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 labor 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 fetor 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 fantasmal 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 center 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. 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
odor 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 one 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
façade 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 vapors--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 odors 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 façade. 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.