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

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.

❤️

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***