My brother John and his two boys are visiting. Peter, Elizabeth, and their two cousins were playing in the circle of stumps in our back yard when I spied something posetively Lovecraftian. There were what looked like pink tentacles coming up through the wood chips in the play area; small, calamari-sized tentacles. They seemed to hatch from egglike puffballs and had a horrible smell which attracted tiny flies. An intrusion of teaspoon-sized Elder Gods, perhaps?

While John photographed them with his marvelous digital camera (I hope to have digital photos to show later), I seached on Google to see what they might be. According to the website of the Boston Mycological Society, what we have appears to be a kind of stinkhorn called Stinky Squid (Pseudocolus fusiformis).