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Other documents randomly have
different content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The haunter
of the dark
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

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.

"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