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object:1f.lovecraft - The Horror at Red Hook
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter


“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 restful rustication, and Malone was a man of
sense despite his mysticism. He had the Celt’s far vision of weird and
hidden things, but the logician’s quick eye for the outwardly
unconvincing; an amalgam which had led him far afield in the forty-two
years of his life, and set him in strange places for a Dublin
University man born in a Georgian villa near Phoenix Park.
And now, as he reviewed the things he had seen and felt and
apprehended, Malone was content to keep unshared the secret of what
could reduce a dauntless fighter to a quivering neurotic; what could
make old brick slums and seas of dark, subtle faces a thing of
nightmare and eldritch portent. It would not be the first time his
sensations had been forced to bide uninterpreted—for was not his very
act of plunging into the polyglot abyss of New York’s underworld a
freak beyond sensible explanation? What could he tell the prosaic of
the antique witcheries and grotesque marvels discernible to sensitive
eyes amidst the poison cauldron where all the varied dregs of
unwholesome ages mix their venom and perpetuate their obscene terrors?
He had seen the hellish green flame of secret wonder in this blatant,
evasive welter of outward greed and inward blasphemy, and had smiled
gently when all the New-Yorkers he knew scoffed at his experiment in
police work. They had been very witty and cynical, deriding his
fantastic pursuit of unknowable mysteries and assuring him that in
these days New York held nothing but cheapness and vulgarity. One of
them had wagered him a heavy sum that he could not—despite many
poignant things to his credit in the Dublin Review—even write a truly
interesting story of New York low life; and now, looking back, he
perceived that cosmic irony had justified the prophet’s words while
secretly confuting their flippant meaning. The horror, as glimpsed at
last, could not make a story—for like the book cited by Poe’s German
authority, “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 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
aegipans chased endlessly after misshapen fauns over rocks twisted like
swollen toads. Moloch and Ashtaroth were not absent; for in this
quintessence of all damnation the bounds of consciousness were let
down, and man’s fancy lay open to vistas of every realm of horror and
every forbidden dimension that evil had power to 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 aegipan, incubus, succuba, and lemur,
twisted toad and shapeless elemental, dog-faced howler and silent
strutter in darkness—all led by the abominable naked phosphorescent
thing that had squatted on the carved golden throne, and that now
strode insolently bearing in its arms the glassy-eyed corpse of the
corpulent old man. The strange dark 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 burst forth) and spilt blood (here nameless
sounds vied with morbid shriekings), who wanderest in the midst of
shades among the tombs (here a whistling sigh occurred), who longest
for blood and bringest terror to mortals (short, sharp cries from
myriad throats), Gorgo (repeated as response), Mormo (repeated with
ecstasy), thousand-faced moon (sighs and flute notes), look 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!”
Return to “The Horror at Red Hook”


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