BYATIS

BYATIS
"When I press'd him that I must be arm'd against such Daemons by full Knowledge, he said that it had but one Eye like the Cyclops, and had Claws like unto a Crab. He said also that it had a Nose like the Elephants that 'tis said can be seen in Africa, and great Serpent-like Growths which hung from its Face like a Beard, in the Fashion of some Sea Monster."

"A few Minutes after then, they heard a Sound of Wings, like the Flapping of a great Bat, which died away in the Distance."

"The being was supposedly Byatis, a pre-human being which was worshipped as a deity."

"Apparently the terrifying Berkeley Toad was the same being as the deity Byatis; indeed, though the being has only one eye, it does, when its proboscis is retracted occasionally, resemble the general shape of the toad."
Ramsey Campbell, The Room In the Castle

THE SHADOW FROM THE LAND OF THE THREE SUNS

THE SHADOW FROM THE LAND OF THE THREE SUNS

"I went nearer the stone temple, and a huge doorway loomed in front of me. Within that portal were swirling shadows that seemed to dart and leer and try to snatch me inside that awful darkness. I thought I saw three flaming eyes in the shifting void of a doorway, and I screamed with mortal fear. In that noisome depth, I knew, lurked utter destruction—a living hell even worse than death. I screamed again. The vision faded."

 “So in the year of the Black Goat there came unto Nath a shadow that should not be on Earth, and that had no form known to the eyes of Earth. And it fed on the souls of men; they that it gnawed being lured and blinded with dreams till the horror and the endless night lay upon them. Nor did they see that which gnawed them; for the shadow took false shapes that men know or dream of, and only freedom seemed waiting in the Land of the Three Suns. But it was told by priests of the Old Book that he who could see the shadow’s true shape, and live after the seeing, might shun its doom and send it back to the starless gulf of its spawning. This none could do save through the Gem; wherefore did Ka-Nefer the High-Priest keep that gem sacred in the temple. And when it was lost with Phrenes, he who braved the horror and was never seen more, there was weeping in Nath. Yet did the Shadow depart sated at last, nor shall it hunger again till the cycles roll back to the year of the Black Goat.”

 "Where I had, in the landscape itself, seen the twisted, half-sentient tree, there was here visible only a gnarled, terrible hand or talon with fingers or feelers shockingly distended and evidently groping toward something on the ground or in the spectator’s direction."

H.P. Lovecraft & Duane W. Rimel, The Tree On the Hill

CREATURE OF THE MONOLITH

CREATURE OF THE MONOLITH

"I opened my mouth to scream my horror and loathing, but only a dry  rattle sounded; a huge monstrous toad-like thing squatted on the top of the monolith!"

"I saw its bloated, repulsive and unstable outline against the moonlight, and set in what would have been the face of a natural creature, its huge, blinking eyes which reflected all the lust, abysmal  greed,  obscene  cruelty  and  monstrous  evil  that  has  stalked the sons of men since their ancestors mowed blind and hairless  in  the  tree-tops.  In  those  grisly  eyes  were  mirrored  all   the  unholy  things  and  vile  secrets  that  sleep  in  the  cities under the sea, and that skulk from the light of day in the blackness of primordial caverns. And so that ghastly thing that the unhallowed ritual of cruelty and sadism and blood had evoked from  the  silence  of  the  hills,  leered  and  blinked  down  on  its  bestial  worshippers,  who  groveled  in  abhorrent  abasement  before it."

"Now  the  beast-masked  priest  lifted  the  bound  and  weakly  writhing girl in his brutish hands and held her up toward that horror on the monolith. And as that monstrosity sucked in its breath,  lustfully  and  slobberingly,  something  snapped  in  my  brain and I fell into a merciful faint."

Robert E. Howard, The Black Stone

MASHATAAN

MASHATAAN
"There was nothing remotely human about the Mashataan. Their bodies consisted of writhing swarms of tendrils that pulsed with undiluted mchawi. They possessed no other limbs. From the midst of each clump of tendrils rose a head dissimilar in shape to that of anything ever spawned in Nyumbani. Eyes were the only familiar feature on those nightmarish heads — yes that were multitudinous orbs of bright green light, each on refelecting cold, dispassionate involvement in the struggle against the Erriten...the recalcitrant, pathetic and insignificant Erriten...
Charles R. Saunders, Imaro IV

GIANT WALKER

GIANT WALKER
“Storch stared out over the army of creatures that fluttered, staggered, stumbled, stood and slowly shook his head, still smiling. —Well, some the walkers and floppers come from Old Mother Storch. Not so many anymore though. Mostly they come up from the Bottom—floppers, flappers, haystacks, all the others. Ones from Mother Storch used to last longer. Her best could even talk. They got more real blood n’em, like you and me.”
Scott Nicolay, Tuckahoe

DISTORTED RABBIT

DISTORTED RABBIT
"Nahum himself gave the most definite statement of anyone when he said he was disturbed about certain footprints in the snow. They were the usual winter prints of red squirrels, white rabbits, and foxes, but the brooding farmer professed to see something not quite right about their nature and arrangement. He was never specific, but appeared to think that they were not as characteristic of the anatomy and habits of squirrels and rabbits and foxes as they ought to be. Ammi listened without interest to this talk until one night when he drove past Nahum’s house in his sleigh on the way back from Clark’s Corners. There had been a moon, and a rabbit had run across the road, and the leaps of that rabbit were longer than either Ammi or his horse liked."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out Of Space

GROTESQUE WOODCHUCK

GROTESQUE WOODCHUCK
"In February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting woodchucks, and not far from the Gardner place bagged a very peculiar specimen. The proportions of its body seemed slightly altered in a queer way impossible to describe, while its face had taken on an expression which no one ever saw in a woodchuck before. The boys were genuinely frightened, and threw the thing away at once, so that only their grotesque tales of it ever reached the people of the countryside."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out Of Space

DISTORTED SQUIRREL

DISTORTED SQUIRREL

"They were the usual winter prints of red squirrels, white rabbits, and foxes, but the brooding farmer professed to see something not quite right about their nature and arrangement. He was never specific, but appeared to think that they were not as characteristic of the anatomy and habits of squirrels and rabbits and foxes as they ought to be.

"H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out Of Space

DISTORTED FOX

DISTORTED FOX
"They were the usual winter prints of red squirrels, white rabbits, and foxes, but the brooding farmer professed to see something not quite right about their nature and arrangement. He was never specific, but appeared to think that they were not as characteristic of the anatomy and habits of squirrels and rabbits and foxes as they ought to be."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out Of Space

THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE

THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE

"'It must be somethin’ from away off in the sky like the men from the college last year says the meteor stone was. The way it’s made an’ the way it works ain’t like no way o’ God’s world. It’s some’at from beyond.'"

"It was a scene from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest reigned that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison from the well—seething, feeling, lapping, reaching, scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognisable chromaticism."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out Of Space