SUCCUBA

SUCCUBA

"In an instant every moving entity was electrified; and forming at once into a ceremonial procession, the nightmare horde slithered away in quest of the sound—goat, satyr, and aegipan, incubus, succuba, and lemur, twisted toad and shapeless elemental, dog-faced howler and silent strutter in darkness—all led by the abominable naked phosphorescent thing that had squatted on the carved golden throne, and that now strode insolently bearing in its arms the glassy-eyed corpse of the corpulent old man."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror At Red Hook

"Succubus. A devil in female form, the succubus specializes in seducing men. Although feminine in meaning, in form this medieval Latin word, succubus, is masculine (because demons were supposedly sexless); the feminine form succuba (strumpet) is occasionally found."
Rossell Hope Robbins, Encyclopedia Of Witchcraft & Demonology

INSECTOID BEAST

INSECTOID BEAST
"He could see, miles below the surface, a large stone slab, rough and stained. The bodies of children were splattering against it, and crouched down in that darkness was a creature, a large black beast with stiff limbs, each long and bent but quick. The creature's elongated, twitching head danced atop its insectiod torso as it skittered from one end of the slab to the other, gathering the broken bodies of the children as fast as they were falling, enwrapping them, keeping them alive, keeping them for its own sake."
Philip Fracassi, Altar

INCUBUS

INCUBUS

"In an instant every moving entity was electrified; and forming at once into a ceremonial procession, the nightmare horde slithered away in quest of the sound—goat, satyr, and aegipan, incubus, succuba, and lemur, twisted toad and shapeless elemental, dog-faced howler and silent strutter in darkness—all led by the abominable naked phosphorescent thing that had squatted on the carved golden throne, and that now strode insolently bearing in its arms the glassy-eyed corpse of the corpulent old man."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror At Red Hook

"According to many Church Fathers, an incubus is an angel who fell because of lust for wemen. Essentially the incubus is a lewd demon or goblin which seeks sexual intercourse with women. The corresponding devil who appears to men is the succubus."

Rossel Hope Robbins, The Encyclopedia Of Witchcraft & Demonology

INTERDIMENSIONAL SPIRIT

INTERDIMENSIONAL SPIRIT
"It was incredible, surely, but there, opposite and slightly above me, were shapes of some indeterminate sort among the willows, and as the branches swayed in the wind they seemed to group themselves about these shapes, forming a series of monstrous outlines that shifted rapidly beneath the moon. Close, about fifty feet in front of me, I saw these things."

"I saw it through a veil that hung before my eyes like the gauze drop-curtain used at the back of a theater—hazily a little. It was neither a human figure nor an animal. To me it gave the strange impression of being as large as several animals grouped together, like horses, two or three, moving slowly."

"They first became properly visible, these huge figures, just within the tops of the bushes -- immense, bronze-coloured, moving, and wholly independent of the swaying of the branches. I saw them plainly and noted, now I came to examine them more calmly, that they were very much larger than human, and indeed that something in their appearance proclaimed them to be not human at all. Certainly they were not merely the moving tracery of the branches against the moonlight. They shifted independently. They rose upwards in a continuous stream from earth to sky, vanishing utterly as soon as they reached the dark of the sky. They were interlaced one with another, making a great column, and I saw their limbs and huge bodies melting in and out of each other, forming this serpentine line that bent and swayed and twisted spirally with the contortions of the wind-tossed trees.  They were nude, fluid shapes, passing up the bushes, within the leaves almost -- rising up in a living column into the heavens. Their faces I never could see. Unceasingly they poured upwards, swaying in great bending curves, with a hue of dull bronze upon their skins."

"For just as the body swung round to the current the face and the exposed chest turned full towards us, and showed plainly how the skin and flesh were indented with small hollows, beautifully formed, and exactly similar in shape and kind to the sand-funnels that we had found all over the island."   

'"Their mark!" I heard my companion mutter under his breath. "Their awful mark!"'

Algernon Blackwood, The Willows

TOME DEMON

TOME DEMON

"At first you saw only a mass of coarse, matted black hair; presently it was seen that this covered a body of fearful thinness, almost a skeleton, but with the muscles standing out like wires. The hands were of a dusky pallor, covered, like the body, with long, coarse hairs, and hideously taloned. The eyes, touched in with a burning yellow, had intensely black pupils, and were fixed upon the throned King with a look of beast-like hate. Imagine one of the awful bird-catching spiders of South America translated into human form, and endowed with intelligence just less than human, and you will have some faint conception of the terror inspired by the appalling effigy."

"There was black and tattered drapery about it; the coarse hair covered it as in the drawing. The lower jaw was thin — what can I call it? — shallow, like a beast’s; teeth showed behind the black lips; there was no nose; the eyes, of a fiery yellow, against which the pupils showed black and intense, and the exulting hate and thirst to destroy life which shone there, were the most horrifying features in the whole vision. There was intelligence of a kind in them — intelligence beyond that of a beast, below that of a man."

M.R. James, Canon Alberic's Scrapbook

THE UNNAMABLE

THE UNNAMABLE

'"Don’t think I was a fool—you ought to have seen that skull. It had four-inch horns, but a face and jaw something like yours and mine.”'

"I was not so seriously hurt, but was covered with welts and contusions of the most bewildering character, including the print of a split hoof."

'“No—it wasn’t that way at all. It was everywhere—a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes—and a blemish. It was the pit—the maelstrom—the ultimate abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable!”'

H.P. Lovecraft, The Unnamable

FUNGUS PERSON

FUNGUS PERSON

"126- Castaways on island eat unknown vegetation and become strangely transformed."

H.P. Lovecraft, Commonplace Book

"Yet, as we drew near to it, I became gradually aware that here the vile fungus, which had driven us from the ship, was growing riot. In places it rose into horrible, fantastic mounds, which seemed almost to quiver, as with a quiet life, when the wind blew across them."

It was on the thumb of her right hand, that the growth first showed. It was only a small circular spot, much like a little grey mole. My god! how the fear leapt to my heart when she showed me the place. We cleansed it, between us, washing it with carbolic and water. In the morning of the following day she showed her hand to me again. The grey warty thing had returned."

"Abruptly, as I stared, the thought came to me that the thing had a grotesque resemblance to the figure of a distorted human creature. Even as the fancy flashed into my brain, there was a slight, sickening of noise of tearing, and I saw that one of the branch-like arms was detaching itself from the surrounding grey masses and coming towards me.

William Hope Hodgson, The Voice In the Night

UNWELCOME BOY

UNWELCOME BOY

"As Terry and Thatcher reach the field, they see the dancing figures were once Better Boys. Once, because their bodies are slack, heads flopping loose on the necks, legs and arms limp, as if their skeletons were stolen, hijacked to help the stalks rising out of their jaws, stretched inhumanely wide. The glistening,mauve tendrils reflect the moonlight, and their weak glow illuminates the slow dance. Filaments from the thickest stalk’s bulbous head extend down to the boy’s wrists and shins, moving them like a marionette on its strings."

"Thatcher’s gasping a litany of swears. Terry’s reminded of the rare hothouse orchids at the Toledo Botanical Garden. “Look at them,” he says, as Thatcher pulls him back. They’re almost beautiful."

"Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the dance?"

The Unwelcome Boys start waving their stalks toward the both of them.The nearest lift their host’s legs, a bow-legged shuffle, to come closer. Terry reaches out to it, and a tendril, long and supple wraps around his hand, a slick,warm festoon between tucker and that which had been tucked away."

Free of its burdensome host, the Unwelcome embraces Terry with all its sprigs and shoots, then startles Thatcher when it wraps around him for an instant. As it leaps away, to bound across the field, toward the distant treeline, toward the river. Thatcher is trying to perform CPR on still Goshen."

Steve Berman, The Unwelcome Boys

TAURAN

TAURAN

“He had two arms and two legs, but his waist was so small you could encompass it with both hands. Under the tiny waist was a large horseshoe-shaped pelvic structure nearly a meter wide, from which dangled two long skinny legs with no apparent knee joint. Above that waist his body swelled out again, to a chest no smaller than the huge pelvis. His arms looked surprisingly human, except that they were too long and undermuscled. There were too many fingers on his hands. Shoulderless, neckless. His head was a nightmarish growth that swelled like a goiter from his massive chest. Two eyes that looked like clusters of fish eggs, a bundle of tassles instead of a nose, and a rigidly open hole that might have been a mouth sitting low down where his adam’s apple should have been. Evidently the soap bubble contained an amenable environment, as he was wearing absolutely nothing except his ridged hide, that looked like skin submerged too long in hot water, then dyed a pale orange. “He” had no external genitalia, but nothing that might hint of mammary glands. So we opted for the male pronoun by default. ”

“Well, yes; I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures. About all they don’t show is the texture of the skin. It’s pebbly and wrinkled like a lizard’s, but pale orange.”

Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

HEAVENIAN SHARK

 

HEAVENIAN SHARK

“He was twelve meters of flexible muscle with a razor-sharp tail at one end and a collection of arm-length fangs at the other.  His eyes, big yellow globes, were set on stalks more than a meter out from his head.  His mouth was so wide that, open, a man could comfortably stand in it.  Make an impressive photo for his heirs.”

Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

CHARONIAN

CHARONIAN

“They were not quite as tall as humans, but wider in girth. They were covered with dark green, almost black, fur — white curls where the laser had singed. They appeared to have three legs and an arm. The only ornament to their shaggy heads was a mouth, wet black orifice filled with flat black teeth. They were thoroughly repulsive, but their worst feature was not a difference from human beings, but a similarity….”

“Nothing in that fucken head but a mouth and ten centimeters of skull. To protect nothing, not a fucken thing.”

“The creature sat back on its haunches, leaning forward on the one front leg. Big green bear with a withered arm.

Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

SNOW SERPENT

 

SNOW SERPENT

“Without more warning than that, a long snowbank between that step and the next above reared up its nearest white end a dozen feet and hissed fearsomely, showing it to be a huge serpent with head a big as an elk’s, all covered with shaggy snow-white fur. Its great violet eyes glared like those of a mad horse and its jaw gaped to show slashing-teeth like a shark’s and two great fangs jetting a mist of pale ichor.The furred serpent hesitated for two sways between the nearer, taller man with flashing ax and the farther, smaller one with thick black stick.

The Mouser’s attention was fixed on a fur-wisped violet eye as big as a girl’s fist.

Hrissa looked down the monster’s gaping dark red gullet rimmed by slaver-swimming ivory knives and the two ichor-jetting fangs.

Fafhrd said, “A hot-blooded serpent, a snake with fur—it goes against experience. My father never spoke of such; I doubt he ever met ‘em.”

Fritz Leiber, Swords Against Wizardry