There, indeed, no stolen child
was found, despite the tales of screams and the red sash picked up in
the areaway; but the paintings and rough inscriptions on the peeling
walls of most of the rooms, and the primitive chemical laboratory in
the attic, all helped to convince the detective that he was on the
track of something tremendous. The paintings were appalling--hideous
monsters of every shape and size, and parodies on human outlines
which cannot be described. The writing was in red, and varied from
Arabic to Greek, Roman, and Hebrew letters. Malone could not read
much of it, but what he did decipher was portentous and cabalistic
enough. One frequently repeated motto was in a sort of Hebraized
Hellenistic Greek, and suggested the most terrible demon-evocations
of the Alexandrian decadence:


HEL. HELOYM. SOTHER. EMMANVEL. SABOATH. AGLA. TETRAGRAMMATION. AGYROS. OTHEOS. ISCHYROS. ATHANATOS. IEHOVA. VA.  ADONAL. SADY. HOMOVSION. MESSIAS. ESCHEREHEYE. Circles and pentagrams loomed on every hand, and told indubitably of
the strange beliefs and aspirations of those who dwelt so squalidly
here. In the cellar, however, the strangest thing was found--a pile
of genuine gold ingots covered carelessly with a piece of burlap, and
bearing upon their shining surfaces the same weird hieroglyphics
which also adorned the walls. During this raid the police
encountered only a passive resistance from the squinting Orientals
that swarmed from every door. Finding nothing relevant, they had to
leave all as it was; but the precinct captain wrote Suydam a note,
advising him to look closely to the character of his tenants, and
protegés in view of the growing public clamor. V

Then came the June wedding and the great sensation; Flatbush was gay
for the hour about high noon, and pennanted motors thronged the
street near the old Dutch church where an awning stretched from door
to highway. No local event ever surpassed the Suydam-Gerritsen
nuptials in tone and scale, and the party which escorted the bride
and groom to the Cunard pier was, if not exactly the smartest, at
least a solid page from the Social Register! At 5 o'clock adieux was
waved, and the ponderous liner edged away from the long pier, slowly
turned its nose seaward, discarded its tug, and headed for widening
water spaces that led to Old World wonders. By night the outer
harbor was cleared, and late passengers watched the stars twinkling
above an unpolluted ocean. Whether the tramp steamer or the scream was first to gain attention,
no one can say. Probably they were simultaneous, but it is of no use
to calculate. The scream came from the Suydam stateroom, and the
sailor who broke down the door could perhaps have told frightful
things if he had not forthwith gone completely mad--as it is, he
shrieked more loudly than the first victims, and thereafter ran
simpering about the vessel till caught and put in irons. The ship's
doctor who entered the stateroom and turned on the lights a moment
later did not go mad, but told nobody what he saw till afterward,
when he corresponded with Malone in Chepachet. It was
murder--strangulation--but one need not say that the claw-mark on
Mrs. Suydam's throat could not have come from her husband's or any
other human hand, or that upon the white wall there flickered for an
instant in hateful red a legend which, later copied from memory,
seems to have been nothing less than the fearsome Chaldee letters of
the word "LILITH." One need not mention these things because they
vanished so quickly--as for Suydam, one could at least bar others
from the room until one knew what to think oneself. The doctor has
distinctly assured Malone that 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. As proof, the doctor points to his
continued sanity. Then the tramp steamer claimed all attention. A boat put off, and a
horde of swart, insolent ruffians in officers' dress swarmed aboard
the temporarily halted Cunarder. They wanted Suydam or his
body--they had known of his trip, and for certain reasons were sure
he would die. The captain's deck was almost a pandemonium; for at
the instant, between the doctor's report from the stateroom and the
demands of the men from the tramp, not even the wisest and gravest
seaman could think what to do. Suddenly the leader of the visiting
mariners, an Arab with a hatefully negroid 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:


_In case of sudden or unexpected 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._


Captain and doctor looked at each other, and the latter whispered
something to the former. Finally they nodded rather helplessly and
led the way to the Suydam stateroom. 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 burden after an unaccountably long period of preparation. It
was wrapped in bedding from the berths, and the doctor was glad that
the outlines were not very revealing. Somehow the men got the thing
over the side and away to their tramp steamer without uncovering it. The Cunarder started again, and the doctor and ship's undertaker
sought out the Suydam stateroom to perform what last services they
could. Once more the physician was forced to reticence and even to
mendacity, for a hellish thing had happened. When the undertaker
asked him why he had drained off all of Mrs. Suydam's blood, he
neglected to affirm that he had not done so; nor did he point to the
vacant bottle-spaces on the rack, 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. Two hours later, and the world knew by radio all that
it ought to know of the horrible affair. VI

That same June evening, without having heard a word from the sea,
Malone was very busy among the alleys of Red Hook. A sudden stir
seemed to permeate the place, and as if apprized by "grapevine
telegraph" of something singular, the denizens clustered expectantly
around the dance-hall church and the houses in Parker Place. Three
children had just disappeared--blue-eyed Norwegians from the streets
toward Gowanus--and there were rumors of a mob forming among the
sturdy Viking of that section.