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His backstory was tragic, but this was West Virginia, tragedy was cheap and plentiful.
War is not coming to the Avallon, Gilfoyle had told her. How could it even find us? Turned out, it could just drive up the mountain, and he would open the front door.
perfume, blood, fruit, dirt, caves, blossoms. The smell of the mineral springs. He remembered that smell well.
Her gaze had found a mark nearly hidden by his collar, one most people didn’t notice and, if they did, didn’t identify: a coal tattoo. Children who played in houses powdered with coal and miners who survived tunnel collapses got them when coal dust permanently settled into their wounds.
When you believed in one intangible thing, why not a second, why not a third. If God, then why not the listeners in the water, if the listeners in the water, why not ghosts, if ghosts, why not unicorns—
one of the guests left her a gray-jacketed ledger book with a handwritten inscription: One day, you will run this place. —E. R. Norvell.
Kindness was a virtue, but in evil places, empathy punished the wearer.
Whitedamp will kill you slow. Firedamp, that will take you fast. Stinkdamp, that’s the one that smells of eggs, and that means you’re done for in three hours. Afterdamp, you won’t even know you’re dead.
They wouldn’t have, would they? Wealthy intruders had been interfering with West Virginia for as long as the state could remember.
The Avallon had never been for those who deserved it. The Avallon had to present itself the same to everyone who came, or the entire illusion collapsed.
The air here smelled like smoke, as it had at the embassy, though it was not the acrid scent of burning files, but the more elemental scent of woodsmoke.
What if the mountain lion had poured words out of its mouth in a language that only she could understand?
It looked like the sweetwater smelled.
The sweetwater was the only language Sandy never tried to learn.
All these years, she had thought she was content, but now she realized she had been complacent, which was not the same at all.
Mr. Francis had once told June: They say youth is wasted on the young. Why do we hate the foolishness that made us unfoolish?
