KUDZU DEVIL

 KUDZU DEVIL
"There  was a skull beside it on the table. Except for a few clinging tatters of dried flesh and greenish fur-the other was bleached white by the sun-this skull was identical to Gradie's Japanese souvenir: a high-domed skull the size of a large, clenched fist, with a jutting, sharp-toothed muzzle. A baboon of some sort, Mercer judged, picking it up."

"'No,' Mercer said dully, glancing at the freshly typed label he had scooped from the table. 'He's boiling off the flesh so he can exhibit the skull.' For the carefully prepared label in his hand read: 'Kudzu Devil Skull. Shot by Red Gradie in Yard, Knoxville, Tenn. June 1977'"

"'They're little green devils,' Gradie raved weakly. 'And they ain't no animals-they're clever as you or me. They live in the kudzu.'"

"'Hiding down there beneath the damn vines, living off the roots and whatever they can scavenge. They nurture the goddamn stuff, he said, help it spread around, care for it just like a man looks after his garden. Winter comes, they burrow down underneath the soil and hibernate.'"

Karl Edward Wagner, Where the Summer Ends

LICH

 LICH

"I shall go mad if he is not, for I may be the next. But my will is not weak—and I shall not let it be undermined by the terrors I know are seething around it. One life—Ephraim, Asenath, and Edward—who now? I will not be driven out of my body . . . I will not change souls with that bullet-ridden lich in the madhouse!"

H.P. Lovecraft, The Thing On the Doorstep

"It was a lich's face-desiccated flesh tight over its skull. Filthy strands of hair were matted over its scalp, tattered lips were drawn away from broken yellowed teeth, and, sunken in their sockets, eyes that should be dead were bright with hideous life."

Karl Edward Wagner, Sticks 

"After a while, in the gray waste, they found the remnant of another horse and rider, which the jackals had spared and the sun had dried to the leanness of old mummies. These also they raised up from death; and Mmatmuor bestrode the withered charger; and the two magicians rode on in state, like errant emperors, with a lich and a skeleton to attend them. Other bones and charnel remnants of men and beasts, to which they came anon, were duly resurrected in like fashion; so that they gathered to themselves an everswelling train in their progress through Cincor."
Clark Ashton Smith, The Empire Of the Necromancers