Kindle Notes & Highlights
(Liar, Gerald’s caped skull accused, without your farsight what are you? Naun but a maggot in my belly, Richard Edwin Porter.)
The deer skull nodded with the tremor, bobbing in mute agreement.
his acid-white fingers.
Gerald only shivered with the movement of the needle, antlers dipping. Gerald never moved when Ricky was watching. Never had.
with cornflower-blue eyeballs. They needed replacing, too.
Long, mismatched canine limbs sagged, protruding awkwardly from the donkey hide.
Hell’s bells and buckets of blood.”
Folding his arms, he regarded his amateur taxidermy creation. Gerald had seen much better days, once a magisterial sentinel in Ricky’s father’s old cape, towering over the much-younger Richard with a benevolent air, his only friend. Now he was a relic, a weakness, a bloated body full of straw and maggots.
but now is the time for introductions,
now is the time in shakespeare when we dance
Sheila Azeman smiled, showing two elongated canines.
Mrs Varney,
She looked old enough to remember the murder first-hand, even if she had been a girl when it happened.
Mrs Azeman eyeballed her, unflinching. Mrs Varney growled – actually growled – in the back of her throat.
do we have rival werewolves?
“New blood?” Janet Varney asked, gliding with long strides across the room. “Colonel, you spoil us.” “She’s here of her own volition,”
Carrie fiddled with her chain.
what IS the pendant?
sheep-cream curls.
“Chatting to the lovely Mrs Wade about the old theatre.” She pronounced ‘lovely’ the way Carrie’s grandmother had always pronounced ‘Jezebel’.
This was as good a time as any to make a start in a new place. No one caught her eye except Beverley, who gave her a thin smile.
It was like a hipster version of Phil had entered the room.
Guy even looked attractive when surprised.
Even his teeth were perfect. Nothing not to like.
She filed the red flags away for later.
She spoke with a slight affectation, as if deliberately masking the more natural local accent underneath.
raising his voice and taking odd punctuating breaths as his face darkened into an unhealthy beetroot stain.
well-worn groove of appeasement.
He was probably an axe murderer.
Mercy warning her against the Wend family over dinner at the Ram.
Her eyes widened in the rear-view mirror, catching Sheila’s amber gleam in the dark.
“If you go to Beverley’s,” Mrs Azeman whispered, “Don’t drink the tea.”
Carrie’s skin crawled where Sheila had tapped her. It felt like a signal of some kind, something she couldn’t interpret. Like another warning.
The house absorbed her thrill of delight, wood settling in contented creaks around her as she caressed the bannisters and made her way gleefully upstairs. Warmth flowed in her wake, coursing through the varnished woodgrain from her fingertips.
Besides, although Mercy’s advice had been sincerely meant, every town had its scapegoats, every community had That Family. As an outsider, as much as she hated that designation, Carrie could approach people with an open mind. At least, that’s what she spent the day telling herself, avoiding the obvious knot in this line of thinking: maybe Mercy was exactly what she seemed, and Carrie should stop projecting.
Wundorwick was not the fairy-tale dwelling Carrie had imagined.
“Don’t let him fool you. It’s short for Mephistopheles.”
“Wundorwick? That’s an interesting name.” Mrs Wend followed her gaze to the sign on the wall. “Old English, with a little poetic licence. Roughly, it means ‘wonder house’. Everyone needs a little bit of wonder in their lives, don’t they?”
The framed photographs showed how closely the sitters had been captured.
One old photograph caught Carrie’s attention. It was of a young, pale girl in a dark dress, straw boater set winsomely on her tight ringlets, standing by a rose bush. She was staring up at the camera with a hooded expression, a twisted smile of secret knowledge on her face. There was something malevolent about it that sent a chill up Carrie’s spine.
The perspective was a little off, but they told a story of a quiet girl with sad eyes and a proud, younger girl with a strong jaw. It was the swirling background that made Carrie uneasy, as if the painter had been trying to capture something they couldn’t quite see, something reaching for the girls with writhing, pale green coils.
“This is Olive,” Mrs Wend said. “Olive-in-the-middle. And Eileen, the youngest. Got away with everything, did our Eileen.”
Pendle. Like the gamekeeper. The family connected to the girl’s murder. Her kitchen chimney was literally built out of the old stones of the Pendle cottage. What a strange coincidence.
"coincidence." he said bc it wasn't
A terracotta tile was propped against the wall with a Green Man face painted on it, the open eyes peering at her through the glazed leaves. It felt familiar.
she saw the marks on its edges where someone had chiselled it out of its place.
“Most people looked at that old place, ruined and alone, so isolated, damaged, and they thought, dreadful things have happened there – and they’d be right – best to leave it be, let it decay...
I like to get to know people. It’s what they do that interests me, you know. You can learn a lot about a person by watching what they do.”
I can barely dust it – allergic to the glaze or something, I think. It’s yours.”
She saw a handmade wind chime above the back door, a protection pentangle of twigs, small shells dangling from silken threads.
“No, I’m a bit beyond all that now.
and, what does that mean exactly
Eglantine
"sweetbriar"
a name
briar rose comes to mind--a fairytale name
Eat up, dear, you’re skin and bone.
i keep having the worst hansel & gretel overlay w beverly
“I didn’t want to seem rude, but...” ...but you lot bloody were.
