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By sharing her past, she cuts herself with sharp memories; having stopped bleeding at last, she is determined not to reopen the wounds.
After twenty-six months on Jacob’s Ladder, her fear has largely faded, and her despair has gradually eased into a settled sorrow. She is not happy, nor is she unhappy; she takes pleasure in her endurance.
Her signature style is hyperrealism, an attempt to capture everything a photograph might and then much more: what the mind knows about a scene that the scene itself does not reveal; what the heart feels about the subject before it; how the past lives in the present and how the future looms real but unrevealed; what any moment on the Earth might mean, if it means anything at all.
My point is, it’s clear to me that any great artist—musician, painter, sculptor, a fine prose stylist—is on a subconscious level a mathematician and a carpenter and a mason and an engineer. A great artist intuitively understands how the world is built and how it works and how people best fit into it. That’s how they’re able to create beauty—because they know the truth of things. An artist is a mathematician who knows the formulas of the soul. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’”
anger can never conjure justice where justice does not already exist.
experience has taught her that allies in a righteous cause are rare in a world of self-interest. Expect deceit. Distrust is essential to survival.
Yet from deep in flesh and blood and bone, where thousands of years of human experience are condensed in her genes, the intuition arises that what awaits her is something worse than death.
No fertilizer she could purchase would grow grass this lush—and in a matter of mere hours. Nor has the ground been watered to facilitate such growth.
It’s a roar and a shriek unlike anything that she’s ever heard before, at once human and unhuman, a wail of despair that seems also to be sharp with glee, as if two voices—that of prey and predator—are so harmonized that they sound like one.
It is as if a creature with fierce teeth and razor-sharp claws is tearing itself apart, simultaneously screaming in agony and ecstasy, triumphant in self-destruction.
The cry is the voice of nihilism personified, an insane and ferociously empty scream of rage at the very fact that the world exists.
Fear is useful when it’s on a leash, Avi once said, but it’s always a bad dog when you let it run free in your mind.
Focus intently on quotidian needs and trust that maintaining routines will eventually restore meaning to life and quiet fear.
the most encouraging thing Katie has learned about herself is that she’s more resilient than she ever imagined. Perhaps she can be broken, but it has not happened yet. She can be bent so severely that it doesn’t seem as though she can ever straighten herself out again, but she always does. She gets on with getting on.
When a majority of people in any society share the same array of illusions and cling passionately to them, they will encourage one another until illusion becomes delusion, until delusion becomes mass insanity. Whole societies do go mad. History is filled with chilling examples.
“If you’re concerned about the environmental effects of the flatulence of cattle, don’t be. It’s a myth. What’ll kill us all is the flatulence of politicians.”
If this creature is what the information on Raleigh’s laptop suggests it is, then when it finds Libby, it will bring her into communion with itself, but also with her mother, if Francesca is already one with it, as she must have been when she came home from Ringrock. Such a commune of flesh and mind, human and inhuman, in a rapture of blood lust and violence, will be an existence more horrific than anything that anyone has ever imagined Hell might provide.
Like a kraken risen out of the deeps, its voice never heard before in the world above the water, the intruder speaks again, a roar entwined with a squeal. This time Libby hears her name wrapped in the louder sound, attenuated and distorted—“Liiiiibeeeee”—not spoken in the yearning tone of a mother for her daughter, but as the dead and damned might call jealously to the living. Three more shots follow the first three.
Moloch was a god of an ancient people who sacrificed their own children to him. He was insatiable, his hunger for human flesh so intense that he was not always able to wait for a child to be butchered on an altar for him. Then he descended from some nameless god country—certainly not Heaven—and fed on children and their parents, which ought to have taught them something about the inadequacy of their
theology.
No one can have gotten inside, but on this goblin night, she doesn’t trust that what was impossible yesterday is impossible now.
The thing that surmounts her is perhaps five feet in height, a hundred pounds of pale, muscular coils that appear to writhe in greasy knots, yet it has four pincered legs with which it fastens fiercely to her back. Her coat and other garments shred away like tissue paper. The assailant presses down as though thrusting in sexual congress, a creature so strange that no words can convey the horror of it. Like a demon in a dream, it seems to be ceaselessly changing, a million species encoded in its genes, so that it can summon itself into whatever form it wishes. The worst thing about it is the
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This beast that has spawned—with others—from the fusion of Moloch and Francesca now appears not merely to ride Sarah, but also to conjoin with her, apparently remaking her flesh as easily as its own, and she screams against the window glass. The scream is human for a moment, but then it becomes two voices twined in an unholy shriek, simultaneously a cry of terror and one of glee, despair and triumph.
