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Title: The horror at Red Hook
Author: H. P. Lovecraft
Release date: February 15, 2024 [eBook #72966]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Weird Tales, 1927
Credits: Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HORROR AT RED HOOK ***
[Source: Weird Tales, March 1952]
The Horror at Red Hook
By H. P. Lovecraft
_"The nightmare horde slithered away, led by the abominable naked
phosphorescent thing that now strode insolently, bearing in its arms
the glassy-eyed corpse of the corpulent old man._
_"There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us, and we
live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there
are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is possible that
man may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my
belief that an awful lore is not yet dead."_
_--Arthur Machen_
I
Not many weeks ago, on a street corner in the village of Pascoag,
Rhode Island, a tall heavily built, and wholesome looking pedestrian
furnished much speculation by a singular lapse of behavior. He had,
it appears, been descending the hill by the road from Chepachet; and
encountering the compact section, had turned to his left into the
main thoroughfare where several modest business blocks convey a touch
of the urban. At this point, without visible provocation, he
committed his astonishing lapse; staring queerly for a second at the
tallest of the buildings, before him, and then, with a series of
terrified, hysterical shrieks, breaking into a frantic run which
ended in a stumble and fall at the next crossing. Picked up and
dusted off by ready hands, he was found to be conscious, organically
unhurt, and evidently cured of his sudden nervous attack. He
muttered some shamefaced explanations involving a strain he had
undergone, and with downcast glance turned back, up the Chepachet
road, trudging out of sight, without once looking behind him. It was
a strange incident to befall so large, robust, normal-featured, and
capable-looking a man, and the strangeness was not lessened by the
remarks of a bystander who had recognized him as the boarder of a
well-known dairyman on the outskirts of Chepachet.
He was, it developed, a New York police-detective named Thomas F.
Malone, now on a long leave of absence under medical treatment after
some disproportionately arduous work on a gruesome local case which
accident had made dramatic. There had been a collapse of several old
brick buildings during a raid in which he had shared, and something
about the wholesale loss of life, both of prisoners and of his
companions, had peculiarly appalled him. As a result, he had
acquired an acute and anomalous horror of any buildings even remotely
suggesting the ones which had fallen in, so that in the end mental
specialists forbade him the sight of such things for an indefinite
period. A police surgeon with relatives in Chepachet had put forward
that quaint hamlet of wooden Colonial houses as an ideal spot for the
psychological convalescence; and thither the sufferer had gone,
promising never to venture among the brick-lined streets of larger
villages till duly advised by the Woonsocket specialist with whom he
was put in touch. This walk to Pascoag for magazines had been a
mistake, and the patient had paid in fright, bruises, and humiliation
for his disobedience.
So much the gossips of Chepachet and Pascoag knew; and so much, also,
the most learned specialists believed. But Malone had at first told
the specialists much more, ceasing only when he saw that utter
incredulity was his portion. Thereafter he held his peace,
protesting not at all when it was generally agreed that the collapse
of certain squalid brick houses in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn,
and the consequent death of many brave officers, had unseated his
nervous equilibrium. He had worked too hard, all said, in trying to
clean up those nests of disorder and violence; certain features were
shocking enough, in all conscience, and the unexpected tragedy was
the last straw. This was a simple explanation which everyone could
understand, and because Malone was not a simple person he perceived
that he had better let it suffice. To hint to unimaginative people
of a horror beyond all human conception--a horror of houses and
blocks and cities leprous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder
worlds--would be merely to invite a padded cell instead of a restful
rustication, and Malone was a man of sense despite his mysticism. He
had the Celt's far vision of weird and hidden things, but the
logician's quick eye for the outwardly unconvincing; an amalgam which
had led him far afield in the forty-two years of his life, and set
him in strange places for a Dublin University man born in a Georgian
villa near Phoenix Park.
And now, as he reviewed the things he had seen and felt and
apprehended, Malone was content to keep unshared the secret of what
could reduce a dauntless fighter to a quivering neurotic; what could
make old brick slums and seas of dark, subtle faces a thing of
nightmare and eldritch portent. It would not be the first time his
sensations had been forced to bide uninterpreted--for was not his
very act of plunging into the polyglot abyss of New York's underworld
a freak beyond sensible explanation? What could he tell the prosaic
of the antique witcheries and grotesque marvels discernible to
sensitive eyes amidst the poison cauldron where all the varied dregs
of unwholesome ages mix their venom and perpetuate their obscene
terrors? He had seen the hellish green flame of secret wonder in
this blatant, evasive welter of outward greed and inward blasphemy,
and had smiled gently when all the New Yorkers he knew scoffed at his
experiment in police work. They had been very witty and cynical,
deriding his fantastic pursuit of unknowable mysteries and assuring
him that in these days New York held nothing but cheapness and
vulgarity. One of them had wagered him a heavy sum that he could
not--despite many poignant things to his credit in the _Dublin
Review_--even write a truly interesting story of New York low life;
and now, looking back, he perceived that cosmic irony had justified
the prophet's words while secretly confuting their flippant meaning.
The horror, as glimpsed at last, could not make a story--for like the
book cited by Poe's German authority, "er lässt sich nicht lesen"--it
does not permit itself to be read.
II
To Malone the sense of latent mystery in existence was always
present. In youth he had felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of
things, and had been a poet; but poverty and sorrow and exile had
turned his gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the
imputations of evil in the world around. Daily life had for him come
to be a fantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and
jeering with concealed rottenness as in Aubrey Beardsley's best
manner, now hinting terrors behind the commonest shapes and objects
as in the subtler and less obvious work of Gustave Doré. He would
often regard it as merciful that most persons of high intelligence
jeer at the inmost mysteries; for, he argued, if superior minds were
ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by ancient
and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only
wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe.
All this reflection was no doubt morbid, but keen logic and a deep
sense of humor ably offset it. Malone was satisfied to let his
notions remain as half-spied and forbidden visions to be lightly
played with; and hysteria came only when duty flung him into a hell
of revelation too sudden and insidious to escape.
He had for some time been detailed to the Butler Street station in
Brooklyn when the Red Hook matter came to his notice. Red Hook is a
maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite
Governor's Island, with dirty highways climbing the hill from the
wharves to that higher ground where the decayed lengths of Clinton
and Court Streets lead off toward the Borough Hall. Its houses are
mostly of brick, dating from the first quarter of the middle of the
nineteenth century, and some of the obscurer alleys and byways have
that alluring antique flavor which conventional reading leads us to
call "Dickensian." The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma;
Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and Negro elements impinging upon one
another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not
far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange
cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the
monstrous organ litanies of the harbor whistles. Here long ago a
brighter picture dwelt, with clear-eyed mariners on the lower streets
and homes of taste and substance where the larger houses line the
hill. One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim
shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches and the
evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and
there--a worn flight of steps, a battered doorway, a wormy pair of
decorative columns or pilasters, or a fragment of once green space
with bent and rusted iron railing. The houses are generally in solid
blocks, and now and then a many-windowed cupola arises to tell of
days when the households of captains and ship-owners watched the sea.
From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the
blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky. Hordes of
prowlers reel shouting and singing along the lanes and thoroughfares,
occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguish lights and pull down
curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from windows when
visitors pick their way through. Policemen despair of order or
reform, and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside
world from the contagion.
The clang of the patrol is answered by a kind of spectral silence,
and such prisoners as are taken are never communicative. Visible
offenses are as varied as the local dialects, and run the gamut from
the smuggling of rum and prohibited aliens through diverse stages of
lawlessness and obscure vice to murder and mutilation in their most
abhorrent guises. That these visible affairs are not more frequent
is not to the neighborhood's credit, unless the power of concealment
be an art demanding credit. More people enter Red Hook than leave
it--or at least, than leave it by the landward side--and those who
are not loquacious are the likeliest to leave.
Malone found in this state of things a faint stench of secrets more
terrible than any of the sins denounced by citizens and bemoaned by
priest and philanthropists. He was conscious, as one who united
imagination with scientific knowledge, that modern people under
lawless conditions tend uncannily to repeat the darkest instinctive
patterns of primitive half-ape savagery in their daily life and
ritual observances; and he had often viewed with an anthropologist's
shudder the chanting, cursing processions of blear-eyed and
pock-marked young men which wound their way along in the dark small
hours of morning. One saw groups of these youths incessantly;
sometimes in leering vigils on street corners, sometimes in doorways
playing eerily on cheap instruments of music, sometimes in stupefied
dozes or indecent dialogues around cafeteria tables near Borough
Hall, and sometimes in whispering converse around dingy taxicabs
drawn up at the high stoops of crumbling and closely shuttered old
houses. They chilled and fascinated him more than he dared confess
to his associates on the force, for he seemed to see in them some
monstrous thread of secret continuity; some fiendish, cryptical and
ancient pattern utterly beyond and below the sordid mass of facts and
habits and haunts listed with such conscientious technical care by
the police. They must be, he felt inwardly, the heirs of some
shocking and primordial tradition; the sharers of debased and broken
scraps from cults and ceremonies older than mankind. Their coherence
and definiteness suggested it, and it showed in the singular
suspicion of order which lurked beneath their squalid disorder. He
had not read in vain such treatises as Miss Murray's Witch Cult in
Western Europe; and knew that up to recent years there had certainly
survived among peasants and furtive folk a frightful and clandestine
system of assemblies and orgies descended from dark religions
antedating the Aryan World, and appearing in popular legends as Black
Masses and Witches' Sabbaths. That these hellish vestiges of old
Turanian-Asiatic magic and fertility-cults were even now wholly dead
he could not for a moment suppose, and he frequently wondered how
much older and how much blacker than the very worst of the muttered
tales some of them might really be.
III
It was the case of Robert Suydam which took Malone to the heart of
things in Red Hook. Suydam was a lettered recluse of ancient Dutch
family, possessed originally of barely independent means, and
inhabiting the spacious but ill-preserved mansion which his
grandfather had built in Flatbush when that village was little more
then a pleasant group of Colonial cottages surrounding the steepled
and ivy-clad Reformed Church with its iron-railed yard of
Netherlandish gravestones. In this lonely house, set back from
Martense Street amidst a yard of venerable trees, Suydam had read and
brooded for some six decades except for a period a generation before,
when he had sailed for the Old World and remained there out of sight
for eight years. He could afford no servants, and would admit but
few visitors to his absolute solitude; eschewing close friendships
and receiving his rare acquaintances in one of the three ground-floor
rooms, which he kept in order--a vast, high-ceiled library whose
walls were solidly packed with tattered books of ponderous, archaic,
and vaguely repellent aspect. The growth of the town and its final
absorption in the Brooklyn district had meant nothing to Suydam, and
he had come to mean less and less to the town. Elderly people still
pointed him out on the streets, but to most of the recent population
he was merely a queer, corpulent old fellow whose unkempt white hair,
stubbly beard, shiny black clothes and gold-headed cane earned him an
amused glance and nothing more. Malone did not know him by sight
till duty called him to the case, but had heard of him indirectly as
a really profound authority on medieval superstition, and had once
idly meant to look up an out-of-print pamphlet of his on the Kabbalah
and the Faustus legend, which a friend had quoted from memory.
Suydam became a "case" when his distant and only relatives sought
court pronouncements on his sanity. Their action seemed sudden to
the outside world, but was really undertaken only after prolonged
observation and sorrowful debate. It was based on certain odd
changes in his speech and habits; wild references to impending
wonders, and unaccountable hauntings of disreputable Brooklyn
neighborhoods. He had been growing shabbier and shabbier with the
years, and now prowled about like a veritable mendicant; seen
occasionally by humiliated friends in subway stations, or loitering
on the benches around Borough Hall in conversation with groups of
swarthy, evil-looking strangers. When he spoke it was to babble of
unlimited powers almost within his grasp, and to repeat with knowing
leers such mystical words of names as "Sephiroth," "Ashmodai" and
"Samael." The court action revealed that he was using up his income
and wasting his principal in the purchase of curious tomes imported
from London and Paris, and in the maintenance of a squalid basement
flat in the Red Hook district where he spent nearly every night,
receiving odd delegations of mixed rowdies and foreigners, and
apparently conducting some kind of ceremonial service behind the
green blinds of secretive windows. Detectives assigned to follow him
reported strange cries and chants and prancing of feet filtering out
from these nocturnal rites, and shuddered at their peculiar ecstasy
and abandon despite the commonness of weird orgies in that sodden
section. When, however, the matter came to a hearing, Suydam managed
to preserve his liberty. Before the judge his manner grew urbane and
reasonable, and he freely admitted the queerness of demeanor and
extravagant cast of language into which he had fallen through
excessive devotion to study and research. He was, he said, engaged
in the investigation of certain details of European tradition which
required the closest contact with foreign groups and their songs and
folk dances. The notion that any low secret society was preying upon
him, as hinted by his relatives, was obviously absurd; and showed how
sadly limited was their understanding of him and his work.
Triumphing with his calm explanations, he was suffered to depart
unhindered; and the paid detectives of the Suydams, Corlears and Van
Brunts were withdrawn in resigned disgust.
It was here that an alliance of Federal inspectors and police, Malone
with them, entered the case. The law had watched the Suydam action
with interest, and had in many instances been called upon to aid the
private detectives. In this work it developed that Suydam's new
associates were among the blackest and most vicious criminals of Red
Hook's devious lanes, and that at least a third of them were known
and repeated offenders in the matter of thievery, disorder, and the
importation of illegal immigrants. Indeed, it would not have been
too much to say that the old scholar's particular circle coincided
almost perfectly with the worst of the organized cliques which
smuggled ashore certain nameless and unclassified Asian dregs wisely
turned back by Ellis Island. In the teeming rookeries of Parker
Place--since renamed--where Suydam had his basement flat, there had
grown up a very unusual colony of unclassified slant-eyed folk who
used the Arabic alphabet but were eloquently repudiated by the great
mass of Syrians in and around Atlantic Avenue. They could all have
been deported for lack of credentials, but legalism is slow-moving,
and one does not disturb Red Hook unless publicity forces one to.
These creatures attended a tumbledown stone church, used Wednesdays
as a dance hall, which reared its Gothic buttresses near the vilest
part of the waterfront. Clergy throughout Brooklyn denied the place
all standing and authenticity, and policemen agreed with them when
they listened to the noises it emitted at night. Malone used to
fancy he heard terrible cracked bass notes from a hidden organ far
underground when the church stood empty and unlighted, whilst all
observers dreaded the shrieking and drumming which accompanied the
visible services. Suydam, when questioned, said he thought the
ritual was some remnant of Nestorian Christianity tinctured with the
Shamanism of Tibet. Most of the people, he conjectured, were of
Mongoloid stock, originating somewhere in or near Kurdistan--and
Malone could not help recalling that Kurdistan is the land of the
Yezidees, last survivors of the Persian devil-worshippers. However
this may have been, the stir of the Suydam investigation made it
certain that these unauthorized newcomers were flooding Red Hook in
increasing numbers; entering through some marine conspiracy unreached
by revenue officers and harbor police, overrunning Parker Place and
rapidly spreading up the hill, and welcomed with curious fraternalism
by the other assorted denizens of the region. Their squat figures
and characteristic squinting physiognomies grotesquely combined with
flashy American clothing, appeared more and more numerously among the
loafers and nomad gangsters of the Borough Hall section; till at
length it was deemed necessary to compute their number, ascertain
their sources and occupations, and find if possible a way to round
them up and deliver them to the proper immigration authorities. To
this task Malone was assigned by agreement of Federal and city
forces, and as he commenced his canvass of Red Hook he felt poised
upon the brink of nameless terrors, with the shabby, unkempt figure
of Robert Suydam as archfiend and adversary.
IV
Police methods are varied and ingenious. Malone, through
unostentatious rambles, carefully casual conversations, well-timed
offers of hip-pocket liquor, and judicious dialogues with frightened
prisoners, learned many isolated facts about the movement whose
aspect had become so menacing. The newcomers were indeed Kurds, but
of a dialect obscure and puzzling to exact philology. Such of them
as worked lived mostly as dock-hands and unlicensed peddlers, though
frequently serving in Greek restaurants and tending corner
newsstands. Most of them, however, had no visible means of support;
and were obviously connected with underworld pursuits, of which
smuggling and bootlegging were the least indescribable. They had
come in steamships, apparently tramp freighters, and had been
unloaded by stealth on moonless nights in rowboats which stole under
a certain wharf and followed a hidden canal and house Malone could
not locate, for the memories of his informants were exceedingly
confused, while their speech was to a great extent beyond even the
ablest interpreters; nor could he gain any real data on the reasons
for their systematic importation. They were reticent about the exact
spot from which they had come, and were never sufficiently off guard
to reveal the agencies which had sought them out and directed their
course. Indeed, they developed something like acute fright when
asked the reason for their presence. Gangsters of other breeds were
equally taciturn, and the most that could be gathered was that some
god or great priesthood had promised them unheard-of powers and
supernatural glories and rulerships in a strange land.
The attendance of both newcomers and old gangsters at Suydam's
closely guarded nocturnal meetings was very regular, and the police
soon learned that the erstwhile recluse had leased additional flats
to accommodate such guests as knew his password; at last occupying
three entire houses and permanently harboring many of his queer
companions. He spent but little time now at his Flatbush home,
apparently going and coming only to obtain and return books; and his
face and manner had attained an appalling pitch of wildness. Malone
twice interviewed him, but was each time bruskly repulsed. He knew
nothing, he said, of any mysterious plots or movements; and had no
idea how the Kurds could have entered or what they wanted. His
business was to study undisturbed the folk-lore of all the immigrants
of the district; a business with which policemen had no legitimate
concern. Malone mentioned his admiration for Suydam's old brochure
on the Kabbalah and other myths, but the old man's softening was only
momentary. He sensed an intrusion, and rebuffed his visitor in no
uncertain way; till Malone withdrew disgusted, and turned to other
channels of information.
What Malone would have unearthed could he have worked continuously on
the case, we shall never know. As it was, a stupid conflict between
city and Federal authority suspended the investigation for several
months, during which the detective was busy with other assignments.
But at no time did he lose interest, or fail to stand amazed at what
began to happen to Robert Suydam. Just at the time when a wave of
kidnappings and disappearances spread its excitement over New York,
the unkempt scholar embarked upon a metamorphosis as startling as it
was absurd. One day he was seen near Borough Hall with clean-shaved
face, well-trimmed hair, and tastefully immaculate attire, and on
every day thereafter some obscure improvement was noticed in him. He
maintained his new fastidiousness without interruption, added to it
an unwonted sparkle of eye and crispness of speech, and began little
by little to shed the corpulence which had so long deformed him. Now
frequently taken for less than his age, he acquired an elasticity of
step and buoyancy of demeanor to match the new tradition, and showed
a curious darkening of the hair which somehow did not suggest dye.
As the months passed, he commenced to dress less and less
conservatively, and finally astonished his few friends by renovating
and redecorating his Flatbush mansion, which he threw open in a
series of receptions, summoning all the acquaintances he could
remember, and extending a special welcome to the fully forgiven
relatives who had lately sought his restraint. Some attended through
curiosity, others through duty; but all were suddenly charmed by the
dawning grace and urbanity of the former hermit. He had, he
asserted, accomplished most of his allotted work; and having just
inherited some property from a half-forgotten European friend, was
about to spend his remaining years in a brighter second youth which
ease, care and diet had made possible to him. Less and less was he
seen at Red Hook, and more and more did he move in the society to
which he was born. Policemen noted a tendency of the gangsters to
congregate at the old stone church and dancehall instead of at the
basement flat in Parker Place, though the latter and its recent
annexes still overflowed with noxious life.
Then two incidents occurred--wide enough apart, but both of intense
interest in the case as Malone envisaged it. One was a quiet
announcement in the _Eagle_ of Robert Suydam's engagement to Miss
Cornelia Gerritsen of Bayside, a young woman of excellent position,
and distantly related to the elderly bridegroom-elect; whilst the
other was a raid on the dance-hall church by city police, after a
report that the face of a kidnapped child had been seen for a second
at one of the basement windows. Malone had participated in this
raid, and studied the place with much care when inside. Nothing was
found--in fact, the building was entirely deserted when visited--but
the sensitive Celt was vaguely disturbed by many things about the
interior. There were crudely painted panels he did not like--panels
which depicted sacred faces with peculiarly worldly and sardonic
expressions, and which occasionally took liberties that even a
layman's sense of decorum could scarcely countenance. Then, too, he
did not relish the Greek inscription on the wall above the pulpit; an
ancient incantation which he had once stumbled upon in Dublin college
days, and which read, literally translated: "O friend and companion
of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt blood,
who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs; who longest for
blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorge, Mormo, thousand-faced
moon, look favorably on our sacrifices!"
When he read this he shuddered, and thought vaguely of the cracked
bass organ-notes he fancied he had heard beneath the church on
certain nights. He shuddered again at the rust around the rim of a
metal basin which stood on the altar, and paused nervously when his
nostrils seemed to detect a curious and ghastly stench from somewhere
in the neighborhood. That organ memory haunted him, and he explored
the basement with particular assiduity before he left. The place was
very hateful to him; yet after all, were the blasphemous panels and
inscriptions more than mere crudities perpetrated by the ignorant?
By the time of Suydam's wedding the kidnapping epidemic had become a
popular newspaper scandal. Most of the victims were young children
of the lowest classes, but the increasing number of disappearances
had worked up a sentiment of the strongest fury. Journals clamored
for action from the police, and once more the Butler Street station
sent its men over Red Hook for clues, discoveries, and criminals.
Malone was glad to be on the trail again, and took pride in a raid on
one of Suydam's Parker Place houses. There, indeed, no stolen child
was found, despite the tales of screams and the red sash picked up in
the areaway; but the paintings and rough inscriptions on the peeling
walls of most of the rooms, and the primitive chemical laboratory in
the attic, all helped to convince the detective that he was on the
track of something tremendous. The paintings were appalling--hideous
monsters of every shape and size, and parodies on human outlines
which cannot be described. The writing was in red, and varied from
Arabic to Greek, Roman, and Hebrew letters. Malone could not read
much of it, but what he did decipher was portentous and cabalistic
enough. One frequently repeated motto was in a sort of Hebraized
Hellenistic Greek, and suggested the most terrible demon-evocations
of the Alexandrian decadence:
HEL. HELOYM. SOTHER. EMMANVEL. SABOATH. AGLA. TETRAGRAMMATION.
AGYROS. OTHEOS. ISCHYROS. ATHANATOS. IEHOVA. VA. ADONAL. SADY.
HOMOVSION. MESSIAS. ESCHEREHEYE.
Circles and pentagrams loomed on every hand, and told indubitably of
the strange beliefs and aspirations of those who dwelt so squalidly
here. In the cellar, however, the strangest thing was found--a pile
of genuine gold ingots covered carelessly with a piece of burlap, and
bearing upon their shining surfaces the same weird hieroglyphics
which also adorned the walls. During this raid the police
encountered only a passive resistance from the squinting Orientals
that swarmed from every door. Finding nothing relevant, they had to
leave all as it was; but the precinct captain wrote Suydam a note,
advising him to look closely to the character of his tenants, and
protegés in view of the growing public clamor.
V
Then came the June wedding and the great sensation; Flatbush was gay
for the hour about high noon, and pennanted motors thronged the
street near the old Dutch church where an awning stretched from door
to highway. No local event ever surpassed the Suydam-Gerritsen
nuptials in tone and scale, and the party which escorted the bride
and groom to the Cunard pier was, if not exactly the smartest, at
least a solid page from the Social Register! At 5 o'clock adieux was
waved, and the ponderous liner edged away from the long pier, slowly
turned its nose seaward, discarded its tug, and headed for widening
water spaces that led to Old World wonders. By night the outer
harbor was cleared, and late passengers watched the stars twinkling
above an unpolluted ocean.
Whether the tramp steamer or the scream was first to gain attention,
no one can say. Probably they were simultaneous, but it is of no use
to calculate. The scream came from the Suydam stateroom, and the
sailor who broke down the door could perhaps have told frightful
things if he had not forthwith gone completely mad--as it is, he
shrieked more loudly than the first victims, and thereafter ran
simpering about the vessel till caught and put in irons. The ship's
doctor who entered the stateroom and turned on the lights a moment
later did not go mad, but told nobody what he saw till afterward,
when he corresponded with Malone in Chepachet. It was
murder--strangulation--but one need not say that the claw-mark on
Mrs. Suydam's throat could not have come from her husband's or any
other human hand, or that upon the white wall there flickered for an
instant in hateful red a legend which, later copied from memory,
seems to have been nothing less than the fearsome Chaldee letters of
the word "LILITH." One need not mention these things because they
vanished so quickly--as for Suydam, one could at least bar others
from the room until one knew what to think oneself. The doctor has
distinctly assured Malone that he did not see IT. The open porthole,
just before he turned on the lights, was clouded for a second with a
certain phosphorescence, and for a moment there seemed to echo in the
night outside the suggestion of a faint and hellish tittering; but no
real outline met the eye. As proof, the doctor points to his
continued sanity.
Then the tramp steamer claimed all attention. A boat put off, and a
horde of swart, insolent ruffians in officers' dress swarmed aboard
the temporarily halted Cunarder. They wanted Suydam or his
body--they had known of his trip, and for certain reasons were sure
he would die. The captain's deck was almost a pandemonium; for at
the instant, between the doctor's report from the stateroom and the
demands of the men from the tramp, not even the wisest and gravest
seaman could think what to do. Suddenly the leader of the visiting
mariners, an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth, pulled forth a
dirty, crumpled paper and handed it to the captain. It was signed by
Robert Suydam, and bore the following odd message:
_In case of sudden or unexpected accident or death on my part, please
deliver me or my body unquestioningly into the hands of the bearer
and his associates. Everything, for me, and perhaps for you, depends
on absolute compliance. Explanations can come later--do not fail me
now._
_Robert Suydam._
Captain and doctor looked at each other, and the latter whispered
something to the former. Finally they nodded rather helplessly and
led the way to the Suydam stateroom. The doctor directed the
captain's glance away as he unlocked the door and admitted the
strange seamen, nor did he breathe easily, till they filed out with
their burden after an unaccountably long period of preparation. It
was wrapped in bedding from the berths, and the doctor was glad that
the outlines were not very revealing. Somehow the men got the thing
over the side and away to their tramp steamer without uncovering it.
The Cunarder started again, and the doctor and ship's undertaker
sought out the Suydam stateroom to perform what last services they
could. Once more the physician was forced to reticence and even to
mendacity, for a hellish thing had happened. When the undertaker
asked him why he had drained off all of Mrs. Suydam's blood, he
neglected to affirm that he had not done so; nor did he point to the
vacant bottle-spaces on the rack, or to the odor in the sink which
showed the hasty disposition of the bottles' original contents. The
pockets of those men--if men they were--had bulged damnably when they
left the ship. Two hours later, and the world knew by radio all that
it ought to know of the horrible affair.
VI
That same June evening, without having heard a word from the sea,
Malone was very busy among the alleys of Red Hook. A sudden stir
seemed to permeate the place, and as if apprized by "grapevine
telegraph" of something singular, the denizens clustered expectantly
around the dance-hall church and the houses in Parker Place. Three
children had just disappeared--blue-eyed Norwegians from the streets
toward Gowanus--and there were rumors of a mob forming among the
sturdy Viking of that section. Malone had for weeks been urging his
colleagues to attempt a general clean-up; and at last, moved by
conditions more obvious to their common sense than the conjectures of
a Dublin dreamer, they had agreed upon a final stroke. The unrest
and menace of this evening had been the deciding factor, and just
about midnight a raiding party recruited from three stations
descended upon Parker Place and its environs. Doors were battered
in, stragglers arrested, and candle-lighted rooms forced to disgorge
unbelievable throngs of mixed foreigners in figured robes, miters and
other inexplicable devices. Much was lost in the mêlée for objects
were thrown hastily down unexpected shafts, and betraying odors
deadened by the sudden kindling of pungent incense. But spattered
blood was everywhere, and Malone shuddered whenever he saw a brazier
or altar from which the smoke was still rising.
He wanted to be in several places at once, and decided on Suydam's
basement flat only after a messenger had reported the complete
emptiness of the dilapidated dance-hall church. The flat, he
thought, must hold some clue to a cult of which the occult scholar
had so obviously become the center and leader; and it was with real
expectancy that he ransacked the musty rooms, noted their vaguely
charnal odor, and examined the curious books, instruments, gold
ingots, and glass-stoppered bottles scattered carelessly here and
there. Once a lean, black-and-white cat edged between his feet and
tripped him, overturning at the same time a beaker half full of red
liquid. The shock was severe, and to this day Malone is not certain
of what he saw; but in dreams he still pictures that cat as it
scuttled away with certain monstrous alterations and peculiarities.
Then came the locked cellar door, and the search for something to
break it down. A heavy stool stood near, and its tough seat was more
than enough for the antique panels. A crack formed and enlarged, and
the whole door gave way--but from the other side; whence poured a
howling tumult of ice-cold wind with all the stenches of the
bottomless pit, and whence reached a sucking force not of earth or
heaven, which, coiling sentiently about the paralyzed detective,
dragged him through the aperture and down unmeasured spaces filled
with whispers and wails, and gusts of mocking laughter.
Of course it was a dream. All the specialists have told him so, and
he has nothing tangible to prove the contrary. Indeed, he would
rather have it thus; for then the sight of old brick slums and dark
foreign faces would not eat so deeply into his soul. But at the time
it was all horribly real, and nothing can ever efface the memory of
those nighted crypts, those titan arcades, and those half-formed
shapes of hell that strode gigantically in silence holding half-eaten
things whose still surviving portions screamed for mercy or laughed
with madness. Odors of incense and corruption joined in sickening
concert, and the black air was alive with the cloudy, semi-visible
bulk of shapeless elemental things with eyes. Somewhere dark sticky
water was lapping at onyx piers, and once the shivery tinkle of
raucous little bells pealed out to greet the insane titter of a naked
phosphorescent thing which swam into sight, scrambled ashore, and
climbed up to squat leeringly on a carved golden pedestal in the
black ground.
Avenues of limitless night seemed to radiate in every direction, till
one might fancy that here lay the root of a contagion destined to
sicken and swallow cities, and engulf nations in the fetor of hybrid
pestilence. Here cosmic sin had entered, and festered by unhallowed
rites had commenced the grinning march of death that was to rot us
all to fungus abnormalities too hideous for the grave's holding.
Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless
childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved.
Incubi and succubae howled praise to Hecate, and headless mooncalves
bleated to the Magna Mater. Goats leaped to the sound of thin
accursed flutes, and AEgipans chased endlessly after misshapen fauns
over rocks twisted like swollen toads. Moloch and Ashtaroth were not
absent; for in this quintessence of all damnation the bounds of
consciousness were let down, and man's fancy lay open to vistas of
every realm of horror and every forbidden dimension that evil had
power to mold. The world and nature were helpless against such
assaults from unsealed wells of night, nor could any sign or prayer
check the Walpurgissage of horror which had come when a sage with the
hateful locked and brimming coffer of transmitted demon-lore.
Suddenly a ray of physical light shot through these fantasms, and
Malone heard the sound of oars amidst the blasphemies of things that
should be dead. A boat with a lantern in its prow darted into sight,
made fast to an iron ring in the slimy stone pier, and vomited forth
several dark men bearing a long burden swathed in bedding. They took
it to the naked phosphorescent thing on the carved gold pedestal, and
the thing tittered and pawed the bedding. Then they unswathed it,
and propped upright before the pedestal the gangrenous corpse of a
corpulent old man with stubby beard and unkempt white hair. The
phosphorescent thing tittered again, and the men produced bottles
from their pockets and anointed its feet with red, whilst they
afterward gave the bottles to the thing to drink from.
All at once, from an arcaded avenue leading endlessly away, there
came the demoniac rattle and wheeze of a blasphemous organ, choking
and rumbling out of the mockeries of hell in cracked, sardonic bass.
In an instant every moving entity was electrified; and forming at
once into a ceremonial procession, the nightmare horde slithered away
in quiet of the sound--goat, satyr, and AEgipan, incubus, succuba,
and lemur, twisted toad and shapeless elemental, dog-faced howler and
silent strutter in darkness--all led by the abominable naked
phosphorescent thing that had squatted on the carved golden throne;
and that now strode insolently bearing in its arms the glassy-eyed
corpse of the corpulent old man. The strange dark man danced in the
rear, and the whole column skipped and leaped with Dionysiac fury.
Malone staggered after them a few steps, delirious and hazy, and
doubtful of his place in this or any world. Then he turned,
faltered, and sank down on the cold damp stone, gasping and shivering
as the demon organ croaked on, and the howling and drumming and
tinkling of the mad procession grew fainter and fainter.
Vaguely he was conscious of chanted horrors, and shocking croakings
afar off. Now and then a wail or whine of ceremonial devotion would
float to him through the black arcade, whilst eventually there rose
the dreadful Greek incantation whose text he had read above the
pulpit of that dance-hall church.
"O friend and companion of night thou who rejoicest in the baying of
dogs (here a hideous howl burst forth) and spilt blood (here nameless
sounds vied with morbid shriekings), who wanderest in the midst of
shades among the tombs (here a whistling sigh occurred), who longest
for blood and bringest terror to mortals (short, sharp cries from
myriad throats), Gorgo (repeated as response), Mormo (repeated with
ecstasy), thousand-faced moon (sighs and flute notes), look favorably
on our sacrifices!"
As the chant closed, a general shout went up, and hissing sounds
nearly drowned the croaking of the cracked bass organ. Then a gasp
as from many throats, and a babel of barked and bleated
words--"Lilith, Great Lilith, behold the Bridegroom!" More cries, a
clamor of rioting, and the sharp, clicking footfalls of a running
figure. The footfalls approached, and Malone raised himself to his
elbow to look.
The luminosity of the crypt, lately diminished, had now slightly
increased; and in that devil-light there appeared the fleeing form of
that which should not flee or feel or breathe--the glassy-eyed,
gangrenous corpse of the corpulent old man, now needing no support,
but animated by some infernal sorcery of the rite just closed. After
it raced the naked, tittering, phosphorescent thing that belonged on
the carven pedestal, and still farther behind panted the dark men,
and all the dread crew of sentient loathsomenesses. The corpse was
gaining on its pursuers, and seemed bent on a definite object,
straining with every rotting muscle toward the carved golden
pedestal, whose necromantic importance was evidently so great.
Another moment and it had reached its goal, whilst the trailing
throng labored on with more frantic speed. But they were too late,
for in one final spurt of strength which ripped tendon from tendon
and sent its noisome bulk floundering to the floor in a state of
jellyish dissolution, the staring corpse which had been Robert Suydam
achieved its object and its triumph. The push had been tremendous,
but the force had held out; and as the pusher collapsed to a muddy
blotch of corruption the pedestal he had pushed tottered, tipped, and
finally careened from its onyx base into the thick waters below,
sending up a parting gleam of carven gold as it sank heavily to
undreamable gulfs of lower Tartarus. In that instant, too, the whole
scene of horror faded to nothingness before Malone's eyes; and he
fainted amidst a thunderous crash which seemed to blot out all the
evil universe.
VII
Malone's dream, experienced in full before he knew of Suydam's death
and transfer at sea, was curiously supplemented by some oddities of
the case; though that is no reason why anyone should believe it. The
three old houses in Parker Place, doubtless long rotten with decay in
its most insidious form, collapsed without visible cause while half
the raiders and most of the prisoners were inside; and both of the
greater number were instantly killed. Only in the basements and
cellars was there much saving of life, and Malone was lucky to have
been deep below the house of Robert Suydam. For he really was there,
as no one is disposed to deny. They found him unconscious by the
edge of the night-black pool, with a grotesquely horrible jumble of
decay and bone, identifiable through dental work as the body of
Suydam, a few feet away. The case was plain, for it was hither that
the smugglers' underground canal led; and the men who took Suydam
from the ship had brought him home. They themselves were never
found, or identified; and the ship's doctor is not yet satisfied with
the certitudes of the police.
Suydam was evidently a leader in extensive man-smuggling operations,
for the canal to his house was but one of several subterranean
channels and tunnels in the neighborhood. There was a tunnel from
this house to a crypt beneath the dance-hall church; a crypt
accessible from the church only through a narrow secret passage in
the north wall, and in whose chambers some singular and terrible
things were discovered. The croaking organ was there, as well as a
vast arched chapel with wooden benches and a strangely figured altar.
The walls were lined with small cells, in seventeen of which--hideous
to relate--solitary prisoners in a state of complete idiocy were
found chained, including four mothers with infants of disturbingly
strange appearance. These infants died soon after exposure to the
light; a circumstance which the doctors thought rather merciful.
Nobody but Malone, among those who inspected them, remembered the
somber question of old Delrio: "An sint unquan daemones incubi et
succubae, et an ex tali, congressu proles nasci queat?"
Before the canals were filled up they were thoroughly dredged, and
yielded forth a sensational array of sawed and split bones of all
sizes. The kidnapping epidemic, very clearly, had been traced home;
though only two of the surviving prisoners could by any legal thread
be connected with it. These men are now in prison, since they failed
of conviction as accessories in the actual murders. The carved
golden pedestal or throne so often mentioned by Malone as of primary
occult importance was never brought to light, though at one place
under the Suydam house the canal, was observed to sink into a well
too deep for dredging. It was choked up at the mouth and cemented
over when the cellars of the new houses were made, but Malone often
speculates on what lied beneath. The police, satisfied that they had
shattered a dangerous gang of maniacs and alien smugglers, turned
over to the Federal authorities the unconvicted Kurds, who before
their deportation were conclusively found to belong to the Yezidee
clan of devils-worshippers. The tramp ship and its crew remain an
elusive mystery, though cynical detectives are once more ready to
combat its smuggling and rum-running ventures. Malone thinks these
detectives show a sadly limited perspective in their lack of wonder
at the myriad unexplainable details, and the suggestive obscurity of
the whole case; though he is just as critical of the newspapers,
which saw only a morbid sensation and gloated over a minor sadist
cult when they might have proclaimed a horror from the universe's
very heart. But he is content to rest silent in Chepachet, calming
his nervous system and praying that time may gradually transfer his
terrible experience from the realm of present reality to that of
picturesque and semi-mythical remoteness.
Robert Suydam sleeps beside his bride in Greenwood Cemetery. No
funeral was held over the strangely released bones, and relatives are
grateful for the swift oblivion which overtook the case as a whole.
The scholar's connection with the Red Hook horrors, indeed, was never
emblazoned by legal proof; since his death forestalled the inquiry he
would otherwise have faced. His own end is not much mentioned, and
the Suydams hope that posterity may recall him only as a gentle
recluse who dabbled in harmless magic and folk-lore.
As for Red Hook--it is always the same. Suydam came and went; a
terror gathered and faded; but the evil spirit of darkness and
squalor broods on amongst the mongrels in the old brick houses; and
prowling bands still parade on unknown errands past windows where
lights and twisted faces unaccountably appear and disappear. Age-old
horror is a hydra with a thousand heads, and the cults of darkness
are rooted in blasphemies deeper than the well of Democritus. The
soul of the beast is omnipresent and triumphant, and Red Hook's
legions of blear-eyed, pockmarked youths still chant and curse and
howl as they file from abyss to abyss, none knows whence or whither,
pushed on by blind laws of biology which they may never understand.
As of old more people enter Red Hook than leave it on the landward
side, and there are already rumors of new canals running underground
to certain centers of traffic in liquor and less mentionable things.
The dance-hall church is now mostly a dance-hall, and queer faces
have appeared at night at the windows. Lately a policeman expressed
the belief that the filled-up crypt has been dug out again, and for
no simply explainable purpose. Who are we to combat poisons older
than history and mankind? Apes danced in Asia to those horrors, and
the cancer lurks secure and spreading where furtiveness hides in rows
of decaying brick.
Malone does not shudder without cause--for only the other day an
officer overheard a swarthy squinting hag teaching a small child some
whispering patois in the shadow of an areaway. He listened, and
thought it very strange when he heard her repeat over and over again:
"O friend and companion of night thou who rejoicest in the baying of
dogs and spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the
tombs, who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorgo,
Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favorably on our sacrifices!"
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