Narrative living is the beginning of rhetoric.
N.D. WilsonThere is a bus station in Henry, but it isn't on Main Street. It's one block north - the town fathers hadn't wanted all the additional traffic. The station lost one-third of its roof to a tornado fifteen years ago. In the same summer, a bottle rocket brought the gift of fire to its restrooms. The damage has never been repaired, but the town council makes sure that the building is painted fresh every other year, and always the color of a swimming pool. There is never graffiti. Vandals would have to drive more than twenty miles to buy the spray paint.
Every once in a long while, a bus creeps into town and eases to a stop beside the mostly roofed, bright aqua station with the charred bathrooms. Henry is always glad to see a bus. Such treats are rare.
Hold your tongue if you'd like to keep it."
- Jaques
Her evil cannot reach us here. Let us burn the ancient tree-mace trees and close off the ancient ways. Tear down the tower, the crown of our barrow, and let us hide ourselves from evil. Let no one leave the mound, and if evil grows, we shall flee farther.
No! Let evil hear the pounding of our feet! Let evil hear our drumming and our chanting songs of war. Let evil fear us! Let evil flee! In any world, may dark things know our names and fear. May their vile skins creep and shiver at every mention of the faeren. Let the night flee before the dawn and darkness crowd into the shadows. We march to war!"
- Nudd, the Chestnut King
Every year, Kansas watches the world die. Civilizations of wheat grow tall and green; they grow old and golden, and then men shaped from the same earth as the crop cut those lives down. And when the grain is threshed, and the dances and festivals have come and gone, then the fields are given over to fire, and the wheat stubble ascends into the Kansas sky, and the moon swells to bursting above a blackened earth.
The fields around Henry, Kansas, had given up their gold and were charred. Some had already been tilled under, waiting for the promised life of new seed. Waiting for winter, and for spring, and another black death.
The harvest had been good. Men, women, boys and girls had found work, and Henry Days had been all hot dogs and laughter, even without Frank Willis's old brown truck in the parade.
The truck was over on the edge of town, by a lonely barn decorated with new No Trespassing signs and a hole in the ground where the Willis house had been in the spring and the early summer. Late summer had now faded into fall, and the pale blue farm house was gone. Kansas would never forget it.
Frank sniffed. 'You know me well, wife. I thought those were in the
basement.'
'They were. You should have been an English teacher, Frank.'
'What are we going to do?' Henry asked.
'We're going to build a wooden horse, stick you inside it, and offer
it up as a gift,' Frank answered.
'Burn your bridges when you come to them,' Dotty said. She smiled at
Frank, picked up the empty plates, and walked back into the kitchen.
'Can we watch?' Henrietta asked.
'You,' Frank said, 'can go play in the barn, the yard, the fields, or
the ditches, so long as you are nowhere near the action. C'mon, Henry.'
The girls moaned and complained while Henry followed his uncle up the
stairs. At the top, they walked all the way around the landing until
they faced the very old, very wooden door to Grandfather's bedroom.
Uncle Frank set down his tools.
'Today is the day, Henry. I can feel it. I never told your aunt this,
but my favorite book's in there. I was reading it to your Grandfather
near the end. It's been due back at the library for awhile now, and
it'd be nice to be able to check something else out.
Going where no man has gone before is more difficult than it sounds. Our cousins and ancestors were no less curious than we are, and were perhaps bolder. This world is their tomb.
You should look under the bed.
If your boy's alive, the last thing you should want to do is double his trouble. Don't try to run to him when he's in something thick unless you can bring him the answer. ... If you raised your boy how you should've, then you know he's fighting with what he's got. If he dies, then you'll know he died trying, and that's as much as you can ask. ... Ted's gone. But he left you a son made out of the same stuff he was, and don't you underestimate him. If you know Tom, then you'll have some faith in the boy. The odds might be long, but I'll bet on him.
N.D. WilsonThe moon was up, painting the world silver, making things look just a little more alive.
N.D. WilsonCaves and darkness can't hold you when you die, they can only hold your bones.
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