Lovecraft, H P - The Horror At Red Hook

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The Horror at Red Hook

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written 1-2 Aug 1925

Published September 1926 in Weird Tales, Vol. 8, No. 3, p. 373-80.

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 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 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 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

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

The Horror at Red Hook

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, it 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 Germany

authority, 'es lässt sich nicht lesen - it does not permit itself to be read.'

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 fur him come to be a phantasmagoria of

macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and leering with concealed rottenness as in

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,

The Horror at Red Hook

but threaten the very integrity of the universe. All this reflection was no doubt morbid,

but keen logic and a deep sense of humour 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 to the middle of the nineteenth century, and some of the obscurer alleys and

byways have that alluring antique flavour 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 oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies

of the harbour 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

offences 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 neighbourhood'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 priests 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

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摘要：

TheHorroratRedHookTheHorroratRedHookbyH.P.LovecraftWritten1-2Aug1925PublishedSeptember1926inWeirdTales,Vol.8,No.3,p.373-80.INotmanyweeksago,onastreetcornerinthevillageofPascoag,RhodeIsland,atall,heavilybuilt,andwholesome-lookingpedestrianfurnishedmuchspeculationbyasingularlapseofbehaviour.Hehad,itap...

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