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 realized 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 mold-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. _4. 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 down
into whatever bottomless gulf may yawn. And so it was with the waking
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 the excavation that I could not tell how deeply I had
dug that other day. I likewise made a difficult trip to the distant
hamlet where the death-creature had been burnt, and was little repaid
for my trouble. In the ashes of the fateful cabin I found several
bones, but apparently none of the monster's. The squatters said the
thing had had only one victim; but in this I judged them inaccurate,
since besides the complete skull of a human being, there was another
bony fragment which seemed certainly to have belonged to a human skull
at some time. Though the rapid drop of the monster had been seen, no
one could say just what the creature was like; those who had glimpsed
it called it simply a devil. Examining the great tree where it had
lurked, I could discern no distinctive marks. I tried to find some
trail into the black forest, but on this occasion could not stand the
sight of those morbidly large boles, or of those vast serpentlike roots
that twisted so malevolently before they sank into the earth. My next step was to re-examine with microscopic care the deserted
hamlet where death had come most abundantly, and where Arthur Munroe
had seen something he never lived to describe. Though my vain previous
searches had been exceedingly minute, I now had new data to test; for
my horrible grave-crawl convinced me that at least one of the phases
of the monstrosity had been an underground creature. This time, on the
14th of November, my quest concerned itself mostly with the slopes
of Cone Mountain and Maple Hill where they overlook the unfortunate
hamlet, and I gave particular attention to the loose earth of the
landslide region on the latter eminence. The afternoon of my search brought nothing to light, and dusk came
as I stood on Maple Hill looking down at the hamlet and across the
valley to Tempest Mountain. There had been a gorgeous sunset, and now
the moon came up, nearly full and shedding a silver flood over the
plain, the distant mountainside, and the curious low mounds that rose
here and there. It was a peaceful Arcadian scene, but knowing what it
hid I hated it. I hated the mocking moon, the hypocritical plain, the
festering mountain, and those sinister mounds. Everything seemed to me
tainted with a loathsome contagion, and inspired by a noxious alliance
with distorted hidden powers. Presently, as I gazed abstractedly at the moonlit panorama, my eye
became attracted by something singular in the nature and arrangement
of a certain topographical element. Without having any exact knowledge
of geology, I had from the first been interested in the odd mounds
and hummocks of the region. I had noticed that they were pretty
widely distributed around Tempest Mountain, though less numerous on
the plain than near the hilltop itself, where prehistoric glaciation
had doubtless found feebler opposition to its striking and fantastic
caprices. Now, in the light of that low moon which cast long weird
shadows, it struck me forcibly that the various points and lines of the
mound system had a peculiar relation to the summit of Tempest Mountain. That summit was undeniably a center from which the lines or rows of
points radiated indefinitely and irregularly, as if the unwholesome
Martense mansion had thrown out visible tentacles of terror. The idea
of such tentacles gave me an unexplained thrill, and I stopped to
analyze my reason for believing these mounds glacial phenomena. The more I analyzed the less I believed, and against my newly opened
mind there began to beat grotesque and horrible analogies based on
superficial aspects and upon my experience beneath the earth.