THE MASKED MESSENGER (NYARLATHOTEP)

THE MASKED MESSENGER (NYARLATHOTEP)
"The woman was no longer beautiful. Her skin ran with rivulets of toxic acid, dissolving her robes and flaying her flesh. but it was not muscle and blood that was concealed behind her now-graying, bubbling skin; hers was an inner flesh of worms and tentacular sinews tainted with the corruption of ages. From Nowhere she wore a long curved mask of polished bronze, with eye slits the color of oily pools. When the woman laughed she did so with more wickedness that found in all the heathens of this world, 

and I at last understood what real evil was.
David Conyers, The Faceless Watchers

"It’s an interesting book Mr. Peel. Five hundred fables, most of them concerning a dark god called the Masked Messenger, Nyarlathotep, and how she offers power and salvation to those who ask for it. There is, of course, always a price."

"In his small, dull room, he could make out that one of her eyes was covered with a white film. She was properly and modestly veiled, even though it was inappropriate for her to be in the company of a strange man unescorted."

"Acid perspired from her pores, dissolving the fabric of her robes and the car seat, but never enough to completely erode either. She smelt like drain cleaner.
 

"Outside the hot wind gathered, swirled her robe about her slender form as if it were a living entity. She continued to drip acid, an endless supply carving canals in her flesh. Where the acid fell upon the sand, glass formed."

Now the Masked Messenger waited for him. She wore an elongated mask of bronze, with two dark eye-slits and no mouth piece"
David Conyers & John Goodrich, The Masked Messenger

THE SKINLESS ONE (NYARLATHOTEP)

THE SKINLESS ONE (NYARLATHOTEP)
"In the 11th century, the simulacrum came into the possession of Sedefkar, a gazi Turkman who had fallen from Islam and turned against his amir. Protected behind the impregnable walls of Constantinople, this evil apostate accrued great wealth. One night he caught a thief in his treasure room, and had the man flayed to death on the spot, that the thief might die in sight of the gold he desired. The unblinking gaze of the statue watched the torture, and that night Sedefkar was visited by the statue's maker, 

The Skinless One, an avatar of Nyarlathotep."

"An aspect of Nyarlathotep, it usually appears as a muscular eight-foot-tall human without skin, and sometimes a third eye in the center of the forehead."

"The Sedefkar Scrolls are bundled rolls of flayed and treated human skin, cut into rectangles nd stitched together."

Geoff Gillan, Mark Morrison & Nick Hagger, Horror On the Orient Express

SET (NYARLATHOTEP)

SET (NYARLATHOTEP)
"Unknown to Malachi Kloss and many others. Set is one of the many forms of Nyarlathotep, who, in this form, has been worshipped for thousands of years."

"Set appears as a 20 foot tall, muscular man with the head of a black dog or jackal. He wears a black tunic and sandals, while the jewelry he wears is all of onyx."
Scott David Aniolowski, The Sundial Of Amen-Tet

"Set was represented by the so-called Typhonian animal, or wore its head on human shoulders. This strange animal with a long curving snout, square upstanding ears and upright tufted tail has not been identified."
Veronica Ions, Egyptian Mythology

ABOMINABLE SNOW-MAN

  ABOMINABLE SNOW-MAN

"No use, either, to point out the even more startlingly similar belief of the Nepalese hill tribes in the dreaded Mi-Go or “Abominable Snow-Men” who lurk hideously amidst the ice and rock pinnacles of the Himalayan summits."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer In Darkness

"Yetis are not white, except in myth, mostly Western myth. Traditionally, in Nepal, Sikkim, and Tibet, close up sightings of Yeti describe their color as the basic primate blacks to brownish reds. It seems that as soon as the mistranslation to “Abominable Snowman” occurred in the West, the notion has been that these cryptids are white. It is an unfortunate mistake that is still being made with Yeti toys and souvenirs. And art."

Loren Coleman, Cryptomundo message board

"Perhaps the most widely celebrated of the elusive wilderness monsters is the so-called Abominable Snowman-or as Nepal's mountain-dwelling Sherpas say, Ye-teh or Teti-whos tracks have been often discovered in the frigid lands of perpetual snow in the Himalayan regions of India, Nepal, and Tibet."

"In 1889, Waddell found what he took to be large footprints in the snow on a high peak northeast of Sikkim."

"Described as having pointed heads, long arms hanging below the knees and covered in reddish hair, the Yeti would seem to be a smaller version of North America's Bigfoot, though most investigators insist that the two creatures are entirely different."
Mysteries Of the Unknown, Mysterious Creatures

GNOPH-KEH

GNOPH-KEH
"A small bulge in the canvas far to the right suggested the sharp horn of Gnoph-keh, the hairy myth-thing of the Greenland ice, that walked sometimes on two legs, sometimes on four, and sometimes on six."
H.P. Lovecraft & Hazel Heald, The Horror In the Museum

TOTEM-BEAST

TOTEM BEAST

"These creatures, I said to myself, were to the men of the nameless city what the she-wolf was to Rome, or some totem-beast is to a tribe of Indians."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Nameless City

"The word (totem) is from the Algonquian and signified originally a brother-sister blood relationship. As used by anthropologists, it may denote any one or all of a number of related concepts and associated customs stemming from the nuclear idea of a blood covenant between the human and the animal species. Primarily, the anthropological term denotes (1) a mythological identification of the ancestor of a given human family, clan or tribe with the ancestor of some local animal species; but it has also been used to signify either (2) the identification of some particular animal with the guardianship or heraldic sign of some social group or class or (3) the recognition of some particular animal as the guardian, servant, or alter ego of an individual-which is more properly known as nagualism, from the Nahuatl noun nahualli ("sorcerer").
Joseph Campbell, Historical Atlas Of World Mythology

IMP

 IMP

"In 1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoadley, newly come to the Congregational Church at Dunwich Village, preached a memorable sermon on the close 

presence of Satan and his imps;"

H.P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror

"In the folk beliefs of Europe, this is a mischievous little devil, devilet, or minor fiend that is often described as being the childlike offspring of the Devil."

Carol Rose, Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns and Goblins

 

OGRE

 OGRE

"Once more I ventured within those brooding ruins that swelled beneath the sand like an ogre under a coverlet, and again dug vainly for relics of the forgotten race."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Nameless City 

"This is a name given in folklore to a particular class of giant. In general an ogre is a gigantic humanoid male of verly little intellect, enormously strong bulk, cannibal tendencies, and easily outwitted by a clever human."

Carol Rose, Giants, Monsters and Dragons

 

DWELLER IN DARKNESS (NYARLATHOTEP)

DWELLER IN DARKNESS (NYARLATHOTEP)

"For, where  but a moment before there had been nothing, there was now a gigantic protoplasmic mass, a colossal being who towered upward toward the stars, and whose actual physical being was in constant flux;"

"But the thing on the slab, the Dweller in Darkness, was the ultimate in horror, for from its mass of amorphous flesh there grew at will before our eyes tentacles, claws, hands, and withdrew again; the mass itself diminished and swelled effortlessly, and where its head was and its features should have been there was only a blank facelessness all the more horrible because even as we looked there rose from its blind mass a low ululation in that half-bestial, half human voice so familiar to us from the record mad in the night!"

"And the thing that had gone forth and who had returned into the forest to send his minions back to us. It was he who had come from interstellar space even as Cthugha, the fire being, had come from Fomalhaut upon the utterance of the command that woke him from his eon-long sleep under that amber star, the command that Gardner, the living-dead captive of the terrible Nyarlathotep, had discovered in those fantastic travelings in space and time;"

August Derleth, The Dweller In Darkness

HUMAN HOST (NYARLATHOTEP)

HUMAN HOST (NYARLATHOTEP)

"A black squamous growth that had begun around his foot wound and his mouth spread quickly over his limbs and torso, itching terribly and emitting a thick putrefying odour."

"By the time they left for Haiti, Henley's face was darkened with scales. The ears, cheeks, forehead, and scalp were still clear, but he had the mouth of an iguana, and his eyes were ringed with black circles."

"His fingers were gradually becoming webbed, and his joints rearranged so that he could move his body as could no other human."

"The closer he got, the less like Henley it looked. For one, the character was too tall, way over six feet. And there was something about the way he was standing, legs akimbo, head tilted to the side like a puppet, that wasn't Henley and, very nearly, wasn't human."

"When Rapf saw the man's face, he knew at once that it was Henley. They were his eyes. That was the line of his jaw. That was his hair. But that was all that was his. The skin was an oily black. Not negroid, but ink black. And the body was all wrong. Bizarrely elongated, loose as a marionette. Seeing it standing there, cool and lean its eyes bright as nails, Rapf felt his mind peel away.

"On the opposite side of the nearest pool, from behind a massive shaggy tree trunk, the long man with black skin emerged. He was naked, elongated, unreal and there was a sheen on his shoulders that made them look like glass. It was a peculiar body light that addled the air around him. He glided through the grass like an apparition, his arms writhing, unjointed, undulant. Even as far off as he was, rounding the turn of the pool, it was obvious that he was not human. The flesh was crumbling off his bones like soaked bread, and the bones themselves were long and rubbery."

"The shriek was white hot, and they knew it would kill them. Nyarlathotep was screaming."
A.A. Attanasio, The Star Pools