# The Haunter of the Dark (B1 edition)

*H. P. Lovecraft*

## The Haunter of the Dark

(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.*

Careful investigators will not be quick to question the common belief about Robert Blake. Most people believe that lightning killed him. Or perhaps a deep nervous shock from an electrical discharge killed him. It is true that the window in front of him was not broken. But nature has shown that it can do many strange things. The expression on his face may easily have had some hidden cause in the muscles. That cause may have had nothing to do with anything he saw. The entries in his diary clearly came from a wild imagination. Certain local superstitions had excited it, and so had certain old matters he had found out. Then there are the strange conditions at the empty church on Federal Hill. A clever observer is quick to explain them as some kind of trickery, conscious or unconscious. In this view, Blake was secretly connected with at least some of it.

After all, the dead man was a writer and painter. He gave his whole life to myth, dream, terror and superstition. He was always eager to find strange, ghostly scenes and effects. He had stayed in the city once before. He had visited a strange old man who loved occult and forbidden knowledge as much as he did. That visit had ended amidst death and flame. Some unhealthy instinct must have drawn him back from his home in Milwaukee. Perhaps he knew the old stories, although the diary says that he did not. And perhaps his death stopped some huge hoax before it could grow. That hoax might one day have ended up in a book.

Some people, however, have studied and compared all this evidence. Several of them still hold less rational, less ordinary theories. They tend to believe much of Blake's diary just as it is written. They point to certain facts. The old church record is surely genuine. The disliked Starry Wisdom sect, with its unusual beliefs, really existed before 1877. A curious reporter called Edwin M. Lillibridge really disappeared in 1893, and this was recorded. And above all, there was the look on the young writer's face when he died. It was a look of terrible fear that had changed his whole face. One of these believers was pushed to wild extremes. He threw a strangely angled stone into the bay, together with its strangely decorated metal box. These things had been found in the old church steeple. It was the black steeple without windows. It was not the tower, where Blake's diary said those things were at first. This man was a respected physician with a taste for odd folklore. Officials and ordinary people criticized him widely. But he said that he had freed the earth from something too dangerous to stay on it.

The reader must judge between these two schools of opinion. The newspapers have given the solid details from a doubting point of view. They have left the rest to others. Others must draw the picture as Robert Blake saw it—or thought he saw it—or pretended to see it. Now let us study the diary closely, calmly and slowly. Let us summarize the dark chain of events as its chief actor saw them.

Young Blake came back to Providence in the winter of 1934-5. He took the upper floor of a fine old house in a grassy court off College Street. It stood on the top of the great hill to the east, near the Brown University campus. It was behind the marble John Hay Library. It was a cozy and fascinating place. It lay in a little garden oasis that felt like an old village. Here huge, friendly cats lay in the sun on top of a handy shed. The house was square and Georgian. It had a monitor roof, a classic doorway with fan carving, and small-paned windows. It had all the other marks of building work from the early Nineteenth Century. Inside there were six-paneled doors, wide floor-boards and a curved colonial staircase. There were white Adam-period mantels over the fireplaces. At the back, a set of rooms lay three steps below the rest of the house.

Blake's study was a large room on the southwest side. On one side it looked over the front garden. Its west windows looked out from the top of the hill. His desk stood in front of one of them. From there he had a splendid view of the wide roofs of the lower town. He could also see the mystical sunsets that flamed behind them. On the far horizon were the purple slopes of the open countryside. Against these, about two miles away, rose the ghostly hump of Federal Hill. It was crowded with roofs and steeples. Their distant outlines wavered mysteriously. They took strange forms as the smoke of the city rose and turned around them. Blake had a curious feeling about it. He felt that he was looking at some unknown world that was not of this earth. If he ever tried to find it and go there himself, it might disappear like a dream—or it might not.

Blake sent home for most of his books. He bought some antique furniture that suited his rooms. Then he settled down to write and paint. He lived alone and did the simple housework himself. His studio was in a north attic room. There the panes of the monitor roof gave excellent light. During that first winter he wrote five of his best-known short stories. They were *The Burrower Beneath*, *The Stairs in the Crypt*, *Shaggai*, *In the Vale of Pnath*, and *The Feaster from the Stars*. He also painted seven canvases. They showed nameless monsters that were not human, and deeply alien landscapes that did not belong to this earth.

At sunset he often sat at his desk and looked dreamily out to the west. He saw the dark towers of Memorial Hall just below him. He saw the bell tower of the Georgian court-house and the high pointed tops of the downtown buildings. And in the distance he saw that shimmering hill, crowned with steeples. Its unknown streets and its maze of pointed roofs excited his imagination strongly. His few local acquaintances told him that the far-off slope was a large Italian quarter. But most of the houses were left from older Yankee and Irish days. Now and then he pointed his field-glasses at that ghostly world beyond the curling smoke. It was a world he could not reach. He picked out single roofs and chimneys and steeples. He wondered about the strange mysteries that might be hidden inside them. Even through the glasses, Federal Hill seemed somehow alien and half like a fairy tale. It seemed linked to the unreal marvels of Blake's own stories and pictures. The feeling stayed long after the hill had faded into the violet twilight, with its lamps like stars. It stayed after the court-house floodlights and the red Industrial Trust beacon had blazed up. Their light made the night look strange and ugly.

Of all the distant objects on Federal Hill, one huge, dark church fascinated Blake most. It stood out very clearly at certain hours of the day. At sunset the great tower and tapering steeple rose black against the flaming sky. The church seemed to stand on especially high ground. Its dirty front rose boldly above the tangle of roofs and chimney-pots around it. So did the north side, which he saw at an angle. He could see the slope of its roof and the tops of great pointed windows. The church looked very grim and severe. It seemed to be built of stone. More than a century of smoke and storms had stained and worn it. As far as the glass could show, the style was the earliest, experimental kind of Gothic revival. This style came before the grand Upjohn period. It still kept some of the outlines and proportions of the Georgian age. Perhaps the church was built around 1810 or 1815.

As the months passed, Blake watched the far-off, unfriendly building with a strangely growing interest. The huge windows were never lit, so he knew that it must be empty. The longer he watched, the more his imagination worked. In the end he began to imagine curious things. He believed that a vague, strange air of loneliness and emptiness hung over the place. Even the pigeons and swallows seemed to avoid the edges of its roof, black with smoke. Around other towers and bell towers his glass showed great flocks of birds. But here they never rested. At least, that is what he thought and wrote down in his diary. He pointed the place out to several friends. But none of them had ever been on Federal Hill. None of them had the faintest idea what the church was or had been.

In the spring a deep restlessness took hold of Blake. He had begun his long-planned novel. It was based on the idea that the witch-cult had survived in Maine. But strangely, he could not make progress with it. More and more he sat at his west window. He looked at the distant hill and at the black, angry-looking steeple that the birds avoided. Then delicate leaves came out on the branches in the garden. The world was filled with a new beauty, but Blake only grew more restless. It was then that he first thought of crossing the city. He would climb that fabulous slope himself, up into the world of dream, wrapped in smoke.

Late in April, Blake made his first trip into the unknown. It was just before Walpurgis Night, a time full of ancient shadows. He walked slowly through the endless downtown streets and the grim, decayed squares beyond them. At last he came to an avenue that climbed upward. It had steps worn by a century of feet, and old porches with Doric columns, bent with age. There were small round towers with cloudy windows on the roofs. He felt that this avenue must lead up to the world beyond the mists. He had known that world so long, but he had never been able to reach it. There were dirty blue-and-white street signs which meant nothing to him. Soon he noticed the strange, dark faces of the crowds that drifted past. He saw foreign signs over curious shops in old brown buildings. He could not find any of the things he had seen from far away. Once more he half imagined that the Federal Hill of that distant view was a dream-world. No living human feet would ever walk in it.

Now and then a battered church front or a broken old steeple came into sight. But it was never the blackened building that he was looking for. He asked a shopkeeper about a great stone church. The man smiled and shook his head, although he spoke English well. As Blake climbed higher, the area seemed stranger and stranger. Confusing mazes of dark brown alleys led away to the south without end. He crossed two or three broad avenues. Once he thought he saw a familiar tower. Again he asked a merchant about the big stone church. This time he could have sworn that the man only pretended not to know. 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 steeple stood out against the cloudy sky on his left. It rose above the rows of brown roofs along the tangled alleys to the south. Blake knew at once what it was. He went quickly toward it through the dirty lanes of bare earth that climbed from the avenue. Twice he lost his way. But somehow he did not dare to ask anyone. Old men and housewives sat on their door-steps. Children shouted and played in the mud of the shadowy lanes. He asked none of them.

At last he saw the tower clearly against the southwest sky. A huge stone mass rose darkly at the end of an alley. Soon he stood in a windy open square with old-fashioned cobblestones. On the far side was a high bank wall. This was the end of his search. The wall held up a wide plateau with iron railings and weeds. It was a separate, smaller world, raised a full six feet above the streets around it. On it stood a grim, giant building. Blake saw it now from a new angle, but there was no doubt about it. It was the same church.

The empty church was in very bad condition. Some of the high stone supports along its walls had fallen. Several delicate carved stones from the top of the building lay half lost among the brown, neglected weeds and grasses. Most of the sooty Gothic windows were not broken. But many of the stone bars between the panes were missing. Blake wondered how the darkly painted panes had survived so well. He knew what small boys all over the world are like. The huge doors were whole and tightly closed. A rusty iron fence ran around the top of the bank wall and closed in the grounds completely. Its gate stood at the top of a flight of steps from the square. He could see that it was padlocked. The path from the gate to the building was completely overgrown. Emptiness and decay hung over the place like a dark cloth. Blake looked at the roof edges with no birds and the black walls with no ivy. He felt something faintly sinister there that he could not put into words.

There were very few people in the square. But Blake saw a policeman at the north end and went to ask him about the church. He was a big, healthy Irishman. Oddly, he would do little more than make the sign of the cross. He said quietly that people never spoke of that building. When Blake pressed him, he spoke very quickly. He said that the Italian priests warned everybody against it. They swore that a terrible evil had once lived there and left its mark. He himself had heard dark whispers about it from his father. His father remembered certain sounds and rumors from his own boyhood.

There had been a bad sect there in the ould days, the policeman said. It was 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. But there were some who said that light alone could do it. If Father O'Malley were alive, there would be many a thing he could tell. But now there was nothing to do but leave it alone. It hurt nobody now. The people who owned it were dead or far away. They had run away like rats after the threatening talk in '77. That was when people began to notice how folks disappeared now and then in the neighborhood. Some day the city would step in and take the property, because there were no heirs. But little good would come of anybody touching it. It was better to leave it alone for the years to knock down. Otherwise things might be stirred up that ought to rest forever in their black abyss.

After the policeman had gone, Blake stood staring at the dark church with its steeple. It excited him to find that others thought the building as sinister as he did. He wondered what grain of truth might lie behind the old tales the bluecoat had repeated. Probably they were only legends, born from the evil look of the place. But even so, they were like one of his own stories coming strangely to life.

The afternoon sun came out from behind the clouds as they broke up. But it seemed unable to light up the stained, sooty walls of the old temple on its high plateau. It was odd that the green of spring had not touched the brown, withered plants in the raised, fenced yard. Blake found himself moving nearer to the raised area. He studied the bank wall and the rusty fence, looking for a way in. There was a terrible pull about the blackened building, and he could not resist it. The fence had no opening near the steps. But around on the north side some bars were missing. He could go up the steps and walk along the narrow ledge outside the fence to the gap. If the people feared the place so wildly, nobody would try to stop him.

He was up on the bank and almost inside the fence before anyone noticed him. Then he looked down. The few people in the square were moving away from him. They were making the same sign with their right hands that the merchant in the avenue had made. Several windows were slammed shut. A fat woman ran out into the street. She pulled some small children inside a weak old house with no paint. The gap in the fence was very easy to pass through. Soon Blake was walking slowly through the rotting, tangled plants of the empty yard. Here and there the worn remains of a gravestone told him that people had once been buried in this field. But he saw that this must have been very long ago. Now that he was close to the church, its great size pressed heavily on him. But he fought down this feeling. He went up to the front and tried the three great doors. All of them were firmly locked. So he began to walk around the huge building. He was looking for some smaller opening that was easier to get through. Even then he was not sure that he wanted to enter that empty, shadowy place. Yet its strangeness pulled him on, as if he had no choice.

At the back there was an open cellar window with nothing to guard it. It gave him the opening he needed. Blake looked in. He saw an underground gulf of cobwebs and dust. It was faintly lit by the rays of the western sun that came in through the dirt. He saw rubbish, old barrels, and broken boxes and furniture of many kinds. But a thick cover of dust lay over everything and softened all the sharp outlines. The rusty remains of a hot-air furnace were there too. They showed that the building had been used and kept in good order until mid-Victorian times.

Almost without deciding to do it, Blake crawled through the window. He let himself down to the concrete floor, which was covered with dust and rubbish. The vaulted cellar was huge, and it had no walls inside it. In a corner far to the right, in deep shadow, he saw a black archway. It clearly led upstairs. He felt strangely weighed down now that he was really inside the great ghostly building. But he kept the feeling under control as he carefully looked around. In the dust he found a barrel that was still whole. He rolled it over to the open window, so that he could get out again later. Then he took a deep breath. He crossed the wide space, hung with cobwebs, toward the arch. The dust was everywhere, and it half choked him. Ghostly threads of cobweb covered him. He reached the worn stone steps and began to climb them into the darkness. He had no light, so he felt his way carefully with his hands. After a sharp turn he felt a closed door ahead. He felt around for a while and found its ancient handle. The door opened inward. Beyond it he saw a dimly lit corridor. Its walls had wooden panels, eaten by worms.

Once he was on the ground floor, Blake began to explore quickly. All the inner doors were unlocked, so he could go freely from room to room. The huge nave seemed almost like a place from another world. Drifts and mountains of dust lay over the box-like church seats, the altar, the hour-glass pulpit and the sounding-board. Giant ropes of cobweb stretched between the pointed arches of the gallery. They wound around the clustered Gothic columns. Over all this silent emptiness played a horrible gray light, the color of lead. It came from the late afternoon sun. Its rays came through the strange, half-blackened panes of the great windows in the apse.

The paintings on those windows were so covered in soot that Blake could hardly make out what they showed. But from the little he could see, he did not like them. Most of the designs were the usual ones. But he knew a lot about little-known symbols, and he understood much about some of the ancient patterns. A few saints were shown, and their expressions seemed clearly wrong for saints. One of the windows seemed to show only a dark space with spirals of strange light scattered in it. Blake turned away from the windows. Then he noticed the cross above the altar, covered in cobwebs. It was not the ordinary kind. It looked like the ancient ankh, or crux ansata, of shadowy Egypt.

In a vestry room at the back, beside the apse, Blake found a rotting desk. There were also shelves of mildewed books, falling apart, that reached up to the ceiling. Here, for the first time, he felt a real shock of horror. The titles of those books told him a great deal. They were the black, forbidden books that most sane people have never even heard of. Or they have heard of them only in secret, frightened whispers. These banned and feared books held doubtful secrets and very old formulas. These secrets had come down the stream of time from the days of man's youth. Some came from the dim, fabulous days before man even existed. He had read many of them himself. There was a Latin version of the hated *Necronomicon*, and the sinister *Liber Ivonis*. There was the infamous *Cultes des Goules* of Comte d'Erlette, and the *Unaussprechlichen Kulten* of von Junzt. And there was old Ludvig Prinn's hellish *De Vermis Mysteriis*. But there were others that he knew only by name, or not at all. There were the *Pnakotic Manuscripts* and the *Book of Dzyan*. There was an old book, falling apart, in letters that he could not identify at all. Yet it had certain symbols and diagrams that a student of the occult would recognize with fear. Clearly, the old local rumors had not lied. This place had once been the home of an evil older than mankind and wider than the known universe.

In the ruined desk there was a small record-book bound in leather. It was filled with entries in some strange secret code. The handwriting used the common old symbols that astronomy still uses today. Long ago, alchemy, astrology and other doubtful arts used them too. There were the signs of the sun, moon and planets, of aspects, and of the zodiac. Here they filled solid pages of text. The text was divided into sections and paragraphs. This suggested that each symbol stood for a letter of the alphabet.

Blake hoped to solve the code later, so he took the book away in his coat pocket. Many of the great old books on the shelves fascinated him more than he could say. He felt tempted to borrow them at some later time. He wondered how they could have stayed untouched for so long. Was he the first to conquer the fear that held everyone in its grip? For nearly sixty years that fear had kept all visitors away from this empty place.

Now Blake had explored the ground floor thoroughly. He made his way again through the dust of the ghostly nave to the entrance hall at the front. There he had seen a door and a staircase. They probably led up to the blackened tower and steeple, which he had known so long from far away. The climb was a choking experience. Dust lay thick, and the spiders had done their worst in this narrow space. The staircase was a spiral with high, narrow wooden steps. Now and then Blake passed a cloudy window, high above the city. He had seen no bell-ropes below. But he still expected to find a bell, or a set of bells, in the tower. He had studied its narrow, louver-boarded lancet windows so often with his field-glass. Here he was disappointed. When he reached the top of the stairs, he found no bells in the tower room. It had clearly been used for very different purposes.

The room was about fifteen feet square. Four lancet windows, one on each side, gave it a faint light. They had glass inside their screens of rotten louver-boards. Tight, dark screens had also been fitted to them, but these had now mostly decayed. In the center of the dusty floor stood a strangely angled stone pillar. It was about four feet high and about two feet across. Each side was covered with strange, roughly cut hieroglyphs that he could not recognize at all. On this pillar stood a metal box with an oddly uneven shape. Its lid was open and thrown back. Inside, under the deep dust of many years, there seemed to be an object about four inches across. It looked egg-shaped, or roughly round. Around the pillar, in a rough circle, stood seven high-backed Gothic chairs, still mostly whole. Behind them, along the dark-paneled walls, stood seven giant images of old, black-painted plaster that was falling apart. More than anything else, they looked like the mysterious huge stone statues of Easter Island. In one corner of the room, among the cobwebs, a ladder was built into the wall. It led up to the closed trap-door of the windowless steeple above.

As Blake's eyes grew used to the weak light, he noticed strange bas-reliefs on the open box. The box was made of a yellowish metal. He went closer and tried to clear the dust away with his hands and his handkerchief. He saw that the figures were like monsters, and completely alien. They showed beings which seemed to be alive. But they were not like any known form of life that had ever developed on this planet. The four-inch object only seemed to be a sphere. In fact it was a nearly black polyhedron with red stripes and many irregular flat surfaces. It was either a very remarkable crystal of some kind, or a made object. Perhaps someone had carved it from some mineral and polished it highly. It did not touch the bottom of the box. A metal band went around its middle and held it up in the air. Seven strangely designed supports reached out sideways from the band. They went to the corners of the box's inner wall, near the top. Now that the stone was uncovered, it fascinated Blake in an almost alarming way. He could hardly take his eyes off it. He looked at its shining surfaces, and he almost imagined that it was transparent. Inside it there seemed to be half-formed worlds of wonder. Pictures floated into his mind. He saw alien globes with great stone towers. He saw other globes with giant mountains and no sign of life. And he saw still more distant spaces. There, only a stirring in vague blackness showed that a mind and a will were present.

When he did look away, he noticed a rather strange mound of dust in the far corner. It was near the ladder to the steeple. He could not say why it caught his attention. But something in its shape sent a message to his unconscious mind. He made his way toward it, brushing aside the hanging cobwebs as he went. Slowly he began to see something grim about it. With his hand and handkerchief he soon uncovered the truth. Blake caught his breath with a confusing mixture of feelings. It was a human skeleton, and it must have been there for a very long time. The clothes were in rags. But some buttons and pieces of cloth showed that it had been a man's gray suit. There were other clues too. There were shoes, small metal pieces from the clothes, and huge buttons for round cuffs. There was a tie-pin of an old-fashioned kind. There was a reporter's badge with the name of the old *Providence Telegram*. And there was an old leather wallet that was falling apart. Blake examined the wallet carefully. Inside it he found several old-style banknotes and a celluloid advertising calendar for 1893. There were some cards with the name "Edwin M. Lillibridge." And there was a paper covered with notes in pencil.

Much of what was on this paper was hard to understand. Blake read it carefully at the dim west window. Its broken text included phrases like these:

"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. And they say the Haunter of the Dark tells them secrets in some way."

"Story of Orrin B. Eddy 1857. They call it up by looking hard at the crystal, & have a secret language of their own."

"200 or more in cong. 1863, not counting men at front."

"Irish boys attack 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 visits 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 find out truth of report that no human being has entered church since 1877."

"Ask Lanigan for photograph of place taken 1851...."

Blake put the paper back in the wallet and put the wallet in his coat. Then he turned and looked down at the skeleton in the dust. The meaning of the notes was clear. There could be no doubt about this man. He had come to the empty building forty-two years before, looking for a newspaper sensation. Nobody else had been brave enough to try it. Perhaps nobody else had known of his plan—who could tell? But he had never returned to his newspaper. Had a fear that he had bravely held down risen up and overcome him? Had it brought on sudden heart failure? Blake bent over the shining bones and noted their strange condition. Some of them were badly scattered. A few seemed oddly *dissolved* at the ends. Others were strangely yellowed, with vague signs of charring. This charring also reached some of the pieces of clothing. The skull was in a very strange state. It was stained yellow, and it had a burnt hole in the top. It looked as if some powerful acid had eaten through the solid bone. What had happened to the skeleton during its four decades of silent burial here? Blake could not imagine.

Before he realized it, he was looking at the stone again. He let its curious power call up a cloudy procession of pictures in his mind. He saw processions of figures in robes and hoods, whose outlines were not human. He looked at endless miles of desert, lined with huge carved stones that reached to the sky. He saw towers and walls in dark depths under the sea. He saw turning circles in space. There, small pieces of black mist floated before a thin, shimmering, cold purple fog. And beyond all else he glimpsed an endless gulf of pure darkness. There, solid and half-solid forms could be known only by their windy stirrings. Cloudy patterns of force seemed to put order on the chaos. They seemed to offer a key to all the puzzles and secrets of the worlds we know.

Then all at once the spell was broken. An uncertain panic came over him and ate at him. Blake choked and turned away from the stone. He was aware of some shapeless alien presence close to him. It was watching him with horrible attention. He felt caught up with something. It was something which was not in the stone, but which had looked through it at him. It would follow him without end. And it would know him with a kind of knowing that was not physical sight. Plainly, the place was getting on his nerves. That was natural, after his horrible find. The light was fading, too. He had no lamp with him, so he knew he would have to leave soon.

It was then, in the growing twilight, that he thought he saw a faint light in the strangely angled stone. He had tried to look away from it. But some strange force that he did not understand drew his eyes back. Was there a soft glow of radio-activity about the thing? What had the dead man's notes said about a *Shining Trapezohedron*? What, anyway, was this abandoned den of cosmic evil? What had been done here? And what might still be hiding in the shadows that the birds avoided? Now a faint bad smell seemed to have risen somewhere close by. But he could not see where it came from. Blake seized the lid of the box, which had stood open for so long. He snapped it shut. It moved easily on its alien hinges. It closed completely over the stone, which was now clearly glowing.

At the sharp click of the closing lid, a soft stirring sound seemed to come from above. It came from the eternal blackness of the steeple, beyond the trap-door. Rats, without question. They were the only living things that had shown themselves in this cursed building since he came in. And yet that stirring in the steeple frightened him horribly. He rushed almost wildly down the spiral stairs and across the horrible nave. He ran into the vaulted cellar and out into the empty square, where it was getting dark. Then he ran down through the crowded, fear-haunted alleys and avenues of Federal Hill. He went on toward the sane central streets and the home-like brick sidewalks of the college district.

During the days that followed, Blake told nobody about his trip. Instead, he read a great deal in certain books. He studied many years of old newspaper files downtown. And he worked feverishly at the code in the leather book from the vestry room full of cobwebs. He soon saw that the code was not a simple one. He worked at it for a long time. In the end he felt sure that its language could not be English, Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian or German. Clearly he would have to draw on the deepest wells of his strange learning.

Every evening the old wish to look west came back. He saw the black steeple as in the past, among the crowded roofs of a distant, half-fabulous world. But now it held a new note of terror for him. He knew about the evil, secret knowledge that it hid. And with this knowledge his imagination ran wild in strange new ways. The birds of spring were coming back. He watched their flights at sunset. He imagined that they avoided the thin, lonely steeple more than ever before. When a flock came near it, he thought, the birds would turn and scatter in panic and confusion. And he could guess at their wild twittering, which did not reach him across the miles between.

It was in June that Blake's diary told of his victory over the code. He found that the text was in the dark Aklo language. Certain evil cults of ancient times had used it. Blake knew it a little from earlier research. The diary says strangely little about what Blake read in the code. But he was clearly awed and disturbed by what he found. There are references to a Haunter of the Dark. It was woken by looking deep into the Shining Trapezohedron. And there are mad guesses about the black gulfs of chaos from which it was called. The being is described as holding all knowledge and demanding terrible sacrifices. Some of Blake's entries show a fear that the thing might go out and walk about. He seemed to believe that it had been summoned. But he adds that the street-lights form a wall which it cannot cross.

He often speaks of the Shining Trapezohedron. He calls it a window on all time and space. He traces its history back to the days when it was made on dark Yuggoth. That was before the Old Ones ever brought it to earth. The crinoid things of Antarctica treasured it and placed it in its curious box. The serpent-men of Valusia saved it from their ruins. Ages later, in Lemuria, the first human beings looked into it. It crossed strange lands and stranger seas, and it sank with Atlantis. Then a Minoan fisher caught it in his net. He sold it to dark-skinned merchants from shadowy Khem. The Pharaoh Nephren-Ka built a temple around it with a windowless crypt. And he did something that caused his name to be removed from all monuments and records. Then the stone slept in the ruins of that evil temple. The priests and the new Pharaoh had destroyed it. The stone lay there until the digger's spade brought it out once more, to curse mankind.

Early in July the newspapers oddly add to Blake's entries. But they do it so briefly and casually that only the diary has made people notice them. It seems that a new fear had been growing on Federal Hill. It had begun when a stranger entered the dreaded church. The Italians whispered of unusual stirrings, bumpings and scrapings in the dark windowless steeple. They called on their priests to drive out a being which haunted their dreams. Something, they said, was always watching at a door. It was waiting to see if it was dark enough to come out. The newspaper items mentioned the old local superstitions. But they did not tell much about the earlier history of the horror. It was obvious that the young reporters of today are no antiquarians. When Blake wrote about these things in his diary, he showed a curious kind of regret. He talks of his duty to bury the Shining Trapezohedron. He also talks of driving away what he had called up. He would do it by letting daylight into the hideous steeple. At the same time, however, he shows how dangerously fascinated he is. He admits an unhealthy longing, which fills even his dreams. He longs to visit the cursed tower again. He wants to look once more into the cosmic secrets of the glowing stone.

Then something in the *Journal* on the morning of July 17 filled Blake with a real fever of horror. It was only another of the half-funny items about the restlessness on Federal Hill. But to Blake it was somehow very terrible indeed. In the night a thunderstorm had put the city's lighting system out of action for a full hour. In that black time the Italians had nearly gone mad with fear. The people who lived near the dreaded church swore that the thing in the steeple had come out. It had used the absence of the street lamps to go down into the main part of the church. There it had flopped and bumped around in a sticky, utterly dreadful way. Toward the end it had bumped up to the tower, and there were sounds of breaking glass. It could go wherever the darkness reached. But light would always make it flee.

When the power came on again, there had been a shocking commotion in the tower. Even the weak light that came through the dirty, louver-boarded windows was too much for the thing. It had bumped and slithered up into its dark steeple just in time. A long dose of light would have sent it back into the abyss. That was the abyss from which the crazy stranger had called it. During the dark hour, praying crowds had gathered round the church in the rain. They held lighted candles, and lamps that they had somehow shielded with folded papers and umbrellas. It was a guard of light to save the city from the nightmare that walks in darkness. Once, said those nearest the church, the outer door had shaken and banged horribly.

But even this was not the worst. That evening Blake read in the *Bulletin* what the reporters had found. At last two of them had seen the amusing news value of the scare. They ignored the wild, excited crowds of Italians and tried the doors, but they could not open them. So they crawled into the church through the cellar window. They found the dust of the entrance hall and of the ghostly nave plowed up in a strange way. Bits of rotten cushions and satin covers from the church seats lay scattered curiously around. There was a bad smell everywhere. Here and there were bits of yellow stain and patches of what looked like charring. They opened the door to the tower. They stopped for a moment, because they thought they heard a scraping sound above. Then they found that the narrow spiral stairs had been roughly wiped clean.

The tower room itself was half swept in the same way. The reporters wrote about the heptagonal stone pillar, the overturned Gothic chairs, and the strange plaster images. But strangely enough, they did not mention the metal box or the old, damaged skeleton. Blake was disturbed by the hints of stains, charring and bad smells. But one last detail disturbed him most of all. It explained the sound of breaking glass. Every one of the tower's lancet windows was broken. Two of them had been darkened in a rough and quick way. Satin covers from the church seats and horsehair from cushions had been stuffed in there. They filled the spaces between the louver-boards outside, which were set at an angle. More bits of satin and bunches of horsehair lay scattered over the newly swept floor. It was as if someone had been interrupted while making the tower completely black again. It had been black like that in the old days, when it was tightly curtained.

Yellowish stains and charred patches were found on the ladder to the windowless steeple. A reporter climbed up and opened the trap-door, which slid sideways. He pointed a weak flashlight beam into the black space, which had a strange, bad smell. He saw nothing but darkness, and a mixed heap of shapeless fragments near the opening. The verdict, of course, was charlatanry. Somebody had played a joke on the superstitious people of the hill. Or else some person with wild beliefs had tried to make their fears stronger, for their own supposed good. Or perhaps some of the younger, more worldly people there had played a clever hoax on the outside world. There was a funny result when the police sent an officer to check the reports. Three men, one after another, found ways to avoid the job. The fourth went very unwillingly. He came back very soon, and he added nothing to the reporters' account.

From this point on, Blake's diary shows a rising tide of creeping horror and nervous fear. He blames himself for not doing something. He wildly imagines what would happen if the electricity failed again. It has been confirmed that he telephoned the electric light company on three occasions, during thunderstorms. Each time he was wild with fear. He asked them to take desperate steps so that the power would not fail. Now and then his entries show worry about the reporters. They had explored the shadowy tower room, but they had not found the metal box and stone. Nor had they found the strangely damaged old skeleton. He supposed that these things had been taken away. But where, and by whom or what, he could only guess. His worst fears, however, were about himself. He felt that a kind of evil rapport existed between his mind and the hidden horror in the distant steeple. That was the terrible thing of night that he had so foolishly called out of the farthest black spaces. He seemed to feel a constant pulling at his will. Visitors from that time remember how he sat at his desk, lost in thought. He would stare out of the west window at that far-off hill with its many steeples. It lay beyond the smoke of the city, which rose and turned. His entries return again and again to certain terrible dreams. They tell how the evil rapport grew stronger in his sleep. One night, the diary says, he woke up and found himself fully dressed and outdoors. He was walking automatically down College Hill toward the west. Again and again he writes that the thing in the steeple knows where to find him.

The week after July 30 is remembered as the time of Blake's partial breakdown. He did not get dressed, and he ordered all his food by telephone. Visitors noticed the cords that he kept near his bed. He explained that sleep-walking had forced him to tie his ankles every night. He used knots which would probably hold. If they did not hold, the work of untying them would wake him up.

In his diary he told of the horrible experience that had brought on the breakdown. He had gone to bed on the night of the 30th. Then suddenly he found himself feeling his way about in an almost black space. All he could see were short, faint, horizontal streaks of bluish light. But he could smell an overpowering bad smell. And he could hear a strange mixture of soft, secret sounds above him. Whenever he moved, he tripped over something. And at each noise there came a sort of answering sound from above. It was a vague stirring, mixed with the careful sliding of wood on wood.

Once his searching hands touched a stone pillar with an empty top. Later he found himself holding on to the rungs of a ladder built into the wall. He was feeling his uncertain way upward toward some place where the smell was stronger. There, a hot, burning blast beat down against him. Before his eyes a kaleidoscope of ghostly images played. Now and then they all dissolved into the picture of a vast, bottomless abyss of night. In it, suns and worlds of an even deeper blackness turned round and round. He thought of the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos. At its center lies the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, spread out wide. His flopping crowd of mindless, shapeless dancers is all around him. The thin, never-changing piping of a demon's flute keeps him calm and sleepy. The flute is held in nameless paws.

Then a sharp bang from the outside world broke through his dream-like state. It woke him to the horror of where he was, which was too terrible for words. He never knew what the noise was. Perhaps it was a late firework, like those heard all summer on Federal Hill. The people there set them off to honor their various patron saints. Or they honored the saints of their home villages in Italy. In any case, he screamed aloud and dropped wildly from the ladder. He stumbled blindly across the almost lightless room around him, over the things on its floor.

He knew at once where he was. He rushed recklessly down the narrow spiral staircase, tripping and bruising himself at every turn. Then came a nightmare flight. He ran through a vast nave full of cobwebs, whose ghostly arches reached up into leering shadows. He made his way blindly through a cellar full of rubbish. He climbed out into the air and the street-lights outside. Then he raced madly down a ghostly hill of gibbering gables. He crossed a grim, silent city of tall black towers. And he climbed the steep eastern slope to his own old door.

When he woke up in the morning, he was lying on his study floor, fully dressed. Dirt and cobwebs covered him. Every inch of his body felt sore and bruised. When he looked in the mirror, he saw that his hair was badly burnt. A trace of a strange, evil smell seemed to cling to the upper part of his outer clothes. It was then that his nerves broke down. After that he lay about in a dressing-gown, exhausted. He did little but stare from his west window and shiver at any threat of thunder. And he made wild entries in his diary.

The great storm broke just before midnight on August 8th. Lightning struck again and again in all parts of the city. Two remarkable fireballs were reported. The rain came down in floods, and endless crashes of thunder kept thousands of people awake. Blake was utterly wild with fear for the lighting system. Around one a.m. he tried to telephone the company. But by that time the telephone service had been cut off for a while, for safety. He recorded everything in his diary. His large, nervous and often unreadable handwriting tells its own story. It tells of growing wild panic and despair, and of entries written blindly in the dark.

He had to keep the house dark so that he could see out of the window. It seems that he spent most of his time at his desk. He peered anxiously through the rain across the shining miles of downtown roofs. He was looking at the group of distant lights that marked Federal Hill. Now and then he made a clumsy entry in his diary. Separate phrases are found scattered down two of the pages. Among them are "The lights must not go"; "It knows where I am"; and "I must destroy it". There is also "It is calling to me, but perhaps it means no injury this time".

Then the lights went out all over the city. According to power-house records, this happened at 2:12 a.m. But Blake's diary gives no sign of the time. The entry is only, "Lights out—God help me." On Federal Hill there were watchers as anxious as he was. Groups of rain-soaked men walked around the square and the alleys near the evil church. They carried candles shaded by umbrellas, electric flashlights and oil lanterns. They carried crucifixes, and mysterious charms of the many kinds common in southern Italy. They blessed each flash of lightning. Then the storm changed, and the flashes grew fewer and finally stopped altogether. When that happened, the men made secret signs of fear with their right hands. A rising wind blew out most of the candles, so that the scene grew threateningly dark. Someone woke Father Merluzzo of Spirito Santo Church. He went quickly to the gloomy square to say whatever helpful words he could. There could be no doubt at all about the restless, strange sounds in the blackened tower.

For what happened at 2:35, we have the words of several witnesses. One is the priest, a young, intelligent and well-educated person. Another is Patrolman William J. Monahan of the Central Station. He is an officer who can be trusted completely. He had stopped at that part of his beat to look at the crowd. And there are most of the seventy-eight men who had gathered around the church's high bank wall. The most important are those in the square, where the east front of the church could be seen. Of course, nothing happened that can be proved to be outside the order of nature. There are many possible causes of such an event. Nobody can speak with certainty about the hidden chemical processes in such a building. The building was vast, ancient and badly aired. It had stood empty for a long time, and it held all kinds of things. Poisonous vapors—fires that start by themselves—pressure of gases from long decay—any of countless things might be responsible. And then, of course, conscious charlatanry can by no means be ruled out. The event itself was really quite simple. It took less than three minutes of actual time. Father Merluzzo, always a precise man, looked at his watch again and again.

It began with a clear swelling of the dull sounds of movement inside the black tower. For some time a faint breath of strange, evil smells had been coming from the church. Now the smells had become strong and offensive. Then at last there was a sound of wood breaking into pieces. A large, heavy object crashed down into the yard below the dark, angry-looking east front. Now that the candles would not burn, nobody could see the tower. But as the object came near the ground, the people knew what it was. It was the smoke-blackened louver-boarding of the tower's east window.

At once an utterly unbearable smell poured down from the unseen heights. It choked and sickened the trembling watchers. Those in the square were almost knocked to the ground. At the same time the air trembled, as if with the beating of wings. A sudden wind blew toward the east, more violent than any blast before it. It snatched off the hats of the crowd and twisted their dripping umbrellas. Nothing clear could be seen in the night without candles. But some people who were looking up thought they glimpsed something. It was a great spreading blur of denser blackness against the inky sky. It was something like a shapeless cloud of smoke. And it shot toward the east as fast as a meteor.

That was all. The watchers were half numb with fear, awe and discomfort. They hardly knew what to do, or whether to do anything at all. They did not know what had happened, so they did not stop their watch. A moment later they sent up a prayer. A sharp flash of late lightning tore across the flooded sky, followed by an ear-splitting crash. Half an hour later the rain stopped. Fifteen minutes after that the street lights came on again. The tired, soaked watchers went back to their homes with relief.

The next day's papers mentioned these things only briefly, together with the general storm reports. It seems that the great lightning flash and loud explosion after the Federal Hill event were even greater farther east. There, a burst of the same strange smell was also noticed. The effect was strongest over College Hill. There the crash woke up all the sleeping people and led to a confused round of guesses. Of those already awake, only a few saw the strange blaze of light near the top of the hill. Only a few noticed the unexplained upward rush of air. It almost stripped the leaves from the trees and damaged the plants in the gardens. People agreed that the single, sudden lightning-bolt must have struck somewhere in this neighborhood. But afterward no trace of where it struck could be found. A youth in the Tau Omega fraternity house thought he saw something in the air as the first flash burst. It was a strange and hideous mass of smoke. But nobody has confirmed what he saw. All of the few observers, however, agree about the violent gust from the west. They agree about the flood of unbearable smell that came before the late stroke of lightning. And they all speak in the same way of the brief burned smell after it.

These points were discussed very carefully, because they were probably connected with the death of Robert Blake. Students in the Psi Delta house could see into Blake's study from their upper back windows. On the morning of the 9th they noticed the blurred white face at the west window. They wondered what was wrong with its expression. That evening they saw the same face in the same position. Then they felt worried, and they watched for the lights to come on in his apartment. Later they rang the bell of the dark flat. Finally they had a policeman force the door.

The stiff body sat bolt upright at the desk by the window. The people who came in saw the glassy eyes, which stood out from the head. They saw the marks of extreme, violent fear on the twisted face. Sick and dismayed, they turned away. Soon afterward the coroner's physician examined the body. The window was unbroken. Even so, he reported electrical shock, or nervous strain caused by an electrical discharge, as the cause of death. He ignored the hideous expression completely. He thought it was quite a likely result of the deep shock in such a person. Blake, he believed, had an abnormal imagination, and emotions that were not steady. He judged this from the books, paintings and manuscripts found in the apartment. He also judged it from the entries written blindly in the diary on the desk. Blake had gone on with his wild notes to the very end. The pencil, with its point broken, was found in his right hand. His fingers were clutching it in a tight cramp.

The entries made after the lights failed were badly broken up. Only parts of them could be read. From them, certain investigators have drawn conclusions that differ greatly from the official verdict, which only accepts physical causes. But such ideas have little chance of being believed by careful, conservative people. The case of these imaginative thinkers has not been helped by superstitious Doctor Dexter. He threw the curious box and angled stone into the deepest channel of Narragansett Bay. The stone certainly gave off its own light when it was seen in the black windowless steeple. That was where it had been found. Most people explain those last wild notes by Blake's excessive imagination and nervous imbalance. These were made worse by his knowledge of the evil old cult, whose startling traces he had found. 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...."

### Glossary

- **yawning**: opening wide, like a huge mouth
- **unheeded**: with nobody noticing or caring
- **luster**: shine, brightness
- **steeple**: the tall pointed top of a church tower; here it is black and has no windows
- **nave**: the long main hall of a church, where people sit
- **lancet windows**: tall, narrow windows with a pointed top
- **louver-boards**: wooden boards set at an angle in a window; they let air in but keep rain and light out
- **field-glasses**: binoculars, a tool for seeing things far away
- **monitor roof**: a raised part of a roof with windows in its sides
- **exorcise**: to drive out an evil spirit
- **hieroglyphs**: picture-signs used as writing
- **bas-reliefs**: pictures carved so that they stand out a little from a flat surface
- **polyhedron**: a solid shape with many flat sides
- **superstition**: a belief in magic, ghosts or luck that has no real reason
- **occult**: secret magic and hidden knowledge about spirits and other worlds
- **cobweb**: a net of thin threads made by a spider; old cobwebs are full of dust
- **apse**: the round end of a church, behind the altar
- **abyss**: a deep, dark hole that seems to have no bottom
- **vestrymen**: men who help to run a church
- **radio-activity**: a dangerous kind of energy that some materials give off
- **Aklo**: a secret ancient language used by evil cults
- **antiquarians**: people who study old things and local history
- **heptagonal**: having seven sides
- **charlatanry**: dishonest tricks to fool people
- **rapport**: a close link or connection between two minds
- **kaleidoscope**: a quickly changing pattern of many colors and shapes
- **gibbering gables**: the pointed tops of house roofs, which seemed to chatter madly at him
- **coroner's physician**: the official doctor who finds out why a person died suddenly
- **avatar**: a form that a god takes to appear in the world
- **retinal impression**: a picture that stays in your eyes for a moment after a bright flash
- **transfigured**: completely changed
- **hinges**: the metal joints on which a door or a lid turns when it opens and closes
- **superstitious**: believing in magic, ghosts or luck without a real reason