“Because every choice had consequences. Because in America, you could have anything you wanted, just as long as you could pay for it. If you couldn’t pay, or refused to pay, you would remain needful forever.”

“He had begun business many years ago—as a wandering peddler on the blind face of a distant land, a peddler who carried his wares on his back, a peddler who usually came at the fall of darkness and was always gone the next morning, leaving bloodshed, horror, and unhappiness behind him. Years later, in Europe, as the Plague raged and the deadcarts rolled, he had gone from town to town and country to country in a wagon drawn by a slat-thin white horse with terrible burning eyes and a tongue as black as a killer’s heart.”

“Right now you have the look of a woman who is seeing ghosts. Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?”

She had shaken her head slowly.

“Men and women who can’t get over the past,” Aunt Evvie said. “That’s what ghosts are.”

“Alan felt sanity begin to fill him again. It was funny stuff, sanity. When it was taken away, you didn’t know it. You didn’t feel its departure. You only really knew it when it was restored, like some rare wild bird which lived and sang within you not by decree but by choice.”