Short Fiction quotes

“

Viper, in the years before you came to dwell with me and to make your abode in the head of the unicorn, I knew a girl who was lovely and frail as the orchids of the jungle, and who died as the orchids die⁠ ⁠…

Viper, am I not Malygris, in whom is centered the mastery of all occult lore, all forbidden dominations, with dominion over the spirits of earth and sea and air, over the solar and lunar demons, over the living and the dead?

The viper seemed to hesitate. Then, in a more slow and measured hiss: “It is meet for Malygris to do as he would.

Who, save Malygris, can decide if a thing be well or ill?

”

The sand of the desert of Yondo is not as the sand of other deserts; for Yondo lies nearest of all to the world’s rim;

and strange winds, blowing from a pit no astronomer may hope to fathom, have sown its ruinous fields with the gray dust of corroding planets, the black ashes of extinguished suns.

So it was that I hesitated on the verge of those ashen sands, and felt the tremor of a new fear in my wrenched vitals.

It was dreadful to go on, and dreadful to go back, for I felt sure that the priests had made provision against the latter contingency.

So after a little I went forward, singing at each step in loathly softness, and followed by certain long-legged insects that I had met among the cacti. These insects were the color of a week-old corpse and were as large as tarantulas;

“Do not fear for me,” she whispered.

“Foul vampire! accursed lamia! she-serpent of hell!”

thundered the abbot suddenly, as he crossed the threshold of the room, raising the aspergillus aloft. At the same moment, Nycea glided from the couch, with an unbelievable swiftness of motion, and vanished through an outer door that gave upon the forest of laurels.

Alas! the dead captains, the beautiful dead sailors that were borne by the ebbing tide to my couches of amber seaweed, in my caverns underneath a cedared promontory!

Alas! the kisses that I laid on their cold and hueless lips, on their sealed marmorean eyelids!

”

They waited.

The darkness was like the slow oozing of a cold, glaucous eternity.

The mutineers carried watches, which perforce had run down during their period of incarceration.

They could see nothing, could be sure of nothing; but perforce they must go on, not knowing if the next step would plunge them into some terrific pit or bottomless gulf. A sense of uncanny menace, of weird unhuman horror, increased upon them momently.

“This place is dark as the coal-cellars of Hades,” jested Roverton.

The others laughed bravely, though their nerves were on edge with sinister expectation and uncertainty.

Seeing that my efforts to attract their attention were fruitless, I left the platform and wandered along the streets toward the harbor.

The strangeness and inexplicability of it all were too much for me: more and more, I felt that I was being alienated from the realms of all rational experience or conjecture; that I had fallen into some unearthly limbo of confoundment and unreason, into the cul-de-sac of an ultra-terrestrial dimension.

These beings were so palpably astray and bewildered; it was so obvious that they knew as well as I that there was something wrong with the geography, and perhaps with the chronology, of their island.