In a short time I realized that I must tell my story to someone or
break down completely. I had already decided not to abandon the quest
for the lurking fear, for in my rash ignorance it seemed to me that
uncertainty was worse than enlightenment, however terrible the latter
might prove to be. Accordingly I revolved in my mind the best course
to pursue; whom to select for my confidences, and how to track down the
thing which had obliterated two men and cast a nightmare shadow. My chief acquaintances at Lefferts Corners had been the affable
reporters, of whom several still remained to collect final echoes of
the tragedy. It was from these that I determined to choose a colleague,
and the more I reflected the more my preference inclined toward one
Arthur Munroe, a dark, lean man of about thirty-five, whose education,
taste, intelligence, and temperament all seemed to mark him as one not
bound to conventional ideas and experiences. On an afternoon in early September Arthur Munroe listened to my story. I saw from the beginning that he was both interested and sympathetic,
and when I had finished he analyzed and discussed the thing with the
greatest shrewdness and judgment. His advice, moreover, was eminently
practical; for he recommended a postponement of operations at the
Martense mansion until we might become fortified with more detailed
historical and geographical data. On his initiative we combed the
countryside for information regarding the terrible Martense family, and
discovered a man who possessed a marvelously illuminating ancestral
diary. We also talked at length with such of the mountain mongrels
as had not fled from the terror and confusion to remoter slopes, and
arranged to precede our culminating task--the exhaustive and definitive
examination of the mansion in the light of its detailed history--with
an equally exhaustive and definitive examination of spots associated
with the various tragedies of squatter legend. The results of this examination were not at first very enlightening,
though our tabulation of them seemed to reveal a fairly significant
trend; namely, that the number of reported horrors was by far the
greatest in areas either comparatively near the avoided house or
connected with it by stretches of the morbidly overnourished forest. There were, it is true, exceptions; indeed, the horror which had caught
the world's ear had happened in a treeless space remote alike from the
mansion and from any connecting woods. As to the nature and appearance of the lurking fear, nothing could
be gained from the scared and witless shanty-dwellers. In the same
breath they called it a snake and a giant, a thunder-devil and a bat, a
vulture and a walking tree. We did, however, deem ourselves justified
in assuming that it was a living organism highly susceptible to
electrical storms; and although certain of the stories suggested wings,
we believed that its aversion for open spaces made land locomotion
a more probable theory. The only thing really incompatible with the
latter view was the rapidity with which the creature must have traveled
in order to perform all the deeds attributed to it. When we came to know the squatters better, we found them curiously
likable in many ways. Simple animals they were, gently descending
the evolutionary scale because of their unfortunate ancestry and
stultifying isolation. They feared outsiders, but slowly grew
accustomed to us; finally helping vastly when we beat down all the
thickets and tore out all the partitions of the mansion in our search
for the lurking fear. When we asked them to help us find Bennett and
Tobey they were truly distressed; for they wanted to help us, yet knew
that these victims had gone as wholly out of the world as their own
missing people. That great numbers of them had actually been killed
and removed, just as the wild animals had long been exterminated, we
were of course thoroughly convinced; and we waited apprehensively for
further tragedies to occur. By the middle of October we were puzzled by our lack of progress. Owing
to the clear nights no demoniac aggressions had taken place, and the
completeness of our vain searches of house and country almost drove us
to regard the lurking fear as a non-material agency. We feared that
the cold weather would come on and halt our explorations, for all
agreed that the demon was generally quiet in winter. Thus there was
a kind of haste and desperation in our last daylight canvass of the
horror-visited hamlet; a hamlet now deserted because of the squatters'
fears. The ill-fated squatter hamlet had borne no name, but had long stood
in a sheltered though treeless cleft between two elevations called
respectively Cone Mountain and Maple Hill. It was closer to Maple Hill
than to Cone Mountain, some of the crude abodes indeed being dugouts on
the side of the former eminence. Geographically it lay about two miles
northwest of the base of Tempest Mountain, and three miles from the
oak-girt mansion. Of the distance between the hamlet and the mansion,
fully two miles and a quarter on the hamlet's side was entirely open
country; the plain being of fairly level character save for some of the
low snakelike mounds, and having as vegetation only grass and scattered
weeds. Considering this topography, we had finally concluded that
the demon must have come by way of Cone Mountain, a wooded southern
prolongation of which ran to within a short distance of the westernmost
spur of Tempest Mountain. The upheaval of ground we traced conclusively
to a landslide from Maple Hill, a tall lone splintered tree on whose
side had been the striking point of the thunderbolt which summoned the
fiend. *       *       *       *       *

As for the twentieth time or more Arthur Munroe and I went minutely
over every inch of the violated village, we were filled with a
certain discouragement coupled with vague and novel fears. It was
acutely uncanny, even when frightful and uncanny things were common,
to encounter so blankly clueless a scene after such overwhelming
occurrences; and we moved about beneath the leaden, darkening sky with
that tragic directionless zeal which results from a combined sense of
futility and necessity of action. Our care was gravely minute; every
cottage was again entered, every hillside dugout again searched for
bodies, every thorny foot of adjacent slope again scanned for dens and
caves, but all without result. And yet, as I have said, vague new fears
hovered menacingly over us; as if giant bat-winged gryphons squatted
invisibly on the mountain-tops and leered with Abaddon-eyes that had
looked on transcosmic gulfs. As the afternoon advanced, it became increasingly difficult to see; and
we heard the rumble of a thunderstorm gathering over Tempest Mountain. This sound in such a locality naturally stirred us, though less than
it would have done at night.