"The Moon Lens" -

By Ramsey Campbell

Originally published The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, Arkham House, 1964 

Dr. James Linwood is farting around his Mercy Hill Hospital office at midnight, apparently not quite sure what to do with himself, since he clearly has no life.  He decides it will be fun to work on the speech he's going to be giving at a convention soon, advocating for what we now call "physician-assissted suicide", when there's a knock at the door.

His visitor is bundled-up like The Elephant Man and has a simple request - he wants Doc Linwood to kill him.  Well, needless to say the Doc isn't so keen on that idea and insteads triest to talk to him.  

Well, it seems his visitor aka Roy Leakey had a bad experience not long ago.  He got caught in Goatswood, a shithole town in the middle of nowhere, when the next train out was cancelled.  So he took a room at a hotel for the night.  He didn't like the town much - everyone wore baggy clothes and gloves and had faces like goats.  Not to mention his hotel room had a framed photo of a weird-ass monster in it!  Oh and there's a weird pylon in the center of town with a lens and mirrors on the top which no one would explain to him.

Anyway as the sun went down, townsfolk started milling around in the street, and Leakey found himself locked in his room, while a voice from the other side of the locked door lectured him on goat-related arcana.  The folks in the street started chanting and generally weirding out, and finally a beam of moonlight from the lens to a nearby hill caused a door to open in said hill, and a weird-ass monster - yes, the same one as in the photo, emerged and started heading straight for the hotel!  Leakey tried to escape but fell right into the weirdie's "grasp", and carried into the hillside, whence he managed to make his escape.  And it changed him.  In some way he can't describe.  But Doc Linwood's seen it all, and urges Leakey to let him examine him.  

Wel, oops!  Cuz moments later a colleague comes to chat with him, just in time to see someone fleeing the room - someone with a birdlike claw instead of a hand - and finds Doc Linwood insane and screaming on the floor.

This pretty minor, pulpy Campbell and the abrupt shift into flashback is jarring and doesn't really come off.  But like most of the stories in this collection there are hints of the writer Campbell will become, here in particular in the sinister town who's unfriendly and plain weird inhabitants are delineated by the narrator's small observations.