The Black Mass,  1963 to 1970

Snippet: "I mean, sir, that there are devilish agencies at work here. Don't, I entreat you, dismiss what I'm saying as the wanderings of a foolish old man. I have heard them with these ears; I have seen them with these eyes. Though, whether they have any positive substance, sir, is beyond my small knowledge to declare. Devils are creatures made by God, and that, for vengeance." --- the Verger

Snippet: "A certain amount of interest was excited in the village, when it was known that the famous witch, still remembered by a few, was to be exhumed. And a feeling of surprise and, indeed, disquiet was very strong when it was found that though her coffin was fairly sound and unbroken, there was no trace whatever inside of it of body, bones, or dust." --- the narrator.

Snippet: "What DO you think you're doing?" "Can't I take off my shoes?" "Suppose someone comes?" "Well, suppose they do?" "You're sitting there with your shoe off." "Can't I take off my shoes in my own house?" "But you only took off one shoe." "I'm afraid I don't see the difference." "You're completely insensitive." "Alright, we'll watch the programme, then." ...bangs foot on floor again.

Snippet: "It was his passiveness that irritated me. Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance. I felt strangely goaded on to encounter him in ever new opposition." --- Master in Chancery

Snippet: "Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing, benumbs." --- from the intro

Snippet: "Still in all, someone could step on the moss covering by accident and break through it. And then the entrance to the burrow would be revealed and anybody, ANYBODY... anybody intelligent enough... could enter—could enter the burrow and destroy everything, EVERYTHING. Ach, Knowing that, I could NEVER rest! Not for a single hour! At that one spot in the layer of moss I am vulnerable." --- the burrower

Snippet: "Well, there's one thing about Jorkens, and that is that he'll always tell you a story; whether you believe it or not it's your own affair, but he's always good for a story. And another thing about him is that he likes to be offered a drink." --- Jorken's drinking companion

Snippet: "I... I lean forward and row... row... all things are one in my weariness... weariness not of years, not of centuries, but of wide floods of time... eons... eons... the heaviness... the pain in my arms... the part of the scheme made by the gods and all of a piece with Eternity."

Snippet: "What a perplexity. What a perplexity. I-I should be starting on an urgent journey. A seriously ill patient is waiting for me in a village ten miles away. But, between him and me, a thick blizzard fills all the wide spaces. I have a gig—a light gig with big wheels, exactly right for our country roads. Muffled in furs. My bag of instruments in my hand. I am in the courtyard all ready for the journey, but there is no horse to be had. No horse! My own horse died in the night, worn out by the fatigues of this icy winter." the Doctor

Snippet: "Whereas the spirit that removed itself cometh back upon occasion, and is sometimes seen as appearing in the form of the body it bore, yet it hath happened that the body without the spirit hath walked. And it is attested that a corpse so raised hath no natural love, nor remembrance thereof, but only hate. Also, it is known that some spirits which in life were benign become by death evil altogether." --- Hall

Snippet: "Ah there's the mutt. There's the mutt.... Ow, you repulsive little creature, bite ME will you? Ah, ah there's your basket, there's your basket. Just what I'm looking for. Ha! And underneath, ah, underneath in the straw, what do I find, what do I find? Ahahaha. The letters. The letters! I knew it, I knew it, I knew it. Ah... ah, the letters, the letters, the letters.... Now at last, NOW at last, I'll find everything out, all about these intrigues and plots, oh plots, plots. I'll find all the little wheels and springs at the bottom of the [?]. These letters, these letters will explain everything. Everything. Oh dogs are a clever race. They know all about intrigues. Everything is bound to be in the letters." --- the madman

Snippet: "I remember that I went rushing through the house shouting over and over: 'Fire! Fire! Fire!' I know exactly what I said and what feeling underlay the words, though at the time it could scarcely have come to the surface of my consciousness. 'So. So, this is a fire,' I thought. 'This is what it is like to have the house on fire. Is this all there is to it?'" --- man in the café

Snippet: "I corrupted them! I destroyed them all. All! I like some horrible trichina, the plague germ, I infected with myself that entire happy, sinless planet. I can't remember how it happened, some joke, some innocent and playful laugh, the germ of it had penetrated their hearts, and they-they liked it! And then everything else followed. Voluptuousness, jealousy, cruelty, shame—oh, they made shame into a virtue—separation, the struggle for isolation." --- the dreamer

Snippet: "I, Karna-Vootra, very clearly saw last night the queenly Vava-Nyria. Though partly she was hidden by great clouds that swept continually by her, rolling over and over, yet her face was unhidden and shone, being full of moonlight. Vava-Nyria. Walk with me."

Snippet: "There was a sequel to the adventure, though. I got through the post a charming little diamond broach, with the name Esmé set in a sprig of rosemary. Incidentally, too, I lost the friendship of Constance Broddle. You see, when I sold the brooch I quite properly refused to give her any share of the proceeds. I pointed out that the Esmé part of the affair was my own invention, and the hyena part of it belonged to Lord Pabham, if it really was his hyena, of which, of course, I've no proof." --- the Baroness

Snippet: "I was looking straight into another pair of eyes, human eyes. But large. Flat. Luminous. I-I had seen such eyes among the nocturnal creatures which creep out under the artificial red moonlight in the zoo. The owner was only a dozen feet away from me.... He was as pale as a creature found under a stone. His long thin arms ended in hands that hung flowingly more like trailing transparent fins, or wisps of chiffon... than ordinary hands."

Snippet: "Beside one of those rocks... no one believed me when I told the story later, or made out they didn't believe me... well, what I saw was a hand... a whole arm, reaching up from out of the Earth. Now, they say that the hill had once been a burial place in ancient times and that a skeleton arm could very well be unearthed by the rain. Humph. But that was no skeleton arm. There was flesh on it, dark and old, and long nails, more like claws. Now you can believe me or not, but I say I saw that arm reaching up out of the Earth..." --- Granny telling a bedtime story

Snippet: "I've been dead for quite a while, but my cognisance of it comes in little clumps. A day or two together, a year of dead feeling, or no feeling. Time is associated with events. Heh. Associated. The skin on my fingers has turned rubbery. I think about my impatience [?] to come alive. When will it be? When will it be? Yeah, seeps under the door, rakes over my chest, plays with my legs. Will it be gradual? The coming. [Creeping] Filling? Replacing the bones with [tallow]. I-I have those things to wonder about." --- the man

Snippet: "And then... then I first heard it. It-it seemed to come from within my brain... a low-pitched buzzing. And I began to wonder what new trick my failing strength was playing me. But the sound droned on, sometimes increasing, sometimes decreasing. I-I became conscious that the room was growing warmer. I-I swayed a little and stretched out my hand to the door. It opened easily. And a moment later I stood in the hall. Almost immediately I realized that the buzzing had stopped." --- the old tramp

Snippet: "Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure—a ghostly couple."

Snippet: "It had been prophesied of old and foreseen from the ancient days that its enemy would come upon Thlunrana. And the date of its doom was known and the gate by which it would enter, yet none had prophesied of the enemy who he was, save that he was of the gods though he dwelt with men." --- from the intro

Snippet: "We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow, and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse. Tomorrow arrives, and with it a more impatient anxiety to do our duty, but with this very increase of anxiety arrives, also, a nameless, a positively fearful, because unfathomable, craving for delay. This craving gathers strength as the moments fly. The last hour for action is at hand. We tremble with the violence of the conflict before us—of the definite with the indefinite—of the substance with the shadow. But it is the shadow which prevails—we struggle in vain. The clock strikes, and is the knell of our welfare. And the ghost that so long overawed us flies—ah, it disappears—we are free. The old energy returns. Ah we will labour now! Alas. Alas, it is too late!" --- the man in chains

Snippet: "I sometimes came twice in the twenty-four hours.... The moments I liked best were those of gathering dusk, of the short autumn twilight; the time which, again and again, I found myself hoping most. Listening. Feeling my attention, never before so fine on the pulse of the great vague place." --- Spencer

Snippet: "Georg. Georg, listen to me, you've come to talk this business over with me and that certainly does you honour. But it's nothing. It's less than nothing if you don't tell me the whole truth. Now, I don't want to start up matters that shouldn't be mentioned here. Since the death of your dear mother certain things have been done that, that really aren't right. Maybe the time will come for mentioning them, maybe sooner than we think. Many a thing in the business I'm not aware of. Maybe it's not done behind my back. I'm not going to say that it's done behind my back." --- father to Georg

Snippet: "That the thing was all in a dream is beside the point. We have fallen in dreams before, but it is well known that if in one of those falls you ever hit the ground... you die. I-I had looked at those menacing mountaintops below me and knew well that such a fall as the one I feared would have such a termination. Then I went on." --- the dreamer

Snippet: "With my brow to the glass, I was thus occupied in scrutinizing the mob, when suddenly there came into view a countenance (that of a decrepit old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age)—a countenance which at once arrested and absorbed my whole attention. There arose within my mind, the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, coolness, malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excess terror, of intense-of extreme despair. I felt singularly aroused and fascinated. Then came a craving desire to keep the man in view." --- the watcher

Snippet: "The swell surpassed anything I had imagined possible, the swelling of the black stupendous seas became more dismally appalling. At times we gasped for breath at an elevation beyond the Albatross—at times became dizzy with the velocity of our descent into some watery hell. We were at the bottom of one of these abysses, when... a dull, sullen glare of red light streamed down the sides of the vast chasm where we lay... at a terrific height above us, and on the very verge of the precipitous descent, hovered a gigantic ship... Her huge hull was of a deep dingy black... and she bore up under a press of sail in the very teeth of that supernatural sea. For a moment of intense terror she paused upon the giddy pinnacle, as if in contemplation of our own sublimity, then, then trembled and tottered, and came dooooooown, Ahhhhhh." --- the traveller

Snippet: "Murdered. Barbarously murdered.... I had gone to Nashville. I didn't expect to be back before the following afternoon. There was a complication, and I returned home the same night. It was late, nearly dawn. I found I had no latchkey. I didn't want to wake the servants, so I walked around to the back. I don't know why, the doors are always locked, but to my surprise, the backdoor was open. It was standing open as if someone had just used it. I entered and went upstairs to your mother's room. In the darkness, I stumbled over her. I'll spare you the details, save to say that she was already dead. Strangulation." --- Joel Hetman

Snippet: "That, then, was how it was with me. I was slowly edging forward over the borderline of insanity. I dared not go out, but it came to the point where it was not sufficient to lock my door—they would get in. They would get in somehow. Barricades were useless. Indeed, they proved so. For finally I was taken... taken, cringing in a corner of the room that was my last retreat from the world."

Snippet: "I'm going to talk to you dear. Yes, it's about what happened yesterday afternoon. Won't you tell me why you did it, Judith? You may as well, because I know anyway. More than you do! No, no. Don't hide your face like that. It hurts your Auntie more than you can tell when her little girl won't speak to her." --- Auntie

Snippet: "My name is Boffer Bings. I was born of honest parents in one of the humbler walks of life, my father being a manufacturer of dog-oil and my mother having a small studio in the shadow of the village church, where she disposed of unwelcome babies. In my boyhood I was trained to habits of industry; I not only assisted my father in procuring dogs for his vats, but was frequently employed by my mother to carry away the debris of her work in the studio. In performance of this duty I sometimes had need of all my natural intelligence for all the law officers of the vicinity were opposed to my mother's business. They were not elected on an opposition ticket, and the matter had never been made a political issue; it just happened so." --- Boffer Bings

Snippet: "I am miserable. I have become a fool, a non-entity. But after all, you hear before you the happiest of fathers. After all, it ought to be like that and I dare say it is not, but if only you knew. If only you knew, I've lived with my wife for thirty-three years. And I can say those were the best years of my life. I mean, not precisely the best, but generally speaking." --- the lecturer

Snippet: "My first conception of a living person was of something distorted... shrivelled... decaying. I remember there was such a corpse. I often went to it with a feeling of reverence and attachment. It was a woman... ancient... lying as she had died, partly eaten around the throat and chest... the terrible gesture of horror in her sprawled position and opened mouth. I would sometimes roam the passage where she lay. I seem to be drawn there. I wanted to kneel before it. To lie my head against it." --- the narrator

Snippet: "Why did I rush upon my fate? I was seized with an uncontrollable desire to ascend the giddy pinnacle. The door of the cathedral stood invitingly open. My destiny prevailed. I entered the ominous archway.... One step remained. One step! One little step. Upon one such little step in the great staircase of human life how vast a sum of human happiness or misery depends!" --- Signora Psyche Zenobia

Snippet: "As president of the local Psychical Society, I had received a note from our speaker a little more than a week before. Written by a hand which trembled with sickness, age or drunkenness, it asked urgently for a special meeting of the society. An extraordinary, a really impressive experience, was to be described while still fresh in the mind, though what the experience had been was left vague." --- Colonel Crashaw

Snippet: "One of the foremost writers of pure horror and the supernatural is H.P. Lovecraft. He regarded all his work as based on the idea that the world was inhabited at one time by another race which, in practising black magic, lost its foothold and was expelled, yet lives on, outside, ever ready to take possession of this Earth again." --- from the intro

Snippet: "Little Kuziba. Ah, getting to look so much like your mother. Our bodies made entirely of cobwebs. Hair already nearly to your ankle bones. Lovely, yellow, chicken-claw feet, and your wings, dear... Oh... they're going to be great, beautiful bat wings, just like mine! Of course, you do have your father's donkey ears and wax horns, but then..." --- Shiddah

Snippet: "It may be that there is some attractive force which draws lesser matters to greater, or more probably that the wall was not straight but sloped to its base, and that we could not see the inclination from above. But the stone fell with a sickening thud, that came up to us through the hot air, right on the kitten's head, and shattered out its little brains then and there." --- the narrator

Snippet: "How, then, am I mad? Harken and observe how healthily... how calmly I can tell you the whole story. It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain, but, once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me; he had never given me insult. For his gold, I had no desire. I... think it was his eye. Yes. It was this: one of his eyes resembled that of a vulture, a pale blue eye with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold. And so, by degrees, very gradually, I made up my mind to take the life of the old man and thus rid myself of the eye forever." --- the servant

Snippet: "I wandered about the country, always alone. Not caring, really, where I went. One day, I came to the Willow Wood, a haunted sort of place—marsh floating all through it. Ideal for a lonely and aimless man. I was tired of ordinary things and ordinary people... what they said and did, the everyday things. Everything lacking in wonder, surprise, magic. Mystery. And there was a mystery in the woods." --- Jorkens

Snippet: "I saw the workman fall with his scaffolding right from the summit of that hotel. As he came down I saw him holding a knife and trying to cut his name on the scaffold. He had time to try and do this for he must have had nearly three hundred feet to fall." --- a witness