Red Hook text (Patreon)

If you want to follow along, here's the script.

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The Horror at Red Hook

Cast:

Edward, Writer

Richard, Painter

Warren, Professor

Herbert, Scientist

Charles, Dilettante

Detective Thomas F. Malone

Robert Suydam

VOICE (incantation)

MUSIC

SCENE 1.                       CHARLES' HOUSE

SOUND                          CRACKLING FIRE

EDWARD                       What do you fellows think about the current trend in stories that end right at the beginning?

HERBERT                      What do you mean?

RICHARD                       [joking] Are we talking about very very short stories?

EDWARD                       No.  More like the "ever since the events I am about to tell you, I have never been able to do" ...something or other ever again.

CHARLES                       A current trend, Edward?  Doesn’t it go back to the "Had I but known..." style of the gothic novel?

EDWARD                       Hmm.  You might have something there, Charles.

RICHARD                       I suppose when a story begins that way, you at least know the hero survived.  You can't recount your tale if you're dead, after all.

WARREN                       Unless you managed a séance.

HERBERT                      I have very few opinions on fiction as a whole.  Less on "popular" fiction.

EDWARD                       [musing] I suppose the point of such a beginning is to make the reader curious - to need to find out why the protagonist suddenly can't go into basements, or stand cool breezes, or [significant] go anywhere near the tall buildings that make up a modern city.

CHARLES                       Aha.  Anyone else need fortification, now that the curtain's risen?  Hmm?  Just me, then.

SOUND                          POURS A DRINK

EDWARD                       A few days ago, I had a chance to interview the man I am about to speak of.  I've even managed to verify some of the more obvious details of his story.  So this one is not only true--

HERBERT                      On some level.

EDWARD                       Hmm?

HERBERT                      An underlying fact may be true, but the details can still be embellished, or told by way of an unreliable viewpoint that renders them useless.

RICHARD                       Intermission over, back to the story.

EDWARD                       No, no.  Actually, Herbert's hit on a very pertinent point.  Detective Thomas F. Malone is definitely a man with a viewpoint.

CHARLES                       Flatfoot or gumshoe?

EDWARD                       Malone is a well respected New York City police officer.

RICHARD                       You wandered far afield for a story!

EDWARD                       Only a few hours by train, Richard.  But Malone isn't in New York City - or even the State - at the moment.

WARREN                       Good gad, Edward, is he hiding in the hall, about to be brought in to corroborate your tale?

EDWARD                       No, Warren.  [ominous] He wouldn't be able to come near this place.

CHARLES                       [slightly joking] Too big of a city? 

EDWARD                       [ominous] Yes.

MOMENT OF SILENCE

RICHARD                       So... where did you meet him?

EDWARD                       Pascoag [pass-quag], Rhode Island.

RICHARD                       [snickers]  Where on earth is that?

WARREN                       Rhode Island, for starters.

RICHARD                       I should have said WHAT is that.

EDWARD                       A tiny little hamlet.  The nearest place he could get to, that was still small enough that he didn't have fits.

HERBERT                      Fits?  Do you mean an actual physical reaction to fear stimuli?

CHARLES                       Does your Thomas F. Malone suffer from shellshock? 

WARREN                       [just thought of it!] Francis!

CHARLES                       [dry] Yes, Warren?

WARREN                       I would be willing to lay odds that the middle "F" stands for Francis.  Irish just adore St. Francis.

EDWARD                       [overriding him]  Unlike the brutish police stereotype, Detective Malone was a university man, raised in relative comfort. 

CHARLES                       I thought that flatfoots were always Irish.

WARREN                       It's an understood social phenomenon that the least desirable jobs are taken by the newest desperate emigrant population.  Thus, the Irish filling up the Police force at the end of the last century. 

HERBERT                      Of course it helps that they already speak English.  More or less.  I can't imagine someone without some command of the language trying to fill anything beyond a purely menial position.  Chinese as police, Hindus as cab drivers - it would never work,

RICHARD                       Of course, in China, or India, they probably already are.  Police and cabdrivers, that is.

WARREN                       Yes, but there, they ARE they native speakers.  In such a place, it would be ludicrous for a white man to fill such a job.

SCENE 2.                       RED HOOK

EDWARD                       Before "the incident", Malone was assigned to the New York district known as "Red Hook".

MALONE                       [voiceover] 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.  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 harbour whistles.

EDWARD                       His words, and I really did try to soften anything too... choice.

CHARLES                       [slight whistle]  Whoo.  Well.  Your friend Malone certainly isn't afraid to air his opinions.

HERBERT                      There may be some factual basis to some of his beliefs, though undoubtedly facts have little to do with his selection of those beliefs.

RICHARD                       Facts?

HERBERT                      [matter of fact] There are differences in physical makeup between the various strains of humankind. 

WARREN                       Different peoples developed under very different physical conditions. 

HERBERT                      I wasn't making a comment on merit, merely difference.  Animal testing has shown repeatedly that animals prefer that which is like themself and have been known to ostracize that which is other - one brown rat in a crowd of white rats, for instance.

RICHARD                       Now I know you're delusional - my studio is full of perfectly intermingled brown, white, brown-and-white, and even grey rats - who only wish to ostracize me.

EDWARD                       [sigh] Malone continues, regarding the neighborhood:

MALONE                       Long ago, a brighter picture dwelt here, 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 bits of detail here and there - a worn flight of steps, a battered doorway, or a fragment of once green space with bent and rusted iron railings.

CHARLES                       The Irish soul of a poet. 

RICHARD                       Or a travelogue.

EDWARD                       Now an aspiring writer.

RICHARD                       Really?

EDWARD                       That's how we met - he wrote, asking me to look over his manuscript, hoping for some advice on getting it published.

CHARLES                       Is it any good?

EDWARD                       [heavy sigh]  A lot of purple prose like I've already shared.  And the story is ... well... something.  There is a tale possibly worth telling, but I can't quite weed away the chaff to see what it is.

WARREN                       [chuckles] Now you see what I have to deal with, going over papers from my students. 

HERBERT                      You know you get other students to do most of that.

WARREN                       If I lost my mind, who would teach?

EDWARD                       Not the least of the problems is the usage of parallel storylines that only loosely connect until the very end, one being a personal account, and the other being from more of a third person perspective.

CHARLES                       Not to mention the writer's obvious disdain for all the inhabitants of the neighborhood.

EDWARD                       [naive] He has to work among and around them - he must certainly speak from experience.

HERBERT                      I've worked any number of places where I managed to remain blissfully unconcerned with the lives and proclivities of those around me.

CHARLES                       Don't even pretend you can't be just as opinionated as anyone else, Herbert.

HERBERT                      I try to reserve my personal dislike for those individuals who actually earn it.

MALONE                       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.

RICHARD                       Don't you think he might just protesteth too much?

EDWARD                       What do you mean?

RICHARD                       Look at what he's written.  For someone expressing his dislike for a group or an area, he uses a lot of words.  Not simple words either, but ... luscious words.  As if he is attracted to something there, and desperately trying to refute it, but can't take his mind off it.

CHARLES                       Like a fellow I know who gave up drinking.  Turned into a right bore on the subject.

HERBERT                      Technically we've all given up drinking.  At least until Prohibition is repealed.

CHARLES                       Here's to prohibition, then!

SOUND                          POURS DRINK

CHARLES                       Anyone?

WARREN                       [playing along] Just a little bit.  For my digestion.

EDWARD                       [also] Medicinal use only.

HERBERT                      Medicinal uses would be external. 

RICHARD                       I'll just drink mine.

SOUND                          CHARLES POURS ALL ROUND

RICHARD                       [drinks, then]  You see it in art a lot - particularly religious allegories.  For men who have sworn off women, monks are the worst with the nude saints and tortures of the martyrs - as if, by putting their lust onto canvas, they could shed it from their souls. 

HERBERT                      How would monks even know what an unclothed woman looked like?

WARREN                       Some monks weren't as cloistered as we've been led to think.  Many were outright villains.

EDWARD                       [cutting in] In the case of Malone's story, the main villains appear to be a particular group of Asiatic origin. 

MALONE                       There certainly survived among peasants and furtive folk a frightful and clandestine system of assemblies and orgies descended from dark religions antedating the Aryan world--

WARREN                       By which he almost certainly mistakenly means western civilization.

EDWARD                       Oh?

CHARLES                       [amused] Don’t interrupt the orgies, Warren!

MALONE                       Which appeared in popular legends as Black Masses and Witches’ Sabbaths.  Hellish vestiges of old Turanian-Asiatic magic and fertility-cults.  I frequently wondered how much older and how much fouler than the very worst of the muttered tales some of them might really be.

WARREN                       Having experienced many different cultures, I can't concur that any one of them is intrinsically "evil", though some are certainly more welcoming than others.

EDWARD                       From Malone's account, the worst offenders - or the ones directly involved with the events in his story - were Kurds.

CHARLES                       And whey?

EDWARD                       Shush.  Some Mongolian middle eastern mix from an area known for its singularly evil reputation.  And for some reason, they had gravitated to New York.

RICHARD                       For its singularly evil reputation?

SCENE 3.                       YEZIDIS

EDWARD                       Malone called them Yezidis [Yeh-ZIH-dees], last survivors of a cult of Persian devil-worshippers.

CHARLES                       Oh.  Standard police information, I assume?

WARREN                       Well, he was a university man.  Yezidis [Yeh-ZIH-dees], eh? 

EDWARD                       Malone was part of a detail sent to "roust" these fellows from time to time and hand them over for deportation.  First, he set out to get all the information he could.

MALONE                       Through unostentatious rambles, carefully casual conversations, well-timed offers of hip-pocket liquor, and [grim] "judicious dialogues" with frightened prisoners, I learned many facts about the movement whose aspect had become so menacing. 

RICHARD                       Bribery and beatings.  Typical copper.

CHARLES                       Not to mention juicing up the bootleggers.  [drinks] Tsk.  Hypocrisy.

MALONE                       The newcomers were indeed Kurds, but of a dialect obscure and puzzling to exact philology.  Such of them as worked, lived mostly as dock-hands and unlicensed pedlars, or serving in restaurants and tending corner newsstands.  Most of them, however, had no visible means of support.

EDWARD                       While observing these cryptic Kurds, Malone crossed paths with the single Caucasian figure in the whole mess, one Mr. Suydam. [SIGH-duhm]

CHARLES                       Robert Suydam?

EDWARD                       Uh, yes...? 

CHARLES                       The one who recently-- [catches himself]  Ohhhh.  Oh, that's interesting...  Your friend will have to change some names in his story, if he ever hopes to publish.

EDWARD                       I'm sure you're right.  May I go on?

CHARLES                       [encouraging] Please do.

RICHARD                       So Malone naturally decided to focus on this fellow, having already written off any chance of positive interaction with the imports?

HERBERT                      Not that we aren't all, as you put it, imports.  Our bloodlines may have been here for several hundred years, but at some point, someone was eyeing them with the same mistrust.

RICHARD                       Not enough mistrust, frankly.

WARREN                       I have been wracking my brain over the reference to the Yezidis [Yeh-ZIH-dees].  Persia, you say?  That would be the land of Zoroastrianism [zoh-roh-ASS-tree-an-ism] and the legends of the djinn, and they had a lot of evil spirits... But there was also a strong presence of Mohammadism. 

EDWARD                       [resigned] Oh, here.

SOUND                          SHUFFLE OF PAPERS

EDWARD                       Don't spend too much time on it, but I wouldn't want to leave you in a brain storm because you couldn't do some research,

SOUND                          PULLS OUT BOOK, HANDS IT OVER

WARREN                       [reading] Property of Miskatonic University?

EDWARD                       With permission.

SOUND                          WARREN OPENS BOOK

WARREN                       Devil Worship - The Sacred Books And Traditions Of The Yezidiz [Yeh-ZIH-dees] By Isya [“Izayah” sounded fine] Joseph, B.A., M.A., Ph.D.

CHARLES                       How convenient.

EDWARD                       I haven't really had a chance to crack it yet.  [shrug]  Warren'll spot anything juicy faster than I can anyway.

HERBERT                      [offhand] Leave research to the expert.

RICHARD                       So, Edward, what was this lone white man doing lurking about in such a disreputable area?

EDWARD                       Malone describes him as an educated recluse from a Dutch family.  He had independent means, though just barely, and inhabited a spacious but ill-preserved mansion his grandfather had built in Flatbush before that town got swallowed up by Brooklyn.

SOUND                          TURNS PAGES

EDWARD                       [reading] In his lonely house, set back from Martense Street amidst a yard of venerable trees--

WARREN                       [sharp] Martense?

EDWARD                       The street, yes.  Why?

WARREN                       [lying badly to cover] Nothing.  Just sounded ...familiar.  [NOTE: The Martense family is the subject of Warren's next tale - funny!!]

CHARLES                       [probing] Oh?

WARREN                       [a little too casual]  Nothing.

EDWARD                       Suydam [SIGH-duhm] had been getting shabbier and shabbier, apparently spending the bulk of his small income on odd books and maintaining an apartment he visited often... in the Red Hook area.

HERBERT                      Your policeman encountered him there?

EDWARD                       No, he'd read a monograph the old man wrote on the Kabbalah.  Suydam [SIGH-duhm] [SIGH-duhm] was a scholar of various things occult, I suppose.  [back on track]  So when Malone heard of the summons, he had some interest in the proceedings.

HERBERT                      Summons?

SCENE 4.                       THE SUMMONS

EDWARD                       Suydam’s [SIGH-duhms] distant and only relatives sought a court pronouncement on his sanity.

CHARLES                       Tired of old uncle Robert spending their inheritance, eh?

HERBERT                      [scoffing] Just the house and some stipend?

RICHARD                       People have killed for a lot less, Herbert.

EDWARD                       [reading] The action was undertaken only after prolonged observation and debate.  Uncle had been letting himself go, to the point where old friends were embarrassed to even pass him in the street. 

RICHARD                       There's Christian kindness for you.

EDWARD                       ...All while haunting the odd parties at his Red Hook apartment and loitering in conversation with swarthy, evil-looking strangers.

RICHARD                       [bitter] Frequenting low dives and spending too much time with disreputable friends?  How tragic.

EDWARD                       I know it sounds a lot like your arty crowd, Richard, but these people were dangerous.

RICHARD                       [heavy sarcasm]  Oh, I'm sure.

EDWARD                       The family's claim was, Suydam [SIGH-duhm] was nearly raving.  He babbled of powers almost within his grasp, and repeated such mystical words or names as "Sephiroth" [seh-FIR-oth], "Ashmodai" [ash-MO-die], and "Samaël [SAH-may-el]".

WARREN                       Nonsense.

SOUND                          BOOK CLOSES WITH A THUMP

EDWARD                       It's what the records showed.

WARREN                       Not if he was indulging himself in the Yezidi [Yeh-ZIH-dee] religion in any great way - those are biblical terms.  Old testament perhaps, but definitely western. 

EDWARD                       He could be mixing, um, disciplines?

HERBERT                      If you discard all the religious trappings, any underlying entities or concepts are very similar from one belief system to another. 

WARREN                       But they're not.  Sefiroth I'm not familiar with, but the others - though I am no biblical scholar --

RICHARD                       Thank the lord.

WARREN                       Religion does intersect with history enough that certain things crop up.  Samaël [SAH-may-el], I fancy was some kind of fallen angel, akin to Lucifer.  Ashmodai [ash-MO-die] is Asmodeus, and was one of the main sources for the devil as we picture him today. 

CHARLES                       But Suydam [SIGH-duhm] was the one speaking those names, and surely he was the one versed in the Kabbalah as Edward clearly pointed out.  Which brings us to Judaism, which brings us to the bible -- and now we return the helm to our narrator.

EDWARD                       My thanks.  Suydam [SIGH-duhm] was heard muttering names - [agreeing] perhaps from his Kabbalistic studies - and, yes, the matter of his money being wasted came up as well.  The family cited his importation of books, and the cost of his, uh--

RICHARD                       "Party flat"?

EDWARD                       [reading] "The maintenance of the squalid basement flat in the Red Hook district where he spent nearly every night, receiving odd delegations of mixed rowdies and foreigners, and apparently conducting some kind of ceremonial services behind the green blinds of secretive windows."

RICHARD                       Rowdies and foreigners.  Sounds delightful.

CHARLES                       Who ratted him out?

EDWARD                       Private detectives hired by the family who claimed to have heard--

MALONE                       --strange cries and chants and the prancing of feet filtering out from these nocturnal rites, and who shuddered at their peculiar ecstasy and abandon -- despite the commonness of weird orgies in that sodden section.

CHARLES                       Not your common or garden variety orgies, then?  Welllll.

EDWARD                       Suydam [SIGH-duhm] managed to preserve his liberty, once he spoke at the hearing.

SUYDAM                       [clears throat, then speaks smoothly]  While I admit to the queerness of demeanour and extravagant cast of language into which I've so recently fallen, it was all part of my research. 

HERBERT                      That excuse does not universally work.

SUYDAM                       No one but an anthropologist quite understands the difficulty of studying severely clandestine cultures, and the lengths one must go to in order to be accepted and thence allowed to observe.  I have been taking down for posterity a goodly number of ancient folk dances and the accompanying music.

EDWARD                       He seemed so changed - in demeanor, if not in his still shabby and corpulent appearance - that when he insisted to the court that:

SUYDAM                       [earnest] The notion that any low secret society might be preying upon me, as charged by my concerned relatives, is obviously absurd; and just shows how sadly limited their understanding is of my life and my work.

HERBERT                      Why was your policeman involved with a civil case?

WARREN                       Aha!  Here's something in the book.  "The origin of the Yezidi [Yeh-ZIH-dee] sect has been the subject of much discussion, but no satisfactory solution of the problem has as yet been reached. There are those who assert that the Yezidis [Yeh-ZIH-dees] are the remains of the ancient Manichaeans [MAN-ih-KAY-uns]; others entertain the view that the Yezidis [Yeh-ZIH-dees] were originally Christians, whom progressive ignorance has brought into their present condition - some even going so far as to connect the name "Yezidi [Yeh-ZIH-dee]" with "Jesus"

RICHARD                       And?

WARREN                       And?

RICHARD                       That doesn’t really tell us much.

CHARLES                       Thus the name "mystery cult"?

SCENE 5.                       THE RECOVERY

EDWARD                       [clears throat]  After his escape from his relatives, Suydam [SIGH-duhm] appeared to clean up his act - in every possible way. 

MALONE                       Just at the time when a wave of kidnappings and child disappearances spread excitement over New York, the unkempt scholar embarked upon a metamorphosis as startling as it was absurd. One day he was seen with clean-shaven face, well-trimmed hair, and tastefully immaculate attire, and on every day thereafter some obscure improvement was noticed in him.

EDWARD                       He seemed, in fact to become more youthful, losing weight and even "showed a curious darkening of the hair which somehow did not suggest dye."

RICHARD                       The best dyes don't. 

EDWARD                       Suydam [SIGH-duhm] cleaned up and refurbished his mansion in Flatbush, and began to rejoin society.

CHARLES                       I should interject here that I may have actually attended one or two events alongside this fellow, though I can't recall ever having been introduced. 

HERBERT                      So that's why you said--

CHARLES                       And if it comes up, I promise to elucidate.

EDWARD                       Some attended through curiosity, others duty; but all were charmed by the dawning grace and urbanity of the former hermit.  He had, he asserted, accomplished most of his work; and having just inherited some property from a half-forgotten European friend, was planning to spend his remaining years in a brighter second youth which ease, care, and diet had now made possible to him.

WARREN                       Sudden inheritance?  Did anyone look into that?

EDWARD                       Why is that what caught your attention?

WARREN                       Just that so many ancient "folk dances and rituals", as he puts it, were often aimed at self-enrichment of one sort or another - whether through health, position or monetary gain.  Is it just me, or does it seem a bit ... fortuitous that the rituals ended and immediately he came into money?

RICHARD                       You may have something.

EDWARD                       [back on track] Back in Redhook, the final straw, leading to a police raid, was the disappearance of a brother and sister from the more Nordic district beyond Redhook.

RICHARD                       How Hansel and Gretal.

HERBERT                      It's just rarity isn’t it?

CHARLES                       I think you leapt a few stairs on the logic there, Herbert.

HERBERT                      [annoyed] For some reason blondes have been prized for no appreciable quality other than their colouring. 

RICHARD                       Gentlemen prefer blondes?

WARREN                       Such rarified features tend to be the result of recessive traits, or so I seem to recall.  So if they come down through generations reliably, it indicates some amount of inbreeding.  Eh, Herbert?

HERBERT                       I'm sure you don't intend to push me into a disquisition on eugenics, Warren.

EDWARD                       Which is?

HERBERT                      The study of ways to improve a species, for example the human race, by selectively breeding members with the most favorable qualities and suppressing those with unfavorable ones. 

WARREN                       It opens up a vast moral morass of whether it is right to, um--

HERBERT                      Sterilize.

WARREN                       Yes, that--

HERBERT                      Or kill.

WARREN                       [moving on] --those with [ahem] unfavorable qualities.

HERBERT                      On a purely clinical and logical level, it makes perfect sense.  Why not aim to improve the species?

RICHARD                       [offended] Who decides?  Who determines, for instance whether colorblindness or excessive body hair is a trait to be bred out? 

HERBERT                      I was informing, not advocating--

RICHARD                       And what if colorblindness is exactly what we find we need someday and no longer have?

WARREN                       Such processes could, one might easily assume, be abused and extended to include entire ethnic groups by those who ... um... dislike them.

EDWARD                       No one would do that!

RICHARD                       [weary] It's been done, on a small scale, throughout history.  The Armenians, for instance.

HERBERT                      With modern transportation and communication, who knows what sort of global extermination efforts could be in our future.

SOUND                          MOMENT OF SILENCE

SOUND                          RATTLE OF GLASS SET DOWN

CHARLES                       [ahem] Let's leave the future to fend for itself and return to the recent past. 

EDWARD                       [aside] Thank you.

CHARLES                       [stern] Next digression, I'll bring out the riding crop.

EDWARD                       Two incidents occurred - wide enough apart, but both of intense interest in the case as Malone describes it.  One was a quiet announcement in the papers of Robert Suydam’s [SIGH-duhms] engagement to Miss Cornelia Gerritsen of Bayside, a young woman of excellent position.

CHARLES                       A third cousin of his, I seem to remember.  Nice enough woman, a bit on the spinster side, and nothing much to say.  Still...  [shakes his head sadly]

EDWARD                       The other event was a raid on the dance-hall church by police, after a report that a kidnapped child had been spied through a basement window.  The raid uncovered no evidence, but Malone was still disturbed by what he saw.

RICHARD                       His police side or his "sixth sense?"

EDWARD                       Perhaps both. 

MALONE                       Inside, there were crudely painted panels I did not like - panels which depicted sacred faces with peculiarly worldly and sardonic expressions, and which occasionally took liberties that even a layman's sense of decorum could scarcely countenance.

RICHARD                       That is the most unrepentantly ludicrous description I have ever heard.  "worldly and sardonic?"  What does that even mean?

WARREN                       Giving a wink to the audience?  I don't know. 

RICHARD                       And "liberties?" 

EDWARD                       Whatever it was, it offended him on such a deep level that he couldn’t put it into words.  And there was an incantation over the pulpit in Greek.

WARREN                       Oh!  Was this church perhaps Greek Orthodox?  That could explain a lot of discrepencies with the standard imagery of the more modern catholic faith, which I assume your policeman is, being Irish.

EDWARD                       It may have been at one time, but was now defaced, debased, and destitute.  Oh, I like that, just a moment while I make a note.

SOUND                          SCRIBBLING

CHARLES                       Drinks?

HERBERT                      I'll have some.  For the cold. 

WARREN                       [chuckles]

SOUND                          POURING DRINKS

HERBERT                      [serious] Alcohol opens the blood vessels and allows blood to distribute through the body faster, thus warming the extremities.  It's a simple fact.

EDWARD                       [finishing up] There.

WARREN                       The inscription?

EDWARD                       Right.  Malone had previously encountered the inscription in some form - recall he was university trained - and it translated as

VOICE                           'O friend and companion of night, thou who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favourably on our sacrifices!'

EDWARD                       Which made him shudder and think on the cracked base organ notes and ghastly stenches that emanated from the church's very foundations.

MALONE                       The place was very hateful; yet after all, were the blasphemous panels and inscriptions more than mere crudities perpetrated by the ignorant?

SCENE 6.                       THE WEDDING

EDWARD                       By the day of Suydam’s [SIGH-duhms] wedding, the kidnapping epidemic had peaked - becoming a popular newspaper scandal.  Another raid found nothing, but--

MALONE                       A primitive chemical laboratory in the attic helped to convince me that we were on the track of something tremendous.

HERBERT                      [dismissive realization] Drugs.  Opium.  It explains everything.

WARREN                       What do you mean?

HERBERT                      Chemical smells?  A laboratory?  Do you think they just pluck opiates off of trees?

RICHARD                       Of course not, they come from poppies.

HERBERT                      You know what I mean, just like hops must be brewed into beer, opiates require engineering, refining.

CHARLES                       But isn’t the opium den usually associated with insidious Chinese gangs?

HERBERT                      Anyone who wants to can smuggle opium.  There isn't a trade union.

EDWARD                       Drugs didn't interest Malone as much as the graffiti.

MALONE                       The paintings were appalling - hideous monsters of every shape and size, and parodies on human outlines which cannot be described.

RICHARD                       His specialty.  Not describing.

EDWARD                       The strangest thing was that despite the squalor of the area, and the poverty of the people - they found a pile of genuine gold ingots, carelessly concealed with some burlap and etched with the same weird symbols that adorned the walls.

CHARLES                       Was Suydam [SIGH-duhm] ever seen with such gold?  That would certainly explain his change of fortune.

EDWARD                       I think we can assume. 

RICHARD                       Why not.  Malone certainly likes to assume. 

EDWARD                       June came and the great sensation.

CHARLES                       The wedding. 

HERBERT                      I suppose you were present for that as well?

CHARLES                       Sadly, no.  I do love a good wedding.

MALONE                       Pennanted motors thronged the streets near the old Dutch church where an awning stretched from door to highway, and the party which escorted bride and groom to the Cunard Pier was, if not exactly the smartest, at least a solid page from the Social Register.

CHARLES                       A book I am not included in.

MALONE                       The ponderous liner edged away from the long pier, slowly turned its nose seaward, discarded the tug, and headed for the widening water spaces that led to old world wonders.

HERBERT                      Alliteration.  Poets. [bah]

EDWARD                       Late that night, as the last of the passengers watched the stars come out, a scream rent the air!

MALONE                       The scream came from the Suydam [SIGH-duhm] stateroom, and the sailor who broke down the door could perhaps have told frightful things if he had not forthwith gone completely mad!

HERBERT                      [annoyed] Now, really.

EDWARD                       His account, not mine.  The sailor quote "shrieked, and thereafter ran simpering about the vessel till caught and put in irons." unquote.

RICHARD                       Tell him you lost the manuscript in a fire.

CHARLES                       Not till after you finish, though.

RICHARD                       Cleansing with fire is the only hope.

EDWARD                       The ship's doctor was next into the room, and he apparently maintained his sanity, but he never told anyone what he saw - until he wrote some of it to Malone.

MALONE                       It was murder - strangulation - but one need not say that the claw-mark on Mrs. Suydam’s [SIGH-duhms] throat could not have come from her husband's or any other human hand...

HERBERT                      Strangled but with a claw-mark?  If her throat was torn by a claw, why would one assume strangulation as well?

EDWARD                       Maybe the claw was an imprint - like the hand prints of a strangler.

HERBERT                      But why strangle if you have claws - they seem a much more effective mode of killing.

CHARLES                       Too messy? 

HERBERT                      Was there a lot of blood?

EDWARD                       Ah, well.  That gets a bit odd.  Let's finish the doctor's tale.

MALONE                       The doctor insisted that while he did not see IT... the open porthole, just before he turned on the lights, was clouded for a second with a certain phosphorescence, and for a moment there seemed to echo in the night outside the suggestion of a faint and hellish tittering; but no real outline met the eye.

SCENE 7.                       THE OTHER BOAT

EDWARD                       As proof, the doctor points to his continued sanity.  [a moment] Suddenly, out of nowhere, a tramp steamer pulls alongside the ship.

WARREN                       They were well out to sea, were they not?

CHARLES                       Those liners do move at quite a clip, but perhaps they "heave to", or whatever the nautical term is, to stop for the night.

EDWARD                       A rowboat left the steamer, and a "horde of swart, insolent ruffians in officers' dress" swarmed aboard the liner. 

CHARLES                       Naturally, no one tried to stop them.

WARREN                       Perhaps they were surprised, or in shock from the murder.

RICHARD                       First, it was the middle of the night; second, do you know how much security they have on those big cruise ships?  [disparaging sigh, then snide] Maybe it was magic.

EDWARD                       [earnest] Maybe it was.  These insolent ruffians demanded Suydam’s [SIGH-duhms] body.  And this is the odd part - they came aboard already knowing he was dead.

HERBERT                      It was the wife that was murdered, though.

EDWARD                       No, it was both.

WARREN                       I must have missed that myself.

EDWARD                       Hmm. 

SOUND                          PAGES FLIPPING

EDWARD                       Oh, I guess he was so taken with the descriptions of the gibbering and rampaging sailor that he forgot to mention that Suydam [SIGH-duhm] was dead as well. 

RICHARD                       So what we were picturing as a murder is a murder-suicide?

EDWARD                       It's unclear, since the doctor missed his chance to examine the bodies very closely.

MALONE                       The leader of the visiting mariners, an Arab with a hatefully fleshy mouth, pulled forth a dirty, crumpled paper and handed it to the captain.  It was signed by Robert Suydam, and bore the following odd message.

SUYDAM                       In case of sudden or unexplained accident or death on my part, please deliver me or my body unquestioningly into the hands of the bearer and his associates.  Everything, for me, and perhaps for you, depends on absolute compliance.  Explanations can come later - do not fail me now.   - ROBERT SUYDAM [SIGH-DUHM]

HERBERT                      Would never stand up in court.

CHARLES                       They didn’t have court, they had a handful of intimidating and... unpleasant sailors demanding nothing but a corpse.  Would you stand on legality?

HERBERT                      Logically... no.

EDWARD                       Apparently, they didn’t either.  After one hurried exchange of glances, the captain and doctor apparently shrugged and escorted the foreigners to the Suydam [SIGH-duhm] stateroom. 

MALONE                       The doctor directed the captain's glance away as he unlocked the door and admitted the strange seamen, nor did he breathe easily till they filed out with their bedding-wrapped burden after an unaccountably long period of preparation.

HERBERT                      Burden?  Only one?

EDWARD                       Yes.  [ominous] The letter only instructed them to take the old man, not his bride.

WARREN                       Hmm.  And?

EDWARD                       Though he doesn’t say it explicitly, Malone builds some suspense by having the doctor and captain follow along behind the sailors until they were safely off the liner.  After which,

MALONE                       The doctor and a ship's undertaker--

HERBERT                      Undertaker?

RICHARD                       Big ship.

EDWARD                       they went to the stateroom to take care of the wife.

CHARLES                       [annoyed] She has - had a name.  Cornelia Gerritsen-Suydam.

RICHARD                       Was she a friend?

CHARLES                       [heavy sigh]  No.  We spoke once, perhaps twice, but had nothing in common.  I don't have to like her to feel pity for her.

EDWARD                       Oh there's some details, then, that--

CHARLES                       Don't edit on my account.

EDWARD                       Well, the undertaker apparently asked the doctor why he had drained all of her blood. 

MALONE                       He neglected to affirm that he had not done so; nor did he point to the vacant bottle-spaces in the liquor cabinet, or to the odor in the sink which showed the hasty disposition of the bottles' original contents.  The pockets of those men - if men they were - had bulged damnably when they left the ship.

HERBERT                      They took his body and her blood?

WARREN                       This is probably rather crass, but -uh- considering her social class and newly minted marital status, the young lady in question - Cornelia - was very likely, um--

RICHARD                       Just spit it out Warren.  "Virgin sacrifice." 

WARREN                       [ahem] Even so.  And... such blood is often a vital component of various rituals.

HERBERT                      Is that the entire Suydam [SIGH-duhm] story?  He frolics in low places, gets caught, turns his life around and then is murdered?  How... unsatisfying.

RICHARD                       Despite the gore - or pointed lack of it - this wouldn't even make a Grand Guignol [grahnd GEEN-yol] vignette.

SCENE 8.                       THE RAID

EDWARD                       Now we shift back over to Malone and the police on that very same night.

CHARLES                       The night of the wedding?

RICHARD                       They weren't invited anyway.

EDWARD                       Malone had for weeks been urging his colleagues to attempt a general cleanup; and at last they had agreed upon a final stroke.

MALONE                       Just about midnight a raiding party descended.  Doors were battered in, stragglers arrested, and candle lighted rooms disgorged unbelievable throngs of mixed foreigners in figured robes, mitres, and other inexplicable devices.

EDWARD                       In the general melee, Malone made his way to Suydam’s [SIGH-duhms] flat and thence to the basement, where he poked about in a sort of laboratory area.  This needs to be mentioned specifically, since he upset a beaker half full of a red liquid, and to this day Malone is not entirely certain of anything he saw thereafter.

HERBERT                      Opiates.  I should have started a wager.

EDWARD                       Breaking down a door, Malone encountered:

MALONE                       A howling tumult of ice-cold wind with all the stenches of the bottomless pit, and whence reached a sucking force not of earth or heaven, which, coiling sentiently about my paralysed carcass, dragged me through the aperture and down unmeasured spaces filled with whispers and wails, and gusts of mocking laughter.

HERBERT                      They don't call it chasing the dragon for nothing.

RICHARD                       Where did you pick that up?

HERBERT                      I eschew popular culture, but I don't live in a well. 

EDWARD                       Whether dream or hallucination, at the time it was all horribly real.

MALONE                       Odours of incense and corruption joined in sickening concert, and the black air was alive with the cloudy, semi-visible bulk of shapeless elemental things with eyes. Somewhere dark sticky water lapped at onyx piers, and once the shivery tinkle of raucous little bells pealed out to greet the insane titter of a naked phosphorescent thing which swam into sight, scrambled ashore, and climbed up to squat leeringly on a carved golden pedestal in the background.

HERBERT                      This was in the underground tunnels and canals the smugglers used?

EDWARD                       As best as Malone could recall -

RICHARD                       That is, of course, if he went anywhere and saw anything.

MALONE                       Avenues of limitless night seemed to radiate in every direction, till one might fancy that here lay the root of a contagion destined to sicken and swallow cities, and engulf nations in the foetor of hybrid pestilence.  Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved.

RICHARD                       Say that five times fast.

CHARLES                       Lovely mood piece, Edward, but was anything actually happening?

WARREN                       I would guess there was some gibbering and simpering on Malone's part this time?

MALONE                       Suddenly a ray of physical light--

HERBERT                      [about to debate the term] Nonsense--

CHARLES                       Pssh!

MALONE                       --shot through these phantasms, and I heard the sound of oars amidst the blasphemies of things that should be dead. A boat with a lantern in its prow darted into sight, made fast to an iron ring in the slimy stone pier, and vomited forth several dark men bearing a long burden swathed in bedding.

SCENE 9.                       THE CONVERGENCE

RICHARD                       And so the tales converge.

MALONE                       They took it to the naked phosphorescent thing on the carved golden pedestal, and the thing tittered and pawed at the bedding. Then they unswathed it, and propped upright before the pedestal the gangrenous corpse of a corpulent old man with stubbly beard and unkempt white hair.

WARREN                       Suydam [SIGH-duhm] had regressed in death?  Interesting.

MALONE                       The phosphorescent thing tittered again, and the men produced bottles from their pockets and anointed its feet with red, whilst they afterward gave the bottles to the thing to drink from.

HERBERT                      Wait.  So is this thing supposed to be Lilith?  You said - he said - something about "laving its limbs with blood," right?

EDWARD                       I'm glad you were paying attention.  I think it must be.

CHARLES                       I - Well, I should insist on continuing but even I'm confused, wasn't Lilith supposed to be some sort of temptress in the bible?  Warren?

RICHARD                       [teasing] He's no biblical scholar.

WARREN                       Hmm...  I fancy she was supposed to be Adam's original wife, who refused to bow down, or some such thing, so she was written out of the bible and kept around only as some kind of demoness.

CHARLES                       That would be old testament again, presumably, so we come back to the Jewish miscellany that we're all so lacking in detail on. 

EDWARD                       Malone never describes the thing as looking remotely human, let alone female, but I do think it's meant to be that Lilith.

MALONE                       All at once, from an arcaded avenue leading endlessly away, there came the daemoniac rattle and wheeze of a blasphemous organ, choking and rumbling out the mockeries of hell in a cracked, sardonic bass. In an instant every moving entity was electrified; and forming at once into a ceremonial procession, the nightmare horde slithered away in quest of the sound--

EDWARD                       And here he includes a list of just about every nightmare creature he could think of, before--

MALONE                       --all led by the abominable naked phosphorescent thing that had squatted on the carved golden throne, and that now strode insolently bearing in its arms the glassy-eyed corpse of the corpulent old man.

CHARLES                       Big girl, is she?

EDWARD                       Malone followed, or tried to, but seems to have had another bad turn and fell to the floor as the procession grew fainter and fainter.  Even through his haze, he heard what sounded like a ceremony of some sort, and apparently made out the same Greek incantation from the wall of the church.

VOICE                           [incantation from before plays under, slowly with sound effects for the baying and shrieking]

MALONE                       As the chant closed, a general shout went up, and hissing sounds nearly drowned the croaking of the organ.  Then a gasp rose from many throats, and a babel of barked and bleated words - 'Lilith, Great Lilith, behold the Bridegroom!'

CHARLES                       Convenient that this part was in English.

MALONE                       More cries, a clamour of rioting, and the sharp, clicking footfalls of a running figure.

HERBERT                      Suydam [SIGH-duhm] must sleep in his boots.

RICHARD                       Perhaps he had very bony feet.

MALONE                       There appeared the fleeing form of that which should not flee or feel or breathe - the glassy-eyed, gangrenous corpse of the corpulent old man, now needing no support, but animated by some infernal sorcery of the rite just closed.

RICHARD                       [sarcastic] How rude.  His first wife barely dead and he runs off to get married again!

MALONE                       Behind him raced the naked, tittering, phosphorescent thing that belonged on the carven pedestal, and still farther behind panted the dark men, and all the dread crew of sentient loathsomenesses.

CHARLES                       Would this all be considered a shotgun wedding?

MALONE                       The corpse seemed bent on a definite object, straining with every rotting muscle toward the carved golden pedestal, whose necromantic importance was evidently so great. Another moment and it had reached its goal, whilst the trailing throng laboured on with more frantic speed.

HERBERT                      I have some very definite ideas about the motivating force it would require to make dead muscles move independently, and I --

CHARLES                       Magic, not science.  Sorry, Herbert.

HERBERT                      Hmph.

EDWARD                       And the creatures chasing him were too late,

MALONE                       --for in one final spurt of strength which ripped tendon from tendon and sent its noisome bulk floundering to the floor in a state of jellyish dissolution, the staring corpse which had been Robert Suydam [SIGH-duhm] achieved its object and its triumph.

WARREN                       What was it he was he after?  Not Malone, I fancy.

EDWARD                       No, Malone was still just an observer throughout all of this.

HERBERT                      Assuming any of it actually occurred outside his drug-addled brain.

MALONE                       The push had been tremendous, but the force held out; and as the pusher collapsed to a muddy blotch of corruption, the pedestal tottered, tipped, and finally careened from its onyx base into the thick waters below, sending up a parting gleam of carven gold as it sank heavily to undreamable gulfs of lower Tartarus.

CHARLES                       He toppled the pedestal into the canal?  That's all?

EDWARD                       All that Malone saw.

SCENE 10.                     THE EARTH MOVES

MALONE                       In that instant, the whole scene of horror faded to nothingness before my eyes; and I fainted amidst a thunderous crash which seemed to blot out all the evil universe.

RICHARD                       I wonder - was it the tipping of her chair or the dissolving of her "intended" that made Lilith back off...

WARREN                       I doubt we shall ever know.  Does Malone?

EDWARD                       He woke up, buried.

HERBERT                      In a grave?

EDWARD                       In rocks.  A massive earthquake had hit - coincidentally at the very moment - best as he could ever figure out - that Lilith's pedestal went under.  Malone was extremely lucky and neither injured nor unreachable. Rescue crews quickly had him free of the debris.

MALONE                       They found me unconscious by the edge of a night-black pool, a grotesquely horrible jumble of decay and bone, identifiable through dental work as the body of Suydam, a few feet away.

EDWARD                       The carved golden pedestal or throne mentioned by Malone as of primary occult importance cannot be found, as at one place under the Suydam [SIGH-duhm] house, the canal sinks into a well too deep for dredging.  They plan to seal it over and fill in the rest of the canals.

HERBERT                      The canals went all the way inland to Suydam’s [SIGH-duhms] house?

EDWARD                       Didn’t I mention?  Malone went in at the flat in Red Hook, and when dug out was under the Flatbush home.

CHARLES                       Quite a trip.

RICHARD                       [knowingly] Indeed.

MALONE                       As for Red Hook - it is always the same. Suydam [SIGH-duhm] 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.

HERBERT                      [disgusted] A convenient earthquake buries everything?

EDWARD                       Or look at it the other way, and assume the tipping of the pedestal or the fury of Lilith caused the earthquake.

HERBERT                      Hmph. 

EDWARD                       Did you miss the little shock ending?  When he saw Suydam’s [SIGH-duhms] body deep in the canals, [like it's a big reveal] Malone didn’t even yet know the man was dead!

[long silence]

WARREN                       Well, of course.  Presumably the boat incident happened while he was on the raid.

EDWARD                       But you see - it couldn't have been the power of suggestion or anything, since there was no reason to expect either to see him there, or that he was in fact dead.

MALONE                       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.

[silence]

CHARLES                       Promise me, Edward, that you didn't write this.

EDWARD                       On my oath.  Why?

CHARLES                       This way we're free to criticize. 

EDWARD                       You're always free to criticize, even stories I did write.

CHARLES                       [slightly condescending] Of course.  [sips]  To begin with, no matter how perceptive a fellow he is, what are the odds that, having encountered Suydam [SIGH-duhm] just the one time, Malone would recognize his corpse, especially being in the frame of mind he was--

RICHARD                       Walking on pink clouds.

CHARLES                       -thank you - do you see what I mean?

EDWARD                       I hadn't thought of that.

MALONE                       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.

WARREN                       Do you think Suydam [SIGH-duhm] was running away?

HERBERT                      His flight in the tunnels seemed perfectly clear.

WARREN                       No, no, no I don’t mean THEN.  I mean when he boarded the liner.

EDWARD                       What do you mean?

WARREN                       To put it in context, there are any number of tales of a white man trying to take advantage of some kind of tribal magic - be it African, any of the various native American cultures, or even from the Asian subcontinent - and there is a cost, which he agrees to, but later decides that being a modern person, and clearly superior, he can wriggle free of it.

RICHARD                       You're thinking in return for the gold, and renewed youth, he agreed to marry the creature Lilith?

HERBERT                      Why would he then marry the ... the other one?  Was she - or her blood - part of the deal?

CHARLES                       [joking]  Perhaps he thought Lilith would balk at bigamy.

EDWARD                       I hadn't even thought--

RICHARD                       If he wasn't running, why not just stay at home.  Much easier access to the tunnels.

EDWARD                       He wrote that note, though.

HERBERT                      Forged.  Or coerced. 

CHARLES                       Warren, what usually happens to those great white hunters who renege on their mystical contracts?

WARREN                       Nothing ever good.

RICHARD                       So, Edward, what advice are you planning to give your... protégé?

EDWARD                       I... lost the manuscript in a fire.

CLOSING