“At Wells I heard that the only man who had ever managed to reach Fool’s Acre was a trapper, and that he was still living.
“I found him at Rainbow Lake—a very old man, who had a fairly clear recollection of Fool’s Acre and his exhausting journey there.
“And he told me that man had been there before he had. For there was a roofless stone house there, and the remains of a walled garden. And a skull deep in the wild grasses.”
Selden paused and looked down at the recently healed scars on his wrists and hands.
“It was a rotten trip,” he said bluntly. “It took me three days to cut a tunnel through that accursed tangle of matted brier and grey birch.... Fool’s Acre is a grove of giant trees—first growth pine, oak, and maple. Great outcrops of limestone ledges bound it on the east. A brook runs through the woods.
“There is a house there, no longer roofless, and built of slabs of fossil-pitted limestone. The glass in the windows is so old that it is iridescent.
“A seven-foot wall encloses the house, built also of slabs blasted out of the rock outcrop, and all pitted with fossil shells.
“Inside is a garden—not the remains of one—a beautiful garden full of unfamiliar flowers. And in this garden I saw the Yezidee on his knees making living things out of lumps of dead earth!”
“The Tchordagh!” whispered the girl.
“What was the Yezidee doing?” demanded Cleves nervously.