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 Possible Worlds Theory and
Counterfactual Historical Fiction
Riyukta Raghunath
Possible Worlds Theory and Counterfactual
Historical Fiction
 Riyukta Raghunath

Possible Worlds
Theory
and Counterfactual
Historical Fiction
Riyukta Raghunath
New College of the Humanities
London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-53451-6 ISBN 978-3-030-53452-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53452-3

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2020
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland
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 For Mumma and Raghuacha,
For Everything.
For Shadow and Storm, my Talismans
For Shrav,
For never telling me my odds.
 Acknowledgments

This book includes sections that have been previously published in book
collections and journals. A version of Chapter 4 of this book has been
previously published in my (2017) article ‘Alternate History: Defining
Counterparts and Individuals with Transworld Identity’. In: Fantastika
Journal 1(1), pp. 91–108. I want to thank the editors for allowing me to
use this material. Chapter 6 of this book is based on my (2020) article ‘“‘I
AM not mad, most noble Festus.’ No. But I have been”: Possible Worlds
Theory and the Complex Worlds of Sarban’s The Sound of his Horn’.
In: Moser, K. and Sukla, A. (eds.) Imagination and Art: Explorations in
Contemporary Theory. Leiden: Brill. I am grateful to Brill Publishers for
granting permission for the work to appear in this book.
My love for Possible Worlds Theory started with Alice Bell’s book,
The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction, which I read during my master’s
degree in 2011. Sitting in front of this completed manuscript now, the
immeasurable influence that Alice has had on my work is undeniable.
Her unfailing support and guidance from the initial stages of writing the
research proposal and through my doctoral studies, as well as our shared

vii
viii Acknowledgments

passion for all things possible has been invaluable to me. To her, I owe
my deepest gratitude.
A huge thanks to Jan Alber, Sam Browse, Jeremy Scott, Steven Earn-
shaw, Alison Gibbons, Joe Bray, Jess Mason, Keith Moser and Marie-
Laure Ryan. Each of them has read versions or sections of this book
and/or provided constructive comments and criticism at conferences that
has certainly made my work more rigorous. I would also like to express
my gratitude to Richard Steadman-Jones and Joanna Gavins—the former
for mentoring me through my master’s degree and for pointing me in
Alice’s direction in the first place, and the latter for supervising my
master’s dissertation that has inadvertently led to this book. Also, a special
shout out to the #HallamHorde and the English Department at Sheffield
Hallam University.
I would like to thank Palgrave for the opportunity to publish this
project with them, and in particular to Cathy Scott and Alice Green for
their constant support and patience throughout this undertaking.
To my friends and relatives, who in one way or the other extended
their support—thank you. Niki, my once in a lifetime person—I draw
strength from her and for this I owe her a debt of gratitude. Emma,
Claire, Sushanth, and Suren—thank you for the much-needed support
and distraction from the rigours of my work. I also want to single
out Sushanth for patiently executing all my design requests, and kindly
allowing me to use them for this book.
I am ever so thankful to my father for introducing me to the genre
of counterfactual historical fiction and for readily (re)reading portions
of this book as well as to my mother for always having my back. My
parents have given me their unequivocal support throughout, as always,
for which my mere expression of thanks will not suffice. This milestone
is mostly for them. To Shadow, for making sure I took more breaks than
necessary from my laptop screen with his constant need for cuddles and
belly rubs. To my husband, Shravan—thank you for being the calm to
my storm and most of all thank you for tolerating me through this entire
process. My counterparts from all possible worlds, thank you too.
 Contents

1 Introduction: The Genre of Counterfactual Historical

Fiction 1
1.1 Rationale 1
1.2 Counterfactual Writing—The Genre
of Counterfactual Historical Fiction 3
1.3 Existing Research on Counterfactual Historical
Fiction: From Formal Typologies to the Importance
of Readers 10
1.4 Structure of the Book 21
References 24

2 Possible Worlds Theory: History, Approaches, and Its

Relevance to Counterfactual Historical Fiction 27
2.1 Possible Worlds Theory: From Philosophy
to Narratology 27
2.2 Ryan’s (1991) Possible Worlds Model 36
2.3 Possible Worlds Terminology within This Book 38

ix
x Contents

2.4 Possible Worlds Theory and Counterfactual

Historical Fiction 40
References 44

3 New Additions to Possible Worlds Theory: Reader

Knowledge Worlds, Ontological Superimposition,
and Reciprocal Feedback 47
3.1 The Actual World and Counterfactual Historical
Fiction 47
3.1.1 Clarifying Goodman’s (1983) Ontological
Position 55
3.1.2 K-World or Knowledge World 61
3.2 The New Approach: Reader Knowledge Worlds
or RK-Worlds 63
3.3 Ontological Superimposition and Reciprocal
Feedback: Cognitive Concepts to Support a Possible
Worlds Analysis of Counterfactual Historical Fiction 68
3.3.1 Arguing Against the Blending Model 69
3.3.2 Ontological Superimposition 77
3.3.3 Reciprocal Feedback 84
References 88

4 Redefining Counterpart Theory and Transworld

Identity 91
4.1 Counterpart Theory and Transworld Identity
in Philosophy 91
4.1.1 Essential Properties and Rigid Designation 96
4.2 Counterpart Theory and Transworld Identity
Within the Context of Fiction 98
4.3 Counterparts and Transworld Identity
in Counterfactual Historical Fiction 103
4.4 The New Approach 109
4.4.1 Actual World Individuals in Textual Actual
Worlds with a Different Proper Name 113
References 119
 Contents xi

5 The Complex and Mixed Ontology of Fatherland 121

5.1 Fatherland (1992) by Robert Harris 121
5.1.1 Plot Summary 121
5.2 Images Used in Fatherland 123
5.3 Possible Worlds Theory and the Fictionality
of Images 127
5.4 Quotations Used in Fatherland 131
5.5 The New Approach: A Fictionality Scale 136
References 147

6 The Dystopian Counterfactual World and Unreliable

Narration in The Sound of His Horn 149
6.1 The Sound of His Horn (1952) by Sarban 149
6.1.1 Plot Summary 150
6.2 The Textual Universe of The Sound of His Horn 152
6.3 The Protagonist, Alan Querdillon as an Unreliable
Narrator 155
6.4 Possible Worlds Theory and Unreliability 159
6.5 Accessibility Relations and the Textual Universe
of The Sound of His Horn 162
6.6 The Possible Worlds of The Sound of His Horn 166
6.7 F-Universe 168
6.8 The Referential Universe 171
6.8.1 The Referential Universe and Unreliable
Narratives 175
References 178

7 Multiple Textual Actual Worlds and Contradictions

in Making History 181
7.1 Making History (1996) by Stephen Fry 181
7.1.1 Plot Summary 182
7.2 Multiple Textual Actual Worlds and Their
Epistemological Links 183
7.2.1 Rudi Gloder as a Counterpart of Adolf
Hitler 188
xii Contents

7.2.2 The Significance of Presenting Gloder

as a Counterpart of Hitler 191
7.3 Possible Worlds Theory and Contradictory
Statements 193
References 200

8 Conclusion and Future Research Recommendations 201

8.1 RK-Worlds 201
8.2 Ontological Superimposition and Reciprocal
Feedback 205
8.3 Transworld Identity and Counterpart Theory 207
8.4 Fictionality Scale 210
8.5 Textual Reference World and Narratorial Actual
World 212
8.6 The New Modal Universe and Accompanying
Terminology 213
8.7 Future Recommendations 214
8.8 The Key Contributions of This Book 218
References 218

Index 221
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Caption: Visual representation of Fauconnier

and Turner’s (1998) concept of blending 19
Fig. 3.1 A visual interpretation of Goodman’s modal universe 57
Fig. 3.2 Ryan’s (2001: 102) recenterable possible worlds model 58
Fig. 3.3 The modal structure of the actual universe 65
Fig. 3.4 Different types of RK-worlds 66
Fig. 3.5 A visual representation of Dannenberg’s model applied
to a passage from Random Quest (1965) 71
Fig. 3.6 Unspecified input space one when using the blending
model 74
Fig. 3.7 A map of Europe and Russia after the Second World
War in our actual world 78
Fig. 3.8 Map of the Greater German Reich, 1964 in textual
actual world of Fatherland 78
Fig. 3.9 Two layers of the superimposed structure invoked
by Fatherland 79
Fig. 3.10 Reciprocal feedback 87
Fig. 5.1 Greater German Reich, 1964 in Harris (1992: 1) 125
Fig. 5.2 Hitler’s Berlin, 1964 in Harris (1992: 2–3) 125

xiii
xiv List of Figures

Fig. 5.3 Authentic sketch of the installation

in Auschwitz-Birkenau in Harris (1992: 314) 127
Fig. 5.4 Hitler’s ink drawing of The Great Hall (Source
Wikimedia Commons) 130
Fig. 5.5 Notes on Luther’s trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Harris
(1992: 322–323) 138
Fig. 5.6 Fictionality scale for images in Fatherland 140
Fig. 5.7 Fictionality scale for quotations in Fatherland 141
Fig. 5.8 Representation of the quote from The Drowned
and the Saved on the fictionality scale 146
Fig. 6.1 The textual universe of The Sound of his Horn 154
Fig. 6.2 Accessibility relations between TAW1 and the actual
world 163
Fig. 6.3 Accessibility relations between TAW2 and the actual
world 163
Fig. 6.4 Rethinking the accessibility relations between TAW2
and the actual world 166
Fig. 6.5 F-universe in The Sound of his Horn 169
Fig. 6.6 The modal structure of The Sound of his Horn:
the textual universe from Alan’s point of view
and the referential universe with Alan as a reliable
narrator 176
Fig. 6.7 The modal structure of The Sound of his Horn:
the textual universe from Alan’s point of view
and the referential universe with Alan as an unreliable
narrator 176
Fig. 7.1 The ontological landscape of the textual universe
of Making History 197
 List of Tables

Table 3.1 Actual world history and textual actual world history
in Fatherland 48
Table 3.2 Counterfactual history in the textual actual world
of Fatherland with its corresponding fact in the actual
world 83
Table 4.1 Similarities and differences between the two Kremers
presented in the text and the actual world Kremer 108

xv
 1
Introduction: The Genre of Counterfactual
Historical Fiction

1.1 Rationale
The primary purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensive method-
ology with which to analyse counterfactual historical fiction. In short,
counterfactual historical fiction is a genre in literature that comprise
narratives set in worlds whose histories run contrary to the history of
our actual world. They often tend to focus on changed outcomes of wars
and battles owing to their prominence in our history. The most common
themes explored within the genre are: ‘What if Hitler won the Second
World War?’ and ‘What if the South had won the American Civil War?’.
As I will show in this chapter, previous studies of counterfactual
historical fiction have focused on various aspects of counterfactual histo-
ries—some research focuses on developing a formal typology for the
genre and others examine the genre’s poetics or offer interpretive literary
analyses of particular counterfactual historical fiction. While there is
some research that engages with how readers process such fiction, this
is an area that is largely underdeveloped As such, worked examples of
counterfactual historical fiction that address the reader’s role and more
specifically, focus on how they interact cognitively with the worlds built
by these texts are significantly lacking. I argue that a methodology with
© The Author(s) 2020 1
R. Raghunath, Possible Worlds Theory and Counterfactual Historical Fiction,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53452-3_1
2 R. Raghunath

which to effectively analyse counterfactual historical fiction must focus

on the genre’s poetics as well as account for reader experientiality. This
monograph will therefore offer a cognitive-narratological methodology
with which to analyse counterfactual historical fiction. According to
Herman (2013) “[a]pproaches to narrative study that fall under the
heading of cognitive narratology share a focus on the mental states,
capacities, and dispositions that provide grounds for—or, conversely,
are grounded in—narrative experiences” (paragraph 1). As such, what
this book more specifically offers is a systematic critical approach based
on a customised model of Possible Worlds Theory taking into account
the narrative, its structure as well as the mental processes facilitating
world-building. Additionally, this is supplemented by cognitive concepts
modelling the different processes that readers go through when they read
counterfactual historical fiction.
I will analyse three texts in this monograph to both show the need for
a revised Possible Worlds model, and to demonstrate the dexterity of the
subsequent model. Owing to its dominance within the cannon, coun-
terfactual World War II novels, that construct fictional worlds in which
the Axis Powers have won the Second World War, have been chosen for
analysis. In particular, Robert Harris’ Fatherland (1992), Sarban’s The
Sound of His Horn (1952), and Stephen Fry’s Making History (1996)
have been chosen because they each portray a different kind of coun-
terfactual world. Nonetheless, the model that I offer is one that can be
replicated and applied across all narratives within the genre.
This chapter explores the literary genre of counterfactual historical
fiction in detail. In the first section of this chapter, I briefly introduce
the concept of counterfactuals before explaining counterfactual histor-
ical fiction as a literary genre. In the next section, I review the existing
scholarship on this genre to show how it has been previously examined.
In doing so, I also highlight gaps in current scholarly research that this
book aims to fill.
 1 Introduction: The Genre of Counterfactual Historical Fiction 3

1.2 Counterfactual Writing—The Genre

of Counterfactual Historical Fiction
“Cleopatra’s nose: had it been shorter, the whole aspect of the world
would have been altered” (Pascal 2003 [1670]: 48). This quotation
from Pascal expresses the concept of counterfactuals rather remark-
ably—it conveys the idea that a slight alteration could lead to highly
changed outcomes. The Oxford English Dictionary (2020) defines the
word counterfactual as “[p]ertaining to, or expressing, what has not in
fact happened, but might, could, or would, in different conditions”.
For example, in social psychology, and in what is a more appropriate
definition, Neal Roese and James Olson define the term counterfactual
as something that “literally, runs contrary to the facts” (1995: 1–2).
Therefore, a counterfactual expresses what has not happened, but as
Roese and Olson point out, this is done by creating alternatives to
facts. According to narratologist Hillary Dannenberg, a counterfactual
is “generated by creating a nonfactual or false antecedent. This is done by
mentally mutating or undoing a real-world event in the past to produce
an outcome or consequent contrary to reality” (2008: 111, italics original).
Dannenberg here explains how a counterfactual scenario is created when
a particular event in our actual world is changed, thereby producing a
new version of the actual world. Based on this, my own example of a
counterfactual statement is: if I had watched Game of Thrones last night,
my friends couldn’t have spoiled the cliffhanger for me, where ‘I watched
Game of Thrones last night’ is the false antecedent that produces the
outcome—‘couldn’t have spoiled the cliffhanger’.
Simply stated, a counterfactual historical description is an exploration
of a what-if scenario with some speculation on the consequences of a
different result. That is, what if some major historical event had gone
differently? How could that have changed the world? Within the context
of literary fiction, narratives that explore such what-if scenarios are called
counterfactual historical fiction. Duncan (2003) describes counterfactual
historical fiction as “not […] history at all, but a work of fiction in which
history as we know it is changed for dramatic and often ironic effect”
(209). Counterfactual historical fiction can thus be considered a genre of
fiction that is rich in possibilities. Inevitably, all fictional narratives are
4 R. Raghunath

rich in possibilities because they present a what-if scenario in the sense

that they imagine a world where such and such event or series of events
take place, but they differ crucially from counterfactual historical fiction
where the worlds created posit what-if scenarios based on rewriting the
history of our actual world. In the words of Ryan (2006), “[a]lternate
[…] history fiction creates a world whose evolution, following a certain
event, diverges from what we regard as actual history” (657).
Spedo (2009) defines the genre by differentiating it from historical
fiction stating that the key difference between counterfactual histor-
ical fiction and historical fiction lies in the way each of these genres is
written and perceived by readers. He suggests that although counterfac-
tual historical fiction is written as if it were real in that such fiction
include historical characters and events presented within a historical
context, readers tend to think of such fiction as made-up because they
are aware that they are being presented with a historical timeline that
never happened. Historical fiction, on the other hand, Spedo maintains
is also written as though it is real, but unlike counterfactual historical
fiction, readers consider historical fiction as being a representation of
actual history.
What is interesting about the genre of counterfactual historical fiction
is that it is a kind of thought experiment where the author takes as their
starting point an existing historical situation and changes it to explore
the world of what-if scenarios. This starting point where the fictional
history diverges from actual history is known as the ‘point of divergence’.
Singles (2013) defines the point of divergence as “the moment in the
narrative of the real past from which alternative narrative of history runs
a different course” (7). According to her, the point of divergence is also
the chief characteristic that distinguishes counterfactual historical fiction
from other related genres.
The genre of counterfactual historical fiction is often seen as part of
a larger category that also includes some types of science fiction and
fantasy. Hellekson (2001) reminds us:

Science fiction asks, ‘What if the world were somehow different?’ This
question is at the centre of both science fiction and the alternate history.
Answering this question in fictive texts creates science fiction or other
 1 Introduction: The Genre of Counterfactual Historical Fiction 5

fantastic texts, including fantasy and magic realism. One important point
I wish to stress is that the alternate history is a sub-genre of the genre of
science fiction, which is itself a sub-genre of fantastic (that is, not realistic)
literature. (3)

Here, Hellekson addresses the long-standing question of whether or not

counterfactual historical fiction is a sub-category of science fiction and
firmly concludes that it is. I do not agree with the argument that merely
having a world that is different from our actual world makes it science
fiction. Counterfactual historical fiction is not always science fiction and
fantasy. Though some texts have science fictional elements (for example,
Bring the Jubilee [1953] by Ward Moore involves the protagonist trav-
elling back in time using a time machine) and some have fantastical
elements (for example, Temeraire [series] by Naomi Novik that imag-
ines a world during the Napoleonic War fought using dragons), there
are also others that contain neither (for example, SS-GB [1978] by Len
Deighton is set in a world where England is occupied by Germany after
Nazi Germany won the Second World war and The Yiddish Policeman’s
Union [2007] by Michael Chabon presents an alternate world where
during the Second World War, the Jews were relocated to a city named
Sitka which in the present day is a large Yiddish metropolis). While some
counterfactual historical fictional texts are set against science fictional
contexts, there also exists a broad body of work in counterfactual histor-
ical fiction that is not science fiction, and at this point counterfactual
historical fiction needs to be considered a genre on its own.
Jeff Prucher in his Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science
Fiction (2006) notes the preferred usage of the term ‘Alternate History’
by literature scholars to refer to texts that construct worlds based on
historical what-ifs. Hellekson (2001) points out that other terminology
such as alternative history, alternate universe, allohistory, uchronia, and
parahistory is also used to refer to this particular form of fiction (3).
In addition to these terms, Charles Renouvier (1876) uses the term
‘Uchronie’ from French which denotes a fictionalised historical time
period to refer to this genre and Gallagher (2007) proposes to call these
texts ‘alternate world novels’. Gallagher explains, “[a]lternate-history
novels attempt to create a complete alternative reality, presenting in detail
the social, cultural, technological, psychological and emotional totalities
6 R. Raghunath

that result from the alteration, which is why they are often called ‘alter-
nate world novels’” (58, italics original). Throughout this book, I will
be using the term counterfactual historical fiction to refer to these texts
over the more popular ‘alternate history’ because using the premodifier
‘counterfactual’ instead of ‘alternate’, emphasises the typical nature of this
type of fiction to present a world that is contrary to the history of our
actual world. The term “alternate” only conveys that such fiction present
a history that is different to or a substitute to the actual world history.
However, my argument is that the historical descriptions presented in
this type of fiction are not merely alternate to, but they are also histor-
ical deviations that are counter to actual world historical facts. The
implicit distinction here is that the term ‘counterfactual’ expresses more
clearly that the historical deviations in such fiction challenge accepted
accounts of history in the actual world. Moreover, the suffix ‘fiction’
clearly indicates that it is fiction. Therefore, calling this genre ‘counter-
factual historical fiction’ emphasises that it presents fictional worlds that
include historical descriptions that are counterfactual to the actual world
history.
While an extensive discussion of the genre’s canon is beyond the scope
of this book, at this point it is necessary to provide a brief overview of
the genre’s development before contextualising the approach that I aim to
offer. Rosenfeld (2005) views the genre as a long-standing phenomenon
tracing its history back to Greek and Roman History with Livy spec-
ulating what would happen if the Roman Empire faced the armies of
Alexander the Great and Herodotus contemplating the potential conse-
quences of a Greek defeat at Marathon in 490 B.C.E (5). According to
Hellekson (2009), however, the first novel-length counterfactual histor-
ical fiction which was published in large quantities can be dated back
to 1836 when French writer Louis Geoffroy penned his Histoire de la
Monarchie Universelle – Napoléon et la conquête du monde 1812–1832
[History of the Universal Monarchy: Napoleon and the Conquest of the
World] (13). The text envisions the Napoleonic Empire victorious in the
French invasion of Russia in 1812 followed by the invasion of England
in 1814 and later unifying the world under Bonaparte’s rule. However, in
the actual world the French army were defeated in 1812 by the Russians
and consequently Napoleon’s dream of conquering Europe was shattered.
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The horror at Red
Hook
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The horror at Red Hook

Author: H. P. Lovecraft

Release date: February 15, 2024 [eBook #72966]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Weird Tales, 1927

Credits: Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE

HORROR AT RED HOOK ***
[Source: Weird Tales, March 1952]

The Horror at Red Hook

By H. P. Lovecraft

"The nightmare horde slithered away, led by the abominable

naked phosphorescent thing that now strode insolently,
bearing in its arms the glassy-eyed corpse of the corpulent
old man.

"There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us,

and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a
place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in
twilight. It is possible that man may sometimes return on the
track of evolution, and it is my belief that an awful lore is
not yet dead."

—Arthur Machen

I
 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 behavior. 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
recognized 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 squalid brick houses in the Red
Hook section of Brooklyn, and the consequent death of many brave
officers, had unseated his nervous equilibrium. He had worked too hard, all
said, in trying to clean up those nests of disorder and violence; certain
features were shocking enough, in all conscience, and the unexpected
tragedy was the last straw. This was a simple explanation which everyone
could understand, and because Malone was not a simple person he
perceived that he had better let it suffice. To hint to unimaginative people of
a horror beyond all human conception—a horror of houses and blocks and
cities leprous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder worlds—would
be merely to invite a padded cell instead of a restful rustication, and Malone
was a man of sense despite his mysticism. He had the Celt's far vision of
weird and hidden things, but the logician's quick eye for the outwardly
unconvincing; an amalgam which had led him far afield in the forty-two
years of his life, and set him in strange places for a Dublin 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 German authority, "er lässt sich nicht lesen"—it
does not permit itself to be read.

II

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 for him come to be a fantasmagoria of macabre shadow-
studies; now glittering and jeering with concealed rottenness as in Aubrey
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, but threaten
the very integrity of the universe. All this reflection was no doubt morbid,
but keen logic and a deep sense of humor 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 of the middle of the nineteenth century, and some of the
obscurer alleys and byways have that alluring antique flavor 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 of oily waves at its grimy piers and the
monstrous organ litanies of the harbor 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 offenses 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 neighborhood'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 priest 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 viewed
with an anthropologist's shudder the chanting, cursing processions of blear-
eyed and pock-marked young men which wound their way along in the dark
small hours of morning. One saw groups of these youths incessantly;
sometimes in leering vigils on street corners, sometimes in doorways
playing eerily on cheap instruments of music, sometimes in stupefied dozes
or indecent dialogues around cafeteria tables near Borough Hall, and
sometimes in whispering converse around dingy taxicabs drawn up at the
high stoops of crumbling and closely shuttered old houses. They chilled and
fascinated him more than he dared confess to his associates on the force, for
he seemed to see in them some monstrous thread of secret continuity; some
fiendish, cryptical and ancient pattern utterly beyond and below the sordid
mass of facts and habits and haunts listed with such conscientious technical
care by the police. They must be, he felt inwardly, the heirs of some
shocking and primordial tradition; the sharers of debased and broken scraps
from cults and ceremonies older than mankind. Their coherence and
definiteness suggested it, and it showed in the singular suspicion of order
which lurked beneath their squalid disorder. He had not read in vain such
treatises as Miss Murray's Witch Cult in Western Europe; and knew that up
to recent years there had certainly survived among peasants and furtive folk
a frightful and clandestine system of assemblies and orgies descended from
dark religions antedating the Aryan World, and appearing in popular
legends as Black Masses and Witches' Sabbaths. That these hellish vestiges
of old Turanian-Asiatic magic and fertility-cults were even now wholly
dead he could not for a moment suppose, and he frequently wondered how
much older and how much blacker than the very worst of the muttered tales
some of them might really be.
 III

It was the case of Robert Suydam which took Malone to the heart of
things in Red Hook. Suydam was a lettered recluse of ancient Dutch family,
possessed originally of barely independent means, and inhabiting the
spacious but ill-preserved mansion which his grandfather had built in
Flatbush when that village was little more then a pleasant group of Colonial
cottages surrounding the steepled and ivy-clad Reformed Church with its
iron-railed yard of Netherlandish gravestones. In this lonely house, set back
from Martense Street amidst a yard of venerable trees, Suydam had read
and brooded for some six decades except for a period a generation before,
when he had sailed for the Old World and remained there out of sight for
eight years. He could afford no servants, and would admit but few visitors
to his absolute solitude; eschewing close friendships and receiving his rare
acquaintances in one of the three ground-floor rooms, which he kept in
order—a vast, high-ceiled library whose walls were solidly packed with
tattered books of ponderous, archaic, and vaguely repellent aspect. The
growth of the town and its final absorption in the Brooklyn district had
meant nothing to Suydam, and he had come to mean less and less to the
town. Elderly people still pointed him out on the streets, but to most of the
recent population he was merely a queer, corpulent old fellow whose
unkempt white hair, stubbly beard, shiny black clothes and gold-headed
cane earned him an amused glance and nothing more. Malone did not know
him by sight till duty called him to the case, but had heard of him indirectly
as a really profound authority on medieval superstition, and had once idly
meant to look up an out-of-print pamphlet of his on the Kabbalah and the
Faustus legend, which a friend had quoted from memory.

Suydam became a "case" when his distant and only relatives sought
court pronouncements on his sanity. Their action seemed sudden to the
outside world, but was really undertaken only after prolonged observation
and sorrowful debate. It was based on certain odd changes in his speech and
habits; wild references to impending wonders, and unaccountable hauntings
of disreputable Brooklyn neighborhoods. He had been growing shabbier
and shabbier with the years, and now prowled about like a veritable
mendicant; seen occasionally by humiliated friends in subway stations, or
loitering on the benches around Borough Hall in conversation with groups
of swarthy, evil-looking strangers. When he spoke it was to babble of
unlimited powers almost within his grasp, and to repeat with knowing leers
such mystical words of names as "Sephiroth," "Ashmodai" and "Samael."
The court action revealed that he was using up his income and wasting his
principal in the purchase of curious tomes imported from London and Paris,
and in the maintenance of a 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
service behind the green blinds of secretive windows. Detectives assigned
to follow him reported strange cries and chants and prancing of feet
filtering out from these nocturnal rites, and shuddered at their peculiar
ecstasy and abandon despite the commonness of weird orgies in that sodden
section. When, however, the matter came to a hearing, Suydam managed to
preserve his liberty. Before the judge his manner grew urbane and
reasonable, and he freely admitted the queerness of demeanor and
extravagant cast of language into which he had fallen through excessive
devotion to study and research. He was, he said, engaged in the
investigation of certain details of European tradition which required the
closest contact with foreign groups and their songs and folk dances. The
notion that any low secret society was preying upon him, as hinted by his
relatives, was obviously absurd; and showed how sadly limited was their
understanding of him and his work. Triumphing with his calm explanations,
he was suffered to depart unhindered; and the paid detectives of the
Suydams, Corlears and Van Brunts were withdrawn in resigned disgust.

It was here that an alliance of Federal inspectors and police, Malone with
them, entered the case. The law had watched the Suydam action with
interest, and had in many instances been called upon to aid the private
detectives. In this work it developed that Suydam's new associates were
among the blackest and most vicious criminals of Red Hook's devious
lanes, and that at least a third of them were known and repeated offenders in
the matter of thievery, disorder, and the importation of illegal immigrants.
Indeed, it would not have been too much to say that the old scholar's
particular circle coincided almost perfectly with the worst of the organized
cliques which smuggled ashore certain nameless and unclassified Asian
dregs wisely turned back by Ellis Island. In the teeming rookeries of Parker
Place—since renamed—where Suydam had his basement flat, there had
grown up a very unusual colony of unclassified slant-eyed folk who used
the Arabic alphabet but were eloquently repudiated by the great mass of
Syrians in and around Atlantic Avenue. They could all have been deported
for lack of credentials, but legalism is slow-moving, and one does not
disturb Red Hook unless publicity forces one to.

These creatures attended a tumbledown stone church, used Wednesdays

as a dance hall, which reared its Gothic buttresses near the vilest part of the
waterfront. Clergy throughout Brooklyn denied the place all standing and
authenticity, and policemen agreed with them when they listened to the
noises it emitted at night. Malone used to fancy he heard terrible cracked
bass notes from a hidden organ far underground when the church stood
empty and unlighted, whilst all observers dreaded the shrieking and
drumming which accompanied the visible services. Suydam, when
questioned, said he thought the ritual was some remnant of Nestorian
Christianity tinctured with the Shamanism of Tibet. Most of the people, he
conjectured, were of Mongoloid stock, originating somewhere in or near
Kurdistan—and Malone could not help recalling that Kurdistan is the land
of the Yezidees, last survivors of the Persian devil-worshippers. However
this may have been, the stir of the Suydam investigation made it certain that
these unauthorized newcomers were flooding Red Hook in increasing
numbers; entering through some marine conspiracy unreached by revenue
officers and harbor police, overrunning Parker Place and rapidly spreading
up the hill, and welcomed with curious fraternalism by the other assorted
denizens of the region. Their squat figures and characteristic squinting
physiognomies grotesquely combined with flashy American clothing,
appeared more and more numerously among the loafers and nomad
gangsters of the Borough Hall section; till at length it was deemed
necessary to compute their number, ascertain their sources and occupations,
and find if possible a way to round them up and deliver them to the proper
immigration authorities. To this task Malone was assigned by agreement of
Federal and city forces, and as he commenced his canvass of Red Hook he
felt poised upon the brink of nameless terrors, with the shabby, unkempt
figure of Robert Suydam as archfiend and adversary.

IV

Police methods are varied and ingenious. Malone, through

unostentatious rambles, carefully casual conversations, well-timed offers of
hip-pocket liquor, and judicious dialogues with frightened prisoners,
learned many isolated facts about the movement whose aspect had become
so menacing. 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 peddlers, though frequently serving in Greek
restaurants and tending corner newsstands. Most of them, however, had no
visible means of support; and were obviously connected with underworld
pursuits, of which smuggling and bootlegging were the least indescribable.
They had come in steamships, apparently tramp freighters, and had been
unloaded by stealth on moonless nights in rowboats which stole under a
certain wharf and followed a hidden canal and house Malone could not
locate, for the memories of his informants were exceedingly confused,
while their speech was to a great extent beyond even the ablest interpreters;
nor could he gain any real data on the reasons for their systematic
importation. They were reticent about the exact spot from which they had
come, and were never sufficiently off guard to reveal the agencies which
had sought them out and directed their course. Indeed, they developed
something like acute fright when asked the reason for their presence.
Gangsters of other breeds were equally taciturn, and the most that could be
gathered was that some god or great priesthood had promised them
unheard-of powers and supernatural glories and rulerships in a strange land.

The attendance of both newcomers and old gangsters at Suydam's

closely guarded nocturnal meetings was very regular, and the police soon
learned that the erstwhile recluse had leased additional flats to
accommodate such guests as knew his password; at last occupying three
entire houses and permanently harboring many of his queer companions. He
spent but little time now at his Flatbush home, apparently going and coming
only to obtain and return books; and his face and manner had attained an
appalling pitch of wildness. Malone twice interviewed him, but was each
time bruskly repulsed. He knew nothing, he said, of any mysterious plots or
movements; and had no idea how the Kurds could have entered or what
they wanted. His business was to study undisturbed the folk-lore of all the
immigrants of the district; a business with which policemen had no
legitimate concern. Malone mentioned his admiration for Suydam's old
brochure on the Kabbalah and other myths, but the old man's softening was
only momentary. He sensed an intrusion, and rebuffed his visitor in no
uncertain way; till Malone withdrew disgusted, and turned to other channels
of information.

What Malone would have unearthed could he have worked continuously

on the case, we shall never know. As it was, a stupid conflict between city
and Federal authority suspended the investigation for several months,
during which the detective was busy with other assignments. But at no time
did he lose interest, or fail to stand amazed at what began to happen to
Robert Suydam. Just at the time when a wave of kidnappings and
disappearances spread its excitement over New York, the unkempt scholar
embarked upon a metamorphosis as startling as it was absurd. One day he
was seen near Borough Hall with clean-shaved face, well-trimmed hair, and
tastefully immaculate attire, and on every day thereafter some obscure
improvement was noticed in him. He maintained his new fastidiousness
without interruption, added to it an unwonted sparkle of eye and crispness
of speech, and began little by little to shed the corpulence which had so
long deformed him. Now frequently taken for less than his age, he acquired
an elasticity of step and buoyancy of demeanor to match the new tradition,
and showed a curious darkening of the hair which somehow did not suggest
dye. As the months passed, he commenced to dress less and less
conservatively, and finally astonished his few friends by renovating and
redecorating his Flatbush mansion, which he threw open in a series of
receptions, summoning all the acquaintances he could remember, and
extending a special welcome to the fully forgiven relatives who had lately
sought his restraint. Some attended through curiosity, others through duty;
but all were suddenly charmed by the dawning grace and urbanity of the
former hermit. He had, he asserted, accomplished most of his allotted work;
and having just inherited some property from a half-forgotten European
friend, was about to spend his remaining years in a brighter second youth
which ease, care and diet had made possible to him. Less and less was he
seen at Red Hook, and more and more did he move in the society to which
he was born. Policemen noted a tendency of the gangsters to congregate at
the old stone church and dancehall instead of at the basement flat in Parker
Place, though the latter and its recent annexes still overflowed with noxious
life.

Then two incidents occurred—wide enough apart, but both of intense

interest in the case as Malone envisaged it. One was a quiet announcement
in the Eagle of Robert Suydam's engagement to Miss Cornelia Gerritsen of
Bayside, a young woman of excellent position, and distantly related to the
elderly bridegroom-elect; whilst the other was a raid on the dance-hall
church by city police, after a report that the face of a kidnapped child had
been seen for a second at one of the basement windows. Malone had
participated in this raid, and studied the place with much care when inside.
Nothing was found—in fact, the building was entirely deserted when visited
—but the sensitive Celt was vaguely disturbed by many things about the
interior. There were crudely painted panels he 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. Then, too, he did not relish the Greek
inscription on the wall above the pulpit; an ancient incantation which he
had once stumbled upon in Dublin college days, and which read, literally
translated: "O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the
baying of dogs and spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades
among the tombs; who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals,
Gorge, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favorably on our sacrifices!"
 When he read this he shuddered, and thought vaguely of the cracked
bass organ-notes he fancied he had heard beneath the church on certain
nights. He shuddered again at the rust around the rim of a metal basin which
stood on the altar, and paused nervously when his nostrils seemed to detect
a curious and ghastly stench from somewhere in the neighborhood. That
organ memory haunted him, and he explored the basement with particular
assiduity before he left. The place was very hateful to him; yet after all,
were the blasphemous panels and inscriptions more than mere crudities
perpetrated by the ignorant?

By the time of Suydam's wedding the kidnapping epidemic had become

a popular newspaper scandal. Most of the victims were young children of
the lowest classes, but the increasing number of disappearances had worked
up a sentiment of the strongest fury. Journals clamored for action from the
police, and once more the Butler Street station sent its men over Red Hook
for clues, discoveries, and criminals. Malone was glad to be on the trail
again, and took pride in a raid on one of Suydam's Parker Place houses.
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.

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—