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Title: The lurking fear
Author: H. P. Lovecraft
Release Date: April 7, 2023 [eBook #70486]
Most recently updated: April 11, 2023
Language: English
Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LURKING FEAR ***
The LURKING FEAR
By H. P. LOVECRAFT
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales June 1928.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
_1. The Shadow on the Chimney_
There was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted
mansion atop Tempest Mountain to find the lurking fear. I was not
alone, for foolhardiness was not then mixed with that love of the
grotesque and the terrible which has made my career a series of quests
for strange horrors in literature and in life. With me were two
faithful and muscular men for whom I had sent when the time came; men
long associated with me in my ghastly explorations because of their
peculiar fitness.
We had started quietly from the village because of the reporters who
still lingered about after the eldritch panic of a month before--the
nightmare creeping death. Later, I thought, they might aid me; but I
did not want them then. Would to God I had let them share the search,
that I might not have had to bear the secret alone so long; to bear
it alone for fear the world would call me mad or go mad itself at the
demon implications of the thing. Now that I am telling it anyway, lest
the brooding make me a maniac, I wish I had never concealed it. For
I, and I only, know what manner of fear lurked on that spectral and
desolate mountain.
In a small motor-car we covered the miles of primeval forest and
hill until the wooded ascent checked it. The country bore an aspect
more than usually sinister as we viewed it by night and without the
accustomed crowds of investigators, so that we were often tempted to
use the acetylene headlights despite the attention it might attract.
It was not a wholesome landscape after dark, and I believe I would
have noticed its morbidity even had I been ignorant of the terror
that stalked there. Of wild creatures there were none--they are wise
when death leers close. The ancient lightning-scarred trees seemed
unnaturally large and twisted, and the other vegetation unnaturally
thick and feverish, while curious mounds and hummocks in the weedy,
fulgurite-pitted earth reminded me of snakes and dead men's skulls
swelled to gigantic proportions.
Fear had lurked on Tempest Mountain for more than a century. This I
learned at once from newspaper accounts of the catastrophe which first
brought the region to the world's notice. The place is a remote, lonely
elevation in that part of the Catskills where Dutch civilization once
feebly and transiently penetrated, leaving behind as it receded only
a few ruined mansions and a degenerate squatter population inhabiting
pitiful hamlets on isolated slopes. Normal beings seldom visited
the locality till the state police were formed, and even now only
infrequent troopers patrol it. The fear, however, is an old tradition
throughout the neighboring villages; since it is a prime topic in the
simple discourse of the poor mongrels who sometimes leave their valleys
to trade hand-woven baskets for such primitive necessities as they can
not shoot, raise, or make.
The lurking fear dwelt in the shunned and deserted Martense mansion,
which crowned the high but gradual eminence whose liability to frequent
thunderstorms gave it the name of Tempest Mountain. For over a hundred
years the antique, grove-circled stone house had been the subject
of stories incredibly wild and monstrously hideous; stories of a
silent colossal creeping death which stalked abroad in summer. With
whimpering insistence the squatters told tales of a demon which seized
lone wayfarers after dark, either carrying them off or leaving them
in a frightful state of gnawed dismemberment; while sometimes they
whispered of blood-trails toward the distant mansion. Some said the
thunder called the lurking fear out of its habitation, while others
said the thunder was its voice.
No one outside the backwoods had believed these varying and conflicting
stories, with their incoherent, extravagant descriptions of the
half-glimpsed fiend; yet not a farmer or villager doubted that the
Martense mansion was ghoulishly haunted. Local history forbade
such a doubt, although no ghostly evidence was ever found by such
investigators as had visited the building after some especially vivid
tales of the squatters. Grandmothers told strange myths of the Martense
specter; myths concerning the Martense family itself, its queer
hereditary dissimilarity of eyes, its long, unnatural annals, and the
murder which had cursed it.
The terror which brought me to the scene was a sudden and portentous
confirmation of the mountaineers' wildest legends. One summer night,
after a thunderstorm of unprecedented violence, the countryside was
aroused by a squatter stampede which no mere delusion could create. The
pitiful throngs of natives shrieked and whined of the unnamable horror
which had descended upon them, and they were not doubted. They had not
seen it, but had heard such cries from one of their hamlets that they
knew a creeping death had come.
In the morning citizens and state troopers followed the shuddering
mountaineers to the place where they said the death had come. Death
was indeed there. The ground under one of the squatters' villages
had caved in after a lightning strike, destroying several of the
malodorous shanties; but upon this property damage was superimposed an
organic devastation which paled it to insignificance. Of a possible
seventy-five natives who had inhabited this spot, not one living
specimen was visible. The disordered earth was covered with blood and
human debris bespeaking too vividly the ravages of demon teeth and
talons; yet no visible trail led away from the carnage. That some
hideous animal must be the cause, everyone quickly agreed; nor did any
tongue now revive the charge that such cryptic deaths formed merely the
sordid murders common in decadent communities. That charge was revived
only when about twenty-five of the estimated population were found
missing from the dead; and even then it was hard to explain the murder
of fifty by half that number. But the fact remained that on a summer
night a bolt had come out of the heavens and left a dead village whose
corpses were horribly mangled, chewed, and clawed.
The excited countryside immediately connected the horror with the
haunted Martense mansion, though the localities were over three miles
apart. The troopers were more skeptical, including the mansion only
casually in their investigations, and dropping it altogether when they
found it thoroughly deserted. Country and village people, however,
canvassed the place with infinite care; overturning everything in the
house, sounding ponds and brooks, beating down bushes, and ransacking
the near-by forests. All was in vain; the death that had come had left
no trace save destruction itself.
By the second day of the search the affair was fully treated by the
newspapers, whose reporters overran Tempest Mountain. They described
it in much detail, and with many interviews to elucidate the horror's
history as told by local grandams. I followed the accounts languidly
at first, for I am a connoisseur in horrors; but after a week I
detected an atmosphere which stirred me oddly, so that on August
5th, 1921, I registered among the reporters who crowded the hotel at
Lefferts Corners, nearest village to Tempest Mountain and acknowledged
headquarters of the searchers. Three weeks more, and the dispersal of
the reporters left me free to begin a terrible exploration based on the
minute inquiries and surveying with which I had meanwhile busied myself.
So on this summer night, while distant thunder rumbled, I left a silent
motor-car and tramped with two armed companions up the mound-covered
reaches of Tempest Mountain, casting the beams of an electric torch on
the spectral gray walls that began to appear through the giant oaks
ahead. In this morbid night solitude and feeble shifting illumination,
the vast boxlike pile displayed obscure hints of terror which day could
not uncover; yet I did not hesitate, since I had come with fierce
resolution to test an idea. I believed that the thunder called the
death-demon out of some fearsome secret place; and be that demon solid
entity or vaporous pestilence, I meant to see it.
* * * * *
I had thoroughly searched the ruin before, hence knew my plan well;
choosing as the seat of my vigil the old room of Jan Martense, whose
murder looms so great in the rural legends. I felt subtly that the
apartment of this ancient victim was best for my purposes. The chamber,
measuring about twenty feet square, contained like the other rooms some
rubbish which had once been furniture. It lay on the second story, on
the southeast corner of the house, and had an immense east window and
narrow south window, both devoid of panes or shutters. Opposite the
large window was an enormous Dutch fireplace with scriptural tiles
representing the prodigal son, and opposite the narrow window was a
spacious bed built into the wall.
As the tree-muffled thunder grew louder, I arranged my plan's details.
First I fastened side by side on the ledge of the large window three
rope ladders which I had brought with me. I knew they reached a
suitable spot on the grass outside, for I had tested them. Then the
three of us dragged from another room a wide four-poster bedstead,
crowding it laterally against the window. Having strewn it with fir
boughs, all now rested on it with drawn automatics, two relaxing while
the third watched. From whatever direction the demon might come, our
potential escape was provided. If it came from within the house, we had
the window ladders; if from outside, the door and the stairs. We did
not think, judging from precedent, that it would pursue us far even at
worst.
I watched from midnight to 1 o'clock, when in spite of the sinister
house, the unprotected window, and the approaching thunder and
lightning, I felt singularly drowsy. I was between my two companions.
George Bennett being toward the window and William Tobey toward
the fireplace. Bennett was asleep, having apparently felt the same
anomalous drowsiness which affected me, so I designated Tobey for the
next watch although even he was nodding. It is curious how intently I
had been watching that fireplace.
The increasing thunder must have affected my dreams, for in the brief
time I slept there came to me apocalyptic visions. Once I partly
awaked, probably because the sleeper toward the window had restlessly
flung an arm across my chest. I was not sufficiently awake to see
whether Tobey was attending to his duties as sentinel, but felt a
distinct anxiety on that score. Never before had the presence of evil
so poignantly oppressed me. Later I must have dropped asleep again, for
it was out of a phantasmal chaos that my mind leaped when the night
grew hideous with shrieks beyond anything in my former experience or
imagination.
In that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed
hopelessly and insanely at the ebony gates of oblivion. I awoke to
red madness and the mockery of diabolism, as farther and farther down
inconceivable vistas that phobic and crystalline anguish retreated and
reverberated. There was no light, but I knew from the empty space at
my right that Tobey was gone, God alone knew whither. Across my chest
still lay the heavy arm of the sleeper at my left.
Then came the devastating stroke of lightning which shook the whole
mountain, lit the darkest crypts of the hoary grove, and splintered
the patriarch of the twisted trees. In the demon flash of a monstrous
fireball the sleeper started up suddenly while the glare from beyond
the window threw his shadow vividly upon the chimney above the
fireplace from which my eyes had never strayed. That I am still alive
and sane, is a marvel I can not fathom. I can not fathom it, for the
shadow on that chimney was not that of George Bennett or of any other
human creature; but a blasphemous abnormality from hell's nethermost
craters; a nameless, shapeless abomination which no mind could fully
grasp and no pen even partly describe. In another second I was alone
in the accursed mansion, shivering and gibbering. George Bennett and
William Tobey had left no trace, not even of a struggle. They were
never heard of again.
_2. A Passer in the Storm_
For days after that hideous experience in the forest-swathed mansion
I lay nervously exhausted in my hotel room at Lefferts Corners. I do
not remember exactly how I managed to reach the motor-car, start it,
and slip unobserved back to the village; for I retain no distinct
impression save of wild-armed titan trees, demoniac mutterings of
thunder, and Charonian shadows athwart the low mounds that dotted and
streaked the region.
As I shivered and brooded on the casting of that brain-blasting shadow,
I knew that I had at last pried out one of earth's supreme horrors--one
of those nameless blights of outer voids whose faint demon scratchings
we sometimes hear on the farthest rim of space, yet from which our own
finite vision has given us a merciful immunity. The shadow I had seen,
I hardly dared to analyze or identify. Something had lain between me
and the window that night, but I shuddered whenever I could not cast
off the instinct to classify it. If it had only snarled, or bayed,
or laughed titteringly--even that would have relieved the abysmal
hideousness. But it was so silent. It had rested a heavy arm or foreleg
on my chest.... Obviously it was organic, or had once been organic....
Jan Martense, whose room I had invaded, was buried in the graveyard
near the mansion.... I must find Bennett and Tobey, if they lived ...
why had it picked them, and left me for the last?... Drowsiness is so
stifling, and dreams are so horrible....
In a short time I realized that I must tell my story to someone or
break down completely. I had already decided not to abandon the quest
for the lurking fear, for in my rash ignorance it seemed to me that
uncertainty was worse than enlightenment, however terrible the latter
might prove to be. Accordingly I revolved in my mind the best course
to pursue; whom to select for my confidences, and how to track down the
thing which had obliterated two men and cast a nightmare shadow.
My chief acquaintances at Lefferts Corners had been the affable
reporters, of whom several still remained to collect final echoes of
the tragedy. It was from these that I determined to choose a colleague,
and the more I reflected the more my preference inclined toward one
Arthur Munroe, a dark, lean man of about thirty-five, whose education,
taste, intelligence, and temperament all seemed to mark him as one not
bound to conventional ideas and experiences.
On an afternoon in early September Arthur Munroe listened to my story.
I saw from the beginning that he was both interested and sympathetic,
and when I had finished he analyzed and discussed the thing with the
greatest shrewdness and judgment. His advice, moreover, was eminently
practical; for he recommended a postponement of operations at the
Martense mansion until we might become fortified with more detailed
historical and geographical data. On his initiative we combed the
countryside for information regarding the terrible Martense family, and
discovered a man who possessed a marvelously illuminating ancestral
diary. We also talked at length with such of the mountain mongrels
as had not fled from the terror and confusion to remoter slopes, and
arranged to precede our culminating task--the exhaustive and definitive
examination of the mansion in the light of its detailed history--with
an equally exhaustive and definitive examination of spots associated
with the various tragedies of squatter legend.
The results of this examination were not at first very enlightening,
though our tabulation of them seemed to reveal a fairly significant
trend; namely, that the number of reported horrors was by far the
greatest in areas either comparatively near the avoided house or
connected with it by stretches of the morbidly overnourished forest.
There were, it is true, exceptions; indeed, the horror which had caught
the world's ear had happened in a treeless space remote alike from the
mansion and from any connecting woods.
As to the nature and appearance of the lurking fear, nothing could
be gained from the scared and witless shanty-dwellers. In the same
breath they called it a snake and a giant, a thunder-devil and a bat, a
vulture and a walking tree. We did, however, deem ourselves justified
in assuming that it was a living organism highly susceptible to
electrical storms; and although certain of the stories suggested wings,
we believed that its aversion for open spaces made land locomotion
a more probable theory. The only thing really incompatible with the
latter view was the rapidity with which the creature must have traveled
in order to perform all the deeds attributed to it.
When we came to know the squatters better, we found them curiously
likable in many ways. Simple animals they were, gently descending
the evolutionary scale because of their unfortunate ancestry and
stultifying isolation. They feared outsiders, but slowly grew
accustomed to us; finally helping vastly when we beat down all the
thickets and tore out all the partitions of the mansion in our search
for the lurking fear. When we asked them to help us find Bennett and
Tobey they were truly distressed; for they wanted to help us, yet knew
that these victims had gone as wholly out of the world as their own
missing people. That great numbers of them had actually been killed
and removed, just as the wild animals had long been exterminated, we
were of course thoroughly convinced; and we waited apprehensively for
further tragedies to occur.
By the middle of October we were puzzled by our lack of progress. Owing
to the clear nights no demoniac aggressions had taken place, and the
completeness of our vain searches of house and country almost drove us
to regard the lurking fear as a non-material agency. We feared that
the cold weather would come on and halt our explorations, for all
agreed that the demon was generally quiet in winter. Thus there was
a kind of haste and desperation in our last daylight canvass of the
horror-visited hamlet; a hamlet now deserted because of the squatters'
fears.
The ill-fated squatter hamlet had borne no name, but had long stood
in a sheltered though treeless cleft between two elevations called
respectively Cone Mountain and Maple Hill. It was closer to Maple Hill
than to Cone Mountain, some of the crude abodes indeed being dugouts on
the side of the former eminence. Geographically it lay about two miles
northwest of the base of Tempest Mountain, and three miles from the
oak-girt mansion. Of the distance between the hamlet and the mansion,
fully two miles and a quarter on the hamlet's side was entirely open
country; the plain being of fairly level character save for some of the
low snakelike mounds, and having as vegetation only grass and scattered
weeds. Considering this topography, we had finally concluded that
the demon must have come by way of Cone Mountain, a wooded southern
prolongation of which ran to within a short distance of the westernmost
spur of Tempest Mountain. The upheaval of ground we traced conclusively
to a landslide from Maple Hill, a tall lone splintered tree on whose
side had been the striking point of the thunderbolt which summoned the
fiend.
* * * * *
As for the twentieth time or more Arthur Munroe and I went minutely
over every inch of the violated village, we were filled with a
certain discouragement coupled with vague and novel fears. It was
acutely uncanny, even when frightful and uncanny things were common,
to encounter so blankly clueless a scene after such overwhelming
occurrences; and we moved about beneath the leaden, darkening sky with
that tragic directionless zeal which results from a combined sense of
futility and necessity of action. Our care was gravely minute; every
cottage was again entered, every hillside dugout again searched for
bodies, every thorny foot of adjacent slope again scanned for dens and
caves, but all without result. And yet, as I have said, vague new fears
hovered menacingly over us; as if giant bat-winged gryphons squatted
invisibly on the mountain-tops and leered with Abaddon-eyes that had
looked on transcosmic gulfs.
As the afternoon advanced, it became increasingly difficult to see; and
we heard the rumble of a thunderstorm gathering over Tempest Mountain.
This sound in such a locality naturally stirred us, though less than
it would have done at night. As it was, we hoped desperately that the
storm would last until well after dark; and with that hope turned from
our aimless hillside searching toward the nearest inhabited hamlet to
gather a body of squatters as helpers in the investigation. Timid as
they were, a few of the younger men were sufficiently inspired by our
protective leadership to promise such help.
We had hardly more than turned, however, when there descended such a
blinding sheet of torrential rain that shelter became imperative. The
extreme, almost nocturnal darkness of the sky caused us to stumble
sadly, but guided by the frequent flashes of lightning and by our
minute knowledge of the hamlet we soon reached the least porous cabin
of the lot; an heterogeneous combination of logs and boards whose still
existing door and single tiny window both faced Maple Hill. Barring
the door after us against the fury of the wind and rain, we put in
place the crude window shutter which our frequent searches had taught
us where to find. It was dismal sitting there on rickety boxes in the
pitchy darkness, but we smoked pipes and occasionally flashed our
pocket lamps about. Now and then we could see the lightning through
cracks in the wall; the afternoon was so incredibly dark that each
flash was extremely vivid.
The stormy vigil reminded me shudderingly of my ghastly night on
Tempest Mountain. My mind turned to that odd question which had kept
recurring ever since the nightmare thing had happened; and again I
wondered why the demon, approaching the three watchers either from the
window or the interior, had begun with the men on each side and left
the middle man till the last, when the titan fireball had scared it
away. Why had it not taken its victims in natural order, with myself
second, from whichever direction it had approached? With what manner
of far-reaching tentacles did it prey? Or did it know that I was the
leader, and save me for a fate worse than that of my companions?
In the midst of these reflections, as if dramatically arranged to
intensify them, there fell near by a terrific bolt of lightning
followed by the sound of sliding earth. At the same time the wolfish
wind rose to demoniac crescendos of ululation. We were sure that the
lone tree on Maple Hill had been struck again, and Munroe rose from
his box and went to the tiny window to ascertain the damage. When he
took down the shutter the wind and rain howled deafeningly in, so that
I could not hear what he said; but I waited while he leaned out and
tried to fathom nature's pandemonium.
Gradually a calming of the wind and dispersal of the unusual darkness
told of the storm's passing. I had hoped it would last into the night
to help our quest, but a furtive sunbeam from a knothole behind me
removed the likelihood of such a thing. Suggesting to Munroe that we
had better get some light even if more showers came, I unbarred and
opened the crude door. The ground outside was a singular mass of mud
and pools, with fresh heaps of earth from the slight landslide; but I
saw nothing to justify the interest which kept my companion silently
leaning out the window. Crossing to where he leaned, I touched his
shoulder; but he did not move. Then, as I playfully shook him and
turned him around, I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror
whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the
night that broods beyond time.
For Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and
gouged head there was no longer a face.
_3. What the Red Glare Meant_
On the tempest-racked night of November 8th, 1921, with a lantern which
cast charnel shadows, I stood digging alone and idiotically in the
grave of Jan Martense. I had begun to dig in the afternoon, because a
thunderstorm was brewing, and now that it was dark and the storm had
burst above the maniacally thick foliage I was glad.
I believe that my mind was partly unhinged by events since August 5th;
the demon shadow in the mansion, the general strain and disappointment,
and the thing that occurred at the hamlet in an October storm.
After that thing I had dug a grave for one whose death I could not
understand. I knew that others could not understand either, so let
them think Arthur Munroe had wandered away. They searched, but found
nothing. The squatters might have understood, but I dared not frighten
them more. I myself seemed strangely callous. That shock at the mansion
had done something to my brain, and I could think only of the quest for
a horror now grown to cataclysmic stature in my imagination; a quest
which the fate of Arthur Munroe made me vow to keep silent and solitary.
The scene of my excavations would alone have been enough to unnerve
any ordinary man. Baleful primal trees of unholy size, age, and
grotesqueness leered above me like the pillars of some hellish Druidic
temple; muffling the thunder, hushing the clawing wind, and admitting
but little rain. Beyond the scarred trunks in the background, illumined
by faint flashes of filtered lightning, rose the damp ivied stones of
the deserted mansion, while somewhat nearer was the abandoned Dutch
garden whose walks and beds were polluted by a white, fungous, fetid,
overnourished vegetation that never saw full daylight. And nearest of
all was the graveyard, where deformed trees tossed insane branches
as their roots displaced unhallowed slabs and sucked venom from what
lay below. Now and then, beneath the brown pall of leaves that rotted
and festered in the antediluvian forest darkness, I could trace the
sinister outlines of some of these low mounds which characterized the
lightning-pierced region.
History had led me to this archaic grave. History, indeed, was all I
had after everything else ended in mocking Satanism. I now believed
that the lurking fear was no material thing, but a wolf-fanged ghost
that rode the midnight lightning. And I believed, because of the masses
of local tradition I had unearthed in my search with Arthur Munroe,
that the ghost was that of Jan Martense, who died in 1762. That is why
I was digging idiotically in his grave.
The Martense mansion was built in 1670 by Gerrit Martense, a wealthy
New Amsterdam merchant who disliked the changing order under British
rule, and had constructed this magnificent domicile on a remote
woodland summit whose untrodden solitude and unusual scenery pleased
him. The only substantial disappointment encountered in this site was
that which concerned the prevalence of violent thunderstorms in summer.
When selecting the hill and building his mansion, Mynheer Martense
had laid these frequent natural outbursts to some peculiarity of the
year; but in time he perceived that the locality was especially liable
to such phenomena. At length, having found these storms injurious to
his head, he fitted up a cellar into which he could retreat from their
wildest pandemonium.
Of Gerrit Martense's descendants less is known than of himself; since
they were all reared in hatred of the English civilization, and
trained to shun such of the colonists as accepted it. Their life was
exceedingly secluded, and people declared that their isolation had made
them heavy of speech and comprehension. In appearance all were marked
by a peculiar inherited dissimilarity of eyes; one generally being
blue and the other brown. Their social contacts grew fewer and fewer,
till at last they took to intermarrying with the numerous menial class
about the estate. Many of the crowded family degenerated, moved across
the valley, and merged with the mongrel population which was later to
produce the pitiful squatters. The rest had stuck sullenly to their
ancestral mansion, becoming more and more clannish and taciturn, yet
developing a nervous responsiveness to the frequent thunderstorms.
Most of this information reached the outside world through young Jan
Martense, who from some kind of restlessness joined the colonial army
when news of the Albany Convention reached Tempest Mountain. He was
the first of Gerrit's descendants to see much of the world; and when
he returned in 1760, after six years of campaigning, he was hated
as an outsider by his father, uncles, and brothers, in spite of his
dissimilar Martense eyes. No longer could he share the peculiarities
and prejudices of the Martenses, while the very mountain thunderstorms
failed to intoxicate him as they had before. Instead, his surroundings
depressed him; and he frequently wrote to a friend in Albany of plans
to leave the paternal roof.
In the spring of 1763 Jonathan Gifford, the Albany friend of Jan
Martense, became worried by his correspondent's silence; especially in
view of the conditions and quarrels at the Martense mansion. Determined
to visit Jan in person, he went into the mountains on horseback. His
diary states that he reached Tempest Mountain on September 20th,
finding the mansion in great decrepitude. The sullen, odd-eyed
Martenses, whose unclean animal aspect shocked him, told him in broken
gutturals than Jan was dead. He had, they insisted, been struck by
lightning the autumn before, and now lay buried behind the neglected
sunken gardens. They showed the visitor the grave, barren and devoid of
markers. Something in the Martenses' manner gave Gifford a feeling of
repulsion and suspicion, and a week later he returned with spade and
mattock to explore the sepulchral spot. He found what he expected--a
skull crushed cruelly as if by savage blows--so returning to Albany he
openly charged the Martenses with the murder of their kinsman.
Legal evidence was lacking, but the story spread rapidly around the
countryside; and from that time the Martenses were ostracized by the
world. No one would deal with them, and their distant manor was shunned
as an accursed place. Somehow they managed to live on independently
by the products of their estate, for occasional lights glimpsed from
far-away hills attested their continued presence. These lights were
seen as late as 1810, but toward the last they became very infrequent.
Meanwhile there grew up about the mansion and the mountain a body of
diabolic legendry. The place was avoided with doubled assiduousness,
and invested with every whispered myth tradition could supply. It
remained unvisited till 1816, when the continued absence of lights was
noticed by the squatters. At that time a party made investigations,
finding the house deserted and partly in ruins.
There were no skeletons about, so that departure rather than death
was inferred. The clan seemed to have left several years before,
and improvised penthouses showed how numerous it had grown prior to
its migration. Its cultural level had fallen very low, as proved by
decaying furniture and scattered silverware which must have been long
abandoned when its owners left. But though the dreaded Martenses were
gone, the fear of the haunted house continued; and grew very acute
when new and strange stories arose among the mountain decadents. There
it stood; deserted, feared, and linked with the vengeful ghost of Jan
Martense. There it still stood on the night I dug in Jan Martense's
grave.
* * * * *
I have described my protracted digging as idiotic, and such it indeed
was in object and method. The coffin of Jan Martense had been soon
unearthed--it now held only dust and niter--but in my fury to exhume
his ghost I delved irrationally and clumsily down beneath where he had
lain. God knows what I expected to find--I only felt that I was digging
in the grave of a man whose ghost stalked by night.
It is impossible to say what monstrous depth I had attained when my
spade, and soon my feet, broke through the ground beneath. The event,
under the circumstances, was tremendous; for in the existence of a
subterranean space here, my mad theories had terrible confirmation. My
slight fall had extinguished the lantern, but I produced an electric
pocket-lamp and viewed the small horizontal tunnel which led away
indefinitely in both directions. It was amply large for a man to
wriggle through; and though no sane person would have tried it at that
time, I forgot danger, reason, and cleanliness in my single-minded
fever to unearth the lurking fear. Choosing the direction toward the
house, I scrambled recklessly into the narrow burrow; squirming ahead
blindly and rapidly, and flashing but seldom the lamp I kept before me.
What language can describe the spectacle of a man lost in infinitely
abysmal earth; pawing, twisting, wheezing; scrambling madly through
sunken convolutions of immemorial blackness without an idea of time,
safety, direction, or definite object? There is something hideous in
it, but that is what I did. I did it for so long that life faded to
a far memory, and I became one with the moles and grubs of nighted
depths. Indeed, it was only by accident that after interminable
writhings I jarred my forgotten electric lamp alight, so that it shone
eerily along the burrow of caked loam that stretched and curved ahead.
I had been scrambling in this way for some time, so that my battery
had burned very low, when the passage suddenly inclined sharply
upward, altering my mode of progress. And as I raised my glance it
was without preparation that I saw glistening in the distance two
demoniac reflections of my expiring lamp; two reflections glowing
with a baneful and unmistakable effulgence, and provoking maddeningly
nebulous memories. I stopped automatically, though lacking the brain to
retreat. The eyes approached, yet of the thing that bore them I could
distinguish only a claw. But what a claw! Then far overhead I heard
a faint crashing which I recognized. It was the wild thunder of the
mountain, raised to hysteric fury. I must have been crawling upward for
some time, so that the surface was now quite near. And as the muffled
thunder clattered, those eyes still stared with vacuous viciousness.
Thank God I did not then know what it was, else I should have died.
But I was saved by the very thunder that had summoned it, for after
a hideous wait there burst from the unseen outside sky one of those
frequent mountainward bolts whose aftermath I had noticed here and
there as gashes of disturbed earth and fulgurites of various sizes.
With Cyclopean rage it tore through the soil above that damnable pit,
blinding and deafening me, yet not wholly reducing me to a coma.
In the chaos of sliding, shifting earth I clawed and floundered
helplessly till the rain on my head steadied me and I saw that I had
come to the surface in a familiar spot; a steep unforested place on the
southwest slope of the mountain. Recurrent sheet lightnings illumed the
tumbled ground and the remains of the curious low hummock which had
stretched down from the wooded higher slope, but there was nothing in
the chaos to show my place of egress from the lethal catacomb. My brain
was as great a chaos as the earth, and as a distant red glare burst on
the landscape from the south I hardly realized the horror I had been
through.
But when two days later the squatters told me what the red glare
meant, I felt more horror than that which the mold-burrow and the
claw and eyes had given; more horror because of the overwhelming
implications. In a hamlet twenty miles away an orgy of fear had
followed the bolt which brought me above ground, and a nameless thing
had dropped from an overhanging tree into a weak-roofed cabin. It had
done a deed, but the squatters had fired the cabin in frenzy before it
could escape. It had been doing that deed at the very moment the earth
caved in on the thing with the claw and eyes.
_4. The Horror in the Eyes_
There can be nothing normal in the mind of one who, knowing what I
knew of the horrors of Tempest Mountain, would seek alone for the fear
that lurked there. That at least two of the fear's embodiments were
destroyed, formed but a slight guarantee of mental and physical safety
in this Acheron of multiform diabolism; yet I continued my quest with
even greater zeal as events and revelations became more monstrous.
When, two days after my frightful crawl through that crypt of the eyes
and claw, I learned that a thing had malignly hovered twenty miles
away at the same instant the eyes were glaring at me, I experienced
virtual convulsions of fright. But that fright was so mixed with wonder
and alluring grotesqueness that it was almost a pleasant sensation.
Sometimes, in the throes of a nightmare when unseen powers whirl one
over the roofs of strange dead cities toward the grinning chasm of
Nis, it is a relief and even a delight to shriek wildly and throw
oneself voluntarily along with the hideous vortex of dream-doom down
into whatever bottomless gulf may yawn. And so it was with the waking
nightmare of Tempest Mountain; the discovery that two monsters had
haunted the spot gave me ultimately a mad craving to plunge into the
very earth of the accursed region, and with bare hands dig out the
death that leered from every inch of the poisonous soil.
As soon as possible I visited the grave of Jan Martense and dug vainly
where I had dug before. Some extensive cave-in had obliterated all
trace of the underground passage, while the rain had washed so much
earth back into the excavation that I could not tell how deeply I had
dug that other day. I likewise made a difficult trip to the distant
hamlet where the death-creature had been burnt, and was little repaid
for my trouble. In the ashes of the fateful cabin I found several
bones, but apparently none of the monster's. The squatters said the
thing had had only one victim; but in this I judged them inaccurate,
since besides the complete skull of a human being, there was another
bony fragment which seemed certainly to have belonged to a human skull
at some time. Though the rapid drop of the monster had been seen, no
one could say just what the creature was like; those who had glimpsed
it called it simply a devil. Examining the great tree where it had
lurked, I could discern no distinctive marks. I tried to find some
trail into the black forest, but on this occasion could not stand the
sight of those morbidly large boles, or of those vast serpentlike roots
that twisted so malevolently before they sank into the earth.
My next step was to re-examine with microscopic care the deserted
hamlet where death had come most abundantly, and where Arthur Munroe
had seen something he never lived to describe. Though my vain previous
searches had been exceedingly minute, I now had new data to test; for
my horrible grave-crawl convinced me that at least one of the phases
of the monstrosity had been an underground creature. This time, on the
14th of November, my quest concerned itself mostly with the slopes
of Cone Mountain and Maple Hill where they overlook the unfortunate
hamlet, and I gave particular attention to the loose earth of the
landslide region on the latter eminence.
The afternoon of my search brought nothing to light, and dusk came
as I stood on Maple Hill looking down at the hamlet and across the
valley to Tempest Mountain. There had been a gorgeous sunset, and now
the moon came up, nearly full and shedding a silver flood over the
plain, the distant mountainside, and the curious low mounds that rose
here and there. It was a peaceful Arcadian scene, but knowing what it
hid I hated it. I hated the mocking moon, the hypocritical plain, the
festering mountain, and those sinister mounds. Everything seemed to me
tainted with a loathsome contagion, and inspired by a noxious alliance
with distorted hidden powers.
Presently, as I gazed abstractedly at the moonlit panorama, my eye
became attracted by something singular in the nature and arrangement
of a certain topographical element. Without having any exact knowledge
of geology, I had from the first been interested in the odd mounds
and hummocks of the region. I had noticed that they were pretty
widely distributed around Tempest Mountain, though less numerous on
the plain than near the hilltop itself, where prehistoric glaciation
had doubtless found feebler opposition to its striking and fantastic
caprices. Now, in the light of that low moon which cast long weird
shadows, it struck me forcibly that the various points and lines of the
mound system had a peculiar relation to the summit of Tempest Mountain.
That summit was undeniably a center from which the lines or rows of
points radiated indefinitely and irregularly, as if the unwholesome
Martense mansion had thrown out visible tentacles of terror. The idea
of such tentacles gave me an unexplained thrill, and I stopped to
analyze my reason for believing these mounds glacial phenomena.
The more I analyzed the less I believed, and against my newly opened
mind there began to beat grotesque and horrible analogies based on
superficial aspects and upon my experience beneath the earth. Before
I knew it I was uttering frenzied and disjointed words to myself: "My
God! ... Molehills ... the damned place must be honeycombed ... how
many ... that night at the mansion ... they took Bennett and Tobey
first ... on each side of us." ... Then I was digging frantically
into the mound which had stretched nearest me; digging desperately,
shiveringly, but almost jubilantly; digging and at last shrieking aloud
with some unplaced emotion as I came upon a tunnel or burrow just like
the one through which I had crawled on that other demoniac night.
After that I recall running, spade in hand; a hideous run across
moon-litten, mound-marked meadows and through diseased, precipitous
abysses of haunted hillside forest; leaping, screaming, panting,
bounding toward the terrible Martense mansion. I recall digging
unreasoningly in all parts of the brier-choked cellar; digging to find
the core and center of that malignant universe of mounds. And then I
recall how I laughed when I stumbled on the passageway; the hole at
the base of the old chimney, where the thick weeds grew and cast queer
shadows in the light of the lone candle I had happened to have with me.
What still remained down in that hell-hive, lurking and waiting for the
thunder to arouse it, I did not know. Two had been killed; perhaps that
had finished it. But still there remained that burning determination to
reach the innermost secret of the fear, which I had once more come to
deem definite, material, and organic.
My indecisive speculation whether to explore the passage alone and
immediately with my pocket-light or to try to assemble a band of
squatters for the quest was interrupted after a time by a sudden rush
of wind from the outside which blew out the candle and left me in stark
blackness. The moon no longer shone through the chinks and apertures
above me, and with a sense of fateful alarm I heard the sinister and
significant rumble of approaching thunder. A confusion of associated
ideas possessed my brain, leading me to grope back toward the farthest
corner of the cellar. My eyes, however, never turned away from the
horrible opening at the base of the chimney; and I began to get
glimpses of the crumbling bricks and unhealthy weeds as faint glows
of lightning penetrated the woods outside and illumined the chinks in
the upper wall. Every second I was consumed with a mixture of fear
and curiosity. What would the storm call forth--or was there anything
left for it to call? Guided by a lightning flash I settled myself down
behind a dense clump of vegetation, through which I could see the
opening without being seen.
* * * * *
If heaven is merciful, it will some day efface from my consciousness
the sight that I saw, and let me live my last years in peace. I can
not sleep at night now, and have to take opiates when it thunders. The
thing came abruptly and unannounced; a demon, ratlike scurrying from
pits remote and unimaginable, a hellish panting and stifled grunting,
and then from that opening beneath the chimney a burst of multitudinous
and leprous life--a loathsome night-spawned flood of organic corruption
more devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal
madness and morbidity. Seething, stewing, surging, bubbling like
serpents' slime it rolled up and out of that yawning hole, spreading
like a septic contagion and streaming from the cellar at every point of
egress--streaming out to scatter through the accursed midnight forests
and strew fear, madness, and death.
God knows how many there were--there must have been thousands. To see
the stream of them in that faint, intermittent lightning was shocking.
When they had thinned out enough to be glimpsed as separate organisms,
I saw that they were dwarfed, deformed hairy devils or apes--monstrous
and diabolic caricatures of the monkey tribe. They were so hideously
silent; there was hardly a squeal when one of the last stragglers
turned with the skill of long practise to make a meal in accustomed
fashion on a weaker companion. Others snapped up what it left and ate
with slavering relish. Then, in spite of my daze of fright and disgust,
my morbid curiosity triumphed; and as the last of the monstrosities
oozed up alone from that nether world of unknown nightmare, I drew my
automatic pistol and shot it under cover of the thunder.
Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness
chasing one another through endless, ensanguined corridors of purple
fulgurous sky ... formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a
ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous overnourished oaks
with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an
earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; moundlike tentacles
groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion ... insane
lightning over malignant ivied walls and demon arcades choked with
fungous vegetation.... Heaven be thanked for the instinct which led me
unconscious to places where men dwell; to the peaceful village that
slept under the calm stars of clearing skies.
[Illustration: "They were slithering shadows of red madness."]
I had recovered enough in a week to send to Albany for a gang of
men to blow up the Martense mansion and the entire top of Tempest
Mountain with dynamite, stop up all the discoverable mound-burrows,
and destroy certain overnourished trees whose very existence seemed an
insult to sanity. I could sleep a little after they had done this, but
true rest will never come as long as I remember that nameless secret
of the lurking fear. The thing will haunt me, for who can say the
extermination is complete, and that analogous phenomena do not exist
all over the world? Who can, with my knowledge, think of the earth's
unknown caverns without a nightmare dread of future possibilities? I
can not see a well or a subway entrance without shuddering ... why can
not the doctors give me something to make me sleep, or truly calm my
brain when it thunders?
What I saw in the glow of my flashlight after I shot the unspeakable
straggling object was so simple that almost a minute elapsed before
I understood and went delirious. The object was nauseous; a filthy
whitish gorilla thing with sharp yellow fangs and matted fur. It was
the ultimate product of mammalian degeneration; the frightful outcome
of isolated spawning, multiplication, and cannibal nutrition above and
below the ground; the embodiment of all the snarling chaos and grinning
fear that lurk behind life. It had looked at me as it died, and its
eyes had the same odd quality that marked those other eyes which had
stared at me underground and excited cloudy recollections. One eye
was blue, the other brown. They were the dissimilar Martense eyes of
the old legends, and I knew in one inundating cataclysm of voiceless
horror what had become of that vanished family; the terrible and
thunder-crazed house of Martense.
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