The Book of the Damned

"There had been a storm on the coast of Florida." And, unless he have psycho-chemic repulsion for the explanation, the reader feels only momentary astonishment that dead birds from a storm in Florida should fall from an unstormy sky in Louisiana, and with his intellect greased like the plumage of a wild duck, the datum then drops off. Our greasy, shiny brains. That they may be of some use after all: that other modes of existence place a high value upon them as lubricants; that we're hunted for them; a hunting expedition to this earth--the newspapers report a tornado. If from a clear sky, or a sky in which there were no driven clouds, or other evidences of still-continuing wind-power--or, if from a storm in Florida, it could be accepted that hundreds of birds had fallen far away, in Louisiana, I conceive, conventionally, of heavier objects having fallen in Alabama, say, and of the fall of still heavier objects still nearer the origin in Florida. The sources of information of the Weather Bureau are widespread. It has no records of such falls. So a dragnet that was let down from above somewhere-- Or something that I learned from the more scientific of the investigators of psychic phenomena: The reader begins their works with prejudice against telepathy and everything else of psychic phenomena. The writers deny spirit-communication, and say that the seeming data are data of "only telepathy." Astonishing instances of seeming clairvoyance--"only telepathy." After a while the reader finds himself agreeing that it's only telepathy--which, at first, had been intolerable to him.