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)
“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)
“You asked me to explain why I am afraid of a draught of cool air; why I shiver more than others upon entering a cold room, and seem nauseated and repelled when the chill of evening creeps through the heat of a mild autumn day. There are those who say I respond to cold as others do to a bad odour, and I am the last to deny the impression. What I will do is to relate the most horrible circumstance I ever encountered, and leave it to you to judge whether or not this forms a suitable explanation of my peculiarity.”–H. P. Lovecraft
Vision or nightmare it may have been—vision or nightmare I fervently hope it was—yet it is all that my mind retains of what took place in those shocking hours after we left the sight of men. And why Harley Warren did not return, he or his shade—or some nameless thing I cannot describe—alone can tell.–H. P. Lovecraft
“A blood-chilling narrative of a ghastly horror that stalked through the crypts beneath the old graveyard.”-WT
“What do we know,” he had said, “of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their
absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex
cosmos, yet other beings with a wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only
see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have. I have always believed that such strange, inaccessible worlds exist at our very elbows, and
now I believe I have found a way to break down the barriers. I am not joking. Within twenty-four hours that machine near the table will generate waves acting on unrecognized sense organs that exist in us as atrophied or rudimentary vestiges. Those waves will open up to us many vistas unknown to man, and several unknown to anything we consider organic life. We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight. We shall see these things, and other things which no breathing creature has yet
seen. We shall overleap time, space, and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation.”–H.P. Lovecraft
“What do we know,” he had said, “of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with a wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have. I have always believed that such strange, inaccessible worlds exist at our very elbows, and now I believe I have found a way to break down the barriers. I am not joking. Within twenty-four hours that machine near the table will generate waves acting on unrecognised sense-organs that exist in us as atrophied or rudimentary vestiges. Those waves will open up to us many vistas unknown to man, and several unknown to anything we consider organic life. We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight. We shall see these things, and other things which no breathing creature has yet seen. We shall overleap time, space, and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation.”–HP Lovecraft
“I wonder what he thought,
that wretched, unnamed boy
with his sieve under his arm
and his pockets bulging with
an odd conglomerate of sandy
tourist coins, what he thought
when he saw me lurching at
him like a blind conductor
stretching out his hands over
a lunatic orchestra, what he
thought as the last of the light
fell across my hands, red and
split and shining with their
burden of eyes, what he
thought when the hands made
that sudden, flailing gesture
in the air, just before his head
burst.
I know what I thought.
I thought I had peeked over
the rim of the universe and
into the fires of hell itself.”–Stephen King (I Am The Doorway)
Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.–Edgar Allan Poe
The creeping introduction of “Fane of the Black Pharaoh” as stated by Weird Tales says:
“Those eyes shone through the shadows; unwinking, unchanging, omniscient in this little world of the dead.”
But…Robert Bloch’s introduction brought more blood and fang:
“Terrible was the fame of Nephren-Ka, and more terrible still was the destiny that Captain Cartaret read on the walls of the red-litten underground corridors.”
I had faced death and weighed my chances in many a desperate venture, but never in one of this nature. I can swear I am no coward, yet this proposition of journeying back and forth across the borderland of death put the yellow fear upon me. –Jack London
A shuddery story of a ghastly charnel crypt in a weird cave in the hills of Cornwall!–Weird Tales
It was his last moment of fear. When he had recovered his breath and his control, he sat and thought about meeting death with dignity.-Jack London
Jeffrey LeBlanc 