The Haunter of the Dark by H.P. Lovecraft.

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 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 a cult 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 correlate 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

...