S15E03 - "Through Dark Decades" - Horror Hill

**Erik Peabody** (0:02)
Chilling Tales for Dark Nights.
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Greetings, listeners, and welcome back to Horror Hill. As always, I'm Erik Peabody, your host and narrator. Tonight, we're digging deep into the archives, folks. I've got a story here from 1923, but I think it's been aged to perfection. Surprising no one, this is a tale written by HP. Lovecraft, and it's called The Lurking Fear. We can skip the usual synopsis, because this is one that jumps right in to the opening sentence. There was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted mansion atop Tempest Mountain to find the lurking fear. Good old Howie knew how to ladle on the atmosphere, all right. And before we get started, a quick reminder. We're in the process of de-emphasizing our presence on YouTube, and episodes there will be airing a week later than on other platforms. I recommend switching to another podcast platform of your choice, and if you still want video content from the Chilling Tales for Dark Nights group, head on over to Rumble to watch there.
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And now, from author HP. Lovecraft, I give you The Lurking Fear.
One, 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 spent 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'm 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 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 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 of 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 nod 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 a 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.