New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, The [S.S. Col.] by Lovecraft H. P

Author:Lovecraft, H. P. [Lovecraft, H. P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror, Short Stories, Fiction, Fantasy
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2014-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

Still from The Dunwich Horror starring Dean Stockwell and Sandra Dee, shown here (American International Pictures, 1970).

Poster from The Dunwich Horror (American International Pictures, 1970).

The Whisperer in Darkness1

This story may be seen as a more mature version of “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” achieving much greater depth by providing a detailed provenance for an alien race known as the Outer Ones instead of the vague history implied in the prior tale. Lovecraft here expands the panoply of beings of which humans form only a small part, and the story’s documentary style, despite the narrator’s almost unbelievable naïvete, gives it the ring of credibility and enhances its shocking final revelation.

I.

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 Akeley 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, Akeley’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. Eccentricity, 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 3, 1927.2 I was then, as now, an instructor of literature at Miskatonic 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 organised relief which filled the press, there appeared certain odd stories of things found floating in some of the swollen rivers; so that many of my friends embarked on curious discussions and appealed to me to shed what light I could on the subject. I felt flattered at having my folklore study taken so seriously, and did what I could to belittle the wild, vague tales which seemed so clearly an outgrowth of old rustic superstitions. It amused me to find several persons of education who insisted that some stratum of obscure, distorted fact might underlie the rumours.

The tales thus brought to my notice came mostly

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