The Horror at Red Hook

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