The Whisperer in Darkness by H.P. Lovecraft

Chapter 1

Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end.

To say that a mental shock was the cause of what I inferred, that last straw which sent me

racing out of the lonely, achly farmhouse, and through the wild domed hills of Vermont in a

commandeered motor at night, is to ignore the plainest facts of my final experience.

Notwithstanding the deep extent to which I shared the information

and speculations of Henry Akeley, the things I saw and heard, and the admitted

vividness of the impression produced on me by these things, I cannot prove even now whether

I was right or wrong in my hideous inference.

For after all, Aikley's disappearance establishes nothing. People found nothing amiss in his house

despite the bullet marks on the outside and inside. It was just as though he had walked out casually for a

ramble in the hills and failed to return. There was not even a sign that a guest had been there,

or that those horrible cylinders and machines had been stored in the study, that he had mortally

feared the crowded green hills and endless trickle of brooks

among which he had been born and reared means nothing at all either. For thousands are subject

to just such morbid fears. Ecentricity, moreover, could easily account for his strange acts and apprehensions toward the last.

The whole matter began, so far as I am concerned, with the historic and unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3rd, 1927.

I was then, as now, an instructor of literature at Miss Cotonic University

in Arkham, Massachusetts, and an enthusiastic amateur student of New England folklore. Shortly after the

flood, amidst the varied reports of hardship, suffering, and organized relief which filled the press,

there appeared certain odd stories of things found floating in some of the swollen rivers,

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