“Do you mean that?” His eyes penetrated mine as a seer who would probe the faith of a novitiate. “All right. Be around to my house at two-thirty. I’ll take you to a séance.”
CHAPTER XIII
THE SÉANCE OF HORNS
TWO-THIRTY found me on the porch of the judge’s house again, picking up a modern magazine of the occultists which lay there on the table. This time, because I would have liked to read it, the judge showed up on the minute.
“You can take it home with you,” he said, noting my disappointment.
Was he glad of a proselyte, I wondered.
The townspeople stared when we appeared on the front street together, but then, they always stared at me. I had not asked where we were going—to one of the rickety store-buildings on the water-front, I fancied, in some back room over tidewater.
Instead, we turned off at the railroad track and skirting the town dump, where, on a briery height, the refuse of the entire population was spread out to breed mosquitoes, took a little path through the marshy woods at the base of the sand-dunes, and followed it two miles. Blueberry-bushes at our feet grew green and high, rid of their prolific harvest. Wintergreen berries were turning red, anticipating frost. The leaves of the sumac were wine-colored, and the dark racemes hung like tassels heavy with their glutinous ripened seeds. Goldenrod and purple asters rioted along the path, and tiger-lilies bordered the black ponds. Scarlet-winged blackbirds flitted through the low branches of the oaks, and wild canaries dived from sight. Bayberry and sassafras made the air sweet, and the brown pine-cones crunched under foot. The October sunshine, released after yesterday’s storm, danced between the interlacings of the wild grape-vine, which covered the undergrowth with its mocking pattern.
The soil of the woods was shallow, and the trees, sending their roots too quickly into sterile sea sand, shriveled and died before they had reached maturity, so that the forest was half-new and half as dead as if it had been burned. Growth here was quick and almost tropical, a glad green and a fast sunset of color, and then stale brown stalks. The dunes, bearing down upon the woods from the ocean on the far side of the cape, spared nothing. Little by little they covered the trees—first a soft pile of sand, no larger than a child would play with, heaped upon the surface roots, then a half-hill, out of which the fighting trunks protruded, and at last a hard plateau, with the remnants of the highest branches thrusting futile twigs, barren of leaves, up into the mocking sun. The sand suffocated the pines and buried them, so that, climbing up out of the swampy valley into the immensity of the yellow dunes, we walked upon buried forests.
“How far?” I asked the judge. I supposed that we would trudge on to the sea.
“Not far,” he answered.