Terrifying Sea Witch Tale: Jeffrey LeBlanc’s “Curse of the Sea Witch” Episode 2
“The fairest fade and the fairest now rot!” Hawkeye laughed at Maddie Badeaux as she held the body of her Millie.”–Jeffrey LeBlanc (Curse of the Sea Witch)
“The fairest fade and the fairest now rot!” Hawkeye laughed at Maddie Badeaux as she held the body of her Millie.”–Jeffrey LeBlanc (Curse of the Sea Witch)
Children of Horror,/ Legion of Ghouls,
Tonight, we dug August Derleth’s hideous corpse from under some thick vines of wild grapes. This ghastly tale will make you never look at grapes the same way again. We present August Derleth’s “Wild Grapes”.
And some return by the failing light
And some in the waking dream
For she hears the heels of the dripping ghosts
That ride the rough roofbeam–Rudyard Kipling
“I hear her screams. I am in darkness.
I hear her shrieks. I am unable to act.
I hear her pleas then silence. I sob in the lightning and darkness.”–Jeffrey LeBlanc (The Devil of Black Bayou)
Then his voice rose until it filled the cavern. “But the curse was nothing. Words can do no harm, can do nothing, to a man. I live. A hundred generations have I seen come and go, and yet another hundred. What is time? The sun rises and sets, and another day has passed into oblivion. Men watch the sun and set their lives by it. They league themselves on every hand with time. They count the minutes that race them into eternity. Man outlived the centuries ere he began to reckon time. Time is man-made. Eternity is the work of the gods. In this cavern there is no such thing as time. There are no stars, no sun. Without is time; within is eternity. We count not time. Nothing marks the speeding of the hours. The youths go forth. They see the sun, the stars. They reckon time. And they pass. –Robert E. Howard (The Lost Race)
“And, on that first winter breaker, of Grand Isle’s coldest winter…Pierre Santiny plunged into the sea and was seen no more. But none on the island will ever say he died!”–Jeffrey LeBlanc (The Mariner of Caminada Pass)
“I don’t think you were wise to do that,” he said reflectively. “I’ve heard it said that the Wood Gods are rather horrible to those who molest them.”–Saki (The Music on the Hill)
“For life is a little matter,
And death is nought to the young;
And I dare not sell my honour
Under the eye of my son.
Take him, O king, and bind him,
And cast him far in the deep;
And it’s I will tell the secret
That I have sworn to keep.”–Robert Louis Stevenson (Heather Ale)
“Whimpering a little, with the hunger of a starved hound, he waited. He was a monster that nature had made, ready to obey nature’s first commandment: Thou shalt kill and eat. He was a thing of terror… a fable whispered around prehistoric cavern-fires… a miscegenation allied by later myth to the powers of hell and sorcery. But in no sense was he akin to those monsters beyond nature, the spawn of a new and blacker magic, who killed without hunger and without malevolence.”–Clark Ashton Smith (Monsters in the Night)
“Then down from the great red stars above, each like a misty plume,
There fell on my face long drops of blood and I knew at last my doom.”–Robert E. Howard (The Fear That Follows)
“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!)
There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be properly made.-Edgar Allan Poe (The Masque of the Red Death)
“Farewell for awhile, Christophe. But have no fear. You shall find me again if you are brave and patient.”–Clark Ashton Smith (The End of the Story)
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)
“Poetry in the right, devilish hands…can be terrifying! “–Jeffrey LeBlanc (Horrors to Scorch Earth)