The Sea Witch
Part One
I
The night winds were a torrent of darkness amongst the sea and foam,
The coppery moon heaved as a haunted galleon upon golden waves to roam,
The beach trail weaved as a moonlit strand over the skull-white dunes,
And the Sea Witch came gliding—
Gliding—gliding—
The Sea Witch came gliding, up to the druid runes.—Jeffrey LeBlanc (The Sea Witch)
When Lazarus rose from the grave, after three days and nights in the mysterious thraldom of death, and returned alive to his home, it was a long time before anyone noticed the evil peculiarities in him that were later to make his very name terrible. His friends and relatives were jubilant that he had come back to life. They surrounded him with tenderness, they were lavish of their eager attentions, spending the greatest care upon his food and drink and the new garments they made for him. They clad him gorgeously in the glowing colors of hope and laughter, and when, arrayed like a bridegroom, he sat at table with them again, ate again, and drank again, they wept fondly and summoned the neighbours to look upon the man miraculously raised from the dead.—Leonid Andreyev (Lazarus)
“She lighted another match, and then she found herself sitting under a beautiful Christmastree. It was larger and more beautifully decorated than the one which she had seen through the glass door at the rich merchant’s. Thousands of tapers were burning upon the green branches, and colored pictures, like those she had seen in the show-windows, looked down upon it all. The little one stretched out her hand towards them, and the match went out.”—Hans Christian Andersen (The Little Match Girl)
“Come home, my lost child!
Embrace the rivers and the wild
Dance with dwarves, hand in hand,
Forget the human world of weeping,
A painful land you will never understand.”
—Jeffrey LeBlanc (The Lost Child)
“I walked the ridge with a dead man in tow,
He’s not a ghost but someone I did know,
Under the celestial stars we both gazed on the sky,
Together we are finding the perfect grave to let his soul lie.”
—Jeffrey LeBlanc (Final Resting Place For An Urn)
“A sudden terror seized me. I turned to beseech the old man to let me go, but he was not there!.”
—Herman Sisk (The Purple Heart)
“Haunted houses are nothing but superstition. They exist only in the imagination.”
—Farnsworth Wright (The Closing Hand)
I just can’t explain my apprehension going near vast forests these days. Part of it is because of an uncanny feeling—not quite dread, and not quite fear. Maybe, it’s knowing that there is something that terrifying out there. Maybe, on occasion, when I get near the forested wilderness, I can’t help that the thing or one of its kin, might be watching us. –Jeffrey LeBlanc (The Shadow on the Mountain”–Book Excerpt)
Black Lord of bale and fear, master of all confusion!
By thee, thy prophet saith,
New power is given to wizards after death,
And witches in corruption draw forbidden breath
And weave such wild enchantment and illusion
As none but lamiae may use;
And through thy grace the charneled corpses lose
Their horror, and nefandous loves are lighted
In noisome vaults long nighted;
And vampires make their sacrifice to thee —
Disgorging blood as if great urns had poured
Their bright vermilion hoard
About the washed and weltering sarcophagi.
— Ludar’s Litany to Thasaidon.
The earth lay far below him. He flew gracefully on through the silvery darkness.”
— Jack Snow (Night Wings)
“Ah! little ken’d thy reverend grannie,
That sark she coft for her wee Nannie,
Wi’ twa pund Scots (’twas a’ her riches),
Wad ever grac’d a dance of witches!”
— Robert Burns (Tam O’ Shanter)
“Into a patch of moonlight passed the figure of a young girl, looked at them as though about to stop yet thinking better of it, smiled softly, and moved on out of sight into the surrounding darkness. The moon just caught her eyes and teeth, so that they shone; the rest of her body stood in shadow; the effect was striking — almost as though head and shoulders hung alone in mid air, watching them with this shining smile, then fading away.”—Algernon Blackwood (The Singular Death of Morton)
“Start not—nor deem my spirit fled:
In me behold the only skull
From which, unlike a living head,
Whatever flows is never dull.
I lived, I loved, I quaff’d, like thee:
I died: let earth my bones resign;
Fill up—thou canst not injure me;
The worm hath fouler lips than thine.”–Lord Byron (Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed from a Skull)
“All houses wherein men have lived and died
Are haunted houses. Through the open doors
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,
With feet that make no sound upon the floors.”
–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Haunted Houses)
And human heads, many of them, scattered about like an assembly of mocking, dead-alive faces, leering at him, watching him with hellish anticipation. The place was a morgue—a charnel house!”–Hugh B. Cave (Stragella)
Jeffrey LeBlanc 