And Nyarlathotep. Someday i will come up with a way to adapt that into an audio drama.
Easy. Just make it a Lovecraft 5 story, as told by Herbert (the dry skeptic -- the only appropriate member of the group for this story). Open with an indication that it's been a while since the others have seen him. Some sort of nervous collapse, but he's all right now, more or less -- all right, and back to work. We come in at the first meeting of the Five since Herbert's collapse, where he explains to his friends just what happened to him.
Here he recounts the story of "Nyarlathotep," the itinerant showman (a charlatan as far as Herbert is concerned). Herbert, while working on... something (which field of science does he work in? Whichever it is, he's working on something with possible ominous implications -- splitting the atom if he's a physicist, contagious disease if he's a biologist, studying the formation of black holes if he's an astronomer, etc.), hears Nyarlathotep's name bandied about in the streets as he passes through the city, and being a stalwart man of science, feels compelled to investigate. He sees the strange, hideous, and prophetic sights that we know from the story, including disturbing references to the subject of his own work (i.e., a nuclear explosion, sick people dying in the streets, the sun being distorted and warped by something else in the sky, etc.) and angrily denounces Nyarlathotep as a fraud. He and his group are then driven out into the street, where he sees the visions from Nyarlathotep's show, only life-sized and all around him. The end of his story is the one we already know, where the hapless viewers of Nyarlathotep's show are separated and wander off through scenes of post-apocalypse...
... Herbert regains consciousness in a hospital bed, where he is told that he's been raving in fever for weeks. Nyarlathotep has passed through the city, on his merry way to the next, and everything seems to be back to normal again, except for a few screams from sleepers in the middle of the night, remnants of the nightmares that have plagued the city since Nyarlathotep's arrival. Herbert can only conclude that he was drugged or hypnotized somehow, and is more vocal than ever in his denunciation of mysticism and superstition. His zeal for his newest scientific project has only increased; he feels sure that he's on the verge of some discovery or achievement that will show once and for all that Nyarlathotep's predictions could not possibly be true. The other members of the group seem concerned that he's let this "huckster" get into his head so much that it's influencing the direction of his work, but he brushes their concerns aside -- rather brusquely. Finishing his story, he drains his drink with an unsteady hand and excuses himself, perhaps pausing at the door as if to say something else, and then walking off hurriedly. The rest of the group is left to chat, snack, drink... and wonder what direction Herbert's work could be going in after all.
...
Just an idea, anyway.
