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What had I seen back in 1989? What was the memory I was recollecting, so long ago, sending my old ticker to thundering like rattling tin during a hurricane? More importantly, why did I suffer three months of God-awful nightmares after that not-so-great experience? Haunting dreams so bad, evil visions so unnerving, that they made me erratic enough to swear off booze. Well, on the latter, at least habanero peach whiskey.
–ONE SCOTCH, ONE BOURBON, & ONE BEER

‘The pale man shook his head. “At twenty-five dollars an hour,” he said, “are you kidding? I can barely afford to have my cape cleaned once a month.” “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. Why do you wear it?” “You ever hear of a vampire without a cape? It’s part of the whole schmear, that’s all. I don’t know why!” –Charles Beaumont (BLOOD BROTHER)

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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)

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)

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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)