THE CRAWLING HORROR

THE CRAWLING HORROR

"It didn't feel like a dog's back. It was the right distance from the floor, but it was slippery, and there wasn't any hair on it. My hand kept moving, but right off I knew that, whatever I was petting, it wasn't any dog. I had the idea that if I pressed my hand down I could push my fingers right into it."

"It was a slimy sort of stuff, transparent-looking, without any shape to it. It looked as though if you picked it up it would drip right through your fingers. And it was alive-I don't know how I knew that, but I was sure of it even before I looked. It was alive, and a sort of shapeless arm of it lay across the dog's back and covered her head. She didn't move."

"I hit at the thing with a poker, and quick as thought the whole mess started sliding across the floor, stretching out as worms do, oozing under the crack beneath the door that leads onto the porch."

"And a few weeks later I saw the dog that looked like Nan, Doctor Kurt. It was Nan, yet it wasn't."

"Two days ago that Peterson kid disappeared, and he hasn't com back. And what's more, he'll never come back! He's part of that thing that began in my walls, with the rats."

"And it seemed to me that, for a second, I saw something slipping down the window-pane something that clung to the window pane like a colorless jelly, almost like a wave of watery foam, almost like a nothingness that moved heavily down the window-pane and disappeared below the sill."

"And I saw that the thing was slowly giving up pretense of human shape. The face was changing-the hands and arms and the contours of the body were dissolving. And in the last second before it melted into shapeless slime, from that vanishing mouth came Bertha Brandt's voice, crying "I didn't do it, Doctor Kurt!"

"It reared erect as a fountain might gush up. It put forth arms, developed breasts, overspread itself with color. In the time that it might take to draw a long breath the thing had vanished and a something that we knew to be that same ghastly entity, but that looked as Hilda had looked in life, stood naked there amid the jumbled clothes."

Thorp McClusky, The Crawling Horror
Read Scott's blog post about this story here.