“When she finally slipped away I felt the terror drain from me to follow her into places I could not go. So feeble now, enervated by long proximity to the demons of another. I was afraid that when I woke up the angel would speak through her again, or the angry child for whom time had frozen in that one frenzied moment when her father forced himself on her. . . .”
“Ronan imagined the long journey of the priests from the passenger cars to the boiler, to cast the fresh body into the flames to replenish the impetus of the locomotive, that it might carry itself over the next mountain and far beyond. . . .”
“He slashed himself into ribbons and fleshy gravel, all of it gently rolled into black wire and fed in a river of unseen force into the amplifiers on either side of the searing white platform. . . .”
“I could feel his whiskers growing over there, becoming whiter by the second. The bags under his eyes were sinking, his veins bulging, a top hat splitting at the seams materializing over the ridges of his brow, his gut becoming creaking ribs, his dirty T-shirt becoming a faded button-up fastened to his frame by worn-out suspenders. A cloud of sepia absorbed all colors but for a dusty afternoon yellow, and he sat on the porch with his guitar, singing dirty words over gospel tunes. . . .”
“A soldier with blonde hair and crystal-blue eyes is sparking the flint of a lighter over and over, illuminating his face one instant a time, totally mesmerized by the way the light comes and goes: now and then you get a glimpse of a guy you once knew in this stranger, but the next flash shows eyes too deep, features older than the age that bears them, and the memory is gone like the crescent of flint-smoke in the dark that is the byproduct of its genesis. . . .”
“Jason wrenched open the barn door and saw light emanating from Ralphy’s desk on the far side of dark space. But for the slivers of sun between old boards, it was the only medium for vision. He waded through ankle-deep wood fragments toward the glowing aura, where a huge silhouette sat, too big for its chair, nodding and heaving, bent over its own hands, muttering a curse word now and then, pausing, resuming, sawdust orbiting its head in a halo, caught in the gravity well. . . .”
“It’s a temptation—when I see that defenseless desire for the unexplainable in his eye—to spout out some profound obscurity that’ll have him totally sideways for a week. But I can’t do it. So I say, West. Or I say, North. Or I say, South-East. And he nods like it makes perfect sense, as if whatever direction I choose at random is the will of God no less than the direction of the wind, and he believes to the core those wolves will go to where they must and surely must go. . . .”
“The atmosphere is the same inside as out. Soupy air that makes your clothes stick to your skin like tissue paper over a shaving wound. Heat and ever-present strangeness. And dust, every smell comes out of the dust. No one tracked it in here after the airport was built, it was always here. There was dust where the contours of the building would be one day, the dust told them where to build, it was already raining from the ceiling materials before they formed a ceiling. . . .”
“Forty-three years ago in a grungy Wessex studio the magic happened, the sounds were captured. Swift, syncopated horn runs; smoothly wavering flute melodies; long stretches of soft atonality; lyrics to match the grandeur of classical epic. . . .”
“It all happened so fast. There was fire, there was quiet, and then someone tried to tell you you had always been dead. One of his eyes was half closed and he breathed like the wind was trying to steal the air from his chest. They were lies, like everything else he had ever spoken. Yet his skull was so defined under the skin of his face, and his eyes so vacuous they could have been empty sockets. So maybe this was him, Death: not so imposing after all, just another tired old man with a point to make. . . .”