H.P. Lovecraft - The Horror at Red Hook

H.P. LOVECRAFT

THE HORROR AT RED HOOK

Written August 1-2, 1925
First published in Weird Tales, Vol. 9, No. 1, January 1927

CONTENTS

* Chapter 1
* Chapter 2
* Chapter 3
* Chapter 4
* Chapter 5
* Chapter 6
* Chapter 7

CHAPTER 1

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, it 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
Germany authority, 'es lässt sich nicht lesen—it does not permit itself to be
read.'

CHAPTER 2

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
fur him come to be a phantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering
and leering with concealed rottenness as in 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 to 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 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 priests 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 pockmarked 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.

CHAPTER 3

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 than a pleasant group of colonial cottages surrounding the
steepled and ivy-clad Reformed Church with its iron-railed yard of
Netherlandish gravestones. In his 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 or names as 'Sephiroth',
'Ashmodai', and 'Samaël'. 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. It was nominally Catholic; but priests 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 Yezidis, last survivors of the
Persian devil-worshipers. 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
numbers, 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 arch-fiend and
adversary.

CHAPTER 4

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
news stands. 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 to a secret subterranean pool beneath a house. This wharf, 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 reasons for their presence. Gangsters of other
breeds were equally taciturn, and she 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 brusquely 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
folklore 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 investigations 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 new 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 so 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 dance-hall
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, Gorgo, 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 · SABAOTH · AGLA · TETRAGRAMMATON · AGYROS ·
OTHEOS · ISCHYROS · ATHANATOS · IEHOVA · VA · ADONAI · SADAY · 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 the
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 protégés in view of the
growing public clamor.

CHAPTER 5

Then came the June wedding and the great sensation. Flatbush was gay for the
hour about high noon, and pennanted motors thronged the streets 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 bride and groom to the Cunard Pier was, if not exactly the
smartest, at least a solid page from the Social Register. At five o'clock
adieux were waved, and the ponderous liner edged away from the long pier,
slowly turned its nose seaward, discarded its tug, and headed for the 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 unexplained 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 a 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.

CHAPTER 6

That same June evening, without having heard a word from the sea, Malone was
desperately busy among the alleys of Red Hook. A sudden stir seemed to permeate
the place, and as if apprised 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 Vikings of that section. Malone had for weeks been urging his colleagues
to attempt a general cleanup; 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 candlelighted rooms forced to disgorge unbelievable
throngs of mixed foreigners in figured robes, miters, and other inexplicable
devices. Much was lost in the melee, 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 due 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 charnel 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 a 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 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 background.

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 fungous 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 moon-
calves bleated to the Magna Mater. Goats leaped to the sound of thin accursed
flutes, and Ægypans 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 mould. The world and Nature were helpless
against such assaults from unsealed wells of night, nor could any sign or
prayer check the Walpurgis-riot of horror which had come when a sage with the
hateful key had stumbled on a horde with the locked and brimming coffer of
transmitted daemon-lore.

Suddenly a ray of physical light shot through these phantasms, 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 golden pedestal, and the thing tittered and pawed at the bedding. Then
they unswathed it, and propped upright before the pedestal the gangrenous
corpse of a corpulent old man with stubbly 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
daemoniac rattle and wheeze of a blasphemous organ, choking and rumbling out
the mockeries of hell in a 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 quest of the sound— goat, satyr, and Ægypan,
incubus, succubus 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 men 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 in any
world. Then he turned, faltered, and sank down on the cold damp stone, gasping
and shivering as the daemon 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 bust 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 behavior 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.

CHAPTER 7

Malone's dream, experienced in full before he knew of Suydam's death and
transfer at sea, was curiously supplemented by some odd realities 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 of both 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
a 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 at least never identified; and the ship's doctor is not
yet satisfied with the simple 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 behavior. 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
sombre question of old Delrio: 'An sint unquam 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 lies beneath. The police,
satisfied that they had shattered a dangerous gang of maniacs and man-
smugglers, turned over to the Federal authorities the unconvicted Kurds, who
before their deportation were conclusively found to belong to the Yezidi clan
of devil-worshipers. 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 which 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 folklore.

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 whispered 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!'

THE END