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“The entity which rested on that stone bench was like something that had crawled up out of hell. Piercing, malignant red eyes proclaimed that it had a terrible life, and yet that life sustained itself in a black, shrunken, half-mummified body which resembled a disinterred corpse. A few mouldy rags clung to the cadaver-like frame. Wisps of white hair sprouted out of its ghastly grey-white skull. A red smear or blotch of some sort covered the wizened slit which served it as a mouth.”—Joseph Payne Brennan (The Horror At Chilton Castle)

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It was the indignant grins of the liches that made him aware. Jovial secret jests as the cretins observed the pitter of dripping water from the funeral home’s roof onto his dead wife’s waxen face. In that callous moment with this crowd of sycophants, Roger almost turned maniacal. Grumbling in a rage, he saw the owner—Trampus Hock, run to wipe the water from her cheek. –Jeffrey LeBlanc (Hell’s Forge)

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Thro’ the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,

Past the wan-moon’d abysses of night,

I have liv’d o’er my lives without number,

I have sounded all things with my sight;

And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

—H.P. Lovecraft (Nemesis)

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“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)

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Long were the mansion’s mysteries, horrendous were its horrors, and vague were the details of the missing and presumed dead across the mansion grounds. For the past, and the forgetful dead had now hidden much of the sinister, and fogged the memory of the evil that had scorched the manor with a more devious name—Hell’s Forge. Jeffrey LeBlanc (Hell’s Forge)

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The ascending succession of horror was fast paralyzing my will and consciousness, for the eyes that now glared toward me from that hellish head were the grey phosphorescent eyes of my host as they had peered at me through the darkness of the kitchen.  —C.M. Eddy & H.P. Lovecraft (The Ghost-Eater)

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“That double curve folding back on itself with the foot uplifted—was it not the dragon of the box? She wiped her eyes, blaming an overstrained nervous system, and looked again. But surely those were scales!” —Elizabeth Walter (The Tibetan Box)

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“Twilight gathers and none can save me.
Well and well, for I would not stay:
Let me speak through the stone you grave me:
He never could say what he wished to say.”–Robert E. Howard (Lines Written in the Realization That I Must Die) Weird Tales August 1938