Jacob Maitland's story, and his dire suspicions, began to unfurl as he welcomed Dr. Zarnak and his manservant into his tiny office. His name was stenciled onto a cardboard plaque taped to the pebbled glass of the door. As a graduate assistant he had little status and few prerogatives, and those few did not include spacious accommodations. Glancing at the massive frame of the Sikh. Maitland suggested perhaps the faculty club or even the library might be more conducive, but Zarnak insisted privacy was the more important consideration, and Akbar Singh modestly retired from the scene, announcing his intention to stay with their automobile outside.
It seemed that Maitland had been highly annoyed at a duty assigned him by his supervisor, manifestly because no one else with the right to delegate the matter had hesitated to exercise that right. He was to seek out a Mr. Winfield Phillips, heir to the property of one Hiram Stokely, an eccentric recluse for whom no living contemporary had had any use—save for the famous Harold Hadley Copeland, himself the great benefactor of the Sanbourne Institute. Copeland had at some point managed the unthinkable, to purchase from the cantankerous Stokely two priceless old volumes. Die Unaussprechlichen Kulten of F. W. von Junzt and the R'lyeb Text, with which Maitland knew Zarnak to be more than familiar, together with some manuscript pages from an oddity called the Yuggya Chants. How he had been able to persuade old Hiram to yield up these volumes no one at the Institute could even guess, unless, as some suggested, Hiram had mastered all that these books had had to teach him.
Copeland had eventually bequeathed his own vast collection of idols, manuscripts, modern volumes, maps, diaries, and what not to the Sanbourne Institute of Pacific Antiquities. Once it had been discovered among his diaries that his copies of von Junzt and of the R'lyeh Text had come to him from Stokely's collection, the trustees of the Institute naturally wondered what else of similar scholarly importance might lie moldering in the late eccentric's library. Could not some arrangement be made with the heirs, a pair of the old man’s nephews, Bryan Winfield and Winfield Phillips? According to the local scandal mill, the two had moved into the decaying hacienda-style estate of the hated Hiram Stokely some weeks before to set up an openly homosexual household, to the outraged consternation of the poor white trash of the nearby town of Durriham Beach, whose Puritanical scruples apparently did little to hinder their own squalid depravities.
Soon a new scandal had replaced the old. Perhaps rumor had merely substituted a new lie for one that had become stale, but it was noised about that, whereas formerly the two young men had been inseparable on the few occasions they had ventured forth into town, now one caught sight only of Winfield Phillips, whose air seemed distracted in an ominous way, though no one, not even the gossips, could point to any specific evidence of foul play. Perhaps some lovers' spat between the two dandies had driven the offended cousin away under cover of night, or perhaps he had taken his own life in a moment of maudlin despair, as homosexuals were wont (or thought) to do.
Jacob Maitland had found these reports half-plausible, having read somewhere of Phillips' keen Interest in the Decadents. He judged no man for his private affairs, but the Durnham Beach gossip was more than casually interesting to him simply because it had fallen to him to make the first cordial contact with Winfield Phillips, and he feared on the basis of these reports that the man might be arbitrary and unreasonable in his dealings. When Maitland soon discovered, in addition, that Phillips had for a number of years been associated with Miskatonic University in an analogous capacity to his own at the Sanbourne Institute, he began to dread that his counterpart might have designs on whatever of his uncle’s precious volumes might remain, intending to donate the books to the Hoag Library of Miskatonic, and thus to strengthen his own prospects of gaining a choice faculty position. This possibility sounded all the more likely to Maitland because he had hoped, by securing any such rare books for the Sanbourne's collection, to advance his own scholarly career. There had been nothing to do but drive up to the Hiram Stokely property and discuss matters as amicably as he could with Winfield Phillips himself.
Phillips had not bothered to restore telephone service to his uncle's house, apparently sharing some of the old man's eremitic inclinations. So Jacob Maitland had had little choice but to make the long drive through the dreary mudflats and acres of stunted scrub pines to the old hacienda—and just hope that Phillips would be home. Given the desolation of Durnham Beach and the surrounding acres, Maitland had considered it unlikely Phillips would be busy at anything away from home. The peculiar look of the midget forest of scrub pine had made him think of the New Jersey Pine Barrens which, according to local superstition, housed the fantastic Jersey Devil. Looking at the local equivalent of the Barrens, he could well understand how the desolation of a place like this would incarnate itself in legendary form.
He had grimaced as he had realized he was driving past the blasted acres of the infamous Hubble's Field, the routine excavation of which some years previously had yielded shocking revelations of many ages’ worth of human sacrifice and mass murder. These ghastly revelations had effectively doomed the adjacent town to eventual desertion, as no one would move there. Even the surly denizens of Durnham Beach seemed to despise their ancestral habitat, though no appreciable number had ever sought to leave, not even a few years back when there had been a rash of strange disappearances, mostly of children. It seemed to Maitland that something kept the Durnham people rooted to their poisoned land, so that the thought of fleeing never even seemed to cross the minds of most. What could keep an outsider like Phillips here? It was no wonder that his boyfriend had left, no doubt deciding that he had had quite enough of these surroundings.
ZARNAK listened with inscrutable silence as Maitland continued to fill the narrow confines of his office cubicle with details of his story. The younger man more than once paused to reprove himself for boring his guest with over-ample detail, but the latter assured him that no fact ought to be neglected. "Sometimes, my young friend, the memory is but a camera which records details which mean nothing to us but which may speak volumes to another who examines the picture it has taken. Go on."
Maitland had had no idea what to expect when his knock was finally about to be answered. What would Phillips look like? Maitland had seen, a poor photo of the man, standing literally in the shadow of his erstwhile employer, Dr. Seneca Lapham, a professor at Miskatonic, the subject of the photograph. That had been from some years ago, in the aftermath of some queer business at Billington’s Woods in rural Massachusetts.
The sight that had greeted him was even more unexpected. It was not Winfield Phillips, nor even his reputedly vanished cousin. The figure before him, despite his undistinguished manner of dress, had plainly been an American Indian (of the once-local Hippaway people, as Maitland would later learn). This taciturn man, whose prominent cheekbones shaded curious scar patterns, must have been taken on by Winfield Phillips, with some of his new-found wealth, as a factotum. That the man was an Indian might imply that none of the nearby townspeople would willingly work for Phillips, though, God knew, there were few enough employment opportunities in the ghost-town community.