Discarded Prelude to an Uncompleted Tale

The uncouth creature loped toward the pale willow tree and knelt to the place where grass did not grow.  How curious, that such a canine countenance could look so sly, so cunning.  It raised its green eyes to the full moon and uttered a sound of low baying, and those who heard the sound while sleeping found themselves plunged into depths of strange nightmare that is unique to Arkham.  Now, in modern time, people have mostly forgotten the unique relationship that moonlight has with Arkham; but it was recalled on this night, in this haunted place, by the beast that wrapped its talons around pallid willow vines.  The blasphemous thing breathed heavily, and clouds of vapor issued from its large mouth.  As it blinked jade-green eyes to dead moonlight it chortled to think, with what remained of its once-human brain, of its relationship with the lifeless globe of dust in the sky.  It scanned the silt on which it hunkered, unwinding once monstrous paw from the willow vines so as to etch a sigil in the earth.  Its hand formed into a fist, with which it pounded the ground; and from shadowed places in the graveyard there came the echo of other fists that beat the earth, fists that belonged to fiends pent in darkness.

Something stirred beneath the earth in response to ghoulish pounding, and residents of Arkham moaned as their dreams grew heavy and liquescent--an ethereal bile.  The creature bent to kiss the earth, and when it lifted its head there was a faint coating of yellow debris on its mouth.  Pursing impossible lips, it exhaled so that the chalky particles sailed before its face; and then the pallid cloud drifted down to conjoin with other residue that, sifting upward through the earth, formed as filthy phantom.  Weirdly, the willow vines writhed in greeting of the revenant. The specte raised what might have been a hand so as to make motions to the moon, the moon that darkened and took on a crimson tint as it washed Arkham with a blood-hued pall that seeped into the dreaming of poetic souls.  The old witch-town was haunted by those who screamed in sleep.

The hunkering ghoul drank in the screams of dreaming mortals as its jade orbs shimmered in ruddy darkness.  Others of its kindred crept to join it beneath the willow, forming a semi-circle of shadowed things that watched the chalky apparition. Some few, glancing on the scene, may have been reminded of a painting by Richard Upton Pickman, in which the diabolic artist had created the portent portrait of a hag hanging from a gallows.  Beneath the swaying corpse were gathered an assembly of fiends who paid homage to the murdered witch with moon-washed eyes.  Such eyes watched now, as the pallid shape seemed to try and solidify, to assemble as something more than spectral.  It was not to be, and thus the ghost split into particles of dust that drifted again unto the graveyard ground.

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There are a number of things about that explain why I have discarded this particular tale.  Mainly, it is too similar to what I have already written.  How many times can I write of moonlit graveyards and their ghouls?  How often can I evoke Lovecraft's sinister artist?  It all feels too familiar, like I am stuck into some ghastly mode from which I need to escape.  So I share it with ye here.  The writing does not go well.  Mostly, I am bored with the things I try to work on.  Too, I am depress'd about my inability to find a full-time job.  However much I love writing my books, those books bring in so little money and do not help to pay ye bills.  Perhaps that is the root of my depression--I have to grow-up and live in the "real" world.  Bleh....