This novella was originally published in the August, 1931 issue of Weird Tales. The cover went to a Tarzan clone called Tam, Son of the Tiger by Otis Adelbert Kline. Not even a naked woman!
This is the story where Lovecraft’s famous Mi-Go were introduced… sort of. They come from Yuggoth, and Lovecraft had already written a sonnet cycle called “Fungi From Yuggoth”. Lovecraft would allude to them a third and final time in At the Mountains of Madness as competitors of the crinoid Old Ones who caused their decline during the Jurassic.
Anyway, the story is told in past tense in May 1930 by protagonist Albert Wilmarth, who teaches literature at Miskatonic University and doesn’t want to admit that he’s crazy. In May of 1928, he started getting mail from a Henry Akeley forcefully arguing for the truth of Vermont hill folklore about a pre-human race described as human-size, pinkish, crustacean-like, with a distinct head bearing multitudes of short antennae and “vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs.” From an 1839 monograph collecting folklore from the oldest people in the state, Wilmarth described Puritans calling them familiars of the Devil, Scots-Irish linking them to the malign fairies and “little people” of the bogs and raths, and best of all, native Pennacook saying they’re extraterrestrials “from the Great Bear in the sky, and had mines in our earthly hills whence they took a kind of stone they could not get on any other world. They did not live here… They could not eat the things and animals of earth, but brought their own food from the stars.”
He tried to tell the credulous these stories must be false, because they’re no different from the fairy delusions of Ireland and Wales, “belief of the Nepalese hill tribes in the dreaded Mi-Go or ‘Abominable Snow-Men'”, etc, which they just tried to turn around on him as the folklore being evidence of the beings’s being real and active in the past.
This same debate would later play out in real life between UFO believers and skeptics with no acknowledgement of Lovecraft.
However, in Akeley’s description, the aliens aren’t associated with eerie flying objects, but “being able to live in interstellar space and fly through it on clumsy, powerful wings which have a way of resisting the ether”. Why Lovecraft chose to make it thus, I don’t know: the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment had discredited outer space being filled with light-bearing aether (and the rapid acceptance of special relatively after 1905 removed the theoretical need for something to propagate light waves), and by 1897 there were already alien sightings in the United States associated with spacecraft.
Akeley said he found “great black stone with unknown hieroglyphics half worn away which I found in the woods on Round Hill, east of here; and after I took it home everything became different. If they think I suspect too much they will either kill me or take me off the earth to where they come from.” He offered to mail it and a phonograph recording, which Wilmarth accepted in the name of Science, though at the same time Akeley’s claims gave him a stereotypical Lovecraft scholar anxiety attack:
I found myself faced by names and terms that I had heard elsewhere in the most hideous of connexions—Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, R’lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng, the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L’mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the Magnum Innominandum—and was drawn back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way.
…
I am almost glad that the letter and record and photographs are gone now—and I wish, for reasons I shall soon make clear, that the new planet beyond Neptune had not been discovered.
Then came the record, made around 1 AM on “May-Eve—the hideous Sabbat-night of underground European legend”, “near the closed mouth of a cave where the wooded west slope of Dark Mountain rises out of Lee’s Swamp.”
(A CULTIVATED MALE HUMAN VOICE)
. . . is the Lord of the Woods, even to . . . and the gifts of the men of Leng . . . so from the wells of night to the gulfs of space, and from the gulfs of space to the wells of night, ever the praises of Great Cthulhu, of Tsathoggua, and of Him Who is not to be Named. Ever Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!
(A BUZZING IMITATION OF HUMAN SPEECH)
Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!
(HUMAN VOICE)
And it has come to pass that the Lord of the Woods, being . . . seven and nine, down the onyx steps . . . (tri)butes to Him in the Gulf, Azathoth, He of Whom Thou hast taught us marv(els) . . . on the wings of night out beyond space, out beyond th . . . to That whereof Yuggoth is the youngest child, rolling alone in black aether at the rim. . . .
(BUZZING VOICE)
. . . go out among men and find the ways thereof, that He in the Gulf may know. To Nyarlathotep, Mighty Messenger, must all things be told. And He shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides, and come down from the world of Seven Suns to mock. . . .
(HUMAN VOICE)
. . . (Nyarl)athotep, Great Messenger, bringer of strange joy to Yuggoth through the void, Father of the Million Favoured Ones, Stalker among. . . .
It then transpired that Akeley’s attempt to ship the hieroglyphic stone was intercepted by a person whose eerie description could correspond to a Mi-Go in a mask and trenchcoat just as well as a human agent. Summer vacation dragged on, and on August 15 Wilmarth received a letter from Akeley claiming that three of his dogs had been shot, human and claw prints on the farm, his phone line cut and a tree felled across the safest road to town. We get it already, but Lovecraft gilds the lily with more letters, meant to raise tension but just making Akeley look like a farmer who’s gone violently insane, shooting up his home to the point of accidentally killing one of his own dogs. That said, he does convey that the aliens have strange bodies despite being as fragilely mortal as humans:
It was dead, of course. One of the dogs had it, and I found it near the kennel this morning. I tried to save it in the woodshed to convince people of the whole thing, but it all evaporated in a few hours. Nothing left. You know, all those things in the rivers were seen only on the first morning after the flood. And here’s the worst. I tried to photograph it for you, but when I developed the film there wasn’t anything visible except the woodshed. What can the thing have been made of?
Well, Wilmarth finally travels to visit his penpal on Wednesday, September 12 (shouldn’t he be teaching a class by now?), only after receiving a typed, not handwritten, letter in which violent anxiety has been reversed into a message that the aliens are friendly:
What I had thought morbid and shameful and ignominious is in reality awesome and mind-expanding and even glorious—my previous estimate being merely a phase of man’s eternal tendency to hate and fear and shrink from the utterly different.
…
Actually, they have never knowingly harmed men, but have often been cruelly wronged and spied upon by our species. There is a whole secret cult of evil men (a man of your mystical erudition will understand me when I link them with Hastur and the Yellow Sign) devoted to the purpose of tracking them down and injuring them on behalf of monstrous powers from other dimensions. It is against these aggressors—not against normal humanity—that the drastic precautions of the Outer Ones are directed.
I’ll leave how that first quoted sentence relates to Lovecraft’s attitudes to other human cultures to the reader.
But let’s backtrack to the phonograph. The aliens seem to be polytheists who believe in Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Shub-Niggurath, Azathoth, his Great Messenger Nyarlathotep and “Him Who is not to be Named.” Note that the source contradicts the subsequent Cthulhu Mythos, where each alien god has one or more “servitor races”. August Derleth assigned the Mi-Go to Hastur. Is there a term for the reading comprehension version of a malapropism?
As repeatedly requested in the last letter, Wilmarth told no one where he was going and traveled with the phonograph and every photo and letter Akeley sent him… only differing in arriving by train in the closest town around 1 PM rather than the trustworthy letter’s suggested 10 PM. Why yes, this man IS too dumb to live. He’s met at the station by a Mr. Noyes, an urbane man whom Wilmarth nervously felt to have a familiar voice as it politely pumped him for information. Gosh, I wonder where he could have heard his voice before! At the house, Noyes told him Akeley was ready to see him, but he had this asthma attack you know, he can only talk in a whisper and he’ll be clumsy for a couple days with his feet all bandaged…
OK, so he went to talk with Akeley and found him seated in a darkened room with “rigid, immobile expression and unwinking glassy stare”, a scarf high around his neck and a loose dressing gown too long to see his pants. He asked repeatedly for the return of everything he sent before starting to wax joyfully about Yuggoth, the nearest planet fully populated by this pan-cosmic genus of sapients of which others are but degenerate offshoots… it matters not that the Sun is no brighter than a star out there, for “They have other, subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples. Light even hurts and hampers and confuses them,” said the totally normal human singing their praises in a darkened room. He went on:
You know they were here long before the fabulous epoch of Cthulhu was over, and remember all about sunken R’lyeh when it was above the waters. They’ve been inside the earth, too—there are openings which human beings know nothing of—some of them in these very Vermont hills—and great worlds of unknown life down there; blue-litten K’n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black, lightless N’kai. It’s from N’kai that frightful Tsathoggua came
The first part of this got contradicted just six months later when Lovecraft wrote AtMoM, while the latter stuff is a reference to “The Mound”, which he had ghostwritten for Zealia Bishop around January 1930.
Wilmarth got spooked by his host insinuating that tomorrow they’d discuss their voyage to Yuggoth… yes you too, if you choose. “complete human bodies did not indeed make the trip, but that the prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill of the Outer Ones had found a way to convey human brains” in high-tech jars. The portable brain can be kept alive with liquid nutrients, electrodes reach through and connect with elaborate instruments capable of duplicating the three vital faculties of sight, hearing, and speech, then, on every planet covered by their civilisation, there are mechanical bodies it can be plugged into. His host then showed him shelves with a dozen brain cylinders: “Three humans, six fungoid beings who can’t navigate space corporeally, two beings from Neptune…” Hugh Man Akeley, who was totally normal, invited Wilmarth to plug any into a certain machine to communicate with, but “Don’t bother that fresh, shiny cylinder joined to the two testing instruments—the one with my name on it.” Wilmarth obeyed and the system spoke:
“Do you realise what it means when I say I have been on thirty-seven different celestial bodies—planets, dark stars, and less definable objects—including eight outside our galaxy and two outside the curved cosmos of space and time? All this has not harmed me in the least. My brain has been removed from my body by fissions so adroit that it would be crude to call the operation surgery. The visiting beings have methods which make these extractions easy and almost normal—and one’s body never ages when the brain is out of it. The brain, I may add, is virtually immortal with its mechanical faculties and a limited nourishment supplied by occasional changes of the preserving fluid.
Behold, the first uploaded Singularity nerd! Wilmarth though reacted fearfully, internally calling this things normal human beings weren’t meant to know and “blasphemous influences”, yet somehow he took a nap in the guest room before bolting upright and driving away terrified in a stolen old Ford, from Akeley’s garage. A sheriff’s posse found bullet holes, the dogs and livestock all missing with no having bought them, and Akeley vanished with the clothes Wilmarth saw him in discarded. There were no cylinders or other evidence, of course. But Wilmarth insists it was no dream that he was awakened by sounds of extraterrestrials entering the bedroom, while “a kind of obscure paralysis nevertheless kept me inert”. When he regained muscle control, he tried to find Akeley to flee with, but instead his flashlight found in the easy chair metallic clamps attached to… “the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.”
Gosh, bet you didn’t see that coming. Seriously though, this story is fascinating in its precociousness. Here published in 1931 are aliens that have been operating on Earth so long that our science-ignorant ancestors identified them as Fair Folk (and yetis), who want to abduct people and do surgery on them. There’s a coverup involving human agents, and they’re in contact with American elites, though here it’s implied to be Lowell Observatory rather than the federal government.
It’s also an early example of the claim that it’s not viable for human bodies to explore outer space, but by discarding the body with advanced technology your consciousness could explore the visible universe and beyond as an immortal that can plug in to different bodies.
So this story prefigures by decades a chunk of real-world belief and a chunk of SF, and Lovecraft just kind of tossed it out there as opposed to being something he liked to revisit frequently once created (see Cthulhu, crinoid Old Ones). I’m impressed.
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