As everyone knew, coming face-to-face with figures from the Cthulhu Mythos would lower one's Sanity Value and contaminate one with forbidden knowledge. But few people knew that contamination came in many forms. Each of the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods manifested its corruption differently. The specifics generally depended on how the author understood the Cthulhu Mythos.
Most fundamentalists preferred to depict mental contamination: going mad after confronting forbidden knowledge, even attempting to record and spread that knowledge. That was how many deadly tomes came into being.
But some believed that facing an Outer God would inevitably cause physical mutations. These authors had clearly absorbed the body-horror style popular in the seventies and eighties, favoring scenes of "contaminated human limbs becoming cancerous and twisted." It was obviously a new interpretation of cosmic horror born from the pressures of the Cold War and nuclear warfare.
Kth'ulhu possessed similar traits. Those who stared directly at him felt "an unbearable itch in their eyes, accompanied by intense burning pain." This was clearly a physical effect caused by looking upon a Great Old One, and it naturally gave rise to the eye-gouging splatter-film tropes so common in that era.
Merely gazing upon a Great Old One could have such an effect. Hugo had fallen completely into that vortex. Although the Power of Death protected him from being swallowed outright, he was still constantly being chewed by Kth'ulhu. It was hard to say whether that even counted as protection.
It was like an ordinary human falling into a gas giant. They should have been torn apart in an instant by the storms enveloping it, but some mysterious force kept reviving them, forcing them to endure the agony of being shredded every moment.
Hugo's eyeballs had vanished completely, replaced by two tumors growing from his eye