Some places exude spectrality: it has become the fundamental constituent of their being - even though they were not always this way. A lonely row of shop fronts, long ago abandoned and boarded, form an eyesore along the otherwise leafy and suburban Bridgewater Avenue. Yet their anomalous status is not so much a condition of their disrepair, but because bypassers sense their inherently unnerving, spectral quality. It is a quality which, like their abandonment, was produced epiphenomenally out of something terrible which once occured here: an operation so inconceivable in its unnaturalness that it effected a monstrous transformation upon the intangible substance of the real: an alchemy of horror.
No one remembers who once owned the shops; neither is there any local memory of what was once purveyed within their walls; nor are there any extant local scraps of folklore which recount their haunting - surprising for a place like Horsingdon, whose every side alley seems to possess its own ghost or tale of terror.
But perhaps it is best that such things remain unbidden and unremembered, lest recollection calls forth the liveliest awfulness of that which, for the time being, can only be sensed and intuited uneasily.
No comments:
Post a Comment