“And the Latin was replaced by an older tongue, ancient when Egypt was young and the Pyramids built, ancient when this Earth still hung in an unformed, boiling firmament of empty gas: “Gyyagin vardar Yogsoggoth! Verminis! Gyyagin! Gyyagin! Gyyagin!”–Stephen King (Jerusalem’s Lot)
“I’m starting my journey across the waves of time! The blood is my time machine and my portal to the dimensions beyond. I see my loving, raven-haired wife. She is bathed in the foam of sea spray and blood. Lightning flashes around us in arcs of blistering white. Lightning etches around us in emerald green, A final blast paints us in a shade of deep blue. In the moments, between light and darkness, giant pinchers have grasped Marie’s flesh pulling her below! A glowing mauve pool of slime remains. A single hand floats above the sea and then submerges into depths below.
I float back to the present lashing out at the night air. I wrestle with imaginary phantoms who lurk back into that accursed moment in time when my wife was lost to me. I curse and send a glass breaking roar as I fight the ghost of an oozing leviathan who dissipates into mist.”
–Jeffrey LeBlanc (The Devil of Black Bayou Special Edition)
“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)
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
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!)
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)
“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)
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
Jeffrey LeBlanc 