VII
Malone's dream, experienced in full before he knew of Suydam's
death and transfer at sea, was curiously supplemented by some odd realities
of the case; though that is no reason why anyone should believe it. The
three old houses in Parker Place, doubtless long rotten with decay in its
most insidious form, collapsed without visible cause while half the raiders
and most of the prisoners were inside; and of both the greater number were
instantly killed. Only in the basements and cellars was there much saving
of life, and Malone was lucky to have been deep below the house of Robert
Suydam. For he really was there, as no one is disposed to deny. They found
him unconscious by the edge of a night-black pool, with a grotesquely horrible
jumble of decay and bone, identifiable through dental work as the body
of Suydam, a few feet away. The case was plain, for it was hither that
the smugglers' underground canal led; and the men who took Suydam from
the ship had brought him home. They themselves were never found, or at
least never identified; and the ship's doctor is not yet satisfied with
the simple certitudes of the police.
Suydam was evidently a leader in extensive man-smuggling
operations, for the canal to his house was but one of several subterranean
channels and tunnels in the neighbourhood. There was a tunnel from this
house to a crypt beneath the dance-hall church; a crypt accessible from
the church only through a narrow secret passage in the north wall, and
in whose chambers some singular and terrible things were discovered. The
croaking organ was there, as well as a vast arched chapel with wooden benches
and a strangely figured altar. The walls were lined with small cells, in
seventeen of which - hideous to relate - solitary prisoners in a state
of complete idiocy were found chained, including four mothers with infants
of disturbingly strange appearance. These infants died soon after exposure
to the light; a circumstance which the doctors thought rather merciful.
Nobody but Malone, among those who inspected them, remembered the sombre
question of old Delrio: 'An sint unquam daemones incubi et succubae, et
an ex tali congressu proles nasci queat?'
Before the canals were filled up they were thoroughly
dredged, and yielded forth a sensational array of sawed and split bones
of all sizes. The kidnapping epidemic, very clearly, had been traced home;
though only two of the surviving prisoners could by any legal thread be
connected with it. These men are now in prison, since they failed of conviction
as accessories in the actual murders. The carved golden pedestal or throne
so often mentioned by Malone as of primary occult importance was never
brought to light, though at one place under the Suydam house the canal
was observed to sink into a well too deep for dredging. It was choked up
at the mouth and cemented over when the cellars of the new houses were
made, but Malone often speculates on what lies beneath. The police, satisfied
that they had shattered a dangerous gang of maniacs and man-smugglers,
turned over to the Federal authorities the unconvicted Kurds, who befure
their deportation were conclusively found to belong to the Yezidi clan
of devil-worshippers. The tramp ship and its crew remain an elusive mystery.
though cynical detectives are once more ready to combat its smugging and
rum-running ventures. Malone thinks these detectives shew a sadly limited
perspective in their lack of wonder at the myriad unexplainable details,
and the suggestive obscurity of the whole case; though he is just as critical
of the newspapers, which saw only a morbid sensation and gloated over a
minor sadist cult which they might have proclaimed a horror from the universe's
very heart. But he is content to rest silent in Chepachet, calming his
nervous system and praying that time may gradually transfer his terrible
experience from the realm of present reality to that of picturesque and
semi-mythical remoteness.
Robert Suydam sleeps beside his bride in Greenwood Cemetery.
No funeral was held over the strangely released bones, and relatives are
grateful for the swift oblivion which overtook the case as a whole. The
scholar's connexion with the Red Hook horrors, indeed, was never emblazoned
by legal proof; since his death forestalled the inquiry he would otherwise
have faced. His own end is not much mentioned, and the Suydams hope that
posterity may recall him only as a gentle recluse who dabbled in harmless
magic and folklore.
As for Red Hook - it is always the same. Suydam came and
went; a terror gathered and faded; but the evil spirit of darkness and
squalor broods on amongst the mongrels in the old brick houses, and prowling
bands still parade on unknown errands past windows where lights and twisted
faces unaccountably appear and disappear. Age-old horror is a hydra with
a thousand heads, and the cults of darkness are rooted in blasphemies deeper
than the well of Democritus, The soul of the beast is omnipresent and triumphant,
and Red Hook's legions of blear-eyed, pockmarked youths still chant and
curse and howl as they file from abyss to abyss, none knows whence or whither,
pushed on by blind laws of biology which they may never understand. As
of old, more people enter Red Hook than leave it on the landward side,
and there are already rumours of new canals running underground to certain
centres of traffic in liquor and less mentionable things.
The dance-hall church is now mostly a dance-hall, and
queer faces have appeared at night at the windows. Lately a policeman expressed
the belief that the filled-up crypt has been dug out again, and for no
simply explainable purpose. Who are we to combat poisons older than history
and mankind? Apes danced in Asia to those horrors, and the cancer lurks
secure and spreading where furtiveness hides in rows of decaying brick.
Malone does not shudder without cause - for only the other
day an officer overheard a swarthy squinting hag teaching a small child
some whispered patois in the shadow of an areaway. He listened, and thought
it very strange when he heard her repeat over and over again,
'O friend and companion of night, thou who
rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst
of shades among the tombs, who longest for blood and bringest terror to
mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favourably on our sacrifices!'
