Coffin Drop Quotes

I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and was become like Mohammed's coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do.

Did you have one of those days today, like a nail in the foot? Did the pterodactyl corpse dropped by the ghost of your mother from the spectral Hindenburg forever circling the Earth come smashing through the lid of your glass coffin? Did the New York strip steak you attacked at dinner suddenly show a mouth filled with needle-sharp teeth, and did it snap off the end of your fork, the last solid-gold fork from the set Anastasia pressed into your hands as they took her away to be shot? Is the slab under your apartment building moaning that it cannot stand the weight on its back a moment longer, and is the building stretching and creaking? Did a good friend betray you today, or did that good friend merely keep silent and fail to come to your aid? Are you holding the razor at your throat this very instant? Take heart, comfort is at hand. This is the hour that stretches. Djan karet. We are the cavalry. We're here. Put away the pills. We'll get you through this bloody night. Next time, it'll be your turn to help us. "Eidolons" (1988)

Lo!" cried the demon. "I am here! What dost thou seek of me? Why dost thou disturb my repose? Smite me no more with that dread rod!" He looked at Cabal. "Where's your dread rod?" "I left it at home," replied Cabal. "Didn't think I really needed it." "You can't summon me without a dread rod!" said Lucifuge, appalled. "You're here, aren't you?" "Well, yes, but under false pretences. You haven't got a goatskin or two vervain crowns or two candles of virgin wax made by a virgin girl and duly blessed. Have you got the stone called Ematille?" "I don't even know what Ematille is." Neither did the demon. He dropped the subject and moved on. "Four nails from the coffin of a dead child?" "Don't be fatuous." "Half a bottle of brandy?" "I don't drink brandy." "It's not for you." "I have a hip flask," said Cabal, and threw it to him. The demon caught it and took a dram. "Cheers," said Lucifuge, and threw it back. They regarded each other for a long moment. "This really is a shambles," the demon added finally. "What did you summon me for, anyway?

Sobs, heavy, hoarse and loud, shook the chairs, and great tears fell through his fingers on the floor - just such tears, sir, as you dropped into the coffin where lay your first-born son; such tears, woman, as you shed when you heard the cries of your dying babe; for, sir, he was a man, and you are but another man; and, woman, though dressed in silk and jewels, you are but a woman, and, in life's great straits and mighty griefs, ye feel but one sorrow!

The possible, as it was presented in her Health textbook (a mathematical progression of dating, "career," marriage, and motherhood), did not interest Harriet. Of all the heroes on her list, the greatest of them all was Sherlock Holmes, and he wasn’t even a real person. Then there was Harry Houdini. He was the master of the impossible; more importantly, for Harriet, he was a master of escape. No prison in the world could hold him: he escaped from straitjackets, from locked trunks dropped in fast rivers and from coffins buried six feet underground. And how had he done it? He wasn’t afraid. Saint Joan had galloped out with the angels on her side but Houdini had mastered fear on his own. No divine aid for him; he’d taught himself the hard way how to beat back panic, the horror of suffocation and drowning and dark. Handcuffed in a locked trunk in the bottom of a river, he squandered not a heartbeat on being afraid, never buckled to the terror of the chains and the dark and the icy water; if he became lightheaded, for even a moment, if he fumbled at the breathless labor before him– somersaulting along a river-bed, head over heels– he would never come up from the water alive. A training program. This was Houdini’s secret.

You can't escape me, Milaje. You'll have to trap me in an Iron coffin and drop me in the middle of the fucking ocean, and even then, I'll haunt your dreams. Your nightmares. I'll haunt you even when you try to die.

Andrew indulged in a little fantasy in which his father dropped dead, gunned down by an invisible sniper. Andrew visualised himself patting his sobbing mother on the back while he telephoned the undertaker. He had a cigarette in his mouth as he ordered the cheapest coffin.

This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compassion a few hours old. That can happen when people die--the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration. In which estimate lies the greater reality--the uncharitable one permitted us before the funeral, forged, without any claptrap, in the skirmish of daily life, or the one that suffuses us with sadness at the family gathering afterward--this even an outsider can't judge. The sight of a coffin can effect a great change of heart--all at once you find you are not so disappointed in the person who is dead--but what the sight of a coffin does for a mind in its search for the truth, this I don't profess to know.

Holding his candle so that he could read the coffin plates, and so holding it that the sperm dropped in white patches which congealed as they touched the metal, he made assurance of Lucy's coffin. Another

The driver, a black silhouette upon his box, whipped up his bony horses. Icy silence in the coach. Marius, motionless, his body braced in the corner of the carriage, his head dropping down upon his breast, his arms hanging, his legs rigid, appeared to await nothing now but a coffin; Jean Valjean seemed made of shadow, and Javert of stone.

He leaned over the back of the chair, and covered his face with his large hands. Sobs, heavy, hoarse and loud, shook the chair, and great tears fell through his fingers on the floor; just such tears, sir, as you dropped into the coffin where lay your first-born son; just such tears, woman, as you shed when you heard the cries of your dying babe. For, sir, he was a man,-and you are but another man. And, woman, though dressed in silk and jewels, you are but a woman, and, in life's great straits and mighty griefs, ye feel but one sorrow!

They tell a story, probably not true, about a cap trooper who was sight-seeing in Paris. He visited Les Invalides, looked down at Napoleon's coffin, and said to a French guard there: "Who's he?" The Frenchman was properly scandalized. "Monsieur does not know? This is the tomb of Napoleon! Napoleon Bonaparte! The greatest soldier who ever lived!" The cap trooper thought about it. Then he asked, "So? Where were his drops?

In my case, the effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only. Easily was a man made an infidel, but hardly might he be converted to another faith. I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and has become like Mohammed's coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do. Such detachment came at times to a man exhausted by prolonged physical effort and isolation. His body plodded on mechanically, while his reasonable mind left him, and from without looked down critically on him, wondering what that futile lumber did and why. Sometimes these selves would converse in the void; and then madness was very near, as I believe it would be near the man who could see things through the veils at once of two customs, two educations, two environments.

Learning, and especially unlearning, can take place only in the absence of defensiveness.... [W]e can drop our defenses only when we love and are loved.

Aren’t you a little young to be a captain? Not that I’m sure you weren’t wonderful at it,” I added hastily, “but Frank’s got to be your same age, and Mr. Graces and Mr. Liu are both older than you. How on earth did it happen?” He shut down. It was like a curtain being pulled across a window. This was a subject he definitely did not wish to discuss. “The title is honorary,” he said, not meeting my gaze. “I can’t stop them calling me that, even though I’ve asked them not to. I was the highest-ranking officer to survive the…accident.” Accident? I supposed this was another one of those things he didn’t want to tell me because it would make me hate him. Recognizing that dropping that particular topic-for now at least-would probably be best. I said, “John, I can warn you about the Furies. And I know exactly where the coffin is. All you have to do is take me back to Isla Huesos-just this one time, to help Alex-and I’ll never mention going there again. I’ll even,” I said, reaching up to straighten the collar of his leather jacket, which had gone askew, “forgive you for the waffles-“ John seized me by both shoulders, pulling me towards him so abruptly that Hope gave an alarmed flap of her wings. “Pierce,” he said. “Do you mean that?” When I pushed back some of the hair that had tumbled into my face and raised my dark eyes to meet his light ones, I saw that he was staring down at me with an intensity that burned. “You’ll never mention going back to Isla Huesos again if I take you there right now, this once, to talk to your cousin Alex?” he demanded. “You’ll give…cohabitation another chance?” His sudden fierceness was making me nervous. “Of course, John,” I said. “But it’s not like I have a choice.” “What if you did?” he asked, his grip tightening. I blinked. “But I can’t. You said-“ He gave me a little shake. “Never mind what I said. What if I was wrong?” I reached up to lay a hand on his cheek. It felt a little scratchy, because he hadn’t shaved. I didn’t care about stubble. What I cared about was the desperate need I saw in his eyes. The need for me. “I’d come back,” I said, simply, “to stay with you.” A second later, the late-and everything around it-was gone.

You’re used to expecting some North Korean or some Iranian in a MiG to drop out of the sun and lock on. But when the people supposed to be on your side do it, well, it really throws you. Makes you feel dirty, betrayed.

I’m a maker of ballads right pretty I write them right here in the street You can buy them all over the city yours for a penny a sheet I’m a word pecker out of the printers out of the dens of Gin Lane I’ll write up a scene on a counter - confessions and sins in the main, boys confessions and sins in the main Then you’ll find me in Madame Geneva’s keeping the demons at bay There’s nothing like gin for drowning them in but they’ll always be back on a hanging day, on a hanging day They come rattling over the cobbles they sit on their coffins of black Some are struck dumb, some gabble top-heavy on brandy or sack The pews are all full of fine fellows and the hawker has set up her shop As they’re turning them off at the gallows she’ll be selling right under the drop, boys selling right under the drop Then you’ll find me in Madame Geneva’s keeping the demons at bay There’s nothing like gin for drowning them in but they’ll always be back on a hanging day, on a hanging day

For the first time I understood the dogma of eternal pain -- appreciated "the glad tidings of great joy." For the first time my imagination grasped the height and depth of the Christian horror. Then I said: "It is a lie, and I hate your religion. If it is true, I hate your God." From that day I have had no fear, no doubt. For me, on that day, the flames of hell were quenched. From that day I have passionately hated every orthodox creed. That Sermon did some good. In the Old Testament, they said. God is the judge -- but in the New, Christ is the merciful. As a matter of fact, the New Testament is infinitely worse than the Old. In the Old there is no threat of eternal pain. Jehovah had no eternal prison -- no everlasting fire. His hatred ended at the grave. His revenge was satisfied when his enemy was dead. In the New Testament, death is not the end, but the beginning of punishment that has no end. In the New Testament the malice of God is infinite and the hunger of his revenge eternal. The orthodox God, when clothed in human flesh, told his disciples not to resist evil, to love their enemies, and when smitten on one cheek to turn the other, and yet we are told that this same God, with the same loving lips, uttered these heartless, these fiendish words; "Depart ye cursed into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels." These are the words of "eternal love." No human being has imagination enough to conceive of this infinite horror. All that the human race has suffered in war and want, in pestilence and famine, in fire and flood, -- all the pangs and pains of every disease and every death -- all this is as nothing compared with the agonies to be endured by one lost soul. This is the consolation of the Christian religion. This is the justice of God -- the mercy of Christ. This frightful dogma, this infinite lie, made me the implacable enemy of Christianity. The truth is that this belief in eternal pain has been the real persecutor. It founded the Inquisition, forged the chains, and furnished the fagots. It has darkened the lives of many millions. It made the cradle as terrible as the coffin. It enslaved nations and shed the blood of countless thousands. It sacrificed the wisest, the bravest and the best. It subverted the idea of justice, drove mercy from the heart, changed men to fiends and banished reason from the brain. Like a venomous serpent it crawls and coils and hisses in every orthodox creed. It makes man an eternal victim and God an eternal fiend. It is the one infinite horror. Every church in which it is taught is a public curse. Every preacher who teaches it is an enemy of mankind. Below this Christian dogma, savagery cannot go. It is the infinite of malice, hatred, and revenge. Nothing could add to the horror of hell, except the presence of its creator, God. While I have life, as long as I draw breath, I shall deny with all my strength, and hate with every drop of my blood, this infinite lie.

In the Holy Land are two ancient bodies of water. Both are fed by the Jordan River. In one, fish play and roots find sustenance. In the other, there is no splash of fish, no sound of bird, no leaf around. The difference is not in the Jordan, for it empties into both, but in the Sea of Galilee: for every drop taken in one goes out. It gives and lives. The other gives nothing. And it is called the Dead Sea.

As if she had a fever, her skin burned and crackled with a pinpoint sensitivity. She could feel smoke against her skin. She could feel voice waves. She was beginning to feel color, light intensities, and she imagined that she could be put blindfolded in front of the signs at the Thunderbird and the Flamingo and know which was which. 'Maria', she felt someone whisper one night, but when she turned there was nobody. She began to feel the pressure of Hoover Dam, there on the desert, began to feel the pressure and pull of the water. When the pressure got great enough she drove out there. All that day she felt the power surging through her own body. All day she was faint with vertigo, sunk in a world where great power grids converged, throbbing lines plunged finally into the shallow canyon below the dam's face, elevators like coffins dropped into the bowels of the earth itself.

And here were these freemen assembled in the early morning to work on their lord the bishop's road three days each—gratis; every head of a family, and every son of a family, three days each, gratis, and a day or so added for their servants.  Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villany away in one swift tidal-wave of blood—one:  a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break?  What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake?  A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

Here he turned to the rough trundle-bed full of little woolly heads, and broke fairly down. He leaned over the back of the chair, and covered his face with his large hands. Sobs, heavy, hoarse and loud, shook the chair, and great tears fell through his fingers on the floor; just such tears, sir, as you dropped into the coffin where lay your first-born son; such tears, woman, as you shed when you heard the cries of your dying babe. For, sir, he was a man,—and you are but another man. And, woman, though dressed in silk and jewels, you are but a woman, and, in life’s great straits and mighty griefs, ye feel but one sorrow!

horizontal division between clearness and opacity, but were imbedded in an elastic body of a monotonous pallor throughout. There was no perceptible motion in the air, not a visible drop of water fell upon a leaf of the beeches, birches, and firs composing the wood on either side. The trees stood in an attitude of intentness, as if they waited longingly for a wind to come and rock them. A startling quiet overhung all surrounding things—so completely, that the crunching of the waggon-wheels was as a great noise, and small rustles, which had never obtained a hearing except by night, were distinctly individualized. Joseph Poorgrass looked round upon his sad burden as it loomed faintly through the flowering laurustinus, then at the unfathomable gloom amid the high trees on each hand, indistinct, shadowless, and spectre-like in their monochrome of grey. He felt anything but cheerful, and wished he had the company even of a child or dog. Stopping the horse, he listened. Not a footstep or wheel was audible anywhere around, and the dead silence was broken only by a heavy particle falling from a tree through the evergreens and alighting with a smart rap upon the coffin of poor Fanny. The fog had by this time saturated the trees, and this was the first dropping of water from the overbrimming leaves. The hollow echo of its fall reminded the waggoner painfully of the grim Leveller. Then hard by came down another drop, then two or three. Presently there was a continual tapping of these heavy drops upon the dead leaves, the road, and the travellers. The nearer boughs were beaded with the mist to the greyness of aged men, and the rusty-red leaves of the beeches were

What are all these?” Charlie plucked a book of psalms from the unruly pile on the desk. “Have you two robbed a church since I left this morning?” “No,” said Jackaby. “Not personally. We had to delegate that task. Pilfering parish property has fallen to Miss Cavanaugh this week.” Charlie rubbed his neck as he dropped the book back on the stack. “Because if there’s one thing New Fiddleham needs right now, it’s a bit more paranormal petty crime.” “If it makes you feel any better,” I submitted, “the pastor more or less asked us to. He was rather insistent that we should find something in one of his Bibles.” “You’re certain he won’t go storming into the station house tomorrow to tell the duty officer how he’s been robbed by a ghost?” I swallowed. “Not unless he is one himself,” said Jackaby. “He’s dead.” “What?” “Quite dead. He’s up in the attic if you would like to check for yourself.” “Why do you have a dead preacher in your attic?” “Because we found it easier to carry him up to the coffin than to maneuver it down to him.” Charlie looked suddenly very tired. “Enough about our morning,” I said. “You had a difficult patch yourself?

We’re either gonna be fighting Grievers or we need to get inside those big coffins at the right time. Maybe they’re the—” A sharp hiss cut through the air from all directions. The sound pierced Thomas’s eardrums and he clamped his hands to the sides of his head again. Movement on the perimeter surrounding them caught his attention, and he watched carefully what was happening with the large white pods. A line of dark blue light had appeared on one side of each container, then expanded as the top half of the object began to move upward, opening on hinges like the lid of a coffin. It made no sound, at least not enough to be heard over the rushing wind and rumbling thunder. Thomas sensed the Gladers and the others slowly moving closer together, forming a tighter knot. Everyone was trying to get as far away from the pods as possible—and soon they were a coiled pack of bodies encircled by the thirty or so rounded white containers. The lids continued moving until they’d all swung open and dropped to the ground. Something bulky rested inside each vessel. Thomas couldn’t make out much, but from where he stood he couldn’t see anything like the odd appendages of the Grievers. Nothing moved, but he knew not to let his guard down. Teresa? he said to her mind. He didn’t dare try talking loudly enough to be heard—but he had to talk to someone or go nuts. Yeah? Someone should go take a look. See what’s in it. He said it, but he really didn’t want to be the one to do it. Let’s go together, she said easily. She surprised him with her courage. Sometimes you have the worst ideas, he responded. He’d tried to make it feel sarcastic, but he knew the truth of it far more than he wanted to admit to himself. He was terrified. “Thomas!” Minho called. The wind, still wild, was drowned out by the approaching thunder and lightning now, cracking

Ah, you don’t comprehend, friend John. Do not think that I am not sad, though I laugh. See, I have cried even when the laugh did choke me. But no more think that I am all sorry when I cry, for the laugh he come just the same. Keep it always with you that laughter who knock at your door and say, ‘May I come in?’ is not the true laughter. No! he is a king, and he come when and how he like. He ask no person; he choose no time of suitability. He say, ‘I am here.’ Behold, in example I grieve my heart out for that so sweet young girl; I give my blood for her, though I am old and worn; I give my time, my skill, my sleep; I let my other sufferers want that so she may have all. And yet I can laugh at her very grave—laugh when the clay from the spade of the sexton drop upon her coffin and say ‘Thud! thud!’ to my heart, till it send back the blood from my cheek. My heart bleed for that poor boy—that dear boy, so of the age of mine own boy had I been so blessed that he live, and with his hair and eyes the same. There, you know now why I love him so. And yet when he say things that touch my husband-heart to the quick, and make my father-heart yearn to him as to no other man—not even to you, friend John, for we are more level in experiences than father and son—yet even at such moment King Laugh he come to me and shout and bellow in my ear, ‘Here I am! here I am!’ till the blood come dance back and bring some of the sunshine that he carry with him to my cheek. Oh, friend John, it is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles; and yet when King Laugh come he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall—all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. And believe me, friend John, that he is good to come, and kind. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come; and, like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again; and we bear to go on with our labour, what it may be.

The photographer was taking pictures with a small pocket camera but the sergeant sent him back to the car for his big Bertillon camera. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed left the cellar to look around. The apartment was only one room wide but four storeys high. The front was flush with the sidewalk, and the front entrance elevated by two recessed steps. The alleyway at the side slanted down from the sidewalk sufficiently to drop the level of the door six feet below the ground-floor level. The cellar, which could only be entered by the door at the side, was directly below the ground-floor rooms. There were no apartments. Each of the four floors had three bedrooms opening on to the public hall, and to the rear was a kitchen and a bath and a separate toilet to serve each floor. There were three tenants on each floor, their doors secured by hasps and staples to be padlocked when they were absent, bolts and chains and floor locks and angle bars to protect them from intruders when they were present. The doors were pitted and scarred either because of lost keys or attempted burglary, indicating a continuous warfare between the residents and enemies from without, rapists, robbers, homicidal husbands and lovers, or the landlord after his rent. The walls were covered with obscene graffiti, mammoth sexual organs, vulgar limericks, opened legs, telephone numbers, outright boasting, insidious suggestions, and impertinent or pertinent comments about various tenants’ love habits, their mothers and fathers, the legitimacy of their children. “And people live here,” Grave Digger said, his eyes sad. “That’s what it was made for.” “Like maggots in rotten meat.” “It’s rotten enough.” Twelve mailboxes were nailed to the wall in the front hall. Narrow stairs climbed to the top floor. The ground-floor hallway ran through a small back courtyard where four overflowing garbage cans leaned against the wall. “Anybody can come in here day or night,” Grave Digger said. “Good for the whores but hard on the children.” “I wouldn’t want to live here if I had any enemies,” Coffin Ed said. “I’d be scared to go to the john.” “Yeah, but you’d have central heating.” “Personally, I’d rather live in the cellar. It’s private with its own private entrance and I could control the heat.” “But you’d have to put out the garbage cans,” Grave Digger said. “Whoever occupied that whore’s crib ain’t been putting out any garbage cans.” “Well, let’s wake up the brothers on the ground floor.” “If they ain’t already awake.

I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and was become like Mohammed’s coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do.

Prologue “Pain!. Oh, Father of the Dark, how it hurts! My muscles, my bones – every millimeter of my body. Damn locusts! They’re skinning me alive. Do I have any skin left? It seems like it will never end. How many years have passed since I’ve been buried here? One, two, ten? Or maybe, a hundred? Time itself has melded into total dusky looming. A bloody and merciless one. All my thoughts have been mixed up since I’ve been immured in this stone coffin. Without any possibility of escape. Without any chance for freedom. I feel endless agony under the teeny weeny teeth of ghostly beasts. And their small daggers shred my immortal flesh. Time after time, they’re driving me to madness. But I’ll find a way out, or my name is not Rave Eridanus Castro-Firel. And then, I swear, I’ll kill everyone who has taken part in torturing me. Ulfricus, you traitor ass. I hope your soul has never found sanctuary and is being tormented somewhere in the abyss of the Twilight, while I’m decaying here, in immortality. I hope you’re answering for every minute I’ve spent here, in this tomb. Even for every second. And if not, I promise I’ll kill all your relatives. Every person you love. Your wife, your children, your parents, your grandchildren. And your dam cat,...” The man’s interior monologue was interrupted by a restrained growl. “Oh, demons, how it hurts!.. But wait. Someone will surely wander across this damn field again. Someone whom I’ll kill without coming out of the ground. I’ll exhaust the last drop of magic. And, one day, I’ll be able to get out of this trap. Oh, no, who am I kidding? Nobody has appeared here so far. Even animals avoid coming to my field. I don’t sense any living being whose energy I could suck dry and use to appease the burning, even a little... They all sense me. They don’t understand, but they sense that death is there under their feet. Oh, Father of the Dark, I’ll be decomposing here forever! Damn Ulfricus, Banshee take your soul into the Twilight and love it to death.” The internal voice stopped again, and the man stopped short, listening attentively to the sounds of the outer world. “Oh, that just can’t be... Now for the first time since so long ago! A woman. A girl. A very young one. I can almost hear her heart beating... I feel the energy concealed in her blood. Come closer, dear. I don’t have to get out of here to play with you. So sweet... I can practically feel your odor. A strange, unusual smell of blood. What’s wrong with you? You’re a necromancer, for sure. Almost my soulmate. Well, even this won’t save you. Come closer, dear... Yes, this way. Oh Dark! what magic you eradiate! But not black, certainly not. I couldn’t care less. Any energy will suit me...” At this point, somewhere on the surface, somewhere nearby, a woman began singing. The accursed man, chained in the living grave, lay down, having suddenly forgotten the respiratory reflex, which still had not been exterminated through hundreds of years spent under the ground. Without air, without life. “What a pretty voice. A very, very pretty voice. I haven’t heard human voices for so long...” The man’s broad chest rose again. Then, a sequence of dark thoughts continued: “A girl with a ringing voice and strange magic... You’ve come here to the Ash Field in vain. You’re so enigmatic and courageous. You’re alive. But not for long.

Dang, spiders like Slinger are scary things... I heard the Glitch spider’s feet drumming around inside its cobblestone coffin. It hissed again. I think I heard it clack its fangs desperately against the stone. What a terrible way to go, I thought. “We should move on, my lord,” Skonathan said. “We’ve made a good bit of noise. Others may come.” I turned to look at the other side of the crisscrossing tunnel. It was also a dead end. This area was all there was to secure in between the Sleeping City and the bottom tunnels. “This area is clear,” I said. “Let’s go, but be careful. There are five or six Glitch mobs down there, at least. I remember zombies, a skeleton—maybe more than one—and at least one spider. I can’t remember if there were any creepers...” “Let’s do it the same way,” UltimateSword5 said. “Let’s be quick and quiet, and handle them one or two at a time.” “Good idea, if it works,” I replied. “Now, down there, there’s a gravel column I made leading up. I’ll have to make some stairs...” We moved on down the tunnel. The trapped Glitch mobs struggled and made noises on the other side of their cobblestone prisons behind us. Eventually, we stood at the edge of the big hole leading down into the open cavern where I built my way out of darkness with gravel before. I was feeling more confident, but looking down at that hole, seeing the bedrock in the cavern floor below, a cold dread started filling my bones. Soon, we would hear the low, dark moaning of the crimson portal—a lot like a Nether portal, but even more evil, if that was possible... My mind began wondering what lay on the other side of that gateway to another world. Another server, a strange voice echoed in my head. Had I heard that somewhere before? Server?? Where’d that word come from? These mixed-up memories were so confusing sometimes... I shook my skull, and pulled out some cobblestone. Reaching out carefully, I quickly built a crude staircase leading down for us to use instead of messing around with the gravel. “You’re good at that,” UltimateSword5 said. “Like ... you were a Minecraftian once or something.” I laughed. We slowly and quietly stepped down into the terrible tunnels. As soon as I set my bony foot on the hard bedrock floor, I heard the hiss of another spider, then, I remembered the creature that tried to chase me up the gravel last time I was here. As I pinpointed the glowing crimson arachnid eyes coming at me from a dark corner of the cavern, a chill fluttered up my bones when I remember that I had dropped gravel on that spider in my escape. It had glitched. There was another spider around here somewhere... “Spider!” I snapped quietly. Ulti ran down the stairs and stood next to me. As the red-eyed arachnid on the other side of the cavern charged at me, its clawed feet tearing at the stone and bedrock floor, Skonathan leapt down to stand in front of me! I suddenly

Isolde was like a pebble dropped in the shallows, changing the shape of everything on the surface. And the moment I’d kissed her had been a nail in that coffin.

In 1936 Romulus’s grandson asked him how he felt about how the world had changed for “colored people,” and how he thought it was likely to change in the future. Romulus’s answer sounded typical of the time, and did not surprise me. But then the grandson asked him—a man saved from drowning by a Union soldier bearing a coffin—how he felt about white people in general. Romulus’s answer haunts me to this day. “Oh, there’s good white folks out there,” he said. “And when you deal with ’em by themselves, they’ll treat you just like a brother. In fact, I wouldn’t be alive today without one or two. But when you deal with ’em in groups . . . things change. I don’t know why that is, but they do.” “But you have no ill feelings against white people in general?” his grandson pressed. “How can I answer that, boy? I’m more than half-white myself! Yet all my life I been nothing but Black. One drop, right? The truth is, all people are good and bad. There ain’t many saints in this world, regardless of color. I’ve known white people good as anybody. Generous, kind, compassionate. There just ain’t quite enough of ’em.” There just ain’t quite enough of ’em.

This is how it goes in life: sometimes you’re born with a cleft palette or rickets, like my bow-legged Granddaddy, or a touch short on brains, like my Great Aunt Cal who everyone called ‘Stool.’ Me? I’m a double hitter. In addition to being what folks call “large boned,” I came into this world with homosexual tendencies—though back then I thought of it only as my strange, strong affections for some female friends, having no such notion of “homosexual tendencies” as a thing, at least not in Midland, Texas. Notions of this nature found footing in me eight months before I ran away to work in the kitchen at Sugarland Prison, when I got a job at the egg store. The egg store was all wood. Wood floors, wood ceiling beams, wood shelves—that rugged, knotty, reddish wood. The simple kind of wood they used to bury folks in before the floods, when rotting coffins popped from the ground like splinters and dead bodies dropped out in maggoty heaps. The egg store smelled like wood, too, which I liked. That and just the tiniest hint of smoke from Bibby’s metal pork smoker two streets over. I swear he ran that thing day and night, crazy redneck. And that’s where I fell in love for the first time, there in the egg store that smelled like wood and smoked pig fat.

into the passenger seat, unable to forget the horror on Eliza’s face as we broke into the coffin. Jack Morgan’s intel had to be accurate. But I’d never be able to prove it. Mark Talbot had realized this was far bigger than any of us knew. Mary dropped me outside Private’s building

Lo!” cried the demon. “I am here! What dost thou seek of me? Why dost thou disturb my repose? Smite me no more with that dread rod!” He looked at Cabal. “Where’s your dread rod?” “I left it at home,” replied Cabal. “Didn’t think I really needed it.” “You can’t summon me without a dread rod!” said Lucifuge, appalled. “You’re here, aren’t you?” “Well, yes, but under false pretences. You haven’t got a goatskin or two vervain crowns or two candles of virgin wax made by a virgin girl and duly blessed. Have you got the stone called Ematille?” “I don’t even know what Ematille is.” Neither did the demon. He dropped the subject and moved on. “Four nails from the coffin of a dead child?” “Don’t be fatuous.” “Half a bottle of brandy?” “I don’t drink brandy.” “It’s not for you.” “I have a hip flask,” said Cabal, and threw it to him. The demon caught it and took a dram. “Cheers,” said Lucifuge, and threw it back. They regarded each other for a long moment. “This really is a shambles,” the demon added finally. “What did you summon me for, anyway?

This is the thing about fairy tales: You have to live through them, before you get to happily ever after. That ever after has to be earned, and not everyone makes it that far. There are stories where you must wear out your iron shoes to right a wrong, where children are baked into pies, where jealousy cuts off hands and cuts out hearts. We forget, because stories end with those ritual words--happily ever after--all the darkness, all the pain, all the effort that comes before. People say they want a fairy tale life, but what they really want is the part that happens off the page, after the oven has been escaped, after the clock strikes midnight. They want the part that doesn't come with glass slippers still stained with a stepsister's blood, or a lover blinded by an angry mother's thorns. If you live through a fairy tale, you don't make it through unscathed or unchanged. Hands of silver may be beautiful, but they don't replace the hands of flesh and bone that were severed. The hazel tree may speak with your mother's voice, but her bones are still buried beneath its roots. The dead are not always returned, and roses do not always bloom from graves. Not every princess climbs out of her coffin. Happily ever after is the dropping of the curtain, a signal for applause. It is not a guarantee, and it always has a price.

horses which drew the hearse, and far more ineffectual. Every open grave I had to stand beside was a gateway to knowledge which nobody other than I appeared to realise was there to be tapped. As mourners dropped earth on the coffin it sounded very much like knocking on a door, and I imagined how terrified the priest and his little congregation would be if any opened in the earth.

firmly by the shoulders. Jon says, ‘How the hell did you ever get keys for this place?’ I chuckle, though there is really nothing to laugh about. It is the irony, I suppose. ‘The first summer I was here, I landed one day to find that the Lighthouse Board had sent in decorators to paint the place. Everything was opened up. The guys were okay with me taking a look around and we got chatting. The forecast was good, and they expected to be here for a few days. So I spun them the story about writing a book and said I would probably be back tomorrow. And I was. Only this time with a pack of Blu-tack. When they were having their lunch, I took the keys from the inner and outer doors and made impressions. Dead simple. Had keys cut, and access to the place whenever I wanted thereafter.’ The final panel falls away in my hands, and I reach in to retrieve a black plastic bag. I hand it up to Jon, and he peels back the plastic to look inside. As I stand up, I lift one of the wooden panels. I know that this is the one chance I will get, while he is distracted, and I swing the panel at his head as hard as I can. The force with which it hits him sends a judder back up my arms to my shoulders, and I actually hear it snap. He falls to his knees, dropping the hard drive, and his gun skids away across the floor. Sally is so startled, she barely has time to move before I punch her hard in the face. I feel teeth breaking beneath the force of my knuckles, behind lips I once kissed with tenderness and lust. Blood bubbles at her mouth. I grab Karen by the arm and hustle her fast down the corridor, kicking open the door and dragging her out into the night. The storm hits us with a force that assails all the senses. The wind is deafening, driving stinging rain horizontally into our faces. The cold wraps icy fingers around us, instantly numbing. Beyond the protection of the walls, it is worse, and I find it nearly impossible to keep my feet as I pull my daughter off into the dark. Only the relentless turning of the lamp in the light room above us provides any illumination. We turn right, and I know that almost immediately the island drops away into a chasm that must be two or three hundred feet deep. I can hear the ocean rushing into it. Snarling, snapping at the rocks below and sending an amplified roar almost straight up into the air. I guide Karen away from it, half-dragging her, until we reach a small cluster of rocks and I push her flat into the ground behind them. I tear away the tape that binds her wrists, then roll her on to her back to peel away the strip of it over her mouth. She gasps, almost choking, and I feel her body next to mine, racked by sobs, as she

The night seemed like a dream. Had she really found a mysterious dead body? And Falco: he could not be any more infuriating. And offensive. And exciting. Cass’s eyelids fluttered shut and she was with Falco again, walking across a field of flowers. The boy plucked one and tucked it behind her left ear. A white lily. Cass breathed in the aromatic scent. Almost overpowering. Intoxicating. His lips fell on hers, soft, then harder. So hard she was having trouble finding her breath. Falco laid her on the ground, and Cass realized that all the flowers were white lilies. White lilies piled on top of a coffin. Drops of red splashed on the petals. Cass gasped, but then saw it was paint, not blood. Scarlet teardrops falling from a brush Falco held poised above her. Two quick brushstrokes left a red X, emblazoned across her chest. And then Cass couldn’t breathe at all.

The rumors spread to the town by the next day, or so Onora judged. Alastair was in a fouler mood than ever when he dropped off her meal, trudging past with a storm-cloud glower on his face and tossing her the package of food without even pausing. Onora felt a slight pang as she watched him go. No doubt he was wondering what manner of woman he was expected to wed and cursing his own future. Perhaps he was as afraid as she, or more so. Perhaps he had reason to be angry. All the same, he could certainly handle his anger better. Onora shook the thoughts away. If Lord Alastair of Airde revolted at the thought of wedding imposter-Onora, all the better. 'Twould be another nail in the imposter's coffin, and 'twould keep Alastair himself away from the throne.

The air in my chocolate lab still smells like cocoa and regret. I’d spent years perfecting single-origin truffles, roasting beans until they gleamed like obsidian, and stashing Bitcoin profits in a wallet I’d named “Cocoa Reserve.” That wallet held $265,000, a golden ticket to expand my empire with a flagship store in Brussels. And then, with one click on a spoofed bill labeled "Belgian Chocolate Molds – Urgent Payment," my crypto was gone faster than a caramel drip on a hotplate. The swindle was a masterclass of nastiness. Contact WhatsApp: +1 (443) 859 - 2886 Email @ digitaltechguard.com Telegram: digitaltechguard.com Website link: digitaltechguard.com The email mimicked my actual supplier's fonts, logos, even their typo-ridden English ("Kindly proceed the transfer immediately"). I'd been fooled by digital drag-and-drop. My heart sank as I watched the transaction confirmation flash tauntingly on-screen a spinning wheel of death where my life's work once dwelled. My accountant hyperventilated into a bag of cocoa nibs. My CFO threatened to "quit and become a beekeeper." And me? I stared into the blockchain explorer, tracing my Bitcoin's path through a hydra of mixers and offshore wallets, each one a nail in my entrepreneurial coffin. A midnight Slack rant in a food founders' group summoned a lifeline: Digital Tech Guard Recovery. Their name materialized between messages about shelf-stable ganache and FDA audits. Skeptical but spiraling, I slid into their DMs like a kid begging for a Halloween candy refill. Within hours, their team examined the theft with the finesse of a chocolatier tempering couverture. They tracked the scammer's twisting layers of fake KYC docs, Malta shell companies, and a Cypriot payment processor fishier than a truffle oil factory. Digital's forensic team became my avengers in hoodies. They collaborated with regulators from four countries, subpoenaing exchanges and freezing accounts mid-launder. The scammers, it turned out, had gotten greedy, siphoning funds into a stable coin wallet that had been flagged for "excessive hot sauce purchases" (no, really). Thirteen days later, I received a PDF titled "Recovery Complete" and a screenshot of my recovered wallet. No fanfare, no blare of trumpet, just the subdued hum of justice served cold, like a dark chocolate gelato. Digital Tech Guard Recovery not only saved my nest egg; they unraveled a fraud ring that is now in Interpol's sights. My Brussels boutique opens next spring, its safes guarded by triple-authentication and a paranoia so thick you could cut it into bonbons. I've even added a company motto: "Trust no one especially if they claim to sell Belgian molds." If your crypto dissolves into the digital ether, skip the panic attack. Call the Digital. They're the magic between catastrophe and resiliency. Just maybe screen your vendors twice, and keep the cocoa nibs handy for emergencies.