Malone's dream, experienced in full before he knew of Suydam's death
and transfer at sea, was curiously supplemented by some oddities 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 both of 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 the 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 identified; and the ship's doctor is not yet satisfied with
the 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 neighborhood. 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
somber question of old Delrio: "An sint unquan 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 lied beneath. The police, satisfied that they had
shattered a dangerous gang of maniacs and alien smugglers, turned
over to the Federal authorities the unconvicted Kurds, who before
their deportation were conclusively found to belong to the Yezidee
clan of devils-worshippers. The tramp ship and its crew remain an
elusive mystery, though cynical detectives are once more ready to
combat its smuggling and rum-running ventures. Malone thinks these
detectives show 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 when 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 connection 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 folk-lore.
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 rumors of new canals running underground
to certain centers 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
whispering 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 favorably on our sacrifices!"