(Excerpted from the short story "Come", which can be found here. )
We stood there, side-by-side. Sharon dropped to her knees, a hand over her mouth. The awful smell washed over us, making the hot, muggy air thick. The light, which had a certain shimmer to it, was shining from above us, but neither of us was looking at it. The tunnel now opened up into a nearly unimaginably massive cavern. The floor of this cavern tilted down into a sort of crater, and it was at the center of this crater that our eyes were locked. I'm not sure... exactly how I can describe what we saw, but I'll do my best. It was round, a sort of spherical object half-buried in the dirt and rock. It's surface, it's skin--which moved in and out slightly, breathing--was a blueish-gray hue, and hung loosely on what looked like giant ribs, arranged in a circle, their points coming together at the top of the sphere, where they formed... I don't know, teeth, and a mouth. Around the circumference, slanted slightly so that some of them were half-buried as well, sprouted hundreds, maybe thousands, of tentacles, all different thicknesses and lengths, swaying side-to-side, hypnotically. The sphere itself must have been a a hundred-fifty, two-hundred yards across. Massive. And some of the longer tentacles were two-thirds-again as long as it was wide. I can't do it justice with words--it hurt my eyes to look at it, it just didn't make any goddamn sense. It lay something like a hundred yards away and somewhat below us.
I dropped to my knees beside my wife and was noisily sick.
