Every Dead Thing (Charlie Parker, #1)

by John Connolly

For I am every dead thing . . . I am re-begot Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.

Respect had to be met with respect and silences had to be read like signs. Among them, everything had meaning and they were as economical and efficient in their modes of communication as they were with their methods of violence.

It is easy to get lost in the darkness on the edge of modern life, and once we are lost and alone, there are things waiting for us there.

There was a tradition of evil that ran beneath all human existence like the sewers beneath a city, that continued on even after one of its constituent parts was destroyed, because it was simply one small part of a greater, darker whole.

I believe in evil because I have touched it, and it has touched me.

“And you know, the more of us there are, the more distant from each other we become.

All they see is the distance, and they reach across it and pick us off, one by one. All we can do is hope that, if they do it often enough, we’ll spot the pattern and put together a link between us and them, a bridge across the distance.”

“It’s the distance,” he said, his eyes on the street but his gaze beyond it, “the distance between life and death, Heaven and Hell, us and them. They have to cross it to get close enough to us to take us but it’s all a matter of distance. They love the distance.”

The killing of a child seems to bring with it the death of hope, the death of the future.

This man, who had killed and tortured and who had ordered others to kill and torture in his name, had found in his own son a darkness that was beyond naming, a lightless place where slain children lay, the black heart of every dead thing.

I was unsure whether I was a man waking from a dream of death or a dreamer entering a world of loss, a man dreaming of unhappiness or a man waking to grief.

“You should go away from here, do something to put your ghosts behind you. You’re no longer what you once were, but maybe you can still step back, before you lose yourself forever.”

THERE ARE NO COINCIDENCES, only patterns we do not see.