03/19/2025 Snippet, PICKMAN’S MODELS.

This is getting weird.

…

These stairs had to be easily ten times as long as the first set, and Tobias started wondering halfway through why his subconscious felt it necessary to make him walk through every one of them. It felt vaguely sadistic, or at least antagonistic. He told himself that it was probably an obscure punishment for some past neurosis, and kept going.

The staircase ended in a clearing of oak trees, if oak trees glowed like something out of an old Azz and Hastur cartoon. Briefly, Tobias wished that the gear on the table had included a flashlight — but then he realized it didn’t matter. The eldritch green light was easily enough to let him see the grove.

Including the bodies littering it.

Tobias squatted to look at one. It wasn’t a person, thankfully, although its paws looked far too much like hands for comfort. It sort of looked like a cat or rat, or maybe a monkey, but with tentacles where its mouth should be–

“It’s got a mouth, Boss,” Buckley’s voice came from behind him. Tobias jumped at that, and refused to feel bad about it. “A real nasty one, too,” Buckley went on, ignoring Tobias’s reaction. “All full of teeth that like to chow down on human meat.”

“I’m impressed with myself,” Tobias told Buckley. “I didn’t think I had the kind of imagination to come up with something this weird.”