Category: witchcraft

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“And a Shape in the shadows wags its grisly head forever?

You swore by the blood-crust that stained your dagger,

By the haunted woods where hoofed feet swagger,

And under grisly burdens misshapen creatures stagger.

Up, John Kane, and cease your quaking!

You have made the pact which has no breaking,

And your brothers are eager their thirst to be slaking.

Up, John Kane! Why cringe there, and cower?

The pact was sealed with the dark blood-flower;

Glut now your fill in the werewolf ’s hour!”–Robert E. Howard (Up, John Kane!)

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“And how is it with your views of a future life?” inquired the speculative clergyman.

“Worse than with you,” said the old man, in a hollow and feeble tone; “for I cannot conceive it earnestly enough to feel either hope or fear. Mine,—mine is the wretchedness! This cold heart,—this unreal life! Ah! it grows colder still.”

It so chanced that at this juncture the decayed ligaments of the skeleton gave way, and the dry hones fell together in a heap, thus causing the dusty wreath of cypress to drop upon the table. The attention of the company being thus diverted for a single instant from Gervayse Hastings, they perceived, on turning again towards him, that the old man had undergone a change. His shadow had ceased to flicker on the wall.–Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Christmas Banquet)

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“It was the eyes that grew dim. Little by little he came to know that some day the dream would not end when he turned away to go home, but would lead him down the gorge out of which the vision rose. She was nearer now when she beckoned to him. Her cheeks were not livid like those of the dead, but pale with starvation, with the furious and unappeased physical hunger of her eyes that devoured him. They feasted on his soul and cast a spell over him, and at last they were close to his own and held him. He could not tell whether her breath was as hot as fire or as cold as ice; he could not tell whether her red lips burned his or froze them, or whether her five fingers on his wrists seared scorching scars or bit his flesh like frost; he could not tell whether he was awake or asleep, whether she was alive or dead, but he knew that she loved him, she alone of all creatures, earthly or unearthly, and her spell had power over him.”–Francis Marion Crawford (For the Blood is the Life)

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I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?–Edgar Allan Poe (A Dream Within a Dream)

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#bestwerewolfstories #robertehoward #werewolf #hwa #horrorwriting #writingcommunity #authortube #booktube #instahorror #horrorgram #horror #wolfman #demontour “FEAR? Your pardon, Messieurs, but the meaning of fear you do not know. No, I hold to my statement. You are soldiers, adventurers. You have known the charges of regiments of dragoons, the frenzy of wind-lashed seas. But fear, real hair-raising, horror-crawling […]

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“White-hot agony lanced through his breast, throbbed in his eyeballs. His head seemed to be swelling, growing larger and larger; and suddenly he heard the exultant squealing of the rats. He began to scream insanely but could not drown them out. For a moment he thrashed about hysterically within his narrow prison, and then he was quiet, gasping for air. His eyelids closed, his blackened tongue protruded, and he sank down into the blackness of death with the mad squealing of the rats dinning in his ears.”–Henry Kuttner (The Graveyard Rats)

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And as I writhe in my guilty agony, frantic to save the city whose peril every moment grows, and vainly striving to shake off this unnatural dream of a house of stone and brick south of a sinister swamp and a cemetery on a low hillock; the Pole Star, evil and monstrous, leers down from the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.–H.P. Lovecraft (Polaris)

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‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;”–Walter de la Mare (The Listeners)

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“How savage, fierce and grim!
His bones are bleached and white.
But what is death to him?
He grins as if to bite.
He mocks the fate
That bade, ”Begone.”
There’s fierceness stamped
In ev’ry bone.

Let silence settle from the midnight sky—
Such silence as you’ve broken with your cry;
The bleak wind howl, unto the ut’most verge
Of this mighty waste, thy fitting dirge.”–Alexander Lawrence Posey (On Viewing the Skull and Bones of a Wolf)