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The Big Blank. His eyes gone milky, the edges of his eyelids pebbled with nodules of acne that gave his skin the look of an orange rind.
Nothing else had been torched in the entire village. Only the church.
God of the Evening Star—Venus. That’s what Hesperus meant in Greek, Luke had been told.
“What we’ve discovered appears to exist beyond all explication.”
“No. They just disappeared and . . . evanesced. Vaporized. Gone away. Informally, your brother and I have a name for it. Ambrosia, after the Greek word for nectar of the gods.
THE AG MEY ARE HERE COME HOME WE NEED YOU COME HOME
Your child doesn’t owe you loyalty or obedience. You owe your child love and understanding, owe it unconditionally, and if you love them strongly enough, eventually that love may be returned. Luke’s own mother had never seen it that way. She thought Luke and Clay owed her love regardless of how she treated them.
Not smart, just cunning. Animals were cunning. Animals also ate their own shit and chewed live electrical wires.
This overwhelming reek of darkness. A raw mineral smell; it had presence, an aliveness, like in Cave of the Winds. It freaked me out—no good reason; just that old childish worry—but Otto went right in.
Memories degrade. You remember parts of people, but you surrender their wholes.
We need to ascend now, he thought wildly. Seek the sunlight, fast, and never come back.
Who’s to say they didn’t die days ago, Lucas my dear?
“Down here, people . . . they go nuts,” Al said. “You see it a lot on subs. An extremely concentrated form of cabin fever. Even if you’re cooped up in a cabin in the woods in the middle of winter, you can still open the door and breathe fresh air.
If you followed the rules, the world played fair with you.
Luke swore he could see the segmented shape of the millipede’s gargantuan and somehow gothic body, the plating of its exoskeleton exuding its own sick glow. It was approaching with a mincing sidewinder movement.
Something’s happened to everyone down here. And it’s still happening. But what? It refused to be pinpointed, no more than a dark speck in Luke’s brain, growing steadily and gathering weight.
