The Haunter of the Dark

A young writer in Providence becomes fixated on a black steepled church across the city, abandoned for decades and shunned by its neighbours. Inside he finds the Shining Trapezohedron, a crystal in an ancient box, and the remains of a reporter who looked too long. The stone is a window, and looking into it calls its keeper, the Haunter, a thing that can move only in darkness and hungers across the gulfs it opens.

As the city's lights fail in a summer storm, the dark comes for him. Lovecraft's last major tale, written for his friend Robert Bloch, turns a single building into a trap and makes the simple failure of the streetlights into the most patient kind of terror. The Archive sets it in the steeple, a slow figure for the thing that waits for the lights to go.