ILLUSTRATED by FINLAY...

Any man who saw you, or even heard your footsteps must be ambushed, stalked and killed, whether needed for food or not. Otherwise, so long as his strength held out, he would be on your trail. —The Twenty-Fifth Hour, by Herbert Best I was one hundred miles from Nowhere—and I mean that literally—when I spotted this girl out of the corner of my eye. I'd been keeping an extra lookout because I still expected the other undead bugger left over from the murder party at Nowhere to be stalking me. I'd be

—Hamlet When I woke the light was almost full amber and I could feel no flesh against mine, only the blanket under me. I very slowly rolled over and there she was, sitting on the corner of the blanket not two feet from me, combing her long black hair with a big, wide-toothed comb she'd screwed into the leather-and-metal cap over her wrist stump. She'd put on her pants and shirt, but the former were rolled up to her knees and the latter, though tucked in, wasn't buttoned. She was looking at me, c

We are always, thanks to our human nature, potential criminals. None of us stands outside humanity's black collective shadow. —The Undiscovered Self, by Carl Jung Ordinarily scroungers who hide around on the outskirts until the killing's done and then come in to share the loot get what they deserve—wordless orders, well backed up, to be on their way at once. Sometimes they even catch an after-clap of the murder urge, if it hasn't all been expended on the first victim or victims. Yet they will do

Any man who deals in murder, must have very incorrect ways of thinking, and truly inaccurate principles. — Thomas de Quincey in Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts For that matter we took off fast with the plane swinging to beat hell. Alice and me was in the two kneeling seats and we hugged them tight, but Pop was loose and sort of rattled around the cabin for a while—and serve him right! On one of the swings I caught a glimpse of the seven dented gas tanks, looking like dull crescents fro

—Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold I am not going to try to describe point by point all that happened the next half hour because there was too much of it and it involved all three of us, sometimes doing different things at the same time, and although we were told a lot of things, we were seldom if ever told the why of them, and through it all was the constant impression that we were dealing with human beings (I almost left out the "human" and I'm still not absolutely sure whether I shouldn't) of va

Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time. —Thomas de Quincey " And a long merry siege to you, sir, and roast rat for Christmas!" I responded, very out loud and rather to my surprise. "War! How I hate war!"—that was what Pop exploded with. He didn't exactly dance in senile rage—he was still keeping too sharp a watch on Alice—but his voice sounded that way. "Damn you, Pop!" Alice contributed. "And you too, Ray! We might have pulled somet