“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.