It appears that a new fear had been
growing on Federal Hill since a stranger had entered the dreaded
church. The Italians whispered of unaccustomed stirrings and bumpings
and scrapings in the dark windowless steeple, and called on their
priests to banish an entity which haunted their dreams. Something,
they said, was constantly watching at a door to see if it were dark
enough to venture forth. Press items mentioned the long-standing local
superstitions, but failed to shed much light on the earlier background
of the horror. It was obvious that the young reporters of today are no
antiquarians. In writing of these things in his diary, Blake expresses
a curious kind of remorse, and talks of the duty of burying the
Shining Trapezohedron and of banishing what he had evoked by letting
daylight into the hideous jutting spire. At the same time, however, he
displays the dangerous extent of his fascination, and admits a morbid
longing--pervading even his dreams--to visit the accursed tower and
gaze again into the cosmic secrets of the glowing stone. Then something in the _Journal_ on the morning of July 17 threw the
diarist into a veritable fever of horror. It was only a variant of the
other half-humorous items about the Federal Hill restlessness, but to
Blake it was somehow very terrible indeed. In the night a thunderstorm
had put the city's lighting-system out of commission for a full hour,
and in that black interval the Italians had nearly gone mad with
fright. Those living near the dreaded church had sworn that the thing
in the steeple had taken advantage of the street lamps' absence and
gone down into the body of the church, flopping and bumping around in
a viscous, altogether dreadful way. Toward the last it had bumped up
to the tower, where there were sounds of the shattering of glass. It
could go wherever the darkness reached, but light would always send it
fleeing. When the current blazed on again there had been a shocking commotion
in the tower, for even the feeble light trickling through the
grime-blackened, louver-boarded windows was too much for the thing. It had bumped and slithered up into its tenebrous steeple just in
time--for a long dose of light would have sent it back into the abyss
whence the crazy stranger had called it. During the dark hour praying
crowds had clustered round the church in the rain with lighted candles
and lamps somehow shielded with folded papers and umbrellas--a guard
of light to save the city from the nightmare that stalks in darkness. Once, those nearest the church declared, the outer door had rattled
hideously. But even this was not the worst. That evening in the _Bulletin_ Blake
read of what the reporters had found. Aroused at last to the whimsical
news value of the scare, a pair of them had defied the frantic crowds
of Italians and crawled into the church through the cellar window
after trying the doors in vain. They found the dust of the vestibule
and of the spectral nave plowed up in a singular way, with pits of
rotted cushions and satin pew-linings scattered curiously around. There
was a bad odor everywhere, and here and there were bits of yellow stain
and patches of what looked like charring. Opening the door to the
tower, and pausing a moment at the suspicion of a scraping sound above,
they found the narrow spiral stairs wiped roughly clean. In the tower itself a similarly half-swept condition existed. They
spoke of the heptagonal stone pillar, the overturned Gothic chairs,
and the bizarre plaster images; though strangely enough the metal box
and the old mutilated skeleton were not mentioned. What disturbed
Blake the most--except for the hints of stains and charring and bad
odors--was the final detail that explained the crashing glass. Every
one of the tower's lancet windows was broken, and two of them had
been darkened in a crude and hurried way by the stuffing of satin
pew-linings and cushion-horsehair into the spaces between the slanting
exterior louver-boards. More satin fragments and bunches of horsehair
lay scattered around the newly swept floor, as if someone had been
interrupted in the act of restoring the tower to the absolute blackness
of its tightly curtained days. Yellowish stains and charred patches were found on the ladder to
the windowless spire, but when a reporter climbed up, opened the
horizontally-sliding trap-door and shot a feeble flashlight beam into
the black and strangely fetid space, he saw nothing but darkness, and
an heterogeneous litter of shapeless fragments near the aperture. The
verdict, of course, was charlatanry. Somebody had played a joke on
the superstitious hill-dwellers, or else some fanatic had striven to
bolster up their fears for their own supposed good. Or perhaps some of
the younger and more sophisticated dwellers had staged an elaborate
hoax on the outside world. There was an amusing aftermath when the
police sent an officer to verify the reports. Three men in succession
found ways of evading the assignment, and the fourth went very
reluctantly and returned very soon without adding to the account given
by the reporters. *       *       *       *       *

From this point onward Blake's diary shows a mounting tide of
insidious horror and nervous apprehension. He upbraids himself for
not doing something, and speculates wildly on the consequences of
another electrical breakdown. It has been verified that on three
occasions--during thunderstorms--he telephoned the electric light
company in a frantic vein and asked that desperate precautions against
a lapse of power be taken. Now and then his entries show concern over
the failure of the reporters to find the metal box and stone, and the
strangely marred old skeleton, when they explored the shadowy tower
room. He assumed that these things had been removed--whither, and
by whom or what, he could only guess. But his worst fears concerned
himself, and the kind of unholy rapport he felt to exist between his
mind and that lurking horror in the distant steeple--that monstrous
thing of night which his rashness had called out of the ultimate black
spaces. He seemed to feel a constant tugging at his will, and callers
of that period remember how he would sit abstractedly at his desk and
stare out the west window at that far-off, spire-bristling mound beyond
the swirling smoke of the city. His entries dwell monotonously on
certain terrible dreams, and of a strengthening of the unholy rapport
in his sleep. There is mention of a night when he awaked to find
himself fully dressed, outdoors, and headed automatically down College
Hill toward the west. Again and again he dwells on the fact that the
thing in the steeple knows where to find him. The week following July 30 is recalled as the time of Blake's partial
breakdown. He did not dress, and ordered all his food by telephone.