because of Lovecraft’s misrepresenting what they said, we have to work a thousand times as hard to get your attention. His fictions are astounding models of structure, but otherwise, Howie [Author’s Note-Within-a-Note: They all call him “Howie.” Don’t ask me, I’m just doing the typing at this point.] was stuffed full of wild blueberry muffins. William Hope Hodgson, though … there was a scary fucker. The House on the Borderland. Yeah — he knew something.”]
F
is for Finders of the Last Breath. They are led by a lithe female figure with the head of a black horse, its ears erect, its neck arched, vapor jetting from its nostrils; one of her followers is tall and skeletal, with fingers so long their tips brush against the ground: It hunkers down and snakes its fingers around whatever object has attracted its attention, absorbing the sound made by vibrational waves so it can trace them back to their source; other followers hop like frogs, some roll, some scuttle on rootlike filaments that are covered in flowers whose centers are the faces of blind children. Many of them are terrifying to behold, and too many have been killed as they attempt to carry out their duties: to be at the side of infants and the old who are about to die, so that their last breaths can be caught and put in jars and stored away. It is only when the Finders can carry out their duties that your infants and your old will pass in peace, and rest in peace. The Finders make their deaths painless, even majestic. But if their last breaths cannot be caught in time, the infant’s or the aged one’s death — even after the remains have been burned or buried — is never-ending, and their awareness of the horror of their fate is crystalline and without pity. You should welcome and not fear the presence of the Finders. Fear only their absence when the time comes.
G
is for the Glop. The Glop has no real name. The Glop has no real form. It can call itself anything it wants and assume any form it wishes. If it has a purpose, no one knows what it is. The Glop is that nameless, shambling, drooling, unnamable, indescribable “thing” that always manages to get hold of the narrator of a horror story just before said narrator can name it or describe it or reveal its purpose. [Author’s Note: Yet have you noticed that the narrators of these stories always seem to have time to write “Gaaaaah!” or “Arrrrrrgh!” or something like that?] If you read a story that ends with a long, jagged pen-scrawl trailing down to the bottom of the page, that’s because the Glop got to the narrator. If you haven’t figured it out yet, the Glop is in cahoots with the Colophon. Many is the character, both in fiction and in real life, who has found him- or herself in the embarrassing position of being Slurped by the Glop before anyone can learn anything about them. Bad horror movies are especially adept at this. Or episodes of the original Star Trek when everyone beams down to a planet’s surface … but there’s that crew member you’ve never seen before, the one whose uniform doesn’t even come close to matching everyone else’s. You know immediately that crew member is Soon to Be Slurped by the Glop. [Author’s Note: They’d really like to get their hands on the Glop. Reality and fiction are one and the same to it, and they’d like to know how it manages to move so easily between realms of perception and still manage to assume physical form. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind hearing that one myself.]
H
is for Hawkline Monster. [Author’s Note: Not the one of which Richard Brautigan wrote.] The sting came back to him; not the same as before, but far more powerful. He dropped to one knee as the pain began to tear his face in half, he felt it, felt the fire burning through his nose as he struggled to his feet and stumbled into the bathroom, hoping that it was all over now, please let it be over, please let this be the last of my punishment, but then he was in front of the mirror and looking at his face as it began swelling around a gash on his forehead and nose, swelling like a goddamn balloon so he looked away, looked down at his hand and saw it pulsating, felt a cold thing crawling between his shoulders, eyes twitching, what the hell is it, but then he heard the flapping, the flapping from outside the house and the sound of shattering glass and the volume of the dozens, hundreds of wings grew louder as he pulled himself around to look in the mirror and see his face split apart like someone tearing a biscuit in half, only there was no steam, just blood, spraying, geysering, very pretty, really, spattering around, and he tried to look behind him and see the birds as they engulfed the rooms of his house, but the pain was killing him because the cold thing shuddered down between his shoulders and began to push through, snapping his shoulder blades as if they were thin pieces of bark, and he screamed, screamed and whirled and slammed himself into the wall trying to stop the pain, trying to stop it from getting out, but he stunned himself for a moment and slid down to the floor, leaving a wide dark smear behind him, howling as the first thing sawed through his back and fluttered to life, he was on his hands and knees now, waiting, trying to breathe, breathe deep, and now, ohgod now the second one was tearing through, making a sound like a plastic bag melting on a fire, pushing through, unfurling, and he could see them now, could see them easily because their span must have been at least fifteen feet, and he threw his head back to laugh, he wanted to laugh, but he couldn’t laugh, couldn’t make any more human sounds, so he screamed, screamed so loud and long that his eyes bulged out and his face turned a dark blue, but then he listened as his scream turned into the wail of an angry bird of prey when his body was jerked back into a standing position, his arms locking bent, his hands clenching, every muscle in his body on fire; writhing, shifting, bones snapping, he shrieked in the tiny cage of the bathroom as his chest puffed out through his shirt and was covered in thick layers of brown feathers, and the birds were all around him now, flying, soaring majestically, and he knew their sounds, understood their sounds that sang forgiveness and release, understood all of it as he watched the flesh of his face drop off his body like peelings from an orange and he tried to move his arms, tried to grab something, then he jerked around from the waist and saw his arms drop off like branches from a burned tree, and he screamed again, louder than before, wishing that the pain would end and just let him die; instead it only forced him to fall against his great wings and, with one last shriek, jerk back as the spasm took hold of him, pushing the corded claws up through his groin. Soon he looked down on the bloodied heap of his human flesh. The sun was shining. The children were waiting. He offered his apologies for having hidden from them for so long. He’d only needed to know the draw of the Earth, the taste of those who bowed to Gravity. He’d almost forgotten that his flesh was a disguise. He rose above the fields of flesh, talons extended. His children followed. Someday they would carry away the souls of all humankind in their claws; punishment for its cowardice in ceasing exploration of the heavens.
I
is for Ichthyocentaur. Lycophron, Claudian, a Byzantine grammarian named Tzetzes, and Jorge Luis Borges are among the few who have written of the Ichthyocentaur, a creature of terrible wonder and beauty; human to the waist, with the tail of a dolphin and forelegs of a powerful battle-horse, the Ichthyocentaur is a creature capable of parthenogenesis. It is one of the most reverent myths to them. [Author’s Note: The monsters who dictate this to me.] They argue constantly over whose writings come the closest to capturing the mystery of this most wondrous and imposing creature — the majority side with Tzetzes — but none doubt its existence. They have composed hymns, created sculptures, fashioned complex mythologies and tall tales around it. There exists only one Ichthyocentaur, and they are determined to find it, to protect it, and to beg it to create another like itself that its race may multiply through the seas of the world. Even monsters dream of beauty. Even they embrace myth. [Author’s Note: You would not believe some of their myths; please trust me on that one.] They foster imagination within themselves and others of their ilk. This is what should make them holy.
J
is for Joyce Carol Oates. She is their favorite author, bar none. She is their Goddess. She and her stories are the music and words of their Heart-Song-of-Being. She knows their suffering, understands their loneliness, articulates everything within them that they haven’t the emotional vocabulary to express. They can recite all of her works from memory. [Author’s Note: I listened as a trio of them did not so much recite as perform “Dear Husband,” Rape: A Love Story, and the contents of Sourland in its entirety. I would be lying if I claimed not to have been moved.] When at last they finally erase most of humanity from the face of the planet, she will be among the few who will spared. They do not call her by her name — to speak her name is a punishable act, for they see themselves as not yet worthy to speak her name; instead, they whisper “Scheherazade” and genuflect.
K
is for The Ken Doll. For some reason he scares the living shit out of them.
L
