Category: goblins

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Dim, dubious, bat-like creatures seemed to be flitting to and fro between one of the stone vats and the group that toiled like sculptors, clothing the bony foot with a reddish plasm which they applied and moulded like so much clay. Gaspard thought, but was not certain later, that this plasm, which gleamed as if with mingled blood and fire, was being brought from the rosy-litten vat in vessels borne by the claws of the shadowy flying creatures. None of them, however, approached the other vat, whose wannish light was momently enfeebled, as if it were dying down. –Clark Ashton Smith (The Colossus of Ylourgne)

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“Yes,” continued my friend, his eyes still fixed on the spot.
“But the strange thing is that I see the body lying on the top
of it. Of course,” continued Holger, turning his head on one
side as artists do, “it must be an effect of light. In the first
place, it is not a grave at all. Secondly, if it were, the body
would be inside and not outside. Therefore, it’s an effect of
the moonlight. Don’t you see it?”
“Perfectly; I always see it on moonlight nights.” –Francis Marion Crawford (For the Blood is the Life)

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His heart began to sink within him; he endeavored to resume his psalm tune, but his parched tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, and he could not utter a stave. There was something in the moody and dogged silence of this pertinacious companion that was mysterious and appalling. It was soon fearfully accounted for. On mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of his fellow-traveller in relief against the sky, gigantic in height, and muffled in a cloak, Ichabod was horror-struck on perceiving that he was headless!—but his horror was still more increased on observing that the head, which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of his saddle!–Washinton Irving (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow)

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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)

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Long were the mansion’s mysteries, horrendous were its horrors, and vague were the details of the missing and presumed dead across the mansion grounds. For the past, and the forgetful dead had now hidden much of the sinister, and fogged the memory of the evil that had scorched the manor with a more devious name—Hell’s Forge. Jeffrey LeBlanc (Hell’s Forge)

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Then his voice rose until it filled the cavern. “But the curse was nothing. Words can do no harm, can do nothing, to a man. I live. A hundred generations have I seen come and go, and yet another hundred. What is time? The sun rises and sets, and another day has passed into oblivion. Men watch the sun and set their lives by it. They league themselves on every hand with time. They count the minutes that race them into eternity. Man outlived the centuries ere he began to reckon time. Time is man-made. Eternity is the work of the gods. In this cavern there is no such thing as time. There are no stars, no sun. Without is time; within is eternity. We count not time. Nothing marks the speeding of the hours. The youths go forth. They see the sun, the stars. They reckon time. And they pass. –Robert E. Howard (The Lost Race)