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.
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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.