’TWAS the night before Winter Solstice, when all through the ship

Not a creature was stirring, not even a zoog;

The sacrifices were bled by the altar with care,

In hopes that ST. CTHULHU soon would be there;

The children were shackled all snug to their walls,

While nightmares of calamari danced in their skulls;

And mamma with her cauldron, and I with my black cat,

Had just frenzied our brains for a long Witches’ Sabbat,

When out on the sea there arose such a foetor,

I sprang from the altar to see what was the matter.

Away we all scrambled from the ritual Black Mass,

Tore open the porthole and threw wide the glass.

The stars were right, on the Antarctic snow

Giving the lustre of midnight to the albino penguins below,

When, what to my horrified eyes should appear,

But a gargantuan sloop, and eight slimy Cnidar[ians],

With a Great Old abomination, so loathsome and cruel,

I knew in a moment it must be St. Thul.

More rapid than nightgaunts his jellies they came,

And he gurgled, and gibbered, and called them by name;

“Now, Dzyan! now, Derleth! now, Pickman and Gug!

On, Cthäat! on, Chaugnar! on, Dunwich and Bokrug!

To the top of the temple! Through the darkness we crawl!

Now slime away! Slime away! Slime away all!”

As wet leaves that before the wild Ithaqua fly,

They consume any obstacle, as they ooze, through the sky;

So up to the ship-top the jellies they flew,

With the sloop full of shoggoths, and St. Cthulhu too.

And then, in a wink, I heard on the mezzanine

The prowling and pawing of things most obscene.

I drew in my head and hoped to run to the shore,

When through the ceiling St. Cthulhu crashed with a roar.

He was draped all in slime, from his head to his claw,

And his jaws were blood-stained from the men crammed down his maw;

A bundle of torsos he had flung on his back,

And he looked like a nightmare from abysses quite black.

His eyes — how they glimmered! His tentacles how gory!

His teeth were like harpoons, his head the size of a lorry!

His drooling mouth gaped wide enough to swallow a tree,

And the beard of his tentacles was as green as the sea;

The stump of a leg he held tight in his teeth,

And noxious foetor encircled his head like a wreath;

He had an eldritch face and an extra-dimensional girth,

That shook when he chortled, like he might swallow the Earth.

He was bloated and vast, a right loathsome Old One,

And I genuflected when I saw him, quite forgetting my gun;

A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,

Soon gave me to know I had everything to dread;

He gibbered not a word, but went straight to his lunch,

And ate all the family, with a bone-snapping munch,

And laying his talon aside of my head,

Bit it right off, leaving me deathless yet dead;

He sprang to his sloop, to his team gave a gurgle,

And away they all flew with a blasphemous burble,

None were left to hear him exclaim, ere he oozed out of sight,

“Merry Cephalopodmas to all, and to all a squid-night!

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”

Twitter: @barrows_rite

Image credit: Artist — Hongqi Zhang