BYATIS

BYATIS
"When I press'd him that I must be arm'd against such Daemons by full Knowledge, he said that it had but one Eye like the Cyclops, and had Claws like unto a Crab. He said also that it had a Nose like the Elephants that 'tis said can be seen in Africa, and great Serpent-like Growths which hung from its Face like a Beard, in the Fashion of some Sea Monster."

"A few Minutes after then, they heard a Sound of Wings, like the Flapping of a great Bat, which died away in the Distance."

"The being was supposedly Byatis, a pre-human being which was worshipped as a deity."

"Apparently the terrifying Berkeley Toad was the same being as the deity Byatis; indeed, though the being has only one eye, it does, when its proboscis is retracted occasionally, resemble the general shape of the toad."
Ramsey Campbell, The Room In the Castle

SERVITOR OF GLA'AKI

SERVITOR OF GLA'AKI
"But those in the cult certainly were supposed to have the real witches' marks. It was the long, thin spines which are supposed to cover the body of their god Glaaki. In the initiation ceremony the novice was held (sometimes willing, sometimes not) on the lake shore while Glaaki rose from the depths. It would drive one of its spines into the chest of the victim, and when a fluid had been injected into the body the spine detached from itself from the body of Glaaki."

Through the emission of impulses, perhaps magnetic, from the brain of Glaaki, the man was kept alive while he was controlled almost completely by the being."
Ramsey Campbell, The Inhabitant Of the Lake

DWARFISH THING

DWARFISH THING
"In a few moments the dwarfish shape had stumbled to Angela. In the darkness Barbara might have mistaken it for a child, except that its unstable head was disproportionately small, its skin appeared to be flapping."

"She handed the object to the dwarfish thing, which floundered away at once, toward the marshes."

Ramsey Campbell, The Nameless

DAOLOTH

 DAOLOTH
"The object was not shapeless, but so complex that the eye could recognize no describable shape. There were hemispheres and shining metal, coupled by long plastic rods. The rods were of a flat grey colour, so that he could not make out which were nearer; they merged into a flat mass from which protruded individual cylinders. As he looked at it, he had a curious feeling that eyes gleamed from between these rods; but wherever he glanced at the construction, he saw only the spaces between them. The strangest part was that he felt this was an image of something living - something from a dimension where such an example of abnormal geometry could live."

"'Uthgos plam'f Daoloth asgu'i - come, o Thou who swepest the veils of sight aside, and showest the realities beyond.'"

Ramsey Campbell, The Render Of Veils

THE THING FROM THE FIELDS

 THE THING FROM THE FIELDS

"Once she glimpsed its ribs through a gloomy clump of bushes. Even if it was a greyhound, it looked in need of feeding."

"He turned his head and saw a figure running after him on all fours along the dim road, a thin shape moving faster than the car."

"Was it meant to show a mass of vegetation in the shape of a face? If so, what kind of face? All she could identify was the tongue that bulged thirstily from the jagged mouth, unless the tongue was a swollen root, and the stalks that curled upward from the eyes to form horns above the low forehead."

As she floored the pedal the two figures raced past the car, their muscles flexing like windblown branches, and turned their face to her as they ran. She saw how their grayish manes grew out of ragged eye sockets, from one of which a clenched flower dangled as if it had be gouged."

Ramsey Campbell, Ancient Images

SERVITOR OF THE MOON

SERVITOR OF THE MOON

"Then the movements clarified and separated, and he saw that there were three shapes, three insects crawling up the rock. Why should the sight of a few insects make him feel he couldn't breathe? his head was swimming by the time he realized that since the pale, thin shapes were crawling on the wall where it merged with the dark, they must really be larger than he was."

"They were the color of the lizard he'd trodden on, the color of things that lived in the dark. They had long fingers they were using to climb the rock, slowly but relentlessly. Two of them were raising their smooth heads toward him in a way that made him thing they had no eyes."

"The van swung round the curve, and both she and Jeremy cowered back in their seats, gasping as the headlights lit up what was standing in the middle of the road, thrusting forward its white eyeless face that bore a gaping smile, its outstretched arms touching the trees on both side of the road."

"It's long oval body the color of a dead fish, its penis dangling like a withered umbilical cord down one fleshless leg. It only smiled more widely, a smile that seemed totally devoid of emotion on the flat, shiny, featureless face, and let go of the trees, ready to reach for the van with its huge splayed hands."

Ramsey Campbell, The Hungry Moon

INSECT FROM SHAGGAI

 INSECT FROM SHAGGAI
"221-Insects or other entities from space attack and penetrate a man’s head and cause him to remember alien and exotic things—possible displacement of personality."
H.P. Lovecraft, Commonplace Book

"At last a shape appeared, flapping above the ground on leathery wings. The thing which flew whirring toward me was followed by a train of others, wings slapping the air at incredible speed... I could ... make out many more details... Those huge lidless eyes which stared in hate at me, the jointed tendrils which seemed to twist from the head in cosmic rhythms, the ten legs, covered with black shining tentacles and folded into the pallid underbody, and the semi-circular ridged wings covered with triangular scales... I saw the three mouths of the thing move moistly, and then it was upon me."
Ramsey Campbell, The Insects from Shaggai

MONSTROUS BABY

 MONSTROUS BABY

"She could feel how it was moving, she screamed that. She could feel it was a monster."

“’You see, it wasn’t her husband who’d told her
originally what would happen to her baby. It was another man, who had power over her and her husband. Those were her words: had power. And he hadn’t just said the baby would be born a monster. He’d said he would make it born that way.”

“’Was it as bad as she feared?’”

“’Yes,’ the doctor said. ‘Yes, it was.‘”

“’This is all I’ll tell you,’ he said, and George felt he hoped it would leave him in the telling. 

‘It was nearly three feet long.’”
Ramsey Campbell, The Doll Who Ate His Mother

GLA'AKI

GLA'AKI

"They shoved me forward to where I could look down into the lake. The ferns and water were unusually mobile tonight, but I didn't realize what was making them move until an eye rose above the surface. and stared moistly at me. Two others followed it - and, worst of all, none of them was in a face. When the body heaved up behind them I shut my eyes and shrieked for help - to whom I don't know; I had a weird idea that someone was in the house here and could help me. Then i felt a tearing pain in my chest, neutralized by a numbness which spread through my whole body. And I regarded the object I had seen rising from the lake with no horror whatever."

"The centre of each picture was, it was obvious, the being know as Gla'aki. From an oval body protruded countless thin, pointed spines of multicolored metal' at the more rounded end of the oval a circular, thick-lipped mouth formed the centre of a spongy face, from which rose three yellow eyes on thin stalks. Around the underside of the body were many white pyramids, presumably used for locomotion. The diameter of the body must have been about ten feet at its least width."

Ramsey Campbell, The Inhabitant Of the Lake

DOUGHY NIGHTMARE

 DOUGHY NIGHTMARE
"The hand retreated through the opening, scraping the edge, and a huge vague face peered down with eyes like blobs of dough."

"For the flood was composed of bodies which clambered over one another, clutching for the trapped rat. The rat was tearing at the pudgy hands, ripping pieces from the doughy flesh, but that seemed not to affect them at all. Huge toothless mouths gaped in the puffy faces, collapsed inward like senile lips, sucking loudly, hungrily. Three of the bloated heads fell on the rat, and she hear its squeals above their sucking."

"Great moist nostrils were dilating and vanishing in their noseless faces. Could they see her light with their blobs of eyes, or were they smelling her terror?"

"Once, delirious, she'd heard all the sounds around her grow stealthily padded, but this softness was far worse. She was trying both to stand back and to jab the lift button, quite uselessly; the doors refused to budge. The doughy shapes would pile in like tripe, suffocating her, putting out the flame, gorging themselves on her in the dark. The one that had ridden the lift was slithering down the outside to join them."

"Swollen hands were thumping them, soft fingers like grubs were trying to squeeze between them, but already the lift was sailing upward."

"The lift's doors opened, and the doughy face lurched in, its fat white blind eyes bulging, its avid mouth huge as a fist. It took her a moment prolonged as a nightmare to realize that it had been crushed between the lift and shaft - for as the doors struggled open, the face began to tear."
Ramsey Campbell, Down There

MAGGOT FAMILIAR

MAGGOT FAMILIAR

"He was sure he hadn't turned here on his way to the dock; he would have noticed the row of whitish tires in the left-hand alley, tires stacked together like a pipe. In the intermittent moonlight they seemed to squirm restlessly, and he was glad he didn't have to pass them."

"He needed all his wits to figure out the way back, before the fitful moonlight convinced him that the whitish tires were squirming silently, mouth open, down the alley toward him. They looked rather large for tires."

"He closed his eyes and clung to the metal, then he recommenced climbing, mechanically but carefully. Matta's game had had something like a worm, a maggot, carved on the box-something fat and sinuous."

"He was still resting at the top of the ladder when the moon-colored fat-lipped mouth, yawning wide as its body and wider than his head, stooped toward him."

Ramsey Campbell, Playing the Game

BENIGHTED OFFSPRING III

BENIGHTED OFFSPRING III
"The third and last was worse still; the figure grovelling in the shadow of the tower - a shadow, Heather was eager to realise, that wouldn't have existed given the blackness of the sky - had an almost perfect child's face except for the single huge eye perched on top like an egg in a cup."

Ramsey Campbell, The Darkest Part Of the Woods

BENIGHTED OFFSPRING II

BENIGHTED OFFSPRING II 

"She attempted to ignore it while she scanned the text opposite, then snatched the page, only to reveal the drawing of a child with eyes swarming out of its honey-comb of a skull."

Ramsey Campbell, The Darkest Part Of the Woods

BENIGHTED OFFSPRING I

 

BENIGHTED OFFSPRING I

"It showed a small creature crouching on all fours beside a tower. Despite its lack of a mouth and its enormous eyes that looked trapped by an unnaturally lightless sky, it reminded her far too much of a toddler."

Ramsey Campbell, The Darkest Part Of the Woods

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

EYELESS COLOSSUS

EYELESS COLOSSUS

"I disliked the vast footprints which led between the leering figures, and still more disliked the disturbingly gnawed bones of huge animals which were strewn across the plain, for I felt that I knew the cause of these horrors, and knew the abnormality of the colossi, if only I could  place it. Then came those clumping footsteps behind em, startlingly close; and as I turned and saw what came striding across that field of unholy carvings, I knew the answer to both questions. It was humanoid - almost - as it pounded through the maze of statues;  but it towered above the hundred-foot figures. And the atrocious thing which I glimpsed as I fled from that shrine to cosmic accidents was the eyelessness of the living colossus and the way the hair of the scalp grew in the sockets where the eyes should have been."

Ramsey Campbell, The Insects From Shaggai

CHAMBER GUARDIAN

CHAMBER GUARDIAN

"Then a door in the opposite wall crashed open, and I remembered the whispered legend of the guardian of this weapon of a lost race. But I knew how to use the weapon's fullest power, and through it I focused mental waves to blast apart the many-legged furry thing which scuttled from the opened door, its abominably shrunken heads waving on hairy, scrawny necks."

Ramsey Campbell, The Insects From Shaggai

MONSTROUS BLOSSOM

 MONSTROUS BLOSSOM

"They believed in a legendary plant-race which inhabited the bottom of a sheer-sided pit in the outer regions of the country in which the city lay."

"Then came a splashing in that darkness, and a huge purple moist blossom rose from it, its petals opening and closing hungrily. But the greatest abnormality of the thing which splashed out of the pit was its green tentacles, tipped with many-fingered hands of unholy beauty, which it held yearningly towards the point where the sacrifices 

threw themselves off."

Ramsey Campbell, The Insects From Shaggai

WHITE PULPY THING

WHITE PULPY THING
"They were oval, two-legged, dwarved things, scarcely two feet high, without arms or head, but with a gaping moist grey mouth at the centre of their bodies, which were of a
spongy white pulp."
Ramsey Campbell, The Insects From Shaggai

INHABITANT OF XICLOTL

INHABITANT OF XICLOTL

"I had almost collided, I thought, with a metallically grey tree. Small in comparison with the average in the forest, this tree was about sixteen feet high with very thick cylindrical branches. Then I noticed that the trunk divided into two cylinders near the ground, and the lower ends of these cylinders further divided into six flat circular extensions. This might merely have been a natural distortion, and such an explanation might also have accounted for the strange arrangement of the branches in a regular circle at the apex of the trunk; but I could not reach for a natural explanation when those branches nearest me suddenly extended clutchingly in my direction, and from the top of what I had taken for a trunk rose a featureless oval, leaning towards me to show an orifice gaping at the top."

"Another instrument, a box-shaped crystal emitting a scintillating petal-shaped field, was used to subdue the counterparts of that oval-headed faceless being, which apparently were a race of enslaved workers used to perform tasks requiring strength for the relatively weak insect species."

"By some obscure method of teleportation they transported the entire temple, with themselves, to the nearest planet on which they had a colony - the world of the faceless cylindrical beings, called Xiclotl by its inhabitants."

"Nor did they turn in passing the cells of the Xiclotl labor force, even when the beings in them crashed themselves against the doors and extended their tentacles in helpless fury upon sensing the portions of their fellow slave."

"Not until a grey metal tentacle whipped through a grille to quiver within an inch of my face did I realize that here was the passage of the Xiclotl labour force cells."

Ramsey Campbell, The Insects From Shaggai