The Lurking Fear
The Lurking Fear was loosely adapted into a 1994 movie, Lurking Fear.
I. THE SHADOW ON THE CHIMNEYThere was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted mansionatop Tempest Mountain to find the lurking fear. I was not alone, forfoolhardiness was not then mixed with that love of the grotesque and theterrible which has made my career a series of quests for strange horrors inliterature and in life. With me were two faithful and muscular men for whom Ihad sent when the time came; men long associated with me in my ghastlyexplorations because of their peculiar fitness.We had started quietly from the village because of the reporters who stilllingered about after the eldritch panic of a month before - the nightmarecreeping death. Later, I thought, they might aid me; but I did not want themthen. Would to God I had let them share the search, that I might not have had tobear the secret alone so long; to bear it alone for fear the world would call memad or go mad itself at the demon implications of the thing. Now that I amtelling it anyway, lest the brooding make me a maniac, I wish I had neverconcealed it. For I, and I only, know what manner of fear lurked on thatspectral and desolate mountain.In a small motor-car we covered the miles of primeval forest and hill untilthe wooded ascent checked it. The country bore an aspect more than usuallysinister as we viewed it by night and without the accustomed crowds ofinvestigators, so that we were often tempted to use the acetylene headlightdespite the attention it might attract. It was not a wholesome landscape afterdark, and I believe I would have noticed its morbidity even had I been ignorantof the terror that stalked there. Of wild creatures there were none-they arewise when death leers close. The ancient lightning-scarred trees seemedunnaturally large and twisted, and the other vegetation unnaturally thick andfeverish, while curious mounds and hummocks in the weedy, fulgurite-pitted earthreminded 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 learnedat once from newspaper accounts of the catastrophe which first brought theregion to the world's notice. The place is a remote, lonely elevation in thatpart of the Catskills where Dutch civiisation once feebly and transientlypenetrated, leaving behind as it receded only a few mined mansions and adegenerate squatter population inhabiting pitiful hamlets on isolated slopes.Normal beings seldom visited the locality till the state police were formed, andeven now only infrequent troopers patrol it. The fear, however, is an oldtradition throughout the neighboring villages; since it is a prime topic in thesimple discourse of the poor mongrels who sometimes leave their valleys to tradehandwoven baskets for such primitive necessities as they, cannot shoot, raise,or make.The lurking fear dwelt in the shunned and deserted Martense mansion, whichcrowned the high but gradual eminence whose liability to frequent thunderstormsgave 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 andmonstrously hideous; stories of a silent colossal creeping death which stalkedabroad in summer. With whimpering insistence the squatters told tales of a demonwhich seized lone wayfarers after dark, either carrying them off or leaving themin a frightful state of gnawed dismemberment; while sometimes they whispered ofblood trails toward the distant mansion. Some said the thunder called thelurking fear out of its habitation, while others said the thunder was its voice.No one outside the backwoods had believed these varying and conflictingstories, with their incoherent, extravagant descriptions of the hall-glimpsedfiend; yet not a farmer or villager doubted that the Martense mansion wasghoulishly haunted. Local history forbade such a doubt, although no ghostlyevidence was ever found by such investigators as had visited the building aftersome especially vivid tale of the squatters. Grandmothers told strange myths ofthe Martense spectre; myths oonceming the Martense family itself, its queerhereditary dissimilarity of eyes, its long, unnatural annals, and the murderwhich had cursed it.The terror which brought me to the scene was a sudden and portentousconfirmation of the mountaineers' wildest legends. One summer night, after athunderstorm of unprecedented violence, the countryside was aroused by asquatter stampede which no mere delusion could create. The pitiful throngs ofnatives shrieked and whined of the unnamable horror which had descended uponthem, and they were not doubted. They had not seen it, but had heard such criesfrom one of their hamlets that they knew a creeping death had come.In the morning citizens and state troopers followed the shudderingmountaineers to the place where they said the death had come. Death was indeedthere. The ground under one of the squatter's villages had caved in after alightning stroke, destroying several of the malodorous shanties; but upon thisproperty damage was superimposed an organic devastation which paled it toinsignificance. Of a possible seventy-five natives who had inhabited this spot,not one living specimen was visible. The disordered earth was covered with bloodand 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 bethe cause, everyone quickly agreed; nor did any tongue now revive the chargethat such cryptic deaths formed merely the sordid murders common in decadentcommunities. That charge was revived only when about twenty-five of theestimated population were found missing from the dead; and even then it was hardto explain the murder of fifty by half that number. But the fact remained thaton a summer night a bolt had come out of the heavens and left a dead villagewhose corpses were horribly mangled, chewed, and clawed.The excited oountryside immediately connected the horror with the hauntedMartense mansion, though the localities were over three miles apart. Thetroopers were more skeptical; including the mansion only casually in theirinvestigations, and dropping it altogether when they found it thoroughlydeserted. Country and vrnage people, however I canvassed the place with infinitecare; overturning everything in the house, sounding ponds and brooks, beatingdown bushes, and ransacking the nearby forests. All was in vain; the death thathad come had left no trace save destruction itself.By the second day of the search the affair was fully treated by thenewspapers, whose reporters overran Tempest Mountain. They described it in muchdetail, and with many interviews to elucidate the horror's history as told bylocal grandams. I followed the accounts languidly at first, for I am aconnoisseur in horrors; but after a week I detected an atmosphere which stirredme oddly, sQ that on August 5th, 1921, I registered among the reporters whocrowded the hotel at Lefferts Corners, nearest village to Tempest Mountain andacknowledged headquarters of the searchers. Three weeks more, and the dispersalof the reporters left me free-to begin a terrible exploration based on theminute inquiries and surveying with which I had meanwhile busied myself.So on this summer night, while distant thunder rumbled, I left a silentmotor-car and tramped with two armed companions up the last mound-coveredreaches of Tempest Mountain, casting the beams of an electric torch on thespectral grey walls that began to appear through giant oaks ahead. In thismorbid night solitude and feeble shifting illumination, the vast boxlike piledisplayed obscure hints of terror which day could not uncover; yet I did nothesitate, since I had come with fierce resolution to test an idea. I believedthat the thunder called the death-demon out of some fearsome secret place; andbe that demon solid entity or vaporous pestilence, I meant to see itI had thoroughly searched the ruin before, hence knew my plan well; choosingas the seat of my vigil the old room of Jan Martense, whose murder looms sogreat in the rural legends. I felt subtly that the apartment of this ancientvictim was best for my purposes. The chamber, measuring about twenty feetsquare, contained like the other rooms some rubbish which had once beenfurniture. It lay on the second story, on the southeast corner of the house, andhad an immense east window and narrow south window, both devoid of panes orshutters. Opposite the large window was 'an enormous Dutch fireplace withscriptural tiles representing the prodigal son, and opposite the narrow windowwas a spacious bed built into the wall.As the tree-muffled thunder grew louder, I arranged my plan's details. FirstI fastened side by side to the ledge of the large window three rope ladderswhich I had' brought with me. I knew they reached a suitable spot on the grassoutside, for I had tested them. Then the three of us dragged from another room awide four-poster bedstead, crowding it laterally against the window. Havingstrewn it with fir boughs, all now rested on it with drawn automatics, tworelaxing 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 thewindow 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 one o'clock, when in spite of the sinister house,the unprotected window, and the approaching thunder and lightning, I feltsingularly drowsy. I was between my two companions, George Bennett being towardthe window and William Tobey toward the fireplace. Bennett was asleep, havingapparently felt the same anomalous drowsiness which affected me, so I designatedTobey for the next watch although even he was nodding. It is curious howintently I had been watching the fireplace.The increasing thunder must have affected my dreams, for in the brief time Islept there came to me apocalyptic visions. Once I partly awaked, probablybecause the sleeper toward the window had restlessly flung an arm across mychest. I was not sufficiently awake to see whether Tobey was attending to hisduties as sentinel, but felt a distinct anxiety on that score. Never before hadthe presence of evil so poignantly oppressed me. Later I must have droppedasleep again, for it was out of a phantasmal chaos that my mind leaped when thenight grew hideous with shrieks beyond anything in my former experience orimagination.In that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelesslyand insanely at the ebony gates of oblivion. I awoke to red madness and themockery of diabolism, as farther and farther down inconceivable vistas thatphobic 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 knewwhither. Across my chest still lay the heavy arm of the sleeper at my left.Then came the devastating stroke of lightning which shook the wholemountain, lit the darkest crypts of the hoary grove, and splintered thepatriarch of the twisted trees. In the demon flash of a monstrous fireball thesleeper started up suddenly while the glare from beyond the window threw hisshadow vividly upon the chimney above the fireplace from which my eyes had neverstrayed. That I am still alive and sane, is a marvel I cannot fathom. I cannotfathom it, for the shadow on that chimney was not that of George Bennett or ofany other human creature, but a blasphemous abnormality from hell's nethermostcraters; a nameless, shapeless abomination which no mind could fully grasp andno pen even partly describe. In another second I was alone in the accursedmansion, shivering and gibbering. George Bennett and William Tobey had left notrace, not even of a struggle. They were never heard of again.
II. A PASSER IN THE STORMFor days after that hideous experience in the forest-swathed mansion I laynervously exhausted in my hotel room at Lefferts Corners. I do not rememberexactly how I managed to reach the motor-car, start it, and slip unobserved backto the village; for I retain no distinct impression save of wild-armed titantrees, demoniac mutterings of thunder, and Charonian shadows athwart the lowmounds that dotted and streaked the region.As I shivered and brooded on the casting of that brain-blasting shadow, Iknew that I had at last pried out one of earth's supreme horors-one of thosenameless blights of outer voids whose faint demon scratchings we sometimes hearon the farthest rim of space, yet from which our own finite vision has given usa merciful immunity. The shadow I had seen, I hardly dared to analyse oridentify. Something had lain between me and the window that night, but Ishuddered whenever I could not cast off the instinct to classify it. If it hadonly snarled, or bayed, or laughed titteringly-even that would have relieved theabysmal hideousness. But it was so silent. It had rested a heavy arm or forelegon my chest...Obviously it was organic, or had once been organic... Jan Martense, whoseroom I had invaded, was buried in the grave-yard near the mansion... I must findBennett and Tobey, if they lived... why had it picked them, and left me for thelast?... Drowsiness is so stifling, and dreams are so horrible...In a short time I realised that I must tell my storyto someone or break downcompletely. 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 thanenlightenment, however terrible the latter might prove to be. Accordingly Iresolved in my mind the best course to pursue; whom to select for myconfidences, and how to track down the thing which had obliterated two men andcast a nightmare shadow.My chief acquaintances at Lefferts Corners had been the affable reporters,of whom several had still remained to collect final echoes of the tragedy. Itwas from these that I determined to choose a colleague, and the more I reflectedthe more my preference inclined toward one Arthur Munroe, a 'dark, lean man ofabout thirty-five, whose education, taste, intelligence, and temperament allseemed to mark him as one not bound to conventional ideas and experiences.On an afternoon in early September, Arthur Munroe listened to my story. Isaw from the beginning that he was both interested and sympathetic, and when Ihad finished he analysed and discussed the thing with the greatest shrewdnessand judgement. His advice, moreover, was eminently practical; for he recommendeda postponement of operations at the Martense mansion until we might becomefortified with more detailed historical and geographical data. On his initiativewe combed the countryside for information regarding the terrible Martensefamily, and discovered a man who possessed a marvellously illuminating ancestraldiary. We also talked at length with such of the mountain mongrels as had notfled from the terror and confusion to remoter slopes, and slope again scannedfor dens and caves, but all without result. And yet, as I have said, vague newfears hovered menacingly over, us; as if giant bat-winged gryphons looked ontranscosmic gulfs.As the afternoon advanced, it became increasingly difficult to see; and weheard the rumble of a thunderstorm gathering over Tempest Mountain. This soundin such a locality naturally stirred us, though less than it would have done atnight. As it was, we hoped desperately that the storm would last until wellafter dark; and with that hope turned from our aimless hillside searching towardthe nearest inhabited hamlet to gather a body of squatters as helpers in theinvestigation. Timid as they were, a few of the younger men were sufficientlyinspired by our protective leadership to promise such help.We had hardly more than turned, however, when there descended such ablinding sheet of torrential rain that shelter became imperative. The extreme,almost nocturnal darkness of the sky caused us to stumble badly, but guided bythe frequent flashes of lightning and by our minute knowledge of the hamlet wesoon reached the least porous cabin of the lot; an heterogeneous combination oflogs and boards whose still existing door and single tiny window both facedMaple Hill. Barring the door after us against the fury of the wind and rain, weput in place the crude window shutter which our frequent searches had taught uswhere to find. It was dismal sitting there on rickety boxes in the pitchydarkness, but we smoked pipes and occasionally flashed our pocket lamps about.Now and then we could see the lightning through cracks in the wall; theafternoon was so incredibly dark that each flash was extremely vivid.The stormy vigil reminded me shudderingly of my ghastly night on TempestMountain. My mind turned to that odd question which had kept recurring eversince the nightmare thing had happened; and again I wondered why the demon,approaching the three watchers either from the window or the interior, had begunwith the men on each side and left the middle man till the last, when the titanfireball 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 mannerof far-reaching tentacles did it prey? Or did it know that I was the leader, andsaved me for a fate worse than that of my companions?In the midst of these reflections, as if dramatically arranged to intensifythem, there fell nearby a terrific bolt of lightning followed by the sound ofsliding earth. At the same time the wolfish wind rose to demoniac crescendos ofululation. We were sure that the one tree on Maple Hill had been struck again,and Munroe rose from his box and went to the tiny window to ascertain thedamage. 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 andtried to fathom Nature's pandemonium.Gradually a calming of the wind and dispersal of the unusual darkness toldof the storm's passing. I had hoped it would last into the night to help ourquest, but a furtive sunbeam from a knothole behind me removed the likelihood ofsuch a thing. Suggesting to Munroe that we had better get some light even ifmore showers came, I unbarred and opened the crude door. The ground outside wasa singular mass of mud and pools, with fresh heaps of earth from the slightlandslide; but I saw nothing to justify the interest which kept my companionsilently leaning out the window. Crossing to where he leaned, I touched hisshoulder; but he did not move. Then, as I playfully shook him and turned himaround, I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reachedinto illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyondtime.For Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and gougedhead there was no longer a face.
III. WHAT THE RED GLARE MEANTOn the tempest-racked night of November 8, 1921, with a lantern which castcharnel shadows, I stood digging alone and idiotically in the grave of JanMartense. I had begun to dig in the afternoon, because a thunderstorm wasbrewing, and now that it was dark and the storm had burst above the maniacallythick foliage I was glad.I believe that my mind was partly unhinged by events since August 5th; thedemon shadow in the mansion the general strain and disappointment, and the thingthat occurred at the hamlet in an October storm. After that thing I had dug agrave for one whose death I could not understand. I knew that others could notunderstand either, so let them think Arthur Munroe had wandered away. Theysearched, but found nothing. The squatters might have understood, hut I darednot frighten them more. I myself seemed strangely callous. That shock at themansion had done something to my brain, and I could think only of the quest fora horror now grown to cataclysmic stature in my imagination; a quest which thefate of Arthur Munroe made me vow to keep silent and solitary.The scene of my excavations would alone have been enough to unnerve anyordinary man. Baleful primal trees of unholy size, age, and grotesqueness leeredabove me like the pillars of some hellish Druidic temple; muffling the thunder,hushing the clawing wind, and admitting but little rain. Beyond the scarredtrunks in the background, illumined by faint flashes of filtered lightning, rosethe damp ivied stones of the deserted mansion, while somewhat nearer was theabandoned Dutch garden whose walks and beds were polluted by a white, fungous,foetid, over-nourished vegetation that never saw full daylight. And nearest ofall was the graveyard, where deformed trees tossed insane branches as theirroots displaced unhallowed slabs and sucked venom from what lay below. Now andthen, beneath the brown pall of leaves that rotted and festered in theantediluvian forest darkness, I could trace the sinister outlines of some ofthose low mounds which characterized the lightning-pierced region.History had led me to this archaic grave. History, indeed, was all I hadafter everything else ended in mocking Satanism.. I now believed that thelurking fear was no material being, but a wolf-fanged ghost that rode themidnight lightning. And I believed, because of the masses of local tradition Ihad unearthed in search with Arthur Munroe, that the ghost was that of JanMartense, who died in 1762. This is why I was digging idiotically in his grave.The Martense mansion was built in 1670 by Gent Martense, a wealthyNew-Amsterdam merchant who disliked the changing order under British rule, andhad constructed this magnificent domicile on a remote woodland summit whoseuntrodden solitude and unusual scenery pleased him. The only substantialdisappointment encountered in this site was that which concerned the prevalenceof violent thunderstorms in summer. When selecting the hill and building hismansion, Mynheer Martense had laid these frequent natural outbursts to somepeculiarity of the year; but in time he perceived that the locality wasespecially liable to such phenomena. At length, having found these stormsinjurious to his head, he fitted up a cellar into which he could retreat fromtheir wildest pandemonium.Of Gerrit Martense's descendants less is known than of himself; since theywere all reared in hatred of the English civilisation, and trained to shun suchof the colonists as accepted it. Their life was exceedingly secluded, and peopledeclared that their isolation had made them heavy of speech and comprehension.In appearance all were marked by a peculiar inherited dissimilarity of eyes; onegenerally being blue and the other brown. Their social contacts grew fewer andfewer, till at last they took to intermarrying with the numerous menial classabout the estate. Many of the crowded family degenerated, moved across thevalley, and merged with the mongrel population which was later to produce thepitiful squatters. The rest had stuck sullenly to their ancestral mansion,becoming more and more clannish and taciturn, yet developing a nervousresponsiveness to the frequent thunderstorms.Most of this information reached the outside world through young JanMartense, who from some kind of restlessness joined the colonial army when newsof the Albany Convention reached Tempest Mountain. He was the first of Gerrit'sdescendants to see much of the world; and when he returned in 1760 after sixyears of campaigning, he was hated as an outsider by his father, uncles, andbrothers, in spite of his dissimilar Martense eyes. No longer could he share thepeculiarities and prejudices of the Martenses, while the very mountainthunderstorms failed to intoxicate him as they had before. Instead, hissurroundings depressed him; and he frequently wrote to a friend in Albany ofplans 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 theconditions and quarrels at the Martense mansion. Determined to visit Jan inperson, he went into the mountains on horseback. His diary states that hereached Tempest Mountain on September 20, finding the mansion in greatdecrepitude. The sullen, odd-eyed Martenses, whose unclean animal aspect shockedhim, told him in broken gutterals that Jan was dead. He had, they insisted, beenstruck by lightning the autumn before; and now lay buried behind the neglectedsunken gardens. They showed the visitor the grave, barren and devoid of markers.Something in the Martenses' manner gave Gifford a feeling of repulsion andsuspicion, and a week later he returned' with spade and mattock to explore thesepulchral spot. He found what he expected - a skull crushed cruelly as if bysavage blows-so returning to Albany he openly charged the Martenses with themurder of their kinsman.Legal evidence was lacking, but the story spread rapidly round thecountryside; and from that time the Martenses were ostracised by the world. Noone would deal with them, and their distant manor was shunned as an accursedplace. Some how they managed to live on independently by the product of theirestate, for occasional lights glimpsed from far-away hills attested theircontinued presence. These lights were seen as late as 1810, but toward the lastthey became very infrequent.Meanwhile there grew up about the mansion and the mountain a body ofdiabolic legendry. The place was avoided with doubled assiduousness, andinvested with every whispered myth tradition could supply. It remained unvisitedtill 1816, when the continued absence of lights was noticed by the squatters. Atthat time a party made investigations, finding the house deserted and partly mruins.There were no skeletons about, so that departure rather than death wasinferred. The clan seemed to have left several years before, and improvisedpenthouses showed how numerous it had grown prior to its migration. Its culturallevel had fallen very low, as proved by decaying furniture and scatteredsilverware which must have been long abandoned when its owners left. But thoughthe dreaded Martenses were gone, the fear of the haunted house continued; andgrew very acute when new and strange stories arose among the mountain decadents.There it stood; deserted, feared, and linked with the vengeful ghost of JanMartense. 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 inobject and method. The coffin of Jan Martense had soon been unearthed-it nowheld only dust and nitre-but in my fury to exhume his ghost I delvedirrationally and clumsily down beneath where he had lain. God knows what Iexpected to find-I only felt that I was digging in the grave of a man whoseghost 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 thecircumstances, was tremendous; for in the existence of a subterranean spacehere, my mad theories had terrible confirmation. My slight fall had extinguishedthe lantern, but I produced an electric pocket lamp and viewed the smallhorizontal tunnel which led away indefinitely in both directions. It was amplylarge enough for a man to wriggle through; and though no sane person would havetried at that time, I forgot danger, reason, and cleanliness in my single-mindedfever to unearth the lurking fear. Choosing the direction toward the house, Iscrambled recklessly into the narrow burrow; squirming ahead blindly andrapidly, and flashing but seldom the lamp I kept before me.What language can describe the spectacle of a man lost in infinitely abysmalearth; pawing, twisting, wheezing; scrambling madly through sunken -convolutionsof immemorial blackness without an idea of time, safety, direction, or definiteobject? There is something hideous in it, but that is what I did. I did it forso long that life faded to a far memory, and I became one with the moles andgrubs of nighted depths. hdeed, it was only by accident that after interminablewrithings I jarred my forgotten electric lamp alight, so that it shone eerilyalong the burrow of caked loam that stretched and curved ahead.I had been scrambling in this way for some time, so that my battery hadburned very low, when the passage suddenly inclined sharply upward, altering mymode of progress. And as I raised my glance it was without preparation that Isaw glistening in the distance two demoniac reflections of my expiring lamp; tworeflections glowing with a baneful and unmistakable effulgence, and provokingmaddeningly nebulous memories. I stopped automatically, though lacking the brainto retreat. The eyes approached, yet of the thing that bore them I coulddistinguish only a claw. But what a claw! Then far overhead I heard a faintcrashing which I recognized. It was the wild thunder of the mountain, raised tohysteric fury - I must have been crawling upward for some time, so that thesurface was now quite near. And as the muffled thunder clattered, those eyesstill stared with vacuous viciousness.Thank God I did not then know what it was, else I should have died. But Iwas saved by the very thunder that had summoned it, for after a hideous waitthere burst from the unseen outside sky one of those frequent mountainward boltswhose aftermath I had noticed here and there as gashes of disturbed earth andfulgurites of various sizes. With Cyclopean rage it tore through the soil abovethat damnable pit, blinding and deafening me, yet not wholly reducing me to acoma. In the chaos of sliding, shifting earth I clawed and floundered helplesslytill the rain on my head steadied me and I saw that I had come to the surface ina familiar spot; a steep unforested place on the southwest slope of themountain. Recurrent sheet lightuings illumed the tumbled ground and the remainsof the curious low hummock which had stretched down from the wooded higherslope, but there was nothing in the chaos to show my place of egress from thelethal catacomb. My brain was as great a chaos as the earth, and as a distantred glare burst on the landscape from the south I hardly realised the horror Ihad been through.But when two days later the squatters told me what the red glare meant, Ifelt more horror than that which the mould-burrow and the claw and eyes hadgiven; more horror because of the overwhelming implications. In a hamlet twentymiles 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-roofedcabin. It had done a deed, but the squatters had fired the cabin in frenzybefore it could escape. It had been doing that deed at the very moment the earthcaved in on the thing with the claw and eyes.
IV. THE HORROR IN THE EYESThere can be nothing normal in the mind of one who, knowing what I knew ofthe horrors of Tempest Mountain, would seek alone for the fear that lurkedthere. That at least two of the fear's embodiments were destroyed, formed but aslight guarantee of mental and physical safety in this Acheron of multiformdiabolism; yet I continued my quest with even greater zeal as events andrevelations became more monstrous. When, two days after my frightful crawlthrough that crypt of the eyes and claw, I learned that a thing had malignalyhovered twenty miles away at the same instant the eyes were glaring at me, Iexperienced virtual convulsions of fright. But that fright was so mixed withwonder and alluring grotesqueness, that it was almost a pleasant sensation.Sometimes, in the throes of a nightmare when unseen powers whirl one over theroofs of strange dead cities toward the grinning chasm of Nis, it is a reliefand even a delight to shriek wildly and throw oneself voluntarily along with thehideous vortex of dream-doom into whatever bottomless gulf may yawn. And so itwas with the walking nightmare of Tempest Mountain; the discovery that twomonsters had haunted the spot gave me ultimately a mad craving to plunge intothe very earth of the accursed region, and with bare hands dig out the deaththat leered from every inch of the poisonous soil.As soon as possible I visited the grave of Jan Martense and dug vainly whereI had dug before. Some extensive cave-in had obliterated all trace of theunderground passage, while the rain had washed so much earth back into theexcavation that I could not tell how deeply I had dug that other day. I likewisemade a difficult trip to the distant hamlet where the death-creature had beenburnt, and was little repaid for my trouble. In the ashes of the fateful cabin Ifound several bones, but apparently none of the monster's. The squatters saidthe thing had had only one victim; but in this I judged them inaccurate, sincebesides the complete skull of a human being, there was another bony fragmentwhich seemed certainly to have belonged to a human skull at some time. Thoughthe rapid drop of the monster had been seen, no one could say just what thecreature was like; those who had glimpsed it called it simply a devil. Examiningthe great tree where it had lurked, I could discern no distinctive marks. Itried to find some trail into the black forest, but on this occasion could notstand the sight of those morbidly large boles, or of those vast serpent-likeroots that twisted so malevolently before they sank into the earth.My next step was to reexamine with microscopic care the deserted hamletwhere death had come most abundantly, and where Arthur -Munroe had seensomething he never lived to describe. Though my vain previous searches had beenexceedingly minute, I now had new data to test; for my horrible grave-crawlconvinced me that at least one of the phases of the monstrosity had been anunderground creature. This time, on the 14th of November, my quest concerneditself mostly with the slopes of Cone Mountain and Maple Hill where theyoverlook the unfortunate hamlet, and I gave particular attention to the looseearth of the landslide region on the latter eminence.The afternoon of my search brought nothing to light, and dusk came as Istood on Maple Hill looking down at the hamlet and across the valley to TempestMountain. There had been a gorgeous sunset, and now the moon came up, nearlyfull and shedding a silver flood over the plain, the distant tant mountainside,and the curious low mounds that rose here and there. It was a peaceful Arcadianscene, but knowing what it hid I hated it. I hated the mocking moon, thehypocritical plain, the festering mountain, and those sinister mounds.Everything seemed to me tainted with a loathsome contagion, and inspired by anoxious alliance with distorted hidden powers.Presently, as I gazed abstractedly at the moonlit panorama, my eye becameattracted by something singular in the nature and arrangement of a certaintopographical element. Without having any exact knowledge of geology, I had fromthe first been interested in the odd mounds and hummocks of the region. I hadnoticed that they were pretty widely distributed around Tempest Mountain, thoughless numerous on the plain than near the hilltop itself, where prehistoricglaciation had doubtless found feebler opposition to its striking and fantasticcaprices. Now, in the light of that low moon which cast long weird shadows, itstruck me forcibly that the various points and lines of the mound system had apeculiar relation to the summit of Tempest Mountain. That summit was undeniablya centre from which the lines or rows of points radiated indefinitely andirregularly, as if the unwholesome Martense mansion had thrown visible tentaclesof terror. The idea of such tentacles gave me an unexplained thrill, and Istopped to analyse my reason for believing these mounds glacial phenomena.The more I analysed the less I believed, and against my newly opened mindthere began to beat grotesque and horrible analogies based on superficialaspects and upon my experience beneath the earth. Before I knew it I wasuttering frenzied and disjointed words to myself; "My God!... Molehills... thedamned 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 diggingfrantically into the mound which had stretched nearest me; digging desperately,shiveringly, but almost jubilantly; digging and at last shrieking aloud withsome unplaced emotion as I came upon a tunnel or burrow just like the onethrough which I had crawled on the other demoniac night.After that I recall running, spade in hand; a hideous run acrossmoon-litten, mound-marked meadows and through diseased, precipitous abysses ofhaunted hillside forest; leaping screaming, panting, bounding toward theterrible Martense mansion. I recall digging unreasonably in all parts of thebrier-choked cellar; digging to find the core and centre of that malignantuniverse of mounds. And then I recall how I laughed when I stumbled on thepassageway; the hole at the base of the old chimney, where the thick weeds grewand cast queer shadows in the light of the lone candle I had happened to havewith me. What still remained down in that hell-hive, lurking and waiting for thethunder to arouse it, I did not know. Two had been killed; perhaps that hadfinished it. But still there remained that burning determination to reach theinnermost 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 andimmediately with my pocket-light or to try to assemble a band of squatters forthe quest, was interrupted after a time by a sudden rush of wind from theoutside which blew out the candle and left me in stark blackness. The moon nolonger shone through the chinks and apertures above me, and with a sense offateful alarm I heard the sinister and significant rumble of approachingthunder. A confusion of associated ideas possessed my brain, leading me to gropeback toward the farthest corner of the cellar. My eyes, however, never turnedaway from the horrible opening at the base of the chimney; and I began to getglimpses of the crumbling bricks and unhealthy weeds as faint glows of lightningpenetrated the weeds outside and illumined the chinks in the upper wall. Everysecond I was consumed with a mixture of fear and curiosity. What would the stormcall forth-or was there anything left for it to call? Guided by a lightningflash I settled myself down behind a dense clump of vegetation, through which Icould see the opening without being seen.If heaven is merciful, it will some day efface from my consciousness thesight that I saw, and let me live my last years in peace. I cannot sleep atnight now, and have to take opiates when it thunders. The thing came abruptlyand unannounced; a demon, ratlike scurrying from pits remote and unimaginable, ahellish panting and stifled grunting, and then from that opening beneath thechimney a burst of multitudinous and leprous life - a loathsome night-spawnedflood of organic corruption more devastatingly hideous than the blackestconjurations 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 pointof egress - streaming out to scatter through the accursed midnight forests andstrew fear, madness, and death.God knows how many there were - there must have been thousands. To see thestream of them in that faint intermittent lightning was shocking. When they hadthinned out enough to be glimpsed as separate organisms, I saw that they weredwarfed, deformed hairy devils or apes-monstrous and diabolic caricatures of themonkey tribe. They were so hideously silent; there was hardly a squeal when oneof the last stragglers turned with the skill of long practice to make a meal inaccustomed fashion on a weaker companion. 0thers snapped up what it left and atewith slavering relish. Then, in spite of my daze of fright and disgust, mymorbid curiosity triumphed; and as the last of the monstrosities oozed up alonefrom that nether world of unknown nightmare, I drew my automatic pistol and shotit under cover of the thunder.Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing oneanother through endless, ensanguined condors of purple fulgurous sky... formlessphantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forestsof monstrous over-nourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and suckingunnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils;mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion...insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and demon arcades choked withfungous vegetation... Heaven be thanked for the instinct which led meunconscious to places where men dwell; to the peaceful village that slept underthe calm stars of clearing skies.I had recovered enough in a week to send to Albany for a gang of men to blowup the Martense mansion and the entire top of Tempest Mountain with dynamite,stop up all the discoverable mound-burrows, and destroy certain over-nourishedtrees whose very existence seemed an insult to sanity. I could sleep a littleafter they had done this, but true rest will never come as long as I rememberthat nameless secret of the lurking fear. The thing will haunt me, for who cansay the extermination is complete, and that analogous phenomena do not exist allover the world? Who can, with my knowledge, think of the earth's unknown cavernswithout a nightmare dread of future possibilities? I cannot see a well or asubway entrance without shuddering... why cannot the doctors give me somethingto make me sleep, or truly calm my brain when it thunders?What I saw in the glow of flashlight after I shot the unspeakable stragglingobject was so simple that almost a minute elapsed before I understood and wentdelirious. The object was nauseous; a filthy whitish gorilla thing with sharpyellow fangs and matted fur. It was the ultimate product of mammaliandegeneration; the frightful outcome of isolated spawning, multiplication, andcannibal nutrition above and below the ground; the embodiment of all thesnarling and chaos and grinning fear that lurk behind life. It had looked at meas it died, and its eyes had the same odd quality that marked those other eyeswhich had stared at me underground and excited cloudy recollections. One eye wasblue, the other brown. They were the dissimilar Martense eyes of the oldlegends, and I knew in one inundating cataclysm of voiceless horror what hadbecome of that vanished family; the terrible and thunder-crazed house ofMartense.
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