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 passed over his comment, and our correspondence fell off somewhat.
In February 1967 he quoted a passage 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 pass 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 'God, 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, balls 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 Z°ne of the Colossi and check the library.
Best,
EU
Pitt of Helclass="underline" 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 anticipated, 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 passengers 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 Pass 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 Pass from View beneath The Mass in Slow Motion and The Catholic Marriage Manual and Graham Fisher's Identity 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 Pass 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.