The Lurking Fear by H. P. Lovecraft

Chapter 1. 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 motorcar, 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,

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