The Evil Clergyman

One of the more insidious difficulties in my renewed October rite, the nightly immersion in a tale by H. P. Lovecraft, is the creeping infection of his voice upon my own. I had not foreseen how the cadences of that Providence scribe might insinuate themselves into the sinews of my prose, nor how his brooding vision of cosmic dread would shadow my own meditations upon the Gnostic abyss. My current labor, a serialized chronicle steeped in aeonic revelation and spiritual decay, differs in nature from Lovecraft’s monstrous immensities, yet his spectral influence looms ever near, an unseen hand guiding my pen toward forbidden harmonies not wholly mine.

Still, though the struggle for sovereignty of voice is wearying, I find a grim satisfaction in the ordeal, for what apprentice of horror would not be both humbled and exalted to learn at the feet of so dreadful a master?

And now, with the proper reverence and unease, let us turn to this evening’s study, “The Evil Clergyman.”

In the dim loft of a time-eaten house, theournarrator is cautioned by his uneasy companion not to remain after nightfall nor to lay a hand upon the small and sinister object resting upon a table. When solitude enfolds him, he surveys the chamber’s grim array of theological and forbidden volumes, feeling the stealthy pull of that accursed relic. From his pocket he draws a queer device like a flashlight, whose beam is a sickly violet hue composed of infinitesimal motes that drift like living dust. When he turns this radiance upon the object, it crackles with a sound like ruptured air and begins to blush with a dreadful pink light, within which a pale form slowly takes shape.

Before him stands a spectral clergyman, garbed in the vestments of the Anglican Church, his face drawn with knowledge no mortal should possess. In silence he seizes books of occult lore and casts them into the fire. Presently other clergymen appear, pallid and trembling, and confront the apparition before fleeing in unspeakable fear. The lone phantom smiles in hideous triumph, fetches a coil of rope, and sets about fashioning a noose.

When the narrator rushes forward, the figure turns with menace in its eyes. Desperation guides the narrator’s hand, and he raises the violet light as one might a weapon. The beam strikes the revenant, which reels backward and vanishes down a dark stair.

Descending, the narrator finds no corpse, only three men bearing lanterns. Two cry out and flee, leaving the original companion to whisper that he should never have meddled. The narrator is led to a mirror and beholds not his own visage, but that of the blasphemous clergyman, whose soul has taken his place within the flesh of the living.

“The Evil Clergyman” was born of a letter penned in the year 1933, wherein H. P. Lovecraft recounted to his friend Bernard Austin Dwyer a dream of unearthly vividness and dreadful import. After the author’s passing, this fragment of nocturnal vision found its way into the April 1939 issue of Weird Tales, taking on the guise of a story that seemed half dream, half invocation. Many years later it was shaped anew for the ill-fated film Pulse Pounders, which itself never emerged from the shadows of oblivion. What shape the tale might have taken under Lovecraft’s living hand no mortal can say, for its final purpose remains veiled, like the lingering echo of a nightmare glimpsed upon awakening.