The disappearance of Errol Undercliffe in 1967 from his flat in Lower Brichester was not widely reported. The little speculation provoked by the mystery was soon resolved by the belief that Undercliffe had 'disappeared' in search of publicity. While he has not reappeared, his public seems still to be waiting for him to produce himself out of a hat. At the time I hinted in print that I could supply evidence of something more sinister, but I fear that the general branding of Undercliffe as charlatan was sufficiently persuasive to dissuade me from publishing evidence in case Undercliffe reappeared and objected to my making public letters written privately to me. By now, however, I should be more than pleased if Undercliffe declared both his absence and his last letter a hoax.

Undercliffe first wrote me in 1965, when my first book had just become available from Brichester Central Library. Typically, he enclosed a cutting from the letter-column of the Brichester Herald; under the heading 'Can Ghost Stories be Libellous?' one 'Countryman' had written: 'I have recently perused a book of ghost stories by a Mr J. Ramsey Campbell, mainly located in Brichester. Mr Campbell seems to look upon the citizens of our town as either witches, warlocks, or illiterate "country folks". The advertising for the book makes much of the fact that the author is still an infant; since this is obvious from the contents, I would scarcely have thought it necessary to advertise the fact. I would suggest that before he writes another such book Mr Campbell should (1) visit Brichester, where he has clearly never set foot, and (2) grow up.' And so on. I could have replied that on the basis of my several visits to Brichester I didn't consider it the sort of town where I'd care to spend a night; but I find this kind of letter-column duel a little childish, and didn't feel disposed to join swords or even pens. For the record, these days Brichester has an impressively mundane surface, but I still sense that it may crack. When I and Kirby McCauley pa.s.sed through the area in 1965, a month or so before Undercliffe's first letter, I was disturbed to be unable to find the turn-off to Severnford and Brichester, and the groups of youths inert in the sun outside a shack-like cinema in Berkeley (showing, oddly enough, Jerry Lewis' one horror film) proved less than helpful. Hours later, after dark, we were directed by a roundabout policeman, but without conferring we sneaked around the roundabout-only to find ourselves somehow on the road originally indicated and to stay at an inn whose sign we discovered in the dawn to be that of a goat!

However, I digress. I quote the letter from the Herald at length because it seems to me to demonstrate some aspects of Undercliffe's character; not that he wrote it (at least I shouldn't think so), but he did enclose it with his first letter to me, though it is hardly the sort of enclosure most of us would choose when initiating a correspondence. However, Undercliffe's sense of humor was wry-some might call it cynical or cruel. I'm inclined to believe it was the product of a basic insecurity, from what little I know of his life. I never visited him, and his letters were rarely self-revelatory (though the first of the batch here published is more so than he might have wished). Most of them were first drafts of stories, signed and dated; he kept a copy of every letter he wrote-these were carefully filed in his flat-and several of the incidents which he described to me in the two years of our correspondence turned up virtually verbatim in his short stories. In particular the description of the disused station in The Through Train was lifted bodily from his letter to me of 20 November 1966.

If this says little about the man himself, I can only maintain that for the rest of us Errol Undercliffe was the Mr Arkadin of the horror-story world. 'Errol Undercliffe' was almost certainly not his christened name. His refusal to provide biographical details was not as notorious as J. D. Salinger's, but it was fully as obsessive. He seems to have been educated in or near Brichester (see the first letter here) but I cannot trace his school, nor the friend whose engagement party he describes. I never saw a photograph of him. Perhaps he thought the aura of mystery with which he surrounded himself carried over to his stories; perhaps, again, he was bent on preserving his own isolation. If so, he served himself ill as far as his final ordeal was concerned; he had n.o.body to whom he could turn.

When I went down to Undercliffe's flat on hearing that he'd disappeared, I was less surprised than saddened by the experience. The Lower Brichester area, as I've mentioned elsewhere, is the sort of miniature cosmopolis one finds in most major English towns: three-storey houses full of errant lodgers, curtains as varied as flags at a conference but more faded, the occasional smashed pane, the frequent furtive watchers. Somebody was tuning a motorcycle in Pitt Street, and the fumes drifted into Undercliffe's flat through a crack in the pane and clouded the page in his typewriter. The landlady was making ready to dispose of this, together with Undercliffe's books and other possessions, as soon as the rent gave out at the end of the month. I finally persuaded her to let me handle the disposal, after a good deal of wrangling and invocation of August Derleth (who'd never published Undercliffe), the Arts Council (who'd never heard of him, I imagine) and others. Having ushered her out at last, well aware that she'd be prepared to search me before I left the house, I examined the flat. The wardrobe and chest-of-drawers contained two suits, some shirts and so forth, none of which could have looked particularly stylish at an engagement party. The bed commanded a fine view of an arachnidial crack in the ceiling (clearly that crack which 'suddenly, with a horrid lethargy, detached itself from the plaster and fell on Peter's upturned face' in The Man Who Feared to Sleep). The wallpaper had a Charlotte Perkins Gilman look; once Undercliffe complained that 'such an absurd story should have used up an inspiration which I could work into one of my best tales'. The window looked out on the fuming motorcycle, now stuck stubbornly in first gear, and its fuming owner; at night I suppose Undercliffe, seated at his typewriter before the window, might have waved to the girl slipping off her slip in the flat across the street, and I carried on his neighborly gesture, though without much success. On the sill outside his window cigarette-stubs had collected like bird-droppings; he tended to cast these into the night, disliking the sight of a br.i.m.m.i.n.g ashtray. He'd go through a packet per thousand words, he once told me; he'd tried chewing-gum once, but this drew his fillings, and he was terrified of the dentist (cf. The Drill). All this, of course, is trivial, but I needed-still need-distraction. I'd already followed Undercliffe's search through the first three letters printed here, and that page still in the typewriter-a letter to me, probably the last thing he wrote-told of what he found. I removed it, unwillingly enough, and left; the landlady let it go. Later I arranged for transportation of the contents of the flat. The books-which seemed to be Undercliffe's treasured possessions, books of horror stories bought with the profits from his horror stories, a sad and lonely vicious circle-are now held in trust by the British Science Fiction a.s.sociation library; the rest is in storage. I wish more than ever that Undercliffe would come forward to claim them.

Undercliffe's first letter to me (15 October 1965) contains a pa.s.sage which in retrospect seems informed by a macabre irony. 'The implicit theme of your story 'The Insects from s.h.a.ggai' he writes, 'is interesting, but you never come to grips with the true point of the plot: the horror-story author who is skeptical of the supernatural and finally is faced with overwhelming evidence of its reality. What would be his reaction? Certainly not to write of "the lurid glow which shines on the razor lying on the table before me"!! This is as unlikely as the ending of The Yellow Wallpaper. I'd be interested to hear whether you yourself believe in what you write. For myself, I think the fact that I take great pains to check material on the supernatural here in our Central Library is eloquent enough. By the way, have you come across Roland Franklyn's We Pa.s.s from View? The author is a local man who has some quite arresting theories about reincarnation and the like.'

Which brings us to Franklyn and We Pa.s.s from View, in themselves as mysterious as the fate of Undercliffe; but I suspect that the two mysteries are interdependent, that one explains the other-if indeed one wishes to probe for explanation. Before discussing Franklyn, however, I'd like to note some of Undercliffe's work; I feel obliged to bring it to the notice of a wider public. His favorites of his own work were The Drains (the blood of a bygone murder drips from the cold tap), The Carved Desk (the runes carved on what was once a Druid tree call up something which claws at the ankles of anyone foolish enough to sit down to write), and The Drifting Face (never published: originally intended for the ill-fated second issue of Alien Worlds, it now cannot be traced). I favor his more personal, less popular work: The Windows in the Fog (in which the narrator's glimpses of a girl across the street mount to an obsessive pitch until he accosts her one night and rebuffed, murders her), The Steeple on the Hill (where a writer fond of lonely walks is followed by the members of a cult, is eventually drawn within their circle and becomes the incarnation of their G.o.d), and The Man Who Feared to Sleep, which lent its t.i.tle (Peur de Sommeil in France) to Undercliffe's best collection, under the imprint of that excellent publisher who rediscovered such writers as Purse-warden and Sebastian Knight and made again available Robert Blake's legendary collection The Stairs in the Crypt. It is amusing to note that the entire contents of Undercliffe's collection-including the t.i.tle story, which is surely a study of insanity-" listed under 'Supernatural Phenomena' in the H. W. Wilson Short Story Index (in an earlier volume than that which placed my own Church in High Street under 'Church Entertainments', making it sound like a parish farce or a Britten mystery play). Undercliffe was latterly working on a script for Delta Film Productions, but producer Harry Nadler reports that this was never completed; nor was his story Through the Zone of the Colossi, a metaphysical piece based on a reference in my Mine on Yuggoth coupled with material from We Pa.s.s from View.

Which brings me back to the necessity of discussing Franklyn's book, a duty which I fear I've been avoiding. I've never seen the book, but I have little desire to do so. I refrained from consulting Brichester Central Library's copy when I went to Undercliffe's flat; I suppose I could obtain this through the National Central Library, though I suspect that in fact the copy (like all others, apparently) has mysteriously disappeared.

Although, as Undercliffe points out, We Pa.s.s from View displays marked affinities with the Cthulhu Mythos in certain pa.s.sages, such Lovecraft scholars as Derleth, Lin Carter, Timothy d'Arch Smith and J. Vernon Shea can supply no information on the book. I understand that it was published in 1964 by the 'True Light Press', Brichester; references in Undercliffe's letters suggest that it was a duplicated publication, originally circulated in card covers but probably bound by libraries taking copies. I have not been able to discover where, if anywhere, it was on sale. An odd rumor reached me recently that almost the entire edition was stolen from the 'True Light Press'-actually the house of Roland Franklyn-and has not been heard of since; perhaps destroyed, but by whom?

Here is the little information I've obtained from various sources. The British National Bibliography gives the following entry: 129.4-Incarnation and reincarnation.

FRANKLYN, Ronald.

We pa.s.s from View. Brichester, True Light Press, 9/6. Jan 1964. 126 p. 22 cm..

However, the c.u.mulative Book Index, which lists all books published in English, does not acknowledge the book; at least, neither I nor the staff of Liverpool's Picton Library can trace the reference.

While correlating notes I was surprised to turn up in my commonplace book the following review, which might have been copied from the Times Literary Supplement: PSEUDOPODDITIES.

The last few decades have seen the emergence of many disturbing pseudo-philosophies, but We Pa.s.s from View must rank lowest. The author, Roland Franklyn, has less idea of style than most of his kind; however, the ideas behind the writing are expressed with less ambiguity than one might wish. His basic thesis seems to be that the number of souls in the universe is limited, by some illegitimate application of the conservation of energy principle, and that humanity must therefore acknowledge an infinite number of simultaneous incarnations. The last chapter, Toward the True Self, is a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the theory, concluding that the 'true self' is to be found 'outside s.p.a.ce', and that each human being is merely a facet of his 'self, which is itself able to experience all its incarnations simultaneously but unable to control them. There is a suggestion of Beckett here (particularly L'Innomable), and Mr Franklyn has infused enough unconscious humour into many pa.s.sages to cause hilarity when the book was read aloud at a party. But a book which advocates the use of drugs to achieve fulfilment of black-magic rites is worth attention not so much as humour (and certainly not as it was intended) as a sociological phenomenon.

Laughter at a party, indeed! I still find that remark rather frightening. What copy was being read aloud? The TLS review copy, perhaps, but in that case what happened to it? Like so much in this affair, the end fades into mystery. I doubt that many indignant letters replied to the review; those that were written probably weren't printable. In 1966, I heard vaguely of a book called How I Discovered my Infinite Self by 'An Initiate', but whether it was ever published I don't know.

Undercliffe quoted several pa.s.sages from We Pa.s.s from View which, though I find them faintly distasteful, I had better include. I still have all of Undercliffe's letters; some day I may edit them into a memorial article for The Arkham Collector, but it seems in rather bad taste to write a memoir of a man who may still be alive somewhere. The letters printed here are, I think, essential.

In his letter of 2 November 1965 Undercliffe wrote: 'Here's a bizarre pa.s.sage which might set you off on a short story. From the first page of We Pa.s.s from View: "The novice must remind himself always that the Self is infinite and that he is but one part of his Self, not yet aware of his other bodies and lives. REMIND YOURSELF on sleeping. REMIND YOURSELF on waking. Above all, REMIND YOURSELF when entering the First Stage of Initiation". As for this first stage, I've traced references later in the text, but nothing very lucid. Franklyn keeps mentioning "the aids" which seem to be drugs of some sort, usually taken under supervision of an "initiate" who chants invocations ("Ag'lak Sauron, Daoloth asgu'i, Eihort phul'aag"-that ought to ring a bell with you) and attempts to tap the novice's subconscious knowledge of his other incarnations. Not that I necessarily believe what Franklyn says, but it certainly gives you that sense of instability which all good horror stories should provide. I can't discover much about Franklyn. He seems in the last year or two to have drawn together a circle of young men who, from what I hear, visit Goatswood, Clotton, Temphill, the island beyond Severnford, and other places in which you're no doubt as interested as I am. I'd like to get in on the act.'

I replied that he surely didn't need drugs for inspiration and that, warnings from Dennis Wheatley aside, I didn't feel it was advisable to become involved in black magic. 'Experience makes the writer,' Undercliffe retorted. Subsequently he avoided direct quotation, but I gathered he had not joined Franklyn's circle; his own decision, I think. Then, in September 1966, when he was writing The Crawling in the Attic (I'd just started library work and sent him the ma.n.u.script of The Stocking to read, which he didn't like- 'elaborately pointless'), he quoted the following: 'Today's psychologists are wrong about dreams coming from the subconscious mind. Dreams are the links between us and the experiences of our other incarnations. We must be receptive to them. TELL YOURSELF BEFORE YOU SLEEP THAT YOU WILL SEE BEYOND YOUR FACET. The initiate known as Yokh'khim, his name on Tond, came to me describing a dream of long tunnels in which he was pursued but could not see his body. After several sessions, he managed to see himself as a ball of hair rolling through the tunnel away from the Trunks in the Ooze. The ball was known on Tond as Yokh'khim. He has not attained the stage of Black Initiate and spends his time beyond his facet, having set aside all but the minimum of his life on Earth.'

I hadn't much to say to that except to suggest that Franklyn had plagiarized the 'Tond' reference, provoking Undercliffe to reply: 'Surely Franklyn has undermined your complacency enough to make complaints about copyright a little trivial. Anyway, no doubt he'd point out that you knew of Tond through your dreams.' I couldn't decide whether his tongue was in his cheek; I pa.s.sed over his comment, and our correspondence fell off somewhat.

In February 1967 he quoted a pa.s.sage which is significant indeed. 'What about a story of a writer who haunts his own books?' he suggested. 'Franklyn has a paragraph on ghosts: 'The death of a body does not mean that the soul will leave it. This depends on whether there is an incarnation for it to pa.s.s into. If not, the body continues to be inhabited until it is destroyed. The initiate knows that Edgar Allan Poe's fear of premature burial was well-founded. If the death is violent, then it is more difficult than ever for the soul to leave. FOR HIS OWN SAFETY, THE INITIATE MUST INSIST ON CREMATION. Otherwise he will be hopelessly attracted back to Earth, and the burrowers of the core may drag off his body from the grave with him still in it to the feast of Eihort.'

Interesting, I said somewhat wearily. I was rather tired of this sort of verbal delirium. On 5 July 1967 Undercliffe reported that the Brichester Herald had noted Franklyn's death. This meant little to me at the time. Then came the final sequence of letters.

7 Pitt Street: Lower Brichester, Glos: i4july 1967 1.03 a.m.: slightly intoxicated Dear JRC: Always this point at a party where the beer tastes like vomit. Pretty putrid party, actually. Friend of mine from school who got engaged and sent me an invite. Can't think why, I'd just about forgotten him myself, but I wanted to meet him again. Didn't get near. Great fat bluebottle of a woman he got engaged to pawing over him all the evening and wanting to be kissed, messily at that, whenever he tried to act the host. Good luck say I. So I had to make my own way round the conversations. I just don't know where he got them from. All bow ties and 'G.o.d, Bernard, surely you realize the novel is absolutely dead' and banging down tankards of ale which they'd bought to be all boys together, sloshing them over and making little lakes down these trestle tables in the Co-op Hall (another blow for the old town and the Brichester folks-our engaged friend kept patting his bluebottle and bellowing 'I had a wonderful childhood in Brichester, absolutely wonderful, they're fine people', no Palm Court for him). Whole place murky with smoke and some tin band playing in the fog. Hundreds of ashtrays surrounded by those pieces of ash like dead flies. Finally our friend fell to his feet to give thanks for 'all the superb presents', which didn't make me feel any more accepted, since I hadn't known it was done to bring one. I feel a little Better. Repartee: the morning after. Beg pardon, I shouldn't have mentioned engagements and fiancees. Still, I'm sure you're better off. Writers always bloom better with elbow room. I have your letter by me. You're right, your last argument with your girlfriend in Lime Street Station cafeteria with bare tables, b.a.l.l.s of cellophane and someone next to you trying not to listen-it'd never come off in print, even though it happened to you they'd be sure to scream Graham Greene was here first. And then her calling down 'I love you' through the rain before her mother dragged her back from her window-yes, it's very poignant, but you'll have to rewrite before you can print. More on our wavelength, what you say about this other girl running out of your haunted Hornby Library in panic certainly sounds promising. You going to lock yourself in there overnight? I'd give a lot for a genuine supernatural experience.

There was this idiot at the party wanting to know what I did. Horror stories I said. Should have seen him blanch. 'Why do you write those things?' he asked as if he'd caught me picking my nose. 'For the money,' I said. A young couple sliding down the wall behind us laughed. Great, an audience I thought. No doubt if I'd said I wasn't joking they'd have laughed harder. 'No, but seriously,' said this poor man's F. R. Leavis (you couldn't write for anything as base as money, you see) 'would you not agree that the writer is a sort of Christ figure who suffers in order to cohere his suffering for the reader's benefit?' The extent of his suffering was his bank manager calling him on his overdraft, I'll bet. 'And don't you think the horror story coheres (I wasn't cohering myself by that time) an experience?' 'Are you telling me you believe in what you write?' he demanded as if it'd been Mein Kampf. 'You don't think I'd write something in which I didn't believe?' I retorted, carefully placing the preposition. The young couple left; the show was over. He stalked off to tell Bernard about me.

At least the streets were clean and empty. Remarkable girl in the flat across the street. You should come down. Anyway, to bed. Tomorrow to work on Through the Zne of the Colossi and check the library.

Best, EU.

Pitt of h.e.l.l: Lowest Brichester, Glos: 14 July 1967: later!

Dear JRC: I don't normally write twice in a day. Today's events, however, are too important to let fade. I have had my experience. It will unquestionably form into a short story, so forgive me this first draft. I trust you not to use it.

Today, as antic.i.p.ated, I visited the library. After last night/this morning, I felt somewhat sick, but that's the penance. On the bus I was trying to cohere Zone of the Colossi, but they wouldn't let me; you must know how it is. Half the pa.s.sengers were ducking and screaming beneath the flight of a wasp, and the other half were sitting stoically pouring forth clouds of tobacco-smoke, which curled in the hot air. I sat next to some whistling fool and my thoughts kept getting sidetracked into a search for the lyrics in order to fit them to his tune and be rid of it. Not an auspicious start, but Zoneof the Colossi was forgotten when I left the library. I couldn't find We Pa.s.s from View on the shelf in the Religion section; mind you, some cretin in an aged mac was pottering round the shelves and sampling books and replacing them at whatever position he'd pottered to, earning himself glares from the staff. Someone else had erected a fortress of books on one of the tables and behind it was completing his football coupon. He cursed me visibly when I examined his barricade; I've rarely felt so self-conscious as then, his gaze on my canted head. But there it was: We Pa.s.s from View beneath The Ma.s.s in Slow Motion and The Catholic Marriage Manual and Graham Fisher's Ident.i.ty and Awareness. I pulled out the foundation, but the wall held.

The book was bound in bright blue. The table-top was pastel green. The room was warm and sunny, if a little stifling. At the further end, behind a creamy desk, one of the staff was recounting his adventures in a branch library, how he'd been plagued by old ladies pleading for what he called 'cheap novelettes'; I could tell he looked upon all fiction as the poor relation of non-fiction, like all academic librarians -so much for our writing. You couldn't get further from a Lovecraft setting, but then this was the real thing.

I turned back the cover; it slapped the table-top. Silence fell. A blade of sunlight moved along the floor, intensifying cracks. Then the pages of We Pa.s.s from View began to turn of their own accord.

At first I thought it must be a draught. When you're sitting in a bright new library among books and people you don't think of the possibility of the supernatural. When the book exhibits traces of its readership (chewing-gum on one page, a dead fly on another) it's difficult to view it as haunted. And yet I couldn't take my eyes from those moving pages. They turned up the dedication ('to my faithful friends') and for a second, as though my vision were failing, I saw lines of some other print waver as if superimposed on the text. The page turned to the next, a blank leaf. I put out my hand, but I couldn't quite bring myself to touch the book. As I hesitated, lines of print appeared on the blank paper.

HELP ME.

It stood out starkly on the paper, next to the fingerprint of some unclean reader. HELP ME. The letters held for several seconds: great black capitals which seemed to burn my eyeb.a.l.l.s as I stared at them. And I was overwhelmed by the sense of an appeal, of someone trying desperately to contact me. Then they blurred and faded.

FEEL SOMEONE READING MUST BE.

That flashed and disappeared; I read it in a second. The soom seemed airless; I was sweating, my ribs were closing on my lungs. I could see only the book open on the table and feel a terrible, tortuous strain, as of a mind in torment trying to communite its suffering.

SHE HAD ME BURIED HER REVENGE TOLD HER CREMATE b.i.t.c.h WOMEN CANT TRUST HELP ME.

That HELP ME was molten.

FEEL THEM COMING SLOWLY BURROWING WANT ME TO SUFFER CANT MOVE GET ME OUT SAVE ME SOMEHWERE IN BRICHESTER HELP ME.

And the page, which had been lifted trembling, fell back. I waited. The room a.s.sembled round me in the merciless sunlight. The page remained blank. I don't know how long I waited. At last it occurred to me that the setting was wrong; back in my room I might be able to re-establish contact. I picked up the book-holding it rather gingerly; somehow I expected to feel it move, struggle between my fingers-and carried it to the desk and back into mundanity.

'I'm afraid this is a reference copy only,' said the girl at the desk, flashing a smile and her engagement ring at me.

I told her that it seemed to be their only copy and that there were various of my books in the fiction section and that I knew the chief librarian (well, I'd glimpsed him enthroned in his office as someone bore in his coffee the day I was invited by his secretary to sign my books). I could have told her that I felt the book throbbing in my hand. But she replied 'Well, personally I know we can trust you with it and if it were up to me I'd let you have it, but-' and much more of the I'm-only-doing-my-job speech. I set the book down on the desk in order to wave my hands about and she handed it to a girl who was replacing books on the shelves, belatedly asking 'You didn't want it again, did you?'

I saw it carried away on the toppling pile; already the transcendental was being erased by the mundane; Franklyn would be filed carefully and forgotten. And that showed me what I must do. Of course I knew that it was Franklyn whose paragraphs I had been reading from beyond the grave, indeed, from in the grave. But I didn't know how to find him. The Brichester Herald had given neither his address nor where he was buried. 'Do you know anything about Roland Franklyn himself?' I enquired.

'Yes, he used to come in quite often .. .' but she obviously didn't want to talk about it. 'Eric, don't let Mary do all the clearing,' she said to her companion at the desk, who was building a house of holiday postcards.

'Franklyn, the little queer in the cloak?' he addressed me. 'You're not a friend of his, are you? Good job. Used to come in here with a whole crowd of them, the Twelve Disciples we used to call them. One of them came up to the desk one day because we were talking about his master and waved his great emaciated fist at us-you could see the drugs running out of his eyes. Why are you interested in that queer? Can't think what attracted them all, what with that moth-eaten cloak and that huge bald head-he'd probably pulled out the last few hairs to stick on that spidery beard. He had a wife too, I think-must've been before he came to the crossroads. What's the matter, Mary, you want me to rupture myself?'

'Do you know where he lived?' I stayed him.

'Bottom of Mercy Hill. House looked like Satan was in residence. You can't miss it.' He knocked down the house of cards and walked away, and so, feeling rather adrift, did I.

I suppose I could have tried to find Franklyn today, but I wanted to crystallize the experience, to preserve it before it lost its form. I came home and set this down; I think it needs rewriting. Reality always does; I suppose we have to give it some form, even while paying the price of distortion. I keep thinking of Franklyn in his coffin, aware of something tunnelling toward him, unable to move a muscle but still capable of feelings. But it's dark now; I couldn't find him in the dark. Tomorrow, more. Goodbye, girl in the window.

EU.

a fixed point: 15 July 1967 DearJRG: Today has been disturbing.

I knew Franklyn lived on Mercy Hill, but the Hill covers a lot of ground; I couldn't search it for his house. Finally I thought of the street directory-odd I didn't think of that before-and called at the library today to check. There was only one R. Franklyn on Mercy Hill. I did return to the Religion section but they couldn't find We Pa.s.s from View; I suppose they're cla.s.sifying me as one of their regular cranks.

I caught a bus to Mercy Hill. High sun, slight breeze; a bluebottle was patting its reflexion on the window, trying to escape. In the streets couples were taking their ice-creams for a walk; toward the Hill tennis-b.a.l.l.s were punctuating their pauses, girls were leaping, bowls were clicking, and from the houses behind a procession was bearing trays of cakes to the pavilion. It was one of those days when if anything is to happen you have to make it happen; or for me to complete the next episode of my short story.

I dismounted at the foot of the Hill and climbed the piled terraces. At one corner they were erecting a new school; workmen were sunning themselves on girders. Two levels further up I came into Dee Terrace, and at once saw Franklyn's house.

It was unmistakeable. The personality which gave that house its final form was not the architect's". One chimney had been built into a frustum of white stone; an extra room had been added on the left, and its window had been blocked with newer brick; all the curtains, except those of one ground-floor window draped in green, were black. The house looked deserted, the more so for its garden, which could not have been tended in years; gra.s.s and weeds grew knee-high. I brushed through, imagining things crawling into my shoes. A bustling cloud of flies rose from something to one side. I reached the front door and saw the green curtain move; a face peered and drew back. I knocked. There was silence for a moment. Then inside a woman's voice screamed: 'Oh, lie down with you!' Before I could ponder on that, the door was open.

The woman was certainly not in mourning-which was encouraging, for I hadn't known quite what approach to make. She wore a red dress, which looked pale against the crimson wallpaper of the hall. She was heavily, if inaccurately, made up, and her hair was rather arbitrarily bleached. She waited.

'Would you be Mrs. Franklyn?'

She looked suspicious, as if I'd intended a threat. 'Roland Franklyn was my husband,' she admitted ungraciously. 'Who are you?'

Who indeed. It didn't seem as though I'd get far by declaring the supernatural nature of my quest. 'I'm a writer,' I compromised. 'I've read your husband's book several times. I was shocked to hear of his death,' I added to get it over with.

'Well, you don't have to be. Come in, anyway,' she said. She looked round the hall and grimaced. 'Look at this. Would you live with this? Not likely. Getting them in the right mood-half of them didn't know what they were being got in the mood for. Nice boys, some of them, to begin with.' She kicked the crimson wall and ushered me into a room on the right.

I wasn't prepared-I couldn't have been. A ground-floor room with wardrobe, dressing-table complete with cob-webbed mirror, a bed beneath the window, piles of women's magazines, some thick with dust, and a cat chained to the leg of a chair in the middle of the floor; it wasn't a sense of evil or fear that choked me, it was a sense of something locked away, forgotten and gone bad. The cat padded up to meet me; its chain gave it freedom of the room, but it couldn't quite reach the door.

'p.u.s.s.y likes you,' said Mrs Franklyn, closing the door and sinking into a chair amid a haze of dust; her dress drew up her thighs, but she didn't pull it down. 'That could be a good sign, but don't they say only effeminate men can make friends with cats? Why are you looking at me like that?' I hadn't realized I was looking like anything in particular; I was carrying the cat, chain and all, to the chair I took opposite her. 'Don't like the chain, is that it? But me and my cat, we're all we've got-I'm not letting her out so they can carry her off and sacrifice her. They would, you know, on their nights. I take her in the garden, that's all; wouldn't trust them further than that.' I remembered the flies. 'What do you write?' she demanded.

In this context it seemed a little pale to say 'Stories of the supernatural.'

'Stories, eh? Yes, we all like stories,' she mused. 'Anything's better than the real thing. Do you want some tea? I'm afraid that's about all I have to offer.'

'It's all right, thank you,' I refused; I could see cracked cups in the kitchen behind her head. She caught my eye; she was always doing that, d.a.m.n her.

'Oh, I can't blame you for thinking,' she said. 'But it gets you down after a while. After he took the house over-you didn't know that, did you?-yes, he did, Re married me and then he encroached on every room, keeping things I wouldn't touch all over the house, until I took this room and the kitchen and I told him if you try anything in my rooms I'll kill you!' She thumped the chair-arm and dust flew out.

'But why did you put up with it?' I had to ask.

'Why? Because I married him!' The cat fled, knocked over a pile of magazines, sneezed and jumped back; she reeled it in and fondled it. 'Now, p.u.s.s.y's not scared of mummy,' she soothed and put it down. It began to scratch at her shoe. 'Lie down with you, for G.o.d's sake,' she hissed. It came to me for comfort.

'When I married him,' she returned to me, 'he promised I'd have all this house to entertain, to do all the things I never could. I believed him. Then I found out how he really was. So I waited. Every day I wished him dead, so I'd have my house, what was left of my life. I haven't spoken to him for years, did you know that?-hardly even seen him. I used to leave his meals outside his room on a tray; if he didn't eat them that was up to him. But when he didn't touch them for three days I went into his room. No, I didn't go in-all those filthy statues and lights and books-but I could see he wasn't there. He was in his stupid little printing press room. He was dead all right. There was a book-he must have been going to copy something-but I didn't read it; the way his face looked was enough. I threw it in the bin. Didn't touch him, though-oh, no, they're not going to say I killed him after all the years I've suffered.'

'But how did you stand it?' Of course the answer was- she didn't.

'Oh, he made me long ago. We met when we were students-I was impressionable then, I thought he was a good man, the best-and later we got married. I ought to have known; there was a rumor he'd been expelled from the University even then, but when he swore he hadn't I trusted him. Then his parents died and left him this house and we got married. My husband-' Her face contorted as if she'd put her hand in something foul. 'He took me down to Temp-hill and made me watch those things dancing on the graves. I didn't want to but he said it was for a book he was writing. He held my hand, then. And later we went down the steps below Glotton-oh, you may write, but you'd never dare to write about ... I don't want to think about it. But it hardened me. It made me tough when he began his mummery back here, trying to stop me destroying all his muck...'

That sounded like a cue. 'If you haven't thrown away all his books do you think I could look them over? Purely from a writer's viewpoint,' I tacked on, why I'm not sure.

'But you're a nice young man, you don't want to become another of his,' she said, and sat down on the bed; her dress rose again like a curtain. She began to clear piles of magazines festooned with dust away from the bed; atop one was a vase of dandelions-'Just a touch of color, what's it matter what they are, no-one ever comes,' she explained, though the petals had curled and dulled in the flecked light. 'Did you ever write from experience? How could you, you've never had what I'd had to put up with. The things he's doing even now to hinder me- Only yesterday I picked up one of his books to throw it out and it went sticky and soft things started pushing between my fingers-G.o.d!' She wiped her hands down her dress. 'I used to lie awake listening to him going to the bathroom and wishing he was dead- and last night I heard him flopping round his room, beating on the walls. And this morning I woke early, I thought the sun was coming up-but it was his face floating over the rooftops ... It came to the windows, filled them, it followed me from room to room, mouthing at me-G.o.d! You'd never write about it, you'd never write about anything again. But he can't get me down, and he knows it. He was always scared of me. That's why he kept me here, to keep me quiet. But he can't have left many of his little tricks behind him. He knows I'll win. But you don't want to get mixed up with the wrong things. You're a nice young man.'

She swung her legs up and lay back on the pillow, where I could see imprints of hair-dye.

For some time now I'd had the impression that my short story was taking over its own writing; now we seemed to be building to a climax I hadn't foreseen. I had to be direct. 'Your husband was buried, wasn't he?' I asked. 'Didn't he want to be cremated?'

She seemed to take an age to sit up; her eyes were on me all the while. 'How did you know that?' she demanded softly. 'You gave yourself away there, didn't you? You are one of his! I knew it before you got to the door! Yes, he's buried, where you all should be. Go on, go up and be with him, I'm sure he'd like you to be. He must be able to feel them coming by now-I hope he can. Yes, he was always on about his Eihort, but he doesn't like it when they come for him. You go and look after him, you-'

I didn't know what she might be capable of; I retreated hastily, seeing her watching in the mirror and sneering when she caught my eye. Somehow I dislodged a heap of magazines and buried the cat, which fought its way out and tangled my feet in its chain. 'Don't you touch my cat!' she screamed. 'She's worth a million of you! What is it, darling, come to mummy-' and I escaped, running down the hall, an inflamed intestine, and through the gra.s.s, careless of what I might tread in unseen.

Suddenly I was on solid pavement. Down the street an ice-cream van was playing Greensleeves. This time the intrusion of mundanity didn't seem so tasteless. I walked home.

By the time I reached the typewriter I'd glimpsed the paradox. Even the supernatural-story writer who believes what he writes (and I'm not saying I don't) isn't prepared for an actual confrontation. Quite the reverse, for every time he fabricates the supernatural in a story (unless based on experience) he clinches his skepticism; he knows such things can't be, because he wrote them. Thus for him a confrontation would be doubly upsetting. It would at least force him to re-think all his works. Is this desirable? From the self-completion angle I suppose it is. At any rate, I'm going. 'Go up and be with him' she said-it must be the cemetery on Mercy Hill.

Tomorrow.

EU.

(Undated, unaddressed) I don't know what (Foregoing deleted, does not appear on carbon; page apparently withdrawn, carbon attached, reinserted into typewriter) Nonsense. Of course I can write about it. The very fact that I can write proves that I'm still functioning.

I took the bus up Mercy Hill at the height of the day. Few things moved; flies and pedestrians crawled, and the workmen climbed sluggishly on the skeletal school. At the intersection with Dee Terrace I saw the house; it seemed swallowed up by gra.s.s, forever isolated from its surroundings.

I want to get this over. The caretaker directed me down an avenue, and when I reached-No. Description of graveyard. Why write as if this were my last page? Willows, their branches glowing stippled curves, were s.p.a.ced carefully toward the Hill out of which the cemetery was carved; in the Hill itself were catacombs, black behind ivy or railings, and above stood the hospital, a grey reminder of hope or despair. What awful iron juxtaposed hospital and graveyard? The avenues were guarded by broken-nosed angels yearning heavenward; one showed a leprous patch where her left eye and cheek had sloughed away. Urns stood here and there like empty gla.s.ses at a sick-bed, and a young woman was kneeling with a wreath at a shining memorial; I wonder how long before she shakes him off? And then, toward the catacombs, I saw the new headstone and its bed of pebbles. They gleamed behind the high sun. I read Franklyn's name and the framing dates, and waited.

It eventually occurred to me that I didn't quite know what I was waiting for; not in that sunlight. Yet the air had hushed. I paced around the grave, and the pebbles shifted. My shadow had moved them. I'm still capable of an anticlimax! My G.o.d. I thought: Franklyn is alive down there-or perhaps no longer. Then I saw a possibility. I looked back down the perspective. The young mourner was pa.s.sing through the gates. I lay down on the gra.s.s and put my ear to the pebbles. They ground together, then there was nothing. I felt vilely uncomfortable. Suddenly I realized that I was visible all the way down the avenue to the gates. I went hot all over and scrambled to my feet.

And on the way up I heard something. Something. If only I knew. It'd be better if I had something to confront, anything but this uncertainty which sucks the confidence from me. It could have been the foreman at that school calling over the noise of riveting. Or it could-yes, must write-it could have been someone imprisoned, paralyzed, summoning a last muscular spasm, screaming thickly for help and beating his fists in the dark as he was dragged downward, downward . . .

I couldn't run; it was too hot. I walked. When I reached the school the girders were rippling in the heat-haze, as if they were alive. I wish I hadn't seen that. No longer could I trust the surface of the world. It was as though it had been instantaneously revealed to me that there were countless forces awake in everything, invisible, things lurking in daylight, shifting, planning-What had they built into the school? What would stalk unseen among the children?

I walked. Of course I was visualizing too much, but I could imagine, I could feel the pavement thin as ice, ready o engulf me in a world where life crawled. I sat in the parks. It was no good; I didn't know what watched from the trees; I didn't know how many of the pa.s.sers-by might be masked, agents not of this world, preparing the way for- what? Who had Franklyn left behind? The peril of the writer: he can't stop thinking. He may survive by writing, but he doesn't really survive. Why am I no-mustn't give in-I wandered until dark, found a cafe, I don't remember. I was in a deserted street of shops with one red window lit above a darkened store. I don't know why, it seemed evil. Franklyn's hall, I suppose.

So I came back and typed this. The street is empty; only the shadow of the streetlamp seems to move. The window opposite is dark. What may be there, waiting?

I can't turn round. I stare at the reflexion of the room behind me. The reflexion-like a framed photograph about to be split open by something climbing forth. When I've written this I shall turn round.

'I don't dare,' I have just said aloud.

Where can I go where I don't sense movement behind the scenes?

(Unsigned).

Potential (1973).