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By mid-June, the mercury had soared up to the nineties and lingered there, like a fat dowager in her favorite armchair. It was an evil sort of heat, driving men to beat their children and carriage horses to drop dead in their traces.
“When we were growing up and shared a room together, Robert looked at that picture every day,” Brady said. “More than once, I even overheard him talking to it.” He laughed at John’s expression. “Not in a morbid or disturbing way. Just a son who missed his mother. They were very close.”
John insisted that it suited me perfectly, although he grew quiet when I declared that I would never be any man’s wife.
Well then...
I believe change is coming, and we can either get out of the way, or be knocked down flat.”
Not that the North was a great deal better. We just pretended to be.
It also implied honesty, which was a rare enough trait in any civil servant, but especially in law enforcement.
Human beings are complicated creatures, I thought, looking out over the still, dark waters of the lake. We have the ability to hold two perfectly contradictory ideas at the same time, with untroubled consciences. Take the slave owners and their accomplices. They inflicted unimaginable horrors on their fellow man, and blithely went to church on Sunday like good, pious men. Those same slaves had been freed by the North’s victory in the war, and yet the highest court in the land refused to enforce the Civil Rights Act, explicitly placing its stamp of approval on racial discrimination.
The way I figured it, the people of Cassadaga Lake might be eccentric, but if they allowed Rose and Samuel Mason to live in peace, they were all right by me.
I smiled evilly. Perhaps there would finally be an advantage to no one taking me seriously.
‘To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace’.”
“There’s been new research into a certain type of aberrant personality. Some call it mania without delirium, or moral insanity. It describes someone who engages in antisocial behaviour without regard for the consequences. They’re often fluent liars and seem entirely lacking in empathy. But in other ways they’re perfectly sane, capable of cool-headed planning and manipulation. The German psychiatrist Julius Koch has been doing preliminary work in this area.”
Psycopathy or sociopathy.
The abyss is always waiting for the unwary.
As I turned the corner on Tenth Street, I thought about this city. How all the bustle and money and flash and bright new electric lights hid other secret places. Dark places that were just a rabbit hole away. The poor souls who’d tumbled down there, never to emerge again.
