The Shining Trapezohedron is a crystalline polyhedron, approximately four inches across at its longest axis, cut from a material that does not occur naturally in this solar system. When looked into, it shows things that are looking back. It was last held by Robert Harrison Blake of Providence, Rhode Island, who stared into it once too often in the summer of 1935 and was found dead in his rented room, eyes fixed on the window and a smile on his face that his mother refused to describe.
The object's chain of custody is unusually well-documented for an artifact of this class. The Bureau attributes this to the fact that everyone who held it kept careful notes, and most of them did not survive long enough to revise those notes for plausibility.
Origin
Brought from Ģ̃B̄W͢Ï͞N̸̵͆W̆̕W͝͞V̴͓ŹP̊̋F̃͆H͕͡Ţ͆́U͡͠͝ by the Old Ones in some pre-human epoch. Housed in a temple on Earth for tens of thousands of years before the temple was lost to geology. The Trapezohedron passed through hands that did not belong to any species currently extant, in arrangements the Bureau has not attempted to reconstruct.
It surfaces in the historical record in 1844, when the Church of Starry Wisdom acquired it through means that the Church's surviving correspondence does not specify, and installed it in their Providence chapel on Federal Hill. The Church collapsed in 1877 under public pressure from a congregation increasingly afraid of what its leadership did after dark. The Trapezohedron remained in the chapel's steeple, locked in a metal box on a stone altar, unexamined for fifty-eight years.
Blake's Discovery
April 1935. Robert Blake — young writer, occult researcher, recent transplant from Milwaukee — entered the abandoned chapel through a side door that should have been nailed shut. He climbed to the steeple room. He found the box. He opened it. He looked into the Trapezohedron.
Then he went home.
For the next several months Blake wrote obsessively about what he had seen — a dark presence in the chapel's shadows, a "Haunter" that moved along the walls and could not tolerate light. Blake believed the Trapezohedron was a window. The Bureau's assessment is that he was correct, and incomplete. It is also a beacon. The window opens both ways and the thing on the other side knows exactly where the box is when the lights are on it.
The Haunter
Not a separate entity. An avatar of Nyarlathotep. The Haunter of the Dark emerged through the Trapezohedron's connection whenever the object was exposed in lightless conditions. Blake was safe as long as the lights stayed on across Federal Hill — and Blake understood this, and tracked the lighting conditions in his neighborhood with the obsessive precision of a man who knows what is waiting for the next outage.
In August 1935 a thunderstorm killed the power across Federal Hill for several hours. That is when Blake died. The coroner attributed the death to electrical shock from a window struck by lightning. The window was on the opposite side of the room from Blake's body. The coroner did not revise his report.
The Recovery Attempt
Dr. Ambrose Dexter recovered the Trapezohedron from Blake's room shortly after the death. Dexter presented credentials identifying himself as a physician and a friend of the deceased. He was neither. The Bureau has been unable to determine which organization Dexter was working for, only that the credentials were convincing enough for the Providence police to release the object on the spot.
Dexter took the Trapezohedron to the Fox Point pier and dropped it into Narragansett Bay at a depth of approximately thirty fathoms. Dredging operations commissioned in 1936 and again in 1957 recovered nothing. A 1962 sighting by a commercial diver remains the only post-1935 evidence that the object still exists at all — the diver surfaced early, refused to return for the second descent, and within a year had relocated to Arizona and stopped accepting marine work.
Threat Assessment
The Trapezohedron is not a weapon. It is a communication device that operates in both directions, and the entity on the other end is Nyarlathotep. The current location at the bottom of Narragansett Bay does not constitute containment. It constitutes a deferred problem in a tidal estuary subject to dredging, sediment migration, and the periodic interest of parties who have read Blake's notes and drawn their own conclusions about what thirty fathoms of brackish water can and cannot hold back.
The Bureau recommends against any further recovery attempts. The Bureau also recognizes that this recommendation will not be honored indefinitely.
A four-inch crystal at the bottom of a bay. That's all it is. I've stood on the Fox Point pier. Looked down into the water. The bay is brown and ordinary and fishermen pull stripers out of it on weekends. Somewhere under the silt is an object that turned a young writer into a corpse with a smile on his face, and we know exactly where it is, and we have collectively decided that knowing where it is counts as solving the problem. It does not count as solving the problem. It counts as agreeing not to look at the problem until the problem looks at us first.