More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“this mountain is a reaper of souls.”
The face I just saw was Tíwé’s.
Whatever the number five means to Faye, that deep place is where she hid the secret, and the creature seemed to have no power to access it.
“Tíwé’s dead.”
their real pleasure derives from conquering a person from within.
They become fascinated with certain people, and harbor special intentions for them. Faye seemed to be one of the unlucky few who are “chosen” in this way, and this Impostor’s fixation upon her had probably festered for decades.
Without even realizing what I was doing, I moved to a window, reached out my hand, and drew a backward ‘5.’
“He’s in the stains,” she said, lowering her voice further, as if to tell her deepest secret. “He gets up and walks around at night.”
The floorboards groaned beyond our bedroom door. Someone was on the staircase.
As I passed the stain on the wall, it looked bigger than before.
“Son of a bitch learns about his kills through their nightmares,” I said. “That’s why he’s always standing outside the windows. He’s not watching us sleep. He’s listening.”
All the voices we’d heard in the forest, all the tongues the Impostor spoke with – they all belonged to other victims, and the people in their dreams. That wretched thing wandered around in the dark, sharpening his skills and practicing his speech.
He was going to discover what makes five.
“I think that’s what makes Faye so fascinating to this being,” Nathan said at last. “Her mind is mysterious to him. She’s a puzzle...a challenge. And most of all, when he speaks to her through her dreams, she speaks back.
The mountain anchors the spirits and people together.”
She’d take Caleb outside – to him.
I ran over to help Faye. As I did, a huge mass leaped out of the trees and landed in the neighbor’s yard, then darted off into the night.
The creature was grooming Faye to believe that he could take her away to a beautiful place. But in reality, she was being coaxed out of this world.
Becca’s final message read simply, Ask our mom about 5. She knows.
never got to see him,” she replied. “That number was how I always thought of him. Christopher was going to be the fifth member of our family.”
The creature spoke a phrase in the language of Tíwé’s people
A reminder that he was planning to make me suffer in the most personal of ways. The At’an-A’anotogkua was designing a personal hell for me, and was nearly ready to drag me down into it.
He beckoned her in every voice she knew, calling out her name in all his stolen tongues. He whispered things that would make her happy. He made her promises. He begged for help and mimicked the cries of children. He capitalized on her innate motherly instincts, on her buried memories, and on the vulnerability of her unconscious state. And all I could do was stagger around and wait for the thrum of my death-gripped heart to subside.
The bed was empty. Its sheets lay across the floor as if Faye had been dragged from them.
“Wake me up when he gets here.” In under a half hour she was out cold,
Freddy kruger vibes
He uttered only one labored sentence, but each word was formed with a different tongue: ”I…walked…a thousand…years…across…the dark…to find you.”
As a child, Faye repressed the pain of her brother’s death so completely that Christopher himself disappeared with it. The number five became the lockbox in which he was hidden.
he learned his prey through their dreams.
suppose that if you speak long enough into the void, someone is bound to start listening.
