There is no delight the equal of dread. As long as it’s someone else’s.
Be strong, little mother,” she said to Melissa. “I know you can be.” “Yes?” Melissa said a little doubtfully.
The World-Soul is sick, Harry, crazy-sick. And if we don’t each do our part and try to get to the root of its pain and burn it out, then everything is for nothing.
You’re right, of course. I haven’t come this far to deliver us into oblivion. I have such sights to show you. Soon, you will have answers to questions you have never even dared to ask.
The dead have highways.” Clive Barker.
They will say your doubts shed innocent blood. But I say – what’s blood for, if not for shedding?
Here are the stories written on the Book of Blood. They are a map of that dark highway that leads out of life towards unknown destinations. Few will have to take it, most will go on peacefully along lamplit streets, ushered out of living with prayers and caresses. But for a few, a chosen few, the horrors will come, skipping to fetch them off to the highway of the damned...
Women had always existed: they had lived, a species to themselves, with the demons. But they had wanted playmates: and together they had made men. What an error, what a cataclysmic miscalculation.
Everywhere, in the wreckage around him, he found evidence to support the same bitter thesis: that he had encountered nothing in his life – no person, no state of mind or body – he wanted sufficiently to suffer even passing discomfort for.
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.
Has anyone here ever heard of the Harrowing?” Dale asked, breaking the silence. No one replied. “It was in the time between Christ’s crucifixion and his Resurrection,” he went on. “The story goes, Christ went down into Hell, walked among the damned, and set many of them free. Then he returned to Earth and broke the bondage of death. It’s supposedly the first and only amnesty Hell has ever known.
Not a classic reunion. The lover, on seeing his beloved, throws up down his shirt. But then, nothing that happened between Jacqueline and myself was ever quite normal.
Men’s supply of passion, she knew from long experience, was easily depleted. Though they might threaten to move earth and heaven too, half an hour later their boasts would be damp sheets and resentment.
Why? What is his intention? Have you at least discovered that?” “The same as ours, we think,” Felixson said. “The getting and keeping of power. He hasn’t just taken our treaties, scrolls, and grimoires. He’s cleared out all the vestments, all the talismans, all the amulets – ” “Hush,” Ragowski said suddenly. “Listen.” There was a silence among them for a moment, and then a funereal bell chimed softly in the distance. “Oh Christ,” Lili said. “It’s his bell.” The dead man laughed. “He’s found you.
Once you conceded defeat, life was a feather bed. In.
Of such divine neglect was atheism made; belief could not be rekindled now, however profound his terror. Thoughts.
He spent three months in a wash of depression and self-pity that bordered the suicidal. But even that solution was denied him by his new found nihilism. If nothing was worth living for it followed, didn’t it, that there was nothing worth dying for either.
Nobody’s allowed to come and mourn, you see. Out of sight, out of mind: that’s the idea. Of course, that’s not the way it works, is it? People forget prime ministers, but they remember murderers.
Nothing would take him, he was a barbarian with the manners of a gentleman. Neither.
He took a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped hard at his mouth, back and forth, as though a residue of guilt clung there and he was afraid it would give him away.