The Broken Hours: A Novel of H. P. Lovecraft Read Online Free Page B

hilled Providence skyline, domed and steepled, and in the distance, on the edge of the silvered river, a building more striking still: dark and sprawling, its gloomy peaks and dormers lit but dimly through the rain.
    As I stood watching at the window, a light in one of the dormer windows went out, and I was caught by melancholia, as I have always been at the sight of a light going out across a vast distance, like the sudden, cold extinguishing of a star.
    The light came on again, only to be put out a second later. This flickering continued nearly a full minute, as if someone there were sending a signal out across the darkening city, through the storm; as if someone were seeking a reply; and I almost felt, in that moment, in that cold room with the wind and rain raging outside, that the someone being signalled was me. But then the light went out and stayed out. I waited some time but it did not come on again.
    Before me, on the chipped windowsill, the desiccated bodies of flies lay thickly. I touched one with my thumbnail, lightly, and it crumbled to dust. I turned from the window and, putting out my own lamp, pulled off my wet shoes and socks and trousers and climbed into bed in my shirt sleeves, too tired even to bother washing up. From the bed, I could still see out the low window to the dormered building that had so caught my interest. I waited a few moments to see if the light would come on, but there was nothing. It occurred to me then, that, though my attic room was practically ringed with windows, all of the furniture—the bed, a small, dingy armchair, the desk and ladderback chair—were oriented toward this window, this view. It gave me a queer feeling and I made a mental note to rearrange things to my own taste in the morning.
    I said a quick prayer, as had long been my habit, against the suffering of loved ones and for my own failings and for the unhappy intersections between the two. There had been a time in my youth when prayer had brought me actual comfort and so I’d continued the ritual—out of a kind of familiar obligation, as was sometimes the way with habits—long after I had lost faith in it, when it left me only as exposed and unmoved as the solitary, ordinary, lonely bedtime ritual of removing one’s own clothing.
    Thus have you also been cast off, Crandle , I told myself, and closed my eyes.
    But I could not get comfortable. Apart from the smallness of the bed, the room was cold and I lay shivering and sleepless beneath the musty, too-short blankets, finding myself staring out across the city through the window, listening to the rain batter down upon the shingles above my head, and the house creak and shift in the high wind. When I held a palm to the wall, I could feel a draft seep as through something porous, as if the wall were not plaster but skin. The starched sheets chafed, the pillow lumped unpleasantly.
    It was then, as I tossed about seeking comfort, that my hand came upon a small, hard object beneath my pillow, and I pulled it out and turned on the lamp. In my palm lay what appeared to be a triangular chunk of concrete, which I took at first for a broken bit of sidewalk or building masonry.
    And yet, as I turned it beneath the lamplight, I found it to be curved smoothly on one edge, polished but for its broken side, and all in all it gave the sense of something vexingly familiar—some exceedingly common thing—though just what somehow eluded me. I put out the light again and lay back against the pillow, rubbing my thumb against its smooth side as if it were a talisman. Possibly it had been so once, placed there as a charm against darkness for whatever child had inhabited that room. A charm against loneliness. It seemed terribly sad to me that the charm was still there, the child long gone.
    At last I began to sink into sleep, down and down, with that sense of dark plummeting, as I imagined dying might feel.

    I was startled awake. I knew not how long I’d slept, if truly at all, but a