“He spake in wonder, not in fear:
“How walks a man who died?
“Friend of old times, what do ye here,
“Long fallen at my side?”
“Rise up, rise up,” Sir Richard said,
“The hounds of doom are free;
“The slayers come to take your head
“To hang on the ju-ju tree.”— Robert E. Howard (The Return of Sir Richard Grenville)
“Through long nursery nights he stood
By my bed unwearying,
Loomed gigantic, formless, queer,
Purring in my haunted ear
That same hideous nightmare thing,
Talking, as he lapped my blood,
In a voice cruel and flat,
Saying for ever, “Cat! … Cat! … Cat!”— Robert Graves(A Child’s Nightmare)
“The people of Averoigne called her La Mere des Crapauds, Mother of Toads, a name given for more than one reason. Toads swarmed innumerably about her hut; they were said to be her familiars, and dark tales were told concerning their relationship to the sorceress, and the duties they performed at her bidding.”–Clark Ashton Smith” (Mother of Toads)
“Men fled before the flying twain or shrank with bated breath,
And they saw on the face of Adam Brand the seal set there by death.
He reeled on buckling legs that failed, yet on and on he fled;
So through the shuddering market-place, the dying fled the dead.”–Robert E. Howard (Dead Man’s Hate)
“The sun was dying, and its blood spattered the sky as it crept into its sepulcher behind the hills. The keening wind sent the dry, fallen leaves scurrying toward the west, as though hastening them to the funeral of the sun.
“Nuts!” said Henderson to himself, and stopped thinking.”–Robert Bloch (The Cloak)
“The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute.” “They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” “I smiled,—for what had I to fear?”—Edgar Allan Poe (The Tell-Tale Heart)
I bent me down to hear his sigh;
I shook with his gurgling moan,
And I trembled sore when they rode away,
And left him here alone.
—Paul Laurence Dunbar (The Haunted Oak)
“The man repeated the names slowly and distinctly, as if to fix them in the memories of his audience, every member of which was now attentively observing him, but with a slackened apprehension regarding his possible companions somewhere in the darkness that seemed to enclose us like a black wall; in the manner of this volunteer historian was no suggestion of an unfriendly purpose.”—Ambrose Bierce (The Stranger)
It floated in–slowly, slowly, as a mist of early morning might enter one’s casement or a wisp of smoke, wafted in on a stray breeze—unsubstantial, filmy, yet seeming to have the substance of flesh and blood. —Francis Marion Palmer (The Thing)
It’s Dick Hansen, calling to me through the wind and the night and the black waters! Alive or dead, I’m his till I die! —Robert E. Howard (Restless Waters)
For there be divers sorts of death—some wherein the body remaineth; and in some it vanisheth quite away with the spirit. This commonly occurreth only in solitude (such is God’s will) and, none seeing the end, we say the man is lost, or gone on a long journey—which indeed he hath; but sometimes it hath happened in sight of many, as abundant testimony showeth. In one kind of death the spirit also dieth, and this it hath been known to do while yet the body was in vigor for many years. Sometimes, as is veritably attested, it dieth with the body, but after a season is raised up again in that place where the body did decay.–Hali (Ambrose Bierce’s “An Inhabitant of Carcosa”)
“Her voice was the voice that women have,
Who plead for their heart’s desire.
She came—she came—and the quivering flame
Sunk and died in the fire.
It never was lit again on my hearth
Since I hurried across the floor,
To lift her over the threshold, and let her in at the door.”–Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (The Witch)
“And a strange spirit stalks
When the red surr has set.
And the soul of the watcher is filled
With faint pictures he fain would forget”.
—H. P. Lovecraft (The House)
“Never mind the John,” I whispered raising the knife, “Just call me Jack!”–Robert Bloch (Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper)
Jeffrey LeBlanc 