There is a shadow by a rock, and he looks up to see an arrow, which lodges itself in his chest, and he falls, not forward onto his face, like good people, but on his back, like the damned. He is returned to Hell, as familiar as a dog’s vomit, as strange as dancing marshlights in a bog, as real and immediate and empty and wretched as itself. He could pull out his guts in loops and string them about the landscape, but it would afford him no relief.
Crookback is there. “Curse God,” he suggests.
He refuses, and is proud of his refusal.
“Curse God and give me the stone and you can get out of Hell,” Crookback says. “That’s all you have to do.”
“Why are you tempting me?” he asks. “Do you remember, on Earth? Are you trying different things?”
Crookback tears him to pieces and scatters the pieces in distant pits.