Village Of The Damned Quotes

I don't believe in God. Can you understand that? Look around you man. Cant you see? The clamor and din of those in torment has to be the sound most pleasing to his ear. And I loathe these discussions. The argument of the village atheist whose single passion is to revile endlessly that which he denies the existence of in the first place. Your fellowship is a fellowship of pain and nothing more. And if that pain were actually collective instead of simply reiterative then the sheer weight of it would drag the world from the walls of the universe and send it crashing and burning through whatever night it might yet be capable of engendering until it was not even ash. And justice? Brotherhood? Eternal life? Good god, man. Show me a religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There's a church I might enter. Yours prepares one only for more life. For dreams and illusions and lies. If you could banish the fear of death from men's hearts they wouldnt live a day. Who would want this nightmare if not for fear of the next? The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy. Every road ends in death. Or worse. Every friendship. Every love. Torment, betrayal, loss, suffering, pain, age, indignity, and hideous lingering illness. All with a single conclusion. For you and for every one and everything that you have chosen to care for. There's the true brotherhood. The true fellowship. And everyone is a member for life. You tell me that my brother is my salvation? My salvation? Well then damn him. Damn him in every shape and form and guise. Do I see myself in him? Yes. I do. And what I see sickens me. Do you understand me? Can you understand me?

Good grief. You two look like Village of the Sofa Damned. (Cassandra)

The government are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases.

Why should people in one part of the globe have developed collectivist cultures, while others went individualist? The United States is the individualism poster child for at least two reasons. First there's immigration. Currently, 12 percent of Americans are immigrants, another 12 percent are children of immigrants, and everyone else except for the 0.9 percent pure Native Americans descend from people who emigrated within the last five hundred years. And who were the immigrants? Those in the settled world who were cranks, malcontents, restless, heretical, black sheep, hyperactive, hypomanic, misanthropic, itchy, unconventional, yearning to be rich, yearning to be out of their damn boring repressive little hamlet, yearning. Couple that with the second reason - for the majority of its colonial and independent history, America has had a moving frontier luring those whose extreme prickly optimism made merely booking passage to the New World insufficiently novel - and you've got America the individualistic. Why has East Asia provided textbook examples of collectivism? The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. And in East Asia it's all about rice. Rice, which was domesticated there roughly ten thousand years ago, requires massive amounts of communal work. Not just backbreaking planting and harvesting, which are done in rotation because the entire village is needed to harvest each family's rice. The United States was not without labor-intensive agriculture historically. But rather than solving that with collectivism, it solved it withe slavery.

I dont believe in God. Can you understand that? Look around you man. Cant you see? The clamour and din of those in torment has to be the sound most pleasing to his ear. And I loathe these discussions. The argument of the village atheist whose single passion is to revile endlessly that which he denies the existence of in the first place. Your fellowship is a fellowship of pain and nothing more. And if that pain were actually collective instead of simply reiterative then the sheer weight of it would drag the world from the walls of the universe and send it crashing and burning through whatever night it might yet be capable of engendering until it was not even ash. And justice? Brotherhood? Eternal life? Good god, man. Show me a religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There's a church I might enter. Yours prepares one only for more life. For dreams and illusions and lies. If you could banish the fear of death from men's hearts they wouldnt live a day. Who would want this nightmare if not for fear of the next? The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy. Every road ends in death. Or worse. Every friendship. Every love. Torment, betrayal, loss, suffering, pain, age, indignity, and hideous lingering illness. All with a single conclusion. For you and for every one and every thing that you have chosen to care for. There's the true brotherhood. The true fellowship. And everyone is a member for life. You tell me that my brother is my salvation? My salvation? Well then damn him. Damn him in every shape and form and guise. Do I see myself in him? Yes, I do. And what I see sickens me. Do you understand me? Can you understand me?

Damn you! Hear me now and hear me well. If you die, I will raze your Norwood. I will raze all of them--every village every waystation, every wall. I will make the whole of this world your grave. Do you hear me? How could you do this to me? How could you dare? Answer me!

All my grandfather ever wanted to do was wake up at dawn and watch my grandmother kneel and pray in a village hidden between Jaffa and Haifa my mother was born under an olive tree on a soil they say is no longer mine but I will cross their barriers, their check points their damn apartheid walls and return to my homeland I am an Arab woman of color and we come in all shades of anger

Well," he said, quite seriously, "it's this way: you work because you're afraid not to. You work becuase you have to drive yourself to such a fury to begin. That part's just plain hell! It's so hard to get started that once you do you're afraid of slipping back. You'd rather do anything than go through all that agony again--so you keep going--you keep going faster all the time--you keep going till you couldn't stop even if you wanted to. You forget to eat, to shave, to put on a clean shirt when you have one. You almost forget to sleep, and when you do try to you can't--because the avalanche has started, and it keeps going night and day. And people say: 'Why don't you stop sometime? Why don't you forget about it now and then? Why don't you take a few days off?' And you don't do it because you can't--you can't stop yourself--and even if you could you'd be afraid to because there'd be all that hell to go through getting started up again. Then people say you're a glutton for work, but it isn't so. It's laziness--just plain, damned, simple laziness, that's all...Napoleon--and--and Balzac--and Thomas Edison--these fellows who never sleep more than an hour or two at a time, and can keep going night and day--why that's not because they love to work! It's because they're really lazy--and afraid not to work because they know they're lazy! Why, hell yes!..I'll bet you anything you like if you could really find out what's going on in old Edison's mind, you'd find that he wished he could stay in bed every day until two o'clock in the afternoon! And then get up and scratch himself! And then lie around in the sun for awhile! And hang around with the boys down at the village store, talking about politics, and who's going to win the World Series next fall!

Society is rigid. Everyone knows everyone else in their world. Everyone has their place in the scheme of things. If you don't belong to a family, a tribe, a village, a guild, whatever, you don't exist then, either. And you can't just pitch up somewhere without mutual acquaintances, recommendations, or letters of introduction. Life on the fringes of society, any society in any time, is tough.

They had to die. They were killing innocent people. (Wulf) They were surviving, Wulf. You never had to face the choice of being dead at twenty-seven. When most people’s lives are just beginning, we are looking at a death sentence. Have you any idea what it’s like to know you can never see your children grow up? Never see your own grandchildren? My mother used to say we were spring flowers who are only meant to bloom for one season. We bring our gifts to the world and then recede to dust so that others can come after us. When our loved ones die, we immortalize them like this. I have one for my mother and the other four are my sisters. No one will ever know the beauty of my sisters’ laughter. No one will remember the kindness of my mother’s smile. In eight months, my father won’t even have enough of me left to bury. I will become scattered dust. And for what? For something my great-great-great-whatever did? I’ve been alone the whole of my life because I dare not let anyone know me. I don’t want to love for fear of leaving someone like my father behind to mourn me. I will be a vague dream, and yet here you are, Wulf Tryggvason. Viking cur who once roamed the earth raiding villages. How many people did you kill in your human lifetime while you sought treasure and fame? Were you any better than the Daimons who kill so that they can live? What makes you better than us? (Cassandra) It’s not the same thing. (Wulf) Isn’t it? You know, I went to your Web site and saw the names listed there. Kyrian of Thrace, Julian of Macedon, Valerius Magnus, Jamie Gallagher, William Jess Brady. I’ve studied history all my life and know each of those names and the terror they wrought in their day. Why is it okay for the Dark-Hunters to have immortality even though most of you were killers as humans, while we are damned at birth for things we never did? Where is the justice in this? (Cassandra)

I had no concept of what life at the Chelsea Hotel would be like when we checked in, but I soon realized it was a tremendous stroke of luck to end up there. We could have had a fair-seized railroad flat in the East Village for what we were paying, but to dwell in this eccentric and damned hotel provided a sense of security as well as a stellar education. The goodwill that surrounded us was proof that the Fates were conspiring to help their enthusiastic children.

Sister: Linger where you are. This village will soon be a graveyard of the damned

This village,” James announced, “has too many damned secrets.” And with that, he stepped out into the snow.

Percy, you are dismissed from my service." "Me? Why, my lord?" "Why? Because, Percy, far from being a fit consort for a prince of the realm, you would bore the leggings off a village idiot. You ride a horse rather less well than another horse would. Your brain would make a grain of sand look large and ungainly, and the part of you that can't be mentioned, I am reliably informed by women around the court, wouldn't be worth mentioning even if it could be. If you put on a floppy hat and a funny codpiece, you might just get by as a fool, but since you wouldn't know a joke if it got up and gave you a haircut, I doubt it. That's why you're dismissed." "Oh, I see." "And as for you, Baldrick..." "Yes." "You're out, too.

If this new breed of activist urged Obama to hammer away at the Constitution, old-school civil libertarians lamented its demolition. The longtime Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff had fought many a battle for civil liberties and had scars enough to speak his mind. “Apparently he doesn’t give one damn about the separation of powers.” said Hentoff of Obama after the president’s “pen and phone” remarks. “Never before in our history has a president done these things.

Champion Ven knelt in the ruins of the village. Sifting through the rubble, he lifted out a broken doll, its pink dress streaked with dirt and its pottery face cracked. There was always a broken doll. Why did there always have to be a damn doll?

In her article “The Feminist Side of Sweatshops,” Chelsea Follett (the managing editor of HumanProgress) recounts that factory work in the 19th century offered women an escape from the traditional gender roles of farm and village life, and so was held by some men at the time “sufficient to damn to infamy the most worthy and virtuous girl.

And Gilles, menacing and aloof, rides through the deserted villages with their sobbing, shuttered buildings. His impunity seems assured, what peasant would be mad enough to challenge a seignior capable of having him strung up at the drop of a hat? 'And just as the lowly born renounce bringing him to justice, his peers have no intention of seeking to bring him down for the sale of a load of peasants whom they openly despise... 'There is only one power which can rise above such feudal imbalances and earthly interests, only one power which avenges the oppressed and the weak; that of the Church. And it is indeed , the Church, in the person of Jean de Malestroit, which challenges the monster and fells him.

So how are the wedding plans progressing?" Richard asked, once they were out of the village. "They aren't." Breckenridge heard his clipped tones, heard the irritation beneath. Didn't care if Richard did, too. "She's taken some nitwit notion into her head that I don't need to marry her, that she's going to go off and manage an orphanage in the country, or some such thing, so her social ruination doesn't matter." "Ah." Richard nodded sagely. "She's playing stubborn." "Playing?" Breckenridge shot him an irate look. "She's the definition of the word. I've already tried talking her around. Twice." "I hate to break it to you, old son, but it won't be your honeyed words that change her mind." Breckenridge snorted. "I've tried that, too-so far all that's gained me is..." An even deeper sense of being irrevocably linked to her. Richard glanced at him curiously. "What?" Breckenridge pulled a face, growled, "Damned if I know." Richard grinned. "Well, whatever it takes, just console yourself with the thought that the end result will be worth it." Breckenridge cast Richard a sharp glance, saw the open contentment in his face. Felt compelled to ask, "So what did you have to do?" Richard's smile deepened. "The same thing we've all have to do-prostrate ourselves at their dainty feet, swear undying love, and mean it.

Arion, can you help me find the snow village in the basement?” Snow village? That voice. I closed my eyes, the little hairs on my neck rising. Winter. She was home, after all. “What? Now?” Arion whined. “Have Mom help you when she gets back.” Get the fuck out of the pool and get her what she wants. “I don’t know why you want it.” Arion took my beer again. “It’s not even Halloween yet, and you can’t see the damn thing anyway. What’s the point?” Bitch.

… the countryside and the village are symbols of stability and security, of order. Yet they are also, as I have noted, liminal spaces, at a very narrow remove from the atavistic Wild. Arcadia is not the realm even of Giorgione and of Claude, with its cracked pillars and thunderbolts, its lurking banditti; still less is it Poussin’s sun-dappled and regularised realm of order, where, although the lamb may be destined for the altar and the spit, all things proceed with charm and gravity and studied gesture; least of all is it the degenerate and prettified Arcady of Fragonard and Watteau, filled with simpering courtier-Corydons, pallid Olympians, and fat-arsed putti. (It is only family piety that prevents me from taking a poker to an inherited coffee service in gilt porcelain with bastardised, deutero-Fragonard scenes painted on the sides of every damned thing. Cue Wallace Greenslade: ‘… “Round the Horne”, with Marie Antoinette as the dairymaid and Kenneth Williams as the manager of the camp-site….’) No: Arcadia is the very margin of the liminal space between the safe tilth and the threatening Wild, in which Pan lurks, shaggy and goatish, and Death proclaims, from ambush, et in Arcadia ego. Arcadia is not the Wide World nor the Riverbank, but the Wild Wood. And in that wood are worse than stoats and weasels, and the true Pan is no Francis of Assisi figure, sheltering infant otters. The Wild that borders and penetrates Arcady is red in tooth and claw.

We need a test!" I jump up out of the chair and pat my body down. "Where's my wallet?" "In your pocket," she replies dryly. "I'll be back!" I race out of the house and drive the short distance between Dom's estate and the nearest village. After I find a drug store and buy one of each kind of pregnancy test they have, I race back to my hopefully pregnant wife. "That was fast," she murmurs with a grin. She was still sitting in the lounge chair, sipping her coffee. "Should you be drinking coffee?" I ask. "Let's not get crazy," she responds. I need coffee. "I got one of each kind," I announce and opened the bag, sending small white and blue boxes scattering. "Uh, Caleb, we only need one." "What if we can't figure them out?" I ask and pick one up to examine it. "All of the instructions are in Italian." She laughs hysterically and then stands, wiping her eyes. "It's not funny." "Yes, it is. Pregnancy tests are pretty universal, Caleb. You pee on it and a line either appears or it doesn't." She rubs my arm sweetly and kisses my shoulder before plucking the box out of my fingers. "I'll be back." "I'm coming with you." I begin to follow her but she turns quickly with her hands out to stop me. "Oh no, you aren't. You are not going to watch me pee on this stick." I scowled down at her and cross my arms over my chest. "I've helped you bathe and dress and every other damn thing when you were hurt. I can handle watching you pee." "Absolutely not." She shakes her head but then leans in and kisses my chin. "But thank you for helping me when I was hurt." She turns and runs for the bathroom and it feels like an eternity before she comes back out, white stick in her hand. "Well?" I ask. "It takes about three minutes, babe." She sits in the lounge chair and stares out over the vineyard.

We enter a large village. A few bedraggled garlands hang across the street. So many troops have passed through already that it is not worth while to make any special fuss about the last of them. So we must content ourselves with the faded welcome of a few rain-sodden placards loosely looped around with oak leaves cut out of green paper. The people hardly so much as look at us as we march by, so accustomed have they grown to soldiers returning. But for us it is a new thing to come here and we hunger for a few friendly looks, however much we may pretend we do not give a damn. The girls at least might stop and wave to us. Every now and then Tjaden and Jupp try to attract the attention of one, but without success. We look too grisly, no doubt. So in the end they give it up.

I know her very well,” said Sancho, “and I can say that she can throw a metal bar just as well as the brawniest lad in the village. Praise our Maker, she’s a fine girl in every way, sturdy as a horse, and just the one to pull any knight errant or about to be errant, who has her for his lady, right out of any mudhole he’s fallen into! Damn, but she’s strong! And what a voice she has! I can tell you that one day she stood on top of the village bell tower to call some shepherds who were in one of her father’s fields, and even though they were more than half a league away, they heard her just as if they were standing at the foot of the tower. And the best thing about her is that she’s not a prude. In fact, she’s something of a trollop: she jokes with everybody and laughs and makes fun of everything.

TCA pretends to be about raising money for charity. That’s true, but only so far. If I had not taken time off from the Penn & Teller show to do The Celebrity Apprentice—if Teller and I had just done our show, gotten usual pay—I could have donated four times the amount of money that Trump had pledged to give my charity if I won the whole damn shooting match. Opportunity Village, “my” charity that helps intellectually disabled adults to enter society, got a lot of attention because I was on The Celebrity Apprentice, and that does count for something. And when I was “fired,” my real bosses at Caesars, who own the Rio and the Penn & Teller Theater, said, “Oh, you wanted a quarter million for Opportunity Village? We don’t have to do some jive TV show; we’ll just write a check.” They wrote the full winning amount to Opportunity Village and everyone was happy.

Syn pulled Furi to his chest. “Furi, I want you to go back through the bar and go wait at my place. I’m going to have a little chat with your ex-husband,” Syn said extra loudly. Furi huffed in annoyance, “Syn, I took six months of self-defense courses at the YMCA this year. I can fight for myself.” Syn looked at Furi like he’d lost his damn mind. “At the Y? Well hell, that’s great Furious. If you ever get jumped by the Village People, feel free to pull out those moves. As for now, I want you to take your karate-kicking-YMCA-going-ass back to my apartment,” Syn snarled at Furi, urging him toward the door, having neither the time nor the patience to argue with his ridiculous pride. Thankfully, with one final glare Furi went back into the pub. When Syn turned back, God and Day were looking back and forth between him and his two foes. “What’s going on here, fellas?” God asked casually, not acknowledging Syn.

Mama: You men kill me. You come in here, drink your beer, take your pleasure, and then wanna judge the way I run my “business.” The front door swings both ways. I don’t force anyone’s hand. My girls, Emilene, Mazima, Josephine, ask them, they’d rather be here, than back out there in their villages where they are taken with- out regard. They’re safer with me than in their own homes, because this country is picked clean, while men, poets like you, drink beer, eat nuts and look for some place to disappear. And I am without mercy, is that what you’re saying? Because I give them something other than a beggar’s cup. (With ferocity) I didn’t come here as Mama Nadi, I found her the same way miners find their wealth in the muck. I stumbled off of that road without two twigs to start a fire. I turned a basket of sweets and soggy biscuits into a business. I don’t give a damn what any of you think. This is my place, Mama Nadi’s.

Low dark clouds raced over a steel sea toward Barkley Cove. The wind hit first, rattling windows and hurling waves over the wharf. Boats, tied to the dock, bobbed up and down like toys, as men in yellow slickers tied this line or that, securing. Then sideways rain slammed the village, obscuring everything except the odd yellow form moving about in the grayness. The wind whistled through the sheriff’s window, and he raised his voice. “So, Joe, you had something to tell me?” “Sure do. I found out where Miss Clark will claim she was the night Chase died.” “What? Did you finally catch up to her?” “Ya kiddin’? She’s slipperier’n a damn eel. Gets gone ever’ time I get near. So I drove over to Jumpin’s marina this morning to see if he knew when she’d be coming next. Like everybody else she hasta go there for gas, so I figured I’d catch her up sooner or later. You won’t believe what I found out.” “Let’s have it.” “I got two reliable sources say she was outta town that night.

Hump, well! I wonder (if we survive this war) if there will be any niche, even of sufferance, left for reactionary back numbers like me (and you). The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, moral pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, U.S.S.R., Hither Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwanaland, Lhasa, and the villages of the darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be. At any rate it ought to cut down on travel. There will be nowhere to go. So people will (I opine) go all the faster. Colllie Knox says 1/8 of the world's population speaks 'English', and that is the biggest language group. if true, damn shame__ say I. May the curse of Babel strike at all their tongues till they can only say 'baa baa'. It would mean much the same. I think I shall have to refuse to speak anything but Old Mercian.

This estate supports hundreds of people. Without it, many of them won’t survive. Tell me you’d be willing to stand face-to-face with one of the tenants and tell him that he has to move his family to Manchester so they can all work in a filthy factory.” “How can the factory be any worse than living on a muddy scrap of farmland?” “Considering urban diseases, crime, slum alleys, and abject poverty,” Devon said acidly, “I’d say it’s considerably worse. And if my tenants and servants all leave, what of the consequences to the village of Eversby itself? What will become of the merchants and businesses once the estate is gone? I have to make a go of this, West.” His brother stared at him as if he were a stranger. “Your tenants and servants.” Devon scowled. “Yes. Who else’s are they?” West’s lips curled in a derisive sneer. “Tell me this, oh lordly one…what do you expect will happen when you fail?” “I can’t think about failure. If I do, I’ll be doomed from the start.” “You’re already doomed. You’ll preen and posture as lord of the manor while the roof caves in and the tenants starve, and I’m damned if I’ll have any part of your narcissistic folly.” “I wouldn’t ask you to,” Davon retorted, heading for the door. “Since you’re usually as drunk as a boiled owl, you’re of no use to me.” “Who the hell do you think you are?” West called after him. Pausing at the threshold, Devon gave him a cold glance. “I’m the Earl of Trenear,” he said, and left the room.

Blast. This day had not gone as planned. By this time, he was supposed to be well on his way to the Brighton Barracks, preparing to leave for Portugal and rejoin the war. Instead, he was…an earl, suddenly. Stuck at this ruined castle, having pledged to undertake the military equivalent of teaching nursery school. And to make it all worse, he was plagued with lust for a woman he couldn’t have. Couldn’t even touch, if he ever wanted his command back. As if he sensed Bram’s predicament, Colin started to laugh. “What’s so amusing?” “Only that you’ve been played for a greater fool than you realize. Didn’t you hear them earlier? This is Spindle Cove, Bram. Spindle. Cove.” “You keep saying that like I should know the name. I don’t.” “You really must get around to the clubs. Allow me to enlighten you. Spindle Cove-or Spinster Cove, as we call it-is a seaside holiday village. Good families send their fragile-flower daughters here for the restorative sea air. Or whenever they don’t know what else to do with them. My friend. Carstairs sent his sister here last summer, when she grew too fond of the stable boy.” “And so…?” “And so, your little militia plan? Doomed before it even starts. Families send their daughters and wards here because it’s safe. It’s safe because there are no men. That’s why they call it Spinster Cove.” “There have to be men. There’s no such thing as a village with no men.” “Well, there may be a few servants and tradesmen. An odd soul or two down there with a shriveled twig and a couple of currants dangling between his legs. But there aren’t any real men. Carstairs told us all about it. He couldn’t believe what he found when he came to fetch his sister. The women here are man-eaters.” Bram was scarcely paying attention. He focused his gaze to catch the last glimpses of Miss Finch as her figure receded into the distance. She was like a sunset all to herself, her molten bronze hair aglow as she sank beneath the bluff’s horizon. Fiery. Brilliant. When she disappeared, he felt instantly cooler. And then, only then, did he turn to his yammering cousin. “What were you saying?” “We have to get out of here, Bram. Before they take our bollocks and use them for pincushions.” Bram made his way to the nearest wall and propped one shoulder against it, resting his knee. Damn, that climb had been steep. “Let me understand this,” he said, discreetly rubbing his aching thigh under the guise of brushing off loose dirt. “You’re suggesting we leave because the village is full of spinsters? Since when do you complain about an excess of women?” “These are not your normal spinsters. They’re…they’re unbiddable. And excessively educated.” “Oh. Frightening, indeed. I’ll stand my ground when facing a French cavalry charge, but an educated spinster is something different entirely.” “You mock me now. Just you wait. You’ll see, these women are a breed unto themselves.” “These women aren’t my concern.” Save for one woman, and she didn’t live in the village. She lived at Summerfield, and she was Sir Lewis Finch’s daughter, and she was absolutely off limits-no matter how he suspected Miss Finch would become Miss Vixen in bed.

It was said that the Old Folk controlled the power of fire, among other things, but that was in the Long and Long Ago. Before that, the fathers of the Old Folk caught a spark with flint and steel and their own desire to live. It was also said that the world was a great wheel, and everything came round to what it once had been, and so Steven Boughmount knelt in the snow with rocks in his hands, trying to catch a flame. He was having little luck. Just over the low hills, beyond this scrub of forest, the village was warm and sleeping behind its wall. That’s where I should be, Steven thought as he scraped the edge of one rock against the other. Not in bed, not yet, but stretched out in my chair with my feet up, a pipe smoking just right in my hand and Heather curled up beside me. The boys are all asleep, but maybe we’ll stay up for a while. Maybe we’ll move to the bedroom, maybe not. That’s where I should be, not up to my ass in snow trying to light a fire. “C’mon, bastard,” he said, and drug the sharp edge of the rock in his right hand against the flat of the one in his left. A white spark flew, and then died before it could reach the stripped branches and dried moss he had laid out on the frozen ground. Snow crunched somewhere off to the left of him. Steven heard soft, bare footsteps. They were coming, all right. And they were in a hurry, running toward a village protected by two drunks on either side of a leaning gate. That was why Steven sat in the snow. When the Guards slept, the Hunters went to work. And what sounded like a whole clan of goblins was passing him by because he couldn’t get a damn fire lit. Steven drew his sword. It was called Fangodoom, given to him by his mother just before she died. Fangodoom was a dwarf blade, of steel mined and forged deep within the Lyme Mountains centuries ago. Goblins near, the blade all but gleamed though there wasn’t any moon. Again he wondered if this would be the last time, and again he knew that if it was, it was. His hand turned into a fist on the hilt of his weapon, and he prayed. “Lord, make me Your hammer.

The words and ways this requires are…potent. They come at a price—power always does. This isn’t a matter of wrong or right, you understand, but merely the working of the world. If you want strength, if you want to survive, there must be sacrifice.” That’s not what Mags taught them. You can tell the wickedness of a witch by the wickedness of her ways. “So who paid your price?” He bends his neck to look directly at her, weighing something. “A fever spread through my parents’ village that first winter.” The word fever rings in Juniper’s ears, a distant bell toiling. “It was nothing too remarkable, except the midwives and wise women couldn’t cure it. One of them came sniffing around, made certain deductions…I took her shadow, too. And the sickness spread further. The villagers grew unruly. Hysterical. I did what I had to do in order to protect myself.” That line has smoothed-over feel, like a polished pebble, as if he’s said it many times to himself. “But then of course the fever spread even further… I didn’t know how to control it, yet. Which kinda of people were expendable and which weren’t. I’m more careful these days.” The ringing in Juniper’s ears is louder now, deafening. An uncanny illness, the Three had called it. Juniper remembers the illustrations in Miss Hurston’s moldy schoolbooks, showing abandoned villages and overfull graveyards, carts piled high with bloated bodies. Was that Gideon’s price? Had the entire world paid for the sins of one broken, bitter boy? And—were they paying again? I’m more careful these days. Juniper thinks of Eve’s labored breathing, the endless rows of cots at Charity Hospital, the fever that raged through the city’s tenements and row houses and dim alleys, preying on the poor and brown and foreign—the expendable. Oh, you bastard. But Hill doesn’t seem to hear the hitch in her breathing. “People grew frightened, angry. They marched on my village with torches, looking for a villain. So I gave them one.” Hill lifts both hands, palm up: What would you have of me? “I told them a story about an old witch woman who lived in a hut in the roots of an old oak. I told them she spoke with devils and brewed pestilence and death in her cauldron. They believed me.” His voice is perfectly dispassionate, neither guilty nor grieving. “They burned her books and then her. When they left my village I left with them, riding at their head.” So: the young George of Hyll had broken the world, then pointed his finger at his fellow witches like a little boy caught making a mess. He had survived, at any cost, at every cost. Oh, you absolute damn bastard.

He had a rough idea where he was going, since Rylann had previously mentioned that she lived in Roscoe Village. At the stoplight at Belmont Avenue, he pulled out his cell phone and scrolled through his contacts. The beauty of text messaging, he realized, was in its simplicity. He didn’t have to try to explain things, nor did he have to attempt to parse through all the banter in an attempt to figure out what she might be thinking. Instead, he could keep things short and sweet. I’D LIKE TO SEE YOU. He hit send. To kill time while he waited for her response, he drove in the direction of his sister’s wine shop, figuring he could always drop in and harass Jordan about something. This time, however, she beat him to the punch. “So who’s the brunette bombshell?” Jordan asked as soon as he walked into the shop and took a seat at the main bar. Damn. He’d forgotten about the stupid Scene and Heard column. Kyle helped himself to a cracker and some Brie cheese sitting on the bar. “I’m going to say…Angelina Jolie. Actually, no—Megan Fox.” “Megan Fox is, like, twenty-five.” “And this is a problem why, exactly?” Jordan slapped his hand as he reached for more crackers. “Those are for customers.” She put her hand on her hip. “You know, after reading the Scene and Heard column, I’d kind of hoped it was Rylann they were talking about. And that maybe, just maybe, my ne’er-do-well twin had decided to stop playing around and finally pursue a woman of quality.” He stole another cracker. “Now, that would be something.” She shook her head. “Why do I bother? You know, one day you’re going to wake up and…” Kyle’s cell phone buzzed, and he tuned out the rest of Jordan’s lecture—he could probably repeat the whole thing word for word by now—as he checked the incoming message. It was from Rylann, her response as short and sweet as his original text. 3418 CORNELIA, #3. He had her address. With a smile, he looked up and interrupted his sister. “That’s great, Jordo. Hey, by any chance do you have any bottles of that India Ink cabernet lying around?” She stopped midrant and stared at him. “I’m sure I do. Why, what made you think of that?” Then her face broke into a wide grin. “Wait a second…that was the wine Rylann talked about when she was here. She said it was one of her favorites.” “Did she? Funny coincidence.” Jordan put her hand over her heart. “Oh my God, you’re trying to impress her. That is so cute.” “Don’t be ridiculous,” Kyle scoffed. “I just thought, since I’ve heard such good things about the wine, that I would give it a shot.” Jordan gave him a look, cutting through all the bullshit. “Kyle. She’s going to love it.” Okay, whatever. Maybe he was trying to impress Rylann a little. “You don’t think it’s too much? Like I’m trying too hard?” Jordan put her hand over her heart again. “Oh. It’s like watching Bambi take his first steps.” “Jordo…” he growled warningly. With a smile, she put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed affectionately. “It’s perfect. Trust me.

The PEOPLE, SCHOOL, EVERYONE, and EVERYTHING is so FAKE AND GAY.' 'I shrieked, at the top of my voice fingers outspread and frozen in fear, unlike ever before in my young life; being the gentle, sweet, and shy girl that I am.' 'Besides always too timid to have a voice, to stand up for me, and forced not to, by masters.' Amidst my thoughts racing ridiculously, 'I feel that it is all just another way for the 'SOCIETY' to make me feel inferior, they think, they are so 'SUPERIOR' to me, and who I am to them.' 'Nonetheless, every day of my life, I have felt like I have been drowning in a pool, with weights attached to my ankles.' 'Like, of course, there is no way for me to escape the chains that are holding me down.' 'The one and only person, that holds the key to my freedom: WILL NEVER LET ME GO! It's like there is within me, and has been deep inside me!' 'I now live in this small dull town for too damn long. It is an UNSYMPATHETIC, obscure, lonely, totally depressed, and depressing place, for any teenage girl to be, most definitely if you're a girl like me.' 'All these streets surrounding me are covered with filth, and born in the hills of middle western Pennsylvania mentalities of slow-talking and deep heritages, and beliefs, that don't operate me as a soul lost and lingering within the streets and halls.' 'My old town was ultimately left behind when the municipality neighboring made the alterations to the main roads; just to save five minutes of commuting, through this countryside village. Now my town sits on one side of that highway.' 'Just like a dead carcass to the rest of the world, which rushes by. What is sullen about this is that it is a historic town, with some immeasurable old monuments, and landmarks.' 'However, the others I see downright neglect what is here, just like me, it seems. Other than me, no one cares. Yet I care about all the little things.' 'I am so attached to all these trivial things as if they are a part of me. It disheartens me to see anything go away from me.' 'It's a community where the litter blows and bisects the road, like the tumble-wheats of the yore of times past.' 'Furthermore, if you do not look where you are going, you will fall in our trip, in one of the many potholes or heaved up bumps in the pavement, or have an evacuated structure masonry descending on your head.' 'Merely one foolproof way of simplifying the appearance of this ghost town.' 'There are still some reminders of the glory days when you glance around.' 'Like the town clock, that is evaporated black that has chipped enamel; it seems that it is always missing a few light bulbs.' 'The timepiece only has time pointing hands on the one side, and it nevermore shows the right time of day.' 'The same can be assumed for the neon signs on the mom-and-pop shops, which flicker at night as if they're in agonizing PAIN.' 'Why? To me is a question that is asked frequently.' 'It is all over negligence!' 'I get the sense and feeling most of the time, as they must prepare when looking around here at night.' 'The streetlamps do not all work, as they should. The glass in them is cracked.' 'The parking meters are always jammed, or just completely broken off their posts altogether.' 'The same can be said, for the town sign that titles this area. It is not even here anymore, as it should be now moved to the town square or shortage of a park.

That black horse we used for packin’ up here is the most cantankerous beast alive,” Jake grumbled, rubbing his arm. Ian lifted his gaze from the initials on the tabletop and turned to Jake, making no attempt to hide his amusement. “Bit you, did he?” “Damn right he bit me!” the older man said bitterly. “He’s been after a chuck of me since we left the coach at Hayborn and loaded those sacks on his back to bring up here.” “I warned you he bites anything he can reach. Keep your arm out of his way when you’re saddling him.” “It weren’t my arm he was after, it was my arse! Opened his mouth and went for it, only I saw him outter the corner of my eye and swung around, so he missed.” Jakes’s frown darkened when he saw the amusement in Ian’s expression. “Can’t see why you’ve bothered to feed him all these years. He doesn’t deserve to share a stable with your other horses-beauties they are, every one but him.” “Try slinging packs over the backs of one of those and you’ll see why I took him. He was suitable for using as a pack mule; none of my other cattle would have been,” ian said, frowning as he lifted his head and looked about at the months of accumulated dirt covering everything. “He’s slower’n a pack mule,” Jake replied. “Mean and stubborn and slow,” he concluded, but he, too, was frowning a little as he looked around at the thick layers of dust coating every surface. “Thought you said you’d arranged for some village wenches to come up here and clean and cook fer us. This place is a mess.” “I did. I dictated a message to Peters for the caretaker, asking him to stock the place with food and to have two women come up here to clean and cook. The food is here, and there are chickens out in the barn. He must be having difficulty finding two women to stay up here.” “Comely women, I hope,” Jake said. “Did you tell him to make the wenches comely?” Ian paused in his study of the spiderwebs strewn across the ceiling and cast him an amused look. “You wanted me to tell a seventy-year-old caretaker who’s half-blind to make certain the wenches were comely?” “Couldn’ta hurt ‘t mention it,” Jake grumbled, but he looked chastened. “The village is only twelve miles away. You can always stroll down there if you’ve urgent need of a woman while we’re here. Of course, the trip back up here may kill you,” he joked referring to the winding path up the cliff that seemed to be almost vertical. “Never mind women,” Jake said in an abrupt change of heart, his tanned, weathered face breaking into a broad grin. “I’m here for a fortnight of fishin’ and relaxin’, and that’s enough for any man. It’ll be like the old days, Ian-peace and quiet and naught else. No hoity-toity servants hearin’ every word what’s spoke, no carriages and barouches and matchmaking mamas arrivin’ at your house. I tell you, my boy, though I’ve not wanted to complain about the way you’ve been livin’ the past year, I don’t like these servents o’ yours above half. That’s why I didn’t come t’visit you very often. Yer butler at Montmayne holds his nose so far in t’air, it’s amazin’ he gets any oxhegen, and that French chef o’ yers practically threw me out of his kitchens. That what he called ‘em-his kitchens, and-“ The old seaman abruptly broke off, his expression going from irate to crestfallen, “Ian,” he said anxiously, “did you ever learn t’ cook while we was apart?” “No, did you?” “Hell and damnation, no!” Jake said, appalled at the prospect of having to eat anything he fixed himself.

And why do I get so damn horny every time I even think his name?

You wanna watch me come?” “Fuck yes, I wanna watch you.” They were both speaking through heavy breaths, each on the cusp. “I wanna see your face and look in your eyes the moment you blow your load. That too intimate for you?” Tim emphasized the word with a palm-twist around the head of Tyler’s dick. Tyler hissed, lashes fluttering. “Maybe,” he huffed. “It’s pretty intimate.” “You’ve got your ankles wrapped around my neck. That’s pretty damn intimate too.

They both cried out their pleasure when Tim entered him. Some shifting on the mattress, and then the angle was perfect. Tim’s arm slung around Tyler’s chest, holding him tight and breathing hard against the back of his ear while he glided in and out with a languid rhythm. “Oh God, there it is,” Tim said. “Every position feels so good with you. Everything’s too damn good.

Willy looks between Randy and me for a few seconds. “Holy candy canes. You two could almost pass for brothers.” I lean against the bar. “Not quite. I'm a couple of inches shorter, and I don't have the muscle your reindeer has.” “It's the long black hair.” He points at Randy. “I have a thing for long black hair. Hot damn, two hotties like you in Santa's Village at the same time? The elves wouldn't get any work done. They'd be too busy staring and jerk-” “Enough, elf,” Randy stops him.

Babes with the minds of biddies,

Caviar is formed from gray-green boulders that have been eroded by the weather and exposed to frequent rainstorms. This occurs in the mountains. When the stone grows soft, the individual particles, happy to be able to move at last, set out on the double and swim down the torrential streams to the valley. There a joyful village population awaits them, having prepared for the event by erecting walls and defenses against which the caviar will be dammed (not: damned). Anyone who wants to can safely skim it from there and spread it on a slice of bread. The stony taste goes away if you chew long enough. The caviar for sale in stores is excreted from fish and cannot in any way be compared with the original caviar, described above.

Cockoon: The Re-sperm.

Mr. Zelenskyy thinks he was assigned a movie project, titled "Foolish Brave President ". Shooting has started but it has no pack-up date, devastated cities, villages are the artificial movie setup, producer's money, so he doesn't care. There are no refugees also. 3 million citizens who fled are actually junior artists. millions of junior artists. There are working in this movie, 3 million have already returned home after playing their role. Shooting is also going live on telecast. He's glad to feel happy as the world media appreciates his acting, so throughout he's enjoying playing this role. And he's damn sure he will be entitled to each and every award. His character has deep emotions, touching drama, great actions, but the very important thing is completely missing, which is the main character of the leader. Diplomacy and citizens' safety policy !!!

We stay in Sabor because it's our home. Aye, the villages don't want us, but the sinners always do. Every plague-fearing soul sleeps easier knowing we'll come when they call. So you ask why we stay? Because the plague stays. Because someone out there needs mercy. And because this is our damned home.

​Try it in the last hundred years or so and you’ll find the lack of National Insurance number, ID card, or credit rating means you’re officially a non-person and after America closed its borders last year, all sorts of security alarm bells start ringing. ​Or, you think you’ll go back a little further before all these tiresome records were invented, but that doesn’t work either. Society is rigid. Everyone knows everyone else in their world. Everyone has their place in the scheme of things. If you don’t belong to a family, a tribe, a village, a guild, whatever, you don’t exist then, either. And you can’t just pitch up somewhere without mutual acquaintances, recommendations, or letters of introduction. Life on the fringes of society, any society in any time is tough. I should know.

There is nothing,” he whispers, “more delicious than you. I’m not sorry, Tiny.” He lines himself up at my entrance. “I’m not sorry we danced.” He pushes inside. “I’m not sorry we slept together.” There’s a sharp stretch as he pushes farther and brushes his nose against mine. “I’m not sorry we made a baby. I don’t regret a damn thing.

Colin and Edmund were here. How embarrassing. “She’s alive. Conscious too,” Edmund said in the bluff pretend-nothing’s-really-wrong tone she’d only heard him take about horses and hounds before. Colin said something rough. He said it in a foreign tongue—not French or German—and it had a number of syllables, but Reggie knew an oath when she heard one. “. . . gonna hope,” she managed, though her tongue was as swollen as her brain from the feel of it, “you’re not mad ’m alive.” “For the love of God, woman,” said Colin, “don’t talk.” Close up—and he was close up now—his voice didn’t sound normal. His accent was very thick now. More to the point, his voice had dropped at least an octave, and it sounded almost sibilant. Reggie heard more swishing grass and felt a shadow fall over her, then a hand on her arm. It was Colin’s, she thought, but even hotter than he normally was. “…’s wrong w’ you?” she asked. She didn’t want to open her eyes to find out, because of the light needles. “A damned fine question” he said. “Do not move. Do what I say this time.” As Reggie wasn’t inclined to move anyhow, she held still while an equally warm set of fingers travelled gently but urgently over her head, at first avoiding the sticky place on one side and then probing lightly around its edges. No amount of gentleness could have made that not hurt, and she couldn’t manage to control herself. She cried out and batted at Colin’s arm. “Stoppit. Go ’way.” “Damned if I will.” He caught her fingers in his free hand. “There’s a bloody great lump here,” he said, not to her, “but nothing feels broken. But she’s bleeding. Quite a bit, and would you for the love of God go get a doctor? Make yourself useful, man!” “I—” Edmund started to retort angrily, and Reggie wondered if she’d have to get up and deal with the two of them, because she’d quite cheerfully kill both if so. Moving hurt. Thinking hurt. Edmund and Colin shouting hurt. Luckily for everyone, she heard Edmund take a long breath. “I’ll go down to the village and get Dr. Brant if you take Reggie back to the house. We can’t bring him out here, and I don’t want to leave you both waiting—not when she might come back.” She? Reggie was puzzled for a moment, then remembered: Janet Morgan. Ghost, witch, and generally unpleasant person. Quite possibly the reason she was lying on the ground with spikes in her brain. “Stupid cow,” she said. “Stupid? I’d love it if she were,” said Edmund.

The government is too big and too far away,” he said. “Those men in Moscow, they are city men. They cannot know how we live and work, or how people live and work in the next village or on the other side of the mountains. Why doesn’t the government content itself with governing and let us alone? We don’t need their ‘reforms.’” That chance conversation with a communist in a communist village changed the way I saw Communism, and I found myself glad that the fates had earlier dealt me such a severe case of influenza that I was thereby restrained from naively pledging allegiance to the Party. It was neither socialism nor communism but good, old-fashioned American individualism I cherished—American freedom of thought and action, American democracy, and the spirit of American enterprise. I was damned sick of the Old World and glad to be going home to the New.

You have already excommunicated half the village because they will not pay their tithes. So why wouldn't they come to us? Can you excommunicate them twice over? As for the sick, most are here because the Mother Church in her great charity has already damned them and driven them out. The churches are emptier than a pauper's purse and little wonder, for men get more solace from the alewives than from their priests. More stand now outside your church than within it. What difference does it make if you forbid them burial in your churchyard, since they cannot afford the soul-scot you charge them to be buried there? Those who still look to God make their prayers far away from the church, where the air is sweeter and their voices are not smothered beneath your hypocrisy and greed.

I will still help ye, lass,” he said and winced at the desperate note in his voice. Firmer, he said, “Did ye hear me, Malina? I said I will keep my word to you.” Determined to face her wrath like the warrior he was, he caught her arm. She spun around, and to his dismay, tears stained her cheeks. She swatted at them and wouldn’t look him in the eye. His stomach contracted with regret. Och, he’d never meant to make her weep. He shouldna have pretended ire with her, even if it meant angering Steafan. “Malina—” Her shiny eyes flashed. “Don’t you call me that ever again! You bastard!” He nearly recoiled from the whip of her anger, but he’d faced enough Gunn and MacKay to stand his ground against a wee, fiery woman. “Haud your wheesht, wife,” he growled as he pulled her to him. She’d draw the attention of the whole village, and the last thing he wanted were more witnesses to the debacle he’d landed himself in. Come to think of it, he was not some repentant mutt who ought to be whimpering for his sins. He didn’t regret keeping her and her unborn bairn safe from Steafan’s stocks tonight. He didn’t regret taking full and permanent responsibility for a woman with child lost in a strange land. He didn’t exactly expect her thanks, but he didn’t appreciate his bride calling him a bastard on their wedding night, either. “I willna have ye maligning me for the whole of Ackergill to hear.” “Oh, you willna, will you? And just how do you plan to stop me? Will you dole out your husbandly discipline and make your uncle proud?” “Och, woman. I am not your enemy.” He darted a glance around the road to make sure no one was gawking at them. “You’re not my friend, either, Darcy Keith,” she said in a respectable volume, though the sparks in her eyes suggested she’d prefer yelling at him some more. “You betrayed me. You told me I had to meet the laird in order to spend the night here. You made it sound like a formality. You didn’t say anything about ending up married. Married! Damn it, Darcy.

Maybe Mo-O’s refusal to let Namaka go was somehow meant to protect her. But gods damn it, if she was going to be courted by every man in Hamoa Village—perhaps in every village on the Valley Isle—she was at least going to try to enjoy it. Which meant she’d made a new pa’u skirt, woven flowers into her hair, and was going to be there to watch a canoe race held in her honor.

My lord, surely you do not expect me to . . . with men standing around me?” she asked as if he’d suggested she do it in the village square for all to see . . . and naked. “Well, they won’t be able to see anything,” he assured her with amusement. Damned if he’d let his men look on her cute little derriere as she knelt in the bushes. “They’ll be on the other side of the bushes, but there to stop anyone else approaching.” Annabel was shaking her head before he’d finished. “I cannot possibly—not while I know your men are all standing around listening to me . . . I just cannot,” she said helplessly. “It’s pissen, lass,” he said helpfully since she seemed unable to voice the word herself. “It’s a pissen yer needing. Ye can say the word. I’ll no think less o’ ye fer it.” Annabel opened her mouth, closed it, and then simply shook her head again. Ross sighed. If she couldn’t even say the damned word, there was no way she was going to do it with guards standing but feet away. He glanced around, considering what to do, then nodded. “Right. Then come here.” “Where are we—?” Her question died as he led her to a bush at the stream’s edge and paused. “Ye do it here,” he said releasing her arm and moving three or four feet away to turn his back to her. “And I’ll stand guard here. That way yer front and back are safe and we can both keep an eye on the sides.” Ross waited for either agreement or the rustle of her adjusting her clothes, but neither sounded. Resisting the urge to look back and see what she was doing, he asked, “Yer no’ doing it, are ye?” “Umm . . . nay, not yet,” she muttered, then paused, cleared her throat, and asked, “Do you think you could whistle, my lord?” “Whistle?” He did glance around then. She was standing where he’d left her, looking uncomfortable, but still upright, not down on her haunches with her skirt hiked up around her waist. Annabel grimaced apologetically. “It would help if you did.” Sighing, Ross shook his head, but turned away and began to whistle. He was wishing though, that she’d just hurry up and get it done. He still had some pissen of his own to do. So, he was more than a little relieved when she cleared her throat a moment later and murmured, “We can return to the clearing.” Ross

The villagers had removed their masks. They displayed their true faces. And they were dreadful, diabolic visages. Blasted skin hung from shrunken mouths and red veins burst from their skin, leaving pronounced contours akin to miniature rivers. Each throbbed and pulsed, at home on scabby foreheads. I balked. The eyes drew all attention. Silver coins replaced eyeballs. They glinted with the same alluring lustre as the ones I had coveted in the chests. Instantly, dreadfully, I knew they were one and the same – accursed treasure used for nefarious sight, a symbol of the damned. And yet, the more I stared, the more I coveted them.

we were up in Mosul. We had to search all these villages for guns. Those villages are awful up there. So we went into this village and put the blonde girl we had on top of one of the Bradleys. We just rolled in and put her up there and took off her helmet and let her hair spill out. “So she’s standing there on top of the Bradley, blond hair and everything, and we called out on the loudspeaker, ‘This woman is for sale. Blonde woman for sale!’ And I’ll be damned if every Iraqi male in that village wasn’t gathered around the Bradley in about two minutes. You know the Iraqis are crazy for blondes. Crazy for them. They don’t have any here.” The

Late in November, he suddenly appeared at Fort Lyon with the 3rd Colorado and other units and announced his intention to attack Black Kettle. Several officers remonstrated, declaring that the Cheyennes had been led to understand that they were prisoners of war. Chivington responded, as one of the protesters recalled, that “he believed it to be right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians that would kill women and children, and ‘damn any man that was in sympathy with Indians.’“ On November 29, 1864, Chivington methodically deployed his command, about 700 strong with four howitzers, around Black Kettle’s village. The chief, shouting reassurances to his alarmed people, ran up an American flag and a white flag over his tepee. Then the troops opened fire and charged. The Indians fled in panic in all directions. Only one pocket of resistance formed, and that was speedily eliminated. Chivington had made clear his wish that prisoners not be taken, and a massacre followed as the soldiers indiscriminately shot down men, women, and children. Interpreter John Smith later testified: “They were scalped, their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word.” Two hundred Cheyennes, two-thirds of them women and children, perished. Nine chiefs died, but Black Kettle made good his escape. As

Having a good feel up there, Gareth? Sure are taking a damned long time about it!" "Can't blame him. Tisn't every day that a man gets to grope a stone horse!" "Wish I was hung half so well!" "You mean you aren't, Chilcot?" "Lord Gareth is!" cried Tess. "Why, 'e's built foiner than any stallion Oi've ever seen, stone or not!" Drunken laughter rang out, both male and female, and yet another bottle of Irish whiskey made its way among the shadowy figures who stood, or rather swayed, beneath poor Henry on his about-to-be-disgraced charger. "Hey Gareth!  Didn't know yer pref'rences ran to — hic! — bestiality!  What else haven't you tol' us about yershelf, eh?" "Shut up down there, you bacon-brains," Gareth said. "D'you want to wake up the whole damned village?"  But he was as foxed as the rest of them, and no one took him seriously. "Hic! — c'mon, Gareth, it can't take you more than five minutes to — hic! — paint its bollocks blue!" "This is not blue, it's purple. Royal purple. As befits its royal rider." Chilcot gave a credible imitation of a neighing stallion. Cokeham snorted, horselike, and clutched his stomach as he tried to contain his laughter. But the Irish whiskey was too much for him, and, losing his balance, he fell face‑first into the damp grass, still guffawing and holding his side. "Oh!  Oh, I fear I shall cast up my accounts if this keeps up ... oh, dear God...." Without missing a beat, Gareth dipped his brush in the paint and flicked it over the bewigged and powdered heads of his friends below. Howls pierced the night as he calmly went back to his task. "A plague on you, Gareth! — hic — you've jesht ruined my best wig!" "To hell with your damned wig, Hugh, look what he just did to my coat!" Chilcot gave another equine whicker, tucked his chin, and with his beautifully turned out leg began pawing the ground. "Shhhh‑h‑h‑h‑h‑h‑h!" "Oh ... oh, I do feel sick...." "Keep it up, you pillocks, and I shall dump the entire bucket on your heads," Gareth called down from above.

I cannot agree with the gentleman in the magenta coat that Potter’s Pond is only a wretched little hamlet. But it is certainly a very remote and secluded village; so that it seems quite outlandish, like a village of a hundred years ago. The spinsters are really spinsters — damn it, you could almost imagine you saw them spin. The ladies are not just ladies. They are gentlewomen; and their chemist is not a chemist, but an apothecary; pronounced potecary. They do just admit the existence of an ordinary doctor like myself to assist the apothecary. But I am considered rather a juvenile innovation, because I am only fifty-seven years old and have only been in the county for twenty-eight years. The solicitor looks as if he had known it for twenty-eight thousand years. Then there is the old Admiral, who is just like a Dickens illustration; with a house full of cutlasses and cuttle-fish and equipped with a telescope.’ ‘I suppose,’ said Father Brown, ‘there are always a certain number of Admirals washed up on the shore. But I never understood why they get stranded so far inland.’ ‘Certainly no dead-alive place in the depths of the country is complete without one of these little creatures,’ said the doctor. ‘And then, of course, there is the proper sort of clergyman; Tory and High Church in a dusty fashion dating from Archbishop Laud; more of an old woman than any of the old women. He’s a white-haired studious old bird, more easily shocked than the spinsters. Indeed, the gentlewomen, though Puritan in their principles, are sometimes pretty plain in their speech; as the real Puritans were. Once or twice I have known old Miss Carstairs-Carew use expressions as lively as anything in the Bible. The dear old clergyman is assiduous in reading the Bible; but I almost fancy he shuts his eyes when he comes to those words.

Our night together was the kind of night you don’t forget, the kind of night old, wrinkled souls in retirement villages reminisce about over and over again, detailing every damn intoxicating minute, while the other decrepit souls roll their eyes, wishing that schmuck could think of something else to go on about.

Away deep in the aim to study himself in the school of the land his ancestors' gravestones flowered, Rip planned to burn his oil on the journey for growth by the hike, the thumb, the hitch, the rod, the freight, the rail, and he x'd New York on a map and pencilled his way to and into and through and under and up and between and over and across states and capitals and counties and cities and towns and villages and valleys and plains and plateaus and prairies and mountains and hills and rivers and roadways and railways and waterways and deserts and islands and reservations and titanic parks and shores and, ocean across to ocean and great lakes down to gulfs, Rip beheld the west and the east and the north and the south of the Brobdingnagian and, God and Christ and Man, it was a pretty damn good grand big fat rash crass cold hot pure mighty lovely ugly hushed dark lonely loud lusty bitchy tender crazy cruel gentle raw sore dear deep history-proud precious place to see, and he sure would, he thought, make the try to see it and smell it and walk and ride and stop and talk and listen in it and go on in it and try to find and feel and hold and know the beliefs in it and the temper and the talents in it and the omens and joys and hopes and frights and lies and laughs and truths and griefs and glows and gifts and glories and glooms and wastes and profits and the pulse and pitch and the music and the magic and the dreams and facts and the action and the score and the scope and span of the mind and the heart and spine and logic and ego and spirit in the soul and the goal of it.

For god’s sake, Leo thought as he and Gabby approached a cabin in the woods a half mile or so out of the village, this damn country really is a Hallmark movie come to life.

not yet allowing himself to wallow in the wave of relief coursing through his body, and pushed through it, ignoring questions barked at him in a foreign language. He galloped down a set of steps, past another pair of cops rushing in the opposite direction, barely meriting a second glance on this occasion. As he left the park, crossing a road that was cordoned off to traffic at either end, he breathed out a long, deep, endless sigh of relief that flooded out of him with the relentless power of the Nile emptying into the Mediterranean Sea. It was only now that he recognized how fast his heart was beating, or felt the beads of sweat dripping off his forehead – both more a result of tension than exertion. “That was close,” he groaned, cursing himself for breaking the cardinal rule of espionage and thrusting himself into the center of attention. “Too damn close.” And it was far from over. He might have escaped the first cordon of cops, but before long the whole of central Moscow would be on lockdown. He needed to get out before it was too late. Trapp fought against his instincts and slowed his pace, walking casually down a side street, past a government building with a small brass plaque outside which read, ‘Federal Agency for State Property Management’ in English letters under the Cyrillic. He kept his head low, pointed at the ground, hoping that it would obscure him from the surveillance cameras that dotted the area, but knowing that it probably wouldn’t. That’s a problem for another day. He cast a quick look around to make sure no one was paying him any attention, and when he was certain that they were not, he ducked into a space between two parked cars, crouched down, and pulled on the neon vest he had previously stowed by his breast. Again, the disguise was skin deep, but if one of the cops he’d just passed managed to radio in a description, then perhaps this costume change might add a layer of distance. It was better than nothing. He started walking again, slowly enough not to draw the eye, fast enough to put as much distance between himself and what was about to turn into a very hot crime scene as possible. As he walked, his fingers played with the rock he had carried all this time, searching for a seam or a catch. He knew that it would not be locked, or contain the kind of self-destruct device so beloved of Hollywood movies. There wasn’t the space, and besides, any competent intelligence agency would be able to defeat such protections quickly enough. Trapp found it, worked the bottom of the rock open, and saw a memory stick sitting in a foam indentation. He pulled it free, put it into the coin pocket of his denim jeans, and dumped the two halves of the rock into an overflowing trash can. It was only then that the question came to him. What the hell do I do now? 35 The village of Soloslovo was 20 miles from Central Moscow, about thirty minutes by car in light traffic, or twenty on a high-powered motorcycle the likes of which Eliza Ikeda rode as she zipped past, around

Yup. I’m a ninja. But back then I didn’t give a damn about ninja. The hokage is the top ninja of the village. But this isn’t a tale about a boy who aims to become hokage. That was my dad’s story. This is none other than my story. However, since I’m the hokage’s son, I can’t help that my dad ends up being involved in my story. The shinobi whose dream came true, the hokage and my story begins when I was a brat who sulked about his dad not paying enough attention to him. I’ll say this one more time, this is my story. Except, for just a little bit at the start, it’s the story of me and my dad.

He grabbed hold of the bedpost and looked down at Robert. "Major, it's me, Bookman, the man who saved your life on more than one occasion. What do you care about one stupid servant girl?" "I care that you might have harmed an innocent." "She wasn't an innocent. She was a lying, faithless slut." "Who had the decency to write to you to say she had a change of heart. Who expected you to respect her decision and not destroy her wanting another man? I cannot condone such behavior, Bookman." Bookman smiled and brought the laudanum bottle out of his pocket. "You disappoint me, Major. Where's your much-vaunted loyalty to me? Why shouldn't Mary feel a little of the pain I've endured being shot at, bayoneted, and stabbed? She told me she was going to marry another man. Why should I have to come home to nothing?" "We've all endured such things. It doesn't give us the right to inflict them on innocent civilians." "Why not? We inflicted them on the damned French! We slaughtered innocents by the hundreds over there, and you damn well know it!" Bookman was sweating, his skin pale, his nightmarish gaze back in the past with the horrors he'd endured. "I fought for the likes of her to live a peaceful life, and she betrayed me.

The village called. They would like their idiot back. You should probably go.

Tim groaned and his eyes closed. Tyler could see his concentration, feel his effort not to lose the rhythm. But he could tell by the stiffening cock inside him that Tim was right on the edge, so Tyler let himself go, grabbing his own cock and tugging. Once, twice, “Open your eyes, I’m coming!” Tim’s eyes opened then he gasped at the first splash of hot cum hitting his chest. “Tyler, God, yes. Shoot it all over me.” He cried out in pleasure as Tim brought him over the edge with gold-medal stamina. Tim’s hips thrust and his face turned red but damn, he stayed hard and kept pumping until Tyler’s orgasm peaked and he finally stopped howling. Tyler’s legs dropped to the mattress, then Tim’s thrusts slowed. He was still hard, hadn’t come yet. He kissed Tyler deeply as his cock glided in and out, slowly, gently, until he shuddered. His lips tore free and he stared into Tyler’s eyes as he climaxed. “I love the way you look at me,” Tyler whispered. “Especially when you come.” As his breathing slowed, Tim cradled Tyler’s head in his hands. “How do I look at you?” “Like you want me so much it hurts a little.

LOLLIPOP DOLLS IS like some weird little girl's hunting lodge. The heads and faces of every Japanese cartoon character and monster are hung on the walls like trophies. Their plastic guts are in model kits on the shelves and their skins are draped on padded hangers in long rows of animal prints and Little Bo Peep frills. When I turn around, there's a platoon of twelve-year-old Cutie Honey types staring up at me, letting me know that I'm extremely not welcome. It's Village of the Damned with ankle socks.

This is Village Of The Damned type stuff but with killer turkeys instead of freaky blonde kids. Oh my gosh! It's a killer turkey human changeling!

I have this cousin down in Georgia that skinny-dipped in the Chattahoochee and two hours later gave birth to crawfish.” Leakey turned to walk away. “Crawfish, Chief. I’m just saying.