Terrors (40 page)

“There.” He slipped the recorder back into his pocket. “I separated the input circuits. Now we’ll record on two channels. We can mix the sound if we record the same events or keep it separate if we pick up different events. In fact, just to be on the safe side, suppose I leave the recorder here in the car when you and I go to the shack.”

Feinman assented and Whiteside peeled the sealers from
a dime-sized disk of double-adhesive foam. He stuck it to the recorder and stuck the recorder to the bottom of the Ferrari’s dashboard.

“You’re the sexton of the Spiritual Light Church,” Feinman said. “You know a hell of a lot about electronics.”

“My sister’s boy, Mr. Feinman. Bright youngster. It’s his hobby. Started out with a broken Victrola. Got his science teacher to helping. Going to San
Diego State next term. I couldn’t be prouder if he was my own boy. He builds all sorts of gadgets.”

Feinman tooled the Ferrari around the dome-topped hill and pulled to a halt where the Noyes station wagon had parked on the earlier visit. The sun was setting and the somehow too-lush glade was filled with murk.

Vernon Whiteside reached under the dashboard and flicked the microcassette recorder
to automatic mode. He climbed from the car.

Feinman went to the rear of the Ferrari and extracted a long-handled electric torch. He pulled his sports cap down over his eyes and touched Whiteside’s elbow. The men advanced.

The events that transpired following this entrance to the sycamore copse were captured on the microcassette recorder, and a transcript of these sounds appears later in the
report.

In the meanwhile, Elizabeth Akeley and Ezra Noyes waited at the Noyes home in Dark Mountain.

Two hours to the minute after the departure of Marc Feinman and Vernon Whiteside in Feinman’s Ferrari Boxer, the Noyes station wagon, its aged suspension creaking, pulled out of the driveway.

Ezra pushed the Nash to the limit of its tired ability, chattering the while to Elizabeth. Preoccupied,
she responded with low monosyllables.
At the turning-point from the Passumpsic-Lyndonville road onto the old farm track, she waited in the station wagon while Ezra climbed down and opened the fence gate.

The Nash’s headlights picked a narrow path for the car, circling the dome-topped hill that blocked the copse of lush vegetation from the sight of passers-by. The Ferrari Boxer stood silently
at the edge of the copse.

Ezra lifted his camera-bag from the floor and slung it over his shoulder. Elizabeth waited in the car until Ezra walked to her side, opened the door and offered his hand.

They started through the copse. Noyes testified later that this was his first experience with the unusual vegetation. He claimed that, even as he set foot beneath the overhanging branches of the first
sycamore a strange sensation passed through him. The day had been hot and even in the hours of darkness the temperature did not drop drastically. Even so, with his entry into the copse Noyes felt an unnatural and debilitating heat, as if the trees were adapted to a different climate than that of northern Vermont and were actually emitting heat of their own.

He began to perspire.

Elizabeth Akeley
led the way through the wooded area, retracing the steps of her previous visit to the wooden shack.

Noyes found it more and more difficult to continue. With each pace he felt drained of energy and will. Once he halted and was about to sit down for a rest but Akeley grasped his hand and pulled him along.

When they emerged from the copse the dome-topped hill stood directly behind them, the rundown
shack directly ahead.

Ezra and Elizabeth crossed the narrow grassy patch between the sycamore copse and the ramshackle cabin. Ezra found a space where the glass had fallen away and there was a small opening in the omnipresent cobwebs. He peered in, then lifted his camera and poked its lens through the opening. He shot a picture.

“Don’t know what I got, but maybe I got something,” he said.

Elizabeth Akeley pulled the door open. She stepped inside the cabin, closely followed by young Noyes.

The room, Ezra could see, was far larger than he’d estimated. Although the shack contained but a single room, that was astonishingly deep, its far corners utterly lost in shadow. Near to him were a rocking chair, a battered overstuffed couch and a dust-laden wooden table of
a type often found
in old New England homes.

Ezra later reported hearing odd sounds during these minutes. There was a strange buzzing sound. He couldn’t tell whether it was organic—a sound such as a flight of hornets might have made, or such as might have been made by a single insect magnified to a shocking gigantism—or whether the sound was artificial, as if an electrical generator were running slightly out of
adjustment.

The modulation was its oddest characteristic. Not only did the volume rise and fall, but the pitch, and in some odd way, the very tonal quality of the buzzing, kept changing. “It was as if something was trying to talk to me. To us. To Miss Akeley and me. I could almost understand it, but not quite.”

Noyes stood, paralyzed, until he heard Elizabeth Akeley scream. Then he whirled,
turning his back to the table from whence the buzzing sounds were coming. He saw Elizabeth standing before the rocking chair, her hands to her face.

The chair was rocking slowly, gently. The cabin was almost pitch black, its only illumination coming from an array of unfamiliar machinery set up on the long wooden table. Ezra could see now that a figure was seated, apparently unmoving, in the rocker.

It spoke.

“Elizabeth, my darling, you have come,” the figure said. “Now we shall be together. We shall know the love of the body as we have known the love of the mind and of the soul.”

Strangely, Noyes later stated, although the voice in which the figure spoke was that of Marc Feinman, the accent and intonation were those of a typical New England old-timer. Noyes testified also that his powers
of observation played a strange trick on him at this moment. Although the man sitting in the chair was undoubtedly Marc Feinman—the clothing he wore, even to the sporting cap pulled low over his eyes, as if he were driving his Ferrari in bright sunlight—what Ezra noticed most particularly was a tiny red-and-black smudge on Feinman’s jacket.

“It looked like a squashed lady bug,” the youth stated
later.

From somewhere in the darker corners of the cabin there came a strange rustling sound, like that of great leathery wings opening and folding again.

Noyes shot a quick series of pictures, one of the figure in the rocking chair, one of the table with the unusual mechanical equipment on
it, and one of the darker corners of the cabin, hoping vaguely that he would get some results. The rocking
chair tilted slowly backward, slowly forward. The man sitting in it finally said to Ezra, “You’ll never get anything from there. You’d better get over to the other end of the shack and make your pictures.”

As if hypnotized, Noyes walked toward the rear of the cabin. He stated later that as he passed a certain point, it was as if he had penetrated a curtain of total darkness. He tried to turn
and look back at the others, but could not move. He tried to call out but could not speak. He was completely conscious, but seemingly had plunged into a state of total paralysis and of sensory deprivation.

What transpired behind him, in the front end of the cabin, he could not tell. When he recovered from his paralysis and loss of sensory inputs, it was to find himself alone at the rear of the
shack. It was daylight outside and sunshine was pushing through the grimy windows and open door of the shanty. He turned around and found himself facing two figures. A third was at his side.

“Ezra!” The third figure said.

“Mr. Whiteside.” Noyes responded.

“Well, I’m glad to see that you two are all right,” a voice came to them from the other end of the cabin. It was the old New England twang
that Ezra had heard from the man in the rocking chair, and the speaker was, indeed, Marc Feinman. He stood, wooden-faced, his back to the doorway. Elizabeth Akeley, her features similarly expressionless, stood at his side. Feinman’s sporting cap was pulled down almost to the line of his eyebrows. Akeley’s bangs dangled over her forehead.

Noyes claimed later that he thought he could see signs
of a fresh red scar running across Akeley’s forehead beneath the bangs. He claimed also that a corner of red was visible at the edge of the visor of Feinman’s cap. But of course this is unverified.

“We’re going now,” Feinman said in his strange New England twang. “We’ll take my car. You two go home in the other.”

“But—but, Radiant Mother,” Whiteside began.

“Elizabeth is very tired,” Feinman
said nasally. “You’ll have to excuse her. I’m taking her away for a while.”

He started out the door, guiding Elizabeth by the elbow. She walked strangely, yet not as if she were tired, ill, or even injured. Rather, she had the tentative, uncertain movements that are associated with an amputee first learning to maneuver on prosthetic devices.

They left the cabin and walked to the Ferrari. Feinman
opened the door on the passenger side and guided Akeley into the car. Then he circled the vehicle, climbed in and seated himself at the wheel. Strangely, he sat for a long time staring at the controls of the sports car, as if he were unfamiliar with its type.

Vernon Whiteside and Ezra Noyes followed the others from the cabin. Both were still confused from their strange experience of paralysis
and sensory deprivation; both stated later that they felt only half-awake, half-hypnotized. “Else,” agent Whiteside later deposed, “I’d have stopped ’em for sure. Warrant or no warrant, I had probable cause that something fishy was going on, and I’d have grabbed the keys out of that Ferrari, done anything it took to keep those two there. But I could hardly move, I could hardly even think.

“I
did
manage to reach into that car and grab out my machine. My microcassette recorder. Then I looked at my little bug-mike and saw that it was squashed, like somebody’d just squeezed it between his thumb and his finger, only he must have been made out of iron ’cause those bug-mikes are ruggedized. They can take a wallop with a sledgehammer and not even know it. So who squashed my little bug?

“Then
Feinman finally got his car started and they pulled away. I looked at the Noyes kid and he looked at me, and we headed for his Nash wagon and we went back to his house. Nearly cracked up half a dozen times on the way home, he drove like a drunk. When we got to his place we both passed out for twelve hours while Feinman and Akeley were going God-knows-where in that Ferrari.

“Soon as I got myself
back together I phoned in to Agency field HQ and came on in.”

When agent Whiteside reported to Agency field HQ he turned over the microcassette which he and Feinman had made at the shack. Excerpts from the tape follow.

(Whiteside’s Channel)

(All voices mixed): Yeah, this is the place all right … I’ll—got it open, okay … Sheesh, it’s dark in here. How’d she see anything? Well … (Buzzing sound)
What’s that? What’s that? Here, I’ll shine my—what the hell? It looks like … Shining cylinder. No, two of ’em. Two of ’em. What the hell, some kind of futuristic espresso machines. What the hell….

(Buzzing sound becomes very loud, dominates tape. Then volume drops and a rustling is heard.)

Voice #3 (Vernon Whiteside): Here, lend me that thing a minute. No, I just gotta see what’s over there.
Okay, you stay here a minute, I gotta see what’s….

(Sound of walking. Buzzing continues in background but fades, rustling sound increases.)

Voice #3: Jesus God! That can’t be! No, no, that can’t be! It’s too….

(Sound of thump, as if microphone were being struck and then crushed between superhard metallic surfaces. Remainder of Whiteside channel is silent.)

(Feinman Channel)

(Early portion
identical to Whiteside channel; excerpts begin following end of recording on Whiteside channel.)

Voice #1 (Marc Feinman): Vernon? Vernon? What –

Voice #6 (Henry Wentworth Akeley): He is unharmed.

Voice #1: Who’s that?

Voice #6: I am Henry Wentworth Akeley.

Voice #1: Lizzy’s great-grandfather.

Voice #6: Precisely. And you are Mr. Feinman?

Voice #1: Where are you, Akeley?

Voice #6: I am here.

Voice #1: Where? I don’t see … what happened to Whiteside? What’s going on here? I don’t like what’s going on here.

Voice #6: Please, Mr. Feinman, try to remain calm.

Voice #1: Where are you, Akeley? For the last time….

Voice #6: Please, Mr. Feinman, I must ask you to calm yourself. (Rustling sound) Ah, that’s better. Now, Mr. Feinman, do you not see certain objects on the table? Good. Now, Mr. Feinman, you are an intelligent and courageous young man. I understand that your interests are wide and your thirst for knowledge great. I offer you a grand opportunity. One which was offered to me half a century ago.
I tried to
decline at that time. My hand was forced. I never regretted having … let us say, gone where I have gone. But I must now return to earthly flesh, and as my own integument is long destroyed, I have need of another.

Voice #1: What—where—what are you talking about? If this is some kind of….

(Loud sound of rustling, sound of thumping and struggle, incoherent gasps and gurgles, loud breathing,
moans.)

(At this point the same sound that ended the Whiteside segment of the tape is heard. Remainder of Feinman channel is blank.)

When agent Whiteside and young Ezra Noyes woke from their exhausted sleep, Whiteside identified himself as a representative of the Agency. He obtained the film from young Noyes’s camera. It was promptly developed at the nearest Agency facility. The film was subsequently
returned to Noyes and the four usable photographs, in fuzzily screened and mimeographed form, appeared in the
Vermont UFO Intelligencer
.

A description of the four photographs follows:

Frame 1: (Shot through window of the wooden shack) A dingy room containing a rocking chair and a large wooden table.