The great grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.
Not a whisper of flatulence would dare this man’s bowels.
She got up and crossed to the window. Like father like daughter, he thought: window freaks, both of them.
But better to be buried in the rubble than succumb to the Mask. And be flattered, at the end, that Fate had at least offered her a choice of extinctions.
Lori had broken that spell of despair, coming to him not begging but demanding he forgive himself.
Do unto others, boy, before they do unto you.
Heaven will provide. Or else it won’t, and I’ll go hungry.
What time didn’t steal from under your nose, circumstance did. It was useless to hope otherwise. Useless to dream that the world somehow meant you good.
He offered her a grin designed for better teeth.
Nothing’s right... except what you feel and know.
He was no longer innocent. With this slaughter he became the killer Decker had persuaded him he was. In murdering the prophet he made the prophecy true.
I was watching the power at work behind the face of the world. What I had always assumed to be a calamitous unseen war, waged in sky and rock and on occasion invading your human world, was not a bloody battle, with legions slaughtering one another; it was this endless fish-market bartering.
Like a prisoner without hope of parole she took what entertainment she could find to ease the passage of time.
Forgive yourself,’ Boone said. ‘I did.
The seasons long for each other, like men and women, in order that they may be cured of their excesses.
But if it failed to show itself she would not grieve too deeply, for fear that the mending of broken hearts be a puzzle neither wit nor time had the skill to solve.
Nor in prayer either. He had told Billy the truth, about his giving up God when his prayers for his father’s life had gone unanswered. Of such divine neglect was aetheism made; belief could not be rekindled now, however profound his terror.
This idea stayed with me for several years before I found an adequate way to express it. I called the sea Quiddity, and slowly developed a mythology around it. Human beings would enter Quiddity, the dream-sea, three times, I decided. Once when they were born, once when they slept beside the person they would love most in their lives, and once before they died. Three life-changing immersions in the sea of the unconscious. Three confrontations with the secret show of our dreams.
Time would be precious from now on. It would tick by, of course, as it always had, but Harvey was determined he wouldn’t waste it with sighs and complaints. He’d fill every moment with the seasons he’d found in his heart: hopes like birds on a spring branch; happiness like a warm summer sun; magic like the rising mists of autumn. And best of all, love; love enough for a thousand Christmases.
I lived, I suppose, in a cell of my own creation, while outside its walls lay a landscape of unparalleled richness. But I could not bear to venture there. In my self-delusion I thought I was a minor king, and I didn’t want to step beyond the bounds of what I knew for fear I lost my dominion.
You won’t simply witness what is going to unfold in Hell from this point outward; you will make a testament of it, wherein my acts and my philosophies will be recounted in full detail. They will be my Gospels, and I will forbid you nothing in their chapters and verses, as long as it is observed truth, however far from my ideal of myself I may fall.