I shall never forget that first after-hours lecture when you defined a macabrist as “a person whose dreams are as a great charnel ground, one that is dimmed by personal eclipses and slaked by a private Styx.” I remember how you stated that the macabrist is free of faith, strictly speaking, but that if they were to invent a religion it would be based not on the supernatural, but rather on the “grubby subnatural; the Underworld. Indeed, we trawl up our philosophies from our unconscious, and they emerge dripping with abjection.”

I remain determined to gain full admittance to the great subnature, Professor, if only to prove to you that I am worthy of seeing the darkness, that I am truly of the darkness.

Do you see how assimilated your teachings have become with me? Your “little lectures on supernatural horror,” as you somewhat dismissively called them, made me feel as though I had been granted admittance to a buried sphere from which I’d been wrongly banished before being condemned to being born into this world.

I’d always thought I was the only one who longed for some grue-dimmed subnature, a grimy cosmic cellar. But in you I had, at long last, found one who understood. You voiced things which had always felt like shameful intuitions to me, impulses that I had to keep pent at the back of my mind, perennially praying that they would not leak out to condemn me among the Normals. But you uttered your bent observations plainly, with a boldness that could only have stemmed from experiential knowledge. You exuded a confidence I could never possess.

You taught us that the Horror toward existence is not only real but is in fact more real than we are, that it is the boundless gory foam upon which all things, known and unknown, merely bob like so much flotsam.

I was the best pupil you could ever hope for, Professor. If only you would return to experience the fruits of your teachings. I can still see you creeping toward the classroom door on that last night; can still hear your parting words echoing through the halls of my brain: “Good luck on the final.”

I waited for that final examination, waited an unmentionable span of time. After more anguished nights than I care to recall, I came to suspect that the final was not to be held in the cozy confines of your classroom, but in the world at large.

And then it all became so obvious. For what were your lectures if not impressions of life beyond the theoretical, echoes of the palpable nightmare that succors us all?

So I began to prepare for the final.

My preparations were unique and rigorous. I used the Earth as my reference material. I tested myself in a variety of ways.

I now have so much to show you, Professor.