The Beasts of Nuthatch
an excerpt

However strange and disturbing the breathy, whistling music of the flute may have been, it was also soporific and Elanor felt her limbs grow slack and nerveless. As she sat, head drooping, in the blood and filth stained chamber it was as if the piping music became her whole world, nothing outside of those terrible cadences existed or mattered. Colours swam behind her eyes, her head felt tremendously heavy and her neck soft and malleable like damp clay. Her jaw hung, slackly open and, although her tongue was still pinned by the cruel metal bridle she wore, all sensation seemed to have fled, leaving only numbness. It was as though a great wave of fatigue had overtaken her, mind and body, as though the dreadful, ululating flute was sapping all her vital energy as it warbled on and on.
How long passed in that paralysing trance, Elanor could not say but a sudden realisation caused her attention and the strength of her limbs to flood back. It was as though a bucket of just melted snow had been tipped down her back so profound was her horror. For there came a sudden awful awareness that the fluting was no longer only from the warped young man in front of her, for she could distinctly hear an answering warble from the alcove behind her! Though her heart quailed at the prospect of what lay at her back, yet Elanor feared far more the prospect of not knowing. With a sick, empty feeling in her stomach and the burning of bile in her throat, Elanor turned to look upon the player of the answering pipes.
But behind her stood only the monstrous, lumpen statue, its slick surface glistening wetly in the flickering candle light. She fancied then that it must be some strange quality of the alcove in which the ugly stone figure squatted, some curious echo that gave the illusion of an additional piper. Although, the dancing shadows thrown across the surface of the thing by the single lantern did give the hint of animation. Indeed, the four thick growths that hung like stalactites from the statue's face seemed to twitch and pulse in time to the strange music. The more she gazed upon the thing though, the more pronounced the twitching and pulsing became, until they began to writhe in a manner that could not possibly be accounted for by the flickering of a candle flame, not even by the most stoic and practical of minds. There could be no doubt, the statue itself was moving.
As Elanor watched, spellbound, the dread statue's four tentacles raised sinuously before its face like a blindfolded man feeling his way. With a rising sense of horror, Elanor saw that these thick, prehensile growths each ended in a sort of round orifice, that opened and closed like some ghastly, mucilaginous mouth. It was from these 'mouths' that Martin's whistling notes found answer, each one having – or so it seemed – a separate voice. Along the length of each tentacle were several rows of thorn like protrusions, each of which moved independent of its neighbours, waving in the air as though questing for something. And at the root of the wormlike tentacles, the four limbs joined together surrounding a fist sized opening into which the thorny 'teeth' vanished. Every now and then this spiny orifice would contract and then open again as though in a spasm, each motion drawing glistening strings of some clear, slimy secretion across the hole.
Gradually, like a spreading rot, more and more of the statue became animated, its bulbous, rubbery head questing blindly to and fro. As the thing's curiously jointed limbs gained vitality, it flexed them one by one, testing the air with the fingerless cups of flesh that were its hands. Eventually the whole ghastly creature had become living flesh, though such rubbery, rugose flesh had surely never belonged to any natural animal living or dead. The thing's colours seemed to change at random, though it took a while to notice this. Clouds of dark greens, blues, greys and purples drifted across its glistening hide, as though it reflected some thunderous other worldly sky.