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-
-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 73233 ***
-
-
-
-
-
-                        The Haunter of the Dark
-
-                          By H. P. LOVECRAFT
-
-                 _A powerful story about an old church
-                 in Providence, Rhode Island, that was
-                shunned and feared by all who knew it._
-
-           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
-                      Weird Tales December 1936.
-         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
-         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
-
-                      (Dedicated to Robert Bloch)
-
-
-    I have seen the dark universe yawning
-      Where the black planets roll without aim--
-    Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
-      Without knowledge or luster or name.
-
-                                --_Nemesis._
-
-
-Cautious investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief
-that Robert Blake was killed by lightning, or by some profound nervous
-shock derived from an electrical discharge. It is true that the window
-he faced was unbroken, but nature has shown herself capable of many
-freakish performances. The expression on his face may easily have
-arisen from some obscure muscular source unrelated to anything he saw,
-while the entries in his diary are clearly the result of a fantastic
-imagination aroused by certain local superstitions and by certain
-old matters he had uncovered. As for the anomalous conditions at the
-deserted church on Federal Hill--the shrewd analyst is not slow in
-attributing them to some charlatanry, conscious or unconscious, with at
-least some of which Blake was secretly connected.
-
-For after all, the victim was a writer and painter wholly devoted to
-the field of myth, dream, terror, and superstition, and avid in his
-quest for scenes and effects of a bizarre, spectral sort. His earlier
-stay in the city--a visit to a strange old man as deeply given to
-occult and forbidden lore as he--had ended amidst death and flame, and
-it must have been some morbid instinct which drew him back from his
-home in Milwaukee. He may have known of the old stories despite his
-statements to the contrary in the diary, and his death may have nipped
-in the bud some stupendous hoax destined to have a literary reflection.
-
-Among those, however, who have examined and correlated all this
-evidence, there remain several who cling to less rational and
-commonplace theories. They are inclined to take much of Blake's diary
-at its face value, and point significantly to certain facts such as
-the undoubted genuineness of the old church record, the verified
-existence of the disliked and unorthodox Starry Wisdom sect prior to
-1877, the recorded disappearance of an inquisitive reporter named
-Edwin M. Lillibridge in 1893, and--above all--the look of monstrous,
-transfiguring fear on the face of the young writer when he died. It was
-one of these believers who, moved to fanatical extremes, threw into
-the bay the curiously angled stone and its strangely adorned metal box
-found in the old church steeple--the black windowless steeple, and not
-the tower where Blake's diary said those things originally were. Though
-widely censured both officially and unofficially, this man--a reputable
-physician with a taste for odd folklore--averred that he had rid the
-earth of something too dangerous to rest upon it.
-
-Between these two schools of opinion the reader must judge for himself.
-The papers have given the tangible details from a skeptical angle,
-leaving for others the drawing of the picture as Robert Blake saw
-it--or thought he saw it--or pretended to see it. Now, studying the
-diary closely, dispassionately, and at leisure, let us summarize the
-dark chain of events from the expressed point of view of their chief
-actor.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Young Blake returned to Providence in the winter of 1934-5, taking
-the upper floor of a venerable dwelling in a grassy court off
-College Street--on the crest of the great eastward hill near the
-Brown University campus and behind the marble John Hay Library.
-It was a cozy and fascinating place, in a little garden oasis of
-village-like antiquity where huge, friendly cats sunned themselves
-atop a convenient shed. The square Georgian house had a monitor roof,
-classic doorway with fan carving, small-paned windows, and all the
-other earmarks of early Nineteenth Century workmanship. Inside were
-six-paneled doors, wide floor-boards, a curving colonial staircase,
-white Adam-period mantels, and a rear set of rooms three steps below
-the general level.
-
-Blake's study, a large southwest chamber, overlooked the front garden
-on one side, while its west windows--before one of which he had his
-desk--faced off from the brow of the hill and commanded a splendid view
-of the lower town's out-spread roofs and of the mystical sunsets that
-flamed behind them. On the far horizon were the open countryside's
-purple slopes. Against these, some two miles away, rose the spectral
-hump of Federal Hill, bristling with huddled roofs and steeples whose
-remote outlines wavered mysteriously, taking fantastic forms as the
-smoke of the city swirled up and enmeshed them. Blake had a curious
-sense that he was looking upon some unknown, ethereal world which might
-or might not vanish in dream if ever he tried to seek it out and enter
-it in person.
-
-Having sent home for most of his books, Blake bought some antique
-furniture suitable to his quarters and settled down to write and
-paint--living alone, and attending to the simple housework himself. His
-studio was in a north attic room, where the panes of the monitor roof
-furnished admirable lighting. During that first winter he produced five
-of his best-known short stories--_The Burrower Beneath_, _The Stairs in
-the Crypt_, _Shaggai_, _In the Vale of Pnath_, and _The Feaster from
-the Stars_--and painted seven canvases; studies of nameless, unhuman
-monsters, and profoundly alien, non-terrestrial landscapes.
-
-At sunset he would often sit at his desk and gaze dreamily off at
-the out-spread west--the dark towers of Memorial Hall just below,
-the Georgian court-house belfry, the lofty pinnacles of the downtown
-section, and that shimmering, spire-crowned mound in the distance whose
-unknown streets and labyrinthine gables so potently provoked his fancy.
-From his few local acquaintances he learned that the far-off slope
-was a vast Italian quarter, though most of the houses were remnants
-of older Yankee and Irish days. Now and then he would train his
-field-glasses on that spectral, unreachable world beyond the curling
-smoke; picking out individual roofs and chimneys and steeples, and
-speculating upon the bizarre and curious mysteries they might house.
-Even with optical aid Federal Hill seemed somehow alien, half fabulous,
-and linked to the unreal, intangible marvels of Blake's own tales and
-pictures. The feeling would persist long after the hill had faded into
-the violet, lamp-starred twilight, and the court-house floodlights
-and the red Industrial Trust beacon had blazed up to make the night
-grotesque.
-
-Of all the distant objects on Federal Hill, a certain huge, dark church
-most fascinated Blake. It stood out with especial distinctness at
-certain hours of the day, and at sunset the great tower and tapering
-steeple loomed blackly against the flaming sky. It seemed to rest
-on especially high ground; for the grimy façade, and the obliquely
-seen north side with sloping roof and the tops of great pointed
-windows, rose boldly above the tangle of surrounding ridgepoles and
-chimney-pots. Peculiarly grim and austere, it appeared to be built of
-stone, stained and weathered with the smoke and storms of a century
-and more. The style, so far as the glass could show, was that earliest
-experimental form of Gothic revival which preceded the stately Upjohn
-period and held over some of the outlines and proportions of the
-Georgian age. Perhaps it was reared around 1810 or 1815.
-
-As the months passed, Blake watched the far-off, forbidding structure
-with an oddly mounting interest. Since the vast windows were never
-lighted, he knew that it must be vacant. The longer he watched, the
-more his imagination worked, till at length he began to fancy curious
-things. He believed that a vague, singular aura of desolation hovered
-over the place, so that even the pigeons and swallows shunned its smoky
-eaves. Around other towers and belfries his glass would reveal great
-flocks of birds, but here they never rested. At least, that is what he
-thought and set down in his diary. He pointed the place out to several
-friends, but none of them had even been on Federal Hill or possessed
-the faintest notion of what the church was or had been.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-In the spring a deep restlessness gripped Blake. He had begun his
-long-planned novel--based on a supposed survival of the witch-cult in
-Maine--but was strangely unable to make progress with it. More and more
-he would sit at his westward window and gaze at the distant hill and
-the black, frowning steeple shunned by the birds. When the delicate
-leaves came out on the garden boughs the world was filled with a new
-beauty, but Blake's restlessness was merely increased. It was then
-that he first thought of crossing the city and climbing bodily up that
-fabulous slope into the smoke-wreathed world of dream.
-
-Late in April, just before the eon-shadowed Walpurgis time, Blake made
-his first trip into the unknown. Plodding through the endless downtown
-streets and the bleak, decayed squares beyond, he came finally upon
-the ascending avenue of century-worn steps, sagging Doric porches,
-and blear-paned cupolas which he felt must lead up to the long-known,
-unreachable world beyond the mists. There were dingy blue-and-white
-street signs which meant nothing to him, and presently he noted the
-strange, dark faces of the drifting crowds, and the foreign signs
-over curious shops in brown, decade-weathered buildings. Nowhere
-could he find any of the objects he had seen from afar; so that once
-more he half fancied that the Federal Hill of that distant view was a
-dream-world never to be trod by living human feet.
-
-Now and then a battered church façade or crumbling spire came in
-sight, but never the blackened pile that he sought. When he asked a
-shopkeeper about a great stone church the man smiled and shook his
-head, though he spoke English freely. As Blake climbed higher, the
-region seemed stranger and stranger, with bewildering mazes of brooding
-brown alleys leading eternally off to the south. He crossed two or
-three broad avenues, and once thought he glimpsed a familiar tower.
-Again he asked a merchant about the massive church of stone, and this
-time he could have sworn that the plea of ignorance was feigned. The
-dark man's face had a look of fear which he tried to hide, and Blake
-saw him make a curious sign with his right hand.
-
-Then suddenly a black spire stood out against the cloudy sky on his
-left, above the tiers of brown roofs lining the tangled southerly
-alleys. Blake knew at once what it was, and plunged toward it through
-the squalid, unpaved lanes that climbed from the avenue. Twice he
-lost his way, but he somehow dared not ask any of the patriarchs or
-housewives who sat on their door-steps, or any of the children who
-shouted and played in the mud of the shadowy lanes.
-
-At last he saw the tower plain against the southwest, and a huge
-stone bulk rose darkly at the end of an alley. Presently he stood in
-a wind-swept open square, quaintly cobblestoned, with a high bank
-wall on the farther side. This was the end of his quest; for upon the
-wide, iron-railed, weed-grown plateau which the wall supported--a
-separate, lesser world raised fully six feet above the surrounding
-streets--there stood a grim, titan bulk whose identity, despite Blake's
-new perspective, was beyond dispute.
-
-The vacant church was in a state of great decrepitude. Some of the high
-stone buttresses had fallen, and several delicate finials lay half lost
-among the brown, neglected weeds and grasses. The sooty Gothic windows
-were largely unbroken, though many of the stone mullions were missing.
-Blake wondered how the obscurely painted panes could have survived so
-well, in view of the known habits of small boys the world over. The
-massive doors were intact and tightly closed. Around the top of the
-bank wall, fully enclosing the grounds, was a rusty iron fence whose
-gate--at the head of a flight of steps from the square--was visibly
-padlocked. The path from the gate to the building was completely
-overgrown. Desolation and decay hung like a pall above the place, and
-in the birdless eaves and black, ivyless walls Blake felt a touch of
-the dimly sinister beyond his power to define.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-There were very few people in the square, but Blake saw a policeman
-at the northerly end and approached him with questions about the
-church. He was a great wholesome Irishman, and it seemed odd that he
-would do little more than make the sign of the cross and mutter that
-people never spoke of that building. When Blake pressed him he said
-very hurriedly that the Italian priests warned everybody against it,
-vowing that a monstrous evil had once dwelt there and left its mark.
-He himself had heard dark whispers of it from his father, who recalled
-certain sounds and rumors from his boyhood.
-
-There had been a bad sect there in the ould days--an outlaw sect that
-called up awful things from some unknown gulf of night. It had taken
-a good priest to exorcise what had come, though there did be those
-who said that merely the light could do it. If Father O'Malley were
-alive there would be many the thing he could tell. But now there was
-nothing to do but let it alone. It hurt nobody now, and those that
-owned it were dead or far away. They had run away like rats after
-the threatening talk in '77, when people began to mind the way folks
-vanished now and then in the neighborhood. Some day the city would
-step in and take the property for lack of heirs, but little good would
-come of anybody's touching it. Better it be left alone for the years
-to topple, lest things be stirred that ought to rest for ever in their
-black abyss.
-
-After the policeman had gone Blake stood staring at the sullen steepled
-pile. It excited him to find that the structure seemed as sinister
-to others as to him, and he wondered what grain of truth might lie
-behind the old tales the bluecoat had repeated. Probably they were mere
-legends evoked by the evil look of the place, but even so, they were
-like a strange coming to life of one of his own stories.
-
-The afternoon sun came out from behind dispersing clouds, but seemed
-unable to light up the stained, sooty walls of the old temple that
-towered on its high plateau. It was odd that the green of spring had
-not touched the brown, withered growths in the raised, iron-fenced
-yard. Blake found himself edging nearer the raised area and examining
-the bank wall and rusted fence for possible avenues of ingress. There
-was a terrible lure about the blackened fane which was not to be
-resisted. The fence had no opening near the steps, but around on the
-north side were some missing bars. He could go up the steps and walk
-around on the narrow coping outside the fence till he came to the
-gap. If the people feared the place so wildly, he would encounter no
-interference.
-
-He was on the embankment and almost inside the fence before anyone
-noticed him. Then, looking down, he saw the few people in the square
-edging away and making the same sign with their right hands that the
-shopkeeper in the avenue had made. Several windows were slammed down,
-and a fat woman darted into the street and pulled some small children
-inside a rickety, unpainted house. The gap in the fence was very easy
-to pass through, and before long Blake found himself wading amidst
-the rotting, tangled growths of the deserted yard. Here and there the
-worn stump of a headstone told him that there had once been burials
-in this field; but that, he saw, must have been very long ago. The
-sheer bulk of the church was oppressive now that he was close to it,
-but he conquered his mood and approached to try the three great doors
-in the façade. All were securely locked, so he began a circuit of the
-Cyclopean building in quest of some minor and more penetrable opening.
-Even then he could not be sure that he wished to enter that haunt of
-desertion and shadow, yet the pull of its strangeness dragged him on
-automatically.
-
-A yawning and unprotected cellar window in the rear furnished the
-needed aperture. Peering in, Blake saw a subterrene gulf of cobwebs
-and dust faintly litten by the western sun's filtered rays. Debris,
-old barrels, and ruined boxes and furniture of numerous sorts met his
-eye, though over everything lay a shroud of dust which softened all
-sharp outlines. The rusted remains of a hot-air furnace showed that the
-building had been used and kept in shape as late as mid-Victorian times.
-
-Acting almost without conscious initiative, Blake crawled through the
-window and let himself down to the dust-carpeted and debris-strewn
-concrete floor. The vaulted cellar was a vast one, without partitions;
-and in a corner far to the right, amid dense shadows, he saw a black
-archway evidently leading upstairs. He felt a peculiar sense of
-oppression at being actually within the great spectral building,
-but kept it in check as he cautiously scouted about--finding a
-still-intact barrel amid the dust, and rolling it over to the open
-window to provide for his exit. Then, bracing himself, he crossed the
-wide, cobweb-festooned space toward the arch. Half choked with the
-omnipresent dust, and covered with ghostly gossamer fibers, he reached
-and began to climb the worn stone steps which rose into the darkness.
-He had no light, but groped carefully with his hands. After a sharp
-turn he felt a closed door ahead, and a little fumbling revealed its
-ancient latch. It opened inward, and beyond it he saw a dimly illumined
-corridor lined with worm-eaten paneling.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Once on the ground floor, Blake began exploring in a rapid fashion.
-All the inner doors were unlocked, so that he freely passed from room
-to room. The colossal nave was an almost eldritch place with its
-drifts and mountains of dust over box pews, altar, hour-glass pulpit,
-and sounding-board, and its titanic ropes of cobweb stretching among
-the pointed arches of the gallery and entwining the clustered Gothic
-columns. Over all this hushed desolation played a hideous leaden light
-as the declining afternoon sun sent its rays through the strange,
-half-blackened panes of the great apsidal windows.
-
-The paintings on those windows were so obscured by soot that Blake
-could scarcely decipher what they had represented, but from the little
-he could make out he did not like them. The designs were largely
-conventional, and his knowledge of obscure symbolism told him much
-concerning some of the ancient patterns. The few saints depicted bore
-expressions distinctly open to criticism, while one of the windows
-seemed to show merely a dark space with spirals of curious luminosity
-scattered about in it. Turning away from the windows, Blake noticed
-that the cobwebbed cross above the altar was not of the ordinary kind,
-but resembled the primordial ankh or crux ansata of shadowy Egypt.
-
-In a rear vestry room beside the apse Blake found a rotting desk and
-ceiling-high shelves of mildewed, disintegrating books. Here for the
-first time he received a positive shock of objective horror, for the
-titles of those books told him much. They were the black, forbidden
-things which most sane people have never even heard of, or have
-heard of only in furtive, timorous whispers; the banned and dreaded
-repositories of equivocal secrets and immemorial formulæ which have
-trickled down the stream of time from the days of man's youth, and the
-dim, fabulous days before man was. He had himself read many of them--a
-Latin version of the abhorred _Necronomicon_, the sinister _Liber
-Ivonis_, the infamous _Cultes des Goules_ of Comte d'Erlette, the
-_Unaussprechlichen Kulten_ of von Junzt, and old Ludvig Prinn's hellish
-_De Vermis Mysteriis_. But there were others he had known merely by
-reputation or not at all--the _Pnakotic Manuscripts_, the _Book of
-Dzyan_, and a crumbling volume in wholly unidentifiable characters yet
-with certain symbols and diagrams shudderingly recognizable to the
-occult student. Clearly, the lingering local rumors had not lied. This
-place had once been the seat of an evil older than mankind and wider
-than the known universe.
-
-In the ruined desk was a small leather-bound record-book filled with
-entries in some odd cryptographic medium. The manuscript writing
-consisted of the common traditional symbols used today in astronomy and
-anciently in alchemy, astrology, and other dubious arts--the devices
-of the sun, moon, planets, aspects, and zodiacal signs--here massed in
-solid pages of text, with divisions and paragraphings suggesting that
-each symbol answered to some alphabetical letter.
-
-In the hope of later solving the cryptogram, Blake bore off this
-volume in his coat pocket. Many of the great tomes on the shelves
-fascinated him unutterably, and he felt tempted to borrow them at some
-later time. He wondered how they could have remained undisturbed so
-long. Was he the first to conquer the clutching, pervasive fear which
-had for nearly sixty years protected this deserted place from visitors?
-
-Having now thoroughly explored the ground floor, Blake plowed again
-through the dust of the spectral nave to the front vestibule, where he
-had seen a door and staircase presumably leading up to the blackened
-tower and steeple--objects so long familiar to him at a distance. The
-ascent was a choking experience, for dust lay thick, while the spiders
-had done their worst in this constricted place. The staircase was a
-spiral with high, narrow wooden treads, and now and then Blake passed a
-clouded window looking dizzily out over the city. Though he had seen no
-ropes below, he expected to find a bell or peal of bells in the tower
-whose narrow, louver-boarded lancet windows his field-glass had studied
-so often. Here he was doomed to disappointment, for when he attained
-the top of the stairs he found the tower chamber vacant of chimes, and
-clearly devoted to vastly different purposes.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The room, about fifteen feet square, was faintly lighted by four lancet
-windows, one on each side, which were glazed within their screening of
-decayed louver-boards. These had been further fitted with tight, opaque
-screens, but the latter were now largely rotted away. In the center of
-the dust-laden floor rose a curiously angled stone pillar some four
-feet in height and two in average diameter, covered on each side with
-bizarre, crudely incised and wholly unrecognizable hieroglyphs. On
-this pillar rested a metal box of peculiarly asymmetrical form; its
-hinged lid thrown back, and its interior holding what looked beneath
-the decade-deep dust to be an egg-shaped or irregularly spherical
-object some four inches through. Around the pillar in a rough circle
-were seven high-backed Gothic chairs still largely intact, while behind
-them, ranging along the dark-paneled walls, were seven colossal images
-of crumbling, black-painted plaster, resembling more than anything else
-the cryptic carven megaliths of mysterious Easter Island. In one corner
-of the cobwebbed chamber a ladder was built into the wall, leading up
-to the closed trap-door of the windowless steeple above.
-
-As Blake grew accustomed to the feeble light he noticed odd bas-reliefs
-on the strange open box of yellowish metal. Approaching, he tried to
-clear the dust away with his hands and handkerchief, and saw that
-the figurings were of a monstrous and utterly alien kind; depicting
-entities which, though seemingly alive, resembled no known life-form
-ever evolved on this planet. The four-inch seeming sphere turned out
-to be a nearly black, red-striated polyhedron with many irregular
-flat surfaces; either a very remarkable crystal of some sort, or an
-artificial object of carved and highly polished mineral matter. It did
-not touch the bottom of the box, but was held suspended by means of
-a metal band around its center, with seven queerly-designed supports
-extending horizontally to angles of the box's inner wall near the
-top. This stone, once exposed, exerted upon Blake an almost alarming
-fascination. He could scarcely tear his eyes from it, and as he looked
-at its glistening surfaces he almost fancied it was transparent, with
-half-formed worlds of wonder within. Into his mind floated pictures of
-alien orbs with great stone towers, and other orbs with titan mountains
-and no mark of life, and still remoter spaces where only a stirring in
-vague blacknesses told of the presence of consciousness and will.
-
-When he did look away, it was to notice a somewhat singular mound of
-dust in the far corner near the ladder to the steeple. Just why it took
-his attention he could not tell, but something in its contours carried
-a message to his unconscious mind. Plowing toward it, and brushing
-aside the hanging cobwebs as he went, he began to discern something
-grim about it. Hand and handkerchief soon revealed the truth, and Blake
-gasped with a baffling mixture of emotions. It was a human skeleton,
-and it must have been there for a very long time. The clothing was in
-shreds, but some buttons and fragments of cloth bespoke a man's gray
-suit. There were other bits of evidence--shoes, metal clasps, huge
-buttons for round cuffs, a stickpin of bygone pattern, a reporter's
-badge with the name of the old _Providence Telegram_, and a crumbling
-leather pocket-book. Blake examined the latter with care, finding
-within it several bills of antiquated issue, a celluloid advertising
-calendar for 1893, some cards with the name "Edwin M. Lillibridge," and
-a paper covered with penciled memoranda.
-
-This paper held much of a puzzling nature, and Blake read it carefully
-at the dim westward window. Its disjointed text included such phrases
-as the following:
-
-    "Prof. Enoch Bowen home from Egypt May 1844--buys old Free-Will
-    Church in July--his archæological work & studies in occult well
-    known."
-
-    "Dr. Drowne of 4th Baptist warns against Starry Wisdom in sermon
-    Dec. 29, 1844."
-
-    "Congregation 97 by end of '45."
-
-    "1846--3 disappearances--first mention of Shining Trapezohedron."
-
-    "7 disappearances 1848--stories of blood sacrifice begin."
-
-    "Investigation 1853 comes to nothing--stories of sounds."
-
-    "Fr. O'Malley tells of devil-worship with box found in great
-    Egyptian ruins--says they call up something that can't exist in
-    light. Flees a little light, and banished by strong light. Then has
-    to be summoned again. Probably got this from deathbed confession
-    of Francis X. Feeney, who had joined Starry Wisdom in '49. These
-    people say the Shining Trapezohedron shows them heaven & other
-    worlds, & that the Haunter of the Dark tells them secrets in some
-    way."
-
-    "Story of Orrin B. Eddy 1857. They call it up by gazing at the
-    crystal, & have a secret language of their own."
-
-    "200 or more in cong. 1863, exclusive of men at front."
-
-    "Irish boys mob church in 1869 after Patrick Regan's disappearance."
-
-    "Veiled article in J. March 14, '72, but people don't talk about
-    it."
-
-    "6 disappearances 1876--secret committee calls on Mayor Doyle."
-
-    "Action promised Feb. 1877--church closes in April."
-
-    "Gang--Federal Hill Boys--threaten Dr. ---- and vestrymen in May."
-
-    "181 persons leave city before end of '77--mention no names."
-
-    "Ghost stories begin around 1880--try to ascertain truth of report
-    that no human being has entered church since 1877."
-
-    "Ask Lanigan for photograph of place taken 1851...."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Restoring the paper to the pocket-book and placing the latter in
-his coat, Blake turned to look down at the skeleton in the dust.
-The implications of the notes were clear, and there could be no
-doubt but that this man had come to the deserted edifice forty-two
-years before in quest of a newspaper sensation which no one else had
-been bold enough to attempt. Perhaps no one else had known of his
-plan--who could tell? But he had never returned to his paper. Had some
-bravely-suppressed fear risen to overcome him and bring on sudden
-heart-failure? Blake stooped over the gleaming bones and noted their
-peculiar state. Some of them were badly scattered, and a few seemed
-oddly _dissolved_ at the ends. Others were strangely yellowed, with
-vague suggestions of charring. This charring extended to some of the
-fragments of clothing. The skull was in a very peculiar state--stained
-yellow, and with a charred aperture in the top as if some powerful acid
-had eaten through the solid bone. What had happened to the skeleton
-during its four decades of silent entombment here Blake could not
-imagine.
-
-[Illustration: "He had come to the deserted edifice in quest of a
-newspaper sensation."]
-
-Before he realized it, he was looking at the stone again, and letting
-its curious influence call up a nebulous pageantry in his mind. He saw
-processions of robed, hooded figures whose outlines were not human, and
-looked on endless leagues of desert lined with carved, sky-reaching
-monoliths. He saw towers and walls in nighted depths under the sea,
-and vortices of space where wisps of black mist floated before thin
-shimmerings of cold purple haze. And beyond all else he glimpsed an
-infinite gulf of sheer darkness, where solid and semi-solid forms were
-known only by their windy stirrings, and cloudy patterns of force
-seemed to superimpose order on chaos and hold forth a key to all the
-paradoxes and arcana of the worlds we know.
-
-Then all at once the spell was broken by an access of gnawing,
-indeterminate panic fear. Blake choked and turned away from the stone,
-conscious of some formless alien presence close to him and watching him
-with horrible intentness. He felt entangled with something--something
-which was not in the stone, but which had looked through it at
-him--something which would ceaselessly follow him with a cognition
-that was not physical sight. Plainly, the place was getting on his
-nerves--as well it might in view of his gruesome find. The light was
-waning, too, and since he had no illuminant with him he knew he would
-have to be leaving soon.
-
-It was then, in the gathering twilight, that he thought he saw a
-faint trace of luminosity in the crazily angled stone. He had tried
-to look away from it, but some obscure compulsion drew his eyes back.
-Was there a subtle phosphorescence of radio-activity about the thing?
-What was it that the dead man's notes had said concerning a _Shining
-Trapezohedron_? What, anyway, was this abandoned lair of cosmic evil?
-What had been done here, and what might still be lurking in the
-bird-shunned shadows? It seemed now as if an elusive touch of fetor had
-arisen somewhere close by, though its source was not apparent. Blake
-seized the cover of the long-open box and snapped it down. It moved
-easily on its alien hinges, and closed completely over the unmistakably
-glowing stone.
-
-At the sharp click of that closing a soft stirring sound seemed to come
-from the steeple's eternal blackness overhead, beyond the trap-door.
-Rats, without question--the only living things to reveal their presence
-in this accursed pile since he had entered it. And yet that stirring in
-the steeple frightened him horribly, so that he plunged almost wildly
-down the spiral stairs, across the ghoulish nave, into the vaulted
-basement, out amidst the gathering dusk of the deserted square, and
-down through the teeming, fear-haunted alleys and avenues of Federal
-Hill toward the sane central streets and the home-like brick sidewalks
-of the college district.
-
-During the days which followed, Blake told no one of his expedition.
-Instead, he read much in certain books, examined long years of
-newspaper files downtown, and worked feverishly at the cryptogram in
-that leather volume from the cobwebbed vestry room. The cipher, he soon
-saw, was no simple one; and after a long period of endeavor he felt
-sure that its language could not be English, Latin, Greek, French,
-Spanish, Italian, or German. Evidently he would have to draw upon the
-deepest wells of his strange erudition.
-
-Every evening the old impulse to gaze westward returned, and he saw the
-black steeple as of yore amongst the bristling roofs of a distant and
-half-fabulous world. But now it held a fresh note of terror for him. He
-knew the heritage of evil lore it masked, and with the knowledge his
-vision ran riot in queer new ways. The birds of spring were returning,
-and as he watched their sunset flights he fancied they avoided the
-gaunt, lone spire as never before. When a flock of them approached it,
-he thought, they would wheel and scatter in panic confusion--and he
-could guess at the wild twitterings which failed to reach him across
-the intervening miles.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-It was in June that Blake's diary told of his victory over the
-cryptogram. The text was, he found, in the dark Aklo language used by
-certain cults of evil antiquity, and known to him in a halting way
-through previous researches. The diary is strangely reticent about
-what Blake deciphered, but he was patently awed and disconcerted by
-his results. There are references to a Haunter of the Dark awaked by
-gazing into the Shining Trapezohedron, and insane conjectures about the
-black gulfs of chaos from which it was called. The being is spoken of
-as holding all knowledge, and demanding monstrous sacrifices. Some of
-Blake's entries show fear lest the thing, which he seemed to regard as
-summoned, stalk abroad; though he adds that the street-lights form a
-bulwark which cannot be crossed.
-
-Of the Shining Trapezohedron he speaks often, calling it a window
-on all time and space, and tracing its history from the days it was
-fashioned on dark Yuggoth, before ever the Old Ones brought it to
-earth. It was treasured and placed in its curious box by the crinoid
-things of Antarctica, salvaged from their ruins by the serpent-men of
-Valusia, and peered at eons later in Lemuria by the first human beings.
-It crossed strange lands and stranger seas, and sank with Atlantis
-before a Minoan fisher meshed it in his net and sold it to swarthy
-merchants from nighted Khem. The Pharaoh Nephren-Ka built around it a
-temple with a windowless crypt, and did that which caused his name to
-be stricken from all monuments and records. Then it slept in the ruins
-of that evil fane which the priests and the new Pharaoh destroyed, till
-the delver's spade once more brought it forth to curse mankind.
-
-Early in July the newspapers oddly supplement Blake's entries, though
-in so brief and casual a way that only the diary has called general
-attention to their contribution. It appears that a new fear had been
-growing on Federal Hill since a stranger had entered the dreaded
-church. The Italians whispered of unaccustomed stirrings and bumpings
-and scrapings in the dark windowless steeple, and called on their
-priests to banish an entity which haunted their dreams. Something,
-they said, was constantly watching at a door to see if it were dark
-enough to venture forth. Press items mentioned the long-standing local
-superstitions, but failed to shed much light on the earlier background
-of the horror. It was obvious that the young reporters of today are no
-antiquarians. In writing of these things in his diary, Blake expresses
-a curious kind of remorse, and talks of the duty of burying the
-Shining Trapezohedron and of banishing what he had evoked by letting
-daylight into the hideous jutting spire. At the same time, however, he
-displays the dangerous extent of his fascination, and admits a morbid
-longing--pervading even his dreams--to visit the accursed tower and
-gaze again into the cosmic secrets of the glowing stone.
-
-Then something in the _Journal_ on the morning of July 17 threw the
-diarist into a veritable fever of horror. It was only a variant of the
-other half-humorous items about the Federal Hill restlessness, but to
-Blake it was somehow very terrible indeed. In the night a thunderstorm
-had put the city's lighting-system out of commission for a full hour,
-and in that black interval the Italians had nearly gone mad with
-fright. Those living near the dreaded church had sworn that the thing
-in the steeple had taken advantage of the street lamps' absence and
-gone down into the body of the church, flopping and bumping around in
-a viscous, altogether dreadful way. Toward the last it had bumped up
-to the tower, where there were sounds of the shattering of glass. It
-could go wherever the darkness reached, but light would always send it
-fleeing.
-
-When the current blazed on again there had been a shocking commotion
-in the tower, for even the feeble light trickling through the
-grime-blackened, louver-boarded windows was too much for the thing.
-It had bumped and slithered up into its tenebrous steeple just in
-time--for a long dose of light would have sent it back into the abyss
-whence the crazy stranger had called it. During the dark hour praying
-crowds had clustered round the church in the rain with lighted candles
-and lamps somehow shielded with folded papers and umbrellas--a guard
-of light to save the city from the nightmare that stalks in darkness.
-Once, those nearest the church declared, the outer door had rattled
-hideously.
-
-But even this was not the worst. That evening in the _Bulletin_ Blake
-read of what the reporters had found. Aroused at last to the whimsical
-news value of the scare, a pair of them had defied the frantic crowds
-of Italians and crawled into the church through the cellar window
-after trying the doors in vain. They found the dust of the vestibule
-and of the spectral nave plowed up in a singular way, with pits of
-rotted cushions and satin pew-linings scattered curiously around. There
-was a bad odor everywhere, and here and there were bits of yellow stain
-and patches of what looked like charring. Opening the door to the
-tower, and pausing a moment at the suspicion of a scraping sound above,
-they found the narrow spiral stairs wiped roughly clean.
-
-In the tower itself a similarly half-swept condition existed. They
-spoke of the heptagonal stone pillar, the overturned Gothic chairs,
-and the bizarre plaster images; though strangely enough the metal box
-and the old mutilated skeleton were not mentioned. What disturbed
-Blake the most--except for the hints of stains and charring and bad
-odors--was the final detail that explained the crashing glass. Every
-one of the tower's lancet windows was broken, and two of them had
-been darkened in a crude and hurried way by the stuffing of satin
-pew-linings and cushion-horsehair into the spaces between the slanting
-exterior louver-boards. More satin fragments and bunches of horsehair
-lay scattered around the newly swept floor, as if someone had been
-interrupted in the act of restoring the tower to the absolute blackness
-of its tightly curtained days.
-
-Yellowish stains and charred patches were found on the ladder to
-the windowless spire, but when a reporter climbed up, opened the
-horizontally-sliding trap-door and shot a feeble flashlight beam into
-the black and strangely fetid space, he saw nothing but darkness, and
-an heterogeneous litter of shapeless fragments near the aperture. The
-verdict, of course, was charlatanry. Somebody had played a joke on
-the superstitious hill-dwellers, or else some fanatic had striven to
-bolster up their fears for their own supposed good. Or perhaps some of
-the younger and more sophisticated dwellers had staged an elaborate
-hoax on the outside world. There was an amusing aftermath when the
-police sent an officer to verify the reports. Three men in succession
-found ways of evading the assignment, and the fourth went very
-reluctantly and returned very soon without adding to the account given
-by the reporters.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-From this point onward Blake's diary shows a mounting tide of
-insidious horror and nervous apprehension. He upbraids himself for
-not doing something, and speculates wildly on the consequences of
-another electrical breakdown. It has been verified that on three
-occasions--during thunderstorms--he telephoned the electric light
-company in a frantic vein and asked that desperate precautions against
-a lapse of power be taken. Now and then his entries show concern over
-the failure of the reporters to find the metal box and stone, and the
-strangely marred old skeleton, when they explored the shadowy tower
-room. He assumed that these things had been removed--whither, and
-by whom or what, he could only guess. But his worst fears concerned
-himself, and the kind of unholy rapport he felt to exist between his
-mind and that lurking horror in the distant steeple--that monstrous
-thing of night which his rashness had called out of the ultimate black
-spaces. He seemed to feel a constant tugging at his will, and callers
-of that period remember how he would sit abstractedly at his desk and
-stare out the west window at that far-off, spire-bristling mound beyond
-the swirling smoke of the city. His entries dwell monotonously on
-certain terrible dreams, and of a strengthening of the unholy rapport
-in his sleep. There is mention of a night when he awaked to find
-himself fully dressed, outdoors, and headed automatically down College
-Hill toward the west. Again and again he dwells on the fact that the
-thing in the steeple knows where to find him.
-
-The week following July 30 is recalled as the time of Blake's partial
-breakdown. He did not dress, and ordered all his food by telephone.
-Visitors remarked the cords he kept near his bed, and he said that
-sleep-walking had forced him to bind his ankles every night with knots
-which would probably hold or else waken him with the labor of untying.
-
-In his diary he told of the hideous experience which had brought the
-collapse. After retiring on the night of the 30th he had suddenly found
-himself groping about in an almost black space. All he could see were
-short, faint, horizontal streaks of bluish light, but he could smell an
-overpowering fetor and hear a curious jumble of soft, furtive sounds
-above him. Whenever he moved he stumbled over something, and at each
-noise there would come a sort of answering sound from above--a vague
-stirring, mixed with the cautious sliding of wood on wood.
-
-Once his groping hands encountered a pillar of stone with a vacant top,
-whilst later he found himself clutching the rungs of a ladder built
-into the wall, and fumbling his uncertain way upward toward some region
-of intenser stench where a hot, searing blast beat down against him.
-Before his eyes a kaleidoscopic range of fantasmal images played, all
-of them dissolving at intervals into the picture of a vast, unplumbed
-abyss of night wherein whirled suns and worlds of an even profounder
-blackness. He thought of the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at
-whose center sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things,
-encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers,
-and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demoniac flute held in
-nameless paws.
-
-Then a sharp report from the outer world broke through his stupor and
-roused him to the unutterable horror of his position. What it was, he
-never knew--perhaps it was some belated peal from the fireworks heard
-all summer on Federal Hill as the dwellers hail their various patron
-saints, or the saints of their native villages in Italy. In any event
-he shrieked aloud, dropped frantically from the ladder, and stumbled
-blindly across the obstructed floor of the almost lightless chamber
-that encompassed him.
-
-He knew instantly where he was, and plunged recklessly down the
-narrow spiral staircase, tripping and bruising himself at every turn.
-There was a nightmare flight through a vast cobwebbed nave whose
-ghostly arches reached up to realms of leering shadow, a sightless
-scramble through a littered basement, a climb to regions of air and
-street-lights outside, and a mad racing down a spectral hill of
-gibbering gables, across a grim, silent city of tall black towers, and
-up the steep eastward precipice to his own ancient door.
-
-On regaining consciousness in the morning he found himself lying on
-his study floor fully dressed. Dirt and cobwebs covered him, and every
-inch of his body seemed sore and bruised. When he faced the mirror he
-saw that his hair was badly scorched, while a trace of strange, evil
-odor seemed to cling to his upper outer clothing. It was then that
-his nerves broke down. Thereafter, lounging exhaustedly about in a
-dressing-gown, he did little but stare from his west window, shiver at
-the threat of thunder, and make wild entries in his diary.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The great storm broke just before midnight on August 8th. Lightning
-struck repeatedly in all parts of the city, and two remarkable
-fireballs were reported. The rain was torrential, while a constant
-fusillade of thunder brought sleeplessness to thousands. Blake was
-utterly frantic in his fear for the lighting system, and tried to
-telephone the company around one a.m., though by that time service
-had been temporarily cut off in the interest of safety. He recorded
-everything in his diary--the large, nervous, and often undecipherable
-hieroglyphs telling their own story of growing frenzy and despair, and
-of entries scrawled blindly in the dark.
-
-He had to keep the house dark in order to see out the window, and it
-appears that most of his time was spent at his desk, peering anxiously
-through the rain across the glistening miles of downtown roofs at the
-constellation of distant lights marking Federal Hill. Now and then he
-would fumblingly make an entry in his diary, so that detached phrases
-such as "The lights must not go"; "It knows where I am"; "I must
-destroy it"; and "It is calling to me, but perhaps it means no injury
-this time"; are found scattered down two of the pages.
-
-Then the lights went out all over the city. It happened at 2:12 a.m.
-according to power-house records, but Blake's diary gives no indication
-of the time. The entry is merely, "Lights out--God help me." On
-Federal Hill there were watchers as anxious as he, and rain-soaked
-knots of men paraded the square and alleys around the evil church
-with umbrella-shaded candles, electric flashlights, oil lanterns,
-crucifixes, and obscure charms of the many sorts common to southern
-Italy. They blessed each flash of lightning, and made cryptical signs
-of fear with their right hands when a turn in the storm caused the
-flashes to lessen and finally to cease altogether. A rising wind
-blew out most of the candles, so that the scene grew threateningly
-dark. Someone roused Father Merluzzo of Spirito Santo Church, and he
-hastened to the dismal square to pronounce whatever helpful syllables
-he could. Of the restless and curious sounds in the blackened tower,
-there could be no doubt whatever.
-
-For what happened at 2:35 we have the testimony of the priest, a
-young, intelligent, and well-educated person; of Patrolman William J.
-Monahan of the Central Station, an officer of the highest reliability
-who had paused at that part of his beat to inspect the crowd; and of
-most of the seventy-eight men who had gathered around the church's
-high bank wall--especially those in the square where the eastward
-façade was visible. Of course there was nothing which can be proved
-as being outside the order of nature. The possible causes of such an
-event are many. No one can speak with certainty of the obscure chemical
-processes arising in a vast, ancient, ill-aired, and long-deserted
-building of heterogeneous contents. Mephitic vapors--spontaneous
-combustion--pressure of gases born of long decay--any one of numberless
-phenomena might be responsible. And then, of course, the factor of
-conscious charlatanry can by no means be excluded. The thing was really
-quite simple in itself, and covered less than three minutes of actual
-time. Father Merluzzo, always a precise man, looked at his watch
-repeatedly.
-
-It started with a definite swelling of the dull fumbling sounds inside
-the black tower. There had for some time been a vague exhalation of
-strange, evil odors from the church, and this had now become emphatic
-and offensive. Then at last there was a sound of splintering wood, and
-a large, heavy object crashed down in the yard beneath the frowning
-easterly façade. The tower was invisible now that the candles would not
-burn, but as the object neared the ground the people knew that it was
-the smoke-grimed louver-boarding of that tower's east window.
-
-Immediately afterward an utterly unbearable fetor welled forth from
-the unseen heights, choking and sickening the trembling watchers,
-and almost prostrating those in the square. At the same time the
-air trembled with a vibration as of flapping wings, and a sudden
-east-blowing wind more violent than any previous blast snatched off the
-hats and wrenched the dripping umbrellas of the crowd. Nothing definite
-could be seen in the candleless night, though some upward-looking
-spectators thought they glimpsed a great spreading blur of denser
-blackness against the inky sky--something like a formless cloud of
-smoke that shot with meteor-like speed toward the east.
-
-That was all. The watchers were half numbed with fright, awe, and
-discomfort, and scarcely knew what to do, or whether to do anything at
-all. Not knowing what had happened, they did not relax their vigil;
-and a moment later they sent up a prayer as a sharp flash of belated
-lightning, followed by an ear-splitting crash of sound, rent the
-flooded heavens. Half an hour later the rain stopped, and in fifteen
-minutes more the street lights sprang on again, sending the weary,
-bedraggled watchers relievedly back to their homes.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The next day's papers gave these matters minor mention in connection
-with the general storm reports. It seems that the great lightning flash
-and deafening explosion which followed the Federal Hill occurrence
-were even more tremendous farther east, where a burst of the singular
-fetor was likewise noticed. The phenomenon was most marked over College
-Hill, where the crash awaked all the sleeping inhabitants and led to a
-bewildered round of speculations. Of those who were already awake only
-a few saw the anomalous blaze of light near the top of the hill, or
-noticed the inexplicable upward rush of air which almost stripped the
-leaves from the trees and blasted the plants in the gardens. It was
-agreed that the lone, sudden lightning-bolt must have struck somewhere
-in this neighborhood, though no trace of its striking could afterward
-be found. A youth in the Tau Omega fraternity house thought he saw a
-grotesque and hideous mass of smoke in the air just as the preliminary
-flash burst, but his observation has not been verified. All of the few
-observers, however, agree as to the violent gust from the west and the
-flood of intolerable stench which preceded the belated stroke; whilst
-evidence concerning the momentary burned odor after the stroke is
-equally general.
-
-These points were discussed very carefully because of their probable
-connection with the death of Robert Blake. Students in the Psi Delta
-house, whose upper rear windows looked into Blake's study, noticed the
-blurred white face at the westward window on the morning of the 9th,
-and wondered what was wrong with the expression. When they saw the same
-face in the same position that evening, they felt worried, and watched
-for the lights to come up in his apartment. Later they rang the bell of
-the darkened flat, and finally had a policeman force the door.
-
-The rigid body sat bolt upright at the desk by the window, and when
-the intruders saw the glassy, bulging eyes, and the marks of stark,
-convulsive fright on the twisted features, they turned away in sickened
-dismay. Shortly afterward the coroner's physician made an examination,
-and despite the unbroken window reported electrical shock, or nervous
-tension induced by an electrical discharge, as the cause of death.
-The hideous expression he ignored altogether, deeming it a not
-improbable result of the profound shock as experienced by a person of
-such abnormal imagination and unbalanced emotions. He deduced these
-latter qualities from the books, paintings, and manuscripts found in
-the apartment, and from the blindly scrawled entries in the diary on
-the desk. Blake had prolonged his frenzied jottings to the last, and
-the broken-pointed pencil was found clutched in his spasmodically
-contracted right hand.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The entries after the failure of the lights were highly disjointed,
-and legible only in part. From them certain investigators have
-drawn conclusions differing greatly from the materialistic official
-verdict, but such speculations have little chance for belief among
-the conservative. The case of these imaginative theorists has not
-been helped by the action of superstitious Doctor Dexter, who threw
-the curious box and angled stone--an object certainly self-luminous
-as seen in the black windowless steeple where it was found--into
-the deepest channel of Narragansett Bay. Excessive imagination and
-neurotic unbalance on Blake's part, aggravated by knowledge of the evil
-bygone cult whose startling traces he had uncovered, form the dominant
-interpretation given those final frenzied jottings. These are the
-entries--or all that can be made of them.
-
-"Lights still out--must be five minutes now. Everything depends on
-lightning. Yaddith grant it will keep up!... Some influence seems
-beating through it.... Rain and thunder and wind deafen.... The thing
-is taking hold of my mind....
-
-"Trouble with memory. I see things I never knew before. Other worlds
-and other galaxies.... Dark.... The lightning seems dark and the
-darkness seems light....
-
-"It cannot be the real hill and church that I see in the
-pitch-darkness. Must be retinal impression left by flashes. Heaven
-grant the Italians are out with their candles if the lightning stops!
-
-"What am I afraid of? Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in
-antique and shadowy Khem even took the form of man? I remember Yuggoth,
-and more distant Shaggai, and the ultimate void of the black planets....
-
-"The long, winging flight through the void ... cannot cross the
-universe of light ... re-created by the thoughts caught in the Shining
-Trapezohedron ... send it through the horrible abysses of radiance....
-
-"My name is Blake--Robert Harrison Blake of 620 East Knapp Street,
-Milwaukee, Wisconsin.... I am on this planet....
-
-"Azathoth have mercy!--the lightning no longer flashes--horrible--I can
-see everything with a monstrous sense that is not sight--light is dark
-and dark is light ... those people on the hill ... guard ... candles
-and charms ... their priests....
-
-"Sense of distance gone--far is near and near is far. No light--no
-glass--see that steeple--that tower--window--can hear--Roderick
-Usher--am mad or going mad--the thing is stirring and fumbling in the
-tower--I am it and it is I--I want to get out ... must get out and
-unify the forces.... It knows where I am....
-
-"I am Robert Blake, but I see the tower in the dark. There is a
-monstrous odor ... senses transfigured ... boarding at that tower
-window cracking and giving way.... Iä ... ngai ... ygg....
-
-"I see it--coming here--hell-wind--titan blur--black wings--Yog-Sothoth
-save me--the three-lobed burning eye...."
-
-
-
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 73233 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+                        The Haunter of the Dark
+
+                          By H. P. LOVECRAFT
+
+                 _A powerful story about an old church
+                 in Providence, Rhode Island, that was
+                shunned and feared by all who knew it._
+
+           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
+                      Weird Tales December 1936.
+         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+                      (Dedicated to Robert Bloch)
+
+
+    I have seen the dark universe yawning
+      Where the black planets roll without aim--
+    Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
+      Without knowledge or luster or name.
+
+                                --_Nemesis._
+
+
+Cautious investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief
+that Robert Blake was killed by lightning, or by some profound nervous
+shock derived from an electrical discharge. It is true that the window
+he faced was unbroken, but nature has shown herself capable of many
+freakish performances. The expression on his face may easily have
+arisen from some obscure muscular source unrelated to anything he saw,
+while the entries in his diary are clearly the result of a fantastic
+imagination aroused by certain local superstitions and by certain
+old matters he had uncovered. As for the anomalous conditions at the
+deserted church on Federal Hill--the shrewd analyst is not slow in
+attributing them to some charlatanry, conscious or unconscious, with at
+least some of which Blake was secretly connected.
+
+For after all, the victim was a writer and painter wholly devoted to
+the field of myth, dream, terror, and superstition, and avid in his
+quest for scenes and effects of a bizarre, spectral sort. His earlier
+stay in the city--a visit to a strange old man as deeply given to
+occult and forbidden lore as he--had ended amidst death and flame, and
+it must have been some morbid instinct which drew him back from his
+home in Milwaukee. He may have known of the old stories despite his
+statements to the contrary in the diary, and his death may have nipped
+in the bud some stupendous hoax destined to have a literary reflection.
+
+Among those, however, who have examined and correlated all this
+evidence, there remain several who cling to less rational and
+commonplace theories. They are inclined to take much of Blake's diary
+at its face value, and point significantly to certain facts such as
+the undoubted genuineness of the old church record, the verified
+existence of the disliked and unorthodox Starry Wisdom sect prior to
+1877, the recorded disappearance of an inquisitive reporter named
+Edwin M. Lillibridge in 1893, and--above all--the look of monstrous,
+transfiguring fear on the face of the young writer when he died. It was
+one of these believers who, moved to fanatical extremes, threw into
+the bay the curiously angled stone and its strangely adorned metal box
+found in the old church steeple--the black windowless steeple, and not
+the tower where Blake's diary said those things originally were. Though
+widely censured both officially and unofficially, this man--a reputable
+physician with a taste for odd folklore--averred that he had rid the
+earth of something too dangerous to rest upon it.
+
+Between these two schools of opinion the reader must judge for himself.
+The papers have given the tangible details from a skeptical angle,
+leaving for others the drawing of the picture as Robert Blake saw
+it--or thought he saw it--or pretended to see it. Now, studying the
+diary closely, dispassionately, and at leisure, let us summarize the
+dark chain of events from the expressed point of view of their chief
+actor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Young Blake returned to Providence in the winter of 1934-5, taking
+the upper floor of a venerable dwelling in a grassy court off
+College Street--on the crest of the great eastward hill near the
+Brown University campus and behind the marble John Hay Library.
+It was a cozy and fascinating place, in a little garden oasis of
+village-like antiquity where huge, friendly cats sunned themselves
+atop a convenient shed. The square Georgian house had a monitor roof,
+classic doorway with fan carving, small-paned windows, and all the
+other earmarks of early Nineteenth Century workmanship. Inside were
+six-paneled doors, wide floor-boards, a curving colonial staircase,
+white Adam-period mantels, and a rear set of rooms three steps below
+the general level.
+
+Blake's study, a large southwest chamber, overlooked the front garden
+on one side, while its west windows--before one of which he had his
+desk--faced off from the brow of the hill and commanded a splendid view
+of the lower town's out-spread roofs and of the mystical sunsets that
+flamed behind them. On the far horizon were the open countryside's
+purple slopes. Against these, some two miles away, rose the spectral
+hump of Federal Hill, bristling with huddled roofs and steeples whose
+remote outlines wavered mysteriously, taking fantastic forms as the
+smoke of the city swirled up and enmeshed them. Blake had a curious
+sense that he was looking upon some unknown, ethereal world which might
+or might not vanish in dream if ever he tried to seek it out and enter
+it in person.
+
+Having sent home for most of his books, Blake bought some antique
+furniture suitable to his quarters and settled down to write and
+paint--living alone, and attending to the simple housework himself. His
+studio was in a north attic room, where the panes of the monitor roof
+furnished admirable lighting. During that first winter he produced five
+of his best-known short stories--_The Burrower Beneath_, _The Stairs in
+the Crypt_, _Shaggai_, _In the Vale of Pnath_, and _The Feaster from
+the Stars_--and painted seven canvases; studies of nameless, unhuman
+monsters, and profoundly alien, non-terrestrial landscapes.
+
+At sunset he would often sit at his desk and gaze dreamily off at
+the out-spread west--the dark towers of Memorial Hall just below,
+the Georgian court-house belfry, the lofty pinnacles of the downtown
+section, and that shimmering, spire-crowned mound in the distance whose
+unknown streets and labyrinthine gables so potently provoked his fancy.
+From his few local acquaintances he learned that the far-off slope
+was a vast Italian quarter, though most of the houses were remnants
+of older Yankee and Irish days. Now and then he would train his
+field-glasses on that spectral, unreachable world beyond the curling
+smoke; picking out individual roofs and chimneys and steeples, and
+speculating upon the bizarre and curious mysteries they might house.
+Even with optical aid Federal Hill seemed somehow alien, half fabulous,
+and linked to the unreal, intangible marvels of Blake's own tales and
+pictures. The feeling would persist long after the hill had faded into
+the violet, lamp-starred twilight, and the court-house floodlights
+and the red Industrial Trust beacon had blazed up to make the night
+grotesque.
+
+Of all the distant objects on Federal Hill, a certain huge, dark church
+most fascinated Blake. It stood out with especial distinctness at
+certain hours of the day, and at sunset the great tower and tapering
+steeple loomed blackly against the flaming sky. It seemed to rest
+on especially high ground; for the grimy façade, and the obliquely
+seen north side with sloping roof and the tops of great pointed
+windows, rose boldly above the tangle of surrounding ridgepoles and
+chimney-pots. Peculiarly grim and austere, it appeared to be built of
+stone, stained and weathered with the smoke and storms of a century
+and more. The style, so far as the glass could show, was that earliest
+experimental form of Gothic revival which preceded the stately Upjohn
+period and held over some of the outlines and proportions of the
+Georgian age. Perhaps it was reared around 1810 or 1815.
+
+As the months passed, Blake watched the far-off, forbidding structure
+with an oddly mounting interest. Since the vast windows were never
+lighted, he knew that it must be vacant. The longer he watched, the
+more his imagination worked, till at length he began to fancy curious
+things. He believed that a vague, singular aura of desolation hovered
+over the place, so that even the pigeons and swallows shunned its smoky
+eaves. Around other towers and belfries his glass would reveal great
+flocks of birds, but here they never rested. At least, that is what he
+thought and set down in his diary. He pointed the place out to several
+friends, but none of them had even been on Federal Hill or possessed
+the faintest notion of what the church was or had been.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the spring a deep restlessness gripped Blake. He had begun his
+long-planned novel--based on a supposed survival of the witch-cult in
+Maine--but was strangely unable to make progress with it. More and more
+he would sit at his westward window and gaze at the distant hill and
+the black, frowning steeple shunned by the birds. When the delicate
+leaves came out on the garden boughs the world was filled with a new
+beauty, but Blake's restlessness was merely increased. It was then
+that he first thought of crossing the city and climbing bodily up that
+fabulous slope into the smoke-wreathed world of dream.
+
+Late in April, just before the eon-shadowed Walpurgis time, Blake made
+his first trip into the unknown. Plodding through the endless downtown
+streets and the bleak, decayed squares beyond, he came finally upon
+the ascending avenue of century-worn steps, sagging Doric porches,
+and blear-paned cupolas which he felt must lead up to the long-known,
+unreachable world beyond the mists. There were dingy blue-and-white
+street signs which meant nothing to him, and presently he noted the
+strange, dark faces of the drifting crowds, and the foreign signs
+over curious shops in brown, decade-weathered buildings. Nowhere
+could he find any of the objects he had seen from afar; so that once
+more he half fancied that the Federal Hill of that distant view was a
+dream-world never to be trod by living human feet.
+
+Now and then a battered church façade or crumbling spire came in
+sight, but never the blackened pile that he sought. When he asked a
+shopkeeper about a great stone church the man smiled and shook his
+head, though he spoke English freely. As Blake climbed higher, the
+region seemed stranger and stranger, with bewildering mazes of brooding
+brown alleys leading eternally off to the south. He crossed two or
+three broad avenues, and once thought he glimpsed a familiar tower.
+Again he asked a merchant about the massive church of stone, and this
+time he could have sworn that the plea of ignorance was feigned. The
+dark man's face had a look of fear which he tried to hide, and Blake
+saw him make a curious sign with his right hand.
+
+Then suddenly a black spire stood out against the cloudy sky on his
+left, above the tiers of brown roofs lining the tangled southerly
+alleys. Blake knew at once what it was, and plunged toward it through
+the squalid, unpaved lanes that climbed from the avenue. Twice he
+lost his way, but he somehow dared not ask any of the patriarchs or
+housewives who sat on their door-steps, or any of the children who
+shouted and played in the mud of the shadowy lanes.
+
+At last he saw the tower plain against the southwest, and a huge
+stone bulk rose darkly at the end of an alley. Presently he stood in
+a wind-swept open square, quaintly cobblestoned, with a high bank
+wall on the farther side. This was the end of his quest; for upon the
+wide, iron-railed, weed-grown plateau which the wall supported--a
+separate, lesser world raised fully six feet above the surrounding
+streets--there stood a grim, titan bulk whose identity, despite Blake's
+new perspective, was beyond dispute.
+
+The vacant church was in a state of great decrepitude. Some of the high
+stone buttresses had fallen, and several delicate finials lay half lost
+among the brown, neglected weeds and grasses. The sooty Gothic windows
+were largely unbroken, though many of the stone mullions were missing.
+Blake wondered how the obscurely painted panes could have survived so
+well, in view of the known habits of small boys the world over. The
+massive doors were intact and tightly closed. Around the top of the
+bank wall, fully enclosing the grounds, was a rusty iron fence whose
+gate--at the head of a flight of steps from the square--was visibly
+padlocked. The path from the gate to the building was completely
+overgrown. Desolation and decay hung like a pall above the place, and
+in the birdless eaves and black, ivyless walls Blake felt a touch of
+the dimly sinister beyond his power to define.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were very few people in the square, but Blake saw a policeman
+at the northerly end and approached him with questions about the
+church. He was a great wholesome Irishman, and it seemed odd that he
+would do little more than make the sign of the cross and mutter that
+people never spoke of that building. When Blake pressed him he said
+very hurriedly that the Italian priests warned everybody against it,
+vowing that a monstrous evil had once dwelt there and left its mark.
+He himself had heard dark whispers of it from his father, who recalled
+certain sounds and rumors from his boyhood.
+
+There had been a bad sect there in the ould days--an outlaw sect that
+called up awful things from some unknown gulf of night. It had taken
+a good priest to exorcise what had come, though there did be those
+who said that merely the light could do it. If Father O'Malley were
+alive there would be many the thing he could tell. But now there was
+nothing to do but let it alone. It hurt nobody now, and those that
+owned it were dead or far away. They had run away like rats after
+the threatening talk in '77, when people began to mind the way folks
+vanished now and then in the neighborhood. Some day the city would
+step in and take the property for lack of heirs, but little good would
+come of anybody's touching it. Better it be left alone for the years
+to topple, lest things be stirred that ought to rest for ever in their
+black abyss.
+
+After the policeman had gone Blake stood staring at the sullen steepled
+pile. It excited him to find that the structure seemed as sinister
+to others as to him, and he wondered what grain of truth might lie
+behind the old tales the bluecoat had repeated. Probably they were mere
+legends evoked by the evil look of the place, but even so, they were
+like a strange coming to life of one of his own stories.
+
+The afternoon sun came out from behind dispersing clouds, but seemed
+unable to light up the stained, sooty walls of the old temple that
+towered on its high plateau. It was odd that the green of spring had
+not touched the brown, withered growths in the raised, iron-fenced
+yard. Blake found himself edging nearer the raised area and examining
+the bank wall and rusted fence for possible avenues of ingress. There
+was a terrible lure about the blackened fane which was not to be
+resisted. The fence had no opening near the steps, but around on the
+north side were some missing bars. He could go up the steps and walk
+around on the narrow coping outside the fence till he came to the
+gap. If the people feared the place so wildly, he would encounter no
+interference.
+
+He was on the embankment and almost inside the fence before anyone
+noticed him. Then, looking down, he saw the few people in the square
+edging away and making the same sign with their right hands that the
+shopkeeper in the avenue had made. Several windows were slammed down,
+and a fat woman darted into the street and pulled some small children
+inside a rickety, unpainted house. The gap in the fence was very easy
+to pass through, and before long Blake found himself wading amidst
+the rotting, tangled growths of the deserted yard. Here and there the
+worn stump of a headstone told him that there had once been burials
+in this field; but that, he saw, must have been very long ago. The
+sheer bulk of the church was oppressive now that he was close to it,
+but he conquered his mood and approached to try the three great doors
+in the façade. All were securely locked, so he began a circuit of the
+Cyclopean building in quest of some minor and more penetrable opening.
+Even then he could not be sure that he wished to enter that haunt of
+desertion and shadow, yet the pull of its strangeness dragged him on
+automatically.
+
+A yawning and unprotected cellar window in the rear furnished the
+needed aperture. Peering in, Blake saw a subterrene gulf of cobwebs
+and dust faintly litten by the western sun's filtered rays. Debris,
+old barrels, and ruined boxes and furniture of numerous sorts met his
+eye, though over everything lay a shroud of dust which softened all
+sharp outlines. The rusted remains of a hot-air furnace showed that the
+building had been used and kept in shape as late as mid-Victorian times.
+
+Acting almost without conscious initiative, Blake crawled through the
+window and let himself down to the dust-carpeted and debris-strewn
+concrete floor. The vaulted cellar was a vast one, without partitions;
+and in a corner far to the right, amid dense shadows, he saw a black
+archway evidently leading upstairs. He felt a peculiar sense of
+oppression at being actually within the great spectral building,
+but kept it in check as he cautiously scouted about--finding a
+still-intact barrel amid the dust, and rolling it over to the open
+window to provide for his exit. Then, bracing himself, he crossed the
+wide, cobweb-festooned space toward the arch. Half choked with the
+omnipresent dust, and covered with ghostly gossamer fibers, he reached
+and began to climb the worn stone steps which rose into the darkness.
+He had no light, but groped carefully with his hands. After a sharp
+turn he felt a closed door ahead, and a little fumbling revealed its
+ancient latch. It opened inward, and beyond it he saw a dimly illumined
+corridor lined with worm-eaten paneling.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once on the ground floor, Blake began exploring in a rapid fashion.
+All the inner doors were unlocked, so that he freely passed from room
+to room. The colossal nave was an almost eldritch place with its
+drifts and mountains of dust over box pews, altar, hour-glass pulpit,
+and sounding-board, and its titanic ropes of cobweb stretching among
+the pointed arches of the gallery and entwining the clustered Gothic
+columns. Over all this hushed desolation played a hideous leaden light
+as the declining afternoon sun sent its rays through the strange,
+half-blackened panes of the great apsidal windows.
+
+The paintings on those windows were so obscured by soot that Blake
+could scarcely decipher what they had represented, but from the little
+he could make out he did not like them. The designs were largely
+conventional, and his knowledge of obscure symbolism told him much
+concerning some of the ancient patterns. The few saints depicted bore
+expressions distinctly open to criticism, while one of the windows
+seemed to show merely a dark space with spirals of curious luminosity
+scattered about in it. Turning away from the windows, Blake noticed
+that the cobwebbed cross above the altar was not of the ordinary kind,
+but resembled the primordial ankh or crux ansata of shadowy Egypt.
+
+In a rear vestry room beside the apse Blake found a rotting desk and
+ceiling-high shelves of mildewed, disintegrating books. Here for the
+first time he received a positive shock of objective horror, for the
+titles of those books told him much. They were the black, forbidden
+things which most sane people have never even heard of, or have
+heard of only in furtive, timorous whispers; the banned and dreaded
+repositories of equivocal secrets and immemorial formulæ which have
+trickled down the stream of time from the days of man's youth, and the
+dim, fabulous days before man was. He had himself read many of them--a
+Latin version of the abhorred _Necronomicon_, the sinister _Liber
+Ivonis_, the infamous _Cultes des Goules_ of Comte d'Erlette, the
+_Unaussprechlichen Kulten_ of von Junzt, and old Ludvig Prinn's hellish
+_De Vermis Mysteriis_. But there were others he had known merely by
+reputation or not at all--the _Pnakotic Manuscripts_, the _Book of
+Dzyan_, and a crumbling volume in wholly unidentifiable characters yet
+with certain symbols and diagrams shudderingly recognizable to the
+occult student. Clearly, the lingering local rumors had not lied. This
+place had once been the seat of an evil older than mankind and wider
+than the known universe.
+
+In the ruined desk was a small leather-bound record-book filled with
+entries in some odd cryptographic medium. The manuscript writing
+consisted of the common traditional symbols used today in astronomy and
+anciently in alchemy, astrology, and other dubious arts--the devices
+of the sun, moon, planets, aspects, and zodiacal signs--here massed in
+solid pages of text, with divisions and paragraphings suggesting that
+each symbol answered to some alphabetical letter.
+
+In the hope of later solving the cryptogram, Blake bore off this
+volume in his coat pocket. Many of the great tomes on the shelves
+fascinated him unutterably, and he felt tempted to borrow them at some
+later time. He wondered how they could have remained undisturbed so
+long. Was he the first to conquer the clutching, pervasive fear which
+had for nearly sixty years protected this deserted place from visitors?
+
+Having now thoroughly explored the ground floor, Blake plowed again
+through the dust of the spectral nave to the front vestibule, where he
+had seen a door and staircase presumably leading up to the blackened
+tower and steeple--objects so long familiar to him at a distance. The
+ascent was a choking experience, for dust lay thick, while the spiders
+had done their worst in this constricted place. The staircase was a
+spiral with high, narrow wooden treads, and now and then Blake passed a
+clouded window looking dizzily out over the city. Though he had seen no
+ropes below, he expected to find a bell or peal of bells in the tower
+whose narrow, louver-boarded lancet windows his field-glass had studied
+so often. Here he was doomed to disappointment, for when he attained
+the top of the stairs he found the tower chamber vacant of chimes, and
+clearly devoted to vastly different purposes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The room, about fifteen feet square, was faintly lighted by four lancet
+windows, one on each side, which were glazed within their screening of
+decayed louver-boards. These had been further fitted with tight, opaque
+screens, but the latter were now largely rotted away. In the center of
+the dust-laden floor rose a curiously angled stone pillar some four
+feet in height and two in average diameter, covered on each side with
+bizarre, crudely incised and wholly unrecognizable hieroglyphs. On
+this pillar rested a metal box of peculiarly asymmetrical form; its
+hinged lid thrown back, and its interior holding what looked beneath
+the decade-deep dust to be an egg-shaped or irregularly spherical
+object some four inches through. Around the pillar in a rough circle
+were seven high-backed Gothic chairs still largely intact, while behind
+them, ranging along the dark-paneled walls, were seven colossal images
+of crumbling, black-painted plaster, resembling more than anything else
+the cryptic carven megaliths of mysterious Easter Island. In one corner
+of the cobwebbed chamber a ladder was built into the wall, leading up
+to the closed trap-door of the windowless steeple above.
+
+As Blake grew accustomed to the feeble light he noticed odd bas-reliefs
+on the strange open box of yellowish metal. Approaching, he tried to
+clear the dust away with his hands and handkerchief, and saw that
+the figurings were of a monstrous and utterly alien kind; depicting
+entities which, though seemingly alive, resembled no known life-form
+ever evolved on this planet. The four-inch seeming sphere turned out
+to be a nearly black, red-striated polyhedron with many irregular
+flat surfaces; either a very remarkable crystal of some sort, or an
+artificial object of carved and highly polished mineral matter. It did
+not touch the bottom of the box, but was held suspended by means of
+a metal band around its center, with seven queerly-designed supports
+extending horizontally to angles of the box's inner wall near the
+top. This stone, once exposed, exerted upon Blake an almost alarming
+fascination. He could scarcely tear his eyes from it, and as he looked
+at its glistening surfaces he almost fancied it was transparent, with
+half-formed worlds of wonder within. Into his mind floated pictures of
+alien orbs with great stone towers, and other orbs with titan mountains
+and no mark of life, and still remoter spaces where only a stirring in
+vague blacknesses told of the presence of consciousness and will.
+
+When he did look away, it was to notice a somewhat singular mound of
+dust in the far corner near the ladder to the steeple. Just why it took
+his attention he could not tell, but something in its contours carried
+a message to his unconscious mind. Plowing toward it, and brushing
+aside the hanging cobwebs as he went, he began to discern something
+grim about it. Hand and handkerchief soon revealed the truth, and Blake
+gasped with a baffling mixture of emotions. It was a human skeleton,
+and it must have been there for a very long time. The clothing was in
+shreds, but some buttons and fragments of cloth bespoke a man's gray
+suit. There were other bits of evidence--shoes, metal clasps, huge
+buttons for round cuffs, a stickpin of bygone pattern, a reporter's
+badge with the name of the old _Providence Telegram_, and a crumbling
+leather pocket-book. Blake examined the latter with care, finding
+within it several bills of antiquated issue, a celluloid advertising
+calendar for 1893, some cards with the name "Edwin M. Lillibridge," and
+a paper covered with penciled memoranda.
+
+This paper held much of a puzzling nature, and Blake read it carefully
+at the dim westward window. Its disjointed text included such phrases
+as the following:
+
+    "Prof. Enoch Bowen home from Egypt May 1844--buys old Free-Will
+    Church in July--his archæological work & studies in occult well
+    known."
+
+    "Dr. Drowne of 4th Baptist warns against Starry Wisdom in sermon
+    Dec. 29, 1844."
+
+    "Congregation 97 by end of '45."
+
+    "1846--3 disappearances--first mention of Shining Trapezohedron."
+
+    "7 disappearances 1848--stories of blood sacrifice begin."
+
+    "Investigation 1853 comes to nothing--stories of sounds."
+
+    "Fr. O'Malley tells of devil-worship with box found in great
+    Egyptian ruins--says they call up something that can't exist in
+    light. Flees a little light, and banished by strong light. Then has
+    to be summoned again. Probably got this from deathbed confession
+    of Francis X. Feeney, who had joined Starry Wisdom in '49. These
+    people say the Shining Trapezohedron shows them heaven & other
+    worlds, & that the Haunter of the Dark tells them secrets in some
+    way."
+
+    "Story of Orrin B. Eddy 1857. They call it up by gazing at the
+    crystal, & have a secret language of their own."
+
+    "200 or more in cong. 1863, exclusive of men at front."
+
+    "Irish boys mob church in 1869 after Patrick Regan's disappearance."
+
+    "Veiled article in J. March 14, '72, but people don't talk about
+    it."
+
+    "6 disappearances 1876--secret committee calls on Mayor Doyle."
+
+    "Action promised Feb. 1877--church closes in April."
+
+    "Gang--Federal Hill Boys--threaten Dr. ---- and vestrymen in May."
+
+    "181 persons leave city before end of '77--mention no names."
+
+    "Ghost stories begin around 1880--try to ascertain truth of report
+    that no human being has entered church since 1877."
+
+    "Ask Lanigan for photograph of place taken 1851...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Restoring the paper to the pocket-book and placing the latter in
+his coat, Blake turned to look down at the skeleton in the dust.
+The implications of the notes were clear, and there could be no
+doubt but that this man had come to the deserted edifice forty-two
+years before in quest of a newspaper sensation which no one else had
+been bold enough to attempt. Perhaps no one else had known of his
+plan--who could tell? But he had never returned to his paper. Had some
+bravely-suppressed fear risen to overcome him and bring on sudden
+heart-failure? Blake stooped over the gleaming bones and noted their
+peculiar state. Some of them were badly scattered, and a few seemed
+oddly _dissolved_ at the ends. Others were strangely yellowed, with
+vague suggestions of charring. This charring extended to some of the
+fragments of clothing. The skull was in a very peculiar state--stained
+yellow, and with a charred aperture in the top as if some powerful acid
+had eaten through the solid bone. What had happened to the skeleton
+during its four decades of silent entombment here Blake could not
+imagine.
+
+[Illustration: "He had come to the deserted edifice in quest of a
+newspaper sensation."]
+
+Before he realized it, he was looking at the stone again, and letting
+its curious influence call up a nebulous pageantry in his mind. He saw
+processions of robed, hooded figures whose outlines were not human, and
+looked on endless leagues of desert lined with carved, sky-reaching
+monoliths. He saw towers and walls in nighted depths under the sea,
+and vortices of space where wisps of black mist floated before thin
+shimmerings of cold purple haze. And beyond all else he glimpsed an
+infinite gulf of sheer darkness, where solid and semi-solid forms were
+known only by their windy stirrings, and cloudy patterns of force
+seemed to superimpose order on chaos and hold forth a key to all the
+paradoxes and arcana of the worlds we know.
+
+Then all at once the spell was broken by an access of gnawing,
+indeterminate panic fear. Blake choked and turned away from the stone,
+conscious of some formless alien presence close to him and watching him
+with horrible intentness. He felt entangled with something--something
+which was not in the stone, but which had looked through it at
+him--something which would ceaselessly follow him with a cognition
+that was not physical sight. Plainly, the place was getting on his
+nerves--as well it might in view of his gruesome find. The light was
+waning, too, and since he had no illuminant with him he knew he would
+have to be leaving soon.
+
+It was then, in the gathering twilight, that he thought he saw a
+faint trace of luminosity in the crazily angled stone. He had tried
+to look away from it, but some obscure compulsion drew his eyes back.
+Was there a subtle phosphorescence of radio-activity about the thing?
+What was it that the dead man's notes had said concerning a _Shining
+Trapezohedron_? What, anyway, was this abandoned lair of cosmic evil?
+What had been done here, and what might still be lurking in the
+bird-shunned shadows? It seemed now as if an elusive touch of fetor had
+arisen somewhere close by, though its source was not apparent. Blake
+seized the cover of the long-open box and snapped it down. It moved
+easily on its alien hinges, and closed completely over the unmistakably
+glowing stone.
+
+At the sharp click of that closing a soft stirring sound seemed to come
+from the steeple's eternal blackness overhead, beyond the trap-door.
+Rats, without question--the only living things to reveal their presence
+in this accursed pile since he had entered it. And yet that stirring in
+the steeple frightened him horribly, so that he plunged almost wildly
+down the spiral stairs, across the ghoulish nave, into the vaulted
+basement, out amidst the gathering dusk of the deserted square, and
+down through the teeming, fear-haunted alleys and avenues of Federal
+Hill toward the sane central streets and the home-like brick sidewalks
+of the college district.
+
+During the days which followed, Blake told no one of his expedition.
+Instead, he read much in certain books, examined long years of
+newspaper files downtown, and worked feverishly at the cryptogram in
+that leather volume from the cobwebbed vestry room. The cipher, he soon
+saw, was no simple one; and after a long period of endeavor he felt
+sure that its language could not be English, Latin, Greek, French,
+Spanish, Italian, or German. Evidently he would have to draw upon the
+deepest wells of his strange erudition.
+
+Every evening the old impulse to gaze westward returned, and he saw the
+black steeple as of yore amongst the bristling roofs of a distant and
+half-fabulous world. But now it held a fresh note of terror for him. He
+knew the heritage of evil lore it masked, and with the knowledge his
+vision ran riot in queer new ways. The birds of spring were returning,
+and as he watched their sunset flights he fancied they avoided the
+gaunt, lone spire as never before. When a flock of them approached it,
+he thought, they would wheel and scatter in panic confusion--and he
+could guess at the wild twitterings which failed to reach him across
+the intervening miles.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was in June that Blake's diary told of his victory over the
+cryptogram. The text was, he found, in the dark Aklo language used by
+certain cults of evil antiquity, and known to him in a halting way
+through previous researches. The diary is strangely reticent about
+what Blake deciphered, but he was patently awed and disconcerted by
+his results. There are references to a Haunter of the Dark awaked by
+gazing into the Shining Trapezohedron, and insane conjectures about the
+black gulfs of chaos from which it was called. The being is spoken of
+as holding all knowledge, and demanding monstrous sacrifices. Some of
+Blake's entries show fear lest the thing, which he seemed to regard as
+summoned, stalk abroad; though he adds that the street-lights form a
+bulwark which cannot be crossed.
+
+Of the Shining Trapezohedron he speaks often, calling it a window
+on all time and space, and tracing its history from the days it was
+fashioned on dark Yuggoth, before ever the Old Ones brought it to
+earth. It was treasured and placed in its curious box by the crinoid
+things of Antarctica, salvaged from their ruins by the serpent-men of
+Valusia, and peered at eons later in Lemuria by the first human beings.
+It crossed strange lands and stranger seas, and sank with Atlantis
+before a Minoan fisher meshed it in his net and sold it to swarthy
+merchants from nighted Khem. The Pharaoh Nephren-Ka built around it a
+temple with a windowless crypt, and did that which caused his name to
+be stricken from all monuments and records. Then it slept in the ruins
+of that evil fane which the priests and the new Pharaoh destroyed, till
+the delver's spade once more brought it forth to curse mankind.
+
+Early in July the newspapers oddly supplement Blake's entries, though
+in so brief and casual a way that only the diary has called general
+attention to their contribution. It appears that a new fear had been
+growing on Federal Hill since a stranger had entered the dreaded
+church. The Italians whispered of unaccustomed stirrings and bumpings
+and scrapings in the dark windowless steeple, and called on their
+priests to banish an entity which haunted their dreams. Something,
+they said, was constantly watching at a door to see if it were dark
+enough to venture forth. Press items mentioned the long-standing local
+superstitions, but failed to shed much light on the earlier background
+of the horror. It was obvious that the young reporters of today are no
+antiquarians. In writing of these things in his diary, Blake expresses
+a curious kind of remorse, and talks of the duty of burying the
+Shining Trapezohedron and of banishing what he had evoked by letting
+daylight into the hideous jutting spire. At the same time, however, he
+displays the dangerous extent of his fascination, and admits a morbid
+longing--pervading even his dreams--to visit the accursed tower and
+gaze again into the cosmic secrets of the glowing stone.
+
+Then something in the _Journal_ on the morning of July 17 threw the
+diarist into a veritable fever of horror. It was only a variant of the
+other half-humorous items about the Federal Hill restlessness, but to
+Blake it was somehow very terrible indeed. In the night a thunderstorm
+had put the city's lighting-system out of commission for a full hour,
+and in that black interval the Italians had nearly gone mad with
+fright. Those living near the dreaded church had sworn that the thing
+in the steeple had taken advantage of the street lamps' absence and
+gone down into the body of the church, flopping and bumping around in
+a viscous, altogether dreadful way. Toward the last it had bumped up
+to the tower, where there were sounds of the shattering of glass. It
+could go wherever the darkness reached, but light would always send it
+fleeing.
+
+When the current blazed on again there had been a shocking commotion
+in the tower, for even the feeble light trickling through the
+grime-blackened, louver-boarded windows was too much for the thing.
+It had bumped and slithered up into its tenebrous steeple just in
+time--for a long dose of light would have sent it back into the abyss
+whence the crazy stranger had called it. During the dark hour praying
+crowds had clustered round the church in the rain with lighted candles
+and lamps somehow shielded with folded papers and umbrellas--a guard
+of light to save the city from the nightmare that stalks in darkness.
+Once, those nearest the church declared, the outer door had rattled
+hideously.
+
+But even this was not the worst. That evening in the _Bulletin_ Blake
+read of what the reporters had found. Aroused at last to the whimsical
+news value of the scare, a pair of them had defied the frantic crowds
+of Italians and crawled into the church through the cellar window
+after trying the doors in vain. They found the dust of the vestibule
+and of the spectral nave plowed up in a singular way, with pits of
+rotted cushions and satin pew-linings scattered curiously around. There
+was a bad odor everywhere, and here and there were bits of yellow stain
+and patches of what looked like charring. Opening the door to the
+tower, and pausing a moment at the suspicion of a scraping sound above,
+they found the narrow spiral stairs wiped roughly clean.
+
+In the tower itself a similarly half-swept condition existed. They
+spoke of the heptagonal stone pillar, the overturned Gothic chairs,
+and the bizarre plaster images; though strangely enough the metal box
+and the old mutilated skeleton were not mentioned. What disturbed
+Blake the most--except for the hints of stains and charring and bad
+odors--was the final detail that explained the crashing glass. Every
+one of the tower's lancet windows was broken, and two of them had
+been darkened in a crude and hurried way by the stuffing of satin
+pew-linings and cushion-horsehair into the spaces between the slanting
+exterior louver-boards. More satin fragments and bunches of horsehair
+lay scattered around the newly swept floor, as if someone had been
+interrupted in the act of restoring the tower to the absolute blackness
+of its tightly curtained days.
+
+Yellowish stains and charred patches were found on the ladder to
+the windowless spire, but when a reporter climbed up, opened the
+horizontally-sliding trap-door and shot a feeble flashlight beam into
+the black and strangely fetid space, he saw nothing but darkness, and
+an heterogeneous litter of shapeless fragments near the aperture. The
+verdict, of course, was charlatanry. Somebody had played a joke on
+the superstitious hill-dwellers, or else some fanatic had striven to
+bolster up their fears for their own supposed good. Or perhaps some of
+the younger and more sophisticated dwellers had staged an elaborate
+hoax on the outside world. There was an amusing aftermath when the
+police sent an officer to verify the reports. Three men in succession
+found ways of evading the assignment, and the fourth went very
+reluctantly and returned very soon without adding to the account given
+by the reporters.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From this point onward Blake's diary shows a mounting tide of
+insidious horror and nervous apprehension. He upbraids himself for
+not doing something, and speculates wildly on the consequences of
+another electrical breakdown. It has been verified that on three
+occasions--during thunderstorms--he telephoned the electric light
+company in a frantic vein and asked that desperate precautions against
+a lapse of power be taken. Now and then his entries show concern over
+the failure of the reporters to find the metal box and stone, and the
+strangely marred old skeleton, when they explored the shadowy tower
+room. He assumed that these things had been removed--whither, and
+by whom or what, he could only guess. But his worst fears concerned
+himself, and the kind of unholy rapport he felt to exist between his
+mind and that lurking horror in the distant steeple--that monstrous
+thing of night which his rashness had called out of the ultimate black
+spaces. He seemed to feel a constant tugging at his will, and callers
+of that period remember how he would sit abstractedly at his desk and
+stare out the west window at that far-off, spire-bristling mound beyond
+the swirling smoke of the city. His entries dwell monotonously on
+certain terrible dreams, and of a strengthening of the unholy rapport
+in his sleep. There is mention of a night when he awaked to find
+himself fully dressed, outdoors, and headed automatically down College
+Hill toward the west. Again and again he dwells on the fact that the
+thing in the steeple knows where to find him.
+
+The week following July 30 is recalled as the time of Blake's partial
+breakdown. He did not dress, and ordered all his food by telephone.
+Visitors remarked the cords he kept near his bed, and he said that
+sleep-walking had forced him to bind his ankles every night with knots
+which would probably hold or else waken him with the labor of untying.
+
+In his diary he told of the hideous experience which had brought the
+collapse. After retiring on the night of the 30th he had suddenly found
+himself groping about in an almost black space. All he could see were
+short, faint, horizontal streaks of bluish light, but he could smell an
+overpowering fetor and hear a curious jumble of soft, furtive sounds
+above him. Whenever he moved he stumbled over something, and at each
+noise there would come a sort of answering sound from above--a vague
+stirring, mixed with the cautious sliding of wood on wood.
+
+Once his groping hands encountered a pillar of stone with a vacant top,
+whilst later he found himself clutching the rungs of a ladder built
+into the wall, and fumbling his uncertain way upward toward some region
+of intenser stench where a hot, searing blast beat down against him.
+Before his eyes a kaleidoscopic range of fantasmal images played, all
+of them dissolving at intervals into the picture of a vast, unplumbed
+abyss of night wherein whirled suns and worlds of an even profounder
+blackness. He thought of the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at
+whose center sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things,
+encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers,
+and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demoniac flute held in
+nameless paws.
+
+Then a sharp report from the outer world broke through his stupor and
+roused him to the unutterable horror of his position. What it was, he
+never knew--perhaps it was some belated peal from the fireworks heard
+all summer on Federal Hill as the dwellers hail their various patron
+saints, or the saints of their native villages in Italy. In any event
+he shrieked aloud, dropped frantically from the ladder, and stumbled
+blindly across the obstructed floor of the almost lightless chamber
+that encompassed him.
+
+He knew instantly where he was, and plunged recklessly down the
+narrow spiral staircase, tripping and bruising himself at every turn.
+There was a nightmare flight through a vast cobwebbed nave whose
+ghostly arches reached up to realms of leering shadow, a sightless
+scramble through a littered basement, a climb to regions of air and
+street-lights outside, and a mad racing down a spectral hill of
+gibbering gables, across a grim, silent city of tall black towers, and
+up the steep eastward precipice to his own ancient door.
+
+On regaining consciousness in the morning he found himself lying on
+his study floor fully dressed. Dirt and cobwebs covered him, and every
+inch of his body seemed sore and bruised. When he faced the mirror he
+saw that his hair was badly scorched, while a trace of strange, evil
+odor seemed to cling to his upper outer clothing. It was then that
+his nerves broke down. Thereafter, lounging exhaustedly about in a
+dressing-gown, he did little but stare from his west window, shiver at
+the threat of thunder, and make wild entries in his diary.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The great storm broke just before midnight on August 8th. Lightning
+struck repeatedly in all parts of the city, and two remarkable
+fireballs were reported. The rain was torrential, while a constant
+fusillade of thunder brought sleeplessness to thousands. Blake was
+utterly frantic in his fear for the lighting system, and tried to
+telephone the company around one a.m., though by that time service
+had been temporarily cut off in the interest of safety. He recorded
+everything in his diary--the large, nervous, and often undecipherable
+hieroglyphs telling their own story of growing frenzy and despair, and
+of entries scrawled blindly in the dark.
+
+He had to keep the house dark in order to see out the window, and it
+appears that most of his time was spent at his desk, peering anxiously
+through the rain across the glistening miles of downtown roofs at the
+constellation of distant lights marking Federal Hill. Now and then he
+would fumblingly make an entry in his diary, so that detached phrases
+such as "The lights must not go"; "It knows where I am"; "I must
+destroy it"; and "It is calling to me, but perhaps it means no injury
+this time"; are found scattered down two of the pages.
+
+Then the lights went out all over the city. It happened at 2:12 a.m.
+according to power-house records, but Blake's diary gives no indication
+of the time. The entry is merely, "Lights out--God help me." On
+Federal Hill there were watchers as anxious as he, and rain-soaked
+knots of men paraded the square and alleys around the evil church
+with umbrella-shaded candles, electric flashlights, oil lanterns,
+crucifixes, and obscure charms of the many sorts common to southern
+Italy. They blessed each flash of lightning, and made cryptical signs
+of fear with their right hands when a turn in the storm caused the
+flashes to lessen and finally to cease altogether. A rising wind
+blew out most of the candles, so that the scene grew threateningly
+dark. Someone roused Father Merluzzo of Spirito Santo Church, and he
+hastened to the dismal square to pronounce whatever helpful syllables
+he could. Of the restless and curious sounds in the blackened tower,
+there could be no doubt whatever.
+
+For what happened at 2:35 we have the testimony of the priest, a
+young, intelligent, and well-educated person; of Patrolman William J.
+Monahan of the Central Station, an officer of the highest reliability
+who had paused at that part of his beat to inspect the crowd; and of
+most of the seventy-eight men who had gathered around the church's
+high bank wall--especially those in the square where the eastward
+façade was visible. Of course there was nothing which can be proved
+as being outside the order of nature. The possible causes of such an
+event are many. No one can speak with certainty of the obscure chemical
+processes arising in a vast, ancient, ill-aired, and long-deserted
+building of heterogeneous contents. Mephitic vapors--spontaneous
+combustion--pressure of gases born of long decay--any one of numberless
+phenomena might be responsible. And then, of course, the factor of
+conscious charlatanry can by no means be excluded. The thing was really
+quite simple in itself, and covered less than three minutes of actual
+time. Father Merluzzo, always a precise man, looked at his watch
+repeatedly.
+
+It started with a definite swelling of the dull fumbling sounds inside
+the black tower. There had for some time been a vague exhalation of
+strange, evil odors from the church, and this had now become emphatic
+and offensive. Then at last there was a sound of splintering wood, and
+a large, heavy object crashed down in the yard beneath the frowning
+easterly façade. The tower was invisible now that the candles would not
+burn, but as the object neared the ground the people knew that it was
+the smoke-grimed louver-boarding of that tower's east window.
+
+Immediately afterward an utterly unbearable fetor welled forth from
+the unseen heights, choking and sickening the trembling watchers,
+and almost prostrating those in the square. At the same time the
+air trembled with a vibration as of flapping wings, and a sudden
+east-blowing wind more violent than any previous blast snatched off the
+hats and wrenched the dripping umbrellas of the crowd. Nothing definite
+could be seen in the candleless night, though some upward-looking
+spectators thought they glimpsed a great spreading blur of denser
+blackness against the inky sky--something like a formless cloud of
+smoke that shot with meteor-like speed toward the east.
+
+That was all. The watchers were half numbed with fright, awe, and
+discomfort, and scarcely knew what to do, or whether to do anything at
+all. Not knowing what had happened, they did not relax their vigil;
+and a moment later they sent up a prayer as a sharp flash of belated
+lightning, followed by an ear-splitting crash of sound, rent the
+flooded heavens. Half an hour later the rain stopped, and in fifteen
+minutes more the street lights sprang on again, sending the weary,
+bedraggled watchers relievedly back to their homes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day's papers gave these matters minor mention in connection
+with the general storm reports. It seems that the great lightning flash
+and deafening explosion which followed the Federal Hill occurrence
+were even more tremendous farther east, where a burst of the singular
+fetor was likewise noticed. The phenomenon was most marked over College
+Hill, where the crash awaked all the sleeping inhabitants and led to a
+bewildered round of speculations. Of those who were already awake only
+a few saw the anomalous blaze of light near the top of the hill, or
+noticed the inexplicable upward rush of air which almost stripped the
+leaves from the trees and blasted the plants in the gardens. It was
+agreed that the lone, sudden lightning-bolt must have struck somewhere
+in this neighborhood, though no trace of its striking could afterward
+be found. A youth in the Tau Omega fraternity house thought he saw a
+grotesque and hideous mass of smoke in the air just as the preliminary
+flash burst, but his observation has not been verified. All of the few
+observers, however, agree as to the violent gust from the west and the
+flood of intolerable stench which preceded the belated stroke; whilst
+evidence concerning the momentary burned odor after the stroke is
+equally general.
+
+These points were discussed very carefully because of their probable
+connection with the death of Robert Blake. Students in the Psi Delta
+house, whose upper rear windows looked into Blake's study, noticed the
+blurred white face at the westward window on the morning of the 9th,
+and wondered what was wrong with the expression. When they saw the same
+face in the same position that evening, they felt worried, and watched
+for the lights to come up in his apartment. Later they rang the bell of
+the darkened flat, and finally had a policeman force the door.
+
+The rigid body sat bolt upright at the desk by the window, and when
+the intruders saw the glassy, bulging eyes, and the marks of stark,
+convulsive fright on the twisted features, they turned away in sickened
+dismay. Shortly afterward the coroner's physician made an examination,
+and despite the unbroken window reported electrical shock, or nervous
+tension induced by an electrical discharge, as the cause of death.
+The hideous expression he ignored altogether, deeming it a not
+improbable result of the profound shock as experienced by a person of
+such abnormal imagination and unbalanced emotions. He deduced these
+latter qualities from the books, paintings, and manuscripts found in
+the apartment, and from the blindly scrawled entries in the diary on
+the desk. Blake had prolonged his frenzied jottings to the last, and
+the broken-pointed pencil was found clutched in his spasmodically
+contracted right hand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The entries after the failure of the lights were highly disjointed,
+and legible only in part. From them certain investigators have
+drawn conclusions differing greatly from the materialistic official
+verdict, but such speculations have little chance for belief among
+the conservative. The case of these imaginative theorists has not
+been helped by the action of superstitious Doctor Dexter, who threw
+the curious box and angled stone--an object certainly self-luminous
+as seen in the black windowless steeple where it was found--into
+the deepest channel of Narragansett Bay. Excessive imagination and
+neurotic unbalance on Blake's part, aggravated by knowledge of the evil
+bygone cult whose startling traces he had uncovered, form the dominant
+interpretation given those final frenzied jottings. These are the
+entries--or all that can be made of them.
+
+"Lights still out--must be five minutes now. Everything depends on
+lightning. Yaddith grant it will keep up!... Some influence seems
+beating through it.... Rain and thunder and wind deafen.... The thing
+is taking hold of my mind....
+
+"Trouble with memory. I see things I never knew before. Other worlds
+and other galaxies.... Dark.... The lightning seems dark and the
+darkness seems light....
+
+"It cannot be the real hill and church that I see in the
+pitch-darkness. Must be retinal impression left by flashes. Heaven
+grant the Italians are out with their candles if the lightning stops!
+
+"What am I afraid of? Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in
+antique and shadowy Khem even took the form of man? I remember Yuggoth,
+and more distant Shaggai, and the ultimate void of the black planets....
+
+"The long, winging flight through the void ... cannot cross the
+universe of light ... re-created by the thoughts caught in the Shining
+Trapezohedron ... send it through the horrible abysses of radiance....
+
+"My name is Blake--Robert Harrison Blake of 620 East Knapp Street,
+Milwaukee, Wisconsin.... I am on this planet....
+
+"Azathoth have mercy!--the lightning no longer flashes--horrible--I can
+see everything with a monstrous sense that is not sight--light is dark
+and dark is light ... those people on the hill ... guard ... candles
+and charms ... their priests....
+
+"Sense of distance gone--far is near and near is far. No light--no
+glass--see that steeple--that tower--window--can hear--Roderick
+Usher--am mad or going mad--the thing is stirring and fumbling in the
+tower--I am it and it is I--I want to get out ... must get out and
+unify the forces.... It knows where I am....
+
+"I am Robert Blake, but I see the tower in the dark. There is a
+monstrous odor ... senses transfigured ... boarding at that tower
+window cracking and giving way.... Iä ... ngai ... ygg....
+
+"I see it--coming here--hell-wind--titan blur--black wings--Yog-Sothoth
+save me--the three-lobed burning eye...."
+
+
+
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 73233 ***
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-<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 73233 ***</div>
-
-<div class="titlepage">
-
-<h1>The Haunter of the Dark</h1>
-
-<p class="ph1">By H. P. LOVECRAFT</p>
-
-<p><i>A powerful story about an old church<br>
-in Providence, Rhode Island, that was<br>
-shunned and feared by all who knew it.</i></p>
-
-<p>[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from<br>
-Weird Tales December 1936.<br>
-Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that<br>
-the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]</p>
-
-<p>(Dedicated to Robert Bloch)</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<hr class="chap">
-
-<div class="poetry-container">
-<div class="poetry">
-  <div class="stanza">
-    <div class="verse indent0">I have seen the dark universe yawning</div>
-    <div class="verse indent2">Where the black planets roll without aim—</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">Where they roll in their horror unheeded,</div>
-    <div class="verse indent2">Without knowledge or luster or name.</div>
-  </div>
-  <div class="stanza">
-    <div class="verse indent10">—<i>Nemesis.</i></div>
-  </div>
-</div>
-</div>
-
-
-<p>Cautious investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief
-that Robert Blake was killed by lightning, or by some profound nervous
-shock derived from an electrical discharge. It is true that the window
-he faced was unbroken, but nature has shown herself capable of many
-freakish performances. The expression on his face may easily have
-arisen from some obscure muscular source unrelated to anything he saw,
-while the entries in his diary are clearly the result of a fantastic
-imagination aroused by certain local superstitions and by certain
-old matters he had uncovered. As for the anomalous conditions at the
-deserted church on Federal Hill—the shrewd analyst is not slow in
-attributing them to some charlatanry, conscious or unconscious, with at
-least some of which Blake was secretly connected.</p>
-
-<p>For after all, the victim was a writer and painter wholly devoted to
-the field of myth, dream, terror, and superstition, and avid in his
-quest for scenes and effects of a bizarre, spectral sort. His earlier
-stay in the city—a visit to a strange old man as deeply given to
-occult and forbidden lore as he—had ended amidst death and flame, and
-it must have been some morbid instinct which drew him back from his
-home in Milwaukee. He may have known of the old stories despite his
-statements to the contrary in the diary, and his death may have nipped
-in the bud some stupendous hoax destined to have a literary reflection.</p>
-
-<p>Among those, however, who have examined and correlated all this
-evidence, there remain several who cling to less rational and
-commonplace theories. They are inclined to take much of Blake's diary
-at its face value, and point significantly to certain facts such as
-the undoubted genuineness of the old church record, the verified
-existence of the disliked and unorthodox Starry Wisdom sect prior to
-1877, the recorded disappearance of an inquisitive reporter named
-Edwin M. Lillibridge in 1893, and—above all—the look of monstrous,
-transfiguring fear on the face of the young writer when he died. It was
-one of these believers who, moved to fanatical extremes, threw into
-the bay the curiously angled stone and its strangely adorned metal box
-found in the old church steeple—the black windowless steeple, and not
-the tower where Blake's diary said those things originally were. Though
-widely censured both officially and unofficially, this man—a reputable
-physician with a taste for odd folklore—averred that he had rid the
-earth of something too dangerous to rest upon it.</p>
-
-<p>Between these two schools of opinion the reader must judge for himself.
-The papers have given the tangible details from a skeptical angle,
-leaving for others the drawing of the picture as Robert Blake saw
-it—or thought he saw it—or pretended to see it. Now, studying the
-diary closely, dispassionately, and at leisure, let us summarize the
-dark chain of events from the expressed point of view of their chief
-actor.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>Young Blake returned to Providence in the winter of 1934-5, taking
-the upper floor of a venerable dwelling in a grassy court off
-College Street—on the crest of the great eastward hill near the
-Brown University campus and behind the marble John Hay Library.
-It was a cozy and fascinating place, in a little garden oasis of
-village-like antiquity where huge, friendly cats sunned themselves
-atop a convenient shed. The square Georgian house had a monitor roof,
-classic doorway with fan carving, small-paned windows, and all the
-other earmarks of early Nineteenth Century workmanship. Inside were
-six-paneled doors, wide floor-boards, a curving colonial staircase,
-white Adam-period mantels, and a rear set of rooms three steps below
-the general level.</p>
-
-<p>Blake's study, a large southwest chamber, overlooked the front garden
-on one side, while its west windows—before one of which he had his
-desk—faced off from the brow of the hill and commanded a splendid view
-of the lower town's out-spread roofs and of the mystical sunsets that
-flamed behind them. On the far horizon were the open countryside's
-purple slopes. Against these, some two miles away, rose the spectral
-hump of Federal Hill, bristling with huddled roofs and steeples whose
-remote outlines wavered mysteriously, taking fantastic forms as the
-smoke of the city swirled up and enmeshed them. Blake had a curious
-sense that he was looking upon some unknown, ethereal world which might
-or might not vanish in dream if ever he tried to seek it out and enter
-it in person.</p>
-
-<p>Having sent home for most of his books, Blake bought some antique
-furniture suitable to his quarters and settled down to write and
-paint—living alone, and attending to the simple housework himself. His
-studio was in a north attic room, where the panes of the monitor roof
-furnished admirable lighting. During that first winter he produced five
-of his best-known short stories—<i>The Burrower Beneath</i>, <i>The Stairs in
-the Crypt</i>, <i>Shaggai</i>, <i>In the Vale of Pnath</i>, and <i>The Feaster from
-the Stars</i>—and painted seven canvases; studies of nameless, unhuman
-monsters, and profoundly alien, non-terrestrial landscapes.</p>
-
-<p>At sunset he would often sit at his desk and gaze dreamily off at
-the out-spread west—the dark towers of Memorial Hall just below,
-the Georgian court-house belfry, the lofty pinnacles of the downtown
-section, and that shimmering, spire-crowned mound in the distance whose
-unknown streets and labyrinthine gables so potently provoked his fancy.
-From his few local acquaintances he learned that the far-off slope
-was a vast Italian quarter, though most of the houses were remnants
-of older Yankee and Irish days. Now and then he would train his
-field-glasses on that spectral, unreachable world beyond the curling
-smoke; picking out individual roofs and chimneys and steeples, and
-speculating upon the bizarre and curious mysteries they might house.
-Even with optical aid Federal Hill seemed somehow alien, half fabulous,
-and linked to the unreal, intangible marvels of Blake's own tales and
-pictures. The feeling would persist long after the hill had faded into
-the violet, lamp-starred twilight, and the court-house floodlights
-and the red Industrial Trust beacon had blazed up to make the night
-grotesque.</p>
-
-<p>Of all the distant objects on Federal Hill, a certain huge, dark church
-most fascinated Blake. It stood out with especial distinctness at
-certain hours of the day, and at sunset the great tower and tapering
-steeple loomed blackly against the flaming sky. It seemed to rest
-on especially high ground; for the grimy façade, and the obliquely
-seen north side with sloping roof and the tops of great pointed
-windows, rose boldly above the tangle of surrounding ridgepoles and
-chimney-pots. Peculiarly grim and austere, it appeared to be built of
-stone, stained and weathered with the smoke and storms of a century
-and more. The style, so far as the glass could show, was that earliest
-experimental form of Gothic revival which preceded the stately Upjohn
-period and held over some of the outlines and proportions of the
-Georgian age. Perhaps it was reared around 1810 or 1815.</p>
-
-<p>As the months passed, Blake watched the far-off, forbidding structure
-with an oddly mounting interest. Since the vast windows were never
-lighted, he knew that it must be vacant. The longer he watched, the
-more his imagination worked, till at length he began to fancy curious
-things. He believed that a vague, singular aura of desolation hovered
-over the place, so that even the pigeons and swallows shunned its smoky
-eaves. Around other towers and belfries his glass would reveal great
-flocks of birds, but here they never rested. At least, that is what he
-thought and set down in his diary. He pointed the place out to several
-friends, but none of them had even been on Federal Hill or possessed
-the faintest notion of what the church was or had been.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>In the spring a deep restlessness gripped Blake. He had begun his
-long-planned novel—based on a supposed survival of the witch-cult in
-Maine—but was strangely unable to make progress with it. More and more
-he would sit at his westward window and gaze at the distant hill and
-the black, frowning steeple shunned by the birds. When the delicate
-leaves came out on the garden boughs the world was filled with a new
-beauty, but Blake's restlessness was merely increased. It was then
-that he first thought of crossing the city and climbing bodily up that
-fabulous slope into the smoke-wreathed world of dream.</p>
-
-<p>Late in April, just before the eon-shadowed Walpurgis time, Blake made
-his first trip into the unknown. Plodding through the endless downtown
-streets and the bleak, decayed squares beyond, he came finally upon
-the ascending avenue of century-worn steps, sagging Doric porches,
-and blear-paned cupolas which he felt must lead up to the long-known,
-unreachable world beyond the mists. There were dingy blue-and-white
-street signs which meant nothing to him, and presently he noted the
-strange, dark faces of the drifting crowds, and the foreign signs
-over curious shops in brown, decade-weathered buildings. Nowhere
-could he find any of the objects he had seen from afar; so that once
-more he half fancied that the Federal Hill of that distant view was a
-dream-world never to be trod by living human feet.</p>
-
-<p>Now and then a battered church façade or crumbling spire came in
-sight, but never the blackened pile that he sought. When he asked a
-shopkeeper about a great stone church the man smiled and shook his
-head, though he spoke English freely. As Blake climbed higher, the
-region seemed stranger and stranger, with bewildering mazes of brooding
-brown alleys leading eternally off to the south. He crossed two or
-three broad avenues, and once thought he glimpsed a familiar tower.
-Again he asked a merchant about the massive church of stone, and this
-time he could have sworn that the plea of ignorance was feigned. The
-dark man's face had a look of fear which he tried to hide, and Blake
-saw him make a curious sign with his right hand.</p>
-
-<p>Then suddenly a black spire stood out against the cloudy sky on his
-left, above the tiers of brown roofs lining the tangled southerly
-alleys. Blake knew at once what it was, and plunged toward it through
-the squalid, unpaved lanes that climbed from the avenue. Twice he
-lost his way, but he somehow dared not ask any of the patriarchs or
-housewives who sat on their door-steps, or any of the children who
-shouted and played in the mud of the shadowy lanes.</p>
-
-<p>At last he saw the tower plain against the southwest, and a huge
-stone bulk rose darkly at the end of an alley. Presently he stood in
-a wind-swept open square, quaintly cobblestoned, with a high bank
-wall on the farther side. This was the end of his quest; for upon the
-wide, iron-railed, weed-grown plateau which the wall supported—a
-separate, lesser world raised fully six feet above the surrounding
-streets—there stood a grim, titan bulk whose identity, despite Blake's
-new perspective, was beyond dispute.</p>
-
-<p>The vacant church was in a state of great decrepitude. Some of the high
-stone buttresses had fallen, and several delicate finials lay half lost
-among the brown, neglected weeds and grasses. The sooty Gothic windows
-were largely unbroken, though many of the stone mullions were missing.
-Blake wondered how the obscurely painted panes could have survived so
-well, in view of the known habits of small boys the world over. The
-massive doors were intact and tightly closed. Around the top of the
-bank wall, fully enclosing the grounds, was a rusty iron fence whose
-gate—at the head of a flight of steps from the square—was visibly
-padlocked. The path from the gate to the building was completely
-overgrown. Desolation and decay hung like a pall above the place, and
-in the birdless eaves and black, ivyless walls Blake felt a touch of
-the dimly sinister beyond his power to define.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>There were very few people in the square, but Blake saw a policeman
-at the northerly end and approached him with questions about the
-church. He was a great wholesome Irishman, and it seemed odd that he
-would do little more than make the sign of the cross and mutter that
-people never spoke of that building. When Blake pressed him he said
-very hurriedly that the Italian priests warned everybody against it,
-vowing that a monstrous evil had once dwelt there and left its mark.
-He himself had heard dark whispers of it from his father, who recalled
-certain sounds and rumors from his boyhood.</p>
-
-<p>There had been a bad sect there in the ould days—an outlaw sect that
-called up awful things from some unknown gulf of night. It had taken
-a good priest to exorcise what had come, though there did be those
-who said that merely the light could do it. If Father O'Malley were
-alive there would be many the thing he could tell. But now there was
-nothing to do but let it alone. It hurt nobody now, and those that
-owned it were dead or far away. They had run away like rats after
-the threatening talk in '77, when people began to mind the way folks
-vanished now and then in the neighborhood. Some day the city would
-step in and take the property for lack of heirs, but little good would
-come of anybody's touching it. Better it be left alone for the years
-to topple, lest things be stirred that ought to rest for ever in their
-black abyss.</p>
-
-<p>After the policeman had gone Blake stood staring at the sullen steepled
-pile. It excited him to find that the structure seemed as sinister
-to others as to him, and he wondered what grain of truth might lie
-behind the old tales the bluecoat had repeated. Probably they were mere
-legends evoked by the evil look of the place, but even so, they were
-like a strange coming to life of one of his own stories.</p>
-
-<p>The afternoon sun came out from behind dispersing clouds, but seemed
-unable to light up the stained, sooty walls of the old temple that
-towered on its high plateau. It was odd that the green of spring had
-not touched the brown, withered growths in the raised, iron-fenced
-yard. Blake found himself edging nearer the raised area and examining
-the bank wall and rusted fence for possible avenues of ingress. There
-was a terrible lure about the blackened fane which was not to be
-resisted. The fence had no opening near the steps, but around on the
-north side were some missing bars. He could go up the steps and walk
-around on the narrow coping outside the fence till he came to the
-gap. If the people feared the place so wildly, he would encounter no
-interference.</p>
-
-<p>He was on the embankment and almost inside the fence before anyone
-noticed him. Then, looking down, he saw the few people in the square
-edging away and making the same sign with their right hands that the
-shopkeeper in the avenue had made. Several windows were slammed down,
-and a fat woman darted into the street and pulled some small children
-inside a rickety, unpainted house. The gap in the fence was very easy
-to pass through, and before long Blake found himself wading amidst
-the rotting, tangled growths of the deserted yard. Here and there the
-worn stump of a headstone told him that there had once been burials
-in this field; but that, he saw, must have been very long ago. The
-sheer bulk of the church was oppressive now that he was close to it,
-but he conquered his mood and approached to try the three great doors
-in the façade. All were securely locked, so he began a circuit of the
-Cyclopean building in quest of some minor and more penetrable opening.
-Even then he could not be sure that he wished to enter that haunt of
-desertion and shadow, yet the pull of its strangeness dragged him on
-automatically.</p>
-
-<p>A yawning and unprotected cellar window in the rear furnished the
-needed aperture. Peering in, Blake saw a subterrene gulf of cobwebs
-and dust faintly litten by the western sun's filtered rays. Debris,
-old barrels, and ruined boxes and furniture of numerous sorts met his
-eye, though over everything lay a shroud of dust which softened all
-sharp outlines. The rusted remains of a hot-air furnace showed that the
-building had been used and kept in shape as late as mid-Victorian times.</p>
-
-<p>Acting almost without conscious initiative, Blake crawled through the
-window and let himself down to the dust-carpeted and debris-strewn
-concrete floor. The vaulted cellar was a vast one, without partitions;
-and in a corner far to the right, amid dense shadows, he saw a black
-archway evidently leading upstairs. He felt a peculiar sense of
-oppression at being actually within the great spectral building,
-but kept it in check as he cautiously scouted about—finding a
-still-intact barrel amid the dust, and rolling it over to the open
-window to provide for his exit. Then, bracing himself, he crossed the
-wide, cobweb-festooned space toward the arch. Half choked with the
-omnipresent dust, and covered with ghostly gossamer fibers, he reached
-and began to climb the worn stone steps which rose into the darkness.
-He had no light, but groped carefully with his hands. After a sharp
-turn he felt a closed door ahead, and a little fumbling revealed its
-ancient latch. It opened inward, and beyond it he saw a dimly illumined
-corridor lined with worm-eaten paneling.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>Once on the ground floor, Blake began exploring in a rapid fashion.
-All the inner doors were unlocked, so that he freely passed from room
-to room. The colossal nave was an almost eldritch place with its
-drifts and mountains of dust over box pews, altar, hour-glass pulpit,
-and sounding-board, and its titanic ropes of cobweb stretching among
-the pointed arches of the gallery and entwining the clustered Gothic
-columns. Over all this hushed desolation played a hideous leaden light
-as the declining afternoon sun sent its rays through the strange,
-half-blackened panes of the great apsidal windows.</p>
-
-<p>The paintings on those windows were so obscured by soot that Blake
-could scarcely decipher what they had represented, but from the little
-he could make out he did not like them. The designs were largely
-conventional, and his knowledge of obscure symbolism told him much
-concerning some of the ancient patterns. The few saints depicted bore
-expressions distinctly open to criticism, while one of the windows
-seemed to show merely a dark space with spirals of curious luminosity
-scattered about in it. Turning away from the windows, Blake noticed
-that the cobwebbed cross above the altar was not of the ordinary kind,
-but resembled the primordial ankh or crux ansata of shadowy Egypt.</p>
-
-<p>In a rear vestry room beside the apse Blake found a rotting desk and
-ceiling-high shelves of mildewed, disintegrating books. Here for the
-first time he received a positive shock of objective horror, for the
-titles of those books told him much. They were the black, forbidden
-things which most sane people have never even heard of, or have
-heard of only in furtive, timorous whispers; the banned and dreaded
-repositories of equivocal secrets and immemorial formulæ which have
-trickled down the stream of time from the days of man's youth, and the
-dim, fabulous days before man was. He had himself read many of them—a
-Latin version of the abhorred <i>Necronomicon</i>, the sinister <i>Liber
-Ivonis</i>, the infamous <i>Cultes des Goules</i> of Comte d'Erlette, the
-<i>Unaussprechlichen Kulten</i> of von Junzt, and old Ludvig Prinn's hellish
-<i>De Vermis Mysteriis</i>. But there were others he had known merely by
-reputation or not at all—the <i>Pnakotic Manuscripts</i>, the <i>Book of
-Dzyan</i>, and a crumbling volume in wholly unidentifiable characters yet
-with certain symbols and diagrams shudderingly recognizable to the
-occult student. Clearly, the lingering local rumors had not lied. This
-place had once been the seat of an evil older than mankind and wider
-than the known universe.</p>
-
-<p>In the ruined desk was a small leather-bound record-book filled with
-entries in some odd cryptographic medium. The manuscript writing
-consisted of the common traditional symbols used today in astronomy and
-anciently in alchemy, astrology, and other dubious arts—the devices
-of the sun, moon, planets, aspects, and zodiacal signs—here massed in
-solid pages of text, with divisions and paragraphings suggesting that
-each symbol answered to some alphabetical letter.</p>
-
-<p>In the hope of later solving the cryptogram, Blake bore off this
-volume in his coat pocket. Many of the great tomes on the shelves
-fascinated him unutterably, and he felt tempted to borrow them at some
-later time. He wondered how they could have remained undisturbed so
-long. Was he the first to conquer the clutching, pervasive fear which
-had for nearly sixty years protected this deserted place from visitors?</p>
-
-<p>Having now thoroughly explored the ground floor, Blake plowed again
-through the dust of the spectral nave to the front vestibule, where he
-had seen a door and staircase presumably leading up to the blackened
-tower and steeple—objects so long familiar to him at a distance. The
-ascent was a choking experience, for dust lay thick, while the spiders
-had done their worst in this constricted place. The staircase was a
-spiral with high, narrow wooden treads, and now and then Blake passed a
-clouded window looking dizzily out over the city. Though he had seen no
-ropes below, he expected to find a bell or peal of bells in the tower
-whose narrow, louver-boarded lancet windows his field-glass had studied
-so often. Here he was doomed to disappointment, for when he attained
-the top of the stairs he found the tower chamber vacant of chimes, and
-clearly devoted to vastly different purposes.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>The room, about fifteen feet square, was faintly lighted by four lancet
-windows, one on each side, which were glazed within their screening of
-decayed louver-boards. These had been further fitted with tight, opaque
-screens, but the latter were now largely rotted away. In the center of
-the dust-laden floor rose a curiously angled stone pillar some four
-feet in height and two in average diameter, covered on each side with
-bizarre, crudely incised and wholly unrecognizable hieroglyphs. On
-this pillar rested a metal box of peculiarly asymmetrical form; its
-hinged lid thrown back, and its interior holding what looked beneath
-the decade-deep dust to be an egg-shaped or irregularly spherical
-object some four inches through. Around the pillar in a rough circle
-were seven high-backed Gothic chairs still largely intact, while behind
-them, ranging along the dark-paneled walls, were seven colossal images
-of crumbling, black-painted plaster, resembling more than anything else
-the cryptic carven megaliths of mysterious Easter Island. In one corner
-of the cobwebbed chamber a ladder was built into the wall, leading up
-to the closed trap-door of the windowless steeple above.</p>
-
-<p>As Blake grew accustomed to the feeble light he noticed odd bas-reliefs
-on the strange open box of yellowish metal. Approaching, he tried to
-clear the dust away with his hands and handkerchief, and saw that
-the figurings were of a monstrous and utterly alien kind; depicting
-entities which, though seemingly alive, resembled no known life-form
-ever evolved on this planet. The four-inch seeming sphere turned out
-to be a nearly black, red-striated polyhedron with many irregular
-flat surfaces; either a very remarkable crystal of some sort, or an
-artificial object of carved and highly polished mineral matter. It did
-not touch the bottom of the box, but was held suspended by means of
-a metal band around its center, with seven queerly-designed supports
-extending horizontally to angles of the box's inner wall near the
-top. This stone, once exposed, exerted upon Blake an almost alarming
-fascination. He could scarcely tear his eyes from it, and as he looked
-at its glistening surfaces he almost fancied it was transparent, with
-half-formed worlds of wonder within. Into his mind floated pictures of
-alien orbs with great stone towers, and other orbs with titan mountains
-and no mark of life, and still remoter spaces where only a stirring in
-vague blacknesses told of the presence of consciousness and will.</p>
-
-<p>When he did look away, it was to notice a somewhat singular mound of
-dust in the far corner near the ladder to the steeple. Just why it took
-his attention he could not tell, but something in its contours carried
-a message to his unconscious mind. Plowing toward it, and brushing
-aside the hanging cobwebs as he went, he began to discern something
-grim about it. Hand and handkerchief soon revealed the truth, and Blake
-gasped with a baffling mixture of emotions. It was a human skeleton,
-and it must have been there for a very long time. The clothing was in
-shreds, but some buttons and fragments of cloth bespoke a man's gray
-suit. There were other bits of evidence—shoes, metal clasps, huge
-buttons for round cuffs, a stickpin of bygone pattern, a reporter's
-badge with the name of the old <i>Providence Telegram</i>, and a crumbling
-leather pocket-book. Blake examined the latter with care, finding
-within it several bills of antiquated issue, a celluloid advertising
-calendar for 1893, some cards with the name "Edwin M. Lillibridge," and
-a paper covered with penciled memoranda.</p>
-
-<p>This paper held much of a puzzling nature, and Blake read it carefully
-at the dim westward window. Its disjointed text included such phrases
-as the following:</p>
-
-<div class="blockquot">
-
-<p>"Prof. Enoch Bowen home from Egypt May 1844—buys old Free-Will Church
-in July—his archæological work &amp; studies in occult well known."</p>
-
-<p>"Dr. Drowne of 4th Baptist warns against Starry Wisdom in sermon Dec.
-29, 1844."</p>
-
-<p>"Congregation 97 by end of '45."</p>
-
-<p>"1846—3 disappearances—first mention of Shining Trapezohedron."</p>
-
-<p>"7 disappearances 1848—stories of blood sacrifice begin."</p>
-
-<p>"Investigation 1853 comes to nothing—stories of sounds."</p>
-
-<p>"Fr. O'Malley tells of devil-worship with box found in great Egyptian
-ruins—says they call up something that can't exist in light. Flees a
-little light, and banished by strong light. Then has to be summoned
-again. Probably got this from deathbed confession of Francis X.
-Feeney, who had joined Starry Wisdom in '49. These people say the
-Shining Trapezohedron shows them heaven &amp; other worlds, &amp; that the
-Haunter of the Dark tells them secrets in some way."</p>
-
-<p>"Story of Orrin B. Eddy 1857. They call it up by gazing at the
-crystal, &amp; have a secret language of their own."</p>
-
-<p>"200 or more in cong. 1863, exclusive of men at front."</p>
-
-<p>"Irish boys mob church in 1869 after Patrick Regan's disappearance."</p>
-
-<p>"Veiled article in J. March 14, '72, but people don't talk about it."</p>
-
-<p>"6 disappearances 1876—secret committee calls on Mayor Doyle."</p>
-
-<p>"Action promised Feb. 1877—church closes in April."</p>
-
-<p>"Gang—Federal Hill Boys—threaten Dr. —— and vestrymen in May."</p>
-
-<p>"181 persons leave city before end of '77—mention no names."</p>
-
-<p>"Ghost stories begin around 1880—try to ascertain truth of report
-that no human being has entered church since 1877."</p>
-
-<p>"Ask Lanigan for photograph of place taken 1851...."</p>
-</div>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>Restoring the paper to the pocket-book and placing the latter in
-his coat, Blake turned to look down at the skeleton in the dust.
-The implications of the notes were clear, and there could be no
-doubt but that this man had come to the deserted edifice forty-two
-years before in quest of a newspaper sensation which no one else had
-been bold enough to attempt. Perhaps no one else had known of his
-plan—who could tell? But he had never returned to his paper. Had some
-bravely-suppressed fear risen to overcome him and bring on sudden
-heart-failure? Blake stooped over the gleaming bones and noted their
-peculiar state. Some of them were badly scattered, and a few seemed
-oddly <i>dissolved</i> at the ends. Others were strangely yellowed, with
-vague suggestions of charring. This charring extended to some of the
-fragments of clothing. The skull was in a very peculiar state—stained
-yellow, and with a charred aperture in the top as if some powerful acid
-had eaten through the solid bone. What had happened to the skeleton
-during its four decades of silent entombment here Blake could not
-imagine.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap">
-
-<div class="figcenter">
-  <img src="images/illus.jpg" alt="">
-  <div class="caption">
-    <p>"He had come to the deserted edifice in quest of a newspaper sensation."</p>
-  </div>
-</div>
-
-<hr class="chap">
-
-<p>Before he realized it, he was looking at the stone again, and letting
-its curious influence call up a nebulous pageantry in his mind. He saw
-processions of robed, hooded figures whose outlines were not human, and
-looked on endless leagues of desert lined with carved, sky-reaching
-monoliths. He saw towers and walls in nighted depths under the sea,
-and vortices of space where wisps of black mist floated before thin
-shimmerings of cold purple haze. And beyond all else he glimpsed an
-infinite gulf of sheer darkness, where solid and semi-solid forms were
-known only by their windy stirrings, and cloudy patterns of force
-seemed to superimpose order on chaos and hold forth a key to all the
-paradoxes and arcana of the worlds we know.</p>
-
-<p>Then all at once the spell was broken by an access of gnawing,
-indeterminate panic fear. Blake choked and turned away from the stone,
-conscious of some formless alien presence close to him and watching him
-with horrible intentness. He felt entangled with something—something
-which was not in the stone, but which had looked through it at
-him—something which would ceaselessly follow him with a cognition
-that was not physical sight. Plainly, the place was getting on his
-nerves—as well it might in view of his gruesome find. The light was
-waning, too, and since he had no illuminant with him he knew he would
-have to be leaving soon.</p>
-
-<p>It was then, in the gathering twilight, that he thought he saw a
-faint trace of luminosity in the crazily angled stone. He had tried
-to look away from it, but some obscure compulsion drew his eyes back.
-Was there a subtle phosphorescence of radio-activity about the thing?
-What was it that the dead man's notes had said concerning a <i>Shining
-Trapezohedron</i>? What, anyway, was this abandoned lair of cosmic evil?
-What had been done here, and what might still be lurking in the
-bird-shunned shadows? It seemed now as if an elusive touch of fetor had
-arisen somewhere close by, though its source was not apparent. Blake
-seized the cover of the long-open box and snapped it down. It moved
-easily on its alien hinges, and closed completely over the unmistakably
-glowing stone.</p>
-
-<p>At the sharp click of that closing a soft stirring sound seemed to come
-from the steeple's eternal blackness overhead, beyond the trap-door.
-Rats, without question—the only living things to reveal their presence
-in this accursed pile since he had entered it. And yet that stirring in
-the steeple frightened him horribly, so that he plunged almost wildly
-down the spiral stairs, across the ghoulish nave, into the vaulted
-basement, out amidst the gathering dusk of the deserted square, and
-down through the teeming, fear-haunted alleys and avenues of Federal
-Hill toward the sane central streets and the home-like brick sidewalks
-of the college district.</p>
-
-<p>During the days which followed, Blake told no one of his expedition.
-Instead, he read much in certain books, examined long years of
-newspaper files downtown, and worked feverishly at the cryptogram in
-that leather volume from the cobwebbed vestry room. The cipher, he soon
-saw, was no simple one; and after a long period of endeavor he felt
-sure that its language could not be English, Latin, Greek, French,
-Spanish, Italian, or German. Evidently he would have to draw upon the
-deepest wells of his strange erudition.</p>
-
-<p>Every evening the old impulse to gaze westward returned, and he saw the
-black steeple as of yore amongst the bristling roofs of a distant and
-half-fabulous world. But now it held a fresh note of terror for him. He
-knew the heritage of evil lore it masked, and with the knowledge his
-vision ran riot in queer new ways. The birds of spring were returning,
-and as he watched their sunset flights he fancied they avoided the
-gaunt, lone spire as never before. When a flock of them approached it,
-he thought, they would wheel and scatter in panic confusion—and he
-could guess at the wild twitterings which failed to reach him across
-the intervening miles.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>It was in June that Blake's diary told of his victory over the
-cryptogram. The text was, he found, in the dark Aklo language used by
-certain cults of evil antiquity, and known to him in a halting way
-through previous researches. The diary is strangely reticent about
-what Blake deciphered, but he was patently awed and disconcerted by
-his results. There are references to a Haunter of the Dark awaked by
-gazing into the Shining Trapezohedron, and insane conjectures about the
-black gulfs of chaos from which it was called. The being is spoken of
-as holding all knowledge, and demanding monstrous sacrifices. Some of
-Blake's entries show fear lest the thing, which he seemed to regard as
-summoned, stalk abroad; though he adds that the street-lights form a
-bulwark which cannot be crossed.</p>
-
-<p>Of the Shining Trapezohedron he speaks often, calling it a window
-on all time and space, and tracing its history from the days it was
-fashioned on dark Yuggoth, before ever the Old Ones brought it to
-earth. It was treasured and placed in its curious box by the crinoid
-things of Antarctica, salvaged from their ruins by the serpent-men of
-Valusia, and peered at eons later in Lemuria by the first human beings.
-It crossed strange lands and stranger seas, and sank with Atlantis
-before a Minoan fisher meshed it in his net and sold it to swarthy
-merchants from nighted Khem. The Pharaoh Nephren-Ka built around it a
-temple with a windowless crypt, and did that which caused his name to
-be stricken from all monuments and records. Then it slept in the ruins
-of that evil fane which the priests and the new Pharaoh destroyed, till
-the delver's spade once more brought it forth to curse mankind.</p>
-
-<p>Early in July the newspapers oddly supplement Blake's entries, though
-in so brief and casual a way that only the diary has called general
-attention to their contribution. It appears that a new fear had been
-growing on Federal Hill since a stranger had entered the dreaded
-church. The Italians whispered of unaccustomed stirrings and bumpings
-and scrapings in the dark windowless steeple, and called on their
-priests to banish an entity which haunted their dreams. Something,
-they said, was constantly watching at a door to see if it were dark
-enough to venture forth. Press items mentioned the long-standing local
-superstitions, but failed to shed much light on the earlier background
-of the horror. It was obvious that the young reporters of today are no
-antiquarians. In writing of these things in his diary, Blake expresses
-a curious kind of remorse, and talks of the duty of burying the
-Shining Trapezohedron and of banishing what he had evoked by letting
-daylight into the hideous jutting spire. At the same time, however, he
-displays the dangerous extent of his fascination, and admits a morbid
-longing—pervading even his dreams—to visit the accursed tower and
-gaze again into the cosmic secrets of the glowing stone.</p>
-
-<p>Then something in the <i>Journal</i> on the morning of July 17 threw the
-diarist into a veritable fever of horror. It was only a variant of the
-other half-humorous items about the Federal Hill restlessness, but to
-Blake it was somehow very terrible indeed. In the night a thunderstorm
-had put the city's lighting-system out of commission for a full hour,
-and in that black interval the Italians had nearly gone mad with
-fright. Those living near the dreaded church had sworn that the thing
-in the steeple had taken advantage of the street lamps' absence and
-gone down into the body of the church, flopping and bumping around in
-a viscous, altogether dreadful way. Toward the last it had bumped up
-to the tower, where there were sounds of the shattering of glass. It
-could go wherever the darkness reached, but light would always send it
-fleeing.</p>
-
-<p>When the current blazed on again there had been a shocking commotion
-in the tower, for even the feeble light trickling through the
-grime-blackened, louver-boarded windows was too much for the thing.
-It had bumped and slithered up into its tenebrous steeple just in
-time—for a long dose of light would have sent it back into the abyss
-whence the crazy stranger had called it. During the dark hour praying
-crowds had clustered round the church in the rain with lighted candles
-and lamps somehow shielded with folded papers and umbrellas—a guard
-of light to save the city from the nightmare that stalks in darkness.
-Once, those nearest the church declared, the outer door had rattled
-hideously.</p>
-
-<p>But even this was not the worst. That evening in the <i>Bulletin</i> Blake
-read of what the reporters had found. Aroused at last to the whimsical
-news value of the scare, a pair of them had defied the frantic crowds
-of Italians and crawled into the church through the cellar window
-after trying the doors in vain. They found the dust of the vestibule
-and of the spectral nave plowed up in a singular way, with pits of
-rotted cushions and satin pew-linings scattered curiously around. There
-was a bad odor everywhere, and here and there were bits of yellow stain
-and patches of what looked like charring. Opening the door to the
-tower, and pausing a moment at the suspicion of a scraping sound above,
-they found the narrow spiral stairs wiped roughly clean.</p>
-
-<p>In the tower itself a similarly half-swept condition existed. They
-spoke of the heptagonal stone pillar, the overturned Gothic chairs,
-and the bizarre plaster images; though strangely enough the metal box
-and the old mutilated skeleton were not mentioned. What disturbed
-Blake the most—except for the hints of stains and charring and bad
-odors—was the final detail that explained the crashing glass. Every
-one of the tower's lancet windows was broken, and two of them had
-been darkened in a crude and hurried way by the stuffing of satin
-pew-linings and cushion-horsehair into the spaces between the slanting
-exterior louver-boards. More satin fragments and bunches of horsehair
-lay scattered around the newly swept floor, as if someone had been
-interrupted in the act of restoring the tower to the absolute blackness
-of its tightly curtained days.</p>
-
-<p>Yellowish stains and charred patches were found on the ladder to
-the windowless spire, but when a reporter climbed up, opened the
-horizontally-sliding trap-door and shot a feeble flashlight beam into
-the black and strangely fetid space, he saw nothing but darkness, and
-an heterogeneous litter of shapeless fragments near the aperture. The
-verdict, of course, was charlatanry. Somebody had played a joke on
-the superstitious hill-dwellers, or else some fanatic had striven to
-bolster up their fears for their own supposed good. Or perhaps some of
-the younger and more sophisticated dwellers had staged an elaborate
-hoax on the outside world. There was an amusing aftermath when the
-police sent an officer to verify the reports. Three men in succession
-found ways of evading the assignment, and the fourth went very
-reluctantly and returned very soon without adding to the account given
-by the reporters.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>From this point onward Blake's diary shows a mounting tide of
-insidious horror and nervous apprehension. He upbraids himself for
-not doing something, and speculates wildly on the consequences of
-another electrical breakdown. It has been verified that on three
-occasions—during thunderstorms—he telephoned the electric light
-company in a frantic vein and asked that desperate precautions against
-a lapse of power be taken. Now and then his entries show concern over
-the failure of the reporters to find the metal box and stone, and the
-strangely marred old skeleton, when they explored the shadowy tower
-room. He assumed that these things had been removed—whither, and
-by whom or what, he could only guess. But his worst fears concerned
-himself, and the kind of unholy rapport he felt to exist between his
-mind and that lurking horror in the distant steeple—that monstrous
-thing of night which his rashness had called out of the ultimate black
-spaces. He seemed to feel a constant tugging at his will, and callers
-of that period remember how he would sit abstractedly at his desk and
-stare out the west window at that far-off, spire-bristling mound beyond
-the swirling smoke of the city. His entries dwell monotonously on
-certain terrible dreams, and of a strengthening of the unholy rapport
-in his sleep. There is mention of a night when he awaked to find
-himself fully dressed, outdoors, and headed automatically down College
-Hill toward the west. Again and again he dwells on the fact that the
-thing in the steeple knows where to find him.</p>
-
-<p>The week following July 30 is recalled as the time of Blake's partial
-breakdown. He did not dress, and ordered all his food by telephone.
-Visitors remarked the cords he kept near his bed, and he said that
-sleep-walking had forced him to bind his ankles every night with knots
-which would probably hold or else waken him with the labor of untying.</p>
-
-<p>In his diary he told of the hideous experience which had brought the
-collapse. After retiring on the night of the 30th he had suddenly found
-himself groping about in an almost black space. All he could see were
-short, faint, horizontal streaks of bluish light, but he could smell an
-overpowering fetor and hear a curious jumble of soft, furtive sounds
-above him. Whenever he moved he stumbled over something, and at each
-noise there would come a sort of answering sound from above—a vague
-stirring, mixed with the cautious sliding of wood on wood.</p>
-
-<p>Once his groping hands encountered a pillar of stone with a vacant top,
-whilst later he found himself clutching the rungs of a ladder built
-into the wall, and fumbling his uncertain way upward toward some region
-of intenser stench where a hot, searing blast beat down against him.
-Before his eyes a kaleidoscopic range of fantasmal images played, all
-of them dissolving at intervals into the picture of a vast, unplumbed
-abyss of night wherein whirled suns and worlds of an even profounder
-blackness. He thought of the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at
-whose center sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things,
-encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers,
-and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demoniac flute held in
-nameless paws.</p>
-
-<p>Then a sharp report from the outer world broke through his stupor and
-roused him to the unutterable horror of his position. What it was, he
-never knew—perhaps it was some belated peal from the fireworks heard
-all summer on Federal Hill as the dwellers hail their various patron
-saints, or the saints of their native villages in Italy. In any event
-he shrieked aloud, dropped frantically from the ladder, and stumbled
-blindly across the obstructed floor of the almost lightless chamber
-that encompassed him.</p>
-
-<p>He knew instantly where he was, and plunged recklessly down the
-narrow spiral staircase, tripping and bruising himself at every turn.
-There was a nightmare flight through a vast cobwebbed nave whose
-ghostly arches reached up to realms of leering shadow, a sightless
-scramble through a littered basement, a climb to regions of air and
-street-lights outside, and a mad racing down a spectral hill of
-gibbering gables, across a grim, silent city of tall black towers, and
-up the steep eastward precipice to his own ancient door.</p>
-
-<p>On regaining consciousness in the morning he found himself lying on
-his study floor fully dressed. Dirt and cobwebs covered him, and every
-inch of his body seemed sore and bruised. When he faced the mirror he
-saw that his hair was badly scorched, while a trace of strange, evil
-odor seemed to cling to his upper outer clothing. It was then that
-his nerves broke down. Thereafter, lounging exhaustedly about in a
-dressing-gown, he did little but stare from his west window, shiver at
-the threat of thunder, and make wild entries in his diary.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>The great storm broke just before midnight on August 8th. Lightning
-struck repeatedly in all parts of the city, and two remarkable
-fireballs were reported. The rain was torrential, while a constant
-fusillade of thunder brought sleeplessness to thousands. Blake was
-utterly frantic in his fear for the lighting system, and tried to
-telephone the company around one a.m., though by that time service
-had been temporarily cut off in the interest of safety. He recorded
-everything in his diary—the large, nervous, and often undecipherable
-hieroglyphs telling their own story of growing frenzy and despair, and
-of entries scrawled blindly in the dark.</p>
-
-<p>He had to keep the house dark in order to see out the window, and it
-appears that most of his time was spent at his desk, peering anxiously
-through the rain across the glistening miles of downtown roofs at the
-constellation of distant lights marking Federal Hill. Now and then he
-would fumblingly make an entry in his diary, so that detached phrases
-such as "The lights must not go"; "It knows where I am"; "I must
-destroy it"; and "It is calling to me, but perhaps it means no injury
-this time"; are found scattered down two of the pages.</p>
-
-<p>Then the lights went out all over the city. It happened at 2:12 a.m.
-according to power-house records, but Blake's diary gives no indication
-of the time. The entry is merely, "Lights out—God help me." On
-Federal Hill there were watchers as anxious as he, and rain-soaked
-knots of men paraded the square and alleys around the evil church
-with umbrella-shaded candles, electric flashlights, oil lanterns,
-crucifixes, and obscure charms of the many sorts common to southern
-Italy. They blessed each flash of lightning, and made cryptical signs
-of fear with their right hands when a turn in the storm caused the
-flashes to lessen and finally to cease altogether. A rising wind
-blew out most of the candles, so that the scene grew threateningly
-dark. Someone roused Father Merluzzo of Spirito Santo Church, and he
-hastened to the dismal square to pronounce whatever helpful syllables
-he could. Of the restless and curious sounds in the blackened tower,
-there could be no doubt whatever.</p>
-
-<p>For what happened at 2:35 we have the testimony of the priest, a
-young, intelligent, and well-educated person; of Patrolman William J.
-Monahan of the Central Station, an officer of the highest reliability
-who had paused at that part of his beat to inspect the crowd; and of
-most of the seventy-eight men who had gathered around the church's
-high bank wall—especially those in the square where the eastward
-façade was visible. Of course there was nothing which can be proved
-as being outside the order of nature. The possible causes of such an
-event are many. No one can speak with certainty of the obscure chemical
-processes arising in a vast, ancient, ill-aired, and long-deserted
-building of heterogeneous contents. Mephitic vapors—spontaneous
-combustion—pressure of gases born of long decay—any one of numberless
-phenomena might be responsible. And then, of course, the factor of
-conscious charlatanry can by no means be excluded. The thing was really
-quite simple in itself, and covered less than three minutes of actual
-time. Father Merluzzo, always a precise man, looked at his watch
-repeatedly.</p>
-
-<p>It started with a definite swelling of the dull fumbling sounds inside
-the black tower. There had for some time been a vague exhalation of
-strange, evil odors from the church, and this had now become emphatic
-and offensive. Then at last there was a sound of splintering wood, and
-a large, heavy object crashed down in the yard beneath the frowning
-easterly façade. The tower was invisible now that the candles would not
-burn, but as the object neared the ground the people knew that it was
-the smoke-grimed louver-boarding of that tower's east window.</p>
-
-<p>Immediately afterward an utterly unbearable fetor welled forth from
-the unseen heights, choking and sickening the trembling watchers,
-and almost prostrating those in the square. At the same time the
-air trembled with a vibration as of flapping wings, and a sudden
-east-blowing wind more violent than any previous blast snatched off the
-hats and wrenched the dripping umbrellas of the crowd. Nothing definite
-could be seen in the candleless night, though some upward-looking
-spectators thought they glimpsed a great spreading blur of denser
-blackness against the inky sky—something like a formless cloud of
-smoke that shot with meteor-like speed toward the east.</p>
-
-<p>That was all. The watchers were half numbed with fright, awe, and
-discomfort, and scarcely knew what to do, or whether to do anything at
-all. Not knowing what had happened, they did not relax their vigil;
-and a moment later they sent up a prayer as a sharp flash of belated
-lightning, followed by an ear-splitting crash of sound, rent the
-flooded heavens. Half an hour later the rain stopped, and in fifteen
-minutes more the street lights sprang on again, sending the weary,
-bedraggled watchers relievedly back to their homes.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>The next day's papers gave these matters minor mention in connection
-with the general storm reports. It seems that the great lightning flash
-and deafening explosion which followed the Federal Hill occurrence
-were even more tremendous farther east, where a burst of the singular
-fetor was likewise noticed. The phenomenon was most marked over College
-Hill, where the crash awaked all the sleeping inhabitants and led to a
-bewildered round of speculations. Of those who were already awake only
-a few saw the anomalous blaze of light near the top of the hill, or
-noticed the inexplicable upward rush of air which almost stripped the
-leaves from the trees and blasted the plants in the gardens. It was
-agreed that the lone, sudden lightning-bolt must have struck somewhere
-in this neighborhood, though no trace of its striking could afterward
-be found. A youth in the Tau Omega fraternity house thought he saw a
-grotesque and hideous mass of smoke in the air just as the preliminary
-flash burst, but his observation has not been verified. All of the few
-observers, however, agree as to the violent gust from the west and the
-flood of intolerable stench which preceded the belated stroke; whilst
-evidence concerning the momentary burned odor after the stroke is
-equally general.</p>
-
-<p>These points were discussed very carefully because of their probable
-connection with the death of Robert Blake. Students in the Psi Delta
-house, whose upper rear windows looked into Blake's study, noticed the
-blurred white face at the westward window on the morning of the 9th,
-and wondered what was wrong with the expression. When they saw the same
-face in the same position that evening, they felt worried, and watched
-for the lights to come up in his apartment. Later they rang the bell of
-the darkened flat, and finally had a policeman force the door.</p>
-
-<p>The rigid body sat bolt upright at the desk by the window, and when
-the intruders saw the glassy, bulging eyes, and the marks of stark,
-convulsive fright on the twisted features, they turned away in sickened
-dismay. Shortly afterward the coroner's physician made an examination,
-and despite the unbroken window reported electrical shock, or nervous
-tension induced by an electrical discharge, as the cause of death.
-The hideous expression he ignored altogether, deeming it a not
-improbable result of the profound shock as experienced by a person of
-such abnormal imagination and unbalanced emotions. He deduced these
-latter qualities from the books, paintings, and manuscripts found in
-the apartment, and from the blindly scrawled entries in the diary on
-the desk. Blake had prolonged his frenzied jottings to the last, and
-the broken-pointed pencil was found clutched in his spasmodically
-contracted right hand.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>The entries after the failure of the lights were highly disjointed,
-and legible only in part. From them certain investigators have
-drawn conclusions differing greatly from the materialistic official
-verdict, but such speculations have little chance for belief among
-the conservative. The case of these imaginative theorists has not
-been helped by the action of superstitious Doctor Dexter, who threw
-the curious box and angled stone—an object certainly self-luminous
-as seen in the black windowless steeple where it was found—into
-the deepest channel of Narragansett Bay. Excessive imagination and
-neurotic unbalance on Blake's part, aggravated by knowledge of the evil
-bygone cult whose startling traces he had uncovered, form the dominant
-interpretation given those final frenzied jottings. These are the
-entries—or all that can be made of them.</p>
-
-<p>"Lights still out—must be five minutes now. Everything depends on
-lightning. Yaddith grant it will keep up!... Some influence seems
-beating through it.... Rain and thunder and wind deafen.... The thing
-is taking hold of my mind....</p>
-
-<p>"Trouble with memory. I see things I never knew before. Other worlds
-and other galaxies.... Dark.... The lightning seems dark and the
-darkness seems light....</p>
-
-<p>"It cannot be the real hill and church that I see in the
-pitch-darkness. Must be retinal impression left by flashes. Heaven
-grant the Italians are out with their candles if the lightning stops!</p>
-
-<p>"What am I afraid of? Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in
-antique and shadowy Khem even took the form of man? I remember Yuggoth,
-and more distant Shaggai, and the ultimate void of the black planets....</p>
-
-<p>"The long, winging flight through the void ... cannot cross the
-universe of light ... re-created by the thoughts caught in the Shining
-Trapezohedron ... send it through the horrible abysses of radiance....</p>
-
-<p>"My name is Blake—Robert Harrison Blake of 620 East Knapp Street,
-Milwaukee, Wisconsin.... I am on this planet....</p>
-
-<p>"Azathoth have mercy!—the lightning no longer flashes—horrible—I can
-see everything with a monstrous sense that is not sight—light is dark
-and dark is light ... those people on the hill ... guard ... candles
-and charms ... their priests....</p>
-
-<p>"Sense of distance gone—far is near and near is far. No light—no
-glass—see that steeple—that tower—window—can hear—Roderick
-Usher—am mad or going mad—the thing is stirring and fumbling in the
-tower—I am it and it is I—I want to get out ... must get out and
-unify the forces.... It knows where I am....</p>
-
-<p>"I am Robert Blake, but I see the tower in the dark. There is a
-monstrous odor ... senses transfigured ... boarding at that tower
-window cracking and giving way.... Iä ... ngai ... ygg....</p>
-
-<p>"I see it—coming here—hell-wind—titan blur—black wings—Yog-Sothoth
-save me—the three-lobed burning eye...."
-</p>
-<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 73233 ***</div>
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+<div class="titlepage">
+
+<h1>The Haunter of the Dark</h1>
+
+<p class="ph1">By H. P. LOVECRAFT</p>
+
+<p><i>A powerful story about an old church<br>
+in Providence, Rhode Island, that was<br>
+shunned and feared by all who knew it.</i></p>
+
+<p>[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from<br>
+Weird Tales December 1936.<br>
+Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that<br>
+the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]</p>
+
+<p>(Dedicated to Robert Bloch)</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap">
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">I have seen the dark universe yawning</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Where the black planets roll without aim—</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Where they roll in their horror unheeded,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Without knowledge or luster or name.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent10">—<i>Nemesis.</i></div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Cautious investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief
+that Robert Blake was killed by lightning, or by some profound nervous
+shock derived from an electrical discharge. It is true that the window
+he faced was unbroken, but nature has shown herself capable of many
+freakish performances. The expression on his face may easily have
+arisen from some obscure muscular source unrelated to anything he saw,
+while the entries in his diary are clearly the result of a fantastic
+imagination aroused by certain local superstitions and by certain
+old matters he had uncovered. As for the anomalous conditions at the
+deserted church on Federal Hill—the shrewd analyst is not slow in
+attributing them to some charlatanry, conscious or unconscious, with at
+least some of which Blake was secretly connected.</p>
+
+<p>For after all, the victim was a writer and painter wholly devoted to
+the field of myth, dream, terror, and superstition, and avid in his
+quest for scenes and effects of a bizarre, spectral sort. His earlier
+stay in the city—a visit to a strange old man as deeply given to
+occult and forbidden lore as he—had ended amidst death and flame, and
+it must have been some morbid instinct which drew him back from his
+home in Milwaukee. He may have known of the old stories despite his
+statements to the contrary in the diary, and his death may have nipped
+in the bud some stupendous hoax destined to have a literary reflection.</p>
+
+<p>Among those, however, who have examined and correlated all this
+evidence, there remain several who cling to less rational and
+commonplace theories. They are inclined to take much of Blake's diary
+at its face value, and point significantly to certain facts such as
+the undoubted genuineness of the old church record, the verified
+existence of the disliked and unorthodox Starry Wisdom sect prior to
+1877, the recorded disappearance of an inquisitive reporter named
+Edwin M. Lillibridge in 1893, and—above all—the look of monstrous,
+transfiguring fear on the face of the young writer when he died. It was
+one of these believers who, moved to fanatical extremes, threw into
+the bay the curiously angled stone and its strangely adorned metal box
+found in the old church steeple—the black windowless steeple, and not
+the tower where Blake's diary said those things originally were. Though
+widely censured both officially and unofficially, this man—a reputable
+physician with a taste for odd folklore—averred that he had rid the
+earth of something too dangerous to rest upon it.</p>
+
+<p>Between these two schools of opinion the reader must judge for himself.
+The papers have given the tangible details from a skeptical angle,
+leaving for others the drawing of the picture as Robert Blake saw
+it—or thought he saw it—or pretended to see it. Now, studying the
+diary closely, dispassionately, and at leisure, let us summarize the
+dark chain of events from the expressed point of view of their chief
+actor.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Young Blake returned to Providence in the winter of 1934-5, taking
+the upper floor of a venerable dwelling in a grassy court off
+College Street—on the crest of the great eastward hill near the
+Brown University campus and behind the marble John Hay Library.
+It was a cozy and fascinating place, in a little garden oasis of
+village-like antiquity where huge, friendly cats sunned themselves
+atop a convenient shed. The square Georgian house had a monitor roof,
+classic doorway with fan carving, small-paned windows, and all the
+other earmarks of early Nineteenth Century workmanship. Inside were
+six-paneled doors, wide floor-boards, a curving colonial staircase,
+white Adam-period mantels, and a rear set of rooms three steps below
+the general level.</p>
+
+<p>Blake's study, a large southwest chamber, overlooked the front garden
+on one side, while its west windows—before one of which he had his
+desk—faced off from the brow of the hill and commanded a splendid view
+of the lower town's out-spread roofs and of the mystical sunsets that
+flamed behind them. On the far horizon were the open countryside's
+purple slopes. Against these, some two miles away, rose the spectral
+hump of Federal Hill, bristling with huddled roofs and steeples whose
+remote outlines wavered mysteriously, taking fantastic forms as the
+smoke of the city swirled up and enmeshed them. Blake had a curious
+sense that he was looking upon some unknown, ethereal world which might
+or might not vanish in dream if ever he tried to seek it out and enter
+it in person.</p>
+
+<p>Having sent home for most of his books, Blake bought some antique
+furniture suitable to his quarters and settled down to write and
+paint—living alone, and attending to the simple housework himself. His
+studio was in a north attic room, where the panes of the monitor roof
+furnished admirable lighting. During that first winter he produced five
+of his best-known short stories—<i>The Burrower Beneath</i>, <i>The Stairs in
+the Crypt</i>, <i>Shaggai</i>, <i>In the Vale of Pnath</i>, and <i>The Feaster from
+the Stars</i>—and painted seven canvases; studies of nameless, unhuman
+monsters, and profoundly alien, non-terrestrial landscapes.</p>
+
+<p>At sunset he would often sit at his desk and gaze dreamily off at
+the out-spread west—the dark towers of Memorial Hall just below,
+the Georgian court-house belfry, the lofty pinnacles of the downtown
+section, and that shimmering, spire-crowned mound in the distance whose
+unknown streets and labyrinthine gables so potently provoked his fancy.
+From his few local acquaintances he learned that the far-off slope
+was a vast Italian quarter, though most of the houses were remnants
+of older Yankee and Irish days. Now and then he would train his
+field-glasses on that spectral, unreachable world beyond the curling
+smoke; picking out individual roofs and chimneys and steeples, and
+speculating upon the bizarre and curious mysteries they might house.
+Even with optical aid Federal Hill seemed somehow alien, half fabulous,
+and linked to the unreal, intangible marvels of Blake's own tales and
+pictures. The feeling would persist long after the hill had faded into
+the violet, lamp-starred twilight, and the court-house floodlights
+and the red Industrial Trust beacon had blazed up to make the night
+grotesque.</p>
+
+<p>Of all the distant objects on Federal Hill, a certain huge, dark church
+most fascinated Blake. It stood out with especial distinctness at
+certain hours of the day, and at sunset the great tower and tapering
+steeple loomed blackly against the flaming sky. It seemed to rest
+on especially high ground; for the grimy façade, and the obliquely
+seen north side with sloping roof and the tops of great pointed
+windows, rose boldly above the tangle of surrounding ridgepoles and
+chimney-pots. Peculiarly grim and austere, it appeared to be built of
+stone, stained and weathered with the smoke and storms of a century
+and more. The style, so far as the glass could show, was that earliest
+experimental form of Gothic revival which preceded the stately Upjohn
+period and held over some of the outlines and proportions of the
+Georgian age. Perhaps it was reared around 1810 or 1815.</p>
+
+<p>As the months passed, Blake watched the far-off, forbidding structure
+with an oddly mounting interest. Since the vast windows were never
+lighted, he knew that it must be vacant. The longer he watched, the
+more his imagination worked, till at length he began to fancy curious
+things. He believed that a vague, singular aura of desolation hovered
+over the place, so that even the pigeons and swallows shunned its smoky
+eaves. Around other towers and belfries his glass would reveal great
+flocks of birds, but here they never rested. At least, that is what he
+thought and set down in his diary. He pointed the place out to several
+friends, but none of them had even been on Federal Hill or possessed
+the faintest notion of what the church was or had been.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>In the spring a deep restlessness gripped Blake. He had begun his
+long-planned novel—based on a supposed survival of the witch-cult in
+Maine—but was strangely unable to make progress with it. More and more
+he would sit at his westward window and gaze at the distant hill and
+the black, frowning steeple shunned by the birds. When the delicate
+leaves came out on the garden boughs the world was filled with a new
+beauty, but Blake's restlessness was merely increased. It was then
+that he first thought of crossing the city and climbing bodily up that
+fabulous slope into the smoke-wreathed world of dream.</p>
+
+<p>Late in April, just before the eon-shadowed Walpurgis time, Blake made
+his first trip into the unknown. Plodding through the endless downtown
+streets and the bleak, decayed squares beyond, he came finally upon
+the ascending avenue of century-worn steps, sagging Doric porches,
+and blear-paned cupolas which he felt must lead up to the long-known,
+unreachable world beyond the mists. There were dingy blue-and-white
+street signs which meant nothing to him, and presently he noted the
+strange, dark faces of the drifting crowds, and the foreign signs
+over curious shops in brown, decade-weathered buildings. Nowhere
+could he find any of the objects he had seen from afar; so that once
+more he half fancied that the Federal Hill of that distant view was a
+dream-world never to be trod by living human feet.</p>
+
+<p>Now and then a battered church façade or crumbling spire came in
+sight, but never the blackened pile that he sought. When he asked a
+shopkeeper about a great stone church the man smiled and shook his
+head, though he spoke English freely. As Blake climbed higher, the
+region seemed stranger and stranger, with bewildering mazes of brooding
+brown alleys leading eternally off to the south. He crossed two or
+three broad avenues, and once thought he glimpsed a familiar tower.
+Again he asked a merchant about the massive church of stone, and this
+time he could have sworn that the plea of ignorance was feigned. The
+dark man's face had a look of fear which he tried to hide, and Blake
+saw him make a curious sign with his right hand.</p>
+
+<p>Then suddenly a black spire stood out against the cloudy sky on his
+left, above the tiers of brown roofs lining the tangled southerly
+alleys. Blake knew at once what it was, and plunged toward it through
+the squalid, unpaved lanes that climbed from the avenue. Twice he
+lost his way, but he somehow dared not ask any of the patriarchs or
+housewives who sat on their door-steps, or any of the children who
+shouted and played in the mud of the shadowy lanes.</p>
+
+<p>At last he saw the tower plain against the southwest, and a huge
+stone bulk rose darkly at the end of an alley. Presently he stood in
+a wind-swept open square, quaintly cobblestoned, with a high bank
+wall on the farther side. This was the end of his quest; for upon the
+wide, iron-railed, weed-grown plateau which the wall supported—a
+separate, lesser world raised fully six feet above the surrounding
+streets—there stood a grim, titan bulk whose identity, despite Blake's
+new perspective, was beyond dispute.</p>
+
+<p>The vacant church was in a state of great decrepitude. Some of the high
+stone buttresses had fallen, and several delicate finials lay half lost
+among the brown, neglected weeds and grasses. The sooty Gothic windows
+were largely unbroken, though many of the stone mullions were missing.
+Blake wondered how the obscurely painted panes could have survived so
+well, in view of the known habits of small boys the world over. The
+massive doors were intact and tightly closed. Around the top of the
+bank wall, fully enclosing the grounds, was a rusty iron fence whose
+gate—at the head of a flight of steps from the square—was visibly
+padlocked. The path from the gate to the building was completely
+overgrown. Desolation and decay hung like a pall above the place, and
+in the birdless eaves and black, ivyless walls Blake felt a touch of
+the dimly sinister beyond his power to define.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>There were very few people in the square, but Blake saw a policeman
+at the northerly end and approached him with questions about the
+church. He was a great wholesome Irishman, and it seemed odd that he
+would do little more than make the sign of the cross and mutter that
+people never spoke of that building. When Blake pressed him he said
+very hurriedly that the Italian priests warned everybody against it,
+vowing that a monstrous evil had once dwelt there and left its mark.
+He himself had heard dark whispers of it from his father, who recalled
+certain sounds and rumors from his boyhood.</p>
+
+<p>There had been a bad sect there in the ould days—an outlaw sect that
+called up awful things from some unknown gulf of night. It had taken
+a good priest to exorcise what had come, though there did be those
+who said that merely the light could do it. If Father O'Malley were
+alive there would be many the thing he could tell. But now there was
+nothing to do but let it alone. It hurt nobody now, and those that
+owned it were dead or far away. They had run away like rats after
+the threatening talk in '77, when people began to mind the way folks
+vanished now and then in the neighborhood. Some day the city would
+step in and take the property for lack of heirs, but little good would
+come of anybody's touching it. Better it be left alone for the years
+to topple, lest things be stirred that ought to rest for ever in their
+black abyss.</p>
+
+<p>After the policeman had gone Blake stood staring at the sullen steepled
+pile. It excited him to find that the structure seemed as sinister
+to others as to him, and he wondered what grain of truth might lie
+behind the old tales the bluecoat had repeated. Probably they were mere
+legends evoked by the evil look of the place, but even so, they were
+like a strange coming to life of one of his own stories.</p>
+
+<p>The afternoon sun came out from behind dispersing clouds, but seemed
+unable to light up the stained, sooty walls of the old temple that
+towered on its high plateau. It was odd that the green of spring had
+not touched the brown, withered growths in the raised, iron-fenced
+yard. Blake found himself edging nearer the raised area and examining
+the bank wall and rusted fence for possible avenues of ingress. There
+was a terrible lure about the blackened fane which was not to be
+resisted. The fence had no opening near the steps, but around on the
+north side were some missing bars. He could go up the steps and walk
+around on the narrow coping outside the fence till he came to the
+gap. If the people feared the place so wildly, he would encounter no
+interference.</p>
+
+<p>He was on the embankment and almost inside the fence before anyone
+noticed him. Then, looking down, he saw the few people in the square
+edging away and making the same sign with their right hands that the
+shopkeeper in the avenue had made. Several windows were slammed down,
+and a fat woman darted into the street and pulled some small children
+inside a rickety, unpainted house. The gap in the fence was very easy
+to pass through, and before long Blake found himself wading amidst
+the rotting, tangled growths of the deserted yard. Here and there the
+worn stump of a headstone told him that there had once been burials
+in this field; but that, he saw, must have been very long ago. The
+sheer bulk of the church was oppressive now that he was close to it,
+but he conquered his mood and approached to try the three great doors
+in the façade. All were securely locked, so he began a circuit of the
+Cyclopean building in quest of some minor and more penetrable opening.
+Even then he could not be sure that he wished to enter that haunt of
+desertion and shadow, yet the pull of its strangeness dragged him on
+automatically.</p>
+
+<p>A yawning and unprotected cellar window in the rear furnished the
+needed aperture. Peering in, Blake saw a subterrene gulf of cobwebs
+and dust faintly litten by the western sun's filtered rays. Debris,
+old barrels, and ruined boxes and furniture of numerous sorts met his
+eye, though over everything lay a shroud of dust which softened all
+sharp outlines. The rusted remains of a hot-air furnace showed that the
+building had been used and kept in shape as late as mid-Victorian times.</p>
+
+<p>Acting almost without conscious initiative, Blake crawled through the
+window and let himself down to the dust-carpeted and debris-strewn
+concrete floor. The vaulted cellar was a vast one, without partitions;
+and in a corner far to the right, amid dense shadows, he saw a black
+archway evidently leading upstairs. He felt a peculiar sense of
+oppression at being actually within the great spectral building,
+but kept it in check as he cautiously scouted about—finding a
+still-intact barrel amid the dust, and rolling it over to the open
+window to provide for his exit. Then, bracing himself, he crossed the
+wide, cobweb-festooned space toward the arch. Half choked with the
+omnipresent dust, and covered with ghostly gossamer fibers, he reached
+and began to climb the worn stone steps which rose into the darkness.
+He had no light, but groped carefully with his hands. After a sharp
+turn he felt a closed door ahead, and a little fumbling revealed its
+ancient latch. It opened inward, and beyond it he saw a dimly illumined
+corridor lined with worm-eaten paneling.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Once on the ground floor, Blake began exploring in a rapid fashion.
+All the inner doors were unlocked, so that he freely passed from room
+to room. The colossal nave was an almost eldritch place with its
+drifts and mountains of dust over box pews, altar, hour-glass pulpit,
+and sounding-board, and its titanic ropes of cobweb stretching among
+the pointed arches of the gallery and entwining the clustered Gothic
+columns. Over all this hushed desolation played a hideous leaden light
+as the declining afternoon sun sent its rays through the strange,
+half-blackened panes of the great apsidal windows.</p>
+
+<p>The paintings on those windows were so obscured by soot that Blake
+could scarcely decipher what they had represented, but from the little
+he could make out he did not like them. The designs were largely
+conventional, and his knowledge of obscure symbolism told him much
+concerning some of the ancient patterns. The few saints depicted bore
+expressions distinctly open to criticism, while one of the windows
+seemed to show merely a dark space with spirals of curious luminosity
+scattered about in it. Turning away from the windows, Blake noticed
+that the cobwebbed cross above the altar was not of the ordinary kind,
+but resembled the primordial ankh or crux ansata of shadowy Egypt.</p>
+
+<p>In a rear vestry room beside the apse Blake found a rotting desk and
+ceiling-high shelves of mildewed, disintegrating books. Here for the
+first time he received a positive shock of objective horror, for the
+titles of those books told him much. They were the black, forbidden
+things which most sane people have never even heard of, or have
+heard of only in furtive, timorous whispers; the banned and dreaded
+repositories of equivocal secrets and immemorial formulæ which have
+trickled down the stream of time from the days of man's youth, and the
+dim, fabulous days before man was. He had himself read many of them—a
+Latin version of the abhorred <i>Necronomicon</i>, the sinister <i>Liber
+Ivonis</i>, the infamous <i>Cultes des Goules</i> of Comte d'Erlette, the
+<i>Unaussprechlichen Kulten</i> of von Junzt, and old Ludvig Prinn's hellish
+<i>De Vermis Mysteriis</i>. But there were others he had known merely by
+reputation or not at all—the <i>Pnakotic Manuscripts</i>, the <i>Book of
+Dzyan</i>, and a crumbling volume in wholly unidentifiable characters yet
+with certain symbols and diagrams shudderingly recognizable to the
+occult student. Clearly, the lingering local rumors had not lied. This
+place had once been the seat of an evil older than mankind and wider
+than the known universe.</p>
+
+<p>In the ruined desk was a small leather-bound record-book filled with
+entries in some odd cryptographic medium. The manuscript writing
+consisted of the common traditional symbols used today in astronomy and
+anciently in alchemy, astrology, and other dubious arts—the devices
+of the sun, moon, planets, aspects, and zodiacal signs—here massed in
+solid pages of text, with divisions and paragraphings suggesting that
+each symbol answered to some alphabetical letter.</p>
+
+<p>In the hope of later solving the cryptogram, Blake bore off this
+volume in his coat pocket. Many of the great tomes on the shelves
+fascinated him unutterably, and he felt tempted to borrow them at some
+later time. He wondered how they could have remained undisturbed so
+long. Was he the first to conquer the clutching, pervasive fear which
+had for nearly sixty years protected this deserted place from visitors?</p>
+
+<p>Having now thoroughly explored the ground floor, Blake plowed again
+through the dust of the spectral nave to the front vestibule, where he
+had seen a door and staircase presumably leading up to the blackened
+tower and steeple—objects so long familiar to him at a distance. The
+ascent was a choking experience, for dust lay thick, while the spiders
+had done their worst in this constricted place. The staircase was a
+spiral with high, narrow wooden treads, and now and then Blake passed a
+clouded window looking dizzily out over the city. Though he had seen no
+ropes below, he expected to find a bell or peal of bells in the tower
+whose narrow, louver-boarded lancet windows his field-glass had studied
+so often. Here he was doomed to disappointment, for when he attained
+the top of the stairs he found the tower chamber vacant of chimes, and
+clearly devoted to vastly different purposes.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The room, about fifteen feet square, was faintly lighted by four lancet
+windows, one on each side, which were glazed within their screening of
+decayed louver-boards. These had been further fitted with tight, opaque
+screens, but the latter were now largely rotted away. In the center of
+the dust-laden floor rose a curiously angled stone pillar some four
+feet in height and two in average diameter, covered on each side with
+bizarre, crudely incised and wholly unrecognizable hieroglyphs. On
+this pillar rested a metal box of peculiarly asymmetrical form; its
+hinged lid thrown back, and its interior holding what looked beneath
+the decade-deep dust to be an egg-shaped or irregularly spherical
+object some four inches through. Around the pillar in a rough circle
+were seven high-backed Gothic chairs still largely intact, while behind
+them, ranging along the dark-paneled walls, were seven colossal images
+of crumbling, black-painted plaster, resembling more than anything else
+the cryptic carven megaliths of mysterious Easter Island. In one corner
+of the cobwebbed chamber a ladder was built into the wall, leading up
+to the closed trap-door of the windowless steeple above.</p>
+
+<p>As Blake grew accustomed to the feeble light he noticed odd bas-reliefs
+on the strange open box of yellowish metal. Approaching, he tried to
+clear the dust away with his hands and handkerchief, and saw that
+the figurings were of a monstrous and utterly alien kind; depicting
+entities which, though seemingly alive, resembled no known life-form
+ever evolved on this planet. The four-inch seeming sphere turned out
+to be a nearly black, red-striated polyhedron with many irregular
+flat surfaces; either a very remarkable crystal of some sort, or an
+artificial object of carved and highly polished mineral matter. It did
+not touch the bottom of the box, but was held suspended by means of
+a metal band around its center, with seven queerly-designed supports
+extending horizontally to angles of the box's inner wall near the
+top. This stone, once exposed, exerted upon Blake an almost alarming
+fascination. He could scarcely tear his eyes from it, and as he looked
+at its glistening surfaces he almost fancied it was transparent, with
+half-formed worlds of wonder within. Into his mind floated pictures of
+alien orbs with great stone towers, and other orbs with titan mountains
+and no mark of life, and still remoter spaces where only a stirring in
+vague blacknesses told of the presence of consciousness and will.</p>
+
+<p>When he did look away, it was to notice a somewhat singular mound of
+dust in the far corner near the ladder to the steeple. Just why it took
+his attention he could not tell, but something in its contours carried
+a message to his unconscious mind. Plowing toward it, and brushing
+aside the hanging cobwebs as he went, he began to discern something
+grim about it. Hand and handkerchief soon revealed the truth, and Blake
+gasped with a baffling mixture of emotions. It was a human skeleton,
+and it must have been there for a very long time. The clothing was in
+shreds, but some buttons and fragments of cloth bespoke a man's gray
+suit. There were other bits of evidence—shoes, metal clasps, huge
+buttons for round cuffs, a stickpin of bygone pattern, a reporter's
+badge with the name of the old <i>Providence Telegram</i>, and a crumbling
+leather pocket-book. Blake examined the latter with care, finding
+within it several bills of antiquated issue, a celluloid advertising
+calendar for 1893, some cards with the name "Edwin M. Lillibridge," and
+a paper covered with penciled memoranda.</p>
+
+<p>This paper held much of a puzzling nature, and Blake read it carefully
+at the dim westward window. Its disjointed text included such phrases
+as the following:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>"Prof. Enoch Bowen home from Egypt May 1844—buys old Free-Will Church
+in July—his archæological work &amp; studies in occult well known."</p>
+
+<p>"Dr. Drowne of 4th Baptist warns against Starry Wisdom in sermon Dec.
+29, 1844."</p>
+
+<p>"Congregation 97 by end of '45."</p>
+
+<p>"1846—3 disappearances—first mention of Shining Trapezohedron."</p>
+
+<p>"7 disappearances 1848—stories of blood sacrifice begin."</p>
+
+<p>"Investigation 1853 comes to nothing—stories of sounds."</p>
+
+<p>"Fr. O'Malley tells of devil-worship with box found in great Egyptian
+ruins—says they call up something that can't exist in light. Flees a
+little light, and banished by strong light. Then has to be summoned
+again. Probably got this from deathbed confession of Francis X.
+Feeney, who had joined Starry Wisdom in '49. These people say the
+Shining Trapezohedron shows them heaven &amp; other worlds, &amp; that the
+Haunter of the Dark tells them secrets in some way."</p>
+
+<p>"Story of Orrin B. Eddy 1857. They call it up by gazing at the
+crystal, &amp; have a secret language of their own."</p>
+
+<p>"200 or more in cong. 1863, exclusive of men at front."</p>
+
+<p>"Irish boys mob church in 1869 after Patrick Regan's disappearance."</p>
+
+<p>"Veiled article in J. March 14, '72, but people don't talk about it."</p>
+
+<p>"6 disappearances 1876—secret committee calls on Mayor Doyle."</p>
+
+<p>"Action promised Feb. 1877—church closes in April."</p>
+
+<p>"Gang—Federal Hill Boys—threaten Dr. —— and vestrymen in May."</p>
+
+<p>"181 persons leave city before end of '77—mention no names."</p>
+
+<p>"Ghost stories begin around 1880—try to ascertain truth of report
+that no human being has entered church since 1877."</p>
+
+<p>"Ask Lanigan for photograph of place taken 1851...."</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Restoring the paper to the pocket-book and placing the latter in
+his coat, Blake turned to look down at the skeleton in the dust.
+The implications of the notes were clear, and there could be no
+doubt but that this man had come to the deserted edifice forty-two
+years before in quest of a newspaper sensation which no one else had
+been bold enough to attempt. Perhaps no one else had known of his
+plan—who could tell? But he had never returned to his paper. Had some
+bravely-suppressed fear risen to overcome him and bring on sudden
+heart-failure? Blake stooped over the gleaming bones and noted their
+peculiar state. Some of them were badly scattered, and a few seemed
+oddly <i>dissolved</i> at the ends. Others were strangely yellowed, with
+vague suggestions of charring. This charring extended to some of the
+fragments of clothing. The skull was in a very peculiar state—stained
+yellow, and with a charred aperture in the top as if some powerful acid
+had eaten through the solid bone. What had happened to the skeleton
+during its four decades of silent entombment here Blake could not
+imagine.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap">
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+  <img src="images/illus.jpg" alt="">
+  <div class="caption">
+    <p>"He had come to the deserted edifice in quest of a newspaper sensation."</p>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap">
+
+<p>Before he realized it, he was looking at the stone again, and letting
+its curious influence call up a nebulous pageantry in his mind. He saw
+processions of robed, hooded figures whose outlines were not human, and
+looked on endless leagues of desert lined with carved, sky-reaching
+monoliths. He saw towers and walls in nighted depths under the sea,
+and vortices of space where wisps of black mist floated before thin
+shimmerings of cold purple haze. And beyond all else he glimpsed an
+infinite gulf of sheer darkness, where solid and semi-solid forms were
+known only by their windy stirrings, and cloudy patterns of force
+seemed to superimpose order on chaos and hold forth a key to all the
+paradoxes and arcana of the worlds we know.</p>
+
+<p>Then all at once the spell was broken by an access of gnawing,
+indeterminate panic fear. Blake choked and turned away from the stone,
+conscious of some formless alien presence close to him and watching him
+with horrible intentness. He felt entangled with something—something
+which was not in the stone, but which had looked through it at
+him—something which would ceaselessly follow him with a cognition
+that was not physical sight. Plainly, the place was getting on his
+nerves—as well it might in view of his gruesome find. The light was
+waning, too, and since he had no illuminant with him he knew he would
+have to be leaving soon.</p>
+
+<p>It was then, in the gathering twilight, that he thought he saw a
+faint trace of luminosity in the crazily angled stone. He had tried
+to look away from it, but some obscure compulsion drew his eyes back.
+Was there a subtle phosphorescence of radio-activity about the thing?
+What was it that the dead man's notes had said concerning a <i>Shining
+Trapezohedron</i>? What, anyway, was this abandoned lair of cosmic evil?
+What had been done here, and what might still be lurking in the
+bird-shunned shadows? It seemed now as if an elusive touch of fetor had
+arisen somewhere close by, though its source was not apparent. Blake
+seized the cover of the long-open box and snapped it down. It moved
+easily on its alien hinges, and closed completely over the unmistakably
+glowing stone.</p>
+
+<p>At the sharp click of that closing a soft stirring sound seemed to come
+from the steeple's eternal blackness overhead, beyond the trap-door.
+Rats, without question—the only living things to reveal their presence
+in this accursed pile since he had entered it. And yet that stirring in
+the steeple frightened him horribly, so that he plunged almost wildly
+down the spiral stairs, across the ghoulish nave, into the vaulted
+basement, out amidst the gathering dusk of the deserted square, and
+down through the teeming, fear-haunted alleys and avenues of Federal
+Hill toward the sane central streets and the home-like brick sidewalks
+of the college district.</p>
+
+<p>During the days which followed, Blake told no one of his expedition.
+Instead, he read much in certain books, examined long years of
+newspaper files downtown, and worked feverishly at the cryptogram in
+that leather volume from the cobwebbed vestry room. The cipher, he soon
+saw, was no simple one; and after a long period of endeavor he felt
+sure that its language could not be English, Latin, Greek, French,
+Spanish, Italian, or German. Evidently he would have to draw upon the
+deepest wells of his strange erudition.</p>
+
+<p>Every evening the old impulse to gaze westward returned, and he saw the
+black steeple as of yore amongst the bristling roofs of a distant and
+half-fabulous world. But now it held a fresh note of terror for him. He
+knew the heritage of evil lore it masked, and with the knowledge his
+vision ran riot in queer new ways. The birds of spring were returning,
+and as he watched their sunset flights he fancied they avoided the
+gaunt, lone spire as never before. When a flock of them approached it,
+he thought, they would wheel and scatter in panic confusion—and he
+could guess at the wild twitterings which failed to reach him across
+the intervening miles.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was in June that Blake's diary told of his victory over the
+cryptogram. The text was, he found, in the dark Aklo language used by
+certain cults of evil antiquity, and known to him in a halting way
+through previous researches. The diary is strangely reticent about
+what Blake deciphered, but he was patently awed and disconcerted by
+his results. There are references to a Haunter of the Dark awaked by
+gazing into the Shining Trapezohedron, and insane conjectures about the
+black gulfs of chaos from which it was called. The being is spoken of
+as holding all knowledge, and demanding monstrous sacrifices. Some of
+Blake's entries show fear lest the thing, which he seemed to regard as
+summoned, stalk abroad; though he adds that the street-lights form a
+bulwark which cannot be crossed.</p>
+
+<p>Of the Shining Trapezohedron he speaks often, calling it a window
+on all time and space, and tracing its history from the days it was
+fashioned on dark Yuggoth, before ever the Old Ones brought it to
+earth. It was treasured and placed in its curious box by the crinoid
+things of Antarctica, salvaged from their ruins by the serpent-men of
+Valusia, and peered at eons later in Lemuria by the first human beings.
+It crossed strange lands and stranger seas, and sank with Atlantis
+before a Minoan fisher meshed it in his net and sold it to swarthy
+merchants from nighted Khem. The Pharaoh Nephren-Ka built around it a
+temple with a windowless crypt, and did that which caused his name to
+be stricken from all monuments and records. Then it slept in the ruins
+of that evil fane which the priests and the new Pharaoh destroyed, till
+the delver's spade once more brought it forth to curse mankind.</p>
+
+<p>Early in July the newspapers oddly supplement Blake's entries, though
+in so brief and casual a way that only the diary has called general
+attention to their contribution. It appears that a new fear had been
+growing on Federal Hill since a stranger had entered the dreaded
+church. The Italians whispered of unaccustomed stirrings and bumpings
+and scrapings in the dark windowless steeple, and called on their
+priests to banish an entity which haunted their dreams. Something,
+they said, was constantly watching at a door to see if it were dark
+enough to venture forth. Press items mentioned the long-standing local
+superstitions, but failed to shed much light on the earlier background
+of the horror. It was obvious that the young reporters of today are no
+antiquarians. In writing of these things in his diary, Blake expresses
+a curious kind of remorse, and talks of the duty of burying the
+Shining Trapezohedron and of banishing what he had evoked by letting
+daylight into the hideous jutting spire. At the same time, however, he
+displays the dangerous extent of his fascination, and admits a morbid
+longing—pervading even his dreams—to visit the accursed tower and
+gaze again into the cosmic secrets of the glowing stone.</p>
+
+<p>Then something in the <i>Journal</i> on the morning of July 17 threw the
+diarist into a veritable fever of horror. It was only a variant of the
+other half-humorous items about the Federal Hill restlessness, but to
+Blake it was somehow very terrible indeed. In the night a thunderstorm
+had put the city's lighting-system out of commission for a full hour,
+and in that black interval the Italians had nearly gone mad with
+fright. Those living near the dreaded church had sworn that the thing
+in the steeple had taken advantage of the street lamps' absence and
+gone down into the body of the church, flopping and bumping around in
+a viscous, altogether dreadful way. Toward the last it had bumped up
+to the tower, where there were sounds of the shattering of glass. It
+could go wherever the darkness reached, but light would always send it
+fleeing.</p>
+
+<p>When the current blazed on again there had been a shocking commotion
+in the tower, for even the feeble light trickling through the
+grime-blackened, louver-boarded windows was too much for the thing.
+It had bumped and slithered up into its tenebrous steeple just in
+time—for a long dose of light would have sent it back into the abyss
+whence the crazy stranger had called it. During the dark hour praying
+crowds had clustered round the church in the rain with lighted candles
+and lamps somehow shielded with folded papers and umbrellas—a guard
+of light to save the city from the nightmare that stalks in darkness.
+Once, those nearest the church declared, the outer door had rattled
+hideously.</p>
+
+<p>But even this was not the worst. That evening in the <i>Bulletin</i> Blake
+read of what the reporters had found. Aroused at last to the whimsical
+news value of the scare, a pair of them had defied the frantic crowds
+of Italians and crawled into the church through the cellar window
+after trying the doors in vain. They found the dust of the vestibule
+and of the spectral nave plowed up in a singular way, with pits of
+rotted cushions and satin pew-linings scattered curiously around. There
+was a bad odor everywhere, and here and there were bits of yellow stain
+and patches of what looked like charring. Opening the door to the
+tower, and pausing a moment at the suspicion of a scraping sound above,
+they found the narrow spiral stairs wiped roughly clean.</p>
+
+<p>In the tower itself a similarly half-swept condition existed. They
+spoke of the heptagonal stone pillar, the overturned Gothic chairs,
+and the bizarre plaster images; though strangely enough the metal box
+and the old mutilated skeleton were not mentioned. What disturbed
+Blake the most—except for the hints of stains and charring and bad
+odors—was the final detail that explained the crashing glass. Every
+one of the tower's lancet windows was broken, and two of them had
+been darkened in a crude and hurried way by the stuffing of satin
+pew-linings and cushion-horsehair into the spaces between the slanting
+exterior louver-boards. More satin fragments and bunches of horsehair
+lay scattered around the newly swept floor, as if someone had been
+interrupted in the act of restoring the tower to the absolute blackness
+of its tightly curtained days.</p>
+
+<p>Yellowish stains and charred patches were found on the ladder to
+the windowless spire, but when a reporter climbed up, opened the
+horizontally-sliding trap-door and shot a feeble flashlight beam into
+the black and strangely fetid space, he saw nothing but darkness, and
+an heterogeneous litter of shapeless fragments near the aperture. The
+verdict, of course, was charlatanry. Somebody had played a joke on
+the superstitious hill-dwellers, or else some fanatic had striven to
+bolster up their fears for their own supposed good. Or perhaps some of
+the younger and more sophisticated dwellers had staged an elaborate
+hoax on the outside world. There was an amusing aftermath when the
+police sent an officer to verify the reports. Three men in succession
+found ways of evading the assignment, and the fourth went very
+reluctantly and returned very soon without adding to the account given
+by the reporters.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>From this point onward Blake's diary shows a mounting tide of
+insidious horror and nervous apprehension. He upbraids himself for
+not doing something, and speculates wildly on the consequences of
+another electrical breakdown. It has been verified that on three
+occasions—during thunderstorms—he telephoned the electric light
+company in a frantic vein and asked that desperate precautions against
+a lapse of power be taken. Now and then his entries show concern over
+the failure of the reporters to find the metal box and stone, and the
+strangely marred old skeleton, when they explored the shadowy tower
+room. He assumed that these things had been removed—whither, and
+by whom or what, he could only guess. But his worst fears concerned
+himself, and the kind of unholy rapport he felt to exist between his
+mind and that lurking horror in the distant steeple—that monstrous
+thing of night which his rashness had called out of the ultimate black
+spaces. He seemed to feel a constant tugging at his will, and callers
+of that period remember how he would sit abstractedly at his desk and
+stare out the west window at that far-off, spire-bristling mound beyond
+the swirling smoke of the city. His entries dwell monotonously on
+certain terrible dreams, and of a strengthening of the unholy rapport
+in his sleep. There is mention of a night when he awaked to find
+himself fully dressed, outdoors, and headed automatically down College
+Hill toward the west. Again and again he dwells on the fact that the
+thing in the steeple knows where to find him.</p>
+
+<p>The week following July 30 is recalled as the time of Blake's partial
+breakdown. He did not dress, and ordered all his food by telephone.
+Visitors remarked the cords he kept near his bed, and he said that
+sleep-walking had forced him to bind his ankles every night with knots
+which would probably hold or else waken him with the labor of untying.</p>
+
+<p>In his diary he told of the hideous experience which had brought the
+collapse. After retiring on the night of the 30th he had suddenly found
+himself groping about in an almost black space. All he could see were
+short, faint, horizontal streaks of bluish light, but he could smell an
+overpowering fetor and hear a curious jumble of soft, furtive sounds
+above him. Whenever he moved he stumbled over something, and at each
+noise there would come a sort of answering sound from above—a vague
+stirring, mixed with the cautious sliding of wood on wood.</p>
+
+<p>Once his groping hands encountered a pillar of stone with a vacant top,
+whilst later he found himself clutching the rungs of a ladder built
+into the wall, and fumbling his uncertain way upward toward some region
+of intenser stench where a hot, searing blast beat down against him.
+Before his eyes a kaleidoscopic range of fantasmal images played, all
+of them dissolving at intervals into the picture of a vast, unplumbed
+abyss of night wherein whirled suns and worlds of an even profounder
+blackness. He thought of the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at
+whose center sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things,
+encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers,
+and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demoniac flute held in
+nameless paws.</p>
+
+<p>Then a sharp report from the outer world broke through his stupor and
+roused him to the unutterable horror of his position. What it was, he
+never knew—perhaps it was some belated peal from the fireworks heard
+all summer on Federal Hill as the dwellers hail their various patron
+saints, or the saints of their native villages in Italy. In any event
+he shrieked aloud, dropped frantically from the ladder, and stumbled
+blindly across the obstructed floor of the almost lightless chamber
+that encompassed him.</p>
+
+<p>He knew instantly where he was, and plunged recklessly down the
+narrow spiral staircase, tripping and bruising himself at every turn.
+There was a nightmare flight through a vast cobwebbed nave whose
+ghostly arches reached up to realms of leering shadow, a sightless
+scramble through a littered basement, a climb to regions of air and
+street-lights outside, and a mad racing down a spectral hill of
+gibbering gables, across a grim, silent city of tall black towers, and
+up the steep eastward precipice to his own ancient door.</p>
+
+<p>On regaining consciousness in the morning he found himself lying on
+his study floor fully dressed. Dirt and cobwebs covered him, and every
+inch of his body seemed sore and bruised. When he faced the mirror he
+saw that his hair was badly scorched, while a trace of strange, evil
+odor seemed to cling to his upper outer clothing. It was then that
+his nerves broke down. Thereafter, lounging exhaustedly about in a
+dressing-gown, he did little but stare from his west window, shiver at
+the threat of thunder, and make wild entries in his diary.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The great storm broke just before midnight on August 8th. Lightning
+struck repeatedly in all parts of the city, and two remarkable
+fireballs were reported. The rain was torrential, while a constant
+fusillade of thunder brought sleeplessness to thousands. Blake was
+utterly frantic in his fear for the lighting system, and tried to
+telephone the company around one a.m., though by that time service
+had been temporarily cut off in the interest of safety. He recorded
+everything in his diary—the large, nervous, and often undecipherable
+hieroglyphs telling their own story of growing frenzy and despair, and
+of entries scrawled blindly in the dark.</p>
+
+<p>He had to keep the house dark in order to see out the window, and it
+appears that most of his time was spent at his desk, peering anxiously
+through the rain across the glistening miles of downtown roofs at the
+constellation of distant lights marking Federal Hill. Now and then he
+would fumblingly make an entry in his diary, so that detached phrases
+such as "The lights must not go"; "It knows where I am"; "I must
+destroy it"; and "It is calling to me, but perhaps it means no injury
+this time"; are found scattered down two of the pages.</p>
+
+<p>Then the lights went out all over the city. It happened at 2:12 a.m.
+according to power-house records, but Blake's diary gives no indication
+of the time. The entry is merely, "Lights out—God help me." On
+Federal Hill there were watchers as anxious as he, and rain-soaked
+knots of men paraded the square and alleys around the evil church
+with umbrella-shaded candles, electric flashlights, oil lanterns,
+crucifixes, and obscure charms of the many sorts common to southern
+Italy. They blessed each flash of lightning, and made cryptical signs
+of fear with their right hands when a turn in the storm caused the
+flashes to lessen and finally to cease altogether. A rising wind
+blew out most of the candles, so that the scene grew threateningly
+dark. Someone roused Father Merluzzo of Spirito Santo Church, and he
+hastened to the dismal square to pronounce whatever helpful syllables
+he could. Of the restless and curious sounds in the blackened tower,
+there could be no doubt whatever.</p>
+
+<p>For what happened at 2:35 we have the testimony of the priest, a
+young, intelligent, and well-educated person; of Patrolman William J.
+Monahan of the Central Station, an officer of the highest reliability
+who had paused at that part of his beat to inspect the crowd; and of
+most of the seventy-eight men who had gathered around the church's
+high bank wall—especially those in the square where the eastward
+façade was visible. Of course there was nothing which can be proved
+as being outside the order of nature. The possible causes of such an
+event are many. No one can speak with certainty of the obscure chemical
+processes arising in a vast, ancient, ill-aired, and long-deserted
+building of heterogeneous contents. Mephitic vapors—spontaneous
+combustion—pressure of gases born of long decay—any one of numberless
+phenomena might be responsible. And then, of course, the factor of
+conscious charlatanry can by no means be excluded. The thing was really
+quite simple in itself, and covered less than three minutes of actual
+time. Father Merluzzo, always a precise man, looked at his watch
+repeatedly.</p>
+
+<p>It started with a definite swelling of the dull fumbling sounds inside
+the black tower. There had for some time been a vague exhalation of
+strange, evil odors from the church, and this had now become emphatic
+and offensive. Then at last there was a sound of splintering wood, and
+a large, heavy object crashed down in the yard beneath the frowning
+easterly façade. The tower was invisible now that the candles would not
+burn, but as the object neared the ground the people knew that it was
+the smoke-grimed louver-boarding of that tower's east window.</p>
+
+<p>Immediately afterward an utterly unbearable fetor welled forth from
+the unseen heights, choking and sickening the trembling watchers,
+and almost prostrating those in the square. At the same time the
+air trembled with a vibration as of flapping wings, and a sudden
+east-blowing wind more violent than any previous blast snatched off the
+hats and wrenched the dripping umbrellas of the crowd. Nothing definite
+could be seen in the candleless night, though some upward-looking
+spectators thought they glimpsed a great spreading blur of denser
+blackness against the inky sky—something like a formless cloud of
+smoke that shot with meteor-like speed toward the east.</p>
+
+<p>That was all. The watchers were half numbed with fright, awe, and
+discomfort, and scarcely knew what to do, or whether to do anything at
+all. Not knowing what had happened, they did not relax their vigil;
+and a moment later they sent up a prayer as a sharp flash of belated
+lightning, followed by an ear-splitting crash of sound, rent the
+flooded heavens. Half an hour later the rain stopped, and in fifteen
+minutes more the street lights sprang on again, sending the weary,
+bedraggled watchers relievedly back to their homes.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The next day's papers gave these matters minor mention in connection
+with the general storm reports. It seems that the great lightning flash
+and deafening explosion which followed the Federal Hill occurrence
+were even more tremendous farther east, where a burst of the singular
+fetor was likewise noticed. The phenomenon was most marked over College
+Hill, where the crash awaked all the sleeping inhabitants and led to a
+bewildered round of speculations. Of those who were already awake only
+a few saw the anomalous blaze of light near the top of the hill, or
+noticed the inexplicable upward rush of air which almost stripped the
+leaves from the trees and blasted the plants in the gardens. It was
+agreed that the lone, sudden lightning-bolt must have struck somewhere
+in this neighborhood, though no trace of its striking could afterward
+be found. A youth in the Tau Omega fraternity house thought he saw a
+grotesque and hideous mass of smoke in the air just as the preliminary
+flash burst, but his observation has not been verified. All of the few
+observers, however, agree as to the violent gust from the west and the
+flood of intolerable stench which preceded the belated stroke; whilst
+evidence concerning the momentary burned odor after the stroke is
+equally general.</p>
+
+<p>These points were discussed very carefully because of their probable
+connection with the death of Robert Blake. Students in the Psi Delta
+house, whose upper rear windows looked into Blake's study, noticed the
+blurred white face at the westward window on the morning of the 9th,
+and wondered what was wrong with the expression. When they saw the same
+face in the same position that evening, they felt worried, and watched
+for the lights to come up in his apartment. Later they rang the bell of
+the darkened flat, and finally had a policeman force the door.</p>
+
+<p>The rigid body sat bolt upright at the desk by the window, and when
+the intruders saw the glassy, bulging eyes, and the marks of stark,
+convulsive fright on the twisted features, they turned away in sickened
+dismay. Shortly afterward the coroner's physician made an examination,
+and despite the unbroken window reported electrical shock, or nervous
+tension induced by an electrical discharge, as the cause of death.
+The hideous expression he ignored altogether, deeming it a not
+improbable result of the profound shock as experienced by a person of
+such abnormal imagination and unbalanced emotions. He deduced these
+latter qualities from the books, paintings, and manuscripts found in
+the apartment, and from the blindly scrawled entries in the diary on
+the desk. Blake had prolonged his frenzied jottings to the last, and
+the broken-pointed pencil was found clutched in his spasmodically
+contracted right hand.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The entries after the failure of the lights were highly disjointed,
+and legible only in part. From them certain investigators have
+drawn conclusions differing greatly from the materialistic official
+verdict, but such speculations have little chance for belief among
+the conservative. The case of these imaginative theorists has not
+been helped by the action of superstitious Doctor Dexter, who threw
+the curious box and angled stone—an object certainly self-luminous
+as seen in the black windowless steeple where it was found—into
+the deepest channel of Narragansett Bay. Excessive imagination and
+neurotic unbalance on Blake's part, aggravated by knowledge of the evil
+bygone cult whose startling traces he had uncovered, form the dominant
+interpretation given those final frenzied jottings. These are the
+entries—or all that can be made of them.</p>
+
+<p>"Lights still out—must be five minutes now. Everything depends on
+lightning. Yaddith grant it will keep up!... Some influence seems
+beating through it.... Rain and thunder and wind deafen.... The thing
+is taking hold of my mind....</p>
+
+<p>"Trouble with memory. I see things I never knew before. Other worlds
+and other galaxies.... Dark.... The lightning seems dark and the
+darkness seems light....</p>
+
+<p>"It cannot be the real hill and church that I see in the
+pitch-darkness. Must be retinal impression left by flashes. Heaven
+grant the Italians are out with their candles if the lightning stops!</p>
+
+<p>"What am I afraid of? Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in
+antique and shadowy Khem even took the form of man? I remember Yuggoth,
+and more distant Shaggai, and the ultimate void of the black planets....</p>
+
+<p>"The long, winging flight through the void ... cannot cross the
+universe of light ... re-created by the thoughts caught in the Shining
+Trapezohedron ... send it through the horrible abysses of radiance....</p>
+
+<p>"My name is Blake—Robert Harrison Blake of 620 East Knapp Street,
+Milwaukee, Wisconsin.... I am on this planet....</p>
+
+<p>"Azathoth have mercy!—the lightning no longer flashes—horrible—I can
+see everything with a monstrous sense that is not sight—light is dark
+and dark is light ... those people on the hill ... guard ... candles
+and charms ... their priests....</p>
+
+<p>"Sense of distance gone—far is near and near is far. No light—no
+glass—see that steeple—that tower—window—can hear—Roderick
+Usher—am mad or going mad—the thing is stirring and fumbling in the
+tower—I am it and it is I—I want to get out ... must get out and
+unify the forces.... It knows where I am....</p>
+
+<p>"I am Robert Blake, but I see the tower in the dark. There is a
+monstrous odor ... senses transfigured ... boarding at that tower
+window cracking and giving way.... Iä ... ngai ... ygg....</p>
+
+<p>"I see it—coming here—hell-wind—titan blur—black wings—Yog-Sothoth
+save me—the three-lobed burning eye...."
+</p>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 73233 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>