Fragment of brick from the foundation of the Free-Will Church
which in former times stood on Federal Hill in Providence, Rhode
Island. It was in the dark and windowless chamber beneath the steeple
of this church, a gathering place, late in the nineteenth century,
for
members of the banned Starry Wisdom sect, that the noted painter
and writer Robert Blake discovered a nearly black, red-striated
polyhedron in a strangely adorned metal box, together with the charred
skeletal remains of Edwin M. Lillibridge, formerly a reporter for
the
Providence Telegram. Before his own mysterious death Blake was able
to determine that the oddly-shaped stone (the so-called "Shining
Trapezohedron") was in fact the largest of a group of similar objects
that been created eons earlier on the planet Yuggoth. By all accounts
the history of the Shining Trapezohedron is a complex: one: worshipped
by the crinoid beings of prehistoric Antarctica, it was salvaged
by the
serpent-men of ancient Valusia, transported to Lemuria, taken from
thence to Atlantis, recovered from the sea by a Minoan fisherman,
placed
in a temple by the Egyptian pharoah Nephren-Ka, and brought to Rhode
Island by Professor Enoch Bowen in 1844. Its present location
is unknown.
Of the subordinate stones which also allowed followers to communicate
with
the Haunter of the Dark, only the smaller "Whateley
Trapezohedron," itself
badly damaged when Cotton Mather attempted to destroy it in 1696,
is known
to remain. A detailed account of the circumstances surrounding
Blake's demise
during the blackout of August 8, 1936 may be found in the Providence
Journal
for August 9 of that year. The church within which the occult activities
had taken
place was razed to the ground in September, 1936, and the rubble
dumped into
Narragansett Bay. This fragment of brick, the largest remaining
after the church
was destroyed, was salvaged from the site by Professor Subtley-Askew
himself,
at midnight and at considerable personal risk.
(Provenance: Brick, Subtly-Askew collection; Trapezohedron, Whateley
Trust).
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