Hey Weirdos! Before this episode begins, I
just want to let you know that the first break,
which comes pretty early in the episode, is
a long commercial break, but that’s because
it is the only commercial break I am inserting
in this episode. I want this story to be without
interruption. I hope you understand.
Stories and content in Weird Darkness can
be disturbing for some listeners and is intended
for mature audiences only. Parental discretion
is strongly advised.
Welcome, Weirdos – I’m Darren Marlar and
this is Weird Darkness. Here you’ll find
stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends,
lore, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre,
unsolved and unexplained.
Coming up in this episode of Weird Darkness…
It’s Creepypasta Thursday, and I’m back
with a classic horror story, requested by
one of you, my Weirdo family members. “The
Haunter in the Dark” written by horror writer
H.P. Lovecraft.
While you’re listening, you might want to
check out the Weird Darkness website. At WeirdDarkness.com
you can find transcripts of the episodes,
paranormal and horror audiobooks I’ve narrated,
24/7 streaming video of Horror Hosts and classic
horror movies, you can find my other podcast,
“Church of the Undead”, plus you can visit
the “Hope In The Darkness” page if you
are struggling with depression, anxiety, or
thoughts of suicide. And you can also shop
the Weird Darkness store where all profits
go to support depression awareness and relief.
You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com.
Now.. bolt your doors, lock your windows,
turn off your lights, and come with me into
the Weird Darkness!
“The Haunter in the Dark” came about in
a strange way, in that it is actually a sequel
to the story of a different writer’s story.
Horror author Robert Bloch wrote a story called
“The Shambler From The Stars” which was
published in the September 1935 issue of “Weird
Tales”. Bloch was obviously a fan of H.P.
Lovecraft, because he set the story within
Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, or the Lovecraft
Universe as some prefer to call it. As a horror
writer and lover of all that is creepy, Lovecraft
read that issue of Weird Tales and must have
appreciated the fan fiction Robert Bloch created
of his work, because Lovecraft sat down not
two months later in early November and scratched
out the story you’re about to hear in this
episode - “The Haunter in the Dark”. The
story was later published in that same magazine,
“Weird Tales” in the December 1936 edition
(Vol 28, No.5 if you’re a collector). “The
Haunter in the Dark” is in fact the last
story ever written by H.P. Lovecraft – or
at least the last that we know of, but that
doesn’t mean it’s the end of the story.
While H.P. Lovecraft died the next year on
March 15th, 1937, Robert Bloch returned and
composed a the third and final entry in the
trilogy – and “The Shadow of the Steeple”
was published in 1950. So Robert Bloch wrote
part one, placing the story in Lovecraft’s
universe, Lovecraft wrote part two, then Robert
Bloch returned to write part three. I can
only assume they were – or at least became
– very good friends. The beginning of the
story is even dedicated to Bloch.
The epigraph, that is, the first few lines
of the story after the dedication, is, though
it may seem strange, the second stanza of
Lovecraft's 1917 poem "Nemesis". When Weird
Darkness returns, it’s… “The Haunter
in the Dark” by H.P. Lovecraft.
How would you like to see the very first episode
of a horror host's show?  If your answer
is YES, then join us for our next Weirdo Watch
Party as horror host Professor Will Shivers
from the Staying Scared Show brings his kooky
concoctions of creepiness with the 1962 horror
film, "Carnival of Souls". As always, the
Weirdo Watch party is always free, and while
you watch the film you can jump into the chatroom
with me and other Weirdo family members to
trade snarky comments about the film - sometimes
the horror hosts get in on the chat too! So
again - join me as horror host Professor Willie
Shivers presents 1962’s “Carnival of Souls!”
Again, the Weirdo Watch Party is Saturday
August 8th at 9pm Central Time – that’s
7pm Pacific, 8pm Mountain, 10pm Eastern on
the Weirdo Watch Party page at WeirdDarkness.com.

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(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 lustre 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 shewn 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 sceptical 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 summarise 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 cosy 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-panelled 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 outspread 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 outspread 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.
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 facade, 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 shew,
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 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 aeon-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 facade 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 doorsteps, 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 windswept 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 rumours 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 neighbourhood.
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. Better
it be left alone for the years to topple,
lest things be stirred that ought to rest
forever 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 facade. 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 shewed
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-strown
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 fibres, 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 panelling.
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, hourglass 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 shew 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 formulae 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 recognisable
to the occult student. Clearly, the lingering
local rumours 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.
In the hope of later solving the cryptogram,
Blake bore off this volume in his coat pocket.
Many of the great tomes on the shelves fascinated
him unutterably, and he felt tempted to borrow
them at some later time. He wondered how they
could have remained undisturbed so long. Was
he the first to conquer the clutching, pervasive
fear which had for nearly sixty years protected
this deserted place from visitors?
Having now thoroughly explored the ground
floor, Blake ploughed again through the dust
of the spectral nave to the front vestibule,
where he had seen a door and staircase presumably
leading up to the blackened tower and steeple—objects
so long familiar to him at a distance. The
ascent was a choking experience, for dust
lay thick, while the spiders had done their
worst in this constricted place. The staircase
was a spiral with high, narrow wooden treads,
and now and then Blake passed a clouded window
looking dizzily out over the city. Though
he had seen no ropes below, he expected to
find a bell or peal of bells in the tower
whose narrow, louver-boarded lancet windows
his field-glass had studied so often. Here
he was doomed to disappointment; for when
he attained the top of the stairs he found
the tower chamber vacant of chimes, and clearly
devoted to vastly different purposes.
The room, about fifteen feet square, was faintly
lighted by four lancet windows, one on each
side, which were glazed within their screening
of decayed louver-boards. These had been further
fitted with tight, opaque screens, but the
latter were now largely rotted away. In the
centre of the dust-laden floor rose a curiously
angled stone pillar some four feet in height
and two in average diameter, covered on each
side with bizarre, crudely incised, and wholly
unrecognisable hieroglyphs. On this pillar
rested a metal box of peculiarly asymmetrical
form; its hinged lid thrown back, and its
interior holding what looked beneath the decade-deep
dust to be an egg-shaped or irregularly spherical
object some four inches through. Around the
pillar in a rough circle were seven high-backed
Gothic chairs still largely intact, while
behind them, ranging along the dark-panelled
walls, were seven colossal images of crumbling,
black-painted plaster, resembling more than
anything else the cryptic carven megaliths
of mysterious Easter Island. In one corner
of the cobwebbed chamber a ladder was built
into the wall, leading up to the closed trap-door
of the windowless steeple above.
As Blake grew accustomed to the feeble light
he noticed odd bas-reliefs on the strange
open box of yellowish metal. Approaching,
he tried to clear the dust away with his hands
and handkerchief, and saw that the figurings
were of a monstrous and utterly alien kind;
depicting entities which, though seemingly
alive, resembled no known life-form ever evolved
on this planet. The four-inch seeming sphere
turned out to be a nearly black, red-striated
polyhedron with many irregular flat surfaces;
either a very remarkable crystal of some sort,
or an artificial object of carved and highly
polished mineral matter. It did not touch
the bottom of the box, but was held suspended
by means of a metal band around its centre,
with seven queerly designed supports extending
horizontally to angles of the box’s inner
wall near the top. This stone, once exposed,
exerted upon Blake an almost alarming fascination.
He could scarcely tear his eyes from it, and
as he looked at its glistening surfaces he
almost fancied it was transparent, with half-formed
worlds of wonder within. Into his mind floated
pictures of alien orbs with great stone towers,
and other orbs with titan mountains and no
mark of life, and still remoter spaces where
only a stirring in vague blacknesses told
of the presence of consciousness and will.
When he did look away, it was to notice a
somewhat singular mound of dust in the far
corner near the ladder to the steeple. Just
why it took his attention he could not tell,
but something in its contours carried a message
to his unconscious mind. Ploughing toward
it, and brushing aside the hanging cobwebs
as he went, he began to discern something
grim about it. Hand and handkerchief soon
revealed the truth, and Blake gasped with
a baffling mixture of emotions. It was a human
skeleton, and it must have been there for
a very long time. The clothing was in shreds,
but some buttons and fragments of cloth bespoke
a man’s grey suit. There were other bits
of evidence—shoes, metal clasps, huge buttons
for round cuffs, a stickpin of bygone pattern,
a reporter’s badge with the name of the
old Providence Telegram, and a crumbling
leather pocketbook. Blake examined the latter
with care, finding within it several bills
of antiquated issue, a celluloid advertising
calendar for 1893, some cards with the name
“Edwin M. Lillibridge”, and a paper covered
with pencilled memoranda.
This paper held much of a puzzling nature,
and Blake read it carefully at the dim westward
window. Its disjointed text included such
phrases as the following:
“Prof. Enoch Bowen home from Egypt May 1844—buys
old Free-Will Church in July—his archaeological
work & studies in occult well known.”
“Dr. Drowne of 4th Baptist warns against
Starry Wisdom in sermon Dec. 29, 1844.”
“Congregation 97 by end of ’45.”
“1846—3 disappearances—first mention
of Shining Trapezohedron.”
“7 disappearances 1848—stories of blood
sacrifice begin.”
“Investigation 1853 comes to nothing—stories
of sounds.”
“Fr. O’Malley tells of devil-worship with
box found in great Egyptian ruins—says they
call up something that can’t exist in light.
Flees a little light, and banished by strong
light. Then has to be summoned again. Probably
got this from deathbed confession of Francis
X. Feeney, who had joined Starry Wisdom in
’49. These people say the Shining Trapezohedron
shews them heaven & other worlds, & that the
Haunter of the Dark tells them secrets in
some way.”
“Story of Orrin B. Eddy 1857. They call
it up by gazing at the crystal, & have a secret
language of their own.”
“200 or more in cong. 1863, exclusive of
men at front.”
“Irish boys mob church in 1869 after Patrick
Regan’s disappearance.”
“Veiled article in J. March 14, ’72, but
people don’t talk about it.”
“6 disappearances 1876—secret committee
calls on Mayor Doyle.”
“Action promised Feb. 1877—church closes
in April.”
“Gang—Federal Hill Boys—threaten Dr.
—— and vestrymen in May.”
“181 persons leave city before end of ’77—mention
no names.”
“Ghost stories begin around 1880—try to
ascertain truth of report that no human being
has entered church since 1877.”
“Ask Lanigan for photograph of place taken
1851.” . . .
Restoring the paper to the pocketbook and
placing the latter in his coat, Blake turned
to look down at the skeleton in the dust.
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.
Before he realised 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 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 foetor 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 endeavour 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 shew 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 aeons 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. 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 paper 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 ploughed up in a singular way,
with bits of rotted cushions and satin pew-linings
scattered curiously around. There was a bad
odour 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 odours—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 foetid 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 shews
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
shew 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 of 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. Visitors remarked the cords he
kept near his bed, and he said that sleep-walking
had forced him to bind his ankles every night
with knots which would probably hold or else
waken him with the labour of untying.
In his diary he told of the hideous experience
which had brought the collapse. After retiring
on the night of the 30th he had suddenly found
himself groping about in an almost black space.
All he could see were short, faint, horizontal
streaks of bluish light, but he could smell
an overpowering foetor and hear a curious
jumble of soft, furtive sounds above him.
Whenever he moved he stumbled over something,
and at each noise there would come a sort
of answering sound from above—a vague stirring,
mixed with the cautious sliding of wood on
wood.
Once his groping hands encountered a pillar
of stone with a vacant top, whilst later he
found himself clutching the rungs of a ladder
built into the wall, and fumbling his uncertain
way upward toward some region of intenser
stench where a hot, searing blast beat down
against him. Before his eyes a kaleidoscopic
range of phantasmal images played, all of
them dissolving at intervals into the picture
of a vast, unplumbed abyss of night wherein
whirled suns and worlds of an even profounder
blackness. He thought of the ancient legends
of Ultimate Chaos, at whose centre sprawls
the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All
Things, encircled by his flopping horde of
mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled
by the thin monotonous piping of a daemoniac
flute held in nameless paws.
Then a sharp report from the outer world broke
through his stupor and roused him to the unutterable
horror of his position. What it was, he never
knew—perhaps it was some belated peal from
the fireworks heard all summer on Federal
Hill as the dwellers hail their various patron
saints, or the saints of their native villages
in Italy. In any event he shrieked aloud,
dropped frantically from the ladder, and stumbled
blindly across the obstructed floor of the
almost lightless chamber that encompassed
him.
He knew instantly where he was, and plunged
recklessly down the narrow spiral staircase,
tripping and bruising himself at every turn.
There was a nightmare flight through a vast
cobwebbed nave whose ghostly arches reached
up to realms of leering shadow, a sightless
scramble through a littered basement, a climb
to regions of air and street-lights outside,
and a mad racing down a spectral hill of gibbering
gables, across a grim, silent city of tall
black towers, and up the steep eastward precipice
to his own ancient door.
On regaining consciousness in the morning
he found himself lying on his study floor
fully dressed. Dirt and cobwebs covered him,
and every inch of his body seemed sore and
bruised. When he faced the mirror he saw that
his hair was badly scorched, while a trace
of strange, evil odour seemed to cling to
his upper outer clothing. It was then that
his nerves broke down. Thereafter, lounging
exhaustedly about in a dressing-gown, he did
little but stare from his west window, shiver
at the threat of thunder, and make wild entries
in his diary.
The great storm broke just before midnight
on August 8th. Lightning struck repeatedly
in all parts of the city, and two remarkable
fireballs were reported. The rain was torrential,
while a constant fusillade of thunder brought
sleeplessness to thousands. Blake was utterly
frantic in his fear for the lighting system,
and tried to telephone the company around
1 a.m., though by that time service had been
temporarily cut off in the interest of safety.
He recorded everything in his diary—the
large, nervous, and often undecipherable hieroglyphs
telling their own story of growing frenzy
and despair, and of entries scrawled blindly
in the dark.
He had to keep the house dark in order to
see out the window, and it appears that most
of his time was spent at his desk, peering
anxiously through the rain across the glistening
miles of downtown roofs at the constellation
of distant lights marking Federal Hill. Now
and then he would fumblingly make an entry
in his diary, so that detached phrases such
as “The lights must not go”; “It knows
where I am”; “I must destroy it”; and
“It is calling to me, but perhaps it means
no injury this time”; are found scattered
down two of the pages.
Then the lights went out all over the city.
It happened at 2:12 a.m. according to power-house
records, but Blake’s diary gives no indication
of the time. The entry is merely, “Lights
out—God help me.” On Federal Hill there
were watchers as anxious as he, and rain-soaked
knots of men paraded the square and alleys
around the evil church with umbrella-shaded
candles, electric flashlights, oil lanterns,
crucifixes, and obscure charms of the many
sorts common to southern Italy. They blessed
each flash of lightning, and made cryptical
signs of fear with their right hands when
a turn in the storm caused the flashes to
lessen and finally to cease altogether. A
rising wind blew out most of the candles,
so that the scene grew threateningly dark.
Someone roused Father Merluzzo of Spirito
Santo Church, and he hastened to the dismal
square to pronounce whatever helpful syllables
he could. Of the restless and curious sounds
in the blackened tower, there could be no
doubt whatever.
For what happened at 2:35 we have the testimony
of the priest, a young, intelligent, and well-educated
person; of Patrolman William J. Monahan of
the Central Station, an officer of the highest
reliability who had paused at that part of
his beat to inspect the crowd; and of most
of the seventy-eight men who had gathered
around the church’s high bank wall—especially
those in the square where the eastward facade
was visible. Of course there was nothing which
can be proved as being outside the order of
Nature. The possible causes of such an event
are many. No one can speak with certainty
of the obscure chemical processes arising
in a vast, ancient, ill-aired, and long-deserted
building of heterogeneous contents. Mephitic
vapours—spontaneous combustion—pressure
of gases born of long decay—any one of numberless
phenomena might be responsible. And then,
of course, the factor of conscious charlatanry
can by no means be excluded. The thing was
really quite simple in itself, and covered
less than three minutes of actual time. Father
Merluzzo, always a precise man, looked at
his watch repeatedly.
It started with a definite swelling of the
dull fumbling sounds inside the black tower.
There had for some time been a vague exhalation
of strange, evil odours from the church, and
this had now become emphatic and offensive.
Then at last there was a sound of splintering
wood, and a large, heavy object crashed down
in the yard beneath the frowning easterly
facade. The tower was invisible now that the
candles would not burn, but as the object
neared the ground the people knew that it
was the smoke-grimed louver-boarding of that
tower’s east window.
Immediately afterward an utterly unbearable
foetor welled forth from the unseen heights,
choking and sickening the trembling watchers,
and almost prostrating those in the square.
At the same time the air trembled with a vibration
as of flapping wings, and a sudden east-blowing
wind more violent than any previous blast
snatched off the hats and wrenched the dripping
umbrellas of the crowd. Nothing definite could
be seen in the candleless night, though some
upward-looking spectators thought they glimpsed
a great spreading blur of denser blackness
against the inky sky—something like a formless
cloud of smoke that shot with meteor-like
speed toward the east.
That was all. The watchers were half numbed
with fright, awe, and discomfort, and scarcely
knew what to do, or whether to do anything
at all. Not knowing what had happened, they
did not relax their vigil; and a moment later
they sent up a prayer as a sharp flash of
belated lightning, followed by an earsplitting
crash of sound, rent the flooded heavens.
Half an hour later the rain stopped, and in
fifteen minutes more the street-lights sprang
on again, sending the weary, bedraggled watchers
relievedly back to their homes.
The next day’s papers gave these matters
minor mention in connexion with the general
storm reports. It seems that the great lightning
flash and deafening explosion which followed
the Federal Hill occurrence were even more
tremendous farther east, where a burst of
the singular foetor was likewise noticed.
The phenomenon was most marked over College
Hill, where the crash awaked all the sleeping
inhabitants and led to a bewildered round
of speculations. Of those who were already
awake only a few saw the anomalous blaze of
light near the top of the hill, or noticed
the inexplicable upward rush of air which
almost stripped the leaves from the trees
and blasted the plants in the gardens. It
was agreed that the lone, sudden lightning-bolt
must have struck somewhere in this neighbourhood,
though no trace of its striking could afterward
be found. A youth in the Tau Omega fraternity
house thought he saw a grotesque and hideous
mass of smoke in the air just as the preliminary
flash burst, but his observation has not been
verified. All of the few observers, however,
agree as to the violent gust from the west
and the flood of intolerable stench which
preceded the belated stroke; whilst evidence
concerning the momentary burned odour after
the stroke is equally general.
These points were discussed very carefully
because of their probable connexion with the
death of Robert Blake. Students in the Psi
Delta house, whose upper rear windows looked
into Blake’s study, noticed the blurred
white face at the westward window on the morning
of the 9th, and wondered what was wrong with
the expression. When they saw the same face
in the same position that evening, they felt
worried, and watched for the lights to come
up in his apartment. Later they rang the bell
of the darkened flat, and finally had a policeman
force the door.
The rigid body sat bolt upright at the desk
by the window, and when the intruders saw
the glassy, bulging eyes, and the marks of
stark, convulsive fright on the twisted features,
they turned away in sickened dismay. Shortly
afterward the coroner’s physician made an
examination, and despite the unbroken window
reported electrical shock, or nervous tension
induced by electrical discharge, as the cause
of death. The hideous expression he ignored
altogether, deeming it a not improbable result
of the profound shock as experienced by a
person of such abnormal imagination and unbalanced
emotions. He deduced these latter qualities
from the books, paintings, and manuscripts
found in the apartment, and from the blindly
scrawled entries in the diary on the desk.
Blake had prolonged his frenzied jottings
to the last, and the broken-pointed pencil
was found clutched in his spasmodically contracted
right hand.
The entries after the failure of the lights
were highly disjointed, and legible only in
part. From them certain investigators have
drawn conclusions differing greatly from the
materialistic official verdict, but such speculations
have little chance for belief among the conservative.
The case of these imaginative theorists has
not been helped by the action of superstitious
Dr. Dexter, who threw the curious box and
angled stone—an object certainly self-luminous
as seen in the black windowless steeple where
it was found—into the deepest channel of
Narragansett Bay. Excessive imagination and
neurotic unbalance on Blake’s part, aggravated
by knowledge of the evil bygone cult whose
startling traces he had uncovered, form the
dominant interpretation given those final
frenzied jottings. These are the entries—or
all that can be made of them.
“Lights still out—must be five minutes
now. Everything depends on lightning. Yaddith
grant it will keep up! . . . Some influence
seems beating through it. . . . Rain and
thunder and wind deafen. . . . The thing
is taking hold of my mind. . . .
“Trouble with memory. I see things I never
knew before. Other worlds and other galaxies . . .
Dark . . . The lightning seems dark and
the darkness seems light. . . .
“It cannot be the real hill and church that
I see in the pitch-darkness. Must be retinal
impression left by flashes. Heaven grant the
Italians are out with their candles if the
lightning stops!
“What am I afraid of? Is it not an avatar
of Nyarlathotep, who in antique and shadowy
Khem even took the form of man? I remember
Yuggoth, and more distant Shaggai, and the
ultimate void of the black planets. . . .
“The long, winging flight through the void . . .
cannot cross the universe of light . . .
re-created by the thoughts caught in the Shining
Trapezohedron . . . send it through the
horrible abysses of radiance. . . .
“My name is Blake—Robert Harrison Blake
of 620 East Knapp Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. . . .
I am on this planet. . . .
“Azathoth have mercy!—the lightning no
longer flashes—horrible—I can see everything
with a monstrous sense that is not sight—light
is dark and dark is light . . . those people
on the hill . . . guard . . . candles
and charms . . . their priests. . . .
“Sense of distance gone—far is near and
near is far. No light—no glass—see that
steeple—that tower—window—can hear—Roderick
Usher—am mad or going mad—the thing is
stirring and fumbling in the tower—I am
it and it is I—I want to get out . . .
must get out and unify the forces. . . .
It knows where I am. . . .
“I am Robert Blake, but I see the tower
in the dark. There is a monstrous odour . . .
senses transfigured . . . boarding at that
tower window cracking and giving way. . . .
Iä . . . ngai . . . ygg. . . .
“I see it—coming here—hell-wind—titan
blur—black wings—Yog-Sothoth save me—the
three-lobed burning eye. . . .”
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Do you have a dark tale to tell of your own?
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“The Haunter of the Dark” is a story of
fiction, written by H.P. Lovecraft
Weird Darkness theme by Alibi Music.
WeirdDarkness™ - is a registered trademark.
Copyright ©Weird Darkness 2020.
If you’d like a transcript of this episode,
you can find a link in the show notes.
Now that we’re coming out of the dark, I’ll
leave you with a little light… Psalm 34:18
= “The LORD is close to the brokenhearted
and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”
And a final thought... “Deal with your problems
before they deal with your happiness.”
I’m Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me
in the Weird Darkness.
