All horrors have followed the same course, getting worse and worse and forcing you into a kind of bottleneck till, at the very moment when you thought you must be crushed, behold!  you were out of the narrows and all was suddenly well.  The extraction hurt more and more and then the tooth was out.  The dream became a nightmare and then you woke.  You die and die and then you are beyond death.

Do not be deceived, Wormwood.  Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.