This was someone’s email sig, no attribution. It got stuck in my head because its…well…creepy and disturbing. Don’t know what that says about me as a person. Anyways, they didn’t know where it was from (it was generated by one of those AutoQuote programs), so if someone here can track this down, I will FedEx a cookie to them. No lie!
“Listen: you can hear the screaming. Three children are trapped in an elevator with Bobby-Joe McCann. Harold Smith prowls the dog’s home, a tire iron clutched in his bloodied fist. Maude Carillon screams with laughter as the flame devours the geriatric ward. Listen. Listen: you can hear the sobbing. On the freeway helpless weeping comes from the crash-sculpture of twisted, blistering metal, burning rubber, shattered glass. In the streets of New York, a group of fundamentalists know that this is the Armageddon; and they are still here, trapped on the earth. Bereft of their Rapture they weep for their abandonment by a suddenly distant God. In the radio room Nan Fowler knows she has no more ambulances to send, and the calls just won’t stop coming in. Listen. Listen to the anguish of a world in which the bad things are coming out of the dark places. Listen to a world in pain. Listen. You can hear it.”
My immediate thought is that it’s from Sandman, when Dr. Dee steals his little Dreamstone doohickey.
Confirmation.
This quote can be found in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. It’s in the first trade paperback- Preludes and Nocturnes. The specific comic is Sound and Fury. In the trade paperback, it’s on pages 185-186. The publisher is DC Comics Vertigo.
That particular sequence of the series is a bit dark for my taste… it almost turned me off the whole thing, but I kept on, thankfully.
Anyway, highest recommendation to the Sandman. It’s a marvelous comic, and anything of Gaiman’s is amazing.
Oh, the quote is from a passage where a psychopath (Dr. Dee) steals the Dreamstone from the Sandman (Dream) and uses it to wreak havoc on the world. In the part right before this sequence, he tortures a bunch of people to death in a diner. It’s absolutely more creepy than any scary movie I’ve ever seen- cuts right into the darkness of humanity, IMHO. The whole series is fairly dark, but that is where it gets the most gory. The individual issues vary by price, but the trade paperbacks are from 20-30 dollars American.
Excellent! A tired Plavacek can go to sleep now. 
(Ironic that something from Sandman causes lack of sleep…)
To whom shall I address the cookie? ;j
Lux, do you feel like splitting it? I don’t think I would have found it right away if you hadn’t pointed out what it sounded like.
Although, on second though, give a donation to a local food bank. I don’t need any more cookies.