Of course, I was scared, and of course I said that I was not.

As she entered, he thrust the candle close to her face, and stared at her with eyes that were not truly mad, but were still far from sane.

I like things to be story-shaped.
Reality, however, is not story-shaped, and the eruptions of odd into our lives are not story-shaped either. They do not end in entirely satisfactory ways. Recounting the strange is like telling one's dreams: one can communicate the events of a dream, but not the emotional content, the way that a dream can colour one's entire day.

So I put it aside and started another story, which Harlan and I have now been collaborating on for some years. Bizarrely, whenever we get together and work on it, it gets shorter.

Then he said, "There are some as are what they are. And there are some as aren't what they seem to be. And there are some as only seem to be what they seem to be. Mark my words, and mark them well, Hubert Earnshawe's daughter. Do you understand?"

In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the face and lips and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smiled and kept moving. If I could have physically passed away, just let it all go, like that, without doing anything, stepped out of life as easily as walking through a door, I would have done. But I was going to sleep at night and waking in the morning, disappointed to be there and resigned to existence.

The body analogy breaks down completely when you get out to there. I think that's because London is mad. Multiple personality problems.

He told himself that liking this man was not a sensible thing to do. He had met people like Smith before, people without consciences, without scruples, without hearts, and they were uniformly as dangerous as they were likeable.

"I swear now, by..." and he hesitated, casting his mind around for a suitable curse from the extensive family archives.

He started saying something [...] but he suspected that he'd have to start explaining what he meant, so he said nothing.