Short Fiction quotes

I sit here tonight, a rung farther toward the beast from whence we sprang, instead of on the road back toward man.

Like one lowered into a well, I see above me a circle of light growing smaller and dimmer as I descend into darkness and horror!

What shall I do?

June 24—For three days I have not written. I have not slept and have eaten only when the pangs of hunger roused me from my half-trance of misery.

Horror has closed over my head like water.

At first I searched frantically for more materials for the counter-agent, literally wrecking my laboratory, but to no avail. I had used it all in trying to mix the saving dose three days ago.

I, too, came close. There was no plate, just as the guard had said. But in the lower left-hand corner of the canvas were sprawling capitals, pale paint on the dark, spelling out the word Golgotha. Beneath these, in small, barely readable script:

I sold my soul that I might paint a living picture.

No signature or other clue to the artist’s identity.

“Ach, so you always say!” he exploded, but without genuine wrath. “

Why must the burden of proof rest with the spirits?

How can you prove that they do not live and move and act? Study what Eddington has to say about that.”

Somehow I had come to the stream again, or to another like it. The current moved more swiftly at this point, with a noticeable murmur. As I tried to spring across I landed short, and gasped in sudden pain, for the water was scalding hot.

Of such are the waters of hell.

…

“Werewolves have gone out of fashion, you mean? Ah, you admit that they might have existed.” He fairly beamed his triumph. “

So have beards gone out of fashion, but they will sprout again if we lay down our razors.

Let’s go at it another way. Let’s talk about materialization—ectoplasm—for the moment.” He relaxed, and across his great girth his fingertips sought one another. “Suppose you explain, briefly and simply, what ectoplasm is considered to be.”

I nodded agreement, and my head felt heavy, as if full of sober and important matters. “As for me,” I went on, “I never have had much chance to examine the stuff.

Whenever I get hold of an ectoplasmic hand, it melts like butter.

”

Maybe it is bestial, to match a fierce or desperate spirit within. There may be a shaggy pelt, a sharp muzzle, taloned paws and rending fangs.

To a terrified victim he is doom itself.

But to a brave adversary, facing and fighting him—”

It is hard to show clearly how his constant offering of parallels and rationalizations comforted us.

Only the unknown and unknowable can terrify completely.

We three were even cheerful over a bottle of wine that William fetched and poured out in three glasses. Judge Pursuivant gave us a toast—“May wolves go hungry!”—and Susan and I drank it gladly.

“Perhaps I was born what I am,” he began. “At least, even as a lad I knew that there was a lust and a power for evil within me.

Night called to me, where it frightens most children.

I would slip out of my father’s house and run for miles, under the trees or across fields, with the moon for company. This was in Germany, of course, before the war.”

We ate lunch together in the dining-car, Pursuivant pondering his choice from the menu as once he must have pondered his decision in a case at court. When he made his selection, he devoured it with the same gusto I had observed before.

“Food may be a necessity,” quoth he between bites, “but the enjoyment of it is a blessing.”

“You have other enjoyments,” I reminded him. “Study, fencing—”

I turned, my heart quivering inside my chest.

Shapes⁠—monstrous, pallid, unclean shapes⁠—were closing in upon us.

I doubt if any writer, however accomplished, has ever done full justice to the emotion of terror.

“I’m not worth it,” I assured her. “I’m a sorry failure, and we both know it.”

“Whenever I see you,” she replied irrelevantly, “bells begin to ring in my ears⁠—loud alarm bells, as if fires had broken out all around me.”

“We’re triple idiots to think of love,” I went on. “You’re the top, and I’m the muck under the bottom.”

“We’re triple idiots to think of love,” I went on.

“You’re the top, and I’m the muck under the bottom.”

“You’ll be the sensation of your life when Ruthven comes to Broadway,” rejoined Sigrid confidently. “And the movie magnets will fight duels over the chance to ask for your name on a contract.”

Enid felt her lips grow cold and dry. “He has no—”

“He is the Nameless One,” said Persil Mandifer, and she could discern the capital letters in the last two words he spoke.

“Look,” said Larue, out of the corner of his weak mouth that was nearest his father. “She thinks that she is getting ready to run.”

“The words that Persil Mandifer told me to say.” Her eyes on his, she continued softly: “I came to meet the Nameless One. Are you the—Nameless One?”

“I am certainly not nameless,” he replied.

“I am Lieutenant Lanark, of the Federal Army of the Frontier, at your service.” He bowed slightly, which made it more formal. “Now, come along with me.”

“Stop!” cried Lanark, too late. “Why did you break it? I wanted to have a good look at the thing.”

“But it is not good for men to look upon the devil’s works,” responded Jager, almost pontifically.

“Don’t advise me, sergeant,” said Lanark bleakly. “Remember that I am your officer, and that I don’t need instruction as to what I may look at.” He looked down at the fragments. “Hmm, the thing was hollow, and quite brittle.

They had gone out upon the front porch. There, with Corporal Gray and a blank-faced trooper on guard, lay the silent form of Newton, its face covered with a newspaper.

Almost every man of the gathered patrol knew a corpse when he saw one, and it took no second glance to know that Newton was quite dead.

Jager, bending, lifted the newspaper and then dropped it back. He said something that, for all his religiosity, might have been an oath.

His unconscious awareness grew conscious—conscious of that blunt, pure absence of sound. There was no twitter of birds, no hum of insects. Not a breath of wind stirred in the leafless branches of the trees. Not even echoes came from afar.

The air was dead, as water is dead in a still, stale pond.

He dismounted then, and the creak of his saddle and the scrape of his boot-sole upon the bald earth came sharp and shocking to his quiet-filled ears. A hitching-rail stood there, old-seeming to be in so new a country as this.

And I doubt if Albertus Magnus was evil. Wasn’t he a churchman, and didn’t he teach Saint Thomas Aquinas?” He leafed through the beginning of the book. “Here’s a charm, Jager, to be spoken in the name of God. That doesn’t sound unholy.”

“Satan can recite scripture to his own ends,”

misquoted Jager. “I don’t remember who said that, but—”

He preferred to serve as a common trooper.

He was a chivalric idealist, and a peerless scout.

“You’d better steal some Yankee blues yourself, Dauger,” he advised. “Those homespun pants would drop off of you if you stood up in your stirrups. … Yes, the enemy’s expected to take up a position in Channow Valley.

Old Jael Bettiss, who lived in the hollow among the cypresses, was not a real witch.

It makes no difference that folk thought she was, and walked fearfully wide of her shadow. Nothing can be proved by the fact that she was as disgustingly ugly without as she was wicked within.

Old Jael Bettiss, who lived in the hollow among the cypresses, was not a real witch.

It makes no difference that folk thought she was, and walked fearfully wide of her shadow.

Nothing can be proved by the fact that she was as disgustingly ugly without as she was wicked within. It is quite irrelevant that evil was her study and profession and pleasure. She was no witch; she only pretended to be.

Nothing can be proved by the fact that she was as disgustingly ugly without as she was wicked within. It is quite irrelevant that evil was her study and profession and pleasure.

She was no witch; she only pretended to be.

Jael Bettiss knew that all laws providing for the punishment of witches had been repealed, or at the least forgotten. As to being feared and hated, that was meat and drink to Jael Bettiss, living secretly alone in the hollow.

Once, it is true, a director had stopped him on the street and offered to test him for a featured role, but old Bratton had refused with loud indignation when he heard that the role would be that of a mad scientist.

Old Bratton was touchy about mad scientists, because he was one.

For a time he had been a studio electrician, competent though touchy;

Shannon said one thing: “Ben, how much can we tell the police?”

“It isn’t how much we can tell them,” replied Gascon weightily. “It’s how little.”

When Autumn returned, Ben Gascon was on the air again after all. His sponsors feared that his marriage to Shannon Cole might damage their popularity as co-stars, but radio fans showed quite the opposite reaction.

“I’ll kill myself first,” he thought, but even as he made the promise he knew he would not.

Cowards took the suicide way out, the final yielding to unjust, cruel mastery by the Martians.

Parr stiffened his shoulders, that had grown tanned and vigorous in the healthy air. He spoke grimly to Sadau:

He threw down the pen.

“You’re only half haunted, Scrope.”

Understanding dawned into the little man’s face. He sprang to his feet. He began a glad jabber:

Will Jones! ’Twas an easy name and comfortable. For the nonce I was happier with it than with Charles Stuart, England’s king and son of that other Charles who had died by Cromwell’s axe.

I was heir to bitter sorrow and trouble and mystery, in my youth lost and hunted and friendless as any strong thief.

The rain was steady and weary. I tried to ask myself what I did here in Spring Coppice. It had been necessary to hide the day out, and travel by night; but whose thought was it to choose this dim, sorrowful wood?

But,” and his eyes were like gimlets in mine, “we swore by the oaths set us—the names Cromwell’s men worship, not the names we worship. We will keep the promise as long as we will, and no longer.”

“When it pleases us we make,” contributed Regan. “When it pleases us we break.”

Now ’tis true that Cromwell perished on third September, 1658, seven year to the day from Worcester fight. But I half-believed Pembru even as he spoke, and so would you have done.

Planter whistled. This was a harsh proof of human tenacity. The Skygors discarding unprofitable servants and finding them a menace. “None of you are weaklings,” he said.

“Freedom brings health,” replied Mantha sententiously.

“Yet they are many more than we, well fortified, and have a strange spell to whelm those who attack.” She grimaced in distaste. “We but lurk and linger, fighting when we must and fleeing when we may. As the last of us dies—”

Wasn’t Shiloh supposed to be named after an angel or a devil?

Angels and devils were both there, sorting the two armies through for who should live and who die, who go to heaven and who go to hell.

When I say he was about as great as General Lee, I expect to be believed. When we fell back, Bedford Forrest sent some of us to save a field piece that Bragg’s artillery left behind.

But the Yankees got there fustest with the mostest men.

They carried off the gun, and two or three of us Tennessee cavalry with it.

He left me. I took off my tunic and boots, and stretched out on the cot. Still puzzling over things, I went to sleep.

I woke to the touch of a hand, cold as a washrag, on my brow.

Somehow there was light enough to see a woman standing there. She wore a frosty white dress and veil, like a bride’s. Her face was still whiter.

I remembered that adventure, strangest moment of all my war-boyhood on a late night in the fall of 1876.

The wagon track I walked was frozen to rutted concrete. Wind as cold as fear rustled the tall dead grass and the naked twigs of roadside thickets.

A round moon reminded me of a pancake, and I tried not to think of that or anything else to eat. It had been long since I had eaten.

“

Witches are simple folk. They reckon by full moons.

We have one tonight, and they’ve crept out of their dens to do what mischief their hearts, and their demon, tells them. Beginning at my house.”

“Their friends and families will know that fate overtook them, but not in what form,” replied Jaeger. “If no corpse shows above earth, I will not be required to explain anything. That is the way of the law hereabouts, and it is well.

Wrestlings with demons do not court publicity.

”

And at once there was an answer:

“You lie upon the world Dondromogon.”

I knew the language of that answer, but where it came from—above, beneath, or indeed within me—I could not say. I lifted a hand, and knuckled dust from my eyes.

“You are going to ask how you were brought here. That is the mystery of the Masters.” The voice became grand. “Suffice it that you were needed, and that the time was ripe.

There is a proper time, like a proper place, for each thing and each happening.

Now, go to your destiny.”

She smiled a little, with a certain shy humor.

“Do not all things on Dondromogon belong to Yandro?”

I smiled back. “Doriza, perhaps I should act complimented. Yet it seems to me that Gederr and Elonie told you to make the offer. And I’m not sure—I can say this to my personal aide, can’t I?—that I want any favors at their hands.”