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 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 civilization 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.

No one outside the backwoods had believed these varying and conflicting

stories, with their incoherent, extravagant descriptions of the hall-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 squatter’s 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 seventy-five 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 demon 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 twenty-five 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 skeptical; including the mansion only casually in their

investigations, and dropping it altogether when they found it thoroughly

deserted. Country and village people, however I 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.

So on this summer night, while distant thunder rumbled, I left a silent motor-

car and tramped with two armed companions up the last mound-covered

reaches of Tempest Mountain, casting the beams of an electric torch on the

spectral grey walls that began to appear through giant oaks ahead. In this

morbid night solitude and feeble shifting illumination, the vast boxlike pile

displayed obscure hints of terror which day could not uncover; yet I did not hesitate, since I had come with fierce resolution to test an idea. I believed that

the thunder called the death-demon out of some fearsome secret place; and be

that demon solid entity or vaporous pestilence, I meant to see it.

I had thoroughly searched the ruin before, hence knew my plan well;

choosing as the seat of my vigil the old room of Jan Martense, whose murder

looms so great in the rural legends. I felt subtly that the apartment of this

ancient victim was best for my purposes. The chamber, measuring about

twenty feet square, contained like the other rooms some rubbish which had

once been furniture. It lay on the second story, on the southeast corner of the

house, and had an immense east window and narrow south window, both

devoid of panes or shutters. Opposite the large window was an enormous

Dutch fireplace with scriptural tiles representing the prodigal son, and

opposite the narrow window was a spacious bed built into the wall.

As the tree-muffled thunder grew louder, I arranged my plan’s details. First I

fastened side by side to the ledge of the large window three rope ladders

which I had brought with me. I knew they reached a suitable spot on the grass

outside, for I had tested them. Then the three of us dragged from another

room a wide four-poster bedstead, crowding it laterally against the window.

Having strewn it with fir boughs, all now rested on it with drawn automatics,

two relaxing while the third watched. From whatever direction the demon

might come, our potential escape was provided. If it came from within the

house, we had the window ladders; if from outside the door and the stairs. We

did not think, judging from precedent, that it would pursue us far even at

worst.

I watched from midnight to one o’clock, when in spite of the sinister house,

the unprotected window, and the approaching thunder and lightning, I felt

singularly drowsy. I was between my two companions, George Bennett being

toward the window and William Tobey toward the fireplace. Bennett was

asleep, having apparently felt the same anomalous drowsiness which affected

me, so I designated Tobey for the next watch although even he was nodding.

It is curious how intently I had been watching the fireplace.

The increasing thunder must have affected my dreams, for in the brief time I

slept there came to me apocalyptic visions. Once I partly awaked, probably

because the sleeper toward the window had restlessly flung an arm across my

chest. I was not sufficiently awake to see whether Tobey was attending to his

duties as sentinel, but felt a distinct anxiety on that score. Never before had

the presence of evil so poignantly oppressed me. Later I must have dropped

asleep again, for it was out of a phantasmal chaos that my mind leaped when

the night grew hideous with shrieks beyond anything in my former experience

or imagination.

In that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelessly

and insanely at the ebony gates of oblivion. I awoke to red madness and the

mockery of diabolism, as farther and farther down inconceivable vistas that

phobic and crystalline anguish retreated and reverberated. There was no light,

but I knew from the empty space at my right that Tobey was gone, God alone

knew whither. Across my chest still lay the heavy arm of the sleeper at my

left.

Then came the devastating stroke of lightning which shook the whole

mountain, lit the darkest crypts of the hoary grove, and splintered the

patriarch of the twisted trees. In the demon flash of a monstrous fireball the

sleeper started up suddenly while the glare from beyond the window threw his

shadow vividly upon the chimney above the fireplace from which my eyes

had never strayed. That I am still alive and sane, is a marvel I cannot fathom.

I cannot fathom it, for the shadow on that chimney was not that of George

Bennett or of any other human creature, but a blasphemous abnormality from

hell’s nethermost craters; a nameless, shapeless abomination which no mind

could fully grasp and no pen even partly describe. In another second I was

alone in the accursed mansion, shivering and gibbering. George Bennett and

William Tobey had left no trace, not even of a struggle. They were never

heard of again.

❤️

For days after that hideous experience in the forest-swathed mansion I lay

nervously exhausted in my hotel room at Lefferts Corners. I do not remember

exactly how I managed to reach the motor-car, start it, and slip unobserved

back to the village; for I retain no distinct impression save of wild-armed titan

trees, demoniac mutterings of thunder, and Charonian shadows athwart the

low mounds that dotted and streaked the region.

As I shivered and brooded on the casting of that brain-blasting shadow, I

knew that I had at last pried out one of earth’s supreme horrors - one of those

nameless blights of outer voids whose faint demon scratchings we sometimes

hear on the farthest rim of space, yet from which our own finite vision has

given us a merciful immunity. The shadow I had seen, I hardly dared to

analyse or identify. Something had lain between me and the window that

night, but I shuddered whenever I could not cast off the instinct to classify it.

If it had only snarled, or bayed, or laughed titteringly-even that would have

relieved the abysmal hideousness. But it was so silent. It had rested a heavy

arm or foreleg on my chest…

Obviously it was organic, or had once been organic… Jan Martense, whose

room I had invaded, was buried in the graveyard near the mansion… I must

find Bennett and Tobey, if they lived… why had it picked them, and left me for the last?… Drowsiness is so stifling, and dreams are so horrible…

In a short time I realised that I must tell my story to someone or break down

completely. I had already decided not to abandon the quest for the lurking

fear, for in my rash ignorance it seemed to me that uncertainty was worse than

enlightenment, however terrible the latter might prove to be. Accordingly I

resolved in my mind the best course to pursue; whom to select for my

confidences, and how to track down the thing which had obliterated two men

and cast a nightmare shadow.

My chief acquaintances at Lefferts Corners had been the affable reporters, of

whom several had still remained to collect final echoes of the tragedy. It was

from these that I determined to choose a colleague, and the more I reflected

the more my preference inclined toward one Arthur Munroe, a dark, lean man

of about thirty-five, whose education, taste, intelligence, and temperament all

seemed to mark him as one not bound to conventional ideas and experiences.

On an afternoon in early September, Arthur Munroe listened to my story. I

saw from the beginning that he was both interested and sympathetic, and

when I had finished he analysed and discussed the thing with the greatest

shrewdness and judgement. His advice, moreover, was eminently practical;

for he recommended a postponement of operations at the Martense mansion

until we might become fortified with more detailed historical and

geographical data. On his initiative we combed the countryside for

information regarding the terrible Martense family, and discovered a man who

possessed a marvelously illuminating ancestral diary. We also talked at length

with such of the mountain mongrels as had not fled from the terror and

confusion to remoter slopes, and slope again scanned for dens and caves, but

all without result. And yet, as I have said, vague new fears hovered

menacingly over us; as if giant bat-winged gryphons looked on transcosmic

gulfs.

As the afternoon advanced, it became increasingly difficult to see; and we

heard the rumble of a thunderstorm gathering over Tempest Mountain. This

sound in such a locality naturally stirred us, though less than it would have

done at night. As it was, we hoped desperately that the storm would last until

well after dark; and with that hope turned from our aimless hillside searching

toward the nearest inhabited hamlet to gather a body of squatters as helpers in

the investigation. Timid as they were, a few of the younger men were

sufficiently inspired by our protective leadership to promise such help.

We had hardly more than turned, however, when there descended such a

blinding sheet of torrential rain that shelter became imperative. The extreme,

almost nocturnal darkness of the sky caused us to stumble badly, but guided

by the frequent flashes of lightning and by our minute knowledge of the hamlet we soon reached the least porous cabin of the lot; an heterogeneous

combination of logs and boards whose still existing door and single tiny

window both faced Maple Hill. Barring the door after us against the fury of

the wind and rain, we put in place the crude window shutter which our

frequent searches had taught us where to find. It was dismal sitting there on

rickety boxes in the pitchy darkness, but we smoked pipes and occasionally

flashed our pocket lamps about. Now and then we could see the lightning

through cracks in the wall; the afternoon was so incredibly dark that each

flash was extremely vivid.

The stormy vigil reminded me shudderingly of my ghastly night on Tempest

Mountain. My mind turned to that odd question which had kept recurring ever

since the nightmare thing had happened; and again I wondered why the

demon, approaching the three watchers either from the window or the interior,

had begun with the men on each side and left the middle man till the last,

when the titan fireball had scared it away. Why had it not taken its victims in

natural order, with myself second, from whichever direction it had

approached? With what manner of far-reaching tentacles did it prey? Or did it

know that I was the leader, and saved me for a fate worse than that of my

companions?

In the midst of these reflections, as if dramatically arranged to intensify them,

there fell nearby a terrific bolt of lightning followed by the sound of sliding

earth. At the same time the wolfish wind rose to demoniac crescendos of

ululation. We were sure that the one tree on Maple Hill had been struck again,

and Munroe rose from his box and went to the tiny window to ascertain the

damage. When he took down the shutter the wind, and rain howled

deafeningly in, so that I could not hear what he said; but I waited while he

leaned out and tried to fathom Nature’s pandemonium.

Gradually a calming of the wind and dispersal of the unusual darkness told of

the storm’s passing. I had hoped it would last into the night to help our quest,

but a furtive sunbeam from a knothole behind me removed the likelihood of

such a thing. Suggesting to Munroe that we had better get some light even if

more showers came, I unbarred and opened the crude door. The ground

outside was a singular mass of mud and pools, with fresh heaps of earth from

the 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.

🖤

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

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 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.

❤️