The Mi-Go are winged, fungoid things the colour of old wounds, and they come from Yuggoth, the dim world at the cold outer edge of the solar system. They are in the Vermont hills to mine a metal that does not occur anywhere nearer the sun, and they do not want to be noticed doing it. Where a human becomes a problem, or a curiosity, they have a solution that is worse than killing.
They can take the living brain out of a man and seal it in a bright metal cylinder. The mind stays awake in there. Fitted to the right instruments it can see and hear and speak, and it can be carried, as freight, across the vast cold distances between stars, a passenger in its own severed head. The story's quiet masterstroke is the voice, a buzzing imitation of human speech, friendly and wrong, assuring you that the whole arrangement is a privilege.
Here the horror of Lovecraft's cosmos stops being a thing that broods in the deep and becomes a thing that travels. The Mi-Go are commuters. The abyss has a postal service, and you can be posted.
Heard on Cyclopean Frequencies, in "Silver Cylinders Fly." Listen on Bandcamp.