"... Well, perhaps things will be different soon...?"
Then the fog enveloped them completely, and their senses fled from them....
It was an odd sort of voice, mellow, fluid, yet holding accents of anger in its even flow:
"Both of you complained you couldn't imagine this. So we brought you here to prove its existence."
The writer and artist opened their eyes and the fog in which they'd been bound was no longer there. They were in an immense chamber whose vaulted ceiling extended for a full hundred feet in the air and seemed suspended by slender strings, so tenuous were the web-like supports, so fragile were the arches. They were standing before a tremendous table whose semi-circular length might have been fifty feet from one end to the other. And seated at the table were the most horrifying monsters they had ever seen.
There was one, a huge beetle-like thing with two heads and a scaly body and four pairs of pincers extending from the line of jaw. There was, another, somewhat like a spider, but with dozens of legs. A third was half-man, half alligator; a fourth was all snake, but with three human heads; and another was all head without body. They were, the two men realized, the most terrible things they had ever imagined.
"... And there is the rub," the voice went on. "We are all as you have imagined us. We exist only in your imagination."
"But how can that be?" Harry Zmilch asked. "We are here. We can see you...."
"Only because your imaginations have been developed to such a degree," the voice replied. "Were you able to you would imagine us as something altogether different. But since there are limits to your imagination we are as we are. Now you must pay the penalty of that imagination.