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Title: The haunter of the dark
Author: H. P. Lovecraft
Release date: March 22, 2024 [eBook #73233]
Language: English
Original publication: Indianapolis, IN: Popular Fiction Publishing Company, 1936
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAUNTER OF THE DARK ***
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...."
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