SOURCE: "The Light-House" by Edgar Allan Poe & Robert Bloch (Fantastic, January-February 1953)

DESCRIPTION: "...Pale lips parted as I held out my arms, and she moved closer. Pale lips parted--and I saw the pointed teeth, set in rows like those of a shark. Her eyes, fishlike and staring, swam closer...And now the golden one was gone and in its place was the bloated, swollen obscenity of a thing long-drowned and dead, risen from the slime..." ("The Light-House" by Edgar Allan Poe & Robert Bloch)

NOTES: The Companion is called from the sea by the Light-House keeper's loneliness. It is a cold thing that will kill him and take him into the sea. The companion is destroyed by the man's dog, Neptune.

HISTORY: There is striking similarity to this creature and the one in Robert E. Howard's Merman in "Out of the Deep". Both turn into a mass of seaweed when destroyed. Howard's story was written twenty years before Bloch's but published fourteen years after. Had Bloch seen Howard's story in manuscript?

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