The Shadow by Neil M. Gunn

I’ll fight like seven cats!—I may as well tell you a little first about what these hallucinations are. Just enough to help clear up the shadow, for I want it out of my own mind, of course, just as much as off the land. I want the house and the land and myself to be ready for you. And Ranald dear, whatever happens to me, always remember that I can never tell you what you have meant to me at this time. When I say I’ll fight like seven cats it’s because I know I have you at my back. And it’s not only myself I’ll fight for. But I cannot tell you about that yet. I cannot even write it. Not yet. It’s my ultimate secret.
    About the hallucinations (how I do wander off! My field of associations has more trees than the Dark Wood). The simplest and most troublesome, though I have now almost perfected the trick of defeating them, are what are technically known (with thanks to Aunt Phemie) as hypnogogic hallucinations. You must have had them yourself sometimes as a little boy. They occur in the interval before going to sleep. Have you never seen frightful faces then? They form against the dark with an appalling clarity. You must have, even if you have forgotten, though you won’t have, if there was one that kept coming back. In fact when Aunt Phemie and I were talking about it, I remembered quite a lot and advanced this notion on my own about children who are frightened of the dark and need at least a light: they either feel fear coming upon them out of the unknown—up the stairs or along the corridor or even from the air above them—a thousand times stronger than I felt the sweet panic of the spring— or they see a face.
    However, I mustn’t wander again (though all the same when you sometimes called me scatter-brain you did not know how often I was wilfully so!). All I can be sure about—apart from the spring—are my own faces. They are a little larger, I should say, than life-size. But their distinctness is absolutely overwhelming. I pick out two at random, a man and a woman. I have never seen them in life to my knowledge. The woman’s face is in profile. It is tragic but drained, almost with the effect of lying over against something. The plastic intensity is just terrific, though there is no intensity in the expression. The man’s face—I first feel it forming in the darkness and coming up; I know it’s coming; then I begin to see it. Swirls of the darkness, like dark bands, obscure parts of it, moving across it, but ever clearing. It’s coming right up: chin with long dark hairs, hardly a beard, the cheek bones, the whole moulded face, eyes—I struggle from it, open and shut my eyes, move my head, speak to myself. …
    Let us forget it. And lo! suddenly I realise that what I really wanted to mention is the schoolmaster’s face. Does this mean that the unconscious in me has all the time been busy on its dream-trick of getting the concealed wish through? I wouldn’t put it past it!
    What wish, you ask? Why, my wish that you shouldn’t be worried over that first long thistledown letter. (Your implied criticism or fear has stuck!) You see, I merely happened to have had, the night before writing you, a hypnogogic hallucination of that face. The following day it was quite strong—if I cared to fix on it. I knew it was there, but that’s nothing. Most of the time it wasn’t. I probably dramatised it a little, just to cheer you up a bit! Do you forgive me? Let me be honest and say there was real horror in each eye being a ball of thistledown. Why, I don’t know.
    There is horror in it yet. That part was new, like a horrid revelation. Though again what it revealed I don’t know. Anyway, that’s all it was. The next point is that the face must have been suggested to my mind by the face of the policeman whom I had actually seen earlier in the village when I was there with Aunt Phemie. The policeman’s face is not