Peer into Pan’s dark abyss
Madness in a frightful kiss
Eyes that burn like fire’s blaze
Lost within his wicked maze
–Jeffrey LeBlanc (Where the Shadows Dwell)
He felt the cool air of the open sky on his cheeks,
and when he looked down, as they cleared the summit
of the dark-lying hills, he saw that Issidy had melted
away into himself and they had become one being.
And he knew then that his heart would never pain
him again on earth, or cause him to fear for any of his
beloved dreams. –Algernon Blackwood (The Dance of Death)
And waving in a dusky dragon light
Great moths whose wings unholy tapers char.
Red memory on memory, tier on tier, Builds up a tower, time and space to span;
Through world on world I rise, and sphere on sphere,
To star-shot gulfs of lunacy and fear— Black screaming ages never dreamed by man.’
–Robert E. Howard (Babel)
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she gaz’d and sighed deep,
And there I shut her wild sad eyes So kiss’d to sleep.
And there we slumber’d on the moss,
And there I dream’d, ah woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dream’d On the cold hill side.’ –John Keats (La Belle Dame Sans Merci)
‘It was a great gray-black hood of horror moving over the floor of the sea. It slid through the soft ooze like a monstrous mantle of slime obscenely animated with questing life.’ –Joseph Payne Brennan (Slime)
‘That the thing was all a dream is beside the point. We have fallen in dreams before, but it is well known that if in one of those falls you ever hit the ground—you die:’ –Lord Dunsany (Lobster Salad)
“Take the blood in my veins Madeline!” I ripped the sleeves of my shirt and opened my veins. “Take this heart in my chest! But live damn you. For the world is a darker place without you in it.”–Jeffrey LeBlanc (For the Love of a Phantom)
‘Thunder shook the ground and thunder shook my heart,
But no storm cloud was above to make the heavens part
Then I saw the nightmarish monstrosity–a creature stride across my path
Lumbering as an oak, creaking as the pines with two legs it hath
I stopped and stared at the towering shadow that stood before me
Ancient was the swaying beast who shook earth and topped tree.’ —Jeffrey LeBlanc (The Shadow on the Mountain)
Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.–William Butler Yeats (The Stolen Child)
Jeffrey LeBlanc 