Better it be left alone for the years
to topple, lest things be stirred that ought to rest for ever 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 façade. 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 showed 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-strewn
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 fibers, 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 paneling. *       *       *       *       *

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, hour-glass 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 show 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 formulæ 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 recognizable to the
occult student. Clearly, the lingering local rumors 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.