Crouch End (short story)
| "Crouch End" | |
|---|---|
| Author | Stephen King |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Cthulhu Mythos |
| Genre(s) | Horror, Science fiction short story |
| Published in |
New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1st release), Nightmares & Dreamscapes |
| Publication type | Anthology |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Publication date | 1980 |
Crouch End is a horror story by Stephen King, originally published in New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1980), and republished in a slightly different version in King's Nightmares & Dreamscapes collection (1993). It contains distinct references to the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.
A television adaptation aired July 12, 2006 on TNT, as part of Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King. A song by British black metal/dark ambient band The Axis of Perdition uses excerpts from the story as lyrics.
Police constables Ted Vetter and Robert Farnham are working the night shift at a small station in the London suburb of Crouch End. They discuss the case of Doris Freeman, a young American woman who came in to report the disappearance of her husband, lawyer Lonnie Freeman. Nearly hysterical, Doris arrived in the station speaking of monsters and supernatural occurrences.
Doris relates how she and her husband got lost while searching for a potential employer's house in Crouch End. While looking up the employer's address in a phone book, the cab they had hired mysteriously disappears, and the entire neighborhood becomes strangely deserted and alien, with the sole exception of a cat with a scarred face, and two children, one of whom has a deformed hand. After encountering something unseen beyond a hedge, Lonnie becomes unhinged, and eventually disappears while the couple is walking through a tunnel, leaving Doris alone and scared out of her mind as the surroundings become increasingly bizarre and alien; even the night sky no longer shows Earth's stars, but some unknown alien sky. Eventually, Doris once again encounters the two disgfigured children, who summon an enormous, hideous, otherworldly being from beneath the ground of Crouch End (implied to be the malevolent Lovecraftian goddess Shub-Niggurath). The monster has seemingly consumed Lonny, alongside countless others whose spirits are now trapped in its body, and whose faces Doris glimpses trapped in the body of the being. After that, Doris remembers nothing else, until she woke up huddled in an entrance way back in the real world. Newcomer Farnham dismisses the story as a delusion caused by mental illness, but Vetter, who has policed Crouch End for decades, is not so sure, remembering a number of similar missing-person cases from years gone by. He speculates about other planes of existence, and of Crouch End perhaps being a location where the divide between our world and an alien, demonic world is somehow lesser.
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