“The mountains towered to the ghostly moon
Celestial stars shimmered brilliantly in the sky
As the bats tittered, and twisted, twisted
Across the mountains and the forest upon high
Winding and weaving through the vastness of night
They sang a devilish tale flying by.”
—Jeffrey LeBlanc (Wings of the Night)
Warm my hand lives, in the moment kind and caring
But reaching for you now, can I do so, deathly chill
For I lie beneath hallowed grave ground,
Long shall I haunt your days, and ice your spine on ghostly nights
When you plead to the Angel of Death to reap your wicked soul
My heart will beat, and the worm removes fanged lips as my life roars again,
I give you mercy—a conscience cleared; a burden lifted—reach for my chilled grasp—
My withered fingers rest on your shoulder.
—Jeffrey LeBlanc (Cold Hand)
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)
“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)
“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)
“Black loom the crags of the uplands behind me;
Dark are the sands of the far-stretching shore.
Dim are the pathways and rocks that remind me
Sadly of years in the lost nevermore.
Soft laps the ocean on wave-polish’d boulder;
Sweet is the sound and familiar to me.
Here, with her head gently bent to my shoulder,
Walk’d I with Unda, the Bride of the Sea.”— H.P. Lovecraft (Unda, or The Bride of the Sea)
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Old Masson, the caretaker of one of Salem’s oldest and most neglected cemeteries, had a feud with the rats.–Henry Kuttner (The Graveyard Rats)
“I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.”— H.P. Lovecraft (The Survivor)
“He spake in wonder, not in fear:
“How walks a man who died?
“Friend of old times, what do ye here,
“Long fallen at my side?”
“Rise up, rise up,” Sir Richard said,
“The hounds of doom are free;
“The slayers come to take your head
“To hang on the ju-ju tree.”— Robert E. Howard (The Return of Sir Richard Grenville)
So have your drink, and then my advice to you is to keep right on moving north. Whatever you do, don’t go up that road to Jerusalem’s Lot. Especially not after dark.–Stephen King.”—Stephen King (One For The Road)
“The people of Averoigne called her La Mere des Crapauds, Mother of Toads, a name given for more than one reason. Toads swarmed innumerably about her hut; they were said to be her familiars, and dark tales were told concerning their relationship to the sorceress, and the duties they performed at her bidding.”–Clark Ashton Smith” (Mother of Toads)
It was the indignant grins of the liches that made him aware. Jovial secret jests as the cretins observed the pitter of dripping water from the funeral home’s roof onto his dead wife’s waxen face. In that callous moment with this crowd of sycophants, Roger almost turned maniacal. Grumbling in a rage, he saw the owner—Trampus Hock, run to wipe the water from her cheek. –Jeffrey LeBlanc (Hell’s Forge)
“The sun was dying, and its blood spattered the sky as it crept into its sepulcher behind the hills. The keening wind sent the dry, fallen leaves scurrying toward the west, as though hastening them to the funeral of the sun.
“Nuts!” said Henderson to himself, and stopped thinking.”–Robert Bloch (The Cloak)
Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining—
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.–Edgar Allan Poe (The Lake)
“And one by one we died and were lost in the dust of accumulated time. We knew the years as a passing of shadows, and death itself as the yielding of twilight unto night.”—Clark Ashton Smith (From the Crypts of Memory)
Jeffrey LeBlanc 