H.P. Lovecraft. The Lurking Fear
The Lurking Fear
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written November 1922
Published January-April 1923 in Home Brew
I. The Shadow On The Chimney
Vol. 2, No. 6 (January 1923), p. 4-10;
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 civilization 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
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 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 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 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, 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 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
Vol. 3, No. 1 (February 1923), p. 18-23;
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 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 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 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 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 with the exhaustive and definitive examination of spots
associated with the various tragedies of squatter legend.
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 probably theory. The
only thing really incompativle with the latter view was the rapidity with
which the creature must have travelled in order to perform all the deeds
attributed to it.
When we came to know the squatters better, we found them curiously
likeable 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 Monroe 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 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
Vol. 3, No. 2 (March 1923), p. 31-37, 44, 48;
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 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 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. Somehow 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 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 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. 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 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
Vol. 3, No. 3 (April 1923), p. 35-42.
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
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
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.