The Lurking Fear

The Lurking Fear
by H.P. Lovecraft

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.