“GOD FORGIVE ME, I HATE CRITICS!”
With sweat stinging his eyes, Johnny used the claw end of the hammer to tear open one of the ANFO bags. He tilted the slit over the tiny hole, spread the cloth, and poured through one cupped, bloody hand. The red light was obliterated at once, as if the thing down there feared it might inadvertently set off the charge itself.
“You can’t!” it screamed, its voice muffled now—but Johnny heard it clearly enough in his head, just the same. “You can’t, damn you! An lah! An lah! Os dam! You bastard!”
An lah yourself, Johnny thought. And a big fat can de lach in the bargain.
The first bag was empty. Johnny could see dim whiteness in the hole where there had been only black and pulsing red before. The gullet leading back to Tak’s world . . . or plane . . . or dimension . . . wasn’t that long, then. Not in physical terms of measurement. And was the pain in his back and legs less?
Maybe I’ve just gone numb, he thought. Not a new state for me, actually.
He grabbed the second bag of ANFO and saw one entire side of it was sopped through with his blood. He felt a growing weakness to go along with the fog in his head. Had to be quick now. Had to go like the wind.
He tore open the second bag with the hammer’s claw, trying to steel himself against the shrieks in his head; Tak had lapsed entirely into that other language now.
He turned the bag over the hole and watched ANFO pellets pour out. The whiteness grew brighter as the gullet filled. By the time the bag was empty, the top layer of pellets was only three inches or so down.
Just room enough, Johnny thought.
He became aware that a stillness had fallen here in the well, and in the an tak above; there was only that faint whispering, which could have been the calling of ghosts that had been penned up in here ever since the twenty-first of September, 1859.
If so, he intended to give them their parole.
He fumbled in the pocket of his chaps for what seemed an age, fighting the fog that wanted to blur his thoughts, fighting his own growing weakness. At last his fingers touched something, slipped away, came back, touched it again, grasped it, brought it out.
A fat green shotgun shell.
Johnny slipped it into the eyehole at the bottom of the ini, and wasn’t surprised to find it was a perfect fit, its blunt circular top seated firmly against the ANFO pellets.
“You’re primed, you bastard,” he croaked.
No, a voice whispered in his head. No, you dare not.
Johnny looked at the brass circlet plugging the hole at the bottom of the ini. He gripped the handle of the hammer, his strength flagging badly now, and thought of what the cop had told him just before he stuck him in the back of the cruiser. You’re a sorry excuse for a writer, the cop had said. You’re a sorry excuse for a man, too.
Johnny shoved the helmet off with the heel of his free left hand. He was laughing again as he raised the hammer high above his head, and laughing as he brought it down squarely on the base of the shell.
“GOD FORGIVE ME, I HATE CRITICS!”
