“Give it to it, son!” shrieked my father in obvious terror.   And I realised the creature was demanding the blue crystal.

“No!” I shrieked trying to pull my hand from my father’s grasp to stop him giving the stone to Shub-Niggurath.

“Give it to it and they’ll let us alone!” shrilled my father, sounding barely sane.

“Nooooooooooo, we need it to get back home!” I shouted, not really knowing if this was true.   Doing my best to hold onto the blue crystal, despite my father’s determination to force me to drop it, I began to stare hard into the semi-translucent centre of the stone.

I had nearly given up all hope as the abominations slithered to within inches of us when finally the an image began to appear in the centre of the crystal.   Once more it started out as a thin, filmy mist, then began to take on the outline of Melbourne Town.   Then as I concentrated fiercely the image began to localise until it had narrowed to the western suburbs where I lived.

“Noooooooooo!” shrilled my father and I felt him jerked from my grasp.   Looking round despite my determination not to lose the image within the crystal, I saw Lex being held by what I can only describe as a green blob of jelly with great tentacles, parrot-like beaks and seemingly a thousand eyes set at random around its swelling, bulging mass.

Racing across I grabbed my father’s right hand as the tentacles of the creature encircled his left arm and waist and concentrated on the image of Footscray in the western suburbs, like I have never concentrated before.

“Nooooooooooo!” shrieked my father again.   But even as he shrieked the air began to darken again, and although I could still hear the slither-slop-crawling of a myriad monstrosities in the dark, my fear was gone as the murky darkness began to clear again and we were returned to the safety of our own living room.

Even today I can recall the terror of seeing the slithering obscenities bearing down on my father Lex and I.

“We’re home, dad, we’re home!” I cried in delight turning to where I thought my father stood beside me.

As shrill screams began to ring out deafening me, at first I thought it was my mother and sisters.   Then as I felt myself falling into darkness again, this time a dead faint, I realised the screams came from me.

Even today I can clearly recall the shocked screams of my mother, my two sisters, and myself, at the sight of my father lying dead upon the bedroom floor, in a pool of his own blood.   Or rather as much of my father as I had managed to pull free from the grasp of the green blob as I came through: his right hand, head, neck, and torso down to just above the belly button.   His lower body was nowhere in sight.

THE END