O Povo do Poço de A. Merritt .
Sua descrição está correta. Eu não tenho certeza se nos disseram exatamente onde a história se passa, mas começa com a luz azul do outro lado da montanha:
North of us a shaft of light shot half way to the zenith. It came from behind the five peaks. The beam drove up through a column of blue haze whose edges were marked as sharply as the rain that streams from the edges of a thunder cloud. It was like the flash of a searchlight through an azure mist. It cast no shadows. As it struck upward the summits were outlined hard and black and I saw that the whole mountain was shaped like a hand.
O homem não está rastejando em um trenó:
I threw a pile of wood on the fire and, as it blazed up, saw something break through the bushes. It walked on all fours, but it did not walk like a bear. All at once it flashed upon me – it was like a baby crawling upstairs. The forepaws lifted themselves in grotesquely infantile fashion. It was grotesque but it was – terrible. It grew closer. We reached for our guns – and dropped them. Suddenly we knew that this crawling thing was a man!
Eu não vou passar por toda a história, mas o homem pede que o corpo seja queimado quando ele morrer:
"You're wrong," said the crawling man. "I'm not insane. Give me a very little to drink. I'm going to die soon, but I want you to take me as far South as you can before I die, and afterwards I want you to build a big fire and burn me. I want to be in such shape that no infernal spell of theirs can drag my body back to them."
O artigo da Wikipedia sobre Abraham Merritt descreve-o como uma grande influência em Lovecraft. Eu não teria colocado suas histórias no Cthulhu Mythos, embora elas sejam obviamente semelhantes. Tendo dito que Wikipedia o inclui na lista de escritores de Cthulhu Mythos .