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.
