“I walked the ridge with a dead man in tow,
He’s not a ghost but someone I did know,
Under the celestial stars we both gazed on the sky,
Together we are finding the perfect grave to let his soul lie.”
—Jeffrey LeBlanc (Final Resting Place For An Urn)
Then she began to experience what she often
thought of as her “married feeling”—the peculiar
awareness which usually denoted her husband’s unseen
entrance into a room she occupied.”— Robert Bloch (The Hungry House)
“We were kings of old!” they chanted,
“Rulers of a world enchanted;
“Every nation of creation
“Owned our lordship over men.
“Diadems of power crowned us,
“Then rose Solomon to confound us,
“In the form of beasts he bound us,
“So our rule was broken then.”— Robert E. Howard (Song of the Bats)
“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)
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)
“Unquenched, unquenchable,
Around, within, thy heart shall dwell;
Nor ear can hear nor tongue can tell
The tortures of that inward hell!
But first, on earth as vampire sent,
Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent:–Lord Byron (The Vampyre)
“”Yes,” continued my friend, his eyes still fixed on the spot. “But the strange thing is that I see the body lying on the top of it. Of course,” continued Holger, turning his head on one side as artists do, “it must be an effect of light. In the first place, it is not a grave at all. Secondly, if it were, the body would be inside and not outside. Therefore, it’s an effect of the moonlight. Don’t you see it?”—Francis Marion Crawford (The Blood is the Life)
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)
“Writhing, fighting with all he had left, Josef gasped out his question under the weight of the werewolf, “What do you mean?”–Thomas Swafford (Showing Gratitude: It’s Always Good to Demonstrate Appreciation)
“And one by one we died and were lost in the dust of accumulated time. We knew the years as a passing of shadows, and death itself as the yielding of twilight unto night.”—Clark Ashton Smith (From the Crypts of Memory)
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)
Mighty is the storm that rages in the sky; but it is as nothing to the storm that rages in the heart of the murderer. —George Thomas Spillman (Retribution)
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)
“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)
Jeffrey LeBlanc 