It was all fearfully unsettling and confounding. If I hadn’t attended Miskatonic myself and lived in Arkham, I’d have thought surely they were a writer’s projections.
As you can imagine, I continued to haunt the dusty bookstores and I bombarded Wilmarth with frantic questions. His replies were of a most pacifying and temporizing sort. Yes, he’d been afraid of my getting too excited, but hadn’t been able to resist telling me about the stories. Lovecraft often laid on things very thickly indeed. I’d understand everything much better when we could really talk together and he could explain in person. Really, Lovecraft had an extremely powerful imagination and sometimes it got out of hand. No, Miskatonic had never tried to suppress the stories or take legal action, for fear of even less desirable publicity—and because the project members thought the stories might be a good preparation for the world if some of their more frightening hypotheses were verified. Really, Lovecraft was a very charming and well-intentioned person, but sometimes he went too far. And so on and so on.
Really, I don’t think I could have contained myself except that, it now being 1937, Wilmarth sent me word that he was at last driving west. The Austin had been given a thorough overhaul and was “packed to the gills” with the geo-scanner, endless books and papers, and other instruments and materials, including a drug Morgan had just refined, “which induces dreaming and may, conceivably, he says, facilitate clairvoyance and clairaudience. It might make even you dream—should you consent to ingest an experimental dose.”
While he was gone from 118 Saltonstall his rooms would be occupied and his cats, including his beloved Blackfellow, cared for by a close friend named Danforth, who’d spent the last five years in a mental hospital recovering from his ghastly Antarctic experience at the Mountains of Madness.
Wilmarth hated to leave at this time, he wrote, in particular he was worried about Lovecraft’s failing health, but nevertheless he was on his way!
The next weeks (which dragged out to two months) were a time of particular tension, anxiety, and anticipatory excitement for me. Wilmarth had many more people and places to visit and investigations to make (including readings with the geo-scanner) than I’d ever imagined. Now he sent mostly postcards, some of them scenic, but they came thick and fast (except for a couple of worrisome hiatuses) and with his minuscule handwriting he got so much on them (even the scenic ones) that at times I almost felt I was with him on his trip, worrying about the innards of his Austin, which he called the Tin Hind after Sir Francis Drake’s golden one. I on my part had only a few addresses he’d listed for me where I could write him in advance—Baltimore; Winchester, Virginia; Bowling Green, Kentucky; Memphis; Carlsbad, New Mexico; Tucson; and San Diego.
First he had to stop in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, with its quaintly backward farm communities, to investigate some possibly pre-Colonial ruins and hunt for a rumored cave, using the geo-scanner. Next, after Baltimore, there were extensive limestone caverns to check out in both Virginias. He crossed the Appalachians Winchester to Clarksburg, a stretch with enough sharp turns to satisfy even him. Approaching Louisville, the Tin Hind was almost swallowed up in the Great Ohio Flood (which preoccupied the radio news for days; I hung over my superheterodyne set) and he was unable to visit a new correspondent of Lovecraft’s there. Then there was more work for the geo-scanner near Mammoth Cave. In fact, caves seemed to dominate his journey, for after a side trip to New Orleans to confer with some occult scholar of French extraction, there were the Carlsbad Caverns and nearby but less wellknown subterranean vacuities. I wondered more and more about my tunnels.
The Tin Hind held up very well, except she blew out a piston head crossing Texas (“I held her at high speed a little too long”) and he lost three days getting her mended.
Meanwhile, I was finding and reading new Lovecraft stories. One, which turned up in a secondhand but quite recent science fiction pulp, fictionalized the Australian expedition most impressively—especially the dreams old Peaslee had that led to it. In them, he’d exchanged personalities with a cone-shaped monster and was forever wandering through long stone passageways haunted by invisible whistlers. It reminded me so much of my nightmares in which I’d done the same thing with a winged worm that buzzed, that I airmailed a rather desperate letter to Tucson, telling Wilmarth all about it. I got a reply from San Diego, full of reassurances and more temporizings, and referring to old Akeley’s son and some sea caverns they were looking into, and (at last!) setting a date (it would be soon!) for his arrival.
The day before that last, I made a rare find in my favorite Hollywood hunting-ground. It was a little, strikingly illustrated book by Lovecraft called The Shadow Over Innsmouth and issued by Visionary Press, whoever they were. I was up half the night reading it. The narrator found some sinister, scaly human beings living in a deep submarine city off New England, realized he was himself turning into one of them, and at the end had decided (for better or worse) to dive down and join them. It made me think of crazy fantasies I’d had of somehow going down into the earth beneath the Hollywood Hills and rescuing or joining my dead father.
Meanwhile mail addressed to Wilmarth care of me had begun to arrive. He’d asked my permission to include my address on the itinerary he’d sent other correspondents. There were letters and cards from (by their postmarks) Arkham and places along his route, some from abroad (mostly England and Europe, but one from Argentina), and a small package from New Orleans. The return address on most of them was his own—118 Saltonstall, so he’d eventually get them even if he missed them along his route. (He’d asked me to do the same with my own notes.) The effect was odd, as though Wilmarth were the author of everything—it almost rearoused my first suspicions of him and the project. (One letter, though among the last to come, a thick one bearing extravagantly a six-cent airmail stamp and a ten-cent special delivery, had been addressed to George Goodenough Akeley, 176 Pleasant St., San Diego, Cal., and then forwarded care of my own address in the upper left-hand corner.)
Late the next afternoon (Sunday, April 14—the eve of my twenty-fifth birthday, as it happened) Wilmarth arrived very much as I’d imagined it occurring when I’d finished reading his first letter, except the Tin Hind was even smaller than I’d pictured—and enameled a bright blue, though now most dusty. There was an odd black case on the seat beside him, though there were a lot of other things on it too—maps, mostly.
He greeted me very warmly and began to talk a blue streak almost at once, with many a jest and frequent little laughs.
The thing that really shocked me was that although I knew he was only in his thirties, his hair was white and the haunted (or hunted) look I’d remembered was monstrously intensified. And he was extremely nervous—at first he couldn’t stay still a moment. It wasn’t long before I became certain of something I’d never once suspected before—that his breeziness and jauntiness, his jokes and laughs, were a mask for fear, no, for sheer terror, that otherwise might have mastered him entirely.
His actual first words were, “Mr. Fischer, I presume? So glad to meet you in the flesh! —and share your most salubrious sunlight. I look as if I need it, do I not? —a horrid sight! This landscape hath a distinctly cavish, tunnelly aspect—I’m getting to be an old hand at making such geological judgments. Danforth writes that Blackfellow has quite recovered from his indisposition. But Lovecraft is in the hospital—I do not like it. Did you observe last night’s brilliant conjunction? —I like your clear, clear skies. No, I will carry the geo-scanner (yes, it is that); it’s somewhat crankish. But you might take the small valise. Really, so very glad!”