Jack

“The night had teeth. Wind tore through the apple trees, their skeletal branches clawing at the sky. Beyond the garden fence, the dacha settlement lay in uneasy slumber—rows of dark shacks, abandoned for the season, their windows blind and cold.

Chicken-wire fences sagged under rust and neglect, some topped with barbed wire that glinted like fangs in the distant glow of Moscow. Far off, a cement plant loomed against the horizon, a hulking silhouette of Soviet ambition gone to rot. To the north, the pines of Elk Island groaned under the gale, their black crowns thrashing like beasts in chains. And above it all, the October sky churned with torn clouds, racing toward some unseen war.

I walked two hundred yards down the gravel drive, past sleeping plots fenced in rusted wire, boots rasping over dry, dead grass. Tested the radio. Exchanged a few words with Romeo.

Static hissed like a snake in the dark, but the signal held.”
― R. Magnusholm, Last Tango in Moscow: A Cold War Tale of Espionage, the Mafia, and Forbidden Love

“Evil exists in us all, Torak. Some fight it. Some feed it. That's how it's always been.”
― Michelle Paver

“Each small meanness, each thoughtless expression of hatred, each envious and bitter act, regardless of how petty, can inspire others, and is therefore the seed that ultimately produces evil fruit, poisoning people whom you have never met and never will. All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwined – those dead, those living, those generations yet to come – that the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands.”
― Dean R. Koontz

“I felt its will coming at me in waves. Intense, unwavering, malign. Such malevolence. No mercy. No humanity. It belonged to the dark beyond humanity. It was rage without end. A black tide drowning”
― Michelle Paver, Dark Matter