"... I never turned; it was enough to feel them all there without looking into their flat grey faces with hating eyes. I wish you were all dead, I th… - Shirley Jackson

In my own experience, contacts with the big world outside the typewriter are puzzling and terrifying; I don’t think I like reality very much. Principally, I don’t understand people outside; people in books are sensible and reasonable, but outside there is no predicting what they will do.

All of the village was of a piece, a time, and a style; it was as though the people needed the ugliness of the village, and fed on it. The houses and the stores seemed to have been set up in contemptuous haste to provide shelter for the drab and the unpleasant, and the Rochester house and the Blackwood house and even the town hall had been brought here perhaps accidentally from some far lovely country where people lived with grace. Perhaps the fine houses had been captured — perhaps as punishment for the Rochesters and the Blackwoods and their secret bad hearts? — and were held prisoner in the village; perhaps their slow rot was a sign of the ugliness of the villagers.

Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.