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less of his will; the only thing he clearly knew any longer was that he must find Salazar and kill him, kill him,  kill him, for all of eternity. Time flows differently down below – by his reckoning, he has been at it for more than two million years now, if I’ve done the sums right. The deeper you get, the more ages seem to go by while a single year passes in the world of the living. My customer has probably lived through a hundred years of agony while you’ve been nibbling on that toast. Are you going to eat that other slice?’ He took it without waiting for an answer, and then instead of eating it, busied his hands by rolling it into rather crumbly bread pills.
    ‘So where is your – er – customer now?’
    ‘Fourteen thousand, three hundred and sixty-six levels down,’ said Flivverpuff, beaming with professional pride. ‘There is nothing down there but a featureless plain of dull grey rock, as bare as a billiard table with the nap worn off. And in the middle of that plain there is a bit of flattish slate, strangely eroded, which is all that remains of Salazar. And on the slate is a rounded stone, such as you might find in a riverbed; which is my customer. And he has just enough life left, just enough will, to rock himself back and forth on his rounded underside, once a day or thereabouts. And every day he comes down on the stone that was Salazar like the world’s feeblest hammer:  Tap… Tap… Tap.  And when I last looked in on him, an hour ago by your time, a thousand years by his, there was a hairline crack in the stone that was Salazar, and I confidently expect him to crumble before the aeon is out.
    ‘And  that, my friend, is why  we don’t meddle with vengeance ourselves. We serve it to the customers, cold; but don’t you fear, that is one poison that never passes  our lips. “Vengeance is mine, saith the—” Well, you know who I mean; and in my opinion, he can have it, for he’s the only one who can digest it. When anybody else tries,  it digests  them. Thank you, I prefer to have someone else at the bottom of the food chain.’
     

Kundenschmerz
    The late great Raphael Aloysius Lafferty wrote a large number of tall stories, some with the flavour of science fiction, some of fantasy, some with a taste all of their own. What they had in common, I suppose, was a line of descent from the great American tradition of the tall tale, heavily altered in passing through Lafferty’s zany and fecund brain. A perceptive critic once said that Lafferty was sui generis; his tales could not be classified as this or that genre of fiction, and perhaps it was best simply to call them lafferties.
    Once in a long while, I come up with an idea that fouls up the normal classification systems. I conclude this little book with two of these. They have some of the trappings of science fiction, and some of the matter of fantasy, and some strange quiddity straight from the Muse that sent them, I suppose. I flatter myself, but perhaps not unduly, by thinking they may be worthy to be classified as lafferties, too.
     
    [Sender’s address redacted]
    14 November 20xx
    Customer Service Dept.
    Leibniz Ideenfabrik AG
    Herrenhäuser Straße 4
    30419 Hannover
    Germany
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