Copyright © 1986 by Neil Gaiman

The English Major: chemical_angel: Copyright © 1986 by Neil Gaiman

What can I say, I thought it would be nice to dredge up one of my favorite Gaiman short stories.

I was just being an ass. I love this as well.

Hmmm....Latitude 47° 9' S, Longitude 126° 43' W...isn't that about where the found The Bloop a few years back?

Yes Virginia, there is a Cthulhu...

Link (new window)

Make your children watch this before the reckoning. Cthulhu demands a proper sacrifice.

Abstruse: Hmmm....Latitude 47° 9' S, Longitude 126° 43' W...isn't that about where the found The Bloop a few years back?

dun-dun-DUHNNNN!!!

It's nowhere as good as his "A Study in Emerald" (new window)

Sherlock Holmes + Old Ones = pretty damn good

The Price

by Neil Gaiman

Tramps and vagabonds have marks they make on gateposts and trees and doors, letting others of their kind know a little about the people who live at the houses and farms they pass on their travels. I think cats must leave similar signs; how else to explain the cats who turn up at our door through the year, hungry and flea-ridden and abandoned?

We take them in. We get rid of the fleas and the ticks, feed them and take them to the vet. We pay for them to get their shots, and, indignity upon indignity, we have them neutered or spayed.

And they stay with us, for a few months, or for a year, or for ever.

Most of them arrive in summer. We live in the country, just the right distance out of town for the city-dwellers to abandon their cats near us.

We never seem to have more than eight cats, rarely have less than three. The cat population of my house is currently as follows: Hermione and Pod, tabby and black respectively, the mad sisters who live in my attic office, and do not mingle; Princess, the blue-eyed long-haired white cat, who lived wild in the woods for years before she gave up her wild ways for soft sofas and beds; and, last but largest, Furball, Princess's cushion-like calico long-haired daughter, orange and black and white, whom I discovered as a tiny kitten in our garage one day, strangled and almost dead, her head poked through an old badminton net, and who surprised us all by not dying but instead growing up to be the best-natured cat I have ever encountered.

And then there is the black cat. Who has no other name than the Black Cat, and who turned up almost a month ago. We did not realise he was going to be living here at first: he looked too well-fed to be a stray, too old and jaunty to have been abandoned. He looked like a small panther, and he moved like a patch of night.

One day, in the summer, he was lurking about our ramshackle porch: eight or nine years old, at a guess, male, greenish-yellow of eye, very friendly, quite unperturbable. I assumed he belonged to a neighbouring farmer or household.

I went away for a few weeks, to finish writing a book, and when I came home he was still on our porch, living in an old cat- bed one of the children had found for him. He was, however, almost unrecognisable. Patches of fur had gone, and there were deep scratches on his grey skin. The tip of one ear was chewed away. There was a gash beneath one eye, a slice gone from one lip. He looked tired and thin.

We took the Black Cat to the vet, where we got him some antibiotics, which we fed him each night, along with soft cat food.

We wondered who he was fighting. Princess, our white, beautiful, near-feral queen? Raccoons? A rat-tailed, fanged possum?

Each night the scratches would be worse -- one night his side would be chewed-up; the next, it would be his underbelly, raked with claw marks and bloody to the touch.

When it got to that point, I took him down to the basement to recover, beside the furnace and the piles of boxes. He was surprisingly heavy, the Black Cat, and I picked him up and carried him down there, with a cat-basket, and a litter bin, and some food and water. I closed the door behind me. I had to wash the blood from my hands, when I left the basement.

He stayed down there for four days. At first he seemed too weak to feed himself: a cut beneath one eye had rendered him almost one-eyed, and he limped and lolled weakly, thick yellow pus oozing from the cut in his lip.

I went down there every morning and every night, and I fed him, and gave him antibiotics, which I mixed with his canned food, and I dabbed at the worst of the cuts, and spoke to him. He had diarrhoea, and, although I changed his litter daily, the basement stank evilly.

The four days that the Black Cat lived in the basement were a bad four days in my house: the baby slipped in the bath, and banged her head, and might have drowned; I learned that a project I had set my heart on -- adapting Hope Mirrlees' novel Lud in the Mist for the BBC -- was no longer going to happen, and I realised that I did not have the energy to begin again from scratch, pitching it to other networks, or to other media; my daughter left for Summer Camp, and immediately began to send home a plethora of heart-tearing letters and cards, five or six each day, imploring us to take her away; my son had some kind of fight with his best friend, to the point that they were no longer on speaking terms; and returning home one night, my wife hit a deer, who ran out in front of the car. The deer was killed, the car was left undriveable, and my wife sustained a small cut over one eye.

By the fourth day, the cat was prowling the basement, walking haltingly but impatiently between the stacks of books and comics, the boxes of mail and cassettes, of pictures and of gifts and of stuff. He mewed at me to let him out and, reluctantly, I did so.

He went back onto the porch, and slept there for the rest of the day.

The next morning there were deep, new gashes in his flanks, and clumps of black cat-hair -- his -- covered the wooden boards of the porch.

Letters arrived that day from my daughter, telling us that Camp was going better, and she thought she could survive a few days; my son and his friend sorted out their problem, although what the argument was about -- trading cards, computer games, Star Wars or A Girl -- I would never learn. The BBC Executive who had vetoed Lud in the Mist was discovered to have been taking bribes (well, 'questionable loans') from an independent production company, and was sent home on permanent leave: his successor, I was delighted to learn, when she faxed me, was the woman who had initially proposed the project to me before leaving the BBC.

I thought about returning the Black Cat to the basement, but decided against it. Instead, I resolved to try and discover what kind of animal was coming to our house each night, and from there to formulate a plan of action -- to trap it, perhaps.

For birthdays and at Christmas my family gives me gadgets and gizmos, pricy toys which excite my fancy but, ultimately, rarely leave their boxes. There is a food dehydrator and an electric carving knife, a bread-making machine, and, last year's present, a pair of see-in-the-dark binoculars. On Christmas Day I had put the batteries into the binoculars, and had walked about the basement in the dark, too impatient even to wait until nightfall, stalking a flock of imaginary Starlings. (You were warned not to turn it on in the light: that would have damaged the binoculars, and quite possibly your eyes as well.) Afterwards I had put the device back into its box, and it sat there still, in my office, beside the box of computer cables and forgotten bits and pieces.

Perhaps, I thought, if the creature, dog or cat or raccoon or what-have-you, were to see me sitting on the porch, it would not come, so I took a chair into the box-and-coat-room, little larger than a closet, which overlooks the porch, and, when everyone in the house was asleep, I went out onto the porch, and bade the Black Cat goodnight.

That cat, my wife had said, when he first arrived, is a person. And there was something very person-like in his huge, leonine face: his broad black nose, his greenish-yellow eyes, his fanged but amiable mouth (still leaking amber pus from the right lower lip).

I stroked his head, and scratched him beneath the chin, and wished him well. Then I went inside, and turned off the light on the porch.

I sat on my chair, in the darkness inside the house, with the see-in-the-dark binoculars on my lap. I had switched the binoculars on, and a trickle of greenish light came from the eyepieces.

Time passed, in the darkness.

I experimented with looking at the darkness with the binoculars, learning to focus, to see the world in shades of green. I found myself horrified by the number of swarming insects I could see in the night air: it was as if the night world were some kind of nightmarish soup, swimming with life. Then I lowered the binoculars from my eyes, and stared out at the rich blacks and blues of the night, empty and peaceful and calm.

Time passed. I struggled to keep awake, found myself profoundly missing cigarettes and coffee, my two lost addictions. Either of them would have kept my eyes open. But before I had tumbled too far into the world of sleep and dreams a yowl from the garden jerked me fully awake. I fumbled the binoculars to my eyes, and was disappointed to see that it was merely Princess, the white cat, streaking across the front garden like a patch of greenish-white light. She vanished into the woodland to the left of the house, and was gone.

I was about to settle myself back down, when it occurred to me to wonder what exactly had startled Princess so, and I began scanning the middle distance with the binoculars, looking for a huge raccoon, a dog, or a vicious possum. And there was indeed something coming down the driveway, towards the house. I could see it through the binoculars, clear as day.

It was the Devil.

I had never seen the Devil before, and, although I had written about him in the past, if pressed would have confessed that I had no belief in him, other than as an imaginary figure, tragic and Miltonion. The figure coming up the driveway was not Milton's Lucifer. It was the Devil.

My heart began to pound in my chest, to pound so hard that it hurt. I hoped it could not see me, that, in a dark house, behind window-glass, I was hidden.

The figure flickered and changed as it walked up the drive. One moment it was dark, bull-like, minotaurish, the next it was slim and female, and the next it was a cat itself, a scarred, huge grey-green wildcat, its face contorted with hate.

There are steps that lead up to my porch, four white wooden steps in need of a coat of paint (I knew they were white, although they were, like everything else, green through my binoculars). At the bottom of the steps, the Devil stopped, and called out something that I could not understand, three, perhaps four words in a whining, howling language that must have been old and forgotten when Babylon was young; and, although I did not understand the words, I felt the hairs raise on the back of my head as it called.

And then I heard, muffled through the glass, but still audible, a low growl, a challenge, and, slowly, unsteadily, a black figure walked down the steps of the house, away from me, toward the Devil. These days the Black Cat no longer moved like a panther, instead he stumbled and rocked, like a sailor only recently returned to land.

The Devil was a woman, now. She said something soothing and gentle to the cat, in a tongue that sounded like French, and reached out a hand to him. He sank his teeth into her arm, and her lip curled, and she spat at him.

The woman glanced up at me, then, and if I had doubted that she was the Devil before, I was certain of it now: the woman's eyes flashed red fire at me; but you can see no red through the night-vision binoculars, only shades of a green. And the Devil saw me, through the window. It saw me. I am in no doubt about that at all.

The Devil twisted and writhed, and now it was some kind of jackal, a flat-faced, huge-headed, bull-necked creature, halfway between a hyena and a dingo. There were maggots squirming in its mangy fur, and it began to walk up the steps.

The Black Cat leapt upon it, and in seconds they became a rolling, writhing thing, moving faster than my eyes could follow.

All this in silence.

And then a low roar -- down the country road at the bottom of our drive, in the distance, lumbered a late-night truck, its blazing headlights burning bright as green suns through the binoculars. I lowered them from my eyes, and saw only darkness, and the gentle yellow of headlights, and then the red of rear lights as it vanished off again into the nowhere at all.

When I raised the binoculars once more there was nothing to be seen. Only the Black Cat, on the steps, staring up into the air. I trained the binoculars up, and saw something flying away - - a vulture, perhaps, or an eagle -- and then it flew beyond the trees and was gone.

I went out onto the porch, and picked up the Black Cat, and stroked him, and said kind, soothing things to him. He mewled piteously when I first approached him, but, after a while, he went to sleep on my lap, and I put him into his basket, and went upstairs to my bed, to sleep myself. There was dried blood on my tee shirt and jeans, the following morning.

That was a week ago.

The thing that comes to my house does not come every night. But it comes most nights: we know it by the wounds on the cat, and the pain I can see in those leonine eyes. He has lost the use of his front left paw, and his right eye has closed for good.

I wonder what we did to deserve the Black Cat. I wonder who sent him. And, selfish and scared, I wonder how much more he has to give.

Very nice. I've read a ton of Lovecraft and Gaiman as well but I was unaware of this old short story.

too late to read this...

/bookmark

ProdigalSigh: The Price

by Neil Gaiman

I haven't seen that story since High School - awesome find!

/IIRC (from High School a decade ago) the cat was Gabriel, Angel of Death - Gaiman (since it's in first person) was dead. The Devil came for his soul and, evidenced by the "letters" about coming home from his daughter, were actually his daughter mourning his death. The less his daughter mourned, the more wounded the cat was - until Gabriel couldn't fight anymore, and The Devil gets his soul.

//Think "The Raven"

ProdigalSigh: The Price

by Neil Gaiman

Tramps and vagabonds have marks they make on gateposts and trees and doors, letting others of their kind know a little about the people who live at the houses and farms they pass on their travels. I think cats must leave similar signs; how else to explain the cats who turn up at our door through the year, hungry and flea-ridden and abandoned?

We take them in. We get rid of the fleas and the ticks, feed them and take them to the vet. We pay for them to get their shots, and, indignity upon indignity, we have them neutered or spayed.

And they stay with us, for a few months, or for a year, or for ever.

Most of them arrive in summer. We live in the country, just the right distance out of town for the city-dwellers to abandon their cats near us.

We never seem to have more than eight cats, rarely have less than three. The cat population of my house is currently as follows: Hermione and Pod, tabby and black respectively, the mad sisters who live in my attic office, and do not mingle; Princess, the blue-eyed long-haired white cat, who lived wild in the woods for years before she gave up her wild ways for soft sofas and beds; and, last but largest, Furball, Princess's cushion-like calico long-haired daughter, orange and black and white, whom I discovered as a tiny kitten in our garage one day, strangled and almost dead, her head poked through an old badminton net, and who surprised us all by not dying but instead growing up to be the best-natured cat I have ever encountered.

And then there is the black cat. Who has no other name than the Black Cat, and who turned up almost a month ago. We did not realise he was going to be living here at first: he looked too well-fed to be a stray, too old and jaunty to have been abandoned. He looked like a small panther, and he moved like a patch of night.

One day, in the summer, he was lurking about our ramshackle porch: eight or nine years old, at a guess, male, greenish-yellow of eye, very friendly, quite unperturbable. I assumed he belonged to a neighbouring farmer or household.

I went away for a few weeks, to finish writing a book, and when I came home he was still on our porch, living in an old cat- bed one of the children had found for him. He was, however, almost unrecognisable. Patches of fur had gone, and there were deep scratches on his grey skin. The tip of one ear was chewed away. There was a gash beneath one eye, a slice gone from one lip. He looked tired and thin.

We took the Black Cat to the vet, where we got him some antibiotics, which we fed him each night, along with soft cat food.

We wondered who he was fighting. Princess, our white, beautiful, near-feral queen? Raccoons? A rat-tailed, fanged possum?

Each night the scratches would be worse -- one night his side would be chewed-up; the next, it would be his underbelly, raked with claw marks and bloody to the touch.

When it got to that point, I took him down to the basement to recover, beside the furnace and the piles of boxes. He was surprisingly heavy, the Black Cat, and I picked him up and carried him down there, with a cat-basket, and a litter bin, and some food and water. I closed the door behind me. I had to wash the blood from my hands, when I left the basement.

He stayed down there for four days. At first he seemed too weak to feed himself: a cut beneath one eye had rendered him almost one-eyed, and he limped and lolled weakly, thick yellow pus oozing from the cut in his lip.

I went down there every morning and every night, and I fed him, and gave him antibiotics, which I mixed with his canned food, and I dabbed at the worst of the cuts, and spoke to him. He had diarrhoea, and, although I changed his litter daily, the basement stank evilly.

The four days that the Black Cat lived in the basement were a bad four days in my house: the baby slipped in the bath, and banged her head, and might have drowned; I learned that a project I had set my heart on -- adapting Hope Mirrlees' novel Lud in the Mist for the BBC -- was no longer going to happen, and I realised that I did not have the e ...

Awesome short story. Thanks for posting it. Its amazing the visuals in your mind a truly talented writer can create. Reminds me that I watch far too much TV, and dont read nearly as much as I should.

My favorite Gaiman/Mythos story is "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar".

//It means the moon was nearly full and Dunwich was full of bloody peculiar frogs.

Jedekai: ProdigalSigh: The Price

by Neil Gaiman

I haven't seen that story since High School - awesome find!

/IIRC (from High School a decade ago) the cat was Gabriel, Angel of Death - Gaiman (since it's in first person) was dead. The Devil came for his soul and, evidenced by the "letters" about coming home from his daughter, were actually his daughter mourning his death. The less his daughter mourned, the more wounded the cat was - until Gabriel couldn't fight anymore, and The Devil gets his soul.

//Think "The Raven"

If that's the interpretation from your high school teacher, your teacher was an idiot. If it was you, you're not an idiot, you were just overinterpreting, which is what you do in high school.

It's a horror story, with reality giving it veritas. The cat was real and as hardcore as this. Princess was real (I believe she recently passed away), the daughter's letters, the wife, the trouble with BBC.

Only the battle with the devil is fiction. I think. Maybe. Sort of.

Gaiman's like that.

/loved Shoggoth's Old Peculiar
//and Graveyard Book

and thisis why i love gaiman... so i havent got much work done this morning but I did get to read three gaiman short stories... all in all a wonderful day

Wait... wait...

Did Cthulhu just pull a Fnorgby?

Link (new window)

TeH BlooP~!!

and the Cthulhu..

Link (new window)

t3knomanser: My favorite Gaiman/Mythos story is "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar".

//It means the moon was nearly full and Dunwich was full of bloody peculiar frogs.

Funny story, I had a friend who worked in a chemical plant and he never drank cherryade.

Tax Boy: It's nowhere as good as his "A Study in Emerald" (new window)

Sherlock Holmes + Old Ones = pretty damn good

Damn straight. Excellent story, especially if you're a Holmes nut like me.

KhamanV: Jedekai: ProdigalSigh: The Price

by Neil Gaiman

I haven't seen that story since High School - awesome find!

/IIRC (from High School a decade ago) the cat was Gabriel, Angel of Death - Gaiman (since it's in first person) was dead. The Devil came for his soul and, evidenced by the "letters" about coming home from his daughter, were actually his daughter mourning his death. The less his daughter mourned, the more wounded the cat was - until Gabriel couldn't fight anymore, and The Devil gets his soul.

//Think "The Raven"

If that's the interpretation from your high school teacher, your teacher was an idiot. If it was you, you're not an idiot, you were just overinterpreting, which is what you do in high school.

It's a horror story, with reality giving it veritas. The cat was real and as hardcore as this. Princess was real (I believe she recently passed away), the daughter's letters, the wife, the trouble with BBC.

Only the battle with the devil is fiction. I think. Maybe. Sort of.

Gaiman's like that.

/loved Shoggoth's Old Peculiar
//and Graveyard Book

What's the official story behind the story? Google has failed me today on this.

Hey There Cthulhu (new window)

katerbug72: Hey There Cthulhu (new window)

CURSE YOU!!!!!

I was about to post that

nitefallz: KhamanV: Jedekai: ProdigalSigh: The Price

by Neil Gaiman

I haven't seen that story since High School - awesome find!

/IIRC (from High School a decade ago) the cat was Gabriel, Angel of Death - Gaiman (since it's in first person) was dead. The Devil came for his soul and, evidenced by the "letters" about coming home from his daughter, were actually his daughter mourning his death. The less his daughter mourned, the more wounded the cat was - until Gabriel couldn't fight anymore, and The Devil gets his soul.

//Think "The Raven"

If that's the interpretation from your high school teacher, your teacher was an idiot. If it was you, you're not an idiot, you were just overinterpreting, which is what you do in high school.

It's a horror story, with reality giving it veritas. The cat was real and as hardcore as this. Princess was real (I believe she recently passed away), the daughter's letters, the wife, the trouble with BBC.

Only the battle with the devil is fiction. I think. Maybe. Sort of.

Gaiman's like that.

/loved Shoggoth's Old Peculiar
//and Graveyard Book

What's the official story behind the story? Google has failed me today on this.

From his website: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/07/black-on-black.html (Copy pasta)Third item down.

Doesn't explain much about the plot of the story but reveals that yes, "Snowflake" existed under another name and color scheme. I don't believe Mr. Gaiman has ever confirmed more than the salient points of the story; the baby slipping in the tub, the letters from his daughter, the number of cats in the household at any given time.

Having been kept by cats most of my life, one facing down the Devil on a nightly basis wouldn't surprise me.

Nor would one of my own gladly offering my soul on a platter to old Mr. Splitfoot for just the right price. Like, their testicles back.

nitefallz:

What's the official story behind the story? Google has failed me today on this.

Ugh, it is being a pain in the ass. I've been digging his blog archive (it has a useful search function), but it's being unclear.

I can confirm the "Snowflake is his real cat Princess bit" - here's an older update on her.

Link (new window)

I like that we have the same link. But yeah. The more mundane facts are generally true.

katerbug72: Hey There Cthulhu (new window)

Thanks for that. I had never heard that before, lol.

KhamanV: Jedekai: ProdigalSigh: The Price

by Neil Gaiman

I haven't seen that story since High School - awesome find!

/IIRC (from High School a decade ago) the cat was Gabriel, Angel of Death - Gaiman (since it's in first person) was dead. The Devil came for his soul and, evidenced by the "letters" about coming home from his daughter, were actually his daughter mourning his death. The less his daughter mourned, the more wounded the cat was - until Gabriel couldn't fight anymore, and The Devil gets his soul.

//Think "The Raven"

If that's the interpretation from your high school teacher, your teacher was an idiot. If it was you, you're not an idiot, you were just overinterpreting, which is what you do in high school.

It's a horror story, with reality giving it veritas. The cat was real and as hardcore as this. Princess was real (I believe she recently passed away), the daughter's letters, the wife, the trouble with BBC.

Only the battle with the devil is fiction. I think. Maybe. Sort of.

Gaiman's like that.

/loved Shoggoth's Old Peculiar
//and Graveyard Book

Gabriel isn't the angel of death, Azrael is.

sonder:

Gabriel isn't the angel of death, Azrael is.

That, too. Media depictions keep screwing it up. To be slightly fair, he's a messenger and seems to show up just before shiat gets real, so it's sort of understandable.

The Book of Enoch has him instigating wars among the children of the Grigori.

The Book of Awesome has him as Christopher Walken trying to get to and rip up a little kid for containing the soul of a natural born motherfarker. Still my favorite depiction of Gabriel.

KhamanV: sonder:

Gabriel isn't the angel of death, Azrael is.

That, too. Media depictions keep screwing it up. To be slightly fair, he's a messenger and seems to show up just before shiat gets real, so it's sort of understandable.

The Book of Enoch has him instigating wars among the children of the Grigori.

The Book of Awesome has him as Christopher Walken trying to get to and rip up a little kid for containing the soul of a natural born motherfarker. Still my favorite depiction of Gabriel.

Depending entirely on flavor (i.e. Islam, Judaism, Catholicism) Michael is the *good* angel of death, Sammael the *bad* angel of death, and Azrael an *archangel* of death.

For a dude who can't die, God's apparently awfully obsessed with death.

Thanks to Good Omens I'm still holding out for an epic Discworld/Sandman smash-up wherein Pratchett's Death runs into Gaiman's.

/Peachy

xxBirdMadGirlxx:

Thanks to Good Omens I'm still holding out for an epic Discworld/Sandman smash-up wherein Pratchett's Death runs into Gaiman's.

/Peachy

I'm pretty sure they'd swap shop talk over a good curry.

/I COULD MURDER A CURRY

s7venrw: katerbug72: Hey There Cthulhu (new window)

Thanks for that. I had never heard that before, lol.

You're welcome. I enjoy it more than the original song.

My memory must be going. I don't remember giving that interview...

KhamanV: xxBirdMadGirlxx:

Thanks to Good Omens I'm still holding out for an epic Discworld/Sandman smash-up wherein Pratchett's Death runs into Gaiman's.

/Peachy

I'm pretty sure they'd swap shop talk over a good curry.

/I COULD MURDER A CURRY

MURDER? GET IT? THAT WAS A PUNE, OR PLAY ON WORDS.
I'm laffin' like 'ell on the inside, Master.

xxBirdMadGirlxx: Thanks to Good Omens I'm still holding out for an epic Discworld/Sandman smash-up wherein Pratchett's Death runs into Gaiman's.

I still insist that Good Omens is definitely the best thing that Neil Gaiman ever did, and quite possibly the best thing that Pratchett did too. I just wish that Pratchett realizes this and gets Gaiman for another collaboration before Alzheimers scrapes the rest of his mind down the drain.

Pxtl: xxBirdMadGirlxx: Thanks to Good Omens I'm still holding out for an epic Discworld/Sandman smash-up wherein Pratchett's Death runs into Gaiman's.

I still insist that Good Omens is definitely the best thing that Neil Gaiman ever did, and quite possibly the best thing that Pratchett did too. I just wish that Pratchett realizes this and gets Gaiman for another collaboration before Alzheimers scrapes the rest of his mind down the drain.

Never in my life have I so wished I believed in God as I did the day I heard Mr. Pratchett had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's.

Not so I could pray for his recovery, but so I could curse God and renounce Him.

Since we're posting favorite Gaiman stories, how about this one, in the spirit of the holidays?

Nicholas Was...

older than sin, and his beard could grow no whiter. He wanted to die.

The dwarfish natives of the Arctic caverns did not speak his language, but conversed in their own, twittering tongue, conducted incomprehensible rituals, when they were not actually working in the factories.

Once every year they forced him, sobbing and protesting, into Endless Night. During the journey he would stand near every child in the world, leave one of the dwarves' invisible gifts by its bedside. The children slept, frozen into time.

He envied Prometheus and Loki, Sisyphus and Judas. His punishment was harsher.

Ho.

Ho.

Ho.



/Sent that out as a Christmas card a few years ago. Some friends and family were more amused than others.

Yay Cthulhu thread!

Anybody know if the new documentary (Fear of the Unknown) is any good, or if it just recycles the same ol same ol?

Smile! Cthulu loathes you!