“The sun rose like a stripper, keeping its glory well covered by cloud till it seemed there'd be no show at all.”
“Of all the rash and midnight promises made in the name of love, none, Boone now knew, was more certain to be broken than "I'll never leave you.”
“I was born alive. Isn’t that punishment enough?”
“So discretion was the by-word. They would take meant only when the hunger became crippling, and only then victims who were unlikely to be missed. They would refrain from infecting others, so as no to advertise their presence. if one was found, no other would risk exposure by going to his aid. Hard laws o live by, but not as hard as the consequences of breaking them. The rest was patience, and they were well used to that. Their liberator would come eventually, if they could only survive the wait. Few had any clue as to the shape he'd come in. But all knew his name. Cabal, he was called. Who Unmade Midian. Their prayers were full of him. On the next wind, let him come. If not now, then tomorrow. They might not have prayed so passionately had they known what a sea change his coming would bring. They might not have prayed at all had the know they prayed to themselves. But these were revelations for a later day. For now, they had simpler concerns. Keeping the children from the roofs at night, the bereaved from crying out too loud, the young in summer from falling in love with the human. It was a life.”
“Her gaze went with her, into a room with walls of frozen earth, and a floor the same, the latter split from corner to corner, and a fissure opened in it from which a flame column rose four or five times the size of a man. There was bitter cold off it rather than heat, and no reassuring flicker in its heart. Instead its innards churned upon themselves, turning over and over some freight of stuff which she failed to recognize at first, but her appalled stare rapidly interpreted. There was a body in the fire, hacked limb from limb, human enough that she recognized it as flesh, but no more than that. Baphomet's doing presumably, some torment visited on a transgressor. Boone said the Baptizer's name even now, and she readied herself for sight of its face. She had it too, but from inside the flame, as the creature there--not dead, but alive, not Midian's subject, but its creator--rolled its head over in the turmoil of flame and looked her way. This was Baphomet. This diced and divided thing. Seeing its face, she screamed. No story or movie screen, no desolation, no bliss, had prepared her for the maker of Midian. Sacred it must be, as anything so extreme must be sacred. A thing beyond things. Beyond love or hatred or their sum, beyond the beautiful or the monstrous or their sum. Beyond, finally, her mind's power to comprehend or catalog.”
“For now, they had simpler concerns. Keeping the children from the roofs at night, the bereaved from crying out too loud, the young in summer from falling in love with the human.”
“Putting down the devil was the Lord’s own sport.”
“The un-people, the anti-tribe, humanity’s sack unpicked and sewn together again with the moon inside.”
“You want my advice!
Kiss the Devil, eat the worm. -- Jan de Mooy, Another Matter; or, Man Remade”
“Born from different parents, they were siblings in death, destroyed by the same hand.”
“—when the sun goes out and there’s only night, we’ll live on the earth. It’ll be ours.”
“The wind was not invisible. It had a texture, as though it carried a weight of dust, the motes steadily gumming up her eyes and sealing her nose, finding its way into her underwear and up into her body by those routes too.”
“All Darkness was one darkness in the end. Of heart or Heavens, one Darkness.”
“Or were they breed who had died from their half-life, caught in the sun, perhaps, or withered by longing?”
“Among his memories of the whole and the human, sharpest was that of Decker.”
“There were no chambers now along the passageway and consequently no lights. There was a glow up ahead, however—fitful and cold, but bright enough to illuminate both the ground she stumbled over, which was bare earth, and the silvery frost on the walls.”
“It was bad enough that these creatures had children and art; that they might also have vision was too dangerous a thought to entertain.”
“Only once did Lori glimpse such an entity, supine on a mattress in the corner of its boudoir. It was naked, corpulent and sexless, its sagging body a motley of dark, oily skin and larval eruptions that seeped phosphorescence, soaking its simple bed.”
“Lost in the wasteland, Ashbery was found by a light flickering up from between the fractured paving stones. Its beams were bitterly cold, and sticky in a way light had no right to be, adhering to his sleeve and hand before fading away. Intrigued, he tracked its source from one eruption to another, each point brighter than the one before.”
“ignorant of the place it had been and blind to where it was headed.”
“So many masks. Was she the only one who had no secret life, no other self in marrow or mind?”
“Here was a place sacred to the dead, who were not the living ceased, but almost another species, requiring rites and prayers that belonged uniquely to them.”
“Of all the rash and midnight promises made in the name of love, none, Boone now knew, was more certain to be broken than “I’ll never leave you.” What”
“Decker pulled the mask on. It smelt of his excitement. As soon as he breathed in he got a hard. Not the little sex-hard, but the death-hard; the murder-hard. It sniffed the air for him, even through the thickness of his trousers and underwear. It smelt the victim that ran ahead of him. The Mask didn't care that his prey was female; he got the murder-hard for anyone. In his time he'd had a heat for old men, pissing their pants as they went down in front of him; for girls, sometimes; sometimes women; even children. Ol' Button Face looked with the same cross-threaded eyes on the whole of humanity.”
“them from both sides, it looked like escape. Dan”
“Tell me you like me,” he whispered. He was so close I could almost imagine the feel of his lips as they moved, but not quite.
I pursed mine together, trying to stop my mischievous smile. “No,” I replied.
He shook his head. “That’s not an acceptable answer.”
“Well, it’s the one you’re getting.” I laughed and he did too, releasing me and flopping onto his back.”
“At first I thought, why, he might be a perfect little match for my perfect little girl.”
“Oh my!! How you've grown. Soon you'll be catching the Lord's balls.”
“The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.”
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