The Fear That Follows by Robert E. Howard (Poem)

“The Fear That Follows” first appeared in print in Singers in the Shadows, a poetry collection published by Donald M. Grant, more than three decades after Robert E. Howard’s death. “The Fear that Follows” has since  been included in a few additional anthologies of Howard’s work.

 

About Robert E. Howard

Robert Ervin Howard was an American writer of pulp fiction. Often considered to be the man who began the sword and sorcery subgenre, Howard was the creator of Conan the Barbarian.

Howard began writing fiction when he was just nine years old. In December 1922, aged 16, his work began paying off when The Tattler (Brownwood High School newspaper) printed two of his stories: “‘Golden Hope Christmas” and “West is West”. Then, in 1924, after years of having his stories rejected by Weird Tales, he made his first sale to the magazine with a caveman story called “Spear and Fang”. This marked the start of Howard’s career as a pulp fiction writer and Weird Tales subsequently became one of his main outlets for weird fiction.

 

The Fear That Follows

By Robert E. Howard

The smile of a child was on her lips–oh, smile of a last
long rest.
My arm went up and my arm went down and the
dagger pierced her breast.
Silent she lay–oh still, oh still!–with the breast of her
gown turned red.
Then fear rose up in my soul like death and I fled from
the face of the dead.
The hangings rustled upon the walls, velvet and black
they shook,
And I thought to see strange shadows flash from the
dark of each door and nook.
Tapestries swayed on the ghostly walls as if in a wind
that blew;
Yet never a breeze stole through the rooms and my
black fear grew and grew.

Moonlight dappled the pallid sward as I climbed o’er
the window sill;
I looked not back at the darkened house which lay so
grim and still.
The trees reached phantom hands to me, their
branches brushed my hair,
Footfalls whispered amid the grass, yet never a man
was there.
The shades loomed black in the forest deeps, black as
the doom of death;
Amid the whispers of shapes unseen I stole with bated
breath,
Till I came at last to a ghostly mere bordered with
silver sands;
A faint mist rose from its shimmering breast as I knelt
to lave my hands.

The waters mirrored my haggard face, I bent close
down to see–
Oh, Mother of God! A grinning skull leered up from the
mere at me!
With a gibbering scream I rose and fled till I came to a
mountain dim
And a great black crag in the blood-red moon loomed
up like a gibbet grim.
Then down from the great red stars above, each like a
misty plume,
There fell on my face long drops of blood and I knew at
last my doom.
Then I turned me slow to the only trail that was left
upon earth for me,
The trail that leads to the hangman’s cell and the grip
of the gallows tree.

 

Robert E. Howard (1906 – 1936)