The Invaders

"The Invaders" is a short Cthulhu Mythos story by Henry Kuttner, writing under the pen name Keith Hammond. 
==Plot==
The tale tells of horror writer Michael Hayward who accidentally unleashes monstrosities from a forgotten age upon the Earth.
Hayward, who lives in an isolated cottage on the beach north of Santa Barbara, California, finds the formula for a narcotic drug in Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis. He creates the substance and begins taking it. This drug is a "time drug", allowing Hayward to read the akashic record and recover ancestral memories. Because he did not properly obey the instructions to use magical protections such as the Pnakotic pentagram, he exposed himself to the danger of the ‘the dwellers in the Hidden World’ who now took notice of him. 
Hayward uses the drug to help him prepare a manuscript, which read:
-there the manuscript ended.
The creatures from beyond, resembling gigantic eyeballs with small tentacles on their underside and a small puckered mouth, begin to mutate plants and animals surrounding his beachside house, and eventually even abduct one of his acquaintances, sending a misshapen wrecked undead version of the man back to Hayward, crawling along the beach. The entities then begin to directly impinge upon Earthly reality, the implication being they will mutate and overwhelm normal existence if not somehow stopped.
Eventually, Hayward successfully invokes Vorvadoss of Bel-Yarnak and the interdimensional creatures are banished once more.
==Publication History==
First published in the debut issue of Strange Stories in February 1939, "The Invaders" has since been reprinted several times, and has also been translated into Italian.
Category:Henry Kuttner works
Category:Lovecraft Circle Works