Trophies

Somewhere between the water buffalo and the ibex, you lost track of just how many stuffed and mounted animal species you’d seen. Somewhere between the snow leopard and the Yag-Kosha, you lost track of what was an animal and what was a chimera. The lamplight flickering through the ceiling fans on the wooden beams adds to the disorienting effect of the tangles of antlers and tusks and tentacles.

If this sounds like the beginning scene of yet another version of “The Most Dangerous Game,” it is. But unlike so many versions of the story where the protagonists outwit or out-deus-ex-machina their way out of the situation, this does not end well for you.

You will be hunted. You will be killed. And your head will join the trophies.

Oblivion

The gaping maw of oblivion. The screams of the damned echoing from the darkness. The hot, humid breath of the all-devourer, emanating from a void ringed with sharp, yet rotting teeth. The all-consuming one’s massive, muscular tongue roils in his mouth. His teeth sink into your flesh. Your hot blood spills across his taste buds. You die, horribly and painfully, your bones crunched in the giant mouth of an eldritch god.

Statistics

Whenever I hear medical statistics, like the average length of the small intestine, or the number of quarts of blood in the human body, it always makes me wonder how these things are quantified. How many autopsies have to be performed to arrive at a given figure? Were the families of the deceased always notified when such measurements were being made, or was this being done in the Wild West days of medicine, before standard ethical practices were in place? Either way, your assailants would know better than most how much standard deviation there is in the statistic that the average human has 20 square feet of skin.

The Library

It seems like you’ve been trapped in this creepy house for ages while the storm rages outside. You decide to curl up with a good book. The library is mostly a bust, though. There’s several tomes in languages you’re not familiar with – for some, you’re not even sure it’s human language. There’s some dullsville pamphlet called On the Sending Out of the Soul, and an equally snore-inducing volume called Revelations of Gla’aki. You finally settle on a play called The King in Yellow. A few hours later, your killers find you curled up, clutching your knees, rocking back and forth and gibbering. You don’t remember how they kill you. All you know now is madness.

Detachable

When you spend a fair amount of time on the Wikipedia page for Cthulhu mythos deities, funny little things start to stand out, like the fact that at least two of them have detachable body parts. Yibb-Tstll has detached eyes in addition to her bat wings, and Ayi’ig is a cephalopod-esque horror whose tentacles can detach and operate on their own (and who apparently lives in Texas, because why not?). I’m not sure what the deal with that is. Who knows, maybe the creator was staring at a Mr. Potato Head. However, this might go some way toward explaining why your former companions decided to chop you up into your constituent parts and leave you strewn about like an unfinished game of Cootie.

Fire

Now you know how a hot dog feels as it’s burned to a crisp in a campfire, assuming the hot dog is sentient and can feel pain and has been pushed into the fire by its fellow hot dogs after they doused its little hot dog clothes in gasoline.

Alive

The good news is, you’re still alive. The bad news is, they’re burying you anyway. Hope you’re good at digging -– assuming you can Uma Thurman your way out of this coffin.