Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood

By Algernon Blackwood

A woman of snow . . . a midnight caller keeping his promise . . . forests where Nature is deliberate and malefic . . . enchanted houses . . . these are the beings and ideas that flood through this collection of ghost stories by Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951). Altogether thirteen stories, gathered from the entire corpus of Blackwood's work, are included: stories of such sheer power and imagination that it is easy to see why he has been considered the foremost British supernaturalist of the twentieth century.
Blackwood's ability to create an atmosphere of unrelieved horror and sustain it to the end of the story is almost unsurpassed. "The Willows" — which has been called by H. P. Lovecraft the finest supernatural story — is a typical example of Blackwood's art: slowly and surely Blackwood draws the reader into a world of shadows, nuances, and unearthly terror.
Blackwood was also a master at evoking feelings of mysticism and cosmic experience; dealing with such ideas as interpenetrating levels of existence and pantheistic elemental powers, he expanded the content of supernatural literature enormously. But even the more traditional elements of horror stories such as ghosts and haunted houses are handled with such energy and feeling that they rise far above their predecessors.
Drawing on serious Oriental thought, modern psychology, and philosophy, Algernon Blackwood introduced a sophistication to the horror story that — with few exceptions — it was devoid of before. The results are stories that are not only guaranteed to chill, but stories that have something to say to the intelligent reader.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Apr 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9780486317489

Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Blackwood was a master of supernatural fiction, known for his ability to create a sense of unease and tension in his readers. His writing often explored the boundary between the natural and supernatural worlds, and the psychological impact of encountering the unknown.

Book preview

BEST GHOST STORIES OF

ALGERNON

BLACKWOOD

Selected with an Introduction by

E. F. BLEILER

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

NEW YORK

Copyright © 1973 by Dover Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood, first published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 1973, is a new selection of stories by Algernon Blackwood (reprinted without abridgement) taken from the following sources:

Introduction by Algernon Blackwood, from The Tales of Algernon Blackwood, London, Martin Secker, 1938.

The Empty House and Keeping His Promise from The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories, London, Eveleigh Nash, 1906.

The Willows, The Listener, and Max Hensig from The Listener and Other Stories, London, Eveleigh Nash, 1907.

Secret Worship and Ancient Sorceries from John Silence, Physician Extraordinary, London, Eveleigh Nash, 1908.

The Wendigo from The Lost Valley and Other Stories, London, Eveleigh Nash, 1910.

The Glamour of the Snow and The Transfer from Pan’s Garden, A Volume of Nature Stories, London, Macmillan, 1912.

Ancient Lights and Accessory Before the Fact from Ten Minute Stories, London, John Murray, 1914.

The Other Wing from Day and Night Stories, New York, Dutton, 1917.

The selection was made by E. F. Bleiler, who also wrote the Introduction to the Dover Edition.

International Standard Book Number: 0-486-22977-7

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-75877

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

22977715

www.doverpublications.com

INTRODUCTION

TO THE DOVER EDITION

i

IT would be impossible to better Algernon Blackwood’s own introduction, which was written for a collection of his stories published in 1938. The most that an editor can do, after making his own selection of what he considers to be Blackwood’s best stories, is to expand certain nuances, tell a little more about the external Blackwood, and chart his contribution to the development of English supernatural fiction.

Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), born in Kent, England, was the son of Sir Arthur Blackwood, a high official in the British post office, and the dowager Duchess of Manchester. His family was reasonably well to do, and it might have been expected that his life would be a normal one for a member of the British ruling class. Both of his parents, however, became converted to the Sandemanians, one of the most fanatical ultra-Calvinistic sects, and life was very uncomfortable for a dreamy, sensitive, individualistic young man who could not accept the fact that he was Damned. After a period of education at a Moravian school in the Black Forest and the University of Edinburgh, young Algernon Blackwood rebelled against the family religion—not in a physical way—but by studying the Vedanta and occultism. He was packed off to Canada by his family as a remittance man at the age of twenty.

In Canada his family connections helped him for a time, but a succession of gaffes and blunders revealed all too clearly that he was not suited for business, and he soon lost his entire capital. Journalism, a milk farm, a barroom (which nearly caused his disownment) and other misdirections were followed by flight to New York.

In New York the utmost degradation and misery awaited him. Penniless and sick most of the time, he lived in a world that Hammett and Chandler might have written about, but would not have chosen to inhabit. Con men and thugs, pimps and dope fiends, cynical drunken reporters, corrupt police and ward heelers were his enforced associates. He posed as a model to Charles Dana Gibson to avoid starvation, and was swindled out of badly needed cash while he was lying at the point of death—only to be lampooned in the New York newspapers as a guy because of his mother’s title. He was almost railroaded for arson. He escaped from these horrors almost as if by a miracle when his classical education served to impress a millionaire, who hired him as a secretary. Eventually he returned to England, not wealthier, but wiser.

Blackwood started to write seriously around 1905, with a few periodical pieces. His first book, The Empty House, appeared in 1906, and was soon followed by The Listener (1907). His work was almost immediately recognized as important, and together with M. R. James, with whom he overlapped in time, he was recognized as one of the two greatest living exponents of supernatural fiction. In his old age he established a new career as a narrator of ghost stories on the BBC television, and in 1949 he was made a Commander in the Order of the British Empire. He died in 1951, the last great British master of supernatural fiction, leaving no clear successor.

ii

Blackwood worked in many different subforms within the range of fiction loosely called the ghost story or supernatural story. He wrote tales of terror, intended to thrill the reader; stories that embodied elements of weird science; occult detective stories; psychological-supernatural stories; conventional ghost stories; mystical stories; light fantasies and many other kinds of stories that cannot be labeled easily.

All of these forms Blackwood handled superbly. To the tale of terror he brought a subtlety, a craftsmanship and a maturity of outlook that it had seldom enjoyed before. In The Willows he makes a remarkable use of a scientific idea, interpenetrating dimensions of existence, to create one of the most sustained situations in supernatural fiction. The Wendigo expands a small point in Algonkin folklore—which may ultimately be nothing more than cannibalism—into a cosmic situation. Many of his lesser stories in this same vein show a skill at handling old themes and motives that raises them above their predecessors.

While Blackwood’s terror stories are often great, the stories that are his most personal are those that must be called mystical for the want of a better term. In these the common theme is an empathy between man and the forces of the universe, the elemental powers that are above, around, apart from yet within man. This is not religious mysticism, nor occultism, but a loosely philosophical panentheism of a sort, nature constituting the Godhead. This Divinity could be called the Great God Pan, as long as it is remembered that Pan is not the goat-footed piper, but Everything. Numinous for Blackwood were the dark forests of Canada, the rushing wind from the Caucasus into the Black Sea, the crags of the Alps, and other aspects of the Universe, man subtracted. Many of his stories are built upon this emotional feeling; outstanding among them is his novel The Centaur (1911). Other facets of this mystical thought appear in such works as The Human Chord (1910), in which the ancient Pythagorean wisdom of sound is worked into a moving fiction. The basic concept of traditional mysticism, too, is represented in the Julius LeVallon novels, The Bright Messenger (1922) and Julius Le Vallon (1916), in which an elemental spirit, trapped in a human cage, strives for release. Two of his collections of short stories, The Lost Valley (1910) and Pan’s Garden (1912), present many stories that develop shades of these situations.

Blackwood’s terror stories may have been an outgrowth of his New York experiences, as he says in his introduction—although I have some doubts about this explanation—but his mystical bent is not easily accounted for. It may have been a reaction to his childhood among the Sandemanians—Lord Dunsany and Bierce shared similar backgrounds. Or it may have been something more personal. In any case, Blackwood was saturated from early manhood with the mystical, magical and occult literature of many traditions. At one time he considered himself a Buddhist, although I do not know if this was only a temporary adherence.

Blackwood’s supernatural short stories are spread through several volumes. The Empty House (1906) and The Listener (1907) contain mostly stories of supernatural terror, while John Silence, Physician Extraordinary (1908) records the cases of a psychic detective, certainly the most important occult detective since LeFanu’s Dr. Hesselius. The Lost Valley (1910) and Pan’s Garden (1912) present mostly nature mysticism, while Incredible Adventures (1914) offers several long nouvelles that are difficult to categorize. Most of the stories in these earlier collections are fully developed in the late Victorian manner, occasionally leisurely in their progress, but at best as powerful and homogeneous and embracing as a wave. His later collections, such as Ten Minute Stories (1914), Day and Night Stories (1917), The Wolves of God (1921), Tongues of Fire (1924), and Shocks (1936) are usually briefer, sometimes more conventional in subject matter. But if the themes they develop are sometimes traditional, they are handled with mastery.

Blackwood did not limit himself to the ghost story, however, even though it was his primary interest. In addition to a little poetry and a couple of plays, he wrote a considerable amount of fiction for children, much of which was published in periodicals or annuals, and is now forgotten. Some of it, like How the Circus Came to Tea (1936), deserves revival, for at its best it is whimsical, charming, and dryly humorous, the amiable personality of the author emerging more visibly than in his supernatural fiction. He also wrote a single major work that is not fiction, his autobiography Episodes Before Thirty (1924). This is a brilliant memoir of the New York tenderloin as of about 1900, but the reader who is interested in Algernon Blackwood the fantaisiste may find it disappointing for its reticence. As Blackwood concludes: Of mystical, psychic, or so-called ‘occult’ experiences, I have purposely said nothing.

iii

Several things Algernon Blackwood, in his best work, could do better than anyone else. He could arouse a sensation of terror in the reader, and sustain it at high pitch until the end of the story. The suspense of The Willows, for example, is hard to match anywhere. It has often been rated as the finest single supernatural story in English. Blackwood could also impart to his readers a sort of cosmic experience, and could impel the reader to perceive otherwise invisible powers and stirrings in the universe, inexplicable sensations, and the ineffable bliss of natura naturans. In these areas only Gustav Meyrink, the Austro-Hungarian writer, could match him, though on a different level. Blackwood could also write a fantasy of pathos and tenderness without mawkishness, as in his Dudley and Gilderoy (1929), the experiences of two friends, a cat and a parrot.

Faults, of course, Blackwood had. He wrote because he had to, at word rates, and he did not always resist his natural tendency to say things the full way. His novels suffer from this flaw, on the whole, more than his short stories. In his later short stories, possibly at editorial prodding, he tried to be concise, but the scanty raiment of the 1920’s did not suit him as well as Edwardian full dress. Not all of his experiments, too, were successful, such as his attempts to create an implied supernaturalism of mood within a social-psychological framework, but the attempt at least was admirable. On the verbal level, sometimes, he did not always match the splendor of his ideas, and occasionally his ideas were simply incommunicable. But all in all, no writer of fiction has written better individual stories or spoken better about the ineffable.

Historically Blackwood offered much to the development and continuity of the ghost story. He widened the range of its subject matter greatly, and showed that the myriad rooms of the human mind were teeming with a strange, hidden life. He brought into the supernatural story the realms of philosophy, serious Oriental thought, modern psychology and new areas of magical lore. He demonstrated that the supernatural story did not have to be a revenge story nor a primitive justice drama, nor detritus of ancient wickedness, nor the crudities of the lower-level fiction of his day. While the comparison should not be pushed too far, since there are significant differences, Blackwood in some ways was the heir to J. S. LeFanu, the greatest of Victorian supernaturalists. With the work of Blackwood, it seems safe to say, the ghost story was finally recognized as a legitimate, respectable literary form—not a hypocritical Christmas entertainment nor a horror-bludgeon for the dull—but a thought-provoking work that had something to say to an intelligent reader.

The stories that have been selected for this collection have been taken from Blackwood’s entire corpus, both books and ephemera. It was a difficult choice to make, since there is really too much material for a single book, and many of his better stories are too long for an anthology and too short for separate publication. But books are finite and must stop somewhere. Even though this is a collection of ghost stories, I have taken the liberty of including Max Hensig. It is such a good story that it should not be lost (as it has been), simply because it does not fit its author’s major bent. Based on Blackwood’s experiences as a reporter covering the Carlyle Harris murder case in New York, it shows how much was lost by Blackwood’s concentration on supernaturalism and children’s fiction.

It is not necessary to introduce the other stories, since they carry their own recommendation. To my mind they (along with other stories that could not be included) reveal why Blackwood has been treasured as the foremost British supernaturalist of the twentieth century.

E. F. BLEILER

New York, 1973

CONTENTS

The Willows

Secret Worship

Ancient Sorceries

The Glamour of the Snow

The Wendigo

The Other Wing

The Transfer

Ancient Lights

The Listener

The Empty House

Accessory Before the Fact

Keeping His Promise

Max Hensig

INTRODUCTION

TO THE 1938 EDITION

The body, they assure us, changes its atoms every seven years or so, being therefore totally different at twenty-eight from what it was at twenty-one, but science does not commit itself with regard to mental changes, such changes being doubtless incommensurable. At any rate, Mr. Martin Secker’s request for an introduction to this collection faces me with a question: Am I the man who wrote these tales some thirty years ago, or am I someone else? This considerable period of time is involved, but as I cannot step back to the platform from which I viewed the world in 1906, the question finds no answer. Neither Dunne’s Serial Universe, nor Ouspensky’s other-dimensional time, nor even a book like Forrest Reid’s Uncle Stephen, can help, while the recent exposé of the Versailles Adventure suggests brutally that thirty or one hundred years are precisely what they say they are, no more, no less. Moreover, a polite request from an intelligent publisher being in the nature of force majeure, if not an Act of God, this Introduction, whoever writes it, must be written.

It is, none the less, a dour job, for I have not read these stories since I first wrote them; physically, mentally, spiritually I must have changed more times than I care to remember; they introduce me to someone I now know but slightly, so that it is almost like reading the work of another man. Any desire to cut, to alter, entirely to re-compose is, of course, inadmissible; tinkering is worse than useless, it is dangerous; the tales stand, therefore, as they were first set down. Far from apologising for them, however, I must admit that most of them thrilled me. I wish I had known the fellow who saw things in this way and thus expressed himself is the kind of comment my twentieth-century mind suggests, since behind the actual tale I discern hints of an adventurous philosophy. I wonder whether his queer, observant, questioning mind travelled further! But what I myself honestly think of the stories to-day not even Torquemada could extract from me.

It is, of course, extremely interesting to look back across the years questioningly, wonderingly, objectively, without detachment, though seeing objectively does not necessarily imply seeing truthfully. It ought to imply seeing with self eliminated, yet self obstinately intrudes, whether it be the self of to-day or the self of 1906. I recall, anyhow, that these tales poured from me spontaneously, as though a tap were turned on, and I have often since leaned to the suggestion that many of them derived from buried, unresolved shocks—shocks to the emotions; and by unresolved, I mean, of course, unexpressed. These shocks had come to an exceptionally ignorant youth of twenty who had drifted into the life of a newspaper reporter in New York after a disastrous cattle-farm and a hotel in Canada, and the drifting had included the stress of extreme poverty and starvation. Having told some of this in Adventures Before Thirty, I must not repeat, but it holds this psychological interest for me to-day: that the New York experiences in a world of crime and vice had bruised and bludgeoned a sensitive nature that swallowed the horrors without being able to digest them, and that the seeds thus sown, dormant and unresolved in the subconscious, possibly emerged later—and, since the subconscious always dramatises, emerged in story form.

Others are, of course, ghost-stories, so called, for the classification of ghost-stories has stuck to me closer than a brother, and even when the B.B.C. ask for a story it must be, preferably, of the creepy kind. Yet this alleged interest in ghosts I should more accurately define as an interest in the Extension of Human Faculty. To be known as the ghost man is almost a derogatory classification, and here at last I may perhaps refute it. My interest in psychic matters has always been the interest in questions of extended or expanded consciousness. If a ghost is seen, what is it interests me less than what sees it? Do we possess faculties which, under exceptional stimulus, register beyond the normal gamut of seeing, hearing, feeling? That such faculties may exist in the human being and occasionally manifest is where my interest has always lain. Such exceptional stimulus may be pathogenic (as duplicated in the Salpetrière and other mental hospitals), or due to some dynamic flash of terror or beauty which strikes a Man in the Street, but that they occur is beyond the denials to-day of the petty sceptic. If this is more certain to me now than it was when I wrote these tales a generation ago means merely that I have since studied more of the increasingly voluminous evidence. Thus in most of these stories there is usually an average man who, either through a flash of terror or of beauty, becomes stimulated into extra-sensory experience. A wide gap may lie between a common-place mind that became clairvoyant and clairaudient from a flash of terror in The Empty House, to the Man in the Street in The Centaur whose sense of beauty blazed into a realisation of the planetary bodies as superhuman entities, but the principle is the same: both experienced an expansion of normal consciousness. And this, I submit, travels a little further than the manufacture of the homespun ghost-story.

These early stories, though I did not know it at the time, seem to me now to have been practice-flights for more adventurous explorations, or, as Eveleigh Nash, my first publisher, phrased it, trying your hand on a larger canvas. That idea of a larger canvas scarified me at the age of thirty-six, but seeing my first book in print, I remember, scarified me even more. It is an experience that must surely intensify any hint of inferiority complex that lies hidden. I well recall my intense relief that The Empty House, my first book, enjoyed, if that be the word, a gentle, negligible press until the Spectator of that day, half to my distress, half to my delight, chose it as a verse for a special sermon, and, later, a scholarly article in the Morning Post, analysing the ghost-story as a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon form, based its remarks on this particular book and became traceable to Hilaire Belloc, to whose subsequent encouragement I owe much.

What I may call left-handed compliments, at any rate, flew wildly across a barrage of faithful criticism, and I remember that, while accepting the blame as deserved, I cuddled the compliments, deciding therefore to try again—so that The Listener in due course appeared. And, such are the tricks of memory, I can still see the grave expression on the faces of Eveleigh Nash and his gifted reader, Maude ffoulkes, while we discussed together whether a large Ear might be printed on the cover (picture-jackets had not yet come in), and whether the title-story was not perhaps of too pathogenic a character to be included, my own vote being in the decided negative despite the personal origin of that horrible tale.

It is, at any rate, true that to this persuasive suggestion of trying a larger canvas I owed a later Centaur, Julius Le Vallon, The Human Chord, The Education of Uncle Paul, and many others. Thus, I both blame and bless Eveleigh Nash for a stimulating hint which, if its results have afflicted others, provided relief to an author who found himself more overcharged with material than probably his talent was competent to express adequately.

The origin of some of these stories may be of interest to a reader here or there: this not only sounds egotistical, but is: it interests me, as I look back to revive old memories . . . of a journey down the Danube in a Canadian canoe, and how my friend and I camped on one of the countless lonely islands below Pressburg (Bratislava) and the willows seemed to suffocate us in spite of the gale blowing, and how a year or two later, making the same trip in a barge, we found a dead body caught by a root, its decayed mass dangling against the sandy shore of the very same island my story describes. A coincidence, of course! Of that unfurnished haunted house in a Brighton Square where I sat up to see a ghost with a woman beside me whose rather wrinkled face suddenly blanched smooth as the face of a child, frightening me far more than the ghost I never actually saw; of the Moravian School in the Black Forest (Königsfeld), where as a boy I spent two haunted years and revisited later to find a compensating Devil Worship in full swing and called Secret Worship; of the Island in the Baltic where the Were-wold Legend materialised as The Camp of the Dog, yet whereof our happy party of six campers remained ignorant until they read my tale; above all, of that old French town of Ancient Sorceries, where the slinking inhabitants behaved as cats behave, sidling along the pavements with slanting gestures, twitching their sleeky ears and snakey tails, their sharp eyes glinting, all alert and concentrated upon some hidden, secret life of their own while they feigned attention to tourists like ourselves—ourselves just back from climbing in the Dolomites and finding the train so boring on its way from Basle to Boulogne that we hopped out at Laon and spent two days in this witch-ridden atmosphere. The Auberge de la Hure was the name of the Inn, and it was not Angoulème, as some fancied, nor Coutances as John Gibbons thought (I Wanted to Travel), nor elsewhere as variously attributed, but Laon, a lovely old haunted town where the Cathedral towers stand up against the sunset like cats’ ears, the paws running down the dusky streets, the feline body crouched just below the hill. Yet who should guess that so much magic lay within a kilometre of its dull, desolate railway station, or that from my little bedroom window I should presently stand enthralled as I looked across the moonlit tiles and towers, jotting down on the backs of envelopes an experience that kept sleep away till dawn? Then the awful Wendigo comes shouldering up over a hill of memory, a name I remembered vividly in Hiawatha (Wendigos and giants runs the line), yet hardly thought of again till a friend, just back from Labrador, told me honest tales about mysterious evacuations of a whole family from a lonely valley because the Wendigo had come blundering in and scared them stiff; of the Haunted Island, an island I lived on for an autumn month alone in the Muskoka Lakes north of Toronto, where Red Indians flit to and from when the summer visitors have left; and of a dreadful house I once lived in (New York City) where unaccountable noises, voices, slitherings at night and so forth seemed a commonplace setting for the Eavesdropping re-enactment of a gruesome murder of twenty years before. . . .

Memories, indeed, of where each story was written are clearer to me to-day than the conduct and details of the plots themselves, but clearer still is the vivid recollection that in each case an emotion of a very possessive kind produced each tale. To write a ghost-story I must first feel ghostly, a condition not to be artificially induced; and there was a touch of goose-flesh down my back as I watched my Wendigo in a mountain inn above Champéry and heard the November night-winds crashing among the pine-forests beyond the window; shivers down the spine, too, as the horror of that Willows island crept over the imagination. I think, indeed, the majority of these tales were accompanied at birth by what may be called a delicious shudder. The true other-worldly story should issue from that core of superstition which lies in every mother’s son of us, and we are still close enough to primitive days with their terror of the dark for Reason to abdicate without too violent resistance.

There has, however, been one striking change in knowledge since the generation when these tales were written—matter has been wiped out of existence. Atoms are no longer minute billiard-balls but charges of negative electricity, and these charges, according to Eddington, Jeans and Whitehead, are themselves but symbols. What these symbols stand for ultimately Science admittedly does not know. Physics remains silent. Jeans speaks of a world of shadows. Phenomena, Professor Joad reminds us, may be merely symbols of a Reality which underlies them. The Reality, for all we know to the contrary, may be of an entirely different order from the events which symbolise it. It may be even mental or spiritual. The Universe, thus, seems to be an appearance merely, our old friend Maya, or Illusion, of the Hindus. Possibly, therefore, Reason might to-day encounter less need for abdicating than thirty years ago, and the rapprochement between Modern Physics and so-called psychical and mystical phenomena must seem suggestive to any reflecting mind. All alike conduct their researches in a world of shadows among mere symbols of a Reality that may conceivably be mental or spiritual, but is at any rate unknown, if not unknowable.

Let me leave the stories to speak for themselves. They are printed here in the chronological sequence in which they were written between 1906 and 1910.

A.B.

Savile Club

1938

THE WILLOWS

AFTER leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Buda-Pesth, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes. On the big maps this deserted area is painted in a fluffy blue, growing fainter in colour as it leaves the banks, and across it may be seen in large straggling letters the word Sümpfe, meaning marshes.

In high flood this great acreage of sand, shingle-beds, and willow-grown islands is almost topped by the water, but in normal seasons the bushes bend and rustle in the free winds, showing their silver leaves to the sunshine in an ever-moving plain of bewildering beauty. These willows never attain to the dignity of trees; they have no rigid trunks; they remain humble bushes, with rounded tops and soft outline, swaying on slender stems that answer to the least pressure of the wind; supple as grasses, and so continually shifting that they somehow give the impression that the entire plain is moving and alive. For the wind sends waves rising and falling over the whole surface, waves of leaves instead of waves of water, green swells like the sea, too, until the branches turn and lift, and then silvery white as their under-side turns to the sun.

Happy to slip beyond the control of the stern banks, the Danube here wanders about at will among the intricate network of channels intersecting the islands everywhere with broad avenues down which the waters pour with a shouting sound; making whirlpools, eddies, and foaming rapids; tearing at the sandy banks; carrying away masses of shore and willow-clumps; and forming new islands innumerable which shift daily in size and shape and possess at best an impermanent life, since the flood-time obliterates their very existence.

Properly speaking, this fascinating part of the river’s life begins soon after leaving Pressburg, and we, in our Canadian canoe, with gipsy tent and frying-pan on board, reached it on the crest of a rising flood about mid-July. That very same morning, when the sky was reddening before sunrise, we had slipped swiftly through still-sleeping Vienna, leaving it a couple of hours later a mere patch of smoke against the blue hills of the Wienerwald on the horizon; we had breakfasted below Fischeramend under a grove of birch trees roaring in the wind; and had then swept on the tearing current past Orth, Hainburg, Petronell (the old Roman Carnuntum of Marcus Aurelius,) and so under the frowning heights of Theben on a spur of the Carpathians, where the March steals in quietly from the left and the frontier is crossed between Austria and Hungary.

Racing along at twelve kilometres an hour soon took us well into Hungary, and the muddy waters—sure sign of flood—sent us aground on many a shingle-bed, and twisted us like a cork in many a sudden belching whirlpool before the towers of Pressburg (Hungarian, Poszóny) showed against the sky; and then the canoe, leaping like a spirited horse, flew at top speed under the grey walls, negotiated safely the sunken chain of the Fliegende Brücke ferry, turned the corner sharply to the left, and plunged on yellow foam into the wilderness of islands, sand-banks, and swampland beyond—the land of the willows.

The change came suddenly, as when a series of bioscope pictures snaps down on the streets of a town and shifts without warning into the scenery of lake and forest. We entered the land of desolation on wings, and in less than half an hour there was neither boat nor fishing-hut nor red roof, nor any single sign of human habitation and civilisation within sight. The sense of remoteness from the world of human kind, the utter isolation, the fascination of this singular world of willows, winds, and waters, instantly laid its spell upon us both, so that we allowed laughingly to one another that we ought by rights to have held some special kind of passport to admit us, and that we had, somewhat audaciously, come without asking leave into a separate little kingdom of wonder and magic—a kingdom that was reserved for the use of others who had a right to it, with everywhere unwritten warnings to trespassers for those who had the imaginaton to discover them.

Though still early in the afternoon, the ceaseless buffetings of a most tempestuous wind made us feel weary, and we at once began casting about for a suitable camping-ground for the night. But the bewildering character of the islands made landing difficult; the swirling flood carried us in-shore and then swept us out again; the willow branches tore our hands as we seized them to stop the canoe, and we pulled many a yard of sandy bank into the water before at length we shot with a great sideways blow from the wind into a backwater and managed to beach the bows in a cloud of spray. Then we lay panting and laughing after our exertions on hot yellow sand, sheltered from the wind, and in the full blaze of a scorching sun, a cloudless blue sky above, and an immense army of dancing, shouting willow bushes, closing in from all sides, shining with spray and clapping their thousand little hands as though to applaud the success of our efforts.

What a river! I said to my companion, thinking of all the way we had travelled from the source in the Black Forest, and how he had often been obliged to wade and push in the upper shallows at the beginning of June.

Won’t stand much nonsense now, will it? he said, pulling the canoe a little farther into safety up the sand, and then composing himself for a nap.

I lay by his side, happy and peaceful in the bath of the elements—water, wind, sand, and the great fire of the sun—thinking of the long journey that lay behind us, and of the great stretch before us to the Black Sea, and how lucky I was to have such a delightful and charming travelling companion as my friend, the Swede.

We had made many similar journeys together, but the Danube, more than any other river I knew, impressed us from the very beginning with its aliveness. From its tiny bubbling entry into the world among the pinewood gardens of Donaueschingen, until this moment when it began to play the great river-game of losing itself among the deserted swamps, unobserved, unrestrained, it had seemed to us like following the growth of some living creature. Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge fluid being, through all the countries we had passed, holding our little craft on its mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet always friendly and well-meaning, till at length we had come inevitably to regard it as a Great Personage.

How, indeed, could it be otherwise, since it told us so much of its secret life? At night we heard it singing to the moon as we lay in our tent, uttering that odd sibilant note peculiar to itself and said to be caused by the rapid tearing of the pebbles along its bed, so great is its hurrying speed. We knew, too, the voice of its gurgling whirlpools, suddenly bubbling up on a surface previously quite calm; the roar of its shallows and swift rapids; its constant steady thundering below all mere surface sounds; and that ceaseless tearing of its icy waters at the banks. How it stood up and shouted when the rains fell flat upon its face! And how its laughter roared out when the wind blew upstream and tried to stop its growing speed! We knew all its sounds and voices, its tumblings and foamings, its unnecessary splashing against the bridges; that self-conscious chatter when there were hills to look on; the affected dignity of its speech when it passed through the little towns, far too important to laugh; and all these faint, sweet whisperings when the sun caught it fairly in some slow curve and poured down upon it till the steam rose.

It was full of tricks, too, in its early life before the great world knew it. There were places in the upper reaches among the Swabian forests, when yet the first whispers of its destiny had not reached it, where it elected to disappear through holes in the ground, to appear again on the other side of the porous limestone hills and start a new river with another name; leaving, too, so little water in its own bed that we had to climb out and wade and push the canoe through miles of shallows.

And a chief pleasure, in those early days of its irresponsible youth, was to lie low, like Brer Fox, just before the little turbulent tributaries came to join it from the Alps, and to refuse to acknowledge them when in, but to run for miles side by side, the dividing line well marked, the very levels different, the Danube utterly declining to recognise the newcomer. Below Passau, however, it gave up this particular trick, for there the Inn comes in with a thundering power impossible to ignore, and so pushes and incommodes the parent river that there is hardly room for them in the long twisting gorge that follows, and the Danube is shoved this way and that against the cliffs, and forced to hurry itself with great waves and much dashing to and fro in order to get through in time. And during the fight our canoe slipped down from its shoulder to its breast, and had the time of its life among the struggling waves. But the Inn taught the old river a lesson, and after Passau it no longer pretended to ignore new arrivals.

This was many days back, of course, and since then we had come to know other aspects of the great creature, and across the Bavarian wheat plain of Straubing she wandered so slowly under the blazing June sun that we could well imagine only the surface inches were water, while below there moved, concealed as by a silken mantle, a whole army of Undines, passing silently and unseen down to the sea, and very leisurely too, lest they be discovered.

Much, too, we forgave her because of her friendliness to the birds and animals that haunted the shores. Cormorants lined the banks in lonely places in rows like short black palings; grey crows crowded the shingle-beds; storks stood fishing in the vistas of shallower water that opened up between the islands, and hawks, swans, and marsh birds of all sorts filled the air with glinting wings and singing, petulant cries. It was impossible to feel annoyed with the river’s vagaries after seeing a deer leap with a splash into the water at sunrise and swim past the bows of the canoe; and often we saw fawns peering at us from the underbrush, or looked straight into the brown eyes of a stag as we charged full tilt round a corner and entered another reach of the river. Foxes, too, everywhere haunted the banks, tripping daintily among the driftwood and disappearing so suddenly that it was impossible to see how they managed it.

But now, after leaving Pressburg, everything changed a little, and the Danube became more serious. It ceased trifling. It was half-way to the Black Sea, within scenting distance almost of other, stranger countries where no tricks would be permitted or understood. It became suddenly grown-up, and claimed our respect and even our awe. It broke out into three arms, for one thing, that only met again a hundred kilometres farther down, and for a canoe there were no indications which one was intended to be followed.

If you take a side channel, said the Hungarian officer we met in the Pressburg shop while buying provisions, you may find yourselves, when the flood subsides, forty miles from anywhere, high and dry, and you may easily starve. There are no people, no farms, no fishermen. I warn you not to continue. The river, too, is still rising, and this wind will increase.

The rising river did not alarm us in the least, but the matter of being left high and dry by a sudden subsidence of the waters might be serious, and we had consequently laid in an extra stock of provisions. For the rest, the officer’s prophecy held true, and the wind, blowing down a perfectly clear sky, increased steadily till it reached the dignity of a westerly gale.

It was earlier than usual when we camped, for the sun was a good hour or two from the horizon, and leaving my friend still asleep on the hot sand, I wandered about in desultory examination of our hotel. The island, I found, was less than an acre in extent, a mere sandy bank standing some two or three feet above the level of the river. The far end, pointing into the sunset, was covered with flying spray which the tremendous wind drove off the crests of the broken waves. It was triangular in shape, with the apex up stream.

I stood there for several minutes, watching the impetuous crimson flood bearing down with a shouting roar, dashing in waves against the bank as though to sweep it bodily away, and then swirling by in two foaming streams on either side. The ground seemed to shake with the shock and rush, while the furious movement of the willow bushes as the wind poured over them increased the curious illusion that the island itself actually moved. Above, for a mile or two, I could see the great river descending upon me: it was like looking up the slope of a sliding hill, white with foam, and leaping up everywhere to show itself to the sun.

The rest of the island was too thickly grown with willows to make walking pleasant, but I made the tour, nevertheless. From the lower end the light, of course, changed, and the river looked dark and angry. Only the backs of the flying waves were visible, streaked with foam, and pushed forcibly by the great puffs of wind that fell upon them from behind. For a short mile it was visible, pouring in and out among the islands, and then disappearing with a huge sweep into the willows, which closed about it like a herd of monstrous antediluvian creatures crowding down to drink. They made me think of gigantic sponge-like growths that sucked the river up into themselves. They caused it to vanish from sight. They herded there together in such overpowering numbers.

Altogether it was an impressive scene, with its utter loneliness, its bizarre suggestion; and as I gazed, long and curiously, a singular emotion began to stir somewhere in the depths of me. Midway in my delight of the wild beauty, there crept, unbidden and unexplained, a curious feeling of disquietude, almost of alarm.

A rising river, perhaps, always suggests something of the ominous: many of the little islands I saw before me would probably have been swept away by the morning; this resistless, thundering flood of water touched the sense of awe. Yet I was aware that my uneasiness lay deeper far

Reviews for Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood

[jameshold-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Except for "The Wendigo" I just couldn't get into this. The stories start out interesting but tend to fizzle out as they reach the end.

[thioviolight · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I mostly liked reading this collection of stories by Algernon Blackwood. There was a number of creepy moments, and the stories that stood out for me include "Max Hensig," "The Other Wing," "Keeping His Promise" (which quite spooked me!) and "The Wendigo."

[ocgreg34 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

With the thirteen stories presented in "Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood", the author takes what could be the typical ghost story and, while not turning it on its ear, engulfs the reader with a full sense of terror. Not because the stories are filled with blood, death, monstrous demons with fiery eyes and long sharp teeth dripping with saliva. Blackwood creates atmosphere, offering a detailed sense of time and place which turn them into an integral part of the story, almost like characters themselves. Many of his stories feature Nature as an antagonist, when man suddenly finds himself crossing into its unknown and forbidden territories. in The Willows, the trees surrounding a small sand island in the middle of the Danube seem almost alive with murmurings and movement to the two men trapped on its shores for two nights. And in Ancient Lights, the forest through which Mr. Thomas must cross in order to reach a small red house appears to toy with him, trees seeming to move to block his path or the trail circling back to his point of entry into the forest.He also explores the physical and mental terror that the main characters feel, such as in "Max Hensig" when the protagonist Williams begins seeing the poisoner Hensig almost everywhere he goes in New York, as if he were trailing him, waiting to spring his murderous plan into action. With each new sighting, Williams' fright increases until toward the end of the story, he's in full blown terror, and the readers are dragged right along with him.What I also enjoy about these stories is that the protagonists always have some sort of psychical connection to the events about to take place, such as the immediate, unwarranted dislike of Hensig when Williams first meets him in prison; the feeling that the premonition Martin experiences in "Accessory Before the Fact" as he walks along a road was not meant for him but for another traveler; the hunger that Miss Gould senses calling from a dead patch of earth in her Master's garden in "The Transfer". I think we've all experienced something akin to that at one point or another, a certain sense that tries to warn us about something, but we don't know what it is exactly or how to interpret it so we ignore it. This link just adds to the terror.Of course, Blackwood also throws in a few traditional tales which still manage to scare the pants off any reader: "The Empty House" which deals with a certain house in which no one will stay for a long period of time; or "The Wendigo" which thrusts a Native American legend upon the minds of two woodsman in the late 1800's. Fantastic tales, all of them, just waiting to send a few shivers up and down your spine.

[noirseanf · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

collects: the willows, ancient worship, ancient sorceries, the glamour of the snow, the wendigo, the other wing, the transfer, ancient lights, the listener, the empty house, accessory before the fact, keeping his promise, max hensig, with an introduction by Bleiler and Blackwood (reprinted from 1938)

[lndlindsey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's really hard to beat a Blackwood ghost story.

[veilofisis · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The bleak, ancient, and even charnel terrors of a Canadian backwood in the loneliness of a brutal winter; the fever-pitch horror of an apartment tenanted by a vague memory of something ‘other’ and dripping with disease; the vicious portent of things not yet transpired, when seen through the eyes of a troubled and unwilling ‘accessory’ to tragedy; a haunted woodland; a peculiar, abandoned house—Algernon Blackwood’s spellbinding hand weaves each of these, the mundane as much as the startlingly original, into dark jewels of unwavering elegance. Never condescending, and yet always the portrait of sophistication, Blackwood’s brooding visions are full of the stuff of nightmare, and yet also dreamy, uncertain testimonies to the merciless and mystic facets of a Nature so close to man and yet so incredibly distant from him. Favorites of mine here, in a collection more easily available and more diverse than other Blackwood offerings, include: ‘The Listener,’ which I would consider the most overwhelmingly unnerving and supremely horrifying tale I’ve ever read (and I’ve read my share); ‘The Wendigo,’ which despite its popularity with anthologists is not even one single inch overrated, is so blackly atmospheric that, a hundred years after being penned, it still resonates deeply on a level that is difficult to touch in the hearts of men and women who live so far away from the Nature explored here; and ‘Accessory Before the Fact’ and ‘The Empty House,’ both popular Blackwood tales, which operate on a more typical ‘supernatural’ level than the more complex musings found elsewhere in this collection, but are nonetheless especially engrossing and quite scary.Algernon Blackwood is, by a hair, my favorite author of the short story, and a glorious treasure for readers of ‘weird tales,’ who will experience a profound and moving admiration for what is truly the horror story elevated to art: there is terror here, certainly, but it is a terror that can only be explained as ‘beautiful’ in its own strange and otherworldly way. Never cliché, a master of atmosphere, and a glowing icon of the genre, Blackwood is required reading.J