I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;–Lord Byron (Darkness)
“The sun was dying, and its blood spattered the sky as it crept into its sepulcher behind the hills. The keening wind sent the dry, fallen leaves scurrying toward the west, as though hastening them to the funeral of the sun.
“Nuts!” said Henderson to himself, and stopped thinking.”–Robert Bloch (The Cloak)
“The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute.” “They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” “I smiled,—for what had I to fear?”—Edgar Allan Poe (The Tell-Tale Heart)
“”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)
Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining—
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.–Edgar Allan Poe (The Lake)
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)
It floated in–slowly, slowly, as a mist of early morning might enter one’s casement or a wisp of smoke, wafted in on a stray breeze—unsubstantial, filmy, yet seeming to have the substance of flesh and blood. —Francis Marion Palmer (The Thing)
The surviving members of the family came severally every few minutes to the casket and wept above the placid features beneath the glass. This did them no good; it did no good to John Mortonson; but in the presence of death reason and philosophy are silent.–Ambrose Bierce (John Mortonson’s Funeral)
“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)
“Thunder shook the ground and thunder shook my heart,
But no storm cloud was above to make the heavens part
Then I saw the nightmarish monstrosity–a creature stride cross my path
Lumbering as an oak, creaking as the pines with two legs it hath.”
—Jeffrey LeBlanc (The Shadow on the Mountain)
“Her voice was the voice that women have,
Who plead for their heart’s desire.
She came—she came—and the quivering flame
Sunk and died in the fire.
It never was lit again on my hearth
Since I hurried across the floor,
To lift her over the threshold, and let her in at the door.”–Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (The Witch)
“And a strange spirit stalks
When the red surr has set.
And the soul of the watcher is filled
With faint pictures he fain would forget”.
—H. P. Lovecraft (The House)
“Never mind the John,” I whispered raising the knife, “Just call me Jack!”–Robert Bloch (Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper)
“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
“There was a deep soft thundering in his ears, a rosy dazzlement in his eyes. Somehow the hut appeared to expand, to change luminously about him. He hardly recognized its squalid furnishings, its litter of baleful oddments, on which a torrid splendor was shed by the black candles, tipped with ruddy fire, that towered and swelled gigantically into the softgloom His blood burned as with the throbbing flame of the candles.”—Clark Ashton Smith (Mother of Toads)
Jeffrey LeBlanc 