SOURCE: "The Willows" by Algernon Blackwood  (The Listener and Other Stories 1907)

DESCRIPTION: "I saw it through a veil that hung before my eyes like the gauze drop-curtain used at the back of a theater—hazily a little. It was neither a human figure nor an animal. To me it gave the strange impression of being as large as several animals grouped together, like horses, two or three, moving slowly. The Swede, too, got a similar result, though expressing it differently, for he thought it was shaped and sized like a clump of willow bushes, rounded at the top, and moving all over upon its surface—“coiling upon itself like smoke,” he said afterwards." ("The Willows" by Algernon Blackwood)

NOTES: The monstrous forms hiding behind in the Willows are beings from another dimension allowed into our reality by old pagan magic. They blindly seek victims to consume.

HISTORY: This is probably Blackwood greatest masterpiece. Despite a dull opening it is a very effective tale, often anthologized. Strangely enough set in Europe, when so many of his stories are set in the Canadian wilds. The story is based on an actual canoeing trip on the Danube.

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