And, like his innumerable ancestors before him, the king dares not destroy the Flower, for fear that the devil, driven from its habitation, might seek a new home, and enter into the brain or body of one of the king’s subjects- or even the heart of his fairest and gentlest, and most beloved queen!—Clark Ashton Smith (The Flower-Devil)
Lost from those archangelic thrones that star,
Fadeless and fixed, heaven’s light of azure bliss;
Forbanned of all His splendor and depressed
Beyond the birth of the first sun, and lower
Than the last star’s decline, I still endure,
Abased, majestic, fallen, beautiful,
And unregretful in the doubted dark,
Throneless, that greatens chaos-ward, albeit
From chanting stars that throng the nave of night
Lost echoes wander here, and of His praise
With ringing moons for cymbals dinned afar,
And shouted from the flaming mouths of suns.–Clark Ashton Smith (Satan Unrepentant)
For my death—for death comes to us all in the end–in this hideous murk is soon. It’s the other fate, a fate worse than death, that I truly fear now. It’s inconceivable and incomprehensible to imagine that horrific fate. For should this monster I spoke of find me, I’ll be immortally frozen for all eternity—encased and alive mind you–as lifeless stone.
–Jeffrey LeBlanc (The Gorgon)
But deep in the seaweed-haunted halls in the green unlighted deep,
Inhuman kings await the day that shall break their chains of sleep.
And far in a grim untrodden land on a jungle-girded hill,
A pillar stands like a sign of Fate, in subtle warning still.
—Robert E. Howard (The Symbol)
Have you ever felt the tread of little feet walking across the top of your skull? Footsteps on your skull, back and forth, back and forth? —Robert Bloch (Enoch)
‘Deaf, as he would be for the rest of his days, Stewart Baker slowly glanced back. Sweat poured from his brow and mixed with the blood caked on his shirt. He half expected the colossus of the snails to roar down the trenasse in pursuit, crushing everything in its wake. He almost welcomed the death by such a terrifying beast.’
—Jeffrey LeBlanc (Island of the Giant Snail)
Apparently disembodied, or set in a face too vast for human cognizance, they burned before him in chaotic murk; Then, by degrees, he saw the other features of the sorcerer, and the details of a lurid scene; and became aware of his own situation.’
—Clark Ashton Smith (The Colossus of Ylourgne)
“I cried out to them again, but they didn’t seem to hear me and turned away.” —Cargray Cook (On the Highway)
“Ah! little ken’d thy reverend grannie,
That sark she coft for her wee Nannie,
Wi’ twa pund Scots (’twas a’ her riches),
Wad ever grac’d a dance of witches!”
— Robert Burns (Tam O’ Shanter)
“Into a patch of moonlight passed the figure of a young girl, looked at them as though about to stop yet thinking better of it, smiled softly, and moved on out of sight into the surrounding darkness. The moon just caught her eyes and teeth, so that they shone; the rest of her body stood in shadow; the effect was striking — almost as though head and shoulders hung alone in mid air, watching them with this shining smile, then fading away.”—Algernon Blackwood (The Singular Death of Morton)
“Start not—nor deem my spirit fled:
In me behold the only skull
From which, unlike a living head,
Whatever flows is never dull.
I lived, I loved, I quaff’d, like thee:
I died: let earth my bones resign;
Fill up—thou canst not injure me;
The worm hath fouler lips than thine.”–Lord Byron (Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed from a Skull)
“All houses wherein men have lived and died
Are haunted houses. Through the open doors
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,
With feet that make no sound upon the floors.”
–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Haunted Houses)
And human heads, many of them, scattered about like an assembly of mocking, dead-alive faces, leering at him, watching him with hellish anticipation. The place was a morgue—a charnel house!”–Hugh B. Cave (Stragella)
“Black loom the crags of the uplands behind me;
Dark are the sands of the far-stretching shore.
Dim are the pathways and rocks that remind me
Sadly of years in the lost nevermore.
Soft laps the ocean on wave-polish’d boulder;
Sweet is the sound and familiar to me.
Here, with her head gently bent to my shoulder,
Walk’d I with Unda, the Bride of the Sea.”— H.P. Lovecraft (Unda, or The Bride of the Sea)
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Old Masson, the caretaker of one of Salem’s oldest and most neglected cemeteries, had a feud with the rats.–Henry Kuttner (The Graveyard Rats)
Jeffrey LeBlanc 