Of Gerrit Martense's descendants less is known than of himself; since
they were all reared in hatred of the English civilization, 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 20th,
finding the mansion in great decrepitude. The sullen, odd-eyed
Martenses, whose unclean animal aspect shocked him, told him in broken
gutturals than 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 around the
countryside; and from that time the Martenses were ostracized 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 products 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 been soon
unearthed--it now held only dust and niter--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 for a man to
wriggle through; and though no sane person would have tried it 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.