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 nobody 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 brimming 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 Association 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 passage which in retrospect seems informed by a macabre irony. 'The implicit theme of your story 'The Insects from Shaggai' 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 Pass 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 Pass 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 god), and The Man Who Feared to Sleep, which lent its title (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 title 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 Pass from View.