




                           The LURKING FEAR

                          By H. P. LOVECRAFT

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                        Weird Tales June 1928. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] _1. 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 headlights 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 ruined 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 hand-woven baskets for such primitive necessities as they can
not 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
half-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
tales of the squatters. Grandmothers told strange myths of the Martense
specter; 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 squatters' villages
had caved in after a lightning strike, 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,
canvassed the place with infinite care; overturning everything in the
house, sounding ponds and brooks, beating down bushes, and ransacking
the near-by forests. All was in vain; the death that had come had left
no trace save destruction itself.