Her father [opened the bedroom door to prove to Amy the rooms were not haunted and] swung around to glare at her. "What is it now?" Amy couldn't speak -- couldn't move. The back of her right hand had touched the wall, and felt not wood but cold bare brick. That was why she had gasped and stumbled away from the wall, but it wasn't why she was paralysed now. The dim walls of the windowless room were peeling and patchy with moisture, and so was the face of the figure that had reared up beneath the unlit bulb. It was taller than her father, and thinner than anything except bones could be.

Danny's vision Another shape, looming, rearing. Huge and rectangular. A sloping roof. Whiteness that was blurred in the stormy darkness. Many windows. A long building with a shingled roof. Some of the shingles were greener, newer. His daddy put them on. With nails from the Sidewinder hardware store. Now the snow was covering the shingles. It was covering everything. A green witchlight glowed into being on the front of the building, flickered, and became a giant, grinning skull over two crossed bones. "Poison," [imaginary friend] Tony said from the floating darkness. "Poison."
Now he was in a room filled with strange furniture, a room that was dark. Snow splattered against the windows like thrown sand. His mouth was dry, his eyes like hot marbles, his heart triphammering in his chest. Outside there was a hollow booming noise, like a dreadful door being thrown wide. Footfalls. Across the room was a mirror, and deep down in its silver bubble a single word appeared in green fire and that word was: REDRUM.

Ash took the last step into the hall and walked to its center where he slowly turned in full circle in an attempt to get a bearing on the sound. The cellar door was ajar. The voice drifted up from its depths. Although his footsteps were soft as he approached the open doorway, the faint humming stopped. He bent close to the gap, waiting, listening, a draft chilling his face. Nothing.

"I don't stay after I set out dinner. Not after it begins to get dark. I leave before dark comes. We live over in the town, six miles away. So there won't be anyone around if you need help. We couldn't even hear you, in the night. No one could. No one lives any nearer than the town. No one else will come any nearer than that. In the night."

- Housekeeper Mrs. Dudley

Every sound was heard exxageratedly: the crackling of the fire, the infinitesimal creaking of his chair, the sound of his breath soughing in and out. The smell of the house became intense. The texture of his clothes felt rough against his skin. He could feel the delicate waft of heat from the fire. He frowned. But nothing else. What was happening? It made no sense to him. This house had to be gorged with impressions. The moment he'd walked in on Monday he'd sensed their presence like some cloud of influences, always ready to attack, take advantage of the slightest flaw, the least misstep in judgment. It struck him suddenly. Misstep in judgment! Instantly he started pulling back. But, already; something dark and vast was hurtling at him, something with discernment, something violent that meant to pounce on him and crush him. He gasped and pressed back hard against the chair, recoiling his awareness desperately. He was not in time.

Gilman's dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably colored twilight and baffingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain.

- The Dreams in the Witch House

When at last we plunged into the town itself, clambering over fallen masonry and shrinking from the oppressive nearness and dwarfing height of omnipresent crumbling and pitted walls, our sensations again became such that I marvel at the amount of self-control we retained. Danforth was frankly jumpy, and began making some offensively irrelevant speculations about the horror at the camp -- which I resented all the more because I could not help sharing certain conclusions forced upon us by many features of this morbid survival from nightmare antiquity. The speculations worked on his imagination, too; for in one place -- where a debris-littered alley turned a sharp corner -- he insisted that he saw faint traces of ground markings which he did not like; whilst elsewhere he stopped to listen to a subtle, imaginary sound from some undefined point -- a muffled musical piping, he said, not unlike that of the wind in mountain caves, yet somehow disturbingly different. The ceaseless five-pointedness of the surrounding architecture and of the few distinguishable mural arabesques had a dimly sinister suggestiveness we could not escape, and gave us a touch of terrible subconscious certainty concerning the primal entitles which had reared and dwelt in this unhallowed place.

- At the Mountains of Madness

The sun was down behind the hill, and the light was off the fields, and when the clock bell in the church tower struck seven, I thought no longer of kind mellow evening hours of rest, and scents of flowers and woods on evening air; and of how someone on a farm a mile or two off would be saying, 'How clear Betton bell sounds tonight after the rain!"; but instead images came to me of dusty beams and creeping spiders and savage owls up in the tower, and forgotten graves and their ugly contents below, and of flying time and all it had taken out of my life. And just then into my left ear -- close as if lips had been put within an inch of my head, the frightful scream came thrilling.

- A Neighbour's Landmark