“The Painting That Should Never Have Been“ – A Lovecraftian Drabble

The young artist sighed and delicately laid down his brush and palette.

 The tableau was almost complete but already he imagined he could feel a mesmerising influence.

It was unmistakably the finest painting of his life, but though he knew it not, there are some effigies that ought not be captured.

Pausing to reach for his coffee he brushed past the painting and unexpectedly felt an agonising twinge on the wrist.

As a gargantuan dose of venom surged through his body he looked back at his easel and spotted fresh blood depicted on the fangs of one of Medusa’s vipers.

“The Circle of Stone“ – A Lovecraftian Drabble

The ceremony was in barely a week and he had yet to formulate his plan of action.

The local villagers, the overcast weather, the infamous house, even the thorn bushes and shrubs that surrounded the abandoned mansion all seemed to have conspired against him.

In all truth he was aware of an abundance of coincidences, but not that his free will had been seductively suppressed by the pictures on the wall.

Unable to break free from their enticing charm, he meandered his way up the grassy verge to the foot of the ancient stone circle, then calmly awaited his fate.

“Return of the Ancient Adversary” – A Lovecraftian Drabble

He awoke to the sound of the deep space claxon, its undulating wail reverberated off the battlecruisers hull.

Somewhere out there beyond the colonised systems a relay satellite had detected a radiation anomaly.

False alarms caused by failing circuitry many millennia old were often the cause, but he wasn’t stationed out this far from civilisation to ignore readings.

Silencing the claxon, he instructed the computer to rotate the ship about and close the distance.

Mentally calculating the journey in centuries, he fervently hoped he didn’t die of old age first, as that would negate his family receiving any posthumous bonus.

“Released by Heaven“ – A Lovecraftian Drabble

He was born in the city of towering smoke blocks, and growing up they were all he knew.

As a man he spent each day working in their shade, and deep down he knew he would die having never escaped these looming megaliths of stone and glass.

Yet on clear nights, he would open his windows and lean out to stare up at the stars.

Over time they became his friends, for each he named and knew on sight.

Such firm friends they became that they were moved by his plight, so one dreamy night they mercifully bore him away.

“She-Devil“ – A Lovecraftian Drabble

Hereabouts in swamp gator county there’s a town that now ain’t more than a few ornery folk waiting to taste dirt.

The place used to be a real hoot, full of shindigs and moonshine, ‘til poor Bessie lost her beau an’ her husband on the same day.

That husband of hers was mean as an ox, while her beau was kind-a wiry and had nervous shifty eyes.

No-one rightly knows what went on the day her husband came home full of whisky, but the timing in which her beau first buried him and was then buried himself was mighty suspicious.

“A Head for Alternative Medicines“ – A Lovecraftian Drabble

Following my forlorn struggle against the advancement of my leprosy, I turned to an old friend and physician for a monumental favour.

I had long known of his notoriety in polite circles; however, it was not his bedside manners but his advocation of Caribbean native medicines that I was in dire need of.

Had I only known how far beyond ethical his experimenting had progressed.

The procedure he outlined was incredulous, bordering on lunacy, but it offered my only hope for a prolonged existence.

Thus, I lie here inert and my new body currently rejects all directed thoughts summoning locomotion.

“The Artist’s Reinvigoration“ – A Lovecraftian Drabble

Having submitted his latest painting, he locked his studio for the season.

It had been an arduous labour of love that had left him feeling burned out and short of inspiration.

As he always did after such a commission he retired to a quiet secluded hamlet on the coast and become reacquainted with nature.

He loved the ebbing tides and the clashing rocks, the spewing waves and the lightning storms.

He shunned the nearby town, with its needless seafront amusements and its mindless jabbering tourists, which is why he alone spotted the deep one making off with another unconscious bride.

“The Opponent You Cannot See“ – A Lovecraftian Drabble

The plateau was littered with the scattered bodies of the dead and dying, testament to the ranged intoxication effects of the flower.

The mazes composition was continuous static walls which, though invisible, meant that they could be navigated by logic, which is precisely why the flowers were planted at its centre.

Robbed of their ability to think clearly, the lure of the powerful central prize attracted the greedy, fools whose own imaginations and paranoia would then finish them off.

More than one had collapsed and died agonisingly unaware that through random chance they had already blindly stumbled through an exit.

“The Earth’s Last Hope“ – A Lovecraftian Drabble

Hope, earth’s last human, had lived a solitary existence, though she was barely a creature that anyone previously living would have recognised as such.

A thousand millennia of sunspot activity had melted the poles, scorched the grasses and boiled the oceans of an ozone depleted planet.

Culture, society and civilization were concepts forgotten eons before, as successive progenies struggled merely to survive.

Hope had never ventured this deep underground before, but her daily quest for water was unremitting.

Sadly, disadvantaged by ignorance, she was incapable of attaching any significance to the tiny click of an epoch old boobytrap she disturbed.

“A Beautiful Untruth“ – A Lovecraftian Drabble

As I sit here composing this carefully worded condolence telegram, I find that my vocabulary falls far short of what is required.

What believable lie exists when, because of national security, I am prevented from insinuating that which I know to be true, that he was murdered by an assassin because he idled too close to an aeon old corpse that potentially held the secret to petrifying all of humanity?

The alternative, that this unfortunate lady is now a widower because her late husband accidentally violently strangled himself while patrolling an empty museum at night.

The right words escape me.