a big-game hunter, and even the octogenarian Armitage.
There were occasional delays in his replies, which always filled me with anxiety and restlessness, sometimes because of these attacks of his and sometimes because he’d been away longer than he’d expected on some visit. One of the latter was to Providence to confer with colleagues and help investigate the death under mysterious circumstances involving a lightning bolt of Robert Blake, a poet like myself, short-story writer, and painter whose work had provided much material for the project.
It was just after his visit to Providence that with a curious sort of guardedness and reluctance he mentioned visiting another colleague of sorts there (who was in poor health), a Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who had fictionalized (but quite sensationally, Wilmarth warned me) some Arkham scandals and some of Miskatonic’s researches and project activities. These stories had been published (when at all) in cheap pulp magazines, especially in a lurid journal called Weird Tales (you’ll want to tear the cover off, if ever you should dare to buy a copy, he assured me). I recalled having seen the magazine on downtown newsstands in Hollywood and Westwood. I hadn’t found the covers offensive. Most of their nude female figures, by some sentimental woman artist, were decorously sleek pastels and their activities only playfully perverse. Others, by one Senf, were a rather florid folk art quite reminiscent of my father’s floral chiselings.
But after that, of course, I haunted secondhand bookstores, hunting down copies of Weird Tales (mostly) with Lovecraft stories in them, until I’d found a few and read them—one, “The Call of Cthulhu,” no less. It cost me the strangest shudders, let me tell you, to see that name again, spelled out in cheapest print, under such very outlandish circumstances. Truly, my sense of reality was set all askew and if the tale that Lovecraft told with a strange dignity and power was anything like the truth, then Cthulhu was real, an other-dimensional extraterrestrial monster dreaming in an insane, Pacific-sunken metropolis which sent out mental messages (and—who knows? —tunnels) to the world at large. In another tale, “The Whisperer in Darkness,” Albert N. Wilmarth was a leading character, and that Akeley too he’d mentioned.