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Nightmare Fuel / A Wrinkle in Time

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  • The Black Thing - the grandaddy Eldritch Abomination, a kind of Outer God composed of pure, black evil. And it's always hungry.
  • IT, a giant disembodied brain that enslaves or outright absorbs your mind. IT is the literal Eldritch Abomination and Hive Mind that runs the entire planet of Camazotz, subsuming any dissenting minds within ITself and cowing the rest into fearful, blind obedience. Anyone placed in IT's tender care either ends up completely insane or absorbed into IT, with the only exception being Meg.
    • And it's rammed home exactly what kind of eldritch horror the kids are dealing with when Charles Wallacenote  lets slip how IT thinks of ITself:
      Charles Wallace: IT sometimes calls ITself the Happiest Sadist.
    • An actual nightmare: all roads on Camazotz lead ultimately to IT.
  • At one point, the kids are accidentally transported to a two-dimensional planet for a few seconds. It nearly kills them.
  • IT's servant, The Man With Red Eyes, who talks about the potential enslavement of the universe in the politest terms possible and doesn't open his mouth when he talks. He lets the mask slip when he actually laughs at one point, a laugh that would not be out of place from a Lovecraftian Great Old One (which essentially he is.) Then he channels IT to take control of Charles Wallace...
  • The fate of the boy with the ball, who is seen being tortured for bouncing his ball out of sync with the other children.
  • The rather casual, banal way which Charles explains how Camazotz deals with illness - even minor ailments such as the common cold.
    Charles Wallace: We let no-one suffer. It is so much kinder to simply annihilate anyone who is ill. Nobody has weeks and weeks of runny noses and sore throats. Rather then endure such discomfort, they are simply put to sleep.
    Calvin: You mean they're [literally] put to sleep while they have a cold, or that they're murdered?
  • Tessering: what does nothingness actually feel like?
    • If you're doing it properly, such as the Mrs. Ws can do, it feels mildly uncomfortable, like being in a walk-in refrigerator. If you don't, such as Mr. Murry's frantic tesser away from IT, you get hit with absolute-zero cold. Now combine that with the fact that they had to tesser through the Black Thing to escape. It damn near kills Meg, and even though she survives, it takes Meg a lot of time and very careful care from the Beasts of Ixchel to recover from that.

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