Quotes of Interest:
“They call him the
Alchemist. His age is unguessed at. He was probably resident in this
fair city before gas lamps lit the streets. The Ephemerae, a secret
organisation dedicated to hunting down his master, called him simply
The Corrupt. From what you have said, we now know why.” pg 185
'The man was dressed in
a long, expensive-looking woollen overcoat. His thin black hair hung
in lank threads from his white, balding head. His face was pale, an
almost deathly white blotched with purple – but the most striking
thing about him were his eyes, which were flattened, fishlike discs,
bloodshot and yellowed.' pg 176
- Could illustrate the Alchemist, key character defeated in the book.
'By bobbing, flickering
torchlight two boys moved deeper into the cemetery, kicking through
shin-deep drifts of dead wet leaves. Skeletal trees, each a grave
mother with a clutch of mossy tombstones at her feet, loomed out of
the gloom every few steps. Above, a fuzzy moon was dimly visible in
cold haze, while at ground level, the fog was thicker, lapping around
the gravestones like a ghostly sea.' pg 4
-One of the first key scenes, the fog in the graveyard is very distinctive and symbolic.
'On that side of the
monument some more words were carved. David highlighted his parents’
names with his wavering torch beam; they were much fresher than the
names of his grandparents, with only a few specks of encroaching
lichen to soften their edges. Martin and Hope Carraway. These were
names that he recognised, names that had faces, faces that smiled at
him from the prison of memory.' pg 5
- Could illustrate the gravestone - although this might distract from the title of the book.
'The jars were about
twenty centimetres tall, and almost as wide, the widest point being
quite close to the neck. All three were covered in black lacquer and
had a cork lid with a string handle. They were decorated with
intricately marked golden bands, although the number and position of
the bands and the characters drawn on them varied between the jars.' pg 62
- The jars are key to the exorcism in the book and conjure interesting visual imagery.
'Inside, enveloped in a
bed of crushed red velvet, was a thin disc of translucent crystal,
which could have been a lens taken from a telescope but for the many
unpolished facets around its edge and its slightly irregular shape. A
small pentagonal area in the centre of the crystal had been finely
polished and could be peered through. David held the crystal close to
one of the photographs on the wall to see if it magnified the image.
It did not. It simply distorted it and broke apart the monochrome
into faint rainbows.' pg 31
- Shadow Lens - Interesting shape, unique, could be something that also alters the background colours/tones.
'They had come upon a
circle of standing stones. The circle itself was perhaps twenty
metres across, and was dominated at its centre by a giant doorway
made of three huge stones, two verticals and a lintel. A tree flanked
each of the uprights, and David could see that one of the trees was
still in leaf – a holly, he realised, while the other, larger tree
was either a winter skeleton or dead. Somewhere above the doorway the
two trees merged together into a single huge crown. Around this
central feature were several low slabs, and forming the perimeter of
the clearing was a series of pointed stones, some upright, some
leaning crazily.' pg 226
- The key scene which relates to the title of the book - the door into shadow. Holds a lot of significance.
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