horse spaces

Bad, bad pony.

A preview of Sam Green’s image for the 2013 mass market reprint of Light.

Kearney and Anna stayed in New York for a week. Then Kearney saw the Shrander again. It was at Cathedral Parkway Station on 110th Street, during some kind of stalled time or hiatus, some empty part of the day. The platforms lay deserted, though you sensed that recently they had been full; the heavily-rivetted central girders marched off into the echoing dark in either direction. Kearney thought he heard something like the fluttering of a bird among them. When he looked up, there hung the Shrander, or anyway its head.

“Try and imagine,” he had once said to Anna, “something like a horse’s skull. Not a horse’s head,” he had cautioned her, “but its skull.” The skull of a horse looks nothing like the head at all, but like an enormous curved shears, or a bone beak whose two halves meet only at the tip. “Imagine,” he had told her, “a wicked, intelligent, purposeless-looking thing which apparently cannot speak. Even the shadow of that is more than you can bear to see.” It was more than he could bear to see. He looked up for an instant, then broke and ran.

Light, February 2013.

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