Robert E. Howard
This is Satan, thought Kane as the eyes swayed above him, and the next instant he was battling for his life with the darkness that seemed to have taken tangible form and thrown itself about his body and limbs in great slimy coils. These coils lapped his sword arm and rendered it useless; with the other hand he groped for dagger or pistol, flesh crawling as his fingers slipped from slick scales, while the hissing of the monster filled the cavern with a cold paean of terror.
--Robert E. Howard, THE MOON OF SKULLS
Rumor said that the mad poet Rinaldo had visited these pits and been shown horrors by the wizard, and that the nameless monstrosities of which he hinted in his awful poem, The Song of the Pit, were no mere fantasies of a disordered brain.
--Robert E. Howard, THE SCARLET CITADEL
Then began a thin demoniac piping, and up from the well pranced a hideous anthropomorphic figure dancing to the weird strains of a pipe it held in its monstrous hands.
--Robert E. Howard, THE VALLEY OF THE WORM
Up from the well floated a weird demon-piping that was a symphony of madness. Far down in the darkness I glimpsed the faint fearful glimmering of a vast white bulk.
--Robert E. Howard, THE VALLEY OF THE WORM
From what subterranean hell it crawled in the long ago I know not, nor what black age it represented. But it was not a beast, as humanity knows beasts. I call it a worm for lack of a better term. There is no earthly language that has a name for it.
--Robert E. Howard, THE VALLEY OF THE WORM
Legend said that this cavern was one of their last strongholds against the conquering Celts, and hinted at lost tunnels, long fallen in or blocked up, connecting the cave with a network of subterranean corridors which honeycombed the hills.
--Robert E. Howard, THE PEOPLE OF THE DARK
They had vanished before the invading races, theory said, forming the base of all Aryan legends of trolls, elves, dwarfs and witches. Living in caves from the start, these aborigines had retreated farther and farther into the caverns of the hills, before the conquerors, vanishing at last entirely, though folk-lore fancy pictures their descendants still dwelling in the lost chasms far beneath the hills, loathsome survivals of an outworn age.
--Robert E. Howard, THE PEOPLE OF THE DARK
Centuries of skulking in dim caverns had lent the race terrible and inhuman attributes.
--Robert E. Howard, THE PEOPLE OF THE DARK
And out of the cleft came swarming a loathsome mob, as foul reptiles writhe up out of the darkness, and they stood blinking in the sunlight like the night-things they were.
--Robert E. Howard, THE PEOPLE OF THE DARK
It hissed as it reared up its ghastly head on a horribly long neck, while its yellow slanted eyes glittered with all the horror that is spawned in the black lairs under the earth.
--Robert E. Howard, THE PEOPLE OF THE DARK
What beings, Bran wondered, have slithered up and down this slanting shaft, for how many centuries?
--Robert E. Howard, WORMS OF THE EARTH
...yet Bran felt the potentialities of life--under his feet, in the brown earth--sleeping, but how soon to waken, and in what horrific fashion?
--Robert E. Howard, WORMS OF THE EARTH
"I have been into Hell and I have returned," he growled.
--Robert E. Howard, WORMS OF THE EARTH
"And I have heard stealthy sounds in the night, and noises beneath my dirt floor, as if worms burrowed deep in the earth."
--Robert E. Howard, WORMS OF THE EARTH
"Many caves in these hills," said Atla, her voice sounding small and strangely brittle in the vastness, "are but doors to greater caves which lie beneath, even as a man's words and deeds are but small indications of the dark caverns of murky thought lying behind and beneath."
--Robert E. Howard, WORMS OF THE EARTH
A shudder shook Bran Mak Morn. The worms of the earth! Thousands of vermin digging like moles far below the castle, burrowing away the foundations--gods, the land must be honeycombed with tunnels and caverns--these creatures were even less human than he had thought--what ghastly shapes of darkness had he invoked to his aid?
--Robert E. Howard, WORMS OF THE EARTH
"Worms of the earth, back into your holes and burrows! Ye foul the air and leave on the clean earth the slime of the serpents ye have become! Gonar was right--there are shapes too foul to use even against Rome!"
--Robert E. Howard, WORMS OF THE EARTH