Lovecraft, H P - The Haunter Of The Dark

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The Haunter Of The Dark

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written Nov 1935

Published December 1936 in Weird Tales, Vol. 28, No. 5, p. 538-53.

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.

Cautious investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief that Robert Blake was

killed by lightning, or by some profound nervous shock derived from an electrical

discharge. It is true that the window he faced was unbroken, but nature has shown herself

capable of many freakish performances. The expression on his face may easily have

arisen from some obscure muscular source unrelated to anything he saw, while the entries

in his diary are clearly the result of a fantastic imagination aroused by certain local

superstitions and by certain old matters he had uncovered. As for the anomalous

conditions at the deserted church of 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.

The Haunter Of The Dark

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 summarize the dark chain

of events from the expressed point of view of their chief actor.

Young Blake returned to Providence in the winter of 1934-5, taking the upper floor of a

venerable dwelling in a grassy court off College Street - on the crest of the great eastward

hill near the Brown University campus and behind the marble John Hay Library. It was a

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 for

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 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. 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 Haunter Of The Dark

the violet, lamp-starred twilight, and the court-house floodlights and the red Industrial

Trust beacon had blazed up to make the night grotesque.

Of all the distant objects on Federal Hill, a certain huge, dark church most fascinated

Blake. It stood out with especial distinctness at certain hours of the day, and at sunset the

great tower and tapering steeple loomed blackly against the flaming sky. It seemed to rest

on especially high ground; for the grimy façade, and the obliquely seen north side with

sloping roof and the tops of great pointed windows, rose boldly above the tangle of

surrounding ridgepoles and chimney-pots. Peculiarly grim and austere, it appeared to be

built of stone, stained and weathered with the smoke and storms of a century and more.

The style, so far as the glass could show, was that earliest experimental form of Gothic

revival which preceded the stately Upjohn period and held over some of the outlines and

proportions of the Georgian age. Perhaps it was reared around 1810 or 1815.

As 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 façade or crumbling spire came in sight, but never the

blackened pile that he sought. When he asked a shopkeeper about a great stone church the

man smiled and shook his head, though he spoke English freely. As Blake climbed

The Haunter Of The Dark

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 wind-swept open square, quaintly

cobblestoned, with a high bank wall on the farther side. This was the end of his quest; for

upon the wide, iron-railed, weed-grown plateau which the wall supported - a separate,

lesser world raised fully six feet above the surrounding streets - there stood a grim, titan

bulk whose identity, despite Blake's new perspective, was beyond dispute.

The vacant church was in a state of great decrepitude. Some of the high stone buttresses

had fallen, and several delicate finials lay half lost among the brown, neglected weeds

and grasses. The sooty Gothic windows were largely unbroken, though many of the stone

mullions were missing. Blake wondered how the obscurely painted panes could have

survived so well, in view of the known habits of small boys the world over. The massive

doors were intact and tightly closed. Around the top of the bank wall, fully enclosing the

grounds, was a rusty iron fence whose gate - at the head of a flight of steps from the

square - was visibly padlocked. The path from the gate to the building was completely

overgrown. Desolation and decay hung like a pall above the place, and in the birdless

eaves and black, ivyless walls Blake felt a touch of the dimly sinister beyond his power to

define.

There were very few people in the square, but Blake saw a policeman at the northerly end

and approached him with questions about the church. He was a great wholesome

Irishman, and it seemed odd that he would do little more than make the sign of the cross

and mutter that people never spoke of that building. When Blake pressed him he said

very hurriedly that the Italian priest 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 old 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

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摘要：

TheHaunterOfTheDarkTheHaunterOfTheDarkbyH.P.LovecraftWrittenNov1935PublishedDecember1936inWeirdTales,Vol.28,No.5,p.538-53.IhaveseenthedarkuniverseyawningWheretheblackplanetsrollwithoutaim,Wheretheyrollintheirhorrorunheeded,Withoutknowledgeorlustreorname.Cautiousinvestigatorswillhesitatetochallengeth...

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Lovecraft, H P - The Haunter Of The Dark

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