In his diary he told of the hideous experience which had brought the collapse. 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. © 2020 Gamer Escape: Gaming News, Reviews, Wikis, and Podcasts. 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. 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. 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. He knew instantly where he was, and plunged recklessly down the narrow spiral staircase, tripping and bruising himself at every turn. As months passed, Blake watched the far-off, forbidding structure with an oddly mounting interest. As Blake grew accustomed to the feeble light he noticed odd bas-reliefs on the strange open box of yellowish metal. 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. 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 upwards towards some region of intenser stench where a hot, searing blast beat down against him. The Haunter of the Dark is the last completed story Lovecraft wrote, and nothing less than the purest distillation of everything we nowadays know him of. 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 demoniac flute held in nameless paws. 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. 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. The light was waning, too, and since he had no illuininant with him he knew he would have to be leaving soon. The Haunter of the Dark appears as a huge bat-like thing with a tri-lobed eye, a form that might be that of a huge hunting horror. 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. Of the restless and curious sounds in the blackened tower, there could be no doubt whatever. He was on the embankment and almost inside the fence before anyone noticed him. 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. Perhaps no one else had known of his plan - who could tell? His studio was in a north attic room, where the panes of the monitor roof furnished admirable lighting. The Starry Wisdom Church is its most famous group of followers. These had been further fitted with tight, opaque screens, but the latter were now largely rotted away. In the tower itself a similarly half-swept condition existed. 28, No. Lovecraft's work, and I have read most things he's written in his life. Now and then his entries show concern over the failure of the reporters to find the metal box and stone, and the strangely marred old skeleton, when they explored the shadowy tower room. He had to keep the house dark in order to see out of 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. Evidently he would have to draw upon the deepest wells of his strange erudition. Blake knew at once what it was, and plunged toward it through the squalid, unpaved lanes that climbed from the avenue. Or perhaps some of the younger and more sophisticated dwellers had staged an elaborate hoax on the outside world. The Shining Trapezohedron was discovered in Egyptian ruins, in a box of alien construction, by Professor Enoch Bowen before he returned to Providence in 1844. At last he saw the tower plain against the southwest, and a huge stone bulk rose darkly at the end of an alley. Around other towers and belfries his glass would reveal great flocks of birds, but here they never rested. It was the last-written of the author's known works, and is part of the Cthulhu Mythos. 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. From his few local aquaintances he learned that the far-off slope was a vast Italian quarter, though most of the houses were remnant of older Yankee and Irish days. The entries after the failure of the lights were highly disjointed, and legible only in part. Father Merluzzo, always a precise man, looked at his watch repeatedly. The Haunter of the Dark By H. P. Lovecraft (Dedicated to Robert Bloch) ... unhuman monsters, and profoundly alien, non-terrestrial landscapes. He assumed that these things had been removed- whither, and by whom or what, he could only guess. 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. There was a bad odour everywhere, and here and there were bits of yellow stain and patches of what looked like charring. Late in April, just before the aeon-shadowed Walpurgis time, Blake made his first trip into the unknown. Hand and handkerchief soon revealed the truth, and Blake gasped with a baffling mixture of emotions. Was there a subtle phosphorescence of radio-activity about the thing? What, anyway, was this abandoned lair of cosmic evil? Immediately afterwards an utterly unbearable foetor welled forth from the unseen heights, choking and sickening the trembling watchers, and almost prostrating those in the square. During the days which followed, Blake told no one of his expedition. All were securely locked, so he began a circuit of the Cyclopean building in quest of some minor and more penetrable opening. But now there was nothing to do but let it alone. In the ruined desk was a small leatherbound record-book filled with entries in some odd cryptographic medium. Blake stooped over the gleaming bones and noted their peculiar state. The cult's most sacred item cult is the Shining Trapezohedron, which allows the Haunter to enter our dimension. 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. All the inner doors were unlocked, so that he freely passed from room to room. 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. 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 ninth, and wondered what was wrong with the expression. Later they rang the bell of the darkened flat, and finally had a policeman force the door. Haunter of the Dark is a Mask monster. Take your favorite fandoms with you and never miss a beat. 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 meteorlike speed towards the east. Here for the first time he received a positive shock of objective horror, for the titles of those books told him much. 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. 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. 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. Take your favorite fandoms with you and never miss a beat.