GHROTH

GHROTH

"Before him, suspended in the dark and facing him, was Ghroth."

"It was red as rust, featureless except for bulbous protrusions like hills. Except that of course they weren't immense. A rusty red globe covered with lumps, then. That was all, but that couldn't explain why he felt as if the whole of him were magnetized to it through his eyes. It seemed to hang ponderously, communicating a thunderous sense of imminence, of power. But that was just its unfamiliarity, Ingels thought, struggling against the suction of boundless space; just the sense of its intrusion. It's only a planet, after all. Pain was blazing along his thighs. Just a red warty globe."

"Then it moved"

"It was blurring, that was it, although it was a cold windless day air movements must be causing the image to blur, the surface of a planet doesn't move, it's only a planet, the surface of a planet doesn't crack, it doesn't roll back like that, it doesn't peel back for thousands of miles so you can see what's underneath, pale and glistening. When he tried to scream air whooped into his lungs as if space had exploded a vacuum within him."

"'Don't you see?' Ingles shouted at Bert among the packed faces. 'It closed its eye when it saw us coming!"'

Ramsey Campbell, The Tugging