The Thing in the Cellar

Also on file as: —

Not a creature in any conventional sense but an immense, gelatinous, root-like mass occupying the earth beneath a single house, sustaining itself by slowly draining the vitality of whoever lives above it across generations. It surfaces only as sickness, bad dreams, and a foul phosphorescence in the cellar — until acid, poured directly into the ground it occupies, finally gives it a shape worth naming.