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?"