The Whisperer in Darkness Part 2. 6. On Wednesday, I started, as agreed, taking with me a valis full of simple necessities and scientific data,

including the hideous phonograph record, the Kodak prints, and the entire file of Aikley's correspondence.

As requested, I told no one where I was going, for I could see that the matter demanded

utmost privacy, even allowing for its most favorable

favorable turns. The thought of actual mental contact with alien

outside entities was stupefying enough to my trained and somewhat prepared

mind, and this being so, what might one think of its effect on the vast masses of uninformed laymen?

I do not know whether dread or adventurous expectancy was uppermost in me as I changed trains at Boston and began the long westward run out of familiar regions into those I knew less thoroughly.

Waltham, Concord, Eyre, Fitchburg, Athle.

My train reached Greenfield seven minutes late, but the northbound Connecting Express had

been held.

Transferring in haste, I felt a curious breathlessness as the cars

rumbled on through the early afternoon sunlight into territories I'd always read of

but had never before visited. I knew I was entering an altogether older fashioned and more primitive

New England than the mechanized, urbanized, coastal, and southern areas where all my life had been spent, and unspoiled ancestral New England without the

foreigners and factory smoke, billboards and concrete roads.

There would be odd survivors of that continuous native life whose deep roots make it one authentic growth out of the landscape

The continuous native life which keeps alive strange ancient memories and fertilizes the soil for shadowy marvelous and seldom mentioned beliefs.

Now and then I saw the Blue Connecticut River gleaming in the sun and after after leaving Northfield, we crossed it.

A head loomed green and cryptical hills,

and when the conductor came around, I learned that I was at last in Vermont.

He told me to set my watch back an hour since the Northern Hill country will have

...