The Lurking Fear | Page 7

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