_"The nightmare horde slithered away, led by the abominable naked
phosphorescent thing that now strode insolently, bearing in its arms
the glassy-eyed corpse of the corpulent old man._
_"There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us, and we
live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there
are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is possible that
man may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my
belief that an awful lore is not yet dead."_
_--Arthur Machen_
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 behavior. 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 recognized 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, 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
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 German authority, "er lässt sich nicht lesen"--it
does not permit itself to be read.