




                        The Haunter of the Dark

                          By H. P. LOVECRAFT

                 _A powerful story about an old church
                 in Providence, Rhode Island, that was
                shunned and feared by all who knew it._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                      Weird Tales December 1936. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] (Dedicated to Robert Bloch)


    I have seen the dark universe yawning
      Where the black planets roll without aim--
    Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
      Without knowledge or luster or name. --_Nemesis._


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 on 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. Between these two schools of opinion the reader must judge for himself. The papers have given the tangible details from a skeptical 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 cozy 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-paneled 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 out-spread 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 to 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 out-spread 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 acquaintances he learned that the far-off slope
was a vast Italian quarter, though most of the houses were remnants
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 violet, lamp-starred twilight, and the court-house floodlights
and the red Industrial Trust beacon had blazed up to make the night
grotesque.