(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 lustre 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 shewn 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 sceptical 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 summarise 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 cosy 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-panelled 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
outspread 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 outspread 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 facade, 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 shew, 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 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 aeon-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 facade 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 doorsteps,
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 windswept 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 rumours 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 neighbourhood. 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 forever 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 facade. 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 shewed 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-strown 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 fibres, 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 panelling.

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, hourglass 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 shew 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 formulae 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 recognisable to the occult student. Clearly,
the lingering local rumours 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 ploughed 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 centre 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 unrecognisable 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-panelled 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 centre, 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. Ploughing 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 grey 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 pocketbook. 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 pencilled 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 archaeological 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 shews
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 pocketbook 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.

Before he realised 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 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 foetor 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 endeavour 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 shew 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 aeons
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 paper 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 ploughed up in a singular way, with bits of rotted
cushions and satin pew-linings scattered curiously around. There
was a bad odour 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 odours—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 foetid 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 shews 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 shew 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 of 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 labour 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 foetor
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 phantasmal 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 centre 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 daemoniac
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 odour 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
1 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 facade 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 vapours—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 odours 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
facade. The tower was invisible now that the candles would not
burn, but as the object neared the ground the people knew that it
was the smoke-grimed louver-boarding of that tower’s east
window.

Immediately afterward an utterly unbearable
foetor welled forth from the unseen heights, choking and sickening
the trembling watchers, and almost prostrating those in the square.
At the same time the air trembled with a vibration as of flapping
wings, and a sudden east-blowing wind more violent than any
previous blast snatched off the hats and wrenched the dripping
umbrellas of the crowd. Nothing definite could be seen in the
candleless night, though some upward-looking spectators thought
they glimpsed a great spreading blur of denser blackness against
the inky sky—something like a formless cloud of smoke that shot
with meteor-like speed toward the east.

That was all. The watchers were half numbed
with fright, awe, and discomfort, and scarcely knew what to do, or
whether to do anything at all. Not knowing what had happened, they
did not relax their vigil; and a moment later they sent up a prayer
as a sharp flash of belated lightning, followed by an earsplitting
crash of sound, rent the flooded heavens. Half an hour later the
rain stopped, and in fifteen minutes more the street-lights sprang
on again, sending the weary, bedraggled watchers relievedly back to
their homes.

The next day’s papers gave these matters
minor mention in connexion with the general storm reports. It seems
that the great lightning flash and deafening explosion which
followed the Federal Hill occurrence were even more tremendous
farther east, where a burst of the singular foetor was likewise
noticed. The phenomenon was most marked over College Hill, where
the crash awaked all the sleeping inhabitants and led to a
bewildered round of speculations. Of those who were already awake
only a few saw the anomalous blaze of light near the top of the
hill, or noticed the inexplicable upward rush of air which almost
stripped the leaves from the trees and blasted the plants in the
gardens. It was agreed that the lone, sudden lightning-bolt must
have struck somewhere in this neighbourhood, though no trace of its
striking could afterward be found. A youth in the Tau Omega
fraternity house thought he saw a grotesque and hideous mass of
smoke in the air just as the preliminary flash burst, but his
observation has not been verified. All of the few observers,
however, agree as to the violent gust from the west and the flood
of intolerable stench which preceded the belated stroke; whilst
evidence concerning the momentary burned odour after the stroke is
equally general.

These points were discussed very carefully
because of their probable connexion with the death of Robert Blake.
Students in the Psi Delta house, whose upper rear windows looked
into Blake’s study, noticed the blurred white face at the westward
window on the morning of the 9th, and wondered what was wrong with
the expression. When they saw the same face in the same position
that evening, they felt worried, and watched for the lights to come
up in his apartment. Later they rang the bell of the darkened flat,
and finally had a policeman force the door.

The rigid body sat bolt upright at the desk
by the window, and when the intruders saw the glassy, bulging eyes,
and the marks of stark, convulsive fright on the twisted features,
they turned away in sickened dismay. Shortly afterward the
coroner’s physician made an examination, and despite the unbroken
window reported electrical shock, or nervous tension induced by
electrical discharge, as the cause of death. The hideous expression
he ignored altogether, deeming it a not improbable result of the
profound shock as experienced by a person of such abnormal
imagination and unbalanced emotions. He deduced these latter
qualities from the books, paintings, and manuscripts found in the
apartment, and from the blindly scrawled entries in the diary on
the desk. Blake had prolonged his frenzied jottings to the last,
and the broken-pointed pencil was found clutched in his
spasmodically contracted right hand.

The entries after the failure of the lights
were highly disjointed, and legible only in part. From them certain
investigators have drawn conclusions differing greatly from the
materialistic official verdict, but such speculations have little
chance for belief among the conservative. The case of these
imaginative theorists has not been helped by the action of
superstitious Dr. Dexter, who threw the curious box and angled
stone—an object certainly self-luminous as seen in the black
windowless steeple where it was found—into the deepest channel of
Narragansett Bay. Excessive imagination and neurotic unbalance on
Blake’s part, aggravated by knowledge of the evil bygone cult whose
startling traces he had uncovered, form the dominant interpretation
given those final frenzied jottings. These are the entries—or all
that can be made of them.
“Lights still out—must be five minutes now.
Everything depends on lightning. Yaddith grant it will keep
up! . . . Some influence seems beating through
it. . . . Rain and thunder and wind
deafen. . . . The thing is taking hold of my
mind. . . .
“Trouble with memory. I see things I never
knew before. Other worlds and other galaxies . . .
Dark . . . The lightning seems dark and the darkness
seems light. . . .
“It cannot be the real hill and church that I
see in the pitch-darkness. Must be retinal impression left by
flashes. Heaven grant the Italians are out with their candles if
the lightning stops!
“What am I afraid of? Is it not an avatar of
Nyarlathotep, who in antique and shadowy Khem even took the form of
man? I remember Yuggoth, and more distant Shaggai, and the ultimate
void of the black planets. . . .
“The long, winging flight through the
void . . . cannot cross the universe of
light . . . re-created by the thoughts caught in the
Shining Trapezohedron . . . send it through the
horrible abysses of radiance. . . .
“My name is Blake—Robert Harrison Blake of
620 East Knapp Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. . . . I
am on this planet. . . .
“Azathoth have mercy!—the lightning no longer
flashes—horrible—I can see everything with a monstrous sense that
is not sight—light is dark and dark is light . . .
those people on the hill . . .
guard . . . candles and charms . . .
their priests. . . .
“Sense of distance gone—far is near and near
is far. No light—no glass—see that steeple—that tower—window—can
hear—Roderick Usher—am mad or going mad—the thing is stirring and
fumbling in the tower—I am it and it is I—I want to get
out . . . must get out and unify the
forces. . . . It knows where I
am. . . .
“I am Robert Blake, but I see the tower in
the dark. There is a monstrous odour . . . 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. . . .”