One of the greatest misconceptions among Lovecraft fans is that his creation, Nyarlathotep, has only a thousand forms. The idea stems from the novella Dreamquest Of Unknown Kadath, in which Nyarlathotep appears as a Pharaoh, giving the story’s protagonist a warning, “pray to all space that you may never meet me in my thousand other forms.” What readers tend to overlook is the key word “other” i.e. that in addition to the slender Pharaoh there are also a thousand others… for a grand total of a thousand and one. I went on a dream-quest of my own, looking for the illusive one, the one that Lovecraft fans are probably most familiar with, but whose origins have always been unknown.

The first stop on my quest was a letter to S.T. Joshi, a Mythos Scholar and leading figure in the field of Lovecraftian study. I described to him the Internet’s most popular version of Nyarlathotep, a three-legged giant with a blood-red tongue (or tendril) in place of a face. It’s the first thing querents see when performing a Google search and I wanted to know where that particular avatar came from. To my surprise, S.T. had never heard of it, “I’m afraid I can’t recall ever seeing Nyarlathotep outlined or depicted in that way,” he wrote. “What a bizarre interpretation! It’s certainly not Lovecraft.” Joshi was right. No description of Nyarlathotep appears in Lovecraft’s writing that matches the three-legged creature, so I contacted another expert: Robert M. Price, a theologian, writer and former Baptist minister, credited as playing a major role in the revitalization of Lovecraft’s work.

I asked Price about what Richard Svensson called The Howler avatar. Richard is a filmmaker and animator in Sweeden, who named The Howler in his behind the scenes tutorial The Making Of The Other Gods. The name was important, because it appears in the title of a Richard L. Tierney story, edited by Price and first published in Price’s fanzine Crypt Of Cthulhu. Price responded to my inquiry with a message that was short but sweet, “I just scanned through the story and there’s no description of Nyarlathotep in it, though he is mentioned glancingly, once. Good hunting!” I didn’t want to take Robert’s word, so I obtained a copy of the Tierney story and sure enough, The Howler In The Dark turned out to be a severed human head, kept alive by misfit Antiquarians in the subterrene caverns of a spooky old castle. Frustrated, I decided to go straight to the source and wrote a letter to Mr. Howard Philips Lovecraft.

Lovecraft is the adopted name of artist and thespian, Leeman Kessler. Since 2012 he’s been portraying his namesake H.P. Lovecraft in the web series Ask Lovecraft. Kessler’s likeness as well as incite has always been remarkable and his video response to my question was both poetic and instructional. He pointed me toward Chaosium’s role playing game, Call Of Cthulhu, stating that the large, three-legged tongue (or “little scamp”) was probably a creation of the game’s makers. I didn’t have any of the COC source material, but did find an interesting article, written by Doug Bolden, attempting to link Call Of Cthulhu’s Nyarlathotep to August Derleth’s The Dewller In Darkness.

Bolden’s article gives a detailed account of Nyarlathop in the Derleth story, but doesn’t support the COC connection by citing Nyarlathotep’s description in the game’s pages, or its first illustrated appearance. I found a copy of The Dweller In Darkness (first published in Weird Tales) and though Derleth describes Nyarlathotep as a giant, that description doesn’t exactly match the three-legged giant in Doug’s article. The closest Derleth comes to the Internet’s Howler is to recount an Artist’s depiction, “The drawing represented some kind of creature, but no one could tell what it was; it was certainly not a man, but on the other hand, it did not seem to be hairy like a beast. Moreover, the unknown artist had forgotten to put in a face.” Later, Derleth’s characters encounter a stone carving, illustrating Nyarlthotep as being, “a vast amorphous creature,” with a, “curious, cone-like head which even in stone seemed to have a fluidity which was unnerving.” Derleth never mentions the iconic three legs, but, after corresponding with Doug, I was pointed toward Sandy Petersen’s Field Guide To Cthulhu Monsters, published by Chaosium and illustrated by Tom Sullivan.

I obtained a copy of Petersen’s Guide, printed in 1988, which did list at least five Nyarlathotep avatars, including a brief description of The Howler In Darkness: “the three-legged monstrosity illustrated to the right, often spotted howling at the moon for unguessable purposes.” I can’t include Tom’s wonderful illustration, but I did get a comment, “I wish I could help. I recall the tripod legs, the eye in the palm and the tentacle-like face/snout instructions. My information came in a paragraph supplied by Chaosium. It may have been Sandy Petersen’s description.”

I was having trouble reaching Sandy, so I checked with some of his other illustrators. Earl Geier shared, “From what I remember of working with Chaosium, I’d get a quote, which sounded like Lovecraft and then a specific instruction, especially if the quote had more than one option.” Richard Luong, illustrator for Sandy’s newest Lovecraft game (Cthulhu Wars) remembered the following when asked what inspired his three-legged avatar: “Sandy came to me with a short description of characteristics he wanted to make sure to have: three legs, no face, not too human hands.”

Since it was clear that Sandy knew something no one else did, I knew we had to talk, but every piece of contact info I found for him was out of date. My best option was to keep looking, while simultaneously looking for clues in any Chaosium material published before 1988. The big break finally came when I began corresponding with Tristan Oberon, of Spain, who for over eight years has been diligently cataloging books, games, films and anything else involving the Mythos (for his blog Susurros Desde La Oscuridad).

Tristan and I wrote back and fourth, considering every Chaosium resource we could think of. The company released multiple versions of Call Of Cthulhu, as well as a number of companion scenarios, but thanks to another blogger, Michael Bukowski, I’d been concentrating on the Masks Of Nyarlathotep campaign and Tristan had it. The first edition cover published in 1984, had the very first pictorial representation of what was then called The Bloody Tongue. It’s a faceless giant, with a bloody tongue or tendril in place of a head, but its lower half is hidden by clouds and there’s no mention of The Bloody Tongue having three legs in the book. The game does contain another Nyarlathotep avatar, known in India as The Small Crawler, with three legs, but the first person to put all the elements together turned out to be a woman named Lisa A. Free.

I’d been unwittingly looking at Lisa’s drawings from the moment my quest landed me on Chaosium’s shores. Her work appears in Petersen’s Guide and dozens of other Chaosium books, but it’s the easiest to overlook, since she almost invariably drew nothing but silhouettes for Call Of Cthulhu’s size comparison charts. Her crucial silhouette, the giant, tongue-headed, three-legged Nyarlathotep, was first published in Fragments Of Fear, the second Call Of Cthulhu companion, originally released in 1985.

I needed to speak to Lisa, but unlike Chaosium’s other Artists, she stopped working and it took nearly a week to find her number. I left a few messages, but never got a response. I kept trying and when someone finally did answer her phone they didn’t do it with a friendly “hello.” They only picked up the receiver and greeted me with an eerie silence. I wasn’t sure what to think, or do, so I waited, until the silence was unbearable… until it was obvious that someone was holding the receiver to their head, listening, like a hunter waiting for a twig to snap. Terrified, I snapped, “Hello? This is the reporter from Seattle. I’m trying to reach Lisa?” The awful quiet continued, until a wave of bad psychic mojo altered the sound of silence, then the malign listener hung up.

It would be a cold day in Cthugha’s belly before I tried calling Lisa again. Further research indicates that since leaving Chaosium, she’s become a born again Christian and in 2010 an RPG internet forum user suggested that the illusive illustrator had publicly denounced role playing games as, “the work of the Devil.” Still, I was able to piece together a theory based on her work.

The 1984 Masks cover was a Tom Sullivan pic. At that time he was illustrating The Bloody Tongue as described in the campaign’s pages. By the following year The Bloody Tongue was already becoming the most popular version of Nyarlathotep among Chaosium Gamers and when the company wanted a size comparison chart for Fragments, their icon had only ever been drawn from the waste up, so Lisa had to fill in the blank. Even in silhouette, her Nyarlathotep is almost an exact match for Tom’s Bloody Tongue. She either invented the three legs because she thought they were cool, or extrapolated from the Small Crawler avatar in Masks.

Eventually, Sandy and I began a dialogue. I ran my theory past him, but he must’ve been busy, because his entire response was simply “I took my description of The Howler directly from Lovecraft’s dream, which has been published under the name The Thing In The Moonlight.” I read The Thing In The Moonlight and though it does contain a howling creature, with what could be construed as a bloody tongue, Lovecraft’s tentacle-faced dream was not described as a three-legged giant and was easily mistaken for a man until its face came into view. So again, the 1985 silhouette remains… Lisa’s Howler was the first to incorporate elements of Lovecraft’s dream, Derleth’s Dweller, Tom’s Tongue and Chaosium’s creatures. With no interest in the heathen annals of gaming, Lisa’s become as faceless as the dark icon she helped to create, but the key word to the question is “helped.”

When I first wondered about The Howler’s origin I imagined one answer that could be credited to a single individual, but the final Howler was the brain-child of a community with much more than a thousand and one faces. Lisa helped finalize The Howler by being the first to combine the community’s best efforts. Derleth, Free, Sandy and Sullivan all contributed pieces to a larger puzzle, all did their best to conserve, create and continue Lovecraftian horror. Now that horror has taken on a life of its own and thanks to the next generation of fans, Gamers, Artists, etc., the horror will last, beyond the wildest dreams of even the blackest abyss.