To Malone the sense of latent mystery in existence was always
present. 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 fantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and
jeering with concealed rottenness as in Aubrey Beardsley's best
manner, now hinting terrors behind the commonest shapes and objects
as in the subtler and less obvious work of Gustave Doré. He would
often regard it as merciful that most persons of high intelligence
jeer at the inmost mysteries; for, he argued, if superior minds were
ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by ancient
and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only
wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe.
All this reflection was no doubt morbid, but keen logic and a deep
sense of humor ably offset it. Malone was satisfied to let his
notions remain as half-spied and forbidden visions to be lightly
played with; and hysteria came only when duty flung him into a hell
of revelation too sudden and insidious to escape.
He had for some time been detailed to the Butler Street station in
Brooklyn when the Red Hook matter came to his notice. Red Hook is a
maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite
Governor's Island, with dirty highways climbing the hill from the
wharves to that higher ground where the decayed lengths of Clinton
and Court Streets lead off toward the Borough Hall. Its houses are
mostly of brick, dating from the first quarter of the middle of the
nineteenth century, and some of the obscurer alleys and byways have
that alluring antique flavor which conventional reading leads us to
call "Dickensian." The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma;
Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and Negro elements impinging upon one
another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not
far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange
cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the
monstrous organ litanies of the harbor whistles. Here long ago a
brighter picture dwelt, with clear-eyed mariners on the lower streets
and homes of taste and substance where the larger houses line the
hill. One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim
shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches and the
evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and
there--a worn flight of steps, a battered doorway, a wormy pair of
decorative columns or pilasters, or a fragment of once green space
with bent and rusted iron railing. The houses are generally in solid
blocks, and now and then a many-windowed cupola arises to tell of
days when the households of captains and ship-owners watched the sea.
From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the
blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky. Hordes of
prowlers reel shouting and singing along the lanes and thoroughfares,
occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguish lights and pull down
curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from windows when
visitors pick their way through. Policemen despair of order or
reform, and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside
world from the contagion.
The clang of the patrol is answered by a kind of spectral silence,
and such prisoners as are taken are never communicative. Visible
offenses are as varied as the local dialects, and run the gamut from
the smuggling of rum and prohibited aliens through diverse stages of
lawlessness and obscure vice to murder and mutilation in their most
abhorrent guises. That these visible affairs are not more frequent
is not to the neighborhood's credit, unless the power of concealment
be an art demanding credit. More people enter Red Hook than leave
it--or at least, than leave it by the landward side--and those who
are not loquacious are the likeliest to leave.
Malone found in this state of things a faint stench of secrets more
terrible than any of the sins denounced by citizens and bemoaned by
priest and philanthropists. He was conscious, as one who united
imagination with scientific knowledge, that modern people under
lawless conditions tend uncannily to repeat the darkest instinctive
patterns of primitive half-ape savagery in their daily life and
ritual observances; and he had often viewed with an anthropologist's
shudder the chanting, cursing processions of blear-eyed and
pock-marked young men which wound their way along in the dark small
hours of morning. One saw groups of these youths incessantly;
sometimes in leering vigils on street corners, sometimes in doorways
playing eerily on cheap instruments of music, sometimes in stupefied
dozes or indecent dialogues around cafeteria tables near Borough
Hall, and sometimes in whispering converse around dingy taxicabs
drawn up at the high stoops of crumbling and closely shuttered old
houses. They chilled and fascinated him more than he dared confess
to his associates on the force, for he seemed to see in them some
monstrous thread of secret continuity; some fiendish, cryptical and
ancient pattern utterly beyond and below the sordid mass of facts and
habits and haunts listed with such conscientious technical care by
the police. They must be, he felt inwardly, the heirs of some
shocking and primordial tradition; the sharers of debased and broken
scraps from cults and ceremonies older than mankind. Their coherence
and definiteness suggested it, and it showed in the singular
suspicion of order which lurked beneath their squalid disorder. He
had not read in vain such treatises as Miss Murray's Witch Cult in
Western Europe; and knew that up to recent years there had certainly
survived among peasants and furtive folk a frightful and clandestine
system of assemblies and orgies descended from dark religions
antedating the Aryan World, and appearing in popular legends as Black
Masses and Witches' Sabbaths. That these hellish vestiges of old
Turanian-Asiatic magic and fertility-cults were even now wholly dead
he could not for a moment suppose, and he frequently wondered how
much older and how much blacker than the very worst of the muttered
tales some of them might really be.