The aquarium

Jeremy keeps mi-go. In his living-room he has a 100-litre tank stocked with about a dozen tropical mi-go of various colours - green, red, orange, mottled. At night, under the UV light in the tank, they glitter with pale fluroescence as they display their antennae-lights to each other, a constellation of tiny eldritch horror. During the day they shelter dreamily among the non-Euclidean basalt monoliths that Jeremy had imported for them. Occasionally they make forays across the tank's pale grey gritty substrate, singly or in groups of three or seven, leaving little trails of intricate occult import in their wakes. Sometimes, when all else in the house is quiet, Jeremy thinks he hears them clicking to each other with their tiny crab-claws over the constant humming and bubbling of the filter. He has begun to think he understands them, although he laughs this off self-deprecatingly.

Jeremy has kept things in tanks since he was a child. Starting off with goldfish and sea-monkeys in a glass bowl, he spent his pocket-money on ever grander tanks and more finicky occupants. He had his failures, of course: the yabbies cooked when a filter short-circuited and the octopus kept escaping, getting as far as the bus-stop down the road before expiring. The mi-go are by far his most complex project. He wrote a web article on the best way to use LEDs to simulate the stars being right to keep the fungi alive, how to reproduce the transmundane essences that they feed on, and how to stop their chelating fungal dreams clogging the tank's filter. He idly dreams about becoming an authority among aquariumists on keeping mi-go. He hopes that his pets will someday breed, but no one has managed that with captive mi-go since Alhazred's day. He studies the ancient sage's cryptic aquarium notes for hints on how to make the stars right for the fungi to sporulate.

Jeremy's wife Deb hates her husband's obsession with the star-fungi, and especially the way they gather at the front of the tank to observe her when she's watching 'Idol'. Given half a chance Deb would get rid of them or kill them - a kettle of boiling water over the lot! She has begun to think the repulsive little beasts know her intentions and mock her for her inability to act on them.

Deb knows the old adage that pet-owners come to look like their pets. Is Jeremy growing more fungal? Have his ears and nose begun to glitter at night? All she knows is the longer the little beasts are in her house, the less she wants Jeremy to touch her.

Deb has bought an Elder Sign on eBay and keeps it in her handbag, despite its brooding heaviness. One excuse, one final straw, and she will not hesitate to use it on him.