Bartholomew Farris, February 9th, 1904

Some knowledge is not meant for mortal men. Some of it is too strong, too maddening, or too sad to bear. These letters contain such knowledge, they must, or I must have underestimated my own strength of character, for their texts have rocked me something terrible.

I received a package, a few weeks prior. Twas a bundle of twine and envelopes nearly three pounds in weight. Some of the paper was aged darker than my father’s old bible. Some of it was uncannily white, printed with precision such that I couldn’t imagine a typewriter as flawless… until one reads the dates that occasionally appear upon them, then the precision seems a natural consequence. Then it becomes hauntingly clear where… when those certain letters seemingly come from.

In my years working for The Atlantic, I encountered many strange things. I am no stranger to queer happenings, I am instead a student of strangeness. My article discrediting the supposed phenomenon of spontaneous combustion made me quite the name among my peers. So please take what I am to describe to you without the faintest hint of salt. The content of the letters remains debatable in terms of truth, but what is printed is most worth recounting.

I first believed this mostly to be the work of some disturbed sexual deviant, a young woman by the name of Natalie, who claims to earn her salt drawing profane images of impossible humanoid creatures. If you look through the other contents of this package, you will see her claim authorship, and see many letters that bear her rambling, nearly incoherent voice.

Natalie was the first author I was able to notice, then Emma, but soon I realized that there were more voices at work. I also noted that some of the historical references which at first seemed inconsistent seemed to line up with other parts of this strange canon. I would draw on examples, but I feel that you can likely do a better job of figuring it out if you go on to read the letters yourself, which you should avoid doing at all costs.

Suffice to say, these tales, confessions, shopping lists, diary entries, and what-have-you all seem to draw on a shared history. Some of it is our own. Some are of Americans like you and I, during the wartime half a century prior, which my own father served in, and these letters seem typical of the time if not for the half-mad subject matter within.

Some of these authors speak of a twentieth century in the past tense with an arctic confidence, there was some young woman who claimed to have worked at my very place of employment, a century into the future, as if that dreaded old rag will still be read in a year’s time. They talk of years past that of two thousand. In moments when they draw on historical observations or give passing statements of the present day, they range from the days of the revolutionary war to the days of wars I have never heard of. They speak of immense Communist “Soviet” empires ruling from the eastern half of “Germany” to the Manchurian Coast of “China”, as if to predict the socialists coming out of their union halls and ruling more land than the British do presently, more than the Romans in antiquity, and more than the Mongol Horde betwixt them.

They speak of grandiose fantastical machines, ones with eerie similarity to the machinations of those Wright brothers I did a piece on just a year ago. Of “Flights” from the city of New York to the city of London. They casually drop and painstakingly detail wars fought on the world stage, wars that are “Cold” and other wars that end with a succession of bombs that yield such fire as to burn down entire cities, in a moment, one each.

It is humorous, and indicative of my habits, that I write to you about the least outlandish qualities of this collection, I do admit to this. Yes I am a boring old codger, one who reads letters from days that have yet to pass about alien creatures, herculean machinery, and impossible horrors, and thinks to rant on about the way the authors talk about the least significant part of their stories, and poke fun at my old place of work. Of this offense I am guilty-as-charged. I will move on from the historical minutia, and I will explain my lingering upon them.

I focus on the banalities, on the trivialities, on the frivolous, miniscule details. I do this because I cannot pry myself from these pages other than to tell others about them, and that is the one way to chew on them that I can do without falling into some kind of subconscious trap of believing them. It’s kind of terrifying. I read these unbelievable words and they speak to me like the gospel. They are the truest untruths I have ever witnessed. Perhaps they are just the work of some “science-fiction” writer with an uncanny knack for verisimilitude and an absurd attention to detail. But I fear they are something more. And more sinister, too.

These letters range in subject matter from outright horrors not meant for eyes to drink lest they wish to feel the touch of hemlock, to absurdist rants I can only assume are an amateur’s garish attempt at farce. Hundreds of words spent speaking of “Stinky Boys” which I could not for the life of me describe as anything other than utterly nonsensical and totally believable. All this diversity, and yet there is still the seed of darkness which I must not ignore. I must warn you of the orchid of plague which rots at the center of this mad garden, so that you may avert your eyes.

I said some knowledge is not meant for mortal men. I meant it. Some of it is too rich, too intoxicating, too opiate to allow men to peruse without caution. This letter of mine is many things. One of them is my caution. I have learned from the degenerate Natalie how to dismiss these parasitic thoughts and waking dreams. She describes her letters as something akin to a process of auto-exorcism. Since reading this package of letters, I too have been possessed.

By the letters themselves, I have been snared. I read every waking hour, and relive them every accursed night. They have cost me my senior staff position at The Atlantic, they have cost me a large portion of my sanity, and I hope that after today they will only cost me the price of postage, for I believe that after I finish this letter, I shall be able to send them away, to the first unfortunate soul whose name my finger lands atop in my son-in-law’s mailing list booklet.

I will place this letter first in the package, hoping that you should happen upon it before the others, and that their spell has not seeped through my mind into the ink on the page you hold now. Please do not read further.

This package is filled with more letters, some of them mine, other than this one. Letters that should have been with the package to begin with, but were strangely absent, that I was strangely aware of, and that I had to write myself to solve the absence of.

There lies in my heart a part of me who is still sure that this package is merely nonsense, and that I have simply snapped. That I have simply lost myself to my age and that this is all merely an exercise in fiction which my newly feeble mind has found itself trapped within. This inner skeptic is a very small, sickly man. One that will likely wither away like a vestigial organ if this letter does manage to liberate the majority of my mind from this sickness. Because if it worked as it worked for the other authors, then it means that what I experienced would line up with the story which I long to escape.

It’s defeat seals mine. My escape is my final prison. If I shall be free of this nightmare, I shall know forever of those terrible truths.

If you found this letter before the others, try and destroy the package, perhaps you will break the curse that follows it. I hope it does not already have a hold on you. I pray that you are not willing to turn the page.

If you found this letter somewhere else, further into this catalogue of madness, I grieve for your innocence, for you are now slave to the stories as I have been for the last few months of my life. I weep at what you will come to know, the terror of knowing of the one that sleeps between, that sleeps beyond, the one who bleeds the ink with which the world’s obituary is to be written with.

We will both weep at the feet of that dark faceless God of darker dreams for the rest of our lives, for even if this letter rids me of my obsession like it has done for some of the others, the dreams of That Which Sleeps at the bottom of the deepest trench in the darkest ocean on the coldest planet will be with me until my end.

I can only really hope that this letter will be the first and only one that you read, and the last one that the crawling whisper will tempt a man to write.