"There are sacraments of evil as well
as of good about us, and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a
place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is
possible that man may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my
belief that an awful lore is not yet dead."
—Arthur Machen
I.
Not many weeks ago, on a street corner in the
village of Pascoag, Rhode Island, a tall, heavily built, and wholesome-looking
pedestrian furnished much speculation by a singular lapse of 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, in trying to clean up those nests of disorder and violence; certain
features were shocking enough, in all conscience, and the unexpected tragedy
was the last straw. This was a simple explanation which everyone could
understand, and because Malone was not a simple person he perceived that he had
better let it suffice. To hint to unimaginative people of a horror beyond all
human conception—a horror of houses and blocks and cities leprous and cancerous
with evil dragged from elder worlds—would be merely to invite a padded cell
instead of a restful rustication, and Malone was a man of sense despite his
mysticism. He had the Celt's far vision of weird and hidden things, but the
logician's quick eye for the outwardly unconvincing; an amalgam which had led him
far afield in the forty-two years of his life, and set him in strange places
for a Dublin University man born in a Georgian villa near Phoenix Park.
And now, as he reviewed the things he had seen and
felt and apprehended, Malone was content to keep unshared the secret of what
could reduce a dauntless fighter to a quivering neurotic; what could make old
brick slums and seas of dark, subtle faces a thing of nightmare and eldritch
portent. It would not be the first time his sensations had been forced to bide uninterpreted—for
was not his very act of plunging into the polyglot abyss of New York's
underworld a freak beyond sensible explanation? What could he tell the prosaic
of the antique witcheries and grotesque marvels discernible to sensitive eyes
amidst the poison cauldron where all the varied dregs of unwholesome ages mix
their venom and perpetuate their obscene terrors? He had seen the hellish green
flame of secret wonder in this blatant, evasive welter of outward greed and
inward blasphemy, and had smiled gently when all the New-Yorkers he knew
scoffed at his experiment in police work. They had been very witty and cynical,
deriding his fantastic pursuit of unknowable mysteries and assuring him that in
these days New York held nothing but cheapness and vulgarity. One of them had
wagered him a heavy sum that he could not—despite many poignant things to his
credit in the Dublin Review—even write a truly interesting story of New York
low life; and now, looking back, he perceived that cosmic irony had justified the
prophet's words while secretly confuting their flippant meaning. The horror, as
glimpsed at last, could not make a story—for like the book cited by Poe's
Germany authority, "es lässt sich nicht lesen—it does not permit itself to
be read."
II.
To Malone the sense of latent mystery in existence
was always present. In youth he had felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of
things, and had been a poet; but poverty and sorrow and exile had turned his
gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the imputations of evil in
the world around. Daily life had for him come to be a 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 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 of 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 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
"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 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 organised 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 the most that
could be gathered was that some god or great priesthood had promised them
unheard-of powers and supernatural glories and rulerships in a strange land.
The attendance of both newcomers and old gangsters
at Suydam's closely guarded nocturnal meetings was very regular, and the police
soon learned that the erstwhile recluse had leased additional flats to
accommodate such guests as knew his password; at last occupying three entire
houses and permanently 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 protégés 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 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 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 clue 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 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, succuba and lemur, twisted toad and
shapeless elemental, dog-faced howler and silent strutter in darkness—all led
by the abominable naked phosphorescent thing that had squatted on the carved
golden throne, and that now strode insolently bearing in its arms the
glassy-eyed corpse of the corpulent old man. The strange dark 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 before 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 smuggling 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!"
