Quotes from Books I Read in 2008

Every time Vurdmeister Neph Dada met with Rat, it was in a different place. Rooms in inns, cellars of boat shops, bakeries, east side parks, and dead-end alleys in the Warrens. Ever since Neph had figured out that Rat was afraid of the dark, he'd made sure they always met at night.
Twilight, Neph watched Rat and his bodyguards enter the tiny old overfull graveyard. It wasn't as dark as Neph would have hopedl taverns and game halls and whorehouses huddled not thirty paces away.

The nephew was around thirty years old. What had his parents had done to him had bent his neurons and snapped his synapses. He had an incomprehensible mind, a one-occupant world of torture, degradation and horror.
He never left the apartment.
He never had guests.
His brain didn't register the past. He thought he'd been born when puberty struck, and the warp opened.
But his aunt's mind was still as clear as Bush's agenda.
And she never forgot.

'You want a poison pill,' the nephew finally said, a couple of hours later. He had been listening to me, asking questions listening some more. He was never impatient, never annoyed. I meant less than a cockroach to him, but when his auntie told him to do something, the one pipeline to humanity still inside him opened. He'd kill a planet to hear her say, 'Thank you, Theodore. You're such a good boy.'

All right. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He was exhausted and on edge from watching the people he loved suffer all day.

As the echoes waned to a dull hum, the twins heard a soft clattering sound. Nod's eyes had fallen back inside his head, and now the statue stared out with eerie, empty sockets.

Sid Lancaster has been serving greasy burgers and toxic coffee to the good old boys of Paradise for as long as I can remember. In all that time I don't remember the diner changing--not one little bit. From the chrome-and-naughahyde stools, to the stained booths, to the curtains at the windows, everything's so old it's almost retro-chic.
At any time of the day or night, you can step inside the glass doors at Sid's and be guaranteed to find three things: the scent of coffee left too long on the burner, Sid standing behind the stove wearing a greasy apron and a white paper cap, and at least one pair of Wrangler jeans planted firmly on a stool in front of the counter.

Missis said, 'The bad little boy was only bad because he had never known dogs.' And she was probably right.

The sky turned blood-red, and the red bathed the hills in soft crimson or pink; the night closed around us and gathered the hills into shadow, and the stars lit up their lamps.

The windscreen shattered. Only then did Phryne Fisher realize that the stinging hum which she had heard above the roar of the Hispano-Suiza's engine was not the mosquito she had taken it for. The windscreen broke into a thousand shards and showered her with razor-sharp fragments. She jammed on the huge car's brakes, and it rolled to a stop. She brushed glass from her driving goggles and pulled them off.
Someone was shooting at her. Even in this year of 1928, with its notable industrial unrest and mounting fears of economic disaster, this was too much.

Phryne leaned on the ship's rail, listening to the sea-gulls announcing that land was near, and watched for the first hint of sunrise. She had put on her lounging robe, of a dramatic oriental pattern of green and gold, and outfit not to be sprung suddenly on invalids or those of nervous tendencies--and she was rather glad that there was no one on deck to be astonished.

Just then the dawn wind came, stirring the darkness of the night, touching with cool, long fingers Thowra's coat, his ears; whispering through the snowgum leaves. Daylight would soon come, and he must not be seen, but he could not tear himself away and he remained, never taking his eyes off the yard. The man came out with a pannikin of tea in his hand and leant on the yard fence. He called Golden. To Thowra's amazement he saw her walk over to him and take something out of his hand and eat it.
Thowra tossed his head and turned away into the thick bush. He made no sound as he went back to his herd, but Golden's whinny followed him. He stopped for a second and listened, not understanding how she could whinny to him and yet accept something from the man. But the whinny sealed his determination to get her for himself.

The radio in the background played the latest country and western hits. Paintings of naked women, brown, big-busted, smiled down on them from their black velour backgrounds. They were Ernie's women, just as the apartment had once been Ernie Wheeler's apartment. Logan had been invited five years before, and the Durbin apartment was now home to both of them.
A dozen of Ernie's women now decorated the place, each beckoning the patrolmen to climb atop their sensual bodies and luxuriate in the enveloping blackness. They were all different, yet somehow the same. Each had full pointed breasts, dark liquid eyes. Each had a knee raised to hide her secret treasure.

The door had been blocked by Gaby's body. But Gabrielle had fallen more toward the center of the livingroom. In death, she had spread out from that center. She had reached all the walls, and her belly was pressed flat against the ceiling, and I wondered if she had even bulged through the bedroom doorway.
The ceiling lights shone through the purple-black translucent flesh of her abdomen, making her seem to glow from the inside. And the light passed directly through the crater of a hole where her chest window had once been.
Through silhouetted nests of veins I could see organs inside her, seeming to float in an aquarium of cloudy liquid. I couldn't distinguish her swollen limbs from her torso, except I thought I recognized an immense, distorted foot squashed up against one of the walls.
That smell...
I clamped a hand over my nose and mouth, fought back a rattling gag. With my free hand I fumbled the Thor out of my waistband. I had to burn this blasphemy, burn the witch, burn it from my sight before I lose my nerve and my mind...
There was a muffled sloshing sound. A kind of gurgle like a stopped drain might make. And then I saw one of the murky organs move inside Gabrielle. At first I thought it was merely drifting, but I realized it had paddled itself along, trailing jellyfishlike arms or various lengths and thicknesses.
It wasn't an organ.

Indy's eyes flitted to the satchel hung from the bedpost.
'Not to bother,' Jaekel said. 'I have removed the bullets from your revolver and placed them neatly on the desk. Actually, I am rather disappointed in you. Why do you carry that clumsy piece? It is much too heavy.'
'Maybe,' Indy said, 'But I like to throw it at people.'

Uncle Andrew showed me how to throw knives that afternoon. We didn't tell Mum. She got angry enough last year when he showed me how to shoot clay pigeons with a shotgun. I landed flat on my backside in the muddy slush with a bruise the size of a pudding on my right shoulder. But I blew that clay pigeon to smithereens. I don't know why Mum got so upset.

The Three Keys was admirably suited to mysterious rendezvous. It was set in the middle of nowhere, between warehouses and countinghouses that were vacant at night, silent except for the occasional step of the Watch. People with nowhere else to go went there, seeking anonymity. Some sought oblivion: as Richard approached the tavern he saw the door open, a rectangle of dusky light, and a body come pitching out. The man lay snoring stentorously on the melted snow. St Vier stepped around him and went in.

They walked until he couldn't walk any more and then they just kept going. It was sort of like med school -- except in med school there was coffee and no monkeys and people weren't shooting at you.

The rubber bands that held her braids had been cut and the insistent pulse of the ocean unraveled her smoke-matted hair. Something, seaweed maybe, slunk past her left leg, touching the back of her knee. She added sharks to the list of things she refused to think about. Fear was a burgar, breaking into one's mind, stealing away peace. Mentally she bolted her doors and drifted with the night.

Molly had faked a marriage to an actuary for three years. She figured she could pretty much handle anything.

Unless you are a professional, you will find the tart to be a high-maintenance, unforgiving whistle-blower of a pastry. If they could sprout sexual organs and mate, they'd go extinct on the jungle floor. Chocolate chip cookies, impossible to fuck up, would breed like deer.

--"Smell This"

What stopped him, however--together with the almost unbearable humidity in the room--was the immense aquarium behind the reception desk. It nearly filled the wall--it might have been built right into the wall, for all he could tell--well stocked with species of fish he had never seen before. Small, squidlike creatures with what seemed to be transparent wings of some sort danced through the vegetation sprouting from the aquarium bed. Aquatic frogs with spiny dorsal fins floated peacefully in the mild current, and brightly spotted eels with fanned tails darted from corner to corner, their bodies undulating.

'They shot your truck, Jamie.'

'Not my type.' Serge found an entry in the deed book and marked it with Brenda's index card. 'You wouldn't know it to look at her, but she's a real party animal.' He stuck the volume under his arm and headed for the Xerox. 'Appears ultimately conventional in the library setting, reserved clothes and demeanor. But run into her on the weekend and all bets are off. Hangs out at the clothing-optional Atlantic Shores and gets absolutely wasted. She's got a clit ring, which she's always losing, along with her cell phone and purse...Coleman, where'd you go?'
Coleman was grabbing a bookcase for equilibrium. 'Jesus, Serge, if you don't want her, I do.'
'She'd rip you apart.'
'Hopefully.'
Serge raised the Xereox's cover and flattened the deed book on the glass.
Coleman finished his beer and threw it in the trash. He pulled another off the plastic ring. 'Ever Xerox your balls?'

You were a combat photographer in Vietnam. What effect, if any, do you think that experience has had on your work?

Well, I certainly saw a lot of the same things I create for movies. Only I saw them for real. I almost stepped on an arm once--a Viet Cong was shot by a buddy of mine and when he fell, a grenade he'd had primed under his armpit went off and just blew him to smithereens. I have a picture of him afterwards.

(Tom Savini interviewed by the author)

Bidderdoo Harpell: Harkle's cousin Bidderdoo spent seven years as the Harpell family pet after a bad mix of potions turned him into a dog. During the Time of Troubles, he gathered the necessary components to change himself back, though most of his family liked him better as a dog. The transformation is still ongoing, and Bidderdoo is known to bury things, and often reacts to danger with a bark.

Johnny cried out and flung the hand away from him. He jerked his arms convulsively, knocking the snow globe to the floor with a loud crash. The hand spun on top of the desk and fell off onto the professor's lap. At that moment Johnny could not even speak, but merely stood there gasping.
For at the mention of Esdrias Blackleach's name, the wooden hand had suddenly closed its fingers on his own, giving him a ghastly handshake.

Light flickered over the vast underground laboratory and its ancient scientific equipment, barely illuminating the pale faces of two children dressed in striped footie pajamas.
Ellen sat on the floor, surrounded by stray pieces of paper, and peered into a yellowed notebook. The markings on the page were unintelligible.

A hundred sportswriters in sartorial squalor waited anxiously outside the locked doors of a conference room at the Hyatt.
Inside, the staff completed preparations, plugging in microphones and adjusting the temperature of the warming trays at the complimentary buffet along the back wall.
Rumors were rampant outside the doors. The story was expected to lead all newspapers and broadcasts. The stench of competition coming off the sportswriting corps was thick, everyone checking the time, ready to make their move. Stations prepared to go live at noon.
At one minute before noon, an aide neatly stacked press kits on a table just inside the entrance. Then she opened the doors. The sportswriters stampeded past the table and gang-banged the taco bar in the back of the room. The live broadcasts cut to commercials.
Twenty minutes later, the hot bar looked like an Amtrak derailment, and the last sportswriter straggled to his seat. It was quiet. Someone burped.

All maitre d's in New York City have accents, but it is never one you can positively identify. A girl I dated in the mid-eighties, one who did have a sense of humor (along with a fairly large drug habit, unfortunately), told me once that they all grew up on the same little island and hence all spoke the same language.
'What language is it?' I asked her.
'Snooti,' she said, and I cracked up.

--"Lunch at the Gotham Cafe"

They'd worked together for years, anonymous to each other, the passion growing. By the time they'd broken down together in Warsaw, in that violent thunderstorm, and she revealed her true first name, it was like bearing her naked body to him for the first time. It was the most intimate thing about her.
And now that he thought about it, that was supremely fucked up.

Dr Wallston pointed at the metal hatch, the tub, then up at the grate. 'We have to be extremely careful with the revivification elixir and the vapors from it. It is a compound of the most potent nerve stimulants, and it would be highly toxic to any person who was not already dead. A whiff of the vapors would induce tremors and mild hallucinations. Any contact with the liquid would bring on vomiting, convulsions, and death almost immediately.'

'And for Mrs. Wallston, what is the effect, or the side effects?'

'Motor and mental stimulation to normal levels of activity. I've also added emollients to keep her skin and hair from drying out.'

The Messerman girls were now weird creatures, able to turn themselves at will into birds of the air. They had always been coldhearted, picky, flighty. Now they were demons sure. Nobody ever stands still.

The gash on Beka's thigh was a deep one and it hurt like hell now, though she'd hardly noticed it during the battle. No one had been more surprised than she when she'd fainted across her horse's neck when the fighting was over.

The mistake we make is not realizing that guys have the capacity for both behaviors inside them--the angel and the mongrel, the dream guy and the man-whore. We make the mistake of believing that our angelic, sweet, milk-fed mama's boy couldn't possibly have a dirty mind, and that that dark-eyed swarthy construction worker with a potty mouth and an ass like Valhalla is good for only a romp but couldn't possibly fall. The fact is, they can do both, crossing from the dark side to the light depending on the situation and whether they got something to eat that morning.

Asengai's torturers were regular in their habits--they always left off at sunset. Chained again in his corner of the drafty cell, Alec turned his face to the rough stone wall and sobbed until his chest ached.

It was touch that had pulled her from her dreams. Not because it was violent or unexpected, but because a woman waiting to be knifed is sensitive to these things.

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write, otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood. I dedicated it 'To a Happier Year' and not altogether vainly. Happiness is its keynote--which by the way has had an unexpected result: it has made the book more difficult to publish.

Within the confines of the cyclone fence, equipment clustered like prehistoric creatures at a watering hole. Bones of metal linked with hydraulic cable in place of tendons thrust into the night: the skeletal neck of a crane, the scorpion's claw of a backhoe, the rounded back of a water truck--one she'd never seen in use though dust from construction was a constant irritation.

Roger's two grown girls are athletic and outdoorsy: one's a smoke jumper and ski patroller in Sun Valley, Idaho, and the other was a ski patroller on Mount Hood. He told me once, when I talked to him about dragging my two young daughters into the outdoors, 'Get them outside, do the things you want to do, and they will do everything boys do. Usually better.'

The bustle of Rock Harbor came almost as a relief. She was freed from the responsibility of appreciating a beauty so complex it was nearly a burden. 'Let's get small,' Anna said, and loosed her mind to its petty pursuits.

In the city the lights blinded the night sky, robbed it of stars. Only the moon could compete, a pale contender against the roving searchlights of mall openings, the unwinking concern of security lights. No one was given an opportunity to feel deliciously small, magnificently unimportant. Everyone was forced, always, to take their dying littles as truth.

The elevator community regarded Edward Dipth-Watney as a man of quixotic temperament; while not entirely swayed by Intuitionism, he felt that anything that caused such bellowing and recrimination merited a place to germinate and unfold itself, and hopefully cause more bellowing and recrimination. He was also a well-known model train enthusiast.

'You've grown up into a tall girl yourself, and healthy looking. People may've given you a lot of grief as a little girl, bt they'd think twice before it now, I bet. You're one of them, plain as day. All the women in your family, cut from the same cloth. Intractable bitches--all of you. And I mean that in the good way.'

She was surprised by Dallas's ugliness. Even with the sun rising behind it, the city looked as if it had been built to withstand bombardment. She'd never seen so much concrete in one place.
'What do you think?' Rendell said in the cab. 'Nice, huh?'
'Where are the trees?'
'There are some parks.' He craned his neck. 'I think you can see one...' A heavey truck roared alongside them. The cab darkened like it was descending into the earth. Violet put her fingers in her ears. 'Past that traffic accident.'

When you drink like that, it isn't for pleasure. It's because your thoughts have become diseases. You do it because it's the only easy cure you can find.

'We don't have a village idiot in Swevenings; we have a bloody-minded old gentleman. It's more classy,' said Sir James acidly.

Just by the lime, on that dancing night, she had missed a step and sagged on his arm, which tightened. His hand slid up between her shoulders; then, as she steadied back to the rhythm, down again. They had set out laughing, noisy and conscious, but soon had to save their breath. Gerald's cheek, within an inch of her own, was too near to see. All the way up, he had not missed a step; he was most dependable. And remembering how the family had gone into the house--so flatly, so unregrettingly slamming the glass doors, she felt that that was what she now wanted most: his eagerness and constancy. She felt, like a steady look from him, the perfectness of their being together.

Of course, that [usenet] entry started a flurry of postings that included Jack the Ripper theories and led to the Loch Ness Monster before taking a detour through the twilight zone.

Actively engaged in questioning their relationship to artistic as well s other traditions, modernists saw themselves as having broken with history, and, after 1914, history as having broken with them.

In the case of the Ostrich Fern (Struthiopteris), these underground stems are always a source of great astonishment. They frequently creep away to a distance of four or five feet before re-appearing, and then quietly throw up their vase-like forms where they are, perhas, least expected. A plant in the writer's collection made its way under a tight board fence, and delighted a neighbor, who, thinking it something planted and forgotten, could not recall to mind where she had obtained so charming a fern.

'In the second place, I know Stiffy. A charming girl whom, as I was telling Emerald Stoker, I am always prepared to clasp to my bosom--at least I would be if she wasn't engaged to you--but one who is a cross between a ticking bomb and a poltergeist. She lacks that balanced judment which we like to see in girls. She gets ideas, and if you care to call them bizarre ideas, it will be all right with me. I need scarcely remind you that when I last visited Totleigh Towers she egged you on to pinch Constable Oates' helmet, the one thing a curate should shrink from doing if he wishes to rise to heights in the Church. She is, in short, about as loony a young shrimp as ever wore a windswept hairdo.'

So when Gussie unexpectedly eloped with the cook, it looked as though Bertram was for it. If a girl thinks you're in love with her and says she will marry you, you can't very well voice a preference for being dead in a ditch.

Dr. Lawrence talked of taking his daughters away from the Hotel. 'I quite agree,' he had said, looking at Victor distastefully, 'that my daughter Veronica must marry somebody; but I fail to see any reason why she should marry you.' This had seemed an unnecessarily disagreeable way of putting things. Dr. Lawrence wore yellow spectacles out of doors, where the interview had taken place; these gave him the advantage of looking sinister. An abrupt man, Victor thought, not at all the sort of person one would care to consult if one needed to visit a heart specialist. In spite ofall the tennis and dancing Victor was beginning to put on flesh out here; he felt that Dr. Lawrence had noticed this; he had just borrowed twenty pounds from his father and this he felt Dr. Lawrence knew. It had all been rather awkward. Veronica did what she could; she admitted to Victor that her father was a bit of a beast, and to her father that Victor was a bit of an idiot, then retired to bed for two days, announcing that she had a headache.

'May the lost gods be with us,' Karista Meinor whispered.
'Or if they're not with us,' Mik said, 'I hope they'll at least stay out of the way.'

Lorenzo Langstroth interests me. He was not only a careful observer of bees, a man clever enough to invent the modern beehive, but also the author of a gracefully written and instructive book on beekeeping, The Hive and the Honeybee, first published in 1853. He imported and developed the strain of bees most beekeepers still use, the Italian race of Apis mellifera, the sweet bee. That he could do all this in one lifetime and yet be, by hiw own admission, mentally unbalanced for one half of it, has always struck me as an extraordinary and admirable example of human strength.

But listen, Spotswood is my older brother, but my whole life, he's been more like a younger one. He's got, well, you might call it autism light. Swood can no more read social-interaction data than the average jimp can read a menu written in binary. Photographic memory for the most god-awful arcane trivial nonsense, sure, but he can barely remember to zip up his fly. He's out East working on a double doctorate in superstring theory and thirteenth-century Japanese history, assuming he hasn't gotten lost and ended up in the SPCA again.

Then the cab pulled in front of a once fabulous building that looked like a grounded luxury ocean liner, like the SS Normandie. It was some sort of decomposing nautical fantasy, five stories of flaking navy blue and white paint, wave-shaped friezes, porthole windows, ship railings and a fake smokestack. Air conditioners hung precariously from some of the windows, their drains trailing tails of rust stains on the white walls. Involuntarily, Gabriel looked up to try to imagine where his uncle had jumped from.

Like diving birds they flashed into the water, leaving no ripple in the great Atlantic swells. Down through the green waves, the dim green light; though they breathed as fishes breathe, yet they flickered through the water like bars of light, with a speed no fish could ever attain.
Miles away and fathoms deep they sped, on and on, towards the distant deeps. The sea was full of noises, hissing, groaning, clicking, with great fusillades of thumps like cannon-fire as schools of big startled fish sped out of their way. The water grew warmer; jade-green, translucent. Glancing down, Will saw far below him the last signs of an old wreck. Only stumps remained of the masts and the raised decks, all eaten away by shipworms. From the mounded sand sifting over the hull an ancient cannon jutted, lumpy with coral, and two white skulls grinned up at Will. Killed by pirates, perhaps, he thought: destroyed, like too many men, neither by the Dark nor the Light but by their own kind...
Porpoises played above their heads; great grey sharks cruised and turned, glancing curiously down as the two Old Ones flashed by. Down and down they went, to the twilight zone, that dim-lit layer of the ocean where only a little of the day can reach; where all the fish--long slender fish with great mouths, strange flattened fish with telescopic eyes--glowed with a cold light of their own.

He puts the Hand of Glory down and picks up the M11/9 carefully. He flicks a switch on its side, looks round to make sure he's clear, points it downrange, and squeezes the trigger. There's a shatteringly loud crackle of gunfire followed by a tinkle of brass on concrete around our feet. 'Your call!' he shouts.
I pick up the hand. It feels cold and waxy, but the activation code is scribed on the sawn-off radius in silver. I step up beside him, point it downrange, focus, and concentrate on the trigger string, knowing that it sometimes takes a few seconds--
WHUMP.
'Very good,' Harry says drily. 'You realise it cost an execution in Shanxi province to make that thing?'
I put it down, feeling queasy. 'I only used one finger. Anyway, I thought our suppliers used orangoutangs. What happened?'
He shrugs. 'Blame the animal rights protesters.'

'It was good when you were making love to me,' she murmured. 'You're different from anyone else I've known. So strong, with your Earth-gravity muscles. Gentle, but you can feel the strength there. On Mars, you'll be like one of those mythical supermen.' She smiled, running her slim fingers around the curves of his deltoids. 'You ought to wear a leotard with your initial on your chest, and a red cape.'

(Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah).

94 is blessed with multiple personality disorder. Only one voice speaks at a given time, of course; the others are kept dormant, compressed, encrypted until called upon. Each persona runs on a different type of system. As long as 94 knows where it's going, it can dress for the occasion; satellite mainframe or smart wristwatch, it can present itself in a form that runs.

Going outside is like drowning, once a day.
Clarke stands facing Ballard, diveskin sealed, in an airlock that barely holds both of them. She has learned to tolerate the forced proximity; the glassy armor on her eyes helps a bit. Fuse seals, check headlamp, test injector...The ritual takes her, step by reflexive step, to that horrible moment when she awakens the machines sleeping within her, and changes.
When she catches her breath, and loses it.
When a vacuum opens, somewhere in her chest, that swallows the air she holds. When her remaining lung shrivels in its cage, and her guts collapse; when myoelectric demons flood her sinuses and middle ears with isotonic saline. When every pocket of internal gas disappears in the time it takes to draw a breath.
It always feels the same. The sudden, overwhelming nausea; the narrovw confines of the airlock holding her erect when she tries to fall; seawater churning on all sides. Her face goes under; vision blurs, then clears as her corneal caps adjust.
She collapses against the walls and wishes she could scream. The floor of the airlock drops away like a gallows. Lenie Clarke falls writhing into the abyss.

I watched the whole scene from my bedroom window. Brad and Stephen climbed out of the car and pushed and pushed until their faces looked purple. Brad kept stopping to put his hands on his hips and shake his head. Stephen just scowled with that look he gets when he feels too bad to say he's sorry. Finally, they removed the car from the hedge, which looked totally flattened and kind of offended, too, as if it were wondering why the hell it just got run over by a car.

Rain fell in sheets, rattled catch-pans or gurgled through gutters and into the throats of cisterns. Chains steamed and dripped endlessly, shifted, groaned under the weight of waterlogged buildings--like dull iron voices in every part of Deepgate. The evening light dwindled and died, but no lamplighters appeared to brighten the streets, and soon the temple districts, the Warrens, and the League of Rope filled with darkness.
Twelve Spine assassins had gathered in Pickle Lane: gaunt-faced ghosts, unmoving; rain hissing off leather armour; knives, swords and crossbows within easy reach of their pale hands. Of all the twelve, only Rachel shivered. She had seen the others many times before, yet knew none of their names.
A dead-eyed man with a hook-shaped scar that curled around his nose addressed her. 'You will be bait.'

'Looks like a bedroom here,' Angelica said, poking her head into a darkened room. She found that light switch too. The smell of old paper and leather permeated the space. A twin bed wedged into the corner was made up, the patchwork quilt covering it the only splash of color in the room. On the small nightstand next to it was an open book and a pair of reading glasses, looking like they awaited their owner. The walls were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves stuffed with old tomes, while stacks of homeless books stood in front of the bottom shelves.

'So I couldn't for the life of me figure out why he'd stopped calling. And then one day I ran into his roommate, who told me that he'd been committed to the stae mental hospital--for trying to burn his parents' house down! And I was like: "What, they don't have phones in the state mental hospital?'

One thing I had noticed about how the men moved in the weight room: They swaggered around bowlegged, as if at any minute they were going to face off against Gary Cooper. Tromp, tromp, tromp, don't be too hard on her tromp tromp a rough day tromp, draw on three, pod'ner.

'You men are all the same,' Fleur said. 'Don't think you can just swagger about and it means anything. This doesn't impress me.'
She was strong, but he'd trapped her arms and clearly had her at a disadvantage. 'Oh, but I can swagger about, sweetheart. After all, this is my home. Now if you're done making this social call, I have a lot more swaggering planned for the evening and I'd like to get on with it.'

In a hotel room in Las Vegas, Marcus slept a deep sleep while next to him Jay gripped hard at the sheets of the bed they shared, fighting with every fiber of his body to maintain self-control.

Beneath Providence, below the ancient yellow house on Benefit Street where silver-eyed vampires sleep away the days and pass their dusty, waxwork evenings with Spanish absinthe and stale memories; this house that once belonged to witches, long ago, this house with as many ghosts and secrets and curses as it has spiders and silverfish--beneath the yellow house, at half past midnight on a bitter February night, Mesdames Terpsichore and Mnemosyne are finishing a lecture with corporeal demonstrations.

--Caitlin R Kiernan, "The Dead and the Moonstruck"

The asteroid stood empty, but for the bone dice and the dead physicist.

The dessert hovercraft arrived.

And the house accepted her, slipped itself around her like a steaming bath, and it hardly mattered that she'd closed the door; the house had its own meteorology, its own gentle system of fronts and pressure centers. Spyder stood very still as her eyes adjusted to the shadows and the darkness behind the shadows, letting the day slide off her like grime, breathing in the whispery dustiness of the little foyer. A few seconds more and she easily found the switch on the wall, the ornate iron switchplate cooler to the touch than the wallpaper skin, and flooded the room, the hall beyond, with soft white light.

The Lincoln took us through the steel city onto the highway. I parked at O'Hare. Carried Blossom's bags inside. We stopped at the gate. She faced me, her hands wrapped in the lapels of my jacket. Turquoise eyes glistened with secrets I'd never know.
'Listen to me, trouble-man. I don't know where I'm going, how long it will take me to get there. Maybe I'll be alone, maybe I'll live in a nice big house with a white picket fence, have a husband and four kids, I don't know. Wherever I'll be, I'll be a doctor. Follow the scent, you know what I smell like. You can always find me.'
'Blossom...'
'Just listen to me--I know what's mine. Wherever I end up, I'll tell you one thing, I'm going to have a dog. A big, nasty killer dog who loves only me, protects me with his life. Every night, just before I go to bed, I'm going to let my dog out into the yard. Anybody comes after me, he's going to raise holy hell. You find my house, Burke. Wait until dark. When you come over the fence for me, that dog, he won't bar the way.'
She turned and walked, her heels clicking, trailing mystery and promise behind her.

The plane dropped into La Guardia. I took a cab back to my life.

Though I had always associated rock bands with youth, the one on the stage appeared to be made up of middle-aged men in ill-fitting black T-shirts. The drummer looked suspiciously like Dr. Marks, the principal at Star Brite. They all had their eyes closed as they played. I told Emily it was so they didn't have to look at the other band members and be reminded of who they really were.

Most of the Beings on the Street of the Gods didn't want to talk to me. In fact, most of them hid inside their churches behind locked and bolted doors and refulsed to come out until I'd gone. Understandable; they were still rebuilding parts of the Street from the last time I'd been here. But there are always some determined to show those watching that they aren't afraid of anyone, so a few of the more up-and-coming Beings sauntered casually over to chat with me. A fairly ordinary-looking priest who said he was the newly risen Dagon. Stack! The Magnificent; a more of less humanoid alien who claimed to be slumming it from a higher dimension. And the Elegant Profundity, a guitar-carrying avatar from the Church of Clapton, who was so laid-back he was practically horizontal. The small and shifty God of Lost Things hung around, evasive as always. None of them professed to know anything about a broadcast from the Afterlife, let alone a DVD recording.

We had started at the top of the museum, in its extensive attics, the ballrooms of the bats, and worked our way down with desperate, slipshod haste, aware of Dr Starkweather smoldering in his ofice like an unappeasable pagan volcano-god. At the end of May, we had reached the basement.
The Parrington's basements were an empire unto themselves, a sprawling labyrinth of storage rooms and sub-basements, steam tunnels and abandoned stretches of sewer. No one knew the full extent of them now, although there were rumors that old Mr Chastain had had maps that he had burned in a fit of pique when the previous museum director, Dr Evans, had forced him to retire.

--"The Venebretti Necklace"

Mr Poe was kindhearted, but it is not enough in this world to be kindhearted, particularly if you are responsible for keeping children out of danger.

She listlessly walked around the conference room. She didn't belong. She never belonged, to anyone, anywhere. Deck had called her selfish once. So had Raidon. Well, maybe so. Always the outsider, she was always looking out for number one--because no one else would. If that was selfish, she'd be happy to wear it on a badge.

A bouncer found their names on The List and inside they went. Or out, to be more accurate. Because Skybar was located under the stars, spread across a poolside patio where unnatural concentrations of supermodels lounged with the sultry, bedroom eyes of people coming around after surgery.

Serge speculated there was more missing drug money around Florida than buried pirate treasure. The illegal drug industry flows hundreds of millions of dollars in and out of Florida every year. It's all in cash. It's moving around constantly. It must be concealed every step of the way or ditched in an emergency. And most of the people hiding and retrieving it are on drugs.

he hides things
your eyes on the ceiling
the angel will speak
and unlock you

The woods were silent, other than the screaming.

He envisioned the world as a giant machine, bloodied fragments of bones stuck in its monstrous wheels, and the only periods of happiness or perceived freedom were just a pause while the cogs swung around, nearing the next bone-crunching turn. He knew better than to stick his head out.
He bought what he needed and headed back, never talking to anyone. He brought day-old bread for the rats. They waited for him, their eyes twinkling in the shadows.
He never listened to the radios he built, but the rats seemed to enjoy the static and the voices and somber music that occasionally broke through, and he placed small radios along the walls of the warehouse and the corners of his room. He supposed this was why the rats made him a gift.

Azlar's words, meant to reassure and tempt the warrior, had the completely opposite effect. Corin recoiled in revulsion from the undead flesh, shivering at the unnatural feel of it beneath his caress.
'Keep your zombie hand, wizard.'

My thoughts plod doggedly down trained routes. One guard will likely stay behind. Two of them covering me as we walk would not be enough. They don't know who trained me. I can handle two, even armed.
But Falcone doesn't motion me to walk. He smiles and shoots me himself.

It didn't matter what she thought of Shawna Lee personally. If her cookie competitor was hurt or in trouble, Hannah had a responsibility to do what she could to help.

Another boat approached from the east, a forty-foot trihull catamaran. A reporter from Florida Cable News stood on the tip of the middle bow holding a microphone, facing back toward the cabin and his cameraman. Behind him, hidden under his suit, he had a brace and a safety harness, like a barnstorming wing-walker. He raced at top speed toward news.
The upstart Florida Cable News network had to compensate for lack of money, experience, and reputation with raw daring. The coin of the realm was the scoop, and they regularly beat all major Florida affiliates by going on the air immediately with a ground-breaking series of premature, unconfirmed, flat-wrong stories.
But the worse FCN's accuracy got, the higher the ratings. A cult developed and tuned in to see how factually mangled the coverage had become. The closest thing FCN had to a recognizable personality was correspondent Blaine Crease, a former stuntman who was becoming recognized for exclusively reporting incorrect stories while suspended in a harness. Bouncing on a boat in a harness. Standing atop a fire engine in a harness. Bungee-jumping into precedent-setting slander.

Fontaine has two wives.
Not, he will tell you, a condition to aspire to.
They live, these two wives, in uneasy truce, in a single establishment, nearer the Oakland side. Fontaine has for some time now been opting to sleep here, in his shop.
The younger wife (at forty-eight, by some five years) is a Jamaican originally from Brixton, tall and light-skinned, whom Fontaine has come to regard as punishment for all his former sins.
Her name is Clarisse. Incensed, she reverts to the dialect of her childhood: 'You tek de prize, Fonten.'
Fontaine has been taking the prize for some years now, and he is taking it again today, Clarisse standing angrily before him with a shopping bag full of what appear to be catatonic Japanese babies.
These are in fact life-sized dolls, manufactured in the closing years of the previous century for the solace of distant grandparents, each one made to resemble photographs of an actual infant. Produced by a firm in Meguro called Another One, they are increasingly collectible, each example being to some degree unique.
'I don't want them,' Fontaine allows.
'Listen up,' Clarisse tells him, folding her dialect smoothly away, 'there is no way you are not taking these. You are taking them, you are moving them, you are getting top dollar, and you are giving it to me. Because there is no way, otherwise, that I am staying where you left me, cheek by jowl with that mad bitch you married.'
Who I was married to when you married me, thinks Fontaine, and no secret about it. The reference being to Tourmaline Fontaine, aka Wife One, whom Fontaine thinks of as being only adequately described by the epithet 'mad bitch'.

'You should know,' said Serge. 'Any behaviorist will tell you it's a healthy condition of the animal kingdom, how all living things are programmed for survival. But your medication deadens those urges. And if an animal stops having them, it means his wiring's crossed, and he ends up doing something unnatural like beaching himself and flopping in the sand, making shrill clicking noises , and then the lifeguards ask you to move along because "you're frightening the children"...'

Alex pushed the papers back to us. 'Well, nothing is to be done about death, but to die. Until then, I'll try to live like my fatalist ancestors did before me. Always expect the worst and then be thankful if it comes in just on the underside of shitty.'

Agent Mahoney arrived at the Little League field a few days after Coach Terrier's body was found. The pitcher's mound was still roped off by police tape. The sergeant guarding the scene recognized Mahoney.
'If it isn't my favorite state agent,' said the sergeant. They shook hands. 'I can remember when we didn't need fancy uniforms to play the game.'
'I can remember when aluminum was for beer cans, not baseball bats.'
'I can remember breaking Miss DuBois's first-grade class window.'
'We've all broken our share of windows.'
'I had a crush on Miss DuBois. She wore these cute little berets that drove me wild.'
'But that's not really the point now, is it?'
'No, I just thought--'
'You thought wrong.' Mahoney gazed wisfully over the left-field fence. 'What do you got for me?'
The detective pulled a notepad from his pocket. When he did, several little berets fell out. The sergeant stared at them on the ground for a moment, then looked at Mahoney. 'I'm getting help.'

Mrs. Smith was already seated on the divan, applying a silver fork to the pastry on her canary-yellow Meissen cake plate. She had acknowledged Sebastien earlier. Now, he touched the teacup to his lips before he set it, and its saucer, on the side table. 'Mrs. Smith,' he said. 'You seem very calm.'
Her eyebrows rose over the frame of her spectacles. 'I'm screaming inside,' she said, and laid the fork down beside her plate. 'But that's no reason not to eat.'

'You see, life's all about possibilities. Opportunities are everywhere, except most people are locked into rigid routines and mortgages and clipping coupons and aren't even looking. But I see possibilities in everything: tangible objects, memories, thin air. It's at once a blessing and a curse. I started putting it all on this clipboard, but it wasn't as convenient as the Post-It Notes, which are easily lost and need to be backed up with the digital recorder, which must be transcribed into the notebooks, and before I know it, I'm right back where I started.'
Lenny exhaled a big hit. 'That's how The Man keeps you down.'

I entered the colony through the rusted iron gates and turned off the main road circling the lake, and drove down the narrowest dirt lane that approached the largest, grandest, and gloomiest of the lakefront mansions: my temporary home-sweet-home. It was the perfect setting for one of the gothic novels I'd loved to read in junior high, even rumored to be haunted by the ghost of a woman who died during childbirth in one of its fairy-tale turrets. I've often thought it would be fun to don a long white nightgown and flit about the yard like a heroine in the cover of a gothic, but have decided to wait until the weather gets warmer.

Paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh named Diplodocus in 1878. Its name means 'double beam'.

'Have you spoken with the nagas since you've returned?' Pristoleph asked Devorast, and it was the first sentence she'd really heard since Devorast had arrived earlier that evening. She'd gone through the motions, of course, acting the dutiful wife and charming hostess as best she could with apparitions of violet light circling her, telling her to kill her guest and kill herself.

The alchemist sat at a desk cluttered with glassware and iron pots. A little oil lamp burned under a glass bowl in which a strange yellow liquid boiled, sending orange steam into the air that smelled of deep earth--a welcoming sensation for the dwarf.