The Willows

by Algernon Blackwood

It made me think of the sounds a planet must make, could we only hear it, driving along through space.

I fell again into a troubled and restless sleep; and even then only the upper crust of me slept, and underneath there was something that never quite lost consciousness, but lay alert and on the watch.

But the laughter came no more readily than the cry, for the knowledge that my mind was so receptive to such dangerous imaginings brought the additional terror that it was through our minds and not through our physical bodies that the attack would come, and was coming.

"But you're quite right about one thing," he added, before the subject passed, "and that is that we're wiser not to talk about it, or even to think about it, because what one thinks finds expression in words, and what one says, happens."

It was not then active fear, I think, but the very vagueness of its origin distressed me far more that if I had been able to ticket and face it squarely.