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. [Illustration: "He had come to the deserted edifice in quest of a
newspaper sensation."] Before he realized 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 sheer 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 fetor 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 endeavor 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 show 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 eons 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.