The Lurking Fear

The Lurking Fear
H. P. Lovecraft

I. The Shadow On The Chimney
II. A Passer In The Storm
III. What The Red Glare Meant
IV. The Horror In The Eyes

I. 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 headlight 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 mined 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
handwoven baskets for such primitive necessities as they cannot 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 hall-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 tale
of the squatters. Grandmothers told strange myths of the Martense
spectre; 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