Monster Passage of the Day

Nolon

Nolon

Mannikin
"Now by this nearness, I was the more truly able to perceive how that the Bulk of the Watcher did rise up into the Night, like a Hill; and the colour was mostly black, save and indeed where it did face to the red shine of the Pit; and concerning this I have done telling. And so did I lie there, and stare a great while, parting a small hole in the moss-bushes that I might spy through the same. And the thing was squat there, and might have root within the earth, so it did to mine imaginings, as I did stare with a dumb wonder. And there were monstrous warts upon the thing, and indents and a mighty ruggedness and lumpings; as it were that it did be pimpled with great boulders that were inbred within that monstrous hide. And where the shine from the Pit of Red Fire did strike upon these, they did stand out into the darkness away from the skin."

-- W.H. Hodgson, The Night Land
 
"And I saw now that there were, in truth, matters that did show vague upon that part of the plain that was before me. And I did peer very constant and anxious, and, behold, I saw that there was facing me, a great line of quiet and lofty figures, shrouded unto their feet; and they moved not, neither made they any sound; but stood there amid the greyness, and did seem to make an unending watch upon me; so that my heart went unto weakness, and I did feel that there was no power of the moss-bushes to hide me; for, in verity, they that stood so silent were certain of the Silent Ones; and I was very nigh to the Place of Destruction."

-- W.H. Hodgson, The Night Land
 
"And I saw that a Yellow Thing did hump upward from out of the sand, as it had been a low hillock that did live, and the sand shed downward from it, and it did gather to itself strange and horrid arms from the sand all about it. And it stretched two of the arms unto me; but I smote with the Diskos, and I smote thrice; and afterwards they did wriggle upon the sand. But this was not the end, as I did hope; for the Yellow Thing arose, and ran at me, as it might be that you should see a spider run. And I did leap backward, this way and that, but the monster had a great swiftness; so that I seem surely lost."

-- W.H. Hodgson, The Night Land
 
"What must the inhabitant of this house be like? What must it be seeking here, on this planet, which must have been no less horrible to it than it to us? From what secret regions of astronomy or time, from what ancient and now incalculable twilight, had it reached this South American suburb and this precise night?

I felt that I had intruded, uninvited, into chaos. Outside, the rain had stopped. I looked at my watch and saw with astonishment that it was almost two A.M. I left the light on and began cautiously to climb back down the ladder. Climbing down what I had once climbed up was not impossible - climbing down before the inhabitant came back. I conjectured that it hadn't locked the front door and the gate because it hadn't known how.

My feet were just touching the next to last rung when I heard something coming up the ramp - something heavy and slow and plural. Curiosity got the better of fear, and I did not close my eyes."

-- Jorge Luis Borges, There Are More Things
 
"In another infinitesimal flash he had taken it in. Pale dusky skin covering nothing but bones and tendons of appalling strength; coarse black hairs, longer than ever grew on a human hand; nails rising from the ends of the fingers and curving sharply down and forward, grey, horny, and wrinkled. He flew out of his chair with deadly inconceivable terror clutching at his heart. The shape whose left hand rested on the table was rising to a standing posture behind his seat, its right hand crooked above his scalp. 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 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 Scrap-book
 
"At the moment when the interior cooled with the agonized throes of Wrzesmian's body, the pre-dawn silence was interrupted by a dull ripple. It came from the vat at the corner of the house. The surface of the water, mouldy from the green scum, seethed; inside the rotten barrel, encompassed by rusty hoops, swirls rose, refuse undulated, sediment gurgled. A couple of large, distended bubbles escaped, and a misshapen stump of a hand appeared. Some sort of torso or framework emerged from the depth, dripping with water, covered with mould and a cadaverous putridity - maybe a man, beast or plant. This monstrosity glinted its amazed face towards the sky, opened spongy lips wide in a vague imbecilic-enigmatic smile, extracted from the vat legs twisted as a thicket of coral, and, shaking the water off, started to walk with an unsteady, swinging step ...."

-- Stefan Grabinski, The Area
 
"For reasons unknown, the outsider once more drags his bulky frame earthwards. Arriving exhausted in the superterranean realm, he finds himself standing, badly, in neither darkness nor daylight, but some morbid transitional phase between the two. A senile sun throbs with deadly dimness, and every living thing on the face of the land has been choked by desolation and by an equivocal gloom which has perhaps already lasted millenia, if not longer. The outsider, a thing of the dead, has managed to outlive all those others whom, either from madness or mere loss of memory, he would willingly seek out to escape a personal void that seems to have existed prior to astronomy.

This possibility is now, of course, as defunct as the planet itself. With all biology in tatters, the outsider will never again hear the consoling gasps of those who shunned him and in whose eyes and hearts he achieved a certain tangibly identity, however loathsome. Without the others he simply cannot go on being himself - for there is no longer anyone to be outside of. In no time at all he is overwhelmed by this atrocious paradox of fate."

Thomas Ligotti, The Fabulous Alienation of the Outsider, being of no fixed Abode
 
"Kaufman’s face was raised to it, and without thinking about what he was doing or why, he fell to his knees in the shit in front of the Father of Fathers.

Every day of his life had been leading to this day, every moment quickening to this incalculable moment of holy terror.

Had there been sufficient light in that pit to see the whole, perhaps his tepid heart would have burst. As it was he felt it flutter in his chest as he saw what he saw. It was a giant. Without head or limb. Without a feature that was analogous to human, without an organ that made sense, or senses. If it was like anything, it was like a shoal of fish. A thousand snouts all moving in unison, budding, blossoming and withering rhythmically. It was iridescent, like mother of pearl, but it was sometimes deeper than any colour Kaufman knew, or could put a name to.

That was all Kaufman could see, and it was more than he wanted to see. There was much more in the darkness, flickering and flapping."

— Clive Barker, "The Midnight Meat Train"
 
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