There was no sense of exhilaration, no buzz – not that day – but there was a sense of accomplishment that was almost as good. I’d gotten going, there was that much. The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.
What none of them knew, of course, was that Carrie White was telekinetic.
But the cavalry arrived only in the movies.
I could see the doubt eating into her like acid.
He felt more crypts cracking open inside of him; the stench he smelled was not decayed bodies but decayed memories, and that was somehow worse.
Sorry is so cheap.
My wife’s been telling me that I’m a perfect horse’s ass for years now.
Allie watched them and felt a pang of fleeting despair for the sad times of the world. Things had stretched apart There was no glue at the center of things anymore. She had never seen the ocean, never would.
It would have been foolish and melodramatic to call it the smell of lost hope, but that was what it smelled like to Holly, just the same.
Mistuh Norton, he daid,” the man in black intoned, giving the words a sardonic little twist.
I know about shadows,” he said. “You just want to be careful they don’t grow teeth. Because they can. Then, sometimes when you reach for the light-switch to make them go away, you discover the power’s out.
He could not close his eyes and just walk by; that was a real monster his traitor mind had created, and it could really tear him apart.
Here is the first guest, a young woman in a short blue dress. Her face is a trifle on the vacant side but she’s got a knockout bod. Somewhere inside that dress, Hodges knows, there will be the sort of tattoo now referred to as a tramp-stamp. Maybe two or three. The men in the audience whistle and stomp their feet. The women in the audience applaud more gently. Some roll their eyes. This is the kind of woman you don’t like to catch your husband staring at.
Oh, maybe a little treasure for the more rabid Incunks, the collectors and the academics who maintained their positions in large part by examining the literary equivalent of navel-lint in each other’s abstruse journals; ambitious, overeducated goofs who had lost touch with what books and reading were actually about and could be content to go on spinning straw into footnoted fool’s gold for decades on end.
Now I think I just couldn’t believe an adult could do such a thing to a little person. I know better now. I wish to God I didn’t.
Civilisation required a contribution – or a sacrifice, if that’s what you wanted to call it.
It’s not your bullets I fear, Roland. It’s your idea of answers that scares me.
In time, words might enchant an enchanter. Do you take my meaning Gunslinger?
As for me, I only wish the former Christy Epping had been correct. I wish I had been emotionally blocked, after all. Because everything that followed – every terrible thing – flowed from those tears.
Someday you’re just going to go too far and that will be the end.