HE

I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul
and my vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had
looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient
streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts
to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean
modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I
had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to
master, paralyze, and annihilate me.

The disillusion had been gradual. Coming for the first time upon the town, I had
seen it in the sunset from a bridge, majestic above its waters, its incredible
peaks and pyramids rising flowerlike and delicate from pools of violet mist to
play with the flaming clouds and the first stars of evening. Then it had lighted
up window by window above the shimmering tides where lanterns nodded and glided
and deep horns bayed weird harmonies, and had itself become a starry firmament
of dream, redolent of faery music, and one with the marvels of Carcassonne and
Samarcand and El Dorado and all glorious and half- fabulous cities. Shortly
afterward I was taken through those antique ways so dear to my fancy--narrow,
curving alleys and passages where rows of red Georgian brick blinked with
small-paned dormers above pillared doorways that had looked on gilded sedans and
paneled coaches--and in the first flush of realization of these long-wished
things I thought I had indeed achieved such treasures as would make me in time a
poet.

But success and happiness were not to be. Garish daylight showed only squalor
and alienage and the noxious elephantiasis of climbing, spreading stone where
the moon had hinted of loveliness and elder magic; and the throngs of people
that seethed through the flume-like streets were squat, swarthy strangers with
hardened faces and narrow eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without
kinship to the scenes about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man
of the old folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England village
steeples in his heart.

So instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blackness
and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had
ever dared to breathe before--the unwhisperable secret of secrets--the fact that
this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as
London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite
dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate
things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life. Upon making this
discovery I ceased to sleep comfortably; though something of resigned
tranquillity came back as I gradually formed the habit of keeping off the
streets by day and venturing abroad only at night, when darkness calls forth
what little of the past still hovers wraith-like about, and old white doorways
remember the stalwart forms that once passed through them. With this mode of
relief I even wrote a few poems, and still refrained from going home to my
people lest I seem to crawl back ignobly in defeat.

Then, on a sleepless night's walk, I met the man. It was in a grotesque hidden
courtyard of the Greenwich section, for there in my ignorance I had settled,
having heard of the place as the natural home of poets and artists. The archaic
lanes and houses and unexpected bits of square and court had indeed delighted
me, and when I found the poets and artists to be loud-voiced pretenders whose
quaintness is tinsel and whose lives are a denial of all that pure beauty which
is poetry and art, I stayed on for love of these venerable things. I fancied
them as they were in their prime, when Greenwich was a placid village not yet
engulfed by the town; and in the hours before dawn, when all the revellers had
slunk away, I used to wander alone among their cryptical windings and brood upon
the curious arcana which generations must have deposited there. This kept my
soul alive, and gave me a few of those dreams and visions for which the poet far
within me cried out.

The man came upon me at about two one cloudy August morning, as I was threading
a series of detached courtyards; now accessible only through the unlighted
hallways of intervening buildings, but once forming parts of a continuous
network of picturesque alleys. I had heard of them by vague rumor, and realized
that they could not be upon any map of today; but the fact that they were
forgotten only endeared them to me, so that I had sought them with twice my
usual eagerness. Now that I had found them, my eagerness was again redoubled;
for something in their arrangement dimly hinted that they might be only a few of
many such, with dark, dumb counterparts wedged obscurely betwixt high blank
walls and deserted rear tenements, or lurking lamplessly behind archways
unbetrayed by hordes of the foreign-speaking or guarded by furtive and
uncommunicative artists whose practises do not invite publicity or the light of
day.

He spoke to me without invitation, noting my mood and glances as I studied
certain knockered doorways above iron-railed steps, the pallid glow of traceried
transoms feebly lighting my face. His own face was in shadow, and he wore a
wide-brimmed hat which somehow blended perfectly with the out-of-date cloak he
affected; but I was subtly disquieted even before he addressed me. His form was
very slight; thin almost to cadaverousness; and his voice proved phenomenally
soft and hollow, though not particularly deep. He had, he said, noticed me
several times at my wanderings; and inferred that I resembled him in loving the
vestiges of former years. Would I not like the guidance of one long practised in
these explorations, and possessed of local information profoundly deeper than
any which an obvious newcomer could possibly have gained?

As he spoke, I caught a glimpse of his face in the yellow beam from a solitary
attic window. It was a noble, even a handsome elderly countenance; and bore the
marks of a lineage and refinement unusual for the age and place. Yet some
quality about it disturbed me almost as much as its features pleased me--perhaps
it was too white, or too expressionless, or too much out of keeping with the
locality, to make me feel easy or comfortable. Nevertheless I followed him; for
in those dreary days my quest for antique beauty and mystery was all that I had
to keep my soul alive, and I reckoned it a rare favor of Fate to fall in with
one whose kindred seekings seemed to have penetrated so much farther than mine.

Something in the night constrained the cloaked man to silence and for a long
hour he led me forward without needless words; making only the briefest of
comments concerning ancient names and dates and changes, and directing my
progress very largely by gestures as we squeezed through interstices, tiptoed
through corridors clambered over brick walls, and once crawled on hands and
knees through a low, arched passage of stone whose immense length and tortuous
twistings effaced at last every hint of geographical location I had managed to
preserve. The things we saw were very old and marvelous, or at least they seemed
so in the few straggling rays of light by which I viewed them, and I shall never
forget the tottering Ionic columns and fluted pilasters and urn-headed iron
fenceposts and flaring-linteled windows and decorative fanlights that appeared
to grow quainter and stranger the deeper we advanced into this inexhaustible
maze of unknown antiquity.

We met no person, and as time passed the lighted windows became fewer and fewer.
The streetlights we first encountered had been of oil, and of the ancient
lozenge pattern. Later I noticed some with candles; and at last, after
traversing a horrible unlighted court where my guide had to lead with his gloved
hand through total blackness to a narrow wooded gate in a high wall, we came
upon a fragment of alley lit only by lanterns in front of every seventh
house--unbelievably Colonial tin lanterns with conical tops and holes punched in
the sides. This alley led steeply uphill--more steeply than I thought possible
in this part of New York--and the upper end was blocked squarely by the ivy-clad
wall of a private estate, beyond which I could see a pale cupola, and the tops
of trees waving against a vague lightness in the sky. In this wall was a small,
low-arched gate of nail-studded black oak, which the man proceeded to unlock
with a ponderous key. Leading me within, he steered a course in utter blackness
over what seemed to be a gravel path, and finally up a flight of stone steps to
the door of the house, which he unlocked and opened for me.

We entered, and as we did so I grew faint from a reek of infinite mustiness
which welled out to meet us, and which must have been the fruit of unwholesome
centuries of decay. My host appeared not to notice this, and in courtesy I kept
silent as he piloted me up a curving stairway, across a hall, and into a room
whose door I heard him lock behind us. Then I saw him pull the curtains of the
three small-paned windows that barely showed themselves against the lightening
sky; after which he crossed to the mantel, struck flint and steel, lighted two
candles of a candelabrum of twelve sconces, and made a gesture enjoining
soft-toned speech.

In this feeble radiance I saw that we were in a spacious, well-furnished and
paneled library dating from the first quarter of the Eighteenth Century, with
splendid doorway pediments, a delightful Doric cornice, and a magnificently
carved overmantel with scroll-and-urn top. Above the crowded bookshelves at
intervals along the walls were well-wrought family portraits; all tarnished to
an enigmatical dimness, and bearing an unmistakable likeness to the man who now
motioned me to a chair beside the graceful Chippendale table. Before seating
himself across the table from me, my host paused for a moment as if in
embarrassment; then, tardily removing his gloves, wide-brimmed hat, and cloak,
stood theatrically revealed in full mid-Georgian costume from queued hair and
neck ruffles to knee-breeches, silk hose, and the buckled shoes I had not
previously noticed. Now slowly sinking into a lyre-back chair, he commenced to
eye me intently.

Without his hat he took on an aspect of extreme age which was scarcely visible
before, and I wondered if this unperceived mark of singular longevity were not
one of the sources of my disquiet. When he spoke at length, his soft, hollow,
and carefully muffled voice not infrequently quavered; and now and then I had
great difficulty in following him as I listened with a thrill of amazement and
half-disavowed alarm which grew each instant.

"You behold, Sir," my host began, "a man of very eccentrical habits for whose
costume no apology need be offered to one with your wit and inclinations.
Reflecting upon better times, I have not scrupled to ascertain their ways, and
adopt their dress and manners; an indulgence which offends none if practised
without ostentation. It hath been my good fortune to retain the rural seat of my
ancestors, swallowed though it was by two towns, first Greenwich, which built up
hither after 1800, then New York, which joined on near 1830. There were many
reasons for the close keeping of this place in my family, and I have not been
remiss in discharging such obligations. The squire who succeeded to it in 1768
studied sartain arts and made sartain discoveries, all connected with influences
residing in this particular plot of ground, and eminently desarving of the
strongest guarding. Some curious effects of these arts and discoveries I now
purpose to show you, under the strictest secrecy; and I believe I may rely on my
judgement of men enough to have no distrust of either your interest or your
fidelity."

He paused, but I could only nod my head. I have said that I was alarmed, yet to
my soul nothing was more deadly than the material daylight world of New York,
and whether this man were a harmless eccentric or a wielder of dangerous arts, I
had no choice save to follow him and slake my sense of wonder on whatever he
might have to offer. So I listened.

"To--my ancestor--," he softly continued, "there appeared to reside some very
remarkable qualities in the will of mankind; qualities having a little-suspected
dominance not only over the acts of one's self and of others, but over every
variety of force and substance in Nature, and over many elements and dimensions
deemed more universal than Nature herself. May I say that he flouted the
sanctity of things as great as space and time and that he put to strange uses
the rites of sartain half-breed red Indians once encamped upon this hill? These
Indians showed choler when the place was built, and were plaguey pestilent in
asking to visit the grounds at the full of the moon. For years they stole over
the wall each month when they could, and by stealth performed sartain acts.
Then, in '68, the new squire catched them at their doings, and stood still at
what he saw. Thereafter he bargained with them and exchanged the free access of
his grounds for the exact inwardness of what they did, larning that their
grandfathers got part of their custom from red ancestors and part from an old
Dutchman in the time of the States-General. Arid pox on him, I'm afeared the
squire must have sarved them monstrous bad rum--whether or not by intent--for a
week after he larnt the secret he was the only man living that knew it. You,
Sir, are the first outsider to be told there is a secret, and split me if I'd
have risked tampering that much with--the powers--had ye not been so hot after
bygone things."

I shuddered as the man grew colloquial--and with the familiar speech of another
day. He went on.

"But you must know, Sir, that what--the squire--got from those mongrel savages
was but a small part of the larning he came to have. He had not been at Oxford
for nothing, nor talked to no account with an ancient chymist and astrologer in
Paris. He was, in fine, made sensible that all the world is but the smoke of our
intellects; past the bidding of the vulgar, but by the wise to be puffed out and
drawn in like any cloud of prime Virginia tobacco. What we want, we may make
about us; and what we don't want, we may sweep away. I won't say that all this
is wholly true in body, but 'tis sufficient true to furnish a very pretty
spectacle now and then. You, I conceive, would be tickled by a better sight of
sartain other years than your fancy affords you; so be pleased to hold back any
fright at what I design to show. Come to the window and be quiet."

My host now took my hand to draw me to one of the two windows on the long side
of the malodorous room, and at the first touch of his ungloved fingers I turned
cold. His flesh, though dry and firm, was of the quality of ice; and I almost
shrank away from his pulling. But again I thought of the emptiness and horror of
reality, and boldly prepared to follow whithersoever I might be led. Once at the
window, the man drew apart the yellow silk curtains and directed my stare into
the blackness outside. For a moment I saw nothing save a myriad of tiny dancing
lights, far, far before me. Then, as if in response to an insidious motion of my
host's hand, a flash of heat-lightning played over the scene, and I looked out
upon a sea of luxuriant foliage--foliage unpolluted, and not the sea of roofs to
be expected by any normal mind. On my right the Hudson glittered wickedly, and
in the distance ahead I saw the unhealthy shimmer of a vast salt marsh
constellated with nervous fireflies. The flash died, and an evil smile illumined
the waxy face of the aged necromancer.

"That was before my time--before the new squire's time. Pray let us try again."

I was faint, even fainter than the hateful modernity of that accursed city had
made me.

"Good God!" I whispered, "can you do that for any time?" And as he nodded, and
bared the black stumps of what had once been yellow fangs, I clutched at the
curtains to prevent myself from falling. But he steadied me with that terrible,
ice-cold claw, and once more made his insidious gesture.

Again the lightning flashed--but this time upon a scene not wholly strange. It
was Greenwich, the Greenwich that used to be, with here and there a roof or row
of houses as we see it now, yet with lovely green lanes and fields and bits of
grassy common. The marsh still glittered beyond, but in the farther distance I
saw the steeples of what was then all of New York; Trinity and St. Paul's and
the Brick Church dominating their sisters, and a faint haze of wood smoke
hovering over the whole. I breathed hard, hut not so much from the sight itself
as from the possibilities my imagination terrifiedly conjured up.

"Can you--dare you--go far?" I spoke with awe and I think he shared it for a
second, but the evil grin returned.

"Far? What I have seen would blast ye to a mad statue of stone! Back,
back--forward, forward--look, ye puling lackwit!"

And as he snarled the phrase under his breath he gestured anew bringing to the
sky a flash more blinding than either which had come before. For full three
seconds I could glimpse that pandemoniac sight, and in those seconds I saw a
vista which will ever afterward torment me in dreams. I saw the heavens
verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of
giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and
devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows. And swarming loathsomely on aerial
galleries I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly in
orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered kettle-drums,
the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning of muted horns whose
ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like the wave of an unhallowed ocean
of bitumen.

I saw this vista, I say, and heard as with the mind's ear the blasphemous
domdaniel of cacophony which companioned it. It was the shrieking fulfilment of
all the horror which that corpse-city had ever stirred in my soul, and
forgetting every injunction to silence I screamed and screamed and screamed as
my nerves gave way and the walls quivered about me.

Then, as the flash subsided, I saw that my host was trembling too; a look of
shocking fear half-blotting from his face the serpent distortion of rage which
my screams had excited. He tottered, clutched at the curtains as I had done
before, and wriggled his head wildly, like a hunted animal. God knows he had
cause, for as the echoes of my screaming died away there came another sound so
hellishly suggestive that only numbed emotion kept me sane and conscious. It was
the steady, stealthy creaking of the stairs beyond the locked door, as with the
ascent of a barefoot or skin-shod horde; and at last the cautious, purposeful
rattling of the brass latch that glowed in the feeble candlelight. The old man
clawed and spat at me through the moldy air, and barked things in his throat as
he swayed with the yellow curtain he clutched.

"The full moon--damn ye--ye...ye yelping dog--ye called 'em, and they've come
for me! Moccasined feet--dead men--Gad sink ye, ye red devils, but I poisoned no
rum o' yours--han't I kept your pox-rotted magic safe--ye swilled yourselves
sick, curse ye, and yet must needs blame the squire--let go, you! Unhand that
latch--I've naught for ye here--"

At this point three slow and very deliberate raps shook the panels of the door,
and a white foam gathered at the mouth of the frantic magician. His fright,
turning to steely despair, left room for a resurgence of his rage against me;
and he staggered a step toward the table on whose edge I was steadying myself.
The curtains, still clutched in his right hand as his left clawed out at me,
grew taut and finally crashed down from their lofty fastenings; admitting to the
room a flood of that full moonlight which the brightening of the sky had
presaged. In those greenish beams the candles paled, and a new semblance of
decay spread over the musk-reeking room with its wormy paneling, sagging floor,
battered mantel, rickety furniture, and ragged draperies. It spread over the old
man, too, whether from the same source or because of his fear and vehemence, and
I saw him shrivel and blacken as he lurched near and strove to rend me with
vulturine talons. Only his eyes stayed whole, and they glared with a propulsive,
dilated incandescence which grew as the face around them charred and dwindled.

The rapping was now repeated with greater insistence, and this time bore a hint
of metal. The black thing facing me had become only a head with eyes, impotently
trying to wriggle across the sinking floor in my direction, and occasionally
emitting feeble little spits of immortal malice. Now swift and splintering blows
assailed the sickly panels, and I saw the gleam of a tomahawk as it cleft the
rending wood. I did not move, for I could not; but watched dazedly as the door
fell in pieces to admit a colossal, shapeless influx of inky substance starred
with shining, malevolent eyes. It poured thickly, like a flood of oil bursting a
rotten bulkhead, overturned a chair as it spread, and finally flowed under the
table and across the room to where the blackened head with the eyes still glared
at me. Around that head it closed, totally swallowing it up, and in another
moment it had begun to recede; bearing away its invisible burden without
touching me, and flowing again out that black doorway and down the unseen
stairs, which creaked as before, though in reverse order.

Then the floor gave way at last, and I slid gaspingly down into the nighted
chamber below, choking with cobwebs and half-swooning with terror. The green
moon, shining through broken windows, showed me the hall door half open; and as
I rose from the plaster-strewn floor and twisted myself free from the sagged
ceiling, I saw sweep past it an awful torrent of blackness, with scores of
baleful eyes glowing in it. It was seeking the door to the cellar, and when it
found it, vanished therein. I now felt the floor of this lower room giving as
that of the upper chamber had done, and once a crashing above had been followed
by the fall past the west window of some thing which must have been the cupola.
Now liberated for the instant from the wreckage, I rushed through the hall to
the front door and finding myself unable to open it, seized a chair and broke a
window, climbing frenziedly out upon the unkempt lawn where moon light danced
over yard-high grass and weeds. The wall was high and all the gates were locked
but moving a pile of boxes in a corner I managed to gain the top and cling to
the great stone urn set there.

About me in my exhaustion I could see only strange walls and windows and old
gambrel roofs. The steep street of my approach was nowhere visible, and the
little I did see succumbed rapidly to a mist that rolled in from the river
despite the glaring moonlight. Suddenly the urn to which I clung began to
tremble, as if sharing my own lethal dizziness; and in another instant my body
was plunging downward to I knew not what fate.

The man who found me said that I must have crawled a long way despite my broken
bones, for a trail of blood stretched off as far as he dared look. The gathering
rain soon effaced this link with the scene of my ordeal, and reports could state
no more than that I had appeared from a place unknown, at the entrance to a
little black court off Perry Street.

I never sought to return to those tenebrous labyrinths, nor would I direct any
sane man thither if I could. Of who or what that ancient creature was, I have no
idea; but I repeat that the city is dead and full of unsuspected horrors.
Whither he has gone, I do not know; but I have gone home to the pure New England
lanes up which fragrant sea-winds sweep at evening.