Kindle Notes & Highlights
(like he’d done the last few nights with shut up shut up shut UP.)
(No: heard the Voice, have been for a while. He’s watching me, waiting. I’m part of the wyrd, part of the plan, I can wait.)
One of Gerald’s bonds had come loose, the fox limb torn partially out of the donkey-hide shoulder, as if Gerald had attempted to escape. “Did you do this to him?” Ricky demanded, inspecting the tear. (Could be mice, hard to tell in this light.)
He viewed the meat they served up at family dinners with mild suspicion and distaste: it always tasted better when you knew the butcher hadn’t fucked it first or wanked himself off during the process.
this is an interesting family
Time stopped. So did pain. For a moment, Ricky hovered on the edge of the Outside. Slithering sounds came towards him in the green-black of the darkness. Grandad’s worshippers slapped their way out of the void to his aid, drawn by the tattoos burning a message into their dimension. It wasn’t the first time they’d dived into his mind, but he hated feeling them in there, crawling, worming through his cerebral cortex and drawing him back into the light of his own reality.
“No hard feelings, mate. I still can’t see too well. Starting to think I been short-changed by that bloody shrine, to tell the truth.”
“Look, I’m trying to help you. I promise, I’m looking, but... I’ve got literally nothing to go on, I’m trying to hold down a job, I’ve already been cursed once, can you give me a break?”
remember Janet Varney. Despoiler. Thief. Yes, I remember now. What did she do to you? ...Broke in. Took linen. Ornaments. Things she said no one was using. Left scars, like the rest of them. Thieves, vandals, fools.
She kept something of mine. It’s in the kitchen. ...The house is empty.
Alright, keep your slates on.
“When Ricky said he was going to show me a whole new world, I’m not sure he imagined this,”
Can I please not be knocked out or attacked or cursed for five fucking minutes, this is getting ridiculous.”
“People bleed and bruise,” she shouted at the living room. “We’re not like wood or stone or plaster, we get hurt! So just – can you just remember that, please?”
“Bloody hellfire.” “Oi! That’s my line.”
Ricky giggled delightedly in his unguarded, childlike way, the wrong kind of laugh for a man like that, but she was getting used to the cognitive dissonance it engendered.
“You’re doing this on purpose. This whole, eldritch thing.”
“It’s not – it’s not things-that-go-bump-in-the-night that bother me,” Carrie muttered. “It’s people. Social crap.
in the background of her life all the time, spoiling the quiet moments with its constant, static vibrato.
“You seem alright with me. Does that mean I’m not ‘people’, then?”
Carrie had no intention of saying yes, but the idea was horribly fascinating.
i kinda think you should? which, is unsettling to say the least
Future’s immutable. You can think of that one of two ways – problematic, or lucrative.”
She didn’t fancy the idea of an eldritch horror in her cellar, and she didn’t really believe he’d tell her something so mundane as the jackpot numbers. Of everything she’d seen and put up with over the past few weeks, that one was too unlikely.
“Well. You know how it is, who am I to change another man’s wyrd? I’m just an agent of destiny, me. Anyway, I bash him on the head and take him to the cottage, right? Well then I had to read livers and that didn’t work out, and you turned up, and—”
praying the answer both would and would not be blue.
She imagined handmade mobiles of ID cards, twirling in draughts on catgut strings, macabre tributes to their missing owners.
It was the relief, the treacherous wave of relief, that hit first. The dread, the self-hate, the horror, all that would follow, but not now, not yet, although it churned like flotsam and when the wave broke, she would have to deal with the wreckage. She stared from the card to Ricky and was overwhelmed with the mad desire to kiss his crooked smile, kiss him hard on the lips, break his teeth, rip his tongue out, smash his cocky face in.
“So —” His voice was still gruff, but there was a fragility in it that she hadn’t heard before. “We’re alright then?”
His breath hit her, spearmint-sweet. (He freshened his breath before he came over? He must be serious.) (I’m a serious man, me.)
The kiss burned into her skin like a brand.
he likes you so much--in not gross ways
he likes you DESPITE himself & everything that's been done to him & that he's done
that's weirdly soft
my third eye will be wide open for the foreseeable.”
a k e t w o p i n c h e s w i t h t e a. B l a c k t ea is b e s t. T w ic e a d a y . F r e e R efi l l s. M y F a v oro u r.
(Don’t drink the tea. Never trust a Porter.) Why not? What was he going to do? And what did it matter now, anyway?
(There’s nothing I can do, so we’ll worry about that later, one thing at a time.) Her stomach settled. Her mind eased. (That’s it. One thing at a time.)
There was a mark on her arm that she couldn’t make out. A bruise? A stain on the photograph? “It’s like a big game trophy photo,”
Fairwood’s head, her scarred, gouged twin, lowered close to hers, his soft scent light and soothing. She filled her lungs with it, light-headed.
“Find out who killed Cathy, who polluted my stones and left her there. Give me my revenge. And you’ll be safe, and you can be with me, and they won’t take you away.”
ON SATURDAY, THE SOOTHSAYER moved into the cellar. He came via the smugglers’ tunnel and frightened the ghost into hiding.
At least, it sounded like a one-sided conversation until she tried to catch the actual words, and then it was garbled nonsense.
The white noise of anxiety and guilt reverberating in the background of her life died and went silent. Fortified by its calming balm, Carrie rang Ann just to hear her stepmother’s voice, and they talked about her dad’s health and curtain fabric and where Carrie was spending Christmas, while Cathy Ross dripped ectoplasm down the chimney breast behind her and the serial killer from the woods made himself at home under her feet.
an escapist luxury in beige and cinnamon.
The glass foyer glinted out onto the central square, opposite the town’s morgue, a palatial building that also housed the council offices on the upper stories. The library seemed a tad embarrassed by the ostentatiousness of its neighbour, its own Georgian features heavily remodelled in a modest, accessible fashion.
and the air was soft with old leather, sleeping pages and clean carpet.
(Must go to the doctor’s, can’t go on like this, Ricky said the tea wasn’t a replacement.)
Was he undead, or immortal, or what? And what the hell did this have to do with anything? A bunch of immortals or gods or whatever they were converging in a perfect storm, all to kill a little girl in 1958 and reap the eldritch rewards? What were the rewards? Longer life?
Ricky hadn’t seemed remotely bothered by the idea his gran or her sisters were responsible. Although, he had abducted and tortured a total stranger to death for his mother’s pies and some bloody ritual, so why on earth would a dead child up a chimney bother him?
It was the stab of relief that prompted the guilt.
(Energies.) What was it Ricky had said about energies? Channelling them, opening something... she nearly had it, it was close, a whispered suggestion out of earshot. No. She didn’t have it yet. Energies.
Something in the back of her mind, some tiny voice, whispered from the void, this is wrong. Something’s wrong with us.
Carrie smirked, the relief crashing back, but the flotsam of remorse and fear was nowhere to be felt or found. (Like magic, she thought, Ricky was dead right. Dead, ha.) what’s wrong with me (Nothing, it’s – what’s it called, acclimatisation.)
He had folded his clothes up on the table, knowing the full-body Change was close.
