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The
Festival
I WAS far from
home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon
me. In the twilight I heard it pounding on the
rocks, and I knew it lay just over the hill
where the twisting willows writhed against the
clearing sky and the first stars of evening. And
because my fathers had called me to the old town
beyond, I pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen
snow along the road that soared lonely up to
where Aldebaran twinkled among the trees; on
toward the very ancient town I had never seen
but often dreamed of.
It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas
though they know in their hearts it is older
than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis
and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come
at last to the ancient sea town where my people
had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time
when festival was forbidden; where also they had
commanded their sons to keep festival once every
century, that the memory of primal secrets might
not be forgotten. Mine were an old people, and
were old even when this land was settled three
hundred years before. And they were strange,
because they had come as dark furtive folk from
opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spoken
another tongue before they learnt the tongue of
the blue-eyed fishers. And now they were
scattered, and shared only the rituals of
mysteries that none living could understand. I
was the only one who came back that night to the
old fishing town as legend bade, for only the
poor and the lonely remember.
 The
Haunter of The Dark
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....

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