The Color Out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft

West of Arkham, the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever

cut.

There are dark, narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight

on the gentler slopes there are farms ancient and rocky with squat moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges.

But these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low, gambrel roofs.

The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there.

French Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed.

It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled,

but because of something that is imagined.

The place is not good for the imagination,

and does not bring restful dreams at night.

It must be this which keeps the foreigners away,

for old Ami Pierce has never told them of anything he

recalls from the strange days.

Ami, whose head has been a little queer for years, is the only one who still remains,

or whoever talks of the strange days, and he dares to do this because his house is so near the open fields and the

traveled roads around Arkham. There was once a road over the hills and through the valleys

that ran straight where the blasted heath is now, but people ceased to use it, and a new road was

laid curving far toward the south.

Traces of the old one can still be found amidst the weeds of a returning wilderness,

and some of them will doubtless linger even when half the hollows are flooded for the new reservoir.

...