underslunghero on reddit
- scariest alien message to receive from outer space
I have been watching you since you learned to walk. I have been protecting you since you learned to talk. I have been killing for you since you learned to write. One hundred twelve times I have slain a race that would subjugate you or worse. Following this message is an aggressor powerful enough to destroy me. I love you. Good luck.
Thomas Lopez, AKA Meatball Fulton
- From "The Fourth Tower of Inverness" radio play.
The moon slips sideways through the branches. The branches wring their hands. Little drops of sap slide down and drop free - totally free, except for the gravity and the inevitable <plunk>. "Ah yes, Life's like that," says the moon, picking its teeth with a twig. Ah yes.
Gene Ziegler
- Excerpt from "A Grandchild's Guide to Using Grandpa's Computer"
If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort, and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort, then the socket packet pocket has an error to report! If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash, and the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash, and your data is corrupted 'cause the index doesn't hash, then your situation's hopeless and your system's gonna crash!
Neil Gaiman
- Excerpt from "The Graveyard Book"
Josiah Worthington said, "The dead and the living do not mingle, boy. We are no longer part of their world; they are no part of ours. If it happened that we danced the danse macabre with them, the dance of death, then we would not speak of it, and we certainly would not speak of it to the living." "But I'm one of you." "Not yet, boy. Not for a lifetime."
Joe L. Hensley
- Excerpt from "And Not Quite Human"
"It was a wonderful attack, Captain," the old man said softly. The shadows nodded as they formed and faded. "Nothing human could have lived through it - nothing human did. Some of us were deep underground where they'd buried us long ago - the stakes through our hearts - they knew how to deal with us. But your fire burned the stakes away." He waved a scaly hand at the shadows. They came down upon the captain relentlessly.
Neil Gaiman
- Excerpt from "The Graveyard Book"
"All must dance the Macabray," said Bod, remembering. "Have you danced it? What kind of dance is it?" His guardian looked at him with eyes like black pools and said, "I do not know. I know many things, Bod, for I have been walking this earth at night for a very long time, but I do not know what it is like to dance the Macabray. You must be alive or you must be dead to dance it - and I am neither."
H. P. Lovecraft
- Excerpt from "The Festival"
Out of the unimaginable blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of that cold flame, out of the Tartarean leagues through which that oily river rolled uncanny, unheard, and unsuspected, there flopped rhythmically a horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp, nor sound brain ever wholly remember. They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and must not recall.
Ray Bradbury
- Prologue to "Something Wicked This Way Comes"
But one strange wild dark long year, Halloween came early. One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight. At that time, James Nightshade of 97 Oak Street was thirteen years, eleven months, twenty-three days old. Next door, William Halloway was thirteen years, eleven months and twenty-four days old. Both touched toward fourteen; it almost trembled in their hands. And that was the October week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young any more...
Ray Bradbury
- From "Dandelion Wine"
Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.
