Of all the distant objects on Federal Hill, a certain huge, dark church
most fascinated Blake. It stood out with especial distinctness at
certain hours of the day, and at sunset the great tower and tapering
steeple loomed blackly against the flaming sky. It seemed to rest
on especially high ground; for the grimy façade, and the obliquely
seen north side with sloping roof and the tops of great pointed
windows, rose boldly above the tangle of surrounding ridgepoles and
chimney-pots. Peculiarly grim and austere, it appeared to be built of
stone, stained and weathered with the smoke and storms of a century
and more. The style, so far as the glass could show, was that earliest
experimental form of Gothic revival which preceded the stately Upjohn
period and held over some of the outlines and proportions of the
Georgian age. Perhaps it was reared around 1810 or 1815. As the months passed, Blake watched the far-off, forbidding structure
with an oddly mounting interest. Since the vast windows were never
lighted, he knew that it must be vacant. The longer he watched, the
more his imagination worked, till at length he began to fancy curious
things. He believed that a vague, singular aura of desolation hovered
over the place, so that even the pigeons and swallows shunned its smoky
eaves. Around other towers and belfries his glass would reveal great
flocks of birds, but here they never rested. At least, that is what he
thought and set down in his diary. He pointed the place out to several
friends, but none of them had even been on Federal Hill or possessed
the faintest notion of what the church was or had been. *       *       *       *       *

In the spring a deep restlessness gripped Blake. He had begun his
long-planned novel--based on a supposed survival of the witch-cult in
Maine--but was strangely unable to make progress with it. More and more
he would sit at his westward window and gaze at the distant hill and
the black, frowning steeple shunned by the birds. When the delicate
leaves came out on the garden boughs the world was filled with a new
beauty, but Blake's restlessness was merely increased. It was then
that he first thought of crossing the city and climbing bodily up that
fabulous slope into the smoke-wreathed world of dream. Late in April, just before the eon-shadowed Walpurgis time, Blake made
his first trip into the unknown. Plodding through the endless downtown
streets and the bleak, decayed squares beyond, he came finally upon
the ascending avenue of century-worn steps, sagging Doric porches,
and blear-paned cupolas which he felt must lead up to the long-known,
unreachable world beyond the mists. There were dingy blue-and-white
street signs which meant nothing to him, and presently he noted the
strange, dark faces of the drifting crowds, and the foreign signs
over curious shops in brown, decade-weathered buildings. Nowhere
could he find any of the objects he had seen from afar; so that once
more he half fancied that the Federal Hill of that distant view was a
dream-world never to be trod by living human feet. Now and then a battered church façade or crumbling spire came in
sight, but never the blackened pile that he sought. When he asked a
shopkeeper about a great stone church the man smiled and shook his
head, though he spoke English freely. As Blake climbed higher, the
region seemed stranger and stranger, with bewildering mazes of brooding
brown alleys leading eternally off to the south. He crossed two or
three broad avenues, and once thought he glimpsed a familiar tower. Again he asked a merchant about the massive church of stone, and this
time he could have sworn that the plea of ignorance was feigned. The
dark man's face had a look of fear which he tried to hide, and Blake
saw him make a curious sign with his right hand. Then suddenly a black spire stood out against the cloudy sky on his
left, above the tiers of brown roofs lining the tangled southerly
alleys. Blake knew at once what it was, and plunged toward it through
the squalid, unpaved lanes that climbed from the avenue. Twice he
lost his way, but he somehow dared not ask any of the patriarchs or
housewives who sat on their door-steps, or any of the children who
shouted and played in the mud of the shadowy lanes. At last he saw the tower plain against the southwest, and a huge
stone bulk rose darkly at the end of an alley. Presently he stood in
a wind-swept open square, quaintly cobblestoned, with a high bank
wall on the farther side. This was the end of his quest; for upon the
wide, iron-railed, weed-grown plateau which the wall supported--a
separate, lesser world raised fully six feet above the surrounding
streets--there stood a grim, titan bulk whose identity, despite Blake's
new perspective, was beyond dispute. The vacant church was in a state of great decrepitude. Some of the high
stone buttresses had fallen, and several delicate finials lay half lost
among the brown, neglected weeds and grasses. The sooty Gothic windows
were largely unbroken, though many of the stone mullions were missing. Blake wondered how the obscurely painted panes could have survived so
well, in view of the known habits of small boys the world over. The
massive doors were intact and tightly closed. Around the top of the
bank wall, fully enclosing the grounds, was a rusty iron fence whose
gate--at the head of a flight of steps from the square--was visibly
padlocked. The path from the gate to the building was completely
overgrown. Desolation and decay hung like a pall above the place, and
in the birdless eaves and black, ivyless walls Blake felt a touch of
the dimly sinister beyond his power to define. *       *       *       *       *

There were very few people in the square, but Blake saw a policeman
at the northerly end and approached him with questions about the
church. He was a great wholesome Irishman, and it seemed odd that he
would do little more than make the sign of the cross and mutter that
people never spoke of that building. When Blake pressed him he said
very hurriedly that the Italian priests warned everybody against it,
vowing that a monstrous evil had once dwelt there and left its mark. He himself had heard dark whispers of it from his father, who recalled
certain sounds and rumors from his boyhood. There had been a bad sect there in the ould days--an outlaw sect that
called up awful things from some unknown gulf of night. It had taken
a good priest to exorcise what had come, though there did be those
who said that merely the light could do it. If Father O'Malley were
alive there would be many the thing he could tell. But now there was
nothing to do but let it alone. It hurt nobody now, and those that
owned it were dead or far away. They had run away like rats after
the threatening talk in '77, when people began to mind the way folks
vanished now and then in the neighborhood. Some day the city would
step in and take the property for lack of heirs, but little good would
come of anybody's touching it.