SHAPE FROM THE STREAMING DARK

SHAPE FROM THE STREAMING DARK

 "His vision blurred; her face melted as if tears had come across his eyes."

"Perrin wrenched his eyes from her face 'You're not real You're something which takes the shape of my thoughts. Perhaps you killed Seguilo...'"

"He had believed in the shape called Seguilo; he had believed in the transceiver—and both had slavishly obeyed his expectations. So had the girl, and he had sent her away..."

"No human hands could force the door; it would take the strength of a mastodon, the talons of a rock choundril, the ferocity of a Maldene land-shark..."

"He peered through the window, heart in his mouth. A tall shape, indistinct."

"He listened. It must be near the door now. It would be lifting a heavy warm, the talons would glint in the moonlight."

"He knew what he would see; A black shape tall and round as a pole with eyes like coach-lamps. A huge black arm shoved inside. Perrin saw the talons gleam as the fingers reached for the bolt."

"Tomorrow night the moons would call up no yearning shapes form the streaming dark."
Jack Vance, When The Five Moons Rise

UNIQUE LEPIDOPTERA

UNIQUE LEPIDOPTERA

"Feathery antennae and the two forelegs issued forth, the legs clutching the cocoon in order to hoist the body through the narrow aperture. The furry and distended abdomen, upon which were hinged the crumpled wings, was drawn out with effort."

"Surely this specimen before him was unique. The wings were easily ten inches across and their color was so subtly graduated that it was impossible to say where black turned to purple to green and green back to black. The only definite delineations were a crablike simulacrum centered on each hind wing and upon each fore wing, the imitation of an open mouth with teeth bared. Both the crabs and mouths were chalked in white and vermillion."

John B.L. Goodwin, The Cocoon

TUCKAHOE

TUCKAHOE

"There's a funny kind of toadstool that grows down in the dimmest part of the woods. Tuckahoe, Pa calls them, but Mommas says they aren't like any tuckahoe she's ever seen, and we aren't to eat them under any circumstances. I wouldn't want to anyway, for the sight of them makes my stomach turn somersaults. You never find just one or two, coming up separately around dead wood like regular mushrooms. These tuckahoe like to grow from the heart of a living tree, a hundred or more together in a slippery, gray clump, like overgrown frogs' eggs."

"It couldn't be a tuckahoe, because it was too big, big as a man. Besides that, it was moving, and darn fast, too. Tuckahoe couldn't move by itself, not that I ever heard anyway."

"'Pa', I said, 'I think you should know I saw some kind of strange thing crawling around out here last night, looked like one of those tuckahoe clumps, only almost as big as you are.'"

"There's a crack between the door and the ground, a couple inches maybe. And through that crack came a mess of gray, wet-looking tuckahoe."

Nancy Etchemendy, The Tuckahoe

CARKER

CARKER

"It was a perfect mummy. Either the Indian art had shrunk the bodies, or this was that of a ten-year-old boy. There was no flesh. Only sin and bone and taut dry stretches of tendon between. The eyelids were closed; the sockets looked hollow under them. The nose was sunken and almost lost. The scant lips were tightly curled back from the long and very white teen, which stood forth all the more brilliantly against the deep brown skin."

Anthony Boucher, They Bite

CLAWING FIEND

CLAWING FIEND

"Ghastly shades of bygone gladness,

Clawing fiends of future sadness."

H.P. Lovecraft, Cycle Of Verse

NAMELESS THING

NAMELESS THING

"Black monstrous bridges across oily rivers,

Cobwebs of cable by nameless things spun;

Catacomb deeps whose dank chaos delivers

Streams of live foetor, that rots in the sun."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Cats

SERVITOR OF THE OUTER GODS

SERVITOR OF THE OUTER GODS

"He thought of the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at whose centre sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a daemoniac flute held in nameless paws."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Haunter Of the Dark

"Beside it had been carved two squat squid-like figures from a part of which — presumably the heads, though no outline was definitive — projected what must certainly have been instruments of some kind, for the strange, repugnant attendants appeared to be playing them." 

"And flanking it on either side were two lesser beings, equally amorphous, holding pipes or flutes in appendages and making that demoniac music which echoed and reechoed in the enclosing forest."

August Derleth, The Dweller In Darkness

DISTURBINGLY STRANGE INFANT

DISTURBINGLY STRANGE INFANT

"The walls were lined with small cells, in seventeen of which—hideous to relate—solitary prisoners in a state of complete idiocy were found chained, including four mothers with infants of disturbingly strange appearance. These infants died soon after exposure to the light; a circumstance which the doctors thought rather merciful."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror At Red Hook

DEFORMED TWIN

DEFORMED TWIN

"133-Man has miniature shapeless Siamese Twin-exhib. in circus-twin surgically detached-disappears-does hideous things with malign life of his own."

H.P. Lovecraft, Commonplace Book

HEADLESS MOON-CALF

HEADLESS MOON-CALF

"Incubi and succubae howled praise to Hecate, and headless moon-calves bleated to the Magna Mater. Goats leaped to the sound of thin accursed flutes, and aegipans chased endlessly after misshapen fauns over rocks twisted like swollen toads."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror At Red Hook

"Mooncalf was a term formerly ascribed to the abortive fetus of a cow or other farm animal, and also occasionally to that of a human. The term arose from the formerly widespread belief, present in many European folk traditions, that such malformed creatures were the product of the sinister influence of the moon on fetal development."

Webster's Dictionary