The lurking fearLovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips)
Science
The lurking fear
Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips)
Catskill Mountains Region (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Horror tales; Short stories
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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