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, it 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 a 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 Germany authority, 'es lässt sich
nicht lesen - it does not permit itself to be read.'
Go to Next Chapter....
|
