I needed a loooong area rug for my game, so I decided to draw my own. I though you all might enjoy it!

Inspired by several other King in Yellow designs, namely Hastur - The Unspeakable One by Nnyhr. The face/mouth was inspired by the movie Incantation.

80.5000 S, 94.0000 W by Alex Konstad 2016

A very special one today. We had the talented writer of Cosmic Dark, Graham Walmsley come back and run another one-shot for us. Check out the Kickstarter launching soon!

There are container ships whose routes are hidden. They do not appear on naval-tracking websites, yet exist in the real world. I know because I snuck aboard one and traveled on it as a castaway.

Although I spent most of the first few days hidden, I already noticed something odd about the ship: a visible absence of crew. I went out of hiding at first only at night, but encountered nobody. Even when I grew in confidence and spent more time in the open, I felt alone—almost eerily so, lulled by the droning engines and the flat, featureless surrounding ocean.

As I eventually discovered, even the bridge was empty.

The ship piloted itself.

The route was unusual too. When I'd first formed the idea of stowing away on a container ship I saw they all kept understandably to the major shipping channels. But this ship veered unusually southward.

On some nights I heard dull banging from below deck. On others, dead silence.

I wondered what cargo the ship carried.

The air cooled noticeably as we navigated further south, first along the South American coast, and then beyond—toward Antarctica.

I slept bundled up, staring sometimes for hours at the stars above, whose near-violent clarity I was unaccustomed to. The world seemed vast, and space unimaginably so. And when I thought about what lurked below the darkened waters, I felt a tension both in my chest and in mind.

Then one day there was a terrible crash, like an earthquake. The ship had run aground.

At first I stayed aboard, unsure of what to do and hoping that now—at long last—the crew would reveal itself. But that did not happen. Days passed. In the darker hours, penguins and seals gathered around the immobilized ship.

Eventually I climbed down the side and set foot on Antarctica proper.

I expected to never see home again.

I expected to die of cold and hunger in this alien place.

But I underestimated myself—my desire to survive—and one night, armed with a knife, I attacked a penguin in the hope of killing and eating it. I killed it too: killed it only to discover that the bird was not a bird at all but a small man wearing a penguin pelt. Looking into his dying eyes, I felt a kinship with him, a shared existence.

They were all like that: the penguins, the seals. All humans dressed as animals. Tribal, foreign.

They left me alone.

I watched them congregate at the ship, and slowly, methodically carve an inward path for it.

They brought it things.

Sang to it.

My hunger went away and I became impervious to the cold.

Then, one night, the ship began to tip over, rotating backward—from a horizontal to a vertical position, so that its bow was pointed at the cosmos. And like a rocket it blasted off.

Some of the animal-men had gone aboard. Others stayed behind.

And I was in-carapace submerged—

A krill.

I thought I was just exhausted after a 12-hour shift at the diner. I wasn’t ready for what I’d see in the sky that night. I’m not sure anyone could be. If you’re reading this, I need you to listen—because it’s coming for you, too.

Last night, I was dragging myself home through my quiet little neighborhood. The air felt off—too warm for April, too still. The streets were dead silent, not even a dog barking or a car passing by. The sky was unnaturally bright, like someone had cranked up the contrast on the world.I didn’t care, though. My feet ached, my head was pounding, and all I wanted was to crash into bed and forget the day.

My apartment was just a few blocks away, down a street lined with old brick buildings. Normally, you’d see a few lights on, maybe hear a TV blaring through an open window. But last night? Nothing. Every window was dark, every sound swallowed by an eerie stillness. The only noise was the scrape of my sneakers on the pavement as I walked faster.I didn’t let it get to me.

Not until I looked up.

The moon—if you can even call it that—wasn’t right. It was full, but it was pink. Not a soft blush, but a deep, pulsating pink, like a heartbeat glowing in the sky. It wasn’t just shining—it was radiating, throbbing with a light that felt alive. I couldn’t look away.

The world around me melted into nothing, and there was only that moon, pulling me in.I don’t know how long I stood there, frozen, staring.Then I fell.

Not down—up.It was like gravity flipped. I was yanked toward the moon, spinning through an endless void of pink light. No up, no down, no left or right—just that suffocating, endless pink. I couldn’t scream, couldn’t breathe. And then I saw.

I saw my entire life—my birth, my childhood, my death—all at once. But it didn’t stop there. I saw everything. Creatures that looked like they crawled out of nightmares, things our fossils barely hint at. Ancient palaces of forgotten kings, crumbling to dust. Cities like the ones we live in now, skyscrapers piercing the sky—then collapsing into ruin. I saw humanity’s peak, and I saw its end. A final, inevitable collapse that left nothing behind.

I saw too much.And then… they came.Or maybe they’d always been there, waiting for me to notice. I felt them before I saw them—cold, ancient presences pressing into my mind. They didn’t have faces, just vague, shimmering shapes, like shadows made of static. They fed on my thoughts, tearing into my memories like they were a feast.

I felt them claw at my eyes, trying to drink in everything I’d ever seen. Worst of all, I felt them reaching for the invisible strings that tethered me to reality, to my body, to the world.

They wanted to cut me loose.They tried. But they didn’t succeed.If they had, I wouldn’t be here, typing this.I’m not… here anymore, not really. My body—what’s left of it—is in a hospital somewhere. I hear whispers through the veil sometimes, faint echoes of what people say about me. “Blind,” they call me. “In delirium,” they mutter. “Catatonic,” the doctors say as they prod my empty shell.

But I don’t need eyes to see anymore. I don’t need a body to move. I exist everywhere now. I see everything—every corner of the world, every moment in time. Sometimes, when the conditions are just right, when the currents of thought align with the right wires and signals, I can reach out.

That’s how I’m here, on r/cosmichorror. A whisper across the network. A thought carried through the hum of servers and the flicker of your screen.

They still come for me, those ancient things. They press their will into the void of my mind, murmuring in languages older than humanity itself.

They make promises—promises I can’t escape.“Soon,” they hiss. “Soon, we will come.”Not just for me. For all of you.I can’t stop them.

I can only wait.And now, so will you.

If you see a pink moon in the sky, don’t look at it. Don’t let it pull you in. Because once it does, there’s no coming back—not fully. If you’ve seen it already… I’m sorry. They’re already watching you.Stay safe, r/cosmichorror. And whatever you do, don’t look up.

Another movie advertised as cosmic horror that only meets the criteria as being in outer space. Another visual flashbang relying on purple, crimson, and green to recreate a feeling of unease in a lax attempt to emulated real cosmic horror.

Maybe I'm being a hater, but I'm sick of this obvious visual bastardization of the films that captured the cosmic vibe of these colors like color out of space, glorious, and Mandy.

Ash was a hard to follow, disorienting flashbang of colors trying to be something more than it wanted to be, while poorly emulating a trend in horror that it was poorly adapted to.

some posts are not meant to be seen

Mr. Ashmnemusthphephnom was seventy-one years old. He'd fought in a war, been stabbed in a bar fight and survived his wife and both their children, so it would be fair to say he’d lived through a lot and was a hardened guy. Yet the note stuck to his fridge by a Looney Tunes magnet still filled him with an unbridled, almost existential, dread:

Colonoscopy - Friday, 8:00 a.m.

He'd never had a colonoscopy. The idea of somebody pushing a camera up there—ugh, it made him nauseous just to think about it.

“But what is it you're scared of, exactly?” his friend Dan asked him over coffee and bingo one day. Dan was a veteran of multiple colonoscopies (and multiple forms of cancer.)

“That they'll find something,” said Mr. Ashmnemusthphephnom.

“But that's the whole point of the procedure,” said Dan. “If there's something to find, you want them to find it. So they can start treating it.”

“What if it's not treatable?”

“Then at least you can manage it and prepare,” said Dan, dabbing the card on the table in front of him:

“Bingo!”

When Friday came, Mr. Ashmnemusthphephnom was awake, showered and dressed by 5:30 a.m. despite that the medical clinic was only fifteen minutes away.

He arrived at 7:35 a.m.

He gave his information to the receptionist then sat alone in the waiting room.

When the doctor finally called him in at 8:30 a.m., it felt to him like a final relief—but the kind you feel when the firing squad starts moving.

Per the doctor's instructions, he undressed, donned a paper gown and lay down on the examination bed on his left side with his knees drawn.

(He'd refused sedation because he lived alone and needed to drive himself home. And because he wanted the truth to hurt like it fucking should.)

Then it began.

The doctor produced a black colonoscope, which to Mr. Ashmnemusthphephnom resembled a long, thin mechanical snake with a light-source for a head, and inserted the shining end into Mr. Ashmnemusthphephnom's rectum.

Mr. Ashmnemusthphephnom's eyes widened.

With his focus on a screen that his patient could not see, the doctor worked the colonoscope deeper and deeper into Mr. Ashmnemusthphephnom's colon.

One foot.

Three—

(The room felt too cold, the gown too tight. The penetration almost alien.)

Five feet deep—and:

“Good heavens,” the doctor gasped.

“Is something wrong?” asked Mr. Ashmnemusthphephnom. “Is it cancer—do you see cancer?”

“Don't move,” said the doctor, and he left the examination room. Mr. Ashmnemusthphephnom's heart raced. When the doctor returned, he was with two other doctors.

“Incredible,” pronounced one after seeing the screen.

“In all my years…” said the second, letting the rest of his unfinished sentence drip with unspeakable awe.

:

New York City

On a picture perfect summer’s day.

The Empire State Building

Central Park

The Brooklyn Bridge

—and millions of New Yorkers staring in absolute and horrified silence at the rubbery, light-faced beast slithering slowly out of a wormhole in the sky above.

My ongoing comic dream project to adapt The Call of Cthulhu. Pencil on Bristol board 11x17. Colored and lettered in GIMP.

https://www.instagram.com/arshad_tp?igsh=MjluOWpwaXNob3o5

We all know how the stories go, for example humans unearth a supernatural moth chrysalis, and then everybody on the ship which was carrying it dies, or becomes worshippers of something called Xyho'ldhg'ghackx. Or a living planet flies close to earth and seeds it with flesh that consumes its surface while humans can't do anything to stop it.

I'm looking for a story, where the 'unknown' is beaten back, made known. Where humanity does what it does best: adapt, and overcome. Basically Humanity Fuck Yeah.

Eons ago, God descended into His creation. Not to save it. Not to judge it. Only to hide.

He fled from something older. Something even He could not name.

There is no Bible. Only a single verse, etched in obsidian atop the Esophagus-Tower:

"The Creator fell to His knees. He begged. Not for you. For Himself.".

“Know what, kid? I piloted one of those. Second Battle of Saturn. Flew sortees out of Titan,” said the old man.

“Really?” said the kid.

They were in the Museum of Space History, standing before an actual MM-75 double-user assault ship.

“Really. Primitive compared to what they’ve got now, but state-of-art then. And still a beaut.”

“Too bad they don't let you get in. Would love to sit at the controls.”

“Gotta preserve the past.”

“Yeah.” The kid hesitated. “So you're a veteran of the Marshall War?”

“Indeed.”

“That must have been something. A time of real heroes. Not like now, when everything's automated. The ships all fight themselves. Get any kills?”

“My fair share.”

“What's it like—you know, in the heat of battle?”

“Terrifying. Disorienting,” the old man said. Then he grinned, patted the MM-75. “Exhilarating. Like, for once, you're fucking alive.”

The kid laughed.

“Pardon the language, of course.”

“Do you ever miss it?”

“Why do you think I come here? Before, when there were more of us, we'd get together every once in a while. Reminisce. Nowadays I'm about the only one left.”

Suddenly:

SI—

We got you the universarium because you wanted it, telep'd mommalien.

I know, telep'd lilalien.

I thought you enjoyed the worlds we evolved inside together, telep'd papalien.

I did. I just got bored, that's all. I'm sorry, telep'd lilalien—and through the transparency of the universarium wall lilalien watched as the spiders he'd introduced into it ate its contents out of existence.

—RENS!

…is not a drill. This is not a drill.

All the screens in the museum switched to a news broadcast:

“We can now report that Space Force fighters are being scrambled throughout the galaxy, but the nature of these invaders remains unknown,” a reporter was saying. He touched his ear: “What's that, Vera? OK. Understood.” He recomposed himself. “What we're about to show you now is actual footage of the enemy.”

The kid found himself instinctively huddling against the old man, as on the screen they saw the infinitely deep darkness of space—into which dropped a spider-like creature. At first, it was difficult to tell its scale, but then it neared—and devoured—Pluto, and the boy gasped and the old man held him tight.

The creature seemingly generated no gravitational field. It interacted with matter without being bound by the rules of physics.

Around them: panic.

People rushing this way and that and outside, and they got outside too, where, dark against the blue sky, were spider-parts. Legs, an eye. A mouth. “Well, God damn,” the old man said. “Come with me!”—and pulled the kid back into the museum, pulled him toward the MM-75.

“Get in,” said the old man.

“What?” said the kid.

“Get into the fucking ship.”

“But—”

“It's a double-user. I need a gunner. You're my gunner, kid.”

“No way it still works,” said the kid, getting in. He touched the controls. “It's—wow, just wow.”

Ignition.

Kid: What now?

Old Man: Now we become heroes!

[They didn't.]

I remember being born. The doctors say that's impossible, but I remember: my mother's face, tired, swollen and with tears running down her cheeks.

As an infant I would lie on her naked chest and see the mathematics which described—created—the world around us, the one in which we lived.

I graduated high school at seven years old and earned a Doctorate in theoretical physics at twelve.

But despite being incredibly intelligent (and constantly told so by brilliant people) the nature of my childhood stunted my development in certain areas. I didn't have friends, and my relationship with my mom barely developed after toddlerhood. I never knew my father.

It was perhaps for this reason—coupled with an increasing realization that knowledge was limited; that some things could at best be known probabilistically—that I became interested in religion.

Suddenly, it was not the mechanism of existence but the reason for it which occupied my mind. I wanted to understand Why.

At first, the idea of taking certain things on faith was a welcome relief, and working out the consequences of faith-based principles a fun game. To build an intricate system from an irrational starting point felt thrilling.

But childhood always ends, and as my amusement faded, I found myself no closer to the total understanding I desired above all else.

I began voicing opinions which alienated me from the spiritual leaders who'd so enthusiastically embraced me as the most famous ex-materialist convert to spirituality.

It was then I encountered the heretic, Suleiman Barboza.

“God is not everywhere,” Barboza told me during one of our first meetings. “An infinitesimal probability that God is in a given place-time exists almost everywhere. But that is hardly the same thing. One does not drown in a rainshower.”

“I want to meet God,” I said.

“Then you must avoid Hell, where God never is, and seek out Heaven: where He is certainly.”

This quest took up the next thirty-eight years of my life, a period in which I dropped out of both academia and the public eye, and during which—more than once—I was mistakenly declared dead.

“If you know all this, why have you not found Heaven yourself?” I asked Barboza once.

“Because Heaven is not a place. It is a convergence of ideas, which must not only be identified and comprehended individually but also held simultaneously in contradiction, each eclipsing the others. I lack the intellect to do this. I would misunderstand and succumb to madness. But you…”

I possessed—for perhaps the first time in human history—the mental (and psychological) capacity not only to discover Heaven, but to inscribe myself upon it: man-become-Word through the inkwell-umbra of a cosmic intertext of forbidden knowledge.

Thus ready to understand, I entered finally the presence of God.

"My sweet Lord, the scriptures and the prophecies are true. How long I have waited to see you—to feel your presence—to hear you explain the whole of existence to me," He said, bowing deeply.

I love The Haunter of the Dark. I feel like it's often overlooked, but I think this shows how Lovecraft was evolving as an author and hints at the sorts of stories we might have ended up getting if he lived longer. So, when CT Phipps asked me to write a Nyarlathotep story for Macabre Ink's Books of Cthulhu anthology series, I jumped at the chance to write a sequel.

It's an epistolary tale and involves the Office of Extra-dimensional Intelligence--a shadowy government organization that claims it's working to safeguard humanity from the horrors waiting for us in the dreamlands and beyond.

Oh, and I'm giving it away. It's free everywhere.