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Blackwood, Algernon, 1869-1951

"The Damned"

They were ineffective, sluggish currents. There
was no real wind. Nothing happened. I began to realize--far more clearly
than in my sister's fanciful explanation about "layers"--that here were
many contrary influences at work, mutually destructive of one another.
House and grounds were not haunted merely; they were the arena of past
thinking and feeling, perhaps of terrible, impure beliefs, each striving
to suppress the others, yet no one of them achieving supremacy because
no one of them was strong enough, no one of them was true. Each,
moreover, tried to win me over, though only one was able to reach my
mind at all. For some obscure reason--possibly because my temperament
had a natural bias towards the grotesque--it was the goblin layer. With
me, it was the line of least resistance....
In my own thoughts this "goblin garden" revealed, of course, merely my
personal interpretation. I felt now objectively what long ago my mind
had felt subjectively. My work, essential sign of spontaneous life with
me, had stopped dead; production had become impossible.
I stood now considerably closer to the cause of this sterility. The
Cause, rather, turned bolder, had stepped insolently nearer.


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