I don’t know what it’s doing to me.

There is Loob and he’s just dead like mercifully if that makes any sense, which it does not. There is a hole in the middle of his face but no one tortured him. Rosa has been shot a bunch of times because obviously a woman who makes cakes really needs taking down hard. Thing and Thong are face-first on the sofa and someone walked a pistol up their spines from pretty close range so I’m guessing they surrendered and Leclerc’s people thought that was hilarious. I’m not going to go on because you can make it up you won’t get it wrong. The blood is like oil on water in the dark.

For a yawning moment I wonder if the farm house looks like this too and I will go there and find Doc dead and Charlie and Rex and even Saul and Lucille but no. You cannot just walk up on my Demons. They frighten me. They are strange and even quirky and bad things would happen in unpredictable ways: you would explode and pigs and doors would devour you. Strange diseases would melt you and then a walking knife collection would open your veins and a scary commando would blow you away and you would cease to exist across a whole range of media and your body would never be found. This—this is just—this is just to be unkind. François Leclerc is writing his name on the world. On Charlie.

Hell is other people they say and in this one instance it is exactly true.

—

I stare at hell for a while. I make myself look. Look Jack look. The world has this in it do you understand? The world has this man who did this. People pretend that it does not and they live and have children and if they are lucky they get old and die with their pretense intact but this is the truth right here. These are the rules. Anything you get that is not this was fought and won. A price was paid.

Someone puts a coffee cup against the back of my head and it goes phudd.

Phudd is the sound of the universe not coming to an end but for a moment there I really think I’m about to die and I just haven’t felt it yet and the only reason I do not lose control of my bladder is that I don’t have time before I realize it has not happened.

Phudd is the noise a shotgun-type weapon such as a Donnerbüchse makes when you pull the trigger and it does not fire. The hammer comes down on an empty cartridge and it goes:

Phudd.

Again. And again and—