John Langan

I wouldn’t go so far as to say folks are afraid of Cornelius’s Guest as that they’re ready to be, you know?

Helen’s—eyes, which are different, somehow. Hard as it is to see in the light of the single lantern burning, Rainer is sure Helen’s eyes are gold, entirely gold, with tiny black pupils dotting their centers. He can’t remember what the woman’s eyes looked like before, but he’s sure it wasn’t this

floor, and sets out for Italo’s place. Those who see her making her way over to Italo’s say she doesn’t walk right. She moves the way you’d expect a person trying to use a pair of shattered legs and a broken spine would. And if that isn’t strange enough, the footprints she leaves are wet, as if she’s newly out of her bath and not bothered toweling off

This accent is what you’d imagine if an animal learned how to speak, something that wasn’t trying to master your particular language

This accent is what you’d imagine if an animal learned how to speak, something that wasn’t trying to master your particular language, but the idea of language itself. It’s not the way you’d think a dog or cat would speak, either. It’s the voice you’d give a lizard, or an eel

Now comes Helen’s turn to scream, and scream she does. Bad as her voice is, her scream is a thousand times worse. Like a devil burning in hell, is how Regina will describe it. Years later, I understand, each of the children will still be waking from nightmares of it.

Lottie, who has opened her bedroom door ever-so-slightly during the last part of Italo’s conversation with her parents, thinks he looks as if the secret he’s keeping is eating him alive, chewing its way out from where he tried to cage it deep down inside himself

It’s as if the man’s in the grip of a great power: “like a river of lightning was pouring through him,” is how Rainer will put it to Clara

She knows, in the way you just know some things, that this is speech Helen has brought back with her from the grave. It is a death-tongue, the tongue you learn once you leave this life for lands uncharted, and Lottie realizes she understands what Helen is saying

For her to attack him here, the last bastion of his pride and self-respect, is the kind of betrayal of which only someone you love is capable