“She’s afraid of me. Afraid of my grief. Afraid it’s contagious. I am a reminder of mortality.”
“Oh, how I wish you were here, brother. What I wouldn’t give to show you the stars.”
“PHANTASM I know the phantom That shies away from the sun He s a quiet prayer From the heartless The mourners The no ones”
“If they die here together, starved like prisoners, she hopes he’ll come with her to find her legs. She hopes he can swim. But even if he can’t, she’s sure he’ll learn once the water touches his toes. The knowledge will come to his body, like in a dream. She imagines the two of them swimming side by side in an endless sea, an epic of water below them, billion of colourful fish joining their adventure. There would be an island eventually. They would wade ashore and pick fruit from the trees.”
“There was a little boy to terrorize, a man and his woman to set one against the other, and if it played its cards right they could end up flitting through the overlook s halls like insubstantial shades in a Shirley Jackson novel, whatever walked in hill house walked alone, but you won t be alone in the overlook, oh no, there would be plenty of company.”
“¿Estoy loco? Puede ser, puede ser. ¿Pero qué importa si soy un loco más entre cientos de locos?”
“Where do I go from here? What road do I travel down where you are not by my side? What life do I lead where you are not there to guide me?”
“We were supposed to survive together. We were supposed to leave and live and grow old together. But instead, his death is a sacrifice for my life, a life I no longer want.”
“Everyone blames the victim. And then the victim becomes the villain.”
“The new world would call me unbalanced. The ancients would call me possessed. And that’s what I feel, clawing at the bounds of my ravaged psyche.”
“What do you wear when you go to meet a ghost?”
“Little Lucy, dressed in white Gave her mother such a fright Walked into the woods one day Where she went no one can say Down a road that no one found Or are her bones sunk in the ground? How many steps did Lucy take? One, two, there, four...”
“Do you want to know where Lucy went? She went to play the game. You can play, too. Find a partner. Find a key. Find the road. You have two days.”
“Oddly, most of the movies that actually managed to scare me were not really supposed to be horror movies”
“She was sitting at the kitchen table, naked. She had a chopper in her right hand. Her left hand was flat on the able in front of her. She’d chopped off her thumb, index and middle fingers. They were in a neat row on the table, which was thick with dark blood.”
“Basically people who love horror movies are people with boring lives. They want to be stimulated, and they need to reassure themselves, because when a really scary movie is over, you’re reassured to see that you’re still alive and the world still exists as it did before. That’s the real reason we have horror films—they act as shock absorbers—and if they disappeared altogether it would mean losing one of the few ways we have to ease the anxiety of the imagination. And I bet you’d see a big leap in the number of serial killers and mass murderers. After all, anyone stupid enough to get the idea of murdering people from a movie could get the same idea from watching the news, right?”
“Dad, are we lost?” Luke repeated the question. “Yeah, we’re lost,” Dad replied quietly. “Hopelessly lost.” Clay let out a soft cry and slumped in the seat. He looked a little like a balloon deflating. “Don’t tell him that!” Mom cried sharply. “What should I tell him?” Dad snapped back. “We’re nowhere near Zoo Gardens. We’re nowhere near civilization! We’re in the desert, going nowhere!”