At length the robbers convene in the front vestibule with the feet of the mantis sharded in ornamenting and the squat halfplumaged like some molested pigeon. The kid stands above them on the landing. He is laughing. He was baptized in blood and blood alone and now stands half finished conducting the selfsame sacrament upon these wretched initiates.

Ye guys give up? he queries.

Or ye thirsty fer more?

They are parched. They sprint up the stair like giddy Sunday schoolers to the pulpit, bludgeoned by loaded cans of paint swung from the handrail upon their skulls. Each by each they fall and lay crucified against the wooden slats, hand to hand, married in their mutual atrocity. Again they storm the stair, this time gaining the head. They trip on a planted wire but the mantis reaches out and claws the kid’s foot. Suddenly he spies a small and hirsute fugitive meddling about the attic step which he clutches and places on his combatant’s face. The mantis shrieks and the kid flees to the attic and the spider scurries to the squat’s chest where the mantis lowers a crowbar across his heart.

The kid can smell his reckoning now. The moon is risen full. He exits the attic window across a suspended cable to a wigwam in the trees. The robbers have gained him again and attempt the crossing but the kid won’t give and exhibits a pair of hedgeshears. From what deep well was spawned this genius? Does he not mete out apposite verdicts? With the wise indifference of a middle-aged cow he cuts through the cable and the fools go tumbling downward back upon the hovel face like misstepped trapeze folk. Again the kid implores them and runs to a neighboring shanty, stealing through the basement. Inside is flooded, seems to have been flooded for all time. He runs up the stair and swings wide the door clear into the arms of his forsworn antagonists.

Heya pal!

They lift the kid by his blood-dimmed sweater and hang him on a coatrack. Madness on their faces. The mantis gone moronic. The squat’s tonsured head like some wardfled lobotomite.

What are we goin to do to em?

We goin to burn his head with a blowtorch.

Smash’n his face with an iron.

First thing I aim is to bite off each his’n fingers.

The squat grabs his hands, they are chafed to the raw and cold. The hands of some atavistic creature of darkness. He opens his mouth with the gold tooth since vanquished and draws the kid’s fingers toward his stinking maw when the man with the shovel flashes from behind and wrecks down that eponymic instrument straight upon the squat’s bald head with seraphimic fury. Again he heaves up and strikes the mantis flush like so, a prophecy consummated, the rites all ended, all time vindicated in that absolute judgment. In a moment the sheriff arrives and the robbers are packed in cars and driven off to whatever godforsaken destiny next awaits them.

The kid watches from the window and catches the squat’s eye and waves. A grin cuts across his djinnish face and he laughs. The great gloom of the world is for him an hysterical vaudeville. He laughs again. He laughs so hard he pisses himself, shits himself, his trousers are a bog teemed with alien fish and toad. He vomits from the stench. He laughs like the untold billions before him who laughed in the endless desert and from dark high places and crawling up out of seaweed water. Son of Man, child of God.

channeling the spirit of Sini

_________________
O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

Jordan Hall gets the sini-credit. Thought it fun to read it blind before knowing what it is you're reading.

Couldn't stand that movie...this didn't help

_________________

What about Uncle Buck?