Nightmarish Creatures, Chapter 3 to 7

The thrill and intense terror of the novel is really entering the story world now and I am loving it. Jacob Marber, the dreadful and mysterious hunter who is made of black dust and shadow and moves in the darkness has been introduced. He’s a character who is very well hidden in the background of every other character’s perspective and is described as more of a “feeling” to the person afflicted by his ever watchful gaze and close stalking in the shadows when he is near by. All that is known of him so far is that he had worked at the Cairndale Institute, a place where the gifted children can be safe, have a home and train with their powers. These children are called “talents” and Marber is hunting them. When he left Cairndale, he was not the same Jacob he was before, as a deadly and darker essence had made its way into him. This essence, a “drughur”, is what gives Jacob his shadowy powers and seems to have monstrously alter him. The drughur is of the undead and what was originally hunting the talents and now that is it in Jacob, he hunts the children for it. With his new gifts from the drughur, Jacob brought the life back into a dead man named Walter, a man who also appears to have ties with Cairndale. Walter is more of a sickly creature than a man, with claws for fingers and long sharp teeth who has a disturbing attraction to baby fetuses in a jar and tearing into with his bare hands the abdomens and necks of people. There are voices in his head that talk to him and he is tracking down what Jacob calls “the hurting thing”. Whenever I am reading the book from Walter’s perspective and he is talking to the voices, he appears sweet and misunderstood, childlike, even when he is cutting throats with his fingers, making him all the more terrifying. When he is read from a different character’s perspective, Walter is spiderlike and unnerving, climbing the walls and hanging upside down. “And then there— on a shelf against the far wall— he saw them, his sweet ones, shining in the darkness.” The jar of fetuses are Walter’s “sweet ones”that he loves and they seem to be the voices that are talking to him. I would like to know more about the sweet ones and their power if they have any. These creatures, both Jacob and Walter, still have more to show me and reveal more of themselves and stories of Cairndale from the shadows. For now, they stay and prowl among the darkness.