Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge or lustre or name.
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
of 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 summarize the dark chain of events from the expressed point
of view of their chief actor.
