Holly locked the baby’s room on Valentine’s; she didn’t bother repainting. Walter visited a few weeks later to fix the loose banister railing and the faucet in the kitchen. Roof shingles were still rotten and slid off from day to day. The gutters stank of mildew, like a kind of cabbage boiled too long. Holly hosed them clean with the help of Walter’s borrowed ladder; she averted her eyes from certain second story windows. 

The house rattled when swollen clouds preceded the storms…

Urquhart leveled his pistol and fired, killing one of the ghouls at such immediate range that it left the twitching fiend cloven from mind to maw. Again, the captain aimed, but took no second shot. The crunch of his forearm, shattered from the blow of a cudgel, removed him utterly from the fray. Pain blurred his vision, but pitilessly enough to grant him witness to the site of his sailors being overrun. A great horror unfurled; men were unpieced and robbed of their rubbery skins; sharpened…

Splintered timbers dredged free of the ocean’s bottom stood like ghastly totems as the sailors came ashore. They were tall, misshapen steeples of rotten wood and rose chaotically from the rocky sand like the unearthed fingers of some entombed colossus. Speckled with lead nails, they glittered darkly in the stormy twilight, winking like imp’s eyes as lightning flashed behind rumbling veils of cloud.

Urquhart splashed from the skiff and onto the beach while Moody and his…

“Men are meat, Urquhart—we’re vessels for action you and I—driven by little more than twitching hearts and blinking. But a soul? The soul, my good fellow, is not born when our skins are sewn. It is not woken suddenly when stitches weave us fleshy sleeves to fetter bone and blood and shit. Our soul is born when we are bid to grip our knives and slice the stitches from another. Men do not love and men do not joy until they’ve cut free the strings that limit them.”