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Dim, dubious, bat-like creatures seemed to be flitting to and fro between one of the stone vats and the group that toiled like sculptors, clothing the bony foot with a reddish plasm which they applied and moulded like so much clay. Gaspard thought, but was not certain later, that this plasm, which gleamed as if with mingled blood and fire, was being brought from the rosy-litten vat in vessels borne by the claws of the shadowy flying creatures. None of them, however, approached the other vat, whose wannish light was momently enfeebled, as if it were dying down. –Clark Ashton Smith (The Colossus of Ylourgne)

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“Suppose Jack the Ripper didn’t grow old? Suppose he is still a young man today?

“It’s a crazy theory, I grant you,” he said. “All the theories about the Ripper are crazy. The idea that he was a doctor. Or a maniac. Or a woman. The reasons advanced for such beliefs are flimsy enough. There’s nothing to go by. So why should my notion be any worse?”

“Because people grow older,” I reasoned with him. “Doctors, maniacs, and women alike.”
–Robert Bloch (Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper)

I would not die, and leave no name behind. Three centuries have passed since I quaffed the fatal beverage: another year shall not elapse before, encountering gigantic dangers–warring with the powers of frost in their home–beset by famine, toil, and tempest–I yield this body, too tenacious a cage for a soul which thirsts for freedom, to the destructive elements of air and water–or, if I survive, my name shall be recorded as one of the most famous among the sons of men; and, my task achieved, I shall adopt more resolute means, and, by scattering and annihilating the atoms that compose my frame, set at liberty the life imprisoned within, and so cruelly prevented from soaring from this dim earth to a sphere more congenial to its immortal essence.

Tonight, powerful winds sweep across ancient alien wastelands. Fantastic worlds glimmer in all manner of cosmic luminescence. And something in the shadows drips slime then spiders or slithers into the dark recesses of caverns as we revive the horror, science fiction, and fantasy sorcerer, Clark Ashton Smith. Smith was a self-educated American poet, sculptor, painter […]