"The Tree on the Hill" is a short story written by horror author H. P. Lovecraft and Duane W. Rimel. It was written in 1934 and published in 1940 in Polaris.
Plot[]
In the summer of 1938, the story's narrator is exploring an area called Hell's Acres, near the Salmon River Gorge in the Blue Mountain Forest Reserve, southeast of the town of Hampden. He finds a strange lone tree atop an a hill that resembles "a tree painted on a canvas", and rests beneath it. From the hill, the man spots the Bitterroot Mountains, which should be too far away to see.
He has a vision of a great blue-violet temple next to a sea of ooze in a land with three suns in a pale red sky. When "swirling shadows" try to snatch him inside the temple, he screams and the vision fades. He takes photographs of the tree and the surrounding landscape, and then the vision returns, with the temple's doorway appearing as a "bottomless gulf teeming with nameless shapes and entities." As he fears for his sanity, he awakens miles away, with his clothing torn and dirty.
He shows the pictures of the tree to his friend Constantine Theunis, a scholar of Egyptian mythology. He points out that there are three shadows projected by the tree, indicating light coming from three suns, as he saw in his vision.
Consulting the Chronicle of Nath written by the German alchemist Rudolf Yergler, Theunis tells a story of a shadow or dark force which was repelled by an Egyptian priest, Ka-Nefer, during the year of the Black Goat. He used a peculiar amber gem to divert the dark energy. Theunis uses a camera obscura and the special gem to examine the photos taken earlier. The sight renders him unconscious. Theunis instructs the protagonist to burn the pictures and lock up the gem. He does as instructed, but glances at a drawing of the photograph made by Theunis. The protagonist recoils in horror at the sight of a clawed hand with tendrils reaching for a spot in the grass where the protagonist received the vision.
Connections[]
Theunis mentions that this story takes place during the year of the Black Goat, a probably reference to Lovecraft's invented deity Shub-Niggurath.