5

When he read this he shuddered, and thought vaguely of the cracked

bass organ notes he fancied he had heard beneath the church on cer￾tain 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 disap￾pearances 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 crim￾inals. 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 chemicallabora￾tory in the attic, all helped to convince the detective that he was on

the track of something tremendous. The paintings were appal￾ling-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 por￾tentous and cabalistic enough. One frequently repeated motto was in

a sort of Hebraised Hellenistic Greek, and suggested the most ter￾rible 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 encounter~d

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 proteges in view of the

growing public clamour.

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 the

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 atten￾tion, 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 mem￾ory, seems to have been nothing less than the fearsome Chaldee let￾ters 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 hell￾ish 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:

.....

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