NOT many weeks ago, on a street corner in the village of Pascoag,

Rhode Island, a tall, heavily built, and wholesome looking pedes￾trian, 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 provoca￾tion, 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 inci￾dent 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 indefi￾nite 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 humili￾ation 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 under￾stand, and because Malone was not a simple person he perceived that

he had better let it suffice. To hint to unimaginative people of a hor￾ror 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 rustic~­

tion, 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 appre￾hended, 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 lasst sich nicht lessen-it does not permit

itself to be read'.*

To Malone the sense of latent mystery in existence was always pres￾ent. 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 Dore.

.....

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 nine￾teenth 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 dis￾tant. 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 pic￾ture 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 col￾umns of 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 bl~s￾phemies 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 conta￾gion. 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 shud￾der 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 associ￾ates on the force, for he seemed to see in them some monstrous thread

of secret continuity; some fiendish, cryptical and ancient pattern

utterly beyond and below the sordid mass of facts and habits and

haunts listed with such conscientious technical care by the police.

They must be, he felt inwardly, the heirs of some shocking and

primordial tradition; the sharers of debased and broken scraps

from cults and ceremonies older than mankind. Their coherence and

definiteness suggested it, and it showed in the singular suspicion of

order which lurked beneath their squalid disorder. He had not read

in vain such treatises as Miss Murray's Witch Cult in Western Europe;*

and knew that up to recent years there had certainly survived among

peasants and furtive folk a frightful and clandestine system of assem￾blies 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 mut￾tered tales some of them might really be.

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 grand￾father 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 popula￾tion 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 indir￾ectly as a really profound authority on medieval superstition, and had

once idly meant to look up an out-of-print pamphlet of his on the

Kabbalah and the Faustus legend, * which a friend had quoted from

memory.

.....

Suydam became a 'case' when his distant and only relatives sought

court pronouncements on his sanity. Their action seemed sudden to

the outside world, but was really undertaken only after prolonged

observation and sorrowful debate. It was based on certain odd changes

in his speech and habits; wild references to impending wonders, and

unaccountable hauntings of disreputable Brooklyn neighbourhoods.

He had been growing shabbier and shabbier with the years, and now

prowled about like a veritable mendicant; seen occasionally by humili￾ated friends in subway stations, or loitering on the benches around

Borough Hall in conversation with groups of swarthy, evil-looking

strangers. When he spoke it was to babble of unlimited powers almost

within his grasp, and to repeat with knowing leers such mystical

words or names as 'Sephiroth', 'Ashmodai' and 'Samael'.* The court

action revealed that he was using up his income and wasting his prin￾cipal 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 dele￾gations 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 lib￾erty. 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 con￾tact with foreign groups and their songs and folk dances. The notion

that any low secret society was preying upon him, as hinted by his

relatives, was obviously absurd; and showed how sadly limited was

their understanding of him and his work. Triumphing with his calm

explanations, he was suffered to depart unhindered; and the paid

detectives ofthe Suydams, eorlears, 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 base￾ment 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

A venue. 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 tumble-down 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 Nestor ian

Christianity tinctured with the Shamanism of Thibet. * Most of the

people, he conjectured, were of Mongoloid stock, originating some￾where 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 new￾comers were flooding Red Hook in increasing numbers; entering

through some marine conspiracy unreached by revenue officers a!,d

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 squint￾ing physiognomies, grotesquely combined with flashy American

clothing, appeared more and more numerously among the loafer 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 signed 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.

Police methods are varied and ingenious. Malone, through unostenta￾tious 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.

.....