The White People by Arthur Machen (Heathen Short)

The White People

Heathen Short #16
Author
Arthur Machen
Translator
First Edition
1904
Heathen Edition
2025
Refreshed
Pages
54
Heathen Genera
Arriving Soon-ish, Creepy AF
ISBN
979-8-90075-016-3

And when I had gone about halfway I stopped, and turned round, and got ready, and I bound the handkerchief tightly round my eyes, and made quite sure that I could not see at all, not a twig, nor the end of a leaf, nor the light of the sky, as it was an old red silk handkerchief with large yellow spots, that went round twice and covered my eyes, so that I could see nothing. Then I began to go on, step by step, very slowly. My heart beat faster and faster, and something rose in my throat that choked me and made me want to cry out, but I shut my lips, and went on. Boughs caught in my hair as I went, and great thorns tore me; but I went on to the end of the path. Then I stopped, and held out my arms and bowed, and I went round the first time, feeling with my hands, and there was nothing. I went round the second time, feeling with my hands, and there was nothing. Then I went round the third time, feeling with my hands, and the story was all true, and I wished that the years were gone by, and that I had not so long a time to wait before I was happy for ever and ever.

Arthur Machen (1863–1947), born Arthur Llewellyn Jones, was a prolific Welsh mystic and author whose supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction shaped the spiritual unease of the fin de siècle. Framed by a fireside dialogue on the nature of true evil, Machen’s “The White People” is a liturgy of lost innocence and occult initiation, spiraling inward through a reading of a child’s green-bound diary—where nursery tales become rites and the woods teem with a nurse’s whispered catechisms. The nurse, a shadowy midwife of mystery, ushers the girl into a world where pagan ecstasies masquerade as play and spiritual trespass is cloaked in the language of wonder. Machen’s horror lies not in what is seen, but in what is sanctified: a liturgical labyrinth where purity becomes peril, theology inverts, and the sacred is subtly profaned. As the girl writes toward a supreme revelation, the mystery consumes—and what remains is more than mere absence.

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“A masterpiece of fantastic writing, with almost unlimited power in the intimation of potent hideousness and cosmic aberration.”
H.P. Lovecraft

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