1

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.

.....

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