The genius of the hole: No matter how long you spend climbing out, you can still fall back down in an instant.

Just when you thought you had reached the deepest depths of horror, it suddenly got worse. How to turn off that small voice inside your head that started to whisper that you should be glad… that now, if not before, your revenge was justifiable on any conceivable moral scale. That small voice proved, beyond any doubt, that I was damned.

The sun went down with practiced bravado. Twilight crawled across the sky, laden with foreboding. I didn’t like the way the show started. But they had given me the best seat in the house. Front row center.

They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation mark to everything that had led to this point. I released my finger from the trigger. And then it was over.