WINMX Assorted Textfiles/Ebooks.tar/Text - Compilations - The Library - Volume 02 - D to L - 350 fiction ebooks (PDF HTM(L) RTF TXT DOC).zip/Lovecraft, H P - The Lurking Fear.txt

Text File | 2000-10-08 | 45KB | 599 lines

The Lurking Fear by H.P. Lovecraft
The Lurking Fear
by H.P. Lovecraft
Written November 1922
Published 1923 in Home Brew, 2, No. 6 (January 1923): 4-10; 3, No. 1 (February
1923): 18-23; 3, No. 2 (March 1923): 31-37, 44, 48; 3, No. 3 (April 1923):
35-42.
I. 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 headlight 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 civiisation once feebly and transiently penetrated,
leaving behind as it receded only a few mined 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 handwoven baskets
for such primitive necessities as they, cannot 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 hall-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 tale of the squatters. Grandmothers told strange myths of the
Martense spectre; myths oonceming 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 squatter's villages had caved in after a lightning
stroke, 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 oountryside 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 vrnage people, however I canvassed the place with infinite
care; overturning everything in the house, sounding ponds and brooks, beating
down bushes, and ransacking the nearby 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, sQ
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 last mound-covered
reaches of Tempest Mountain, casting the beams of an electric torch on the
spectral grey walls that began to appear through 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 to 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 one 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 the 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 cannot fathom. I cannot 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.
II. 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 horors-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 analyse 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 grave-yard 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 realised that I must tell my storyto 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
resolved 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 had 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 analysed and discussed the thing with the greatest shrewdness and
judgement. 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 marvellously 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 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 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 badly, 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
saved 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 nearby 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 one 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.
III. WHAT THE RED GLARE MEANT
On the tempest-racked night of November 8, 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, hut 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, foetid,
over-nourished 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 those 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 being, but a wolf-fanged ghost that rode the midnight lightning.
And I believed, because of the masses of local tradition I had unearthed in
search with Arthur Munroe, that the ghost was that of Jan Martense, 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 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 civilisation, 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 20, finding the mansion in great
decrepitude. The sullen, odd-eyed Martenses, whose unclean animal aspect shocked
him, told him in broken gutterals that 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 round the countryside;
and from that time the Martenses were ostracised by the world. No one would deal
with them, and their distant manor was shunned as an accursed place. Some how
they managed to live on independently by the product 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 m 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 soon been unearthed-it now
held only dust and nitre-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 enough for a man to wriggle through; and though no sane person would have
tried 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. hdeed, 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 lightuings 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 realised 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 mould-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.
IV. 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 malignaly 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 into whatever bottomless gulf may yawn. And so it was with the
walking 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 serpent-like
roots that twisted so malevolently before they sank into the earth.
My next step was to reexamine 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 tant 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 centre from which the lines or rows of points radiated indefinitely and
irregularly, as if the unwholesome Martense mansion had thrown visible tentacles
of terror. The idea of such tentacles gave me an unexplained thrill, and I
stopped to analyse my reason for believing these mounds glacial phenomena.
The more I analysed 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 the 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 unreasonably in all parts of the brier-choked
cellar; digging to find the core and centre 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
weeds 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 cannot 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 practice to make a meal in
accustomed fashion on a weaker companion. 0thers 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 condors of purple fulgurous sky... formless
phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forests
of monstrous over-nourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking
unnamable 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 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.
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 over-nourished 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 cannot see a well or a
subway entrance without shuddering... why cannot the doctors give me something
to make me sleep, or truly calm my brain when it thunders?
What I saw in the glow of 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 and 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.




⌐ 1998-1999 William Johns
Last modified: 12/18/1999 18:44:10