The Lurking Fear | Page 6

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