A theme of the novel seemed to be the power of solitude. She assured herself that she wasn’t lonely, and she knew that assurance for a lie. She told herself that life was good, that there were worse things than loneliness, and those were truths.
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The hallway light passes through the living room archway and lays a faint golden arc across floor and furniture, but the deeper reaches of the large room are veiled with shadows as the day recedes beyond the French windows.
Shacket’s strange augmented eyes conjure an eerie light by which he crosses the room to the Steinway. He had forgotten that Megan played the piano.
The lid is down on this parlor grand, and upon it stands an artfully arranged collection of photographs, the silver frames of which attract what light reaches this part of the room. His new way of seeing makes the silver seem to be in motion, molten and flowing even though the frames retain their shapes.
The photographs are from happier days when the family remained intact: Jason and Megan, Jason and Woody, Megan and Woody, three of them together, Jason by himself, and another of Jason, and another. Mom and Dad always smiling, but the kid only sometimes. The brain-screwed kid, the mental case. Jason steals Megan from Shacket, and he saddles her with the useless boy, and then he dies, and still the treacherous sonofabitch is here, still in possession of her heart.
One by one, Shacket turns the photos facedown. Later, when the boy is dead, when Megan understands who owns her now, he will watch while she takes the photos from the frames and throws them in the fireplace and burns them.
Noises arise from the back of the house, probably from the kitchen. He is not concerned. The sounds remain at a distance. He can smell her back there, the moistness of her, such a hot bitch, and she isn’t approaching.
This house is his now. She doesn’t know it, but this house belongs to Shacket. He can burn it down if he wants. If after the boy is dead, if after Shacket has slipped into Megan’s bed in the night and shown her what she’s been missing all these years, if still the slut refuses to submit, he will do to her what he did to Justine. Then he’ll set the house on fire and leave for Costa Rica, where there are a lot of hot women, the jungle and the sea and more hot women than he will ever need.
In his becoming, he amazes himself, for he has not previously been so decisive in all matters.
He leaves the living room and steps into the hallway and goes to the front stairs. As he ascends, he runs his tongue back and forth over his teeth, back and forth, across the lowers and uppers, not over the molars and the bicuspids, but over the canines and the incisors, the canines and the incisors.
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Embarrassed—worse than embarrassed, mortified and ashamed that he had nearly revealed himself to the murderers behind the Dark Web site called Tragedy, that he had come close to endangering himself and his mother—Woody Bookman retreated to Castle Wyvern, where he often found solace in solitude and sought to regain confidence in his worst hours.
Castle Wyvern was a structure of his imagination, but in times like these, it seemed more solid and convincing in its details than the so-called real world. The outer curtain wall was fourteen feet wide: parallel two-foot-thick courses of native sandstone, the ten feet between them filled with a rubble of loose rocks and mortar. Ten formidable towers soared into a perpetually stormy sky, including two each at the outer gatehouse and the postern gatehouse. The outer ward was separated from the inner ward by a second and more massive curtain wall with an even more impregnable gatehouse and six larger towers. The wall walks featured merlons with narrow arrow loops and embrasures from which boiling oil and buckets of stones could be poured down on enemies attacking from below. Each gatehouse had to be approached on a twenty-five-foot-high ramp guarded by archers. Each ramp ended at a drawbridge spanning a moat. Every gatehouse featured a heavy timber portcullis plated with iron, which could be lowered to deny entrance, and beyond each portcullis stood a pair of ironbound wooden doors that could be closed in an emergency and reinforced by double drawbars.