The Lovecraftian Horror of Potterville

{If you look closely, as George flees from the "Ct'ulhu Club", in the top left hand window, a tentacular and bloody horror is taking place. Other shadowy brachiae play about in the top right hand window.}

{Ok, it's more impressionism, but I had to lightly freehand with a mouse and MS Paint.)

"I've got hold of some bad whiskey, or something," George wheezed. "Strange things have happened since a bloody thing got Clarence and dragged him to the Netherworld. I've seen froggish-faced men at the Dime-A-Dance - and worse."

"Listen, Bub, I got my own problems. My Boss, up those stairs, is pretty demanding. It's sacrifice this, and sacrifice that, all night long. And if that weren't bad enough to scour my soul to Hell, there's Old Man Potter. He makes the "Thing up the Stairs" seem like a lap cat."

George tapped the bar twice, and the bartender grasped a bottle of scotch with a lobster-like claw and poured two fingers in a filthy shot glass - straight, no ice.

"You can drink all you want, but a nothingness like you ain't gonna get drunk. Ya never existed, the Whisperers say, so at least the Boss ain't gonna eat ya. However, Potter may have a few things he wants to do to ya, and I wouldn't wish that abhorent domdaniel of evil on a piece of fungal slime. God help ya, if there be a God left."

At that moment screams of women came from up the stairs, and George knew immediately one the voices. He wished that not only could lose the hearing in his formerly-bad-ear, but go completely deaf. It was a tortured voice he'd known from the age of 9; it was the voice of Violet - and the way it was strangled into silence, he knew that Violet was no more.

He threw his drink away, and bolted through the door; pushed past two men in worn haberdashery and half rotted faces, and then out into the snowy night. He fled, heart pounding, while behind him the screams from the upper rooms of the Ct'ulhu Club only seemed to increase in agony. Those horrid sounds seared their sounds in his brain as if pressing a hot wax record. He'd play that sound of terror over and over in the days to come ...

_____

Actually, It's A Wonderful Life is one of my holiday favorites, and I never fail to shed tears at the end - sentimentalist that I am. Still, the terrible horror portrayed in the film belies the Capracorn and really makes you wonder about the creepy doings behind the facade of Potterville.