Five nights at the Five Pines

by Harriet A. Gaul

The cover had a large eye in the center from which shot orange rays, and underneath were symbols I did not understand. The paper was cheap but well printed, one of those ventures in sect literature which, like those dedicated to social propaganda, are always coming and going on the market and sending out subscription-blanks with every issue. The advertisements were, for the most part, how to get fat and how to get thin, where to send words for songs and how to sell motion-picture scenarios. The editorial matter was equally erratic. One erudite article held my interest: a savant had written of the “aura” that surrounds a person. This is the light which exudes from his body, an excrescence imperceptible to the agnostic outside the realm of “truth,” but plainly visible to the initiate. The aura was supposed to radiate various distances, depending on the magnetism of the subject, and its hue changed with the individual. Red was the color of youth and exuberance, blue designated the purist, purple betrayed sex passion, and yellow surrounded the intellectual. Pink and heliotrope were the auras of the artistic; green was the halo of genius. In life this color might not be evident, but after death, the body being expressed in highly magnetized atoms, the color of the aura was quite clear, being, in fact, the sole attribute of the apparition. That is, instead of being visited by the subject reincarnated in mortal form, you beheld his astral color. Understanding his temperament in life, you recognized him by the aura which represented him. Although most difficult to discern with the naked eye, this aura could easily be photographed, and photographs were reproduced on the next page—shadowy outlines of nude figures. Much space was devoted to the female aura, posed in interesting silhouette with a wavy water-line around it, like the coast upon a map. The subjects’ names were given. It was hoped that later they would be able to reproduce the aura of a specter, to print a colored photograph of light alone.

I shut the magazine. It had made fascinating reading, but I would have to procure the observations of more than one savant to be convinced. I began to see how profound a study the psychic might become, and why Mattie and the New Captain had spent all their time on it and gathered together so many books on the occult. It was not so simple as I had supposed when I knew nothing at all about it. Did the judge believe this? I wished that he would come.

It was nine o’clock.

If only this gnawing in my fagged brain to discover the cause of my nocturnal obsessions had taken some other form of elucidation! Why did I force my addled intellect to prove or disprove this theory of spiritism, this revived dogma of the Dark Ages, culled from all religions? I had never subjected Christianity to such severe criticism. After childhood, one ceases to question the code of morality under which he has been brought up; it is his then, for better or for worse. To argue is to lose the nuance of faith. Would a child, I wondered, brought up in the House of the Five Pines, take ghosts as easily as I took Jonah? He certainly would not grow up into materialism by believing that the age of miracles was past. He would take the supernatural as a matter of course. One could hear the family arguing at the breakfast-table:

“I heard something last night; it must have been grandmother.”

And another child, with its mouth full of grapefruit: “No, great-grandmother. I saw her.”

And the bobbed-hair one: “It couldn’t have been Grandmother Brown, because the aura was yellow, and she never had anything in her bean.”

Then they would go roller-skating, leaving the subleties of color emanations to solve or dissolve themselves.

But I had not been brought up that way. I had plunged into this atmosphere unprepared. I never felt more ancient than at that moment, when I realized that I was too old to learn.

What was keeping the judge?