THE FIRST AND LAST LETTER

It’s my fault that the Eldritch Blog has gone quiet but I blame the virus. Well, it gets blamed for everything else.

To try to breathe some life back into the blog, let me tell you about THE FIRST AND LAST LETTER, one of the best-received stories in the first ELDRITCH COLLECTION, THE EVE OF ST ELIGIUS. It is based on actual events on the Smalls Lighthouse, off the coast of Pembrokeshire. These are recounted in the form of an epistolary piece of fiction, so I won’t repeat them here. Suffice it to say that 220 years ago what happened was directly responsible for the Trinity House policy of having lighthouses manned by two rather than three keepers. This policy continued right up to the beginning of the present Millennium, when automation took over.

THE FIRST AND LAST LETTER appeared a few years before the collection, and FRANCIS LYNCH asked me if he could use it for the key scene in his opera, FOR THOSE IN PERIL. This scene can be HEARD in rehearsal (it was subsequently performed in Illinois) and its SCORE can also be seen.

 Where are you, Mr East? Your blog seems to have gone to sleep. Are you hiding in the cellar from the Coronavirus?

Defilement

Defilement is the right title!

Having enjoyed The Eve of St Eligius, I made an effort to get hold of the second 'Eldritch collection', Wish Man's Wood. However I was disappointed to find that a male perspective was taken most of the time. Defilement was perfectly horrible in this respect.

Seeing a Ghost?

Any of the odd sightings I've had in my life can be rationalised away as mistakes, tired eyes, imagination and so on. I find this most difficult to do in the case of something I saw in my first decade.

I was around eight years old, or at any rate of an age when I was trusted to bathe myself but not to run the water at the right temperature. After running my bath my mother called me upstairs. I went up the stairs, not bothering to switch on the light since the bathroom light was on. As I neared the top, a shape (it seemed to be two-dimensional) fluttered through the house wall to my right, undulated quickly close to my face and then passed through the bedroom wall on my left. I wasn't particularly frightened; more surprised than anything else. I didn't even mention what I'd seen to my mother.

Above I've made a rough drawing. As you can see whatever it was didn't have much shape. The important thing missing is the fast undulating, wriggling motion it made. My house was a modern one in London of about the same age as me and it was built on farmland, so there's no 'old dark house' element involved.

Lovecraft

I'm not sure why all this fuss is being made about the word ELDRITCH.  Howard Phillips Lovecraft was using it many years ago.

Christianity?

I read the first edition if The Eve of St Eligius. Nearly all of the stories were good but I couldn't help noticing that many of them were written from a CHRISTIAN viewpoint - like Dream Honeymoon for instance: surely a succubus is a demon lifted straight from the Christian Bible? But the story that convinced me I must be right was The Contract of One Thousand. In this you have the hero saying 'In those days I was very firmly a non-believer...'

The Eldritch Collections

The Eve of St Eligius #1

Wish Man's Wood # 2

       The Eldritch                 Collections
                                  by

           Tom East


                                           A NEW edition of the first collection, The Eve of St Eligius, is available from 1st November, 2019. The second collection, Wish Man's Wood, appears on 30th November, 2019. Click HERE for more information.