Category Archives: Bonechilling Ideas

I took a very interesting walk this Halloween morning, shortly before dawn. Barely had a begun when I noticed a hot air balloon drifting overhead. I see quite a few hot air balloons over my house, on windless mornings and evenings, but this was the first time I’d seen one during actual twilight. It made for a striking sight, because every time whoever was aboard triggered the burners the whole balloon envelope would light up against the gray sky. It was something to see.

A bit later I startled a pack of coyotes, and watched their shadowy forms darting with liquid grace across a nearby field until they’d crested a hillock and left my view. Again, this was unusual, because while there are plenty of coyotes around here, they are usually heard but not seen.

(No photo because elusive)

Finally, as I approached the house, I came across the grisly scene of a scattering of bloody scraps of fur and broken bits of bone.

Clearly, two of these scenes are related to one another. The only question is, why are passing aeronauts dropping cracked and bloody bones near my house? Is it some sort of message, or just chance that they wrapped up some dark airborne ritual while they were overhead? Updates as I gather them…

I find it a bit disturbing that this here is being called an “Octopus Beanie”

It brings to mind previous incidents where the eldritch Cthulu was confused with an octopus, which is what makes me nervous.  Now, if it is simply a matter of pie makers and knitters assuming that the audience of cephalopod lovers is a richer vein than Lovecraft enthusiasts, that’s fine – people who can’t count to eight deserve to be bilked, I say.  But what if this is all a plan from beyond, and someone in R’lyeh is trying to make sure that when he shows up, he gets confused for an octopus?

Something to think about.

Looks like we’ve finally found Yuggoth.  It’s all well and good to find new planets, but this one seems like it could be a problem.  I mean:

It came to the earth from lead-grey Yuggoth, where the cities are under the warm, deep sea.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Horror in the Museum”

That just sounds a bit ominous.  On the other hand:

Yuggoth… is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system… There are mighty cities on Yuggoth—great tiers of terraced towers built of black stone… The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They have other subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples… The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridges—things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids—ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen…
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Whisperer in Darkness”

Dante or Poe – that’s pretty cool, right?

Man, what is this?

I mean, on the most basic level, it is a sign that announces that one can shred CDs here.  But the enthusiasm of the text, with its exclamation point, is kind of unsettling to begin with.  The fact that the CD in the picture is smiling so cheerfully while being shredded is next-level unsettling.  But the really unsettling part is that we’re clearly not looking at a happily suicidal anthropomorphic compact disc.  No, that is obviously a grinning lil’ Cthulu hiding behind a shredder.  Those aren’t shreds of aluminum, my friends – they are obviously tentacles.

I think I’m staying clear of that shredder, is what I’m saying.  Shredders are probably the worst otherworldy portals there are.

For Halloween, a spoooky image I’m using to inspire a redneck eldritch story I’m writing:

The sentence “Blueberry and Octopus Pie?  This dessert will prove you wrong!” is easily the best collection of words I’ve read all week, so thanks to WowAmazing for that.  But that ain’t no octopus.  The folks at WowAmazing had best tread carefully.  Ph’nglui mglw’nafh C’thulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn, after all, and he doesn’t want to hear about being mistaken for an octopus.

I’m totally making that pie, though.

If I can’t use this as the prompt for the most bonechilling story ever, well, I don’t know what’s wrong with me:

I’ve shared a number of bonechilling ideas over the years, for the edification of my readers.  I’m not sure how the latest would work as a story idea, but it certainly was bonechilling.  I was riding along on my bike, minding my own business, passing what I assumed to be a roadkilled squirrel in the other lane, as one does quite a bit in these parts.  When the squirrel sprang to its feet and darted in front of me, I didn’t have time to so much as twitch, and rolled over it with a nasty thump.  Worse yet, thanks to my speed, the squirrel was kicked up and back by my tire, where it grabbed on to my ankle with super-squirrel strength.

I reacted coolly to this development, of course, unclipping from my pedal and shaking it off while saying something witty that I can’t quite recall at the moment in calm, measured tones.  It didn’t look too good as it bounced along the pavement behind me, but once I’d collected myself and returned, planning to put it out of its misery, it was gone.

Now, I don’t wish to alarm anyone, but it is pretty clear that we’re dealing with a zombie squirrel here, and where there is one zombie squirrel there are others.  Worse yet, given the speed with which it moved, it seems these are not a canonical Romero-esque shambling zombies, but rather the fast, “28 Days Later”-ish zombies.