“Dolores liked that story. Men were wolves and practical women took the knife to them, and those wolves, those sharp-toothed men, they didn’t come back after that.”

“Uncle seemed to take pleasure from knowing things other people didn’t. Silas did not like thinking this about the man who’d given them a place to live, but there was a sort of smirk hidden inside his uncle’s words that made Silas feel like he was being laughed at. He knew that tone. He’d heard it often enough from kids at school, from the ones who’d look at you like you weren’t worth talking to, from the ones who looked at your unfashionable clothes, or the shape of your face, and told everyone else that you were a freak. Silas was scared of those kids, because usually, those were the ones who didn’t think that normal rules applied to them, the ones who thought they could get away with anything.”

“His own past kept flying up around him like moths; old fears back again, the ghosts’ problems only serving to remind him of his own. Even the little anxieties that nipped at his heels as a boy were back now as sharp-toothed dogs, following him, barking loudly, drawing more and more attention to themselves. Now, as he looked for his dad, Silas felt like he had as a boy: left behind, alone, forgotten. And he could see, now, his personal feelings made his encounters with the dead and his travels through their lands dangerous and filled with the possibility of entrapment.”

“In life, a person will come and go from many homes. We may leave a house, a town, a room, but that does not mean those places leave us. Once entered, we never entirely depart the homes we make for ourselves in the world. They follow us, like shadows, until we come upon them again, waiting for us in the mist.”

“In that moment, he felt like the illusion that his family had become was held together only by the constellation of patterns left by the furniture feet set on a rug, by the runes formed in the shadows that the chair backs threw on the walls, and that once those things were moved or faded, he wouldn’t know who he was anymore.”

“The day his dad didn’t come home, it was like a huge window over their heads had shattered, and every day they were walking through the broken pieces. Nothing fit together. Nothing made sense or seemed connected to anything else, and every step hurt. Maybe in Lichport he’d find a missing shard or two that would help him start piecing things back together.”

“She thought he cared too much. Sometimes Dolores could see that her son felt what other people were feeling. He was sympathetic, she knew that. But Silas managed to make his feelings about others into another kind of absence. You’d laugh, Silas would laugh. You’d cry, he’d start crying. It was like he was tuning in to a radio station. It took a moment for the distant signal to lock in, but once it did, he’d be right in sync with you. Only when he got angry, or hurt, did the signal fail and he’d become very present indeed, and very annoyed to have his calm broken. Then it was nothing but static.”