I. The Shadow On The Chimney

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.

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