If he returns it to her, she will then win her freedom. She will not be free of the spirits until she gives a heart to the man she loves. The mercenaries give chase, and Marianne falls through the ice into a freezing river where she is visited by ghostly spirits who demand she pay for her sins by sculpting “hearts” for people. They begin to burn the already Burned Man at the stake, but Marianne shoots the Burned Man in the heart to put him out of the misery of being burned alive. Unfortunately, the mercenaries discover the three of them and kill Brandeis. The pair encounters Brandeis, a friend of the Burned Man, who is from the same troop and wishes to escape. Meanwhile, the Burned Man is wanted as a deserter for escaping his troop of mercenaries. They fall in love, leave the monastery, get married, and Marianne becomes pregnant. While the nuns believe the man will die, Marianne is able to nurse him back to relative health. Therefore, everything had been burned except, ironically, where the Inferno lay. The man had been hit with a burning arrow which struck a copy of Dante’s Inferno which the man kept over his heart. When Marianne has grown into a young woman, a mercenary arrives at the monastery with burns covering his body except for a rectangle over his heart. The nuns raise Marianne to be a nun herself and soon the child begins to show extraordinary gifts, such as the ability to speak languages she’s never heard before. The first of which takes place at the German monastery where Marianne is left as a baby. Marianne tells a number of stories about her supposed history stretching back centuries. The affection between them grows until they decide to move in with one another. Nevertheless, the man likes Marianne’s company enough to entertain her increasingly bizarre notions. The man also believes she may be schizophrenic because she insists that the two of them were friends five centuries ago, which the man believes is impossible. She is a sculptor who suffers from manic depression. His suicidal thoughts subside, however, after meeting a woman in the hospital named Marianne Engel. Eventually, he decides to commit suicide. Now a burn victim and a drug addict whose grip on reality is beginning to slip, the man begins to question whether it’s worth it to go on living. He also continues to hallucinate and possesses strange ideas about his body: for instance, in his mind there is a snake that has made a home in the man’s spinal cord. In the process of recovering in a hospital, he is administered morphine for his pain and, before long, he is addicted to the drug. Unfortunately, the man now has burns over a significant portion of his body. The body of water is deep enough to extinguish the flames but not so deep that he drowns. He accepts that he is going to die, but then suddenly his life is saved after the car teeters into a nearby body of water. The man survives the fall, but his car ignites on fire. In a panic over the arrow attack, he swerves off the road and his car plummets into a ravine below. He believes that people are shooting a massive number of arrows at his car while he drives. When he first arrives in the book, he is hallucinating while driving as a result of having consumed alcohol and a number of drugs. We learn that he is an atheist and also a former actor in hardcore pornographic films. At the beginning of the book, the reader meets an unnamed protagonist. Published in 2008, it tells two stories in two different time-frames: One concerns a former porn star at the end of his rope, while the other takes place at a Fourteenth Century monastery in Germany. The Gargoyle is the debut novel by Canadian novelist Andrew Davidson.
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