There was no need to piss in the corner, anyway. He would just raise the toilet seat lid with one hand, aim with the other, and let fly. Of course, given the Port-O-San’s new configuration, that would mean pissing horizontally instead of at a downward-pointing angle. The current throb in his bladder suggested that would be absolutely no problem. Of course the final squirt or two would probably go on the floor, but-

“But thems are the fortunes of war,” he said, and surprised himself with a croaky laugh. “And as far as the toilet seat goes…fuck holding it up. I can do better than that.”

He was no Mr. Hercules, but both the half-ajar toilet seat and the flanges holding it to the bench were plastic-the seat and ring black, the flanges white. This whole goddam box was really just a cheap plastic prefab job, you didn’t have to be a big-time construction contractor to see that, and unlike the walls and the door, there was no cladding on the seat and its fastenings. He thought he could tear it off pretty easily, and if he could he would-if only to vent some of his anger and terror.

Curtis seized the seat and lifted it, meaning to grip the ring just beneath and pull sideways. Instead he paused, looking through the circular hole and into the tank beneath, trying to make sense of what he saw.

It looked like a thin seam of daylight.

He looked at this with perplexity into which hope came stealing slowly-not dawning, exactly, but seeming to rise through his sweaty, ordure-streaked skin. At first he thought it was either a swatch of fluorescent paint or an out-and-out optical illusion. This latter idea was reinforced when the line of light began to fade away. Little…less…least…

But then, just before it could disappear completely, it began to brighten again, a line of light so brilliant he could see it floating behind his lids when he closed his eyes.

That’s sunlight. The bottom of the toilet-what was the bottom before Grunwald tipped it over-is facing east, where the sun just rose.

And when it faded?

“Sun went behind a cloud,” he said, and shoved his sweat-clumped hair back from his forehead with the hand not holding the toilet seat. “Now it’s out again.”

He examined this idea for the deadly pollution of wishful thinking and found none. The evidence was before his eyes: sunlight shining through a thin crack in the bottom of the Port-O-San’s holding tank. Or perhaps it was a split. If he could get in there and widen that split, that glowing aperture into the outside world-

Don’t count on it.

And to get to it, he would have to-

Impossible, he thought. If you’re thinking of wriggling into the holding tank through the toilet seat-like Alice into some shit-splattered Wonderland-think again. Maybe if you were the skinny kid you used to be, but that kid was thirty-five years ago.

That was true. But he was still slim-he supposed his daily bicycle rides were mostly responsible for that-and the thing was, he thought he could wriggle in through the hole under the toilet seat’s ring. It might not even be that tough.

What about getting back out?

Well…if he could do something about that seam of light, maybe he wouldn’t have to leave the same way he went in.

“Assuming I can even get in,” he said. His empty stomach was suddenly full of butterflies, and for the first time since arriving here at scenic Durkin Grove Village, he felt an urge to gag himself. He would be able to think more clearly about this if he just stuck his fingers down his throat and-

“No,” he said curtly, and yanked the toilet seat and ring sideways with his left hand. The flanges creaked but didn’t let go. He applied his other hand to the task. His hair fell back down on his forehead, and he gave an impatient snap of his head to flop it aside. He yanked again. The seat and ring held a moment longer, then tore free. One of the two white plastic dowels fell into the waste tank. The other, cracked down the middle, spun across the door Curtis was kneeling on.

He tossed the seat and ring aside and peered into the tank, hands braced on the bench. The first whiff of the poisoned atmosphere down there caused him to recoil, wincing. He thought he’d gotten used to the smell (or numbed to it), but that wasn’t the case, at least not this close to the source. He wondered again when the damned thing had last been pumped.

Look on the bright side; it’s been a long time since it was used, too.

Maybe, probably, but Curtis wasn’t sure that made things any better. There was still a lot of stuff down there-a lot of crap down there, floating in whatever remained of the disinfected water. Dim as the light was, there was enough to be sure of that. Then there was the matter of getting back out again. He could probably do it-if he could go one way, he could almost certainly go the other-but it was all too easy to imagine how he’d look, a stinking creature being born from the ooze, not a mud-man but a shit-man.

The question was, did he have another choice?

Well, yes. He could sit here, trying to persuade himself that rescue probably would come after all. The cavalry, like in the last reel of an old western. Only he thought it was more likely that The Motherfucker would come back, wanting to make sure he was still…what had he said? Snug in his little housie. Something like that.

That decided him. He looked at the hole in the bench, the dark hole with its evil aroma drifting out, the dark hole with its one hopeful seam of light. A hope as thin as the light itself. He calculated. First his right arm, then his head. Left arm pressed against his body until he had wriggled in as far as his waist. Then, when his left arm was free…

Only what if he wasn’t able to get it free? He saw himself stuck, right arm in the tank, left arm pinned against his body, his midsection blocking the hole, blocking the air, dying a dog’s death, flailing at the sludge just below him while he strangled, the last thing he saw the mocking bright stitch that had lured him on.

He saw someone finding his body half-plugged into the toilet hole with his ass sticking up and his legs splayed, smeary brown sneaker prints stamped on the goddam toilet cubicle from his final dying kicks. He could hear someone-perhaps the IRS agent who was The Motherfucker’s bкte noire-saying “Holy shit, he must have dropped something really valuable down there.”

It was funny, but Curtis didn’t feel like laughing.

How long had he been kneeling there, peering into the tank? He didn’t know-his watch was back in his study, sitting by his computer’s mousepad-but the ache in his thighs suggested quite awhile. And the light had brightened considerably. The sun would be entirely over the horizon now, and soon his prison would once more turn into a steam room.

“Gotta go,” he said, and wiped sweat from his cheeks with the palms of his hands. “It’s the only thing.” But he paused again, because another thought had occurred to him.

What if there was a snake in there?

What if The Motherfucker, imagining that his witchly enemy might try this very thing, had put a snake in there? A copperhead, perhaps, for the time being fast asleep under a layer of cool human mud? A copperhead bite on the arm and he would die slowly and painfully, his arm swelling even as the temperature climbed. A bite from a coral snake would take him more quickly but even more painfully: his heart lunging, stopping, lunging again, then finally giving up.

There are no snakes in there. Bugs, maybe, but no snakes. You saw him, you heard him. He wasn’t thinking that far ahead. He was too sick, too crazy.

Perhaps, perhaps not. You couldn’t really gauge crazy people, could you? They were wild cards.

“Deuces and jacks, man with the axe, natural sevens take all,” Curtis said. The Tao of The Motherfucker. All he knew for sure was that if he didn’t try it down there, he was almost certainly going to die up here. And in the end, a snakebite might be quicker and more merciful.