Before
I knew it I was uttering frenzied and disjointed words to myself: "My
God! ... Molehills ... the damned place must be honeycombed ... how
many ... that night at the mansion ... they took Bennett and Tobey
first ... on each side of us." ... Then I was digging frantically
into the mound which had stretched nearest me; digging desperately,
shiveringly, but almost jubilantly; digging and at last shrieking aloud
with some unplaced emotion as I came upon a tunnel or burrow just like
the one through which I had crawled on that other demoniac night. After that I recall running, spade in hand; a hideous run across
moon-litten, mound-marked meadows and through diseased, precipitous
abysses of haunted hillside forest; leaping, screaming, panting,
bounding toward the terrible Martense mansion. I recall digging
unreasoningly in all parts of the brier-choked cellar; digging to find
the core and center of that malignant universe of mounds. And then I
recall how I laughed when I stumbled on the passageway; the hole at
the base of the old chimney, where the thick weeds grew and cast queer
shadows in the light of the lone candle I had happened to have with me. What still remained down in that hell-hive, lurking and waiting for the
thunder to arouse it, I did not know. Two had been killed; perhaps that
had finished it. But still there remained that burning determination to
reach the innermost secret of the fear, which I had once more come to
deem definite, material, and organic. My indecisive speculation whether to explore the passage alone and
immediately with my pocket-light or to try to assemble a band of
squatters for the quest was interrupted after a time by a sudden rush
of wind from the outside which blew out the candle and left me in stark
blackness. The moon no longer shone through the chinks and apertures
above me, and with a sense of fateful alarm I heard the sinister and
significant rumble of approaching thunder. A confusion of associated
ideas possessed my brain, leading me to grope back toward the farthest
corner of the cellar. My eyes, however, never turned away from the
horrible opening at the base of the chimney; and I began to get
glimpses of the crumbling bricks and unhealthy weeds as faint glows
of lightning penetrated the woods outside and illumined the chinks in
the upper wall. Every second I was consumed with a mixture of fear
and curiosity. What would the storm call forth--or was there anything
left for it to call? Guided by a lightning flash I settled myself down
behind a dense clump of vegetation, through which I could see the
opening without being seen. *       *       *       *       *

If heaven is merciful, it will some day efface from my consciousness
the sight that I saw, and let me live my last years in peace. I can
not sleep at night now, and have to take opiates when it thunders. The
thing came abruptly and unannounced; a demon, ratlike scurrying from
pits remote and unimaginable, a hellish panting and stifled grunting,
and then from that opening beneath the chimney a burst of multitudinous
and leprous life--a loathsome night-spawned flood of organic corruption
more devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal
madness and morbidity. Seething, stewing, surging, bubbling like
serpents' slime it rolled up and out of that yawning hole, spreading
like a septic contagion and streaming from the cellar at every point of
egress--streaming out to scatter through the accursed midnight forests
and strew fear, madness, and death. God knows how many there were--there must have been thousands. To see
the stream of them in that faint, intermittent lightning was shocking. When they had thinned out enough to be glimpsed as separate organisms,
I saw that they were dwarfed, deformed hairy devils or apes--monstrous
and diabolic caricatures of the monkey tribe. They were so hideously
silent; there was hardly a squeal when one of the last stragglers
turned with the skill of long practise to make a meal in accustomed
fashion on a weaker companion. Others snapped up what it left and ate
with slavering relish. Then, in spite of my daze of fright and disgust,
my morbid curiosity triumphed; and as the last of the monstrosities
oozed up alone from that nether world of unknown nightmare, I drew my
automatic pistol and shot it under cover of the thunder. Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness
chasing one another through endless, ensanguined corridors of purple
fulgurous sky ... formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a
ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous overnourished oaks
with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an
earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; moundlike tentacles
groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion ... insane
lightning over malignant ivied walls and demon arcades choked with
fungous vegetation.... Heaven be thanked for the instinct which led me
unconscious to places where men dwell; to the peaceful village that
slept under the calm stars of clearing skies. [Illustration: "They were slithering shadows of red madness."] I had recovered enough in a week to send to Albany for a gang of
men to blow up the Martense mansion and the entire top of Tempest
Mountain with dynamite, stop up all the discoverable mound-burrows,
and destroy certain overnourished trees whose very existence seemed an
insult to sanity. I could sleep a little after they had done this, but
true rest will never come as long as I remember that nameless secret
of the lurking fear. The thing will haunt me, for who can say the
extermination is complete, and that analogous phenomena do not exist
all over the world? Who can, with my knowledge, think of the earth's
unknown caverns without a nightmare dread of future possibilities? I
can not see a well or a subway entrance without shuddering ... why can
not the doctors give me something to make me sleep, or truly calm my
brain when it thunders? What I saw in the glow of my flashlight after I shot the unspeakable
straggling object was so simple that almost a minute elapsed before
I understood and went delirious. The object was nauseous; a filthy
whitish gorilla thing with sharp yellow fangs and matted fur. It was
the ultimate product of mammalian degeneration; the frightful outcome
of isolated spawning, multiplication, and cannibal nutrition above and
below the ground; the embodiment of all the snarling chaos and grinning
fear that lurk behind life. It had looked at me as it died, and its
eyes had the same odd quality that marked those other eyes which had
stared at me underground and excited cloudy recollections. One eye
was blue, the other brown. They were the dissimilar Martense eyes of
the old legends, and I knew in one inundating cataclysm of voiceless
horror what had become of that vanished family; the terrible and