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 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
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 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 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
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.
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