The Lurking Fear | Page 5

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