The Colour Out of Space
West of Arkham the hills rise wild. There are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark, narrow glens where the trees slope in strange ways. Thin little streams run through them, and sunlight has never reached that water. On the gentler slopes there are old, rocky farms. Their low cottages are covered in moss. They sit beside great walls of rock and seem to think forever about old New England secrets. But all of them are empty now. The wide chimneys are falling down. The wooden sides of the houses bulge dangerously under their low gambrel roofs.
The old people have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadians have tried it, and Italians have tried it. The Poles have come and gone again. It is not because of anything that you can see or hear or touch. It is because of something that you imagine. The place is not good for the imagination, and it does not bring restful dreams at night. This must be what keeps the foreigners away. After all, old Ammi Pierce has never told them anything that he remembers from the strange days. Ammi's head has been a little queer for years. He is the only one who still stays there, or who ever talks of the strange days. He dares to do this because his house is so near the open fields and the travelled roads around Arkham.
Once there was a road over the hills and through the valleys. It ran straight across the place where the blasted heath is now. But people stopped using it, and a new road was built. It curves far to the south. You can still find traces of the old road among the weeds, where the land is turning wild again. Some of these traces will surely stay even when half the valleys are flooded for the new reservoir. Then the dark woods will be cut down. The blasted heath will sleep far below blue water. The surface of that water will mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets of the strange days will become part of the secrets of the deep. They will join the hidden stories of the old ocean and all the mystery of the earth's first times.
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I went into the hills and valleys to survey for the new reservoir. People told me the place was evil. They told me this in Arkham. Arkham is a very old town, full of witch legends. So I thought the evil must be some story that grandmothers had whispered to children for centuries. The name "blasted heath" seemed very odd and theatrical to me. I wondered how it had come into the folk stories of a Puritan people. Then I saw that dark tangle of glens and slopes in the west for myself. After that I stopped wondering about anything except its own old mystery. It was morning when I saw it, but there were always shadows there. The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim paths between them. The ground was too soft with wet moss and with the decay of endless years.
In the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were little hillside farms. Sometimes all the buildings were still standing. Sometimes only one or two were left. And sometimes there was only a lone chimney or a cellar that was quickly filling with earth. Weeds and thorny bushes were everywhere. Shy wild animals moved secretly in the bushes. Over everything there was a feeling of restlessness and heavy weight. Something about the place seemed unreal and strangely ugly. It was as if something important about distance, or about light and shadow, were wrong. I was not surprised that the foreigners would not stay. This was no place to sleep in. It looked too much like a landscape by Salvator Rosa. It looked too much like a forbidden old picture in a horror story.
But even all this was not as bad as the blasted heath. I knew it the moment I came to it, at the bottom of a wide valley. No other name could fit such a thing, and no other thing could fit such a name. It was as if the poet had made up the phrase after seeing this one place. When I looked at it, I thought it must be the result of a fire. But why had nothing new ever grown on those five acres of grey, empty land? They lay open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields. Most of it lay north of the old road line, but a little reached the other side. I felt a strange unwillingness to go near it. In the end I did, but only because my work took me through it and past it. Nothing grew anywhere on that wide area. There was only a fine grey dust or ash, and no wind ever seemed to blow it about. The trees near it were sick and small. Many dead trunks stood or lay rotting at the edge. As I walked quickly past, I saw fallen bricks and stones on my right. They were from an old chimney and cellar. I also saw the black, open mouth of an abandoned well. The still, bad air above it played strange tricks with the colours of the sunlight. After that, even the long, dark climb through the woods beyond seemed welcome. I no longer wondered at the frightened whispers of the Arkham people. There had been no house or ruin near. Even in the old days the place must have been lonely and far from everything. At twilight I was afraid to pass that evil spot again. So I walked back to the town the long way, by the curving road in the south. I vaguely wished some clouds would gather. A strange fear of the deep, empty sky above had moved slowly into my soul.