They move about furtively with no word for one another,
lost in their grotesque dreamings.
* * * * *
On a rainy day the city gives them up and they come puttering excitedly
into the loop on a quest. The world is a garish unreality to them. The
streets and the crowds of automatic-faced men and women, the upward rush
of buildings and the horizontal rush of traffic are no more than vague
grimacings. Life is something of which the streets are oblivious. But here
on the gargoyle shelves, the high, shadowed shelves of the old book
store--truth stands in all its terrible reality, wrapped in its authentic
habiliments. Dr. Hickson of the psychopathic laboratory would give these
curious rainy day phantasts identities as weird as the volumes they
caress. But the old book store clerk is more kind. He lets them rummage.
Before the rain ends they will buy "The Cradle of the Giants," "The Key to
Satanism," Cornelius Agrippa's "Natural Magic," "The Astral Chord,"
"Occultism and Its Usages." They will buy books by Jacob Boehme, William
Law, Sadler, Hyslop, Ramachaska. And they will go hurrying home with their
treasures pressed close to them. Stuffy bedrooms lined with hints of
Sabbatical horror, strewn with bizarre refuse; musty smelling books out of
whose pages fantastic shapes rear themselves against the gaslights,
macabre worlds in which unreason rides like a headless D'Artagnan;
evenings in the park arguing suddenly with startled strangers on the
existence of the philosophers' stone or the astrological causes of
influenza--these form a background for the curious men whom the rain has
drifted into the old book store and who stand with their eyes haunting the
gargoyle titles.
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