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Famous Modern Ghost Stories (Various authors) online
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The Willows
"I can't disguise it any longer," I said; "I don't like this place, and the darkness, and the noises, and the awful feelings I get. There's something here that beats me utterly. I'm in a blue funk, and that's the plain truth. If the other shore was--different, I swear I'd be inclined to swim for it!"
The Swede's face turned very white beneath the deep tan of sun and wind. He stared straight at me and answered quietly, but his voice betrayed his huge excitement by its unnatural calmness. For the moment, at any rate, he was the strong man of the two. He was more phlegmatic, for one thing.
"It's not a physical condition we can escape from by running away," he replied, in the tone of a doctor diagnosing some grave disease; "we must sit tight and wait. There are forces close here that could kill a herd of elephants in a second as easily as you or I could squash a fly. Our only chance is to keep perfectly still. Our insignificance perhaps may save us."
I put a dozen questions into my expression of face, but found no words. It was precisely like listening to an accurate description of a disease whose symptoms had puzzled me.
"I mean that so far, although aware of our disturbing presence, they have not _found_ us--not 'located' us, as the Americans say," he went on. "They're blundering about like men hunting for a leak of gas. The paddle and canoe and provisions prove that. I think they _feel_ us, but cannot actually see us. We must keep our minds quiet--it's our minds they feel. We must control our thoughts, or it's all up with us."
"Death you mean?" I stammered, icy with the horror of his suggestion.
"Worse--by far," he said. "Death, according to one's belief, means either annihilation or release from the limitations of the senses, but it involves no change of character. _You_ don't suddenly alter just because the body's gone. But this means a radical alteration, a complete change, a horrible loss of oneself by substitution--far worse than death, and not even annihilation. We happen to have camped in a spot where their region touches ours where the veil between has worn thin"--horrors! he was using my very own phrase, my actual words--"so that they are aware of our being in their neighborhood."
"But _who_ are aware?" I asked.
I forgot the shaking of the willows in the windless calm, the humming overhead, everything except that I was waiting for an answer that I dreaded more than I can possibly explain.
He lowered his voice at once to reply, leaning forward a little over the fire, an indefinable change in his face that made me avoid his eyes and look down upon the ground.
"All my life," he said, "I have been strangely, vividly conscious of another region--not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind--where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires, the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust in the balance; vast purposes, I mean, that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with mere expressions of the soul--"
"I suggest just now--" I began, seeking to stop him, feeling as though I was face to face with a madman. But he instantly overbore me with his torrent that _had_ to come.
"You think," he said, "it is the spirits of the elements, and I thought perhaps it was the old gods. But I tell you now it is--_neither_. These would be comprehensible entities, for they have relations with men, depending upon them for worship or sacrifice, whereas these beings who are now about us have absolutely nothing to do with mankind, and it is mere chance that their space happens just at this spot to touch our own."