The Horror at Red Hook

those nighted crypts, those titan arcades, and those half-formed
shapes of hell that strode gigantically in silence holding half-eaten
things whose still surviving portions screamed for mercy or laughed
with madness.  Odors of incense and corruption joined in sickening
concert, and the black air was alive with the cloudy, semi-visible
bulk of shapeless elemental things with eyes.  Somewhere dark sticky
water was lapping at onyx piers, and once the shivery tinkle of
raucous little bells pealed out to greet the insane titter of a naked
phosphorescent thing which swam into sight, scrambled ashore, and
climbed up to squat leeringly on a carved golden pedestal in the
black ground.

Avenues of limitless night seemed to radiate in every direction, till
one might fancy that here lay the root of a contagion destined to
sicken and swallow cities, and engulf nations in the fetor of hybrid
pestilence.  Here cosmic sin had entered, and festered by unhallowed
rites had commenced the grinning march of death that was to rot us
all to fungus abnormalities too hideous for the grave's holding.
Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless
childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved.