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the sky was the abyss, pointed by stars like bioluminescence.
“Two crimes united by a questionable necklace do not a conspiracy make.
THE WIND-BOISTEROUS LIMBS OF trees.
the universe is a leaf on the time-tree,
“Everything’s fit to be worshipped.”
“Any holy book, it’s the last chapter that gets us interested.”
We live,” he said, too flatly for any humour to be audible, “in the epoch of competing ends.”
“Traditions are for ponces,”
Gods are oviparous. Not just our gods, all gods.
The gods don’t owe us anything. That’s not why we worship. We worship because they’re gods. This is their universe, not ours. What they choose they choose and it’s not ours to know why.”
“What did you pay it?” “I paid it nuts, Billy. What would you think I’d pay a squirrel?”
“Can’t use a photocopy to persuade the world.”
The ecosystems of godhead are fecund, because there’s nothing and nowhere that can’t generate the awe on which they graze.
every stone, cigarette packet, tor and town has its deities,
The streets of London are stone synapses hardwired for worship.
You may not be interested in the gods of London, but they’re interested in you.
You can’t see the future, there’s no such thing. It’s all bets. You’ll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn’t mean either of them’s wrong.”
ANY MOMENT CALLED NOW IS ALWAYS FULL OF POSSIBLES.
water like clotted shadow.
The city felt like it was hesitating. Like a bowling ball on a hilltop, fat with potential energy.
The dead gossip: it is the reverberation of that gossip against the surface tension of death that the better mediums hear. It is like listening to whispered secrets through a toilet door. It is a crude and muffled susurrus.
No one knows for sure it’s connected, but of course it’s connected.
She wanted to run, but she was hobbled by normality.
not memories but metamemories, the bodyguards of remembrance.
She had never lived, but her ghost was everywhere.
not so much balding as threadbare,
“You think something like memory won’t grow spikes to protect it?
respectful distrust,
A WINDOWLESS STOREROOM LIKE some forgotten dollhouse heart
What Collingswood did was motivate into being tenacious gung-ho clichés that believed themselves.
“Just because someone uses something wrong doesn’t mean it’s useless.”
the litter of stars, strewn like discards.
Clouds bundled by, as if something was urgent.
Time’s always a bit more fiddly than you reckon.
THERE WAS A HUBBUB IN BILLY’S HEAD ALL NIGHT. HE WOULD hardly call so raging and discombobulated a torrent of images a dream. Call it a vomit, call it a gush.
“There are people out there who’d rather be tools than people.
Just thugs only ever got so far. The best thugs were all psychologists.
The angels hunted the incoming end,
“What’s up with you? Apocalypse rattled your cage?”
the strange night, in which gods were ignored and memories were out hunting the future.
These felt like moments from some best-forgotten time burped back up, an urban faux pas, squalor as aftertaste.
an internal yard full of cardboard boxes softened by rain into vaguely vectoral brown sludge.
Munching wanktoasters.”
“No one’s so loyal they can’t be bought,”
nothing could stay hidden from an inquisitive sea.
“Imagine if the one apocalypse you missed was the real one.”
London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.
Could you really feel the hand of destiny while pointing a Glock?
drawing red lines so fast it took seconds for the victims to scream.
secrets like this will not behave.
