As it was, we hoped desperately that the
storm would last until well after dark; and with that hope turned from
our aimless hillside searching toward the nearest inhabited hamlet to
gather a body of squatters as helpers in the investigation. Timid as
they were, a few of the younger men were sufficiently inspired by our
protective leadership to promise such help. We had hardly more than turned, however, when there descended such a
blinding sheet of torrential rain that shelter became imperative. The
extreme, almost nocturnal darkness of the sky caused us to stumble
sadly, but guided by the frequent flashes of lightning and by our
minute knowledge of the hamlet we soon reached the least porous cabin
of the lot; an heterogeneous combination of logs and boards whose still
existing door and single tiny window both faced Maple Hill. Barring
the door after us against the fury of the wind and rain, we put in
place the crude window shutter which our frequent searches had taught
us where to find. It was dismal sitting there on rickety boxes in the
pitchy darkness, but we smoked pipes and occasionally flashed our
pocket lamps about. Now and then we could see the lightning through
cracks in the wall; the afternoon was so incredibly dark that each
flash was extremely vivid. The stormy vigil reminded me shudderingly of my ghastly night on
Tempest Mountain. My mind turned to that odd question which had kept
recurring ever since the nightmare thing had happened; and again I
wondered why the demon, approaching the three watchers either from the
window or the interior, had begun with the men on each side and left
the middle man till the last, when the titan fireball had scared it
away. Why had it not taken its victims in natural order, with myself
second, from whichever direction it had approached? With what manner
of far-reaching tentacles did it prey? Or did it know that I was the
leader, and save me for a fate worse than that of my companions? In the midst of these reflections, as if dramatically arranged to
intensify them, there fell near by a terrific bolt of lightning
followed by the sound of sliding earth. At the same time the wolfish
wind rose to demoniac crescendos of ululation. We were sure that the
lone tree on Maple Hill had been struck again, and Munroe rose from
his box and went to the tiny window to ascertain the damage. When he
took down the shutter the wind and rain howled deafeningly in, so that
I could not hear what he said; but I waited while he leaned out and
tried to fathom nature's pandemonium. Gradually a calming of the wind and dispersal of the unusual darkness
told of the storm's passing. I had hoped it would last into the night
to help our quest, but a furtive sunbeam from a knothole behind me
removed the likelihood of such a thing. Suggesting to Munroe that we
had better get some light even if more showers came, I unbarred and
opened the crude door. The ground outside was a singular mass of mud
and pools, with fresh heaps of earth from the slight landslide; but I
saw nothing to justify the interest which kept my companion silently
leaning out the window. Crossing to where he leaned, I touched his
shoulder; but he did not move. Then, as I playfully shook him and
turned him around, I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror
whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the
night that broods beyond time. For Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and
gouged head there was no longer a face. _3. What the Red Glare Meant_


On the tempest-racked night of November 8th, 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, but 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, fetid,
overnourished 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 these 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 thing, but a wolf-fanged ghost
that rode the midnight lightning. And I believed, because of the masses
of local tradition I had unearthed in my search with Arthur Munroe,
that the ghost was that of Jan Martense, who died in 1762. That 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.