The God of the Almighty Dollar demands blood sacrifices. 

The haunting was all in her head, all in her head, she thought, but what was that sound—scraping, something trying to make its way out, scraping—coming from under the bed? 

 The door between the two worlds swung wide that night. 

 Sylvia prayed she was possessed because she couldn't face the proposition that she was just a terrible person. 

Dead tired and forlorn, they dragged themselves towards what they hoped was a new homeland (but turned out to be another cage). 

 Chaos was the only goal. 

Why trust your senses when it's so much easier to believe their lies? 

Seeing the rock god of childhood so gray and withered felt like an assault on cherished memories. 

Nothing bad could happen if you never left home, he was coming to believe. 

 Every day Sam went on the exact same walk and yet seemed able to discover something new each time since she'd stopped burying her head in a phone or allowing herself to be lost in labyrinthian thoughts. 

It wasn't the supernatural we had to worry about, but humanity's capacity for everyday, run-of-the-mill evil.

As the puma lept on him, its claws digging into his flesh, Paul realized he deserved to die this way after taking so many of the big cat's brethren over the years—after all, fair was fair. 

The golden leaves shimmered in the dappled light as they rained down in a final autumnal flurry. 

 Bleary-eyed and half-asleep, it took her a few seconds to comprehend that there was something amiss in the room, an unearthly darkness near the closet that seemed to pulse with a rhythm that matched her steadily increasing heartbeat. 

It was insidious, malignant, as it slowly crept through our lives leaving a trail of slime that coated everything in its path and transformed those who came into contact with it into unrecognizable automatons. 

 "Winter be damned," he thought, "for the fall is more than worth the freezing days ahead."

 Lonely and looking for a drop of human kindness, Ken went online, accidentally discovering (thanks to Google's algorithms) how to turn his hurt into hate, and another extremist was born. 

Once, when Doug was young, he was lost in a deep fog while out delivering newspapers and convinced himself he'd died and was in some sort of netherworld, and now, years later, he realized he'd never really shaken that feeling.  

She was drawn to damaged people as if by gravitational necessity. 

 A faded photo of a night barely remembered moldered away in the bottom of a box waiting to be rediscovered. 

                                                                    The truth is

                                                    the truth is             the truth is

                                                                    is the truth?

 "The choice is yours," the professor said as he scanned the classroom, "you can spend your life creating or you can spend your life consuming."

Barry only understood bullets or bribes. 

 The president was just one symptom in the nation's disease that had been festering for generations. 

The years and distance floated away on cigarette smoke and sipping whiskey. 

 Memories pervaded the space, marked it, like the deep-rooted scent in the couch with its sun-stained throw pillows or the chair whose shape had been molded by the heavy body that once sat there. 

 And just like that, the worst year of her life was over. 

 It was a killer hoax. 

We're all biological weapons.