Night mverzi

Fictional characters from the books of H. Lovecraft (1890-1937).

He writes about them like this:

"When I was six or seven years old, I was constantly tormented by strange and recurring nightmares in which creatures of a monstrous race (called by me "night monsters" — I don't know where I got this name from) grabbed me by the stomach and carried me through the endless distance of the black sky over the towers of dead and terrible cities. Finally they brought me into the gray void, from where I could see the needle-like peaks of giant mountains miles below. And then they would leave me—and when, like Icarus, I started to fall, I would wake up in such horror that I was afraid of the very thought of falling asleep again.

The "night Mverzi" were black, thin and like rubber creatures with horns, spiked tails, wings like bats, and no faces at all. Undoubtedly, I extracted this image from the confused memories of Dora's drawings (mostly illustrations for "Paradise Lost", [i.e. Paradise Lost is an epic poem John Milton, first published in 1667]), whom he admired in reality. They were voiceless, and their only real torture was the habit of tickling my stomach before grabbing me and carrying me away. From somewhere I vaguely knew that they lived in black holes dotted with the peak of some incredibly high mountain.

They were packs of about twenty-five or fifty creatures, and sometimes they were thrown by me among themselves. From night to night I dreamed the same nightmare with only minor differences — but before waking up I never had time to fly to those terrible mountain peaks."