H.P. Lovecraft. The Horror at Red Hook
The Horror at Red Hook
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1-2 Aug 1925
Published September 1926 in Weird Tales, Vol. 8, No. 3, p. 373-80.
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 behaviour. 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
recognised 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 la:sst
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 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 Dore. 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 humour 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 flavour 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 harbour 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 offences 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 neighbourhood'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 shewed 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 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
mediaeval 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 neighbourhoods. 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 '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 demeanour 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 shewed 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 Thibet.
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-worshippers. However this may have been, the stir of the Suydam
investigation made it certain that these unauthorised newcomers were
flooding Red Hook in increasing numbers; entering through some marine
conspiracy unreached by revenue officers and harbour 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.
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
unlicenced pedlars, 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 harbouring 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 demeanour to match the new
tradition, and shewed 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 favourably 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 neighbourhood. 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 clamoured 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 cabbalistic
enough. One frequently repeated motto was in a Sort of Hebraised
Hellenistic Greek, and suggested the most terrible daemon-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 proteges in view of the growing public clamour.
V
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 harbour 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 stateroorn 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 odour in the sink which
shewed 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 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 rumours 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,
mitres, and other inexplicable devices. Much was lost in the melee, for
objects were thrown hastily down unexpected shafts, and betraying odours
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
centre and leader; and it was with real expectancy that he ransacked the
musty rooms, noted their vaguely charnel odour, 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 paralysed 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. Odours 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 foetor 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 AEgypans 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 AEgypan, 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 favourably 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 clamour 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 laboured 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 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 neighbourhood. 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 befure
their deportation were conclusively found to belong to the Yezidi clan of
devil-worshippers. The tramp ship and its crew remain an elusive mystery.
though cynical detectives are once more ready to combat its smugging and
rum-running ventures. Malone thinks these detectives shew 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
connexion 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 rumours of new canals running
underground to certain centres 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 favourably on our sacrifices!'