the book of lost things by john connolly

If they are not madness itself, then they are a prelude to it.’ Without that, they are like the endless pacings of a caged animal. ‘But they must have a purpose and provide an outcome that we can see and take some comfort from, or else they have no use at all. ‘We all have our routines,’ he said softly. Here, you can be king, and I will allow you to age with dignity and without pain, and when the time comes for you to die, I will send you gently to sleep and you will awaken in the paradise of your choosing, for each man dreams his own heaven.” The life you left behind you is no life at all. Instead you will linger on, with no one to hold your hand or soothe your brow, as Death comes and beckons you into his darkness. Diseases will find a warm, moist place inside you and there they will breed, spreading through your system, corrupting it cell by cell until you pray for the doctors to let you die, to put you out of your misery, but they will not. There will be pains deep within that no doctor will be able to cure.

Your limbs will ache, your eyesight will fade, and your skin will grow lined and aged. Those whom you care about-lovers, children-will fall by the wayside, and your love will not be enough to save them.

It will take others from you too, mark me. It took your mother from you, drained her of health and beauty, and then cast her aside like the withered, rotten husk of a fruit. There were wars before it, and there will be wars after it, and in between people will fight one another and hurt one another and maim one another and betray one another, because that is what they have always done.Īnd even if you avoid warfare and violent death, little boy, what else do you think life has in store for you? You have already seen what it is capable of doing. War merely gives people an excuse to indulge themselves further, to murder with impunity. Your world is tearing itself apart, and the most amusing thing of all is that it was little better before the war started.

People were being dragged from their homes and shot in the street. Women and children were being blasted to pieces or burned alive by bombs dropped from planes flown by men with wives and children of their own.

When you left it, cities were being attacked. It is a place of pain and suffering and grief. “Let me tell you the truth about the world to which you so desperately want to return.

The book of lost things by john connolly