1, Toad Place,
Berkeley,
Gloucestershire,
Great Britain
January 18th, 1937.
Lovecrass,
So you are dreaming of me, are you? Or you are so bereft of dreams that you have to write tales about me. I am a haunter of the dark, am I, and a shell which owes its vitality to the presence of a woman.23 It is time that you were confronted with the truth. I shall convey a revelation from which even your mind will be unable to hide. I vow that you will no longer be able to ignore your ignorance.
I shall enclose my photograph. There is, of course, no need for my to delegate my mother to obtain a print, since you can have the film developed yourself. Have you the courage to gaze upon the face of dream, or has all your dreaming been a sham? Perhaps you will never sleep again while you remain in the world, but whenever you dream, there shall I be. Do not imagine that your death will allow you to escape me. Death is the dream from which you can never awaken, because it returns you to the source. No less than life, death will be the mirror of your insignificance.
C. T. Nash.
This was apparently Nash's final letter. Two items are appended to the correspondence. One is a page torn from a book. It bears no running title, and I have been unable to locate the book, which seems to have been either a collection of supposedly true stories about Gloucestershire or a more general anthology of strange tales, including several about that area. Presumably whoever tore out the sheet found the following paragraph on page 232 relevant:
Residents of Berkeley still recall the night of the great scream. Sometime before dawn on the 15th of March 1937, many people were awakened by a sound which at first they were unable to identify. Some thought it was an injured animal, while others took it for a new kind of siren. Those who recognised it as a human voice did so only because it was pronouncing words or attempting to pronounce them. Although there seems to have been general agreement that it was near the river, at some distance from the town, those who remember hearing it describe it as having been almost unbearably loud and shrill. The local police appear to have been busy elsewhere, and the townsfolk were loath to investigate. Over the course of the morning the sound is said to have increased in pitch and volume. A relative of one of the listeners recalled being told by her mother that the noise sounded "as if someone was screaming a hole in himself". By late morning the sound is supposed to have grown somehow more diffuse, as though the source had become enlarged beyond control, and shortly before noon it ceased altogether. Subsequently the river and the area beside it were searched, but no trace of a victim was found.
The second item is a photograph. It looks faded with age, a process exacerbated by copying. The original image is so dim as to be blurred, and is identifiable only as the head and shoulders of a man in an inadequately illuminated room. His eyes are excessively wide and fixed. I am unable to determine what kind of flaw in the image obscures the lower part of his face. Because of the lack of definition of the photograph, the fault makes him look as if his jaw has been wrenched far too wide. It is even possible to imagine that the gaping hole, which is at least as large as half his face, leads into altogether too much darkness. Sometimes I see that face in my dreams.
Notes
1. Nash refers here to Lovecraft's tales "Dagon", "The Hound", "The Rats in the Walls", "Arthur Jermyn" and "Hypnos", all recently published in Weird Tales
2. In this paragraph Nash refers to "The Festival" and "Imprisioned with the Pharaohs".
3. Nash is referring to "The Music of Erich Zann" and "The Unnamable".
4. Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales.
5. "The Tomb" and "The Outsider".
6. Lovecraft's original name for the island in "The Call of Cthulhu".
7. "The Terrible Old Man", "The Moon-Bog", "He" and "The Horror at Red Hook".
8. "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Colour out of Space", The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and Supernatural Horror in Literature
9. "The Colour out of Space" was published in Amazing Stories.
10. August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wandrei and Frank Belknap Long.
11. "The Dunwich Horror".
12. Dunwich is a submerged town off the Suffolk coast.
13. Medusa: A Story of Mystery, and Ecstasy, & Strange Horror (Gollancz, 1929).
14. "The Whisperer in Darkness".
15. Robert E. Howard.
16. "The Dreams in the Witch House".
17. Robert Bloch.
18. "The Shambler from the Stars".
19. "The Space-Eaters" by Frank Belknap Long.
20. The tale originally published as "The White Ape" was reprinted as "Arthur Jermyn".
21. On its appearance in Astounding Stories, "At the Mountains of Madness" attracted hostile comment in the letter-column.
22. After the publication of "The Shadow out of Time", Astounding Stories ran further hostile correspondence.
23.. Nash is referring to "The Haunter of the Dark" and "The Thing on the Doorstep", published in the most recent issues of Weird Tales.
With The Angels (2010)
As Cynthia drove between the massive mossy posts where the gates used to be, Karen said "Were you little when you lived here, Auntie Jackie?"
"Not as little as I was," Cynthia said.
"That's right," Jacqueline said while the poplars alongside the high walls darkened the car, "I'm even older than your grandmother."
Karen and Valerie giggled and then looked for other amusement. "What's this house called, Brian?" Valerie enquired.
"The Populars," the four-year-old declared and set about punching his sisters almost before they began to laugh.
"Now, you three," Cynthia intervened. "You said you'd show Jackie how good you can be."
No doubt she meant her sister to feel more included. "Can't we play?" said Brian as if Jacqueline were a disapproving bystander.
"I expect you may," Jacqueline said, having glanced at Cynthia. "Just don't get yourselves dirty or do any damage or go anywhere you shouldn't or that's dangerous."
Brian and the eight-year-old twins barely waited for Cynthia to haul two-handed at the brake before they piled out of the Volvo and chased across the forecourt into the weedy garden. "Do try and let them be children," Cynthia murmured.
"I wasn't aware I could change them." Jacqueline managed not to groan while she unbent her stiff limbs and clambered out of the car. "I shouldn't think they would take much notice of me," she said, supporting herself on the hot roof as she turned to the house.
Despite the August sunlight, it seemed darker than its neighbours, not just because of the shadows of the trees, which still put her in mind of a graveyard. More than a century's worth of winds across the moors outside the Yorkshire town had plastered the large house with grime. The windows on the topmost floor were half the size of those on the other two storeys, one reason why she'd striven in her childhood not to think they resembled the eyes of a spider, any more than the porch between the downstairs rooms looked like a voracious vertical mouth. She was far from a child now, and she strode or at any rate limped to the porch, only to have to wait for her sister to bring the keys. As Cynthia thrust one into the first rusty lock the twins scampered over, pursued by their brother. "Throw me up again," he cried.
"Where did he get that from?"