The Thing in the Forest

The Thing in the Forest, watercolor, copyright Nina Leung, 2017

  "It's head appeared to form, or become first visible in the distance, between the trees. Its face-which was triangular-appeared like a rubbery or fleshy mask over a shapeless sprouting bulb of a head, like a monstrous turnip. Its colour was the colour of flayed flesh, pitted with wormholes, and its expression was neither wrath nor greed, but pure misery. Its more defined feature was a vast mouth, pulled down at the corners, tight with a kind of pain. Its lips were thin, and raised, like welts from whipstrokes. It has blind, opaque white eyes, fringed with fleshy lashes and brows like the feelers of sea-anenomes. Its face was close to the ground, and moved towards the children between its forearms which were squat, thick, powerful, and akimbo, like a cross between a monstrous washerwoman and a primeval dragon. The flesh on these forearms was glistening and mottled. every colour, from the green mould to the red-brown of raw liver, to the dirty white of dry rot." - A.S Byatt, Little Black Book of Stories