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“There was a deep soft thundering in his ears, a rosy dazzlement in his eyes. Somehow the hut appeared to expand, to change luminously about him. He hardly recognized its squalid furnishings, its litter of baleful oddments, on which a torrid splendor was shed by the black candles, tipped with ruddy fire, that towered and swelled gigantically into the softgloom His blood burned as with the throbbing flame of the candles.”—Clark Ashton Smith (Mother of Toads)

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“I’m starting my journey across the waves of time! The blood is my time machine and my portal to the dimensions beyond. I see my loving, raven-haired wife. She is bathed in the foam of sea spray and blood. Lightning flashes around us in arcs of blistering white. Lightning etches around us in emerald green, A final blast paints us in a shade of deep blue. In the moments, between light and darkness, giant pinchers have grasped Marie’s flesh pulling her below! A glowing mauve pool of slime remains. A single hand floats above the sea and then submerges into depths below.

I float back to the present lashing out at the night air. I wrestle with imaginary phantoms who lurk back into that accursed moment in time when my wife was lost to me. I curse and send a glass breaking roar as I fight the ghost of an oozing leviathan who dissipates into mist.”
–Jeffrey LeBlanc (The Devil of Black Bayou Special Edition)

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I stand chilled and alone in a desolate cane field next to a dead man. His neck is twisted and bent
at an unnatural angle. The yellowed waxen skin—rifled with wounds, of his throat and torso are
exposed. As I look on with a gust of a cold wind at my back, I notice chunks of flesh have been
torn from both. Maculations of crimson on leaves and the splatter of frozen blood surround his
body. But it’s the eyes of the man I’ll remember to my last days. Wide, fixed in shock, they hide
some terrifying secret only the mutilated corpse may know.–Jeffrey LeBlanc (The Curious Death of Dionysus Chennault)