My skull was a face that concealed scorpions.
All Darkness was one darkness in the end. Of heart or Heavens, one Darkness.
They’re not in the gutter because they had visions, Gentle,” Clem said. “They’re there because they’ve been abused, or they’ve abused themselves.” “Which means they can’t cover their despair the way the rest can. They’ve got no distractions from their pain. So they get drunk and crazy, and the next day they’re even more lost than they were the day before. But I’d still rather trust them than all the bishops and the ministers. Maybe they’re naked, but isn’t that a holy state?
Or were they breed who had died from their half-life, caught in the sun, perhaps, or withered by longing?
So let it do its worst, if that at the last was inevitable. Let the void come, and bring an end to the tyranny of hope.
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.
So intent was Frank upon solving the puzzle of Lemarchand’s box that he didn’t hear the great bell begin to ring.
Nothing, I had come to believe by the end, was more illusory than the idea of ending.
There was no harm done; and what would a Resurrection be without a few laughs?
The carcass closest to him was the remains of the pimply youth he’d seen in Car One. The body hung upside-down, swinging back and forth to the rhythm of the train, in unison with its three fellows; an obscene danse macabre. Its arms dangled loosely from the shoulder joints, into which gashes an inch or two deep had been made, so the bodies would hang more neatly.
Muck held the whip hand.
The flawlessly beautiful were flawlessly happy, weren’t they?
He liked the phrase “mother’s tit.” It said so much, so simply. Momma’s tit had a good deal more power to move these men than her apple pie.
We are all our own graveyards I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were.
Sometimes nature is even crueller than politics.
This was the substance of every moment, she realized: the body – never certain if the next lungful would be its last – hovering for a tiny time between cessation and continuance. And in that space out of time, between a breath expelled and another drawn, the miraculous was easy, because neither flesh nor reason has laid their edicts there.
What I do know is that I have never found clowns remotely funny. I am not alone in this, I think. More people find clowns disturbing or distressing rather than raucously amusing. Is it that the nature of human existence has changed so radically in the last century or so that what was funny to our grandparents and great-grandparents is now tragic or terrifying?
Didn’t open the box? What was it last time? Didn’t know what it was? And yet we do keep finding each other, don’t we? – Cenobite.
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.