Resting immortal amongst the asphodels,
Resting immortal amongst the asphodels,
Resting immortal in visions wonder-drowned,
In Lethean ecstasy starlit bound,
Ageless, lost, locked away from the cruel world,
Showered in golden magic and glory crowned.
–CHALICE
HIS voice came to us again. He said, at first, that he saw nothing in the abyss below him. Then he gasped, swayed, and almost lost his balance. We could see the sweat standing out on his brow and neck, soaking his blue shirt. There were things in the abyss, he said in hoarse tones, great shapes that were like blobs of utter blackness, yet which he knew to be alive. From the central masses of their beings he could see them shoot forth incredibly long, filamentine tentacles. They moved themselves forward and backward — horizontally, but could not move vertically, it seemed. They were, he thought, nothing but living shadows.
Robert A.W. Lowndes (THE ABYSS)
FOR THE SAKE OF THE DEAD AND THE WELFARE OF THE LIVING, LET THIS SEPULCHRE
REMAIN UNTOUCHED AND ITS OCCUPANT UNDISTURBED TILL THE COMING OF CHRIST.
IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, THE SON, AND THE HOLY GHOST.
–F.G. Loring (The Tomb of Sarah)
A Greek god horror story to kill all HOPE. Really dark stuff.
‘The old man continued on his way to the sea, coming after a time upon two men who were digging a grave for a third who lay dead.
“It is a holy office to bury the dead,” he remarked.
“Aye,” said one of the men, “especially if you have slain him yourself and are hiding the evidence.”
–ROGER ZELAZNY (But Not The Herald)
From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this
sequestered glen has long been known by the name of SLEEPY HOLLOW, and its rustic lads are called the Sleepy Hollow Boys throughout all the neighboring country. A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere.
–Washington Irving (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow)
In a few minutes I shall have to call the police, but I know that they will not believe me. –THE OTHER ONE
Bats flying, flying in eternal night,
From the river to the cave,
To wheel against the twilight,
Singing songs of the witch’s slave,
Red eyes–blood red–screams in the night!
–SONG OF THE VAMPIRE BATS
Ancient purple eyes see and comprehend,
Countless fires carved across your cosmic plains,
Whisper to me, tell me all that I have sought for in vain,
Before my mortal quest has come to an eternal end.
Let me see, let me feel the Universe at my eternal end!
–PURPLE IMMORTAL
A horror that was more than horror, a fear that was beyond fear, petrified all my faculties and I felt as if I was weighted down by some ineluctable and insupportable burden of nightmare. –Clark Ashton Smith (The Ninth Skeleton)
‘No. The face of a dark, remarkable-looking man, in black, with black hair and a grey moustache – a handsome man except for a reserved and secret air. Not a face she ever saw, or at all like a face she ever saw. Doing nothing in the dream but looking at her fixedly, out of darkness.’–CHARLES DICKENS (To Be Read At Dusk)
hey were people of curious aspect, short and squat, high-cheekboned, with dingy yellow skin and long almond eyes; only in one or two of the younger men there was a suggestion of a wild, almost faunlike grace, as of creatures who always moved between the red fire and the green leaf. –Arthur Machen (The Turanians)
“How say ye that I was lost? I wandered among roses.
Can he go astray that enters the rose garden?
The Lover in the house of the Beloved is not forlorn.
I wandered among roses. How say ye that I was lost?”
–ARTHUR MACHEN (Ornaments in Jade: The Rose Garden)
KING OF THE GARGOYLE album is roaring away!!!
‘He was so different from other men’.
—Robert Bloch
“The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man’s frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man’s place in the universe.”
― Jack London (To Build a Fire)
Jeffrey LeBlanc 