Terrors (38 page)

Reaching the town of Passumpsic,
Akeley, who had never previously traveled farther east than Indianapolis, Indiana, told Ezra to proceed 800 yards, at which point the car was to be halted. Ezra complied. At the appointed spot, Akeley left the car and opened a gate in the wooden fence fronting the highway.

Noyes pulled the wagon from the highway through the gate and found himself on a narrow track that had once been a small dirt
road, long since abandoned and overgrown.

This track led away from the highway and into hilly farm country, years before abandoned by the poor farmers of the region, that lay between Passumpsic and Lyndonville.

Finally, having rounded an ancient dome-topped protuberance that stood between the station wagon and any possible visual surveillance from the blacktop highway or even the overgrown dirt
road, the Nash halted, unable to continue. The vegetation hereabouts was of a peculiar nature. While most of the region consisted of thin, played-out soil whose poor fertility was barely adequate to sustain a covering of tall grasses and undersized, gnarly-trunked trees, in the small area set off by the dome-topped hill the growth was thick, lush and luxuriant.

However, there was a peculiar quality
to the vegetation, a characteristic which even the most learned botanist would have been hard pressed to identify, and yet which was undeniably present. It was as if the vegetation were
too
vibrantly alive, as if it sucked greedily at the earth for nourishment and by so doing robbed the countryside for a mile or more in every direction of sustenance.

Through an incongruously luxuriant copse of
leafy trees a small building could be seen, clearly a shack of many years’ age and equally clearly of long abandonment. The door hung angularly from a single rusted hinge, the windows were cracked or missing altogether and spiders had filled the empty frames with their own geometric handiwork. The paint, if ever the building had known the touch of a painter’s brush, had long since flaked away and
been blown to oblivion by vagrant tempests, and the bare wood beneath had been cracked by scores of winters and bleached by as many summers’ suns.

Elizabeth Akeley looked once at the ramshackle structure, nodded to herself and set out slowly to walk to it. Vernon Whiteside placed himself at her elbow and Ezra Noyes set a pace a short stride behind the others, but Akeley halted at once, turned
and gestured silently but decisively to them both to remain behind. She then
resumed her progress through the copse.

Whiteside watched Elizabeth Akeley proceeding slowly but with apparently complete self-possession through the wooded area. She halted just outside the shack, leaned forward and slightly to one side as if peering through a cobwebbed window frame, then proceeded again. She tugged
at the door, managed to drag it open with a squeal of rusted metal and protesting wood and disappeared inside the shack.

“Are you just going to let her go like that?” Ezra Noyes demanded of Whiteside. “How do you know who’s in there? What if it’s a Beta Reticulan? What if it’s a Moth Man? What if there’s a whole bunch of aliens in there? They might have a tunnel from the shack to their saucer.
The whole thing might be a front. Shouldn’t we go after her?”

Whiteside shook his head. “Mother Akeley issued clear instructions, Ezra. We are to wait here.” He reached inside his jacket and unobtrusively flicked on the concealed microcassette recorder. When he pulled his hand from his pocket be brought with it the earphone. He adjusted it carefully in his ear.

“Oh, I didn’t know you were deaf,”
Noyes said.

“Just a little,” Whiteside replied.

“Well, what are we going to do?” Ezra asked him.

“I shall wait for the Radiant Mother,” Whiteside told him.

“There is nothing to fear. Have faith in the Spiritual Light, little brother, and your footsteps will be illuminated.”

“Oh.” Ezra made a sour face and climbed onto the roof of Ambassador. He seated himself there cross-legged to watch for
any evidence of activity at the shack.

Vernon Whiteside also kept watch on the shack, but chiefly he was listening to the voices transmitted by the cordless microphone concealed behind Elizabeth Akeley’s lapel. Excerpts from the transcript later made of these transmissions follow.

Microcassette, August 8, 1979

Voice #5 (Elizabeth Akeley): Hello? Hello? Is there –

Voice #6 (Unidentified voice;
oddly metallic intonation; accent similar to male New England twang present in San Diego trance tapes): Come in, come in, don’t be afraid.

Voice #5: It’s so dark in here.

Voice #6: I’m sorry. Move carefully. You are perfectly safe but there is
some delicate apparatus set up.

(Sounds of movement, feet shuffling, breathing, a certain vague
buzzing
sound. Creak as of a person sitting in an old
wooden rocking chair.)

Voice #5: I can hardly see. Where are you?

Voice #6: The cells are very sensitive. My friends are not here. You are not Albert Wilmarth.

Voice #5: No, I don’t even –

Voice #6: (Interrupting) Oh, my God! Of course not.

It’s been so—tell me, what year is this?

Voice #5: 1979.

Voice #6: Poor Albert. Poor Albert. He could have come along. But of course he—what did you
say your name was, young woman?

Voice #5: Akeley. Elizabeth Akeley.

(Silence. Buzzing sound. A certain unsettling sound as of wings rustling, but wings larger than those of any creature known to be native to Vermont.)

Voice #6: Do not taunt me, young woman!

Voice #5: Taunt you? Taunt you?

Voice #6: Do you know who I
am?
Does the name Henry Wentworth Akeley mean nothing to you?

(Pause…. buzzing….
rustling)

Voice #5: Yes! Yes! Oh, oh, this is incredible! This is wonderful! It means—Yes, my grandfather spoke of you. If you’re really—My grandfather was George Akeley. He—we –

Voice #6: (Interrupting) Then I am your great-grandfather, Miss Akeley. I regret that I cannot offer you my hand. George Akeley was my son. Tell me, is he still alive?

Voice #5: No, he—he died. He died in 1971, eight
years ago. I was a little girl, but I remember him speaking of his father in Vermont. He said you disappeared mysteriously. But he always expected to hear from you again. He even founded a church. The Spiritual Light Brotherhood. He never lost faith.

I have continued his work. Waiting for word from—beyond. That’s why I came when I—when I started receiving messages.

Voice #6: Thank you. Thank
you, Elizabeth. Perhaps I should not have stayed away so long, but the vistas, my child, the vistas! How old did you say you were?

Voice #5: Why—why—18. Almost 19.

(Buzzing)

Voice #6: You have followed my directions, Elizabeth? You are alone? Yes? Good. The cells are very sensitive. I can see you, even in this darkness, even if you cannot see me. Elizabeth, I have been gone from Earth for half
a century, yet I am no older than the day I—departed—in the year 1928. The sights I have seen, the dimensions and the galaxies I have visited! Not alone, my child. Of course not alone. Those ones who took me—ah, child! Human flesh is too weak, too fragile to travel beyond the earth.

Voice #5: But there are spacesuits. Rockets. Capsules. Oh, I suppose that was after your time. But we’ve visited
the moon. We’ve sent instruments to Venus and Mars and the moons of Jupiter.

Voice #6: And what you know is what Columbus might have learned of the New World, by paddling a rowboat around the port of Cadiz! Those ones who took me, those Old Ones! They can fly between the worlds on their great ribbed wings! They can span the very aether of space as a dragonfly flits across the surface of a pond!
They are the greatest scientists, the greatest naturalists, the greatest anthropologists, the greatest explorers in the universe! Those whom they select to accompany them, if they cannot survive the ultimate vacuum of space, the Old Ones discard their bodies and seal their brains in metal canisters and carry them from world to world, from star to burning, glittering star!

(Buzzing, loud sound
of rustling)

Voice #5: Then—you have been to other worlds? Other planets, other physical worlds. Not other planes of spiritual existence. Our congregants believe –

Voice #6: (Interrupting) Your congregants doubtlessly believe poppycock. Yes, I have been to other worlds. I have seen all the planets of the solar system, from little, sterile Mercury to giant, distant Yuggoth.

Voice #5: Distant
Yu—Yuggoth?

Voice #6: Yes, yes. I suppose those fool astronomers have yet to find it, but it is the gem and the glory of the solar system, glowing with its
own ruby-red glare. It revolves in its own orbit, turned ninety degrees from the plane of the ecliptic. No wonder they’ve never seen it. They don’t know where to look. Yet it perturbs the paths of Neptune and Pluto. That ought to be clue enough!
Yuggoth is very nearly a sun. It possesses its own corps of worldlets, Nithon, Zaman, the miniature twins Thog and Thok! And there is life there! There is the Ghooric Zone where bloated shoggoths splash and spawn!

Voice #5: I can’t—I can’t believe all this! My own great—grandpa! Planets and beasts …

Voice #6: Yuggoth was merely the beginning for me. Those Ones carried me far away from the sun.
I have seen the worlds that circle Arcturus and Centaurus, Wolf and Barnard’s Star and Beta Reticuli. I have seen creatures whose physical embodiment would send a sane man mad into screaming nightmares of horror that never ends and whose minds and souls would put to shame the proudest achievements of Einstein and Schopenhauer, Confucius and Plato, the Enlightened One and the Anointed One! And I
have known love, child, love such as no earth-bound mortal has ever known.

Voice #5: Lo—love, great-grandfather?

(Sound of buzzing, loud and agitated rustling of wings)

Voice #6: You know about love, surely, Elizabeth. Doesn’t your church preach a gospel of love? In fifty-seven years on this planet I never came across a church that didn’t claim that. And have you known love? A girl your age,
surely you’ve known the feeling by now.

Voice #5: Yes, great-grandfather.

Voice #6: Is it merely a physical attraction, Elizabeth? Do you believe that souls can love? Or do you believe in such things as souls? Can
minds
love one another?

Voice #5: All three. All three of those.

Voice #6: Good. Yes, all three. And when two beings love with their minds and their souls, they yearn also for bodies
with which to express their love. Hence the physical manifestation of love. (Pause) Excuse me, child. In a way I suppose I’m nothing but an old man rambling on about abstractions. You have a young man, have you?

Voice #5: Yes.

Voice #6: I would like to meet him. I would like very much to meet him, my child.

Voice #5: Great-grandfather. May I tell the people about you?

Voice #6: No, Elizabeth.
The time is not ripe.

Voice #5: But this is the most important event since—since – (Pause) Contact with other beings, with other races, not of the earth. Proof that there is intelligent life throughout the universe. Proof of visits between the worlds and between the galaxies.

Voice #6: All in time, child. Now I am tired. Please go now. Will you visit me again?

Voice #5: Of course. Of course.

Elizabeth Akeley emerged from the shack, took one step and staggered.

At the far side of the copse of trees, Vernon Whiteside and Ezra Noyes watched. They saw Elizabeth. Ezra scrambled from the roof of the station wagon. Whiteside started forward, prepared to assist Mother Akeley.

But she had merely been blinded, for the moment, by the bright sunlight of a Vermont August. Whiteside and Ezra
Noyes saw her returning through the glade. Once or twice she stopped and leaned against a strangely spongy tree. Each time she started again, to all appearances further debilitated rather than restored.

She reached the station wagon and leaned against its drab metalwork. Whiteside said, “Are you all right, Radiant Mother?”

She managed a wan smile. “Thank you, Vernon. Yes, I’m all right. Thank
you.”

Ezra Noyes was beside himself.

“Who was in there? What was going on? Were there really aliens in that shack? Can I go? Oh, darn it, darn it!” He pounded one fist into the palm of his other hand. “I should never have left home without my camera! Kenneth Arnold himself said that back in ’47. It’s the prime directive of all Ufologists and I went off without one, me of all people. Oh, darn,
darn, darn!”

Vernon Whiteside said, “Radiant Mother, do you wish to leave now? May I visit the shack first?”

“Please, Vernon, don’t. I asked him”—She drew Whiteside away
from Noyes—“I asked him if I could reveal this to the world and he said, not yet.”

“I monitored the tape, Reverend Mother.”

“Yes.”

“What does it mean, Reverend Mother?”

She passed her hand across her face, tugging soft bangs
across her eyes to block out the bright sunlight. “I feel faint. Vernon. Ask Ezra to drive us back to Dark Mountain, would you?”

He helped her climb into the station wagon and signaled to Ezra. “Mother Akeley is fatigued. She must be taken back at once.”

Ezra sighed and started the Ambassador’s straight-six engine.

Elizabeth Akeley telephoned Marc Feinman from the Noyes house in Dark Mountain.
A message had been transmitted surreptitiously by agent Whiteside in time for monitoring arrangements to be made. Neither Akeley nor Feinman was aware of the monitoring system.

Excerpts from the call follow:

August 9, 1979 (Outgoing)

Voice #2 (Sara Feinman): Yes.

Voice #5 (Elizabeth Akeley): Mrs. Feinman?

Voice #2: Yes, who is this?

Voice #5: Mrs. Feinman, this is Elizabeth Akeley speaking.
I’m a friend of Marc’s from San Diego. Is Marc there, please?

Voice #2: I know all about Marc’s friend, Elizabeth darling. Don’t you know Marc’s father is in the hospital? Should you be bothering Marc at such a time?

Voice #5: I’m very sorry about Mr. Feinman, Mrs. Feinman. Marc told me before he left California. Is he all right?