Category: horrortales

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Here they were: the drunks and the sinners, the gambling men
and the grifters, the big-time spenders, the skirt chasers, and all
the jolly crew. They knew where they were going, of course, but
they didn’t seem to be particularly concerned at the moment.
The blinds were drawn on the windows, yet it was light inside,
and they were all sitting around and singing and passing the
bottle and laughing it up, telling their jokes and bragging their
brags, just the way Daddy used to sing about them in the old
song.
“Mighty nice traveling companions,” Martin said. “Why, I’ve
never seen such a pleasant bunch of people. I mean, they seem
to be really enjoying themselves!”
“Sorry,” the conductor told him. “I’m afraid things may not
be quite so enjoyable once we pull into that Depot Way Down
Yonder.”
–Robert Bloch (That Hell-Bound Train)

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‘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)

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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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‘It’s not the kind of story that the columnists like to print; it’s not the yarn press-agents love to tell. When I was still in the Public Relations Department at the studio, they wouldn’t let me break it. I knew better than to try, for no paper would print such a tale. We publicity men must present Hollywood as a gay place; a world of glamor and star-dust. We capture only the light, but underneath the light there must always be shadows. I’ve always known that—it’s been my job to gloss over those shadows for years—but the events of which I speak from a disturbing pattern too strange to be withheld. The shadow of these incidents is not human.’

—Robert Bloch (Return to the Sabbath)

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“John you heard that fucking maniac. He said ‘I’m no man, Sheriff Hughes, as you might have suspected. I’m a cursed dog destined to screw up and kill everything that ever loved me or would love me.” I rubbed my left temple and paused looking at the blood—Two Horse’s blood—dried on my hand. “I wonder if all these things Two Horse believes in—evil spirits, black magic, skinwalkers, and of course demons, could be worse than him?”–Thomas Swafford (Skinwalker-CHAPTER 3)

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What the devil was wrong with him, anyway? Henderson smiled apologetically at the empty darkness. This was the smell of the costumer’s shop, and it carried him back to college days of amateur theatricals. Henderson hiad known this smell of moth balls, decayed furs, grease paint aind oils. He had played amateur Hamlet and in his hands he had held a smirking skull that hid all knowledge in its empty eyes—a skull, from the costumer’s. –Robert Bloch (The Cloak)

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Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,
A mighty lesson we inherit:
Thou art a symbol and a sign
To Mortals of their fate and force;
Like thee, Man is in part divine,
A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;
His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself—and equal to all woes,
And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry
Its own concenter’d recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory.–Lord Byron (Prometheus)

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“Of glass it is,” replied the man, sighing more heavily than ever; “but the glass of it was tempered in the flames of hell. An imp lives in it, and that is the shadow we behold there moving: or so I suppose. If any man buy this bottle the imp is at his command; all that he desires—love, fame, money, houses like this house, ay, or a city like this city—all are his at the word uttered. Napoleon had this bottle, and by it he grew to be the king of the world; but he sold it at the last, and fell. Captain Cook had this bottle, and by it he found his way to so many islands; but he, too, sold it, and was slain upon Hawaii. For, once it is sold, the power goes and the protection; and unless a man remain content with what he has, ill will befall him.”–Robert Louis Stevenson (The Bottle Imp)