Short Fiction quotes

Then, at the spring, he noticed that the footprints of the girl ceased, but that the man’s turned toward the jungle and were more deeply imprinted than before. Therefore Ka‑nanu was carrying the girl.

Ga‑nor was no fool. He knew that a man carries a girl into the forest for no good purpose.

If she had been willing to go, she would not have been carried.

“Ga‑nor!” A‑æa whispered, and Ga‑nor gathered the girl in his arms.

“What I have fought for I will keep,” said he.

And so it was that the girl who went forth into the forest in the arms of an abductor came back in the arms of a lover and a mate.

“What I have fought for I will keep,” said he.

And so it was that the girl who went forth into the forest in the arms of an abductor came back in the arms of a lover and a mate.

My rapier was half out when he grasped my arm and flung me headlong. I dragged him with me and we struck the ground together. Wrenching a hand free I jerked off the mask. A shriek of horror broke from my lips.

Beast eyes glittered beneath that mask, white fangs flashed in the moonlight. The face was that of a wolf.

In an instant those fangs were at my throat. Taloned hands tore the sword from my grasp. I beat at that horrible face with my clenched fists, but his jaws were fastened on my shoulder, his talons tore at my throat.

Fear? Your pardon, Messieurs, but the meaning of fear you do not know.

No, I hold to my statement. You are soldiers, adventurers. You have known the charges of regiments of dragoons, the frenzy of wind-lashed seas. But fear, real hair-raising, horror-crawling fear, you have not known. I myself have known such fear;

At first he refused, then rose, upon their repeated urgings, and stood silent for a moment, goblet raised. He seemed to dominate, to overawe the group of revelers. Then with a mocking, savage laugh, he lifted the goblet above his head.

“To Solomon,” he exclaimed, “who bound all devils! And thrice cursed be he for that some escaped!”

A toast and a curse in one! It was drunk silently, and with many sidelong, doubting glances.

Dom Vincente announced that the sentries would be doubled and some would patrol the corridors of the castle itself. I found myself musing cynically that if Gola’s suspicions were true, sentries would be of little good.

I am not, Messieurs, a man to brook such a situation with patience.

And I was young then. So as we drank before retiring, I flung my goblet on the table and angrily announced that in spite of man, beast or devil, I slept that night with doors flung wide. And I tramped angrily to my chamber.

Now this is the truth: that if a werewolf is slain in the half-form of a man, its ghost will haunt its slayer through eternity. But if it is slain as a wolf, hell gapes to receive it.

The true werewolf is not (as many think) a man who may take the form of a wolf, but a wolf who takes the form of a man!

“Now listen, my friend, and I will tell you of the wisdom, the hellish knowledge that is mine, gained through many a frightful deed, imparted to me amid the ghastly shadows of midnight forests where fiends and half-beasts roamed.

Men watch the sun and set their lives by it. They league themselves on every hand with time. They count the minutes that race them into eternity. Man outlived the centuries ere he began to reckon time.

Time is man-made. Eternity is the work of the gods.

In this cavern there is no such thing as time. There are no stars, no sun. Without is time; within is eternity. We count not time. Nothing marks the speeding of the hours. The youths go forth. They see the sun, the stars.

They count the minutes that race them into eternity. Man outlived the centuries ere he began to reckon time. Time is man-made. Eternity is the work of the gods. In this cavern there is no such thing as time. There are no stars, no sun.

Without is time; within is eternity.

We count not time. Nothing marks the speeding of the hours. The youths go forth. They see the sun, the stars. They reckon time. And they pass. I was a young man when I entered this cavern. I have never left it.

And as the ancient hesitated, evidently pulled one way by his fanatical lust for revenge, and the other by his equally fierce racial pride, the Pict burst into a wild flight of oration, carried on in his own language. At last the ancient chief nodded.

“A Pict ever paid his debts,” said he with impressive grandeur.

“Never a Pict forgets. Unbind him. No Celt shall ever say that a Pict showed ingratitude.”

Cororuc was released, and as, like a man in a daze, he tried to stammer his thanks, the chief waved them aside.

“A Pict never forgets a foe, ever remembers a friendly deed,” he replied.

“Come,” murmured his Pictish friend, tugging at the Celt’s arm.

“All day I keep this up, with superhuman effort, spurred on by the horror behind me. And ever as I hurl myself forward on weakening legs, ever as I lie gasping for breath, I watch the sun with a terrible eagerness.

How swiftly the sun travels when a man races it for life!

A losing race it is, as I know when I watch the sun sinking toward the skyline, and the hills which I had hoped to gain ere sundown seemingly as far away as ever.”

She pouted her pretty lips and called me a tyrant, and then was off over the veldt like an antelope, laughing at me over her shoulder, her hair blowing free in the breeze.

Tyrant! I was her slave from the first.

Somehow the idea of becoming a lover never entered my mind. It was not the fact that she was several years older than I, or that she had a sweetheart (several of them, I think) back in New York. Simply, I worshiped her;

Slowly he rose, mechanically wiping his hands upon his cloak. A dark scowl had settled on his somber brow. Yet he made no wild, reckless vow, swore no oath by saints or devils.

“Men shall die for this,” he said coldly.

“You are a fool!” The words came in a cold snarl that curdled the hearer’s blood.

He did not understand. All his life he had roamed about the world aiding the weak and fighting oppression, he neither knew nor questioned why. That was his obsession, his driving force of life.

Cruelty and tyranny to the weak sent a red blaze of fury, fierce and lasting, through his soul.

When the full flame of his hatred was wakened and loosed, there was no rest for him until his vengeance had been fulfilled to the uttermost.

Rapier clashed on rapier as the two swordsmen fought.

They were fire and ice opposed.

Le Loup fought wildly but craftily, leaving no openings, taking advantage of every opportunity. He was a living flame, bounding back, leaping in, feinting, thrusting, warding, striking—laughing like a wild man, taunting and cursing.

The road was dim from disuse but was clearly defined. Kane went swiftly but warily, sword and pistols at hand. Stars blinked out and night winds whispered among the grass like weeping specters.

The moon began to rise, lean and haggard, like a skull among the stars.

Then suddenly Kane stopped short. From somewhere in front of him sounded a strange and eerie echo—or something like an echo. Again, this time louder. Kane started forward again. Were his senses deceiving him? No!

Kane fought with his arms and his feet and his hands, and he was aware at last that the ghost began to give back before him, that the fearful laughter changed to screams of baffled fury.

For man’s only weapon is courage that flinches not from the gates of Hell itself, and against such not even the legions of Hell can stand.

Of this Kane knew nothing; he only knew that the talons which tore and rended him seemed to grow weaker and wavering, that a wild light grew and grew in the horrible eyes.

“Do you have many guests?” l’Armon pursued.

“Few come twice,” the host grunted.

Kane started and glanced up straight into those small red eyes, as if he sought for some hidden meaning in the host’s words. The flaming eyes seemed to dilate, then dropped sullenly before the Englishman’s cold stare.

“Have done!” Kane’s voice was deep. “No good will come of mocking the dead.”

“The dead should defend themselves,” laughed l’Armon. “Somehow, I will slay the man who kills me, though my corpse climb up forty fathoms of ocean to do it.”

Kane turned toward the outer door, closing the door of the secret room behind him. He liked not this talk which smacked of demonry and witchcraft; and he was in haste to face the host with the charge of his guilt.

… swung out of sight around the gem-blazing shoulders of the Tower of Splendor and Kull reined his stallion about and started toward the palace at an easy gait, discussing the review with the commanders that rode with him, using not many words, but saying much.

“The army is like a sword,” said Kull, “and must not be allowed to rust.”

So down the street they rode, and Kull gave no heed to any of the whispers that reached his hearing from the throngs that still swarmed the streets.

Little did Kull heed.

Heavy-handed had he seized the decaying throne of ancient Valusia and with a heavier hand did he hold it, a man against a nation.

After the council chamber, the social palace where Kull replied to the formal and laudatory phrases of the lords and ladies, with carefully hidden, grim amusement at such frivolities;

Who was he, a straightforward man of the seas and the mountain, to rule a race strangely and terribly wise with the mysticisms of antiquity? An ancient race—

“I am Kull!” said he, flinging back his head as a lion flings back his mane. “I am Kull!”

His falcon gaze swept the ancient hall. His self-confidence flowed back. … And in a dim nook of the hall a tapestry moved—slightly.

Ancient was Ka-nu and wise in statecraft, grown old in the game. There was no elemental hatred in the eyes that looked at Kull appraisingly; no tribal traditions hindered his judgments. Long associations with the statesmen of the civilized nations had swept away such cobwebs.

Not: who and what is this man? was the question ever foremost in Ka-nu’s mind, but: can I use this man, and how?

Tribal prejudices he used only to further his own schemes.

Ka-nu gurgled and his paunch shook with his mirth.

“Wine is red and women are soft,” he remarked tolerantly. “But⁠—ha! ha!⁠—think not old Ka-nu allows either to interfere with business.”

Again he laughed, and Kull moved restlessly. This seemed much like being made sport of, and the king’s scintillant eyes began to glow with a feline light.

“If you think to gain it by flattery—”

“Tush. Who spake of flattery? I flatter only to disguard.”

There was a keen sparkle in Ka-nu’s eyes, a cold glimmer that did not match his lazy smile.

And it seemed to Kull that the clashing hoofs took up the silent refrain to beat it into the night with hollow reechoing mockery:

“Kull⁠—the⁠—king! Kull⁠—the⁠—fool!”

Glow, moon; you light a king’s way! Gleam, stars; you are torches in the train of an emperor! And clang, silver-shod hoofs; you herald that Kull rides through Valusia.

How many of those he looked upon were horrid, inhuman monsters, plotting his death, beneath the smooth mesmeric illusion of a human face?

Valusia⁠—land of dreams and nightmares⁠—a kingdom of the shadows, ruled by phantoms who glided back and forth behind the painted curtains, mocking the futile king who sat upon the throne⁠—himself a shadow.

And like a comrade shadow Brule stood by his side, dark eyes glittering from immobile face. A real man, Brule!

How could a man be so many different men in a lifetime?

For Kull knew that there were many Kulls and he wondered which was the real Kull.

After all, the priests of the Serpent merely went a step further in their magic, for all men wore masks, and many a different mask with each different man or woman; and Kull wondered if a serpent did not lurk under every mask.

There comes, even to kings, the time of great weariness.

Then the gold of the throne is brass, the silk of the palace becomes drab. The gems in the diadem and upon the fingers of the women sparkle drearily like the ice of the white seas;

I gasped—or sought to. For over the high, strange shoulder of the apparition another face stood out clearly for an instant, as if the owner peered at me. Red lips, half parted, long dark eyelashes, shading vivid eyes, a shimmery cloud of hair.

Over the shoulder of Horror, breathtaking beauty for an instant looked at me.

My dream of the skull-face was borne over that usually uncrossable gap that lies between hashish enchantment and humdrum reality.

She bore a tray of food which she set beside me, and then she seated herself on the couch, her large eyes fixed upon my face.

A flower in a serpent den she was, and the beauty of her took hold of my heart.

“Steephen!” she whispered and I thrilled as she spoke my name for the first time.

“The girl led him down the street to the next block and then an automobile stopped and they got in and drove off, sir.”

“The stupidity of the London detective has rightfully become an international jest,” he said acidly.

“No doubt it never occurred to you as being strange that a Limehouse beggar should ride about in his own automobile.”

“This is a veritable labyrinth we are following, leading nowhere! Here, in the very heart of civilization’s metropolis, the direst enemy of that civilization commits crimes of the most outrageous nature and goes free!

We are children, wandering in the night, struggling with an unseen evil⁠—dealing with an incarnate devil, of whose true identity we know nothing and whose true ambitions we can only guess.

“Never have we managed to arrest one of the Egyptian’s direct henchmen, and the few dupes and tools of his we have apprehended have died mysteriously before they could tell us anything. Again I repeat:

I bent, drew her into my arms, felt her lips against mine, then tore myself away.

The fog plucked at me with ghostly fingers, cold as the hands of dead men, as I raced down the street.

I had no plan, but one was forming in my mind, beginning to seethe in the stimulated cauldron that was my brain.

I felt the need of none. As a drunken man walks blithely into danger, I strode to the lair of the Scorpion, magnificently aware of my superiority, imperially confident of my stimulation and sure as the unchanging stars that the way would open before me.

Oh, there never was a superman like that who knocked commandingly on the door of Soho 48 that night in the rain and the fog!

I knocked four times, the old signal that we slaves had used to be admitted into the idol-room at Yun Shatu’s. An aperture opened in the center of the door and slanted eyes looked warily out.

“

I have come to believe that mankind eternally hovers on the brinks of secret oceans of which it knows nothing.

Races have lived and vanished before our race rose out of the slime of the primitive, and it is likely still others will live upon the earth after ours has vanished.

This thought—a mere fantasy, of course—he explained to himself by the legends of vampires, undead, ghosts and suchlike—the fearsome attributes with which the living have cloaked the dead for countless ages, since primitive man first recognized in death something horrid and apart from life.

Man feared death, thought Falred, and some of his fear of death took hold on the dead so that they, too, were feared.

And the sight of the dead engendered grisly thoughts, gave rise to dim fears of hereditary memory, lurking back in the dark corners of the brain.

A great black shadow lay across the land, cleaving the red flame of the sunset.

To the man who toiled up the jungle trail it loomed like a symbol of death and horror, a menace brooding and terrible, like the shadow of a stealthy assassin flung upon some candle-lit wall.

“My name is Solomon Kane,” the white man answered in the same language. “I seek the vampire queen of Negari.”

“Few seek. Fewer find. None return,” answered the other cryptically.

“Will you lead me to her?”

A long red trail, black shadows and crimson shadows weaving a devil’s dance—marked by flashing swords and the smoke of battle—by faltering words falling like drops of blood from the lips of dying men.

Not a consciously dramatic man, certainly, was Solomon Kane.

He told his tale in the same manner in which he had overcome terrific obstacles—coldly, briefly and without heroics.

This explanation Kane himself believed. He never sought to analyze his motives and he never wavered, once his mind was made up. Though he always acted on impulse, he firmly believed that all his actions were governed by cold and logical reasonings.

He was a man born out of his time⁠—a strange blending of Puritan and Cavalier, with a touch of the ancient philosopher, and more than a touch of the pagan, though the last assertion would have shocked him unspeakably.

An atavist of the days of blind chivalry he was, a knight errant in the somber clothes of a fanatic.

He was a man born out of his time—a strange blending of Puritan and Cavalier, with a touch of the ancient philosopher, and more than a touch of the pagan, though the last assertion would have shocked him unspeakably.

An atavist of the days of blind chivalry he was, a knight errant in the somber clothes of a fanatic.

A hunger in his soul drove him on and on, an urge to right all wrongs, protect all weaker things, avenge all crimes against right and justice.

Nakari smiled and then frowned. “The way you say that, it is no compliment. You hate me, do you not?”

“As a man hates a serpent,” Kane replied bluntly.

Nakari’s eyes blazed with almost insane fury. Her hands clenched until the long nails sank into the palms; then as quickly as her anger had arisen, it ebbed away.

The night wind was in his face and behind him rose the clamor of the doomed city as Kane staggered down the hill path that trembled beneath his feet.

Dawn lay like a cool white hand on the brow of Solomon Kane.

The nightmares faded from his soul as he breathed deep of the morning wind which blew up from the jungle far below his feet—a wind laden with the musk of decaying vegetation;

Solomon Kane shifted his musket from his shoulder and let the stock fall to the earth.

Silence lay about him like a fog.

Kane’s lined face and tattered garments showed the effect of long bush travel. He looked about him.

“Here is that which will destroy them,” said Kane grimly, raising the voodoo stave.

“Black magic must fight black magic, and I know not what spell N’Longa put hereon, but⁠—”

“You are a god,” said Zunna decidedly. “No man could overcome two of the walking dead men. Master, can you not lift this curse from my tribe?

Kane was silent. His flesh crawled in spite of himself. Kran rose and stretched his arms in an unfamiliar sort of way, as if his limbs were new to him. He slapped his breast approvingly.

“Me N’Longa!” said he in the old boastful manner. “Mighty juju man! Blood-brother, not you know me, eh?”

“You are Satan,” said Kane sincerely. “Are you Kran or are you N’Longa?”

Just how he’d have come out, I can’t say, for he was little of the Don Juan, but Naluna snuggled up to him, much to his embarrassment, listening to his stumbling Somali with her soul in her eyes.

Love blossoms suddenly and unexpectedly in the East.

“However, a peremptory voice outside our cell made Naluna jump half out of her skin and sent her scurrying, but as she went she pressed Conrad’s hand and whispered something in his ear that we couldn’t understand, but it sounded highly passionate.

Bran shook his head in puzzlement, swung into the saddle and rode away, climbing the eastern slope and vanishing over the ridge. Cormac hesitated: “Strange man, are you in truth of flesh and blood, or are you a ghost?”

“When we dream, we are all flesh and blood⁠—so long as we are dreaming,” Kull answered.

“This is the strangest nightmare I have ever known—but you, who will soon fade into sheer nothingness as I awaken, seem as real to me now, as Brule, or Kananu, or Tu, or Kelkor.”

Bran folded his arms; his eyes were haunted. “Strike if you will; I am sick of slaughter.

It is a cold mead, this kinging it. A king must gamble with men’s lives and naked swords.

The lives of all my people were at stake; I sacrificed the Northmen—yes; and my heart is sore within me, for they were men! But had I given the order when you would have desired, all might have gone awry.

“And then Kull lived despite his many wounds,” said Cormac, “and has returned to the mists of silence and the centuries. Well—he thought us a dream; we thought him a ghost.

And sure, life is but a web spun of ghosts and dreams and illusion, and it is in my mind that the kingdom which has this day been born of swords and slaughter in this howling valley is a thing no more solid than the foam of the bright sea.

”

Across the red drifts and mail-clad forms, two figures approached one another. In that utter desolation only they moved. The frosty sky was over them, the white illimitable plain around them, the dead men at their feet.

Slowly through the corpses they came, as ghosts might come to a tryst through the shambles of a world.

Their shields were gone, their corselets dinted. Blood smeared their mail; their swords were red. Their horned helmets showed the marks of fierce strokes.

“My dwelling place is further than you can walk, Amra of Akbitana!” she laughed. Spreading wide her arms she swayed before him, her golden head lolling wantonly, her scintillant eyes shadowed beneath long silken lashes. “Am I not beautiful, man?”

“Like Dawn running naked on the snows,” he muttered, his eyes burning like those of a wolf.

“Then why do you not rise and follow me? Who is the strong warrior who falls down before me?” she chanted in maddening mockery. “Lie down and die in the snow with the other fools, Amra of the black hair.

Of all the fantastic—well, since he killed his wife, I suppose you’ll be expecting Evelyn to murder you!” This last was delivered in searing sarcasm, as I thought of the sweet, gentle girl Gordon had married. His answer stunned me.

“My wife,” he said slowly, “has tried to kill me three times in the past week.”

There was no reply to that. I glanced helplessly at John Kirowan. He sat in his customary position, chin resting on his strong, slim hands; his white face was immobile, but his dark eyes gleamed with interest.

I was making toward my prostrate friend with Donnelly and Bain, but Kirowan caught my arm. His face was no longer immobile; his eyes glittered with a controlled savagery.

“Leave him to them!” he snarled. “We are hunters, not healers! Lead me to the house of Joseph Roelocke!”

I did not question him. We drove there in Gordon’s car. I had the wheel, and something about the grim face of my companion caused me to hurl the machine recklessly through the traffic.

In his demoralization he fell easy prey to the thing he had called forth. It, of course, was always watching for a moment of weakness on his part.

The powers of Darkness never deal fairly with human beings; he who traffics with them is always cheated in the end.

”

Voodoo was comparatively a young religion, after all, born in the hills of Haiti. Behind the froth of voodooism rose the grim religions of Africa, like granite cliffs glimpsed through a mask of green fronds.

Voodooism was a mewling infant beside the black, immemorial colossus that had reared its terrible shape in the older land through uncounted ages.

Zambebwei! The very name sent a shudder through him, symbolic of horror and fear. It was more than the name of a country and the mysterious tribe that inhabited that country;

They agreed without question; the Buckners have always been tacitly considered leaders in Canaan, and it came natural for me to offer suggestions.

Nobody gives orders to white men in Canaan.

“I reckoned you’d be showin’ up soon,” opined McBride, as we rode along the whitening road. “You usually manage to keep up with what’s happenin’ in Canaan.”

I comprehended the horror that breathed like an invisible mist from that accursed hut. I sensed the reality of the juju, of which the grotesque wooden images which voodoo men place in their huts are only a symbol.

Saul Stark was gone; but he had left a Presence to guard his hut.

I backed away, sweat beading the backs of my hands. Not for a bag of gold would I have peered into the shuttered windows or touched that unbolted door. My pistol hung in my hand, useless I knew against the Thing in that cabin.

Stark had run from his hut, a pistol in his hand. He was staring wildly about, alarmed by the noise he had heard, but I knew he could not see me. His ashy skin glistened with perspiration.

He who had ruled by fear was now ruled by fear.

He feared the unknown hand that had slain his mistress; feared the negroes who had fled from him; feared the abysmal swamp which had sheltered him, and the monstrosities he had created. He lifted a weird call that quavered with panic.

They think to this day that a swamp negro killed Jim Braxton, after he had killed the brown woman, and that I broke up the threatened uprising by killing Saul Stark. I let them think it.

They will never know the shapes the black water of Tularoosa hides.

That is a secret I share with the cowed and terror-haunted black people of Goshen, and of it neither they nor I have ever spoken.

Such thoughts are likely to keep company with any man who dares invade, in the night, that lonely stretch of densely timbered river-country which the black people call Egypt, for some obscurely racial reason.

There is no blackness this side of Hell’s unlighted abyss as absolute as the blackness of the pine woods.

The trail was but a half-guessed trace winding between walls of solid ebony. I followed it as much by the instincts of the piny woods dweller as by the guidance of the external senses.

Her wide eyes were fixed on her uncle as if she were seeing the real man for the first time, and was stricken by what she saw. He plunged on, too obsessed and engulfed by fear to care or heed what she thought of him.

The sight of a soul stripped of its conventional veneer and surface pretense is not always pleasant.

“I broke through the lines of the besiegers and escaped in the night. Grimm, naturally, fell into the hands of the devil-worshippers, and for years I supposed that he was dead. They had the reputation of slaying, by torture, every alien that they captured.

Instantly he exploded into a hurricane of ferocity that would have dismembered a lesser man than I. We rolled on the pine-needles, rending and tearing.

Were I penning an elegant romance, I should tell how I vanquished Tope Braxton by a combination of higher intelligence, boxing skill and deft science that defeated his brute strength. But I must stick to facts in this chronicle.

Intelligence played little part in that battle. It would have helped me no more than it would help a man in the actual grip of a gorilla. As for artificial skill, Tope would have torn the average boxer or wrestler limb from limb.

The sun sank and the moon rose, flooding the desert with weird silver light. Drifted sand glimmered in long ripples, as if a sea had suddenly been frozen into immobility. Steve, parched fiercely by a thirst he dared not fully quench, cursed beneath his breath.

The desert was beautiful beneath the moon, with the beauty of a cold marble lorelei to lure men to destruction.

What a mad quest! his weary brain reiterated; the Fire of Ashurbanipal retreated into the mazes of unreality with each dragging step. The desert became not merely a material wasteland, but the gray mists of the lost eons, in whose depths dreamed sunken things.

Steve himself felt the somber antiquity of the place, and almost found himself fearing a rush of bronze war chariots down the forgotten streets, or to hear the sudden menacing flare of bronze trumpets.

The silence in dead cities was so much more intense, he reflected, than that on the open desert.

They came to the portals of the great temple. Rows of immense columns flanked the wide doorway, which was ankle-deep in sand, and from which sagged massive bronze frameworks that had once braced mighty doors, whose polished woodwork had rotted away centuries ago.