16 Quotes by Hazel Butler

Before long, the smokey spectre appeared, as I knew it would, the barest whisper of a shadow, inky and incandescent. It darted forwards, then back, closer, then ppfft, it was gone in an instant, only to return, darker and more substantial. As ever, it grew bolder, and bolder, until finally it dared to drift through the window and into my home.Every night I had lain here, the geist had come.

Without Bardawulf's pelt about me I felt naked before the crowds, yet I knew what I would invite if folk saw me wearing it. The whispers would become shouts, the shouts accusations, and finally cries of terror, and even if they did not whip me at the post or burn me for my gramarye, the fear would swell within their minds. Their thoughts would focus on naught but me. And I would find myself at the mercy of an onslaught of geiste from which even Lynae would be unable to defend me.

The same good folk who would burn me for a psychal now paid me to use my cursed gramarye to guard their sheep.

Cold coiled through me, lacing each breath with clouded wisps of frost. There was not so much as a candle lit within the small, single room of my cottage, and delicate crystals of alabaster and beryl rimed my meagre possessions and the barren fireplace. I did not care.

James had taken his own life, but the need to do so was not something easily explained. He had the life he wanted: money, a home, a job, a wife, a good friend. I’d known people who died at their own hand because life became unbearable, or because something happened, something terrible. That wasn’t so for James—there was something inside him, something a part of him, something over which he had no control, but which had absolute control over him.

I imagined her poised, a humerus in one hand, a toothbrush in the other, as she gently brushed away the last remnants of the person who had once used that arm to shake hands, open doors, lift a mug of tea. I wondered if it was so very different from how I myself looked when I sat on the floor of my finds room, perhaps sitting cross-legged, at the centre of a circle of newly cleaned bones, a tibia in one hand, a toothbrush in the other …

he night beyond the window was still, mordant white snow, punctuated only by the eerie dark of the trees, gumshoeing their way along the edge of the path outside. Their skeletal fingers clawed up at the stars, held down by an insidious, weightless lacing of snowflakes. I gazed idly at the moon and wondered if it truly had the power to sway the will of men.

The night beyond the window was still, mordant white snow, punctuated only by the eerie dark of the trees, gumshoeing their way along the edge of the path outside. Their skeletal fingers clawed up at the stars, held down by an insidious, weightless lacing of snowflakes. I gazed idly at the moon and wondered if it truly had the power to sway the will of men.

Insects crawled across my skin, legs skittering across my flesh, numbed paths of cold left in their wake. They were the creatures that heralded my ghosts, and I knew them well, yet the revulsion they caused in those moments far exceeded anything I’d felt before.