The Horror At Red Hook
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
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 singu-
lar 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 provoca-
tion, 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 evi-
dently 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, ro-
bust, 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 some-
thing 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 suf-
ferer 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 Uni-
What is all that about in a short summary ???