Crouch End (short story)
Police constables Ted Vetter and Robert Farnham are working the night shift at a small station in the London suburb of Crouch End.While they are 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.Eventually, Doris once again encounters the two disfigured children, who summon an enormous, hideous, otherworldly being from beneath the ground of Crouch End (implied to be the Lovecraftian goddess Shub-Niggurath).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.Doris returns to America with her children, where she attempts suicide and spends time in a mental hospital, but eventually learns to live with the memory of Crouch End and is released.