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 daemon 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
civilisation once feebly and transiently penetrated, leaving behind
as it receded only a few ruined 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 neighbouring villages;
since it is a prime topic in the simple discourse of the poor
mongrels who sometimes leave their valleys to trade hand-woven
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 daemon 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 half-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 squatters’ 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 75 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 daemon 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 25 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 sceptical; including the
mansion only casually in their investigations, and dropping it
altogether when they found it thoroughly deserted. Country and
village people, however, 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.