Mister B. Gone
Clive Barker
The long-awaited return of the great master of horror. Mister B. Gone is Barker's shockingly bone-chilling discovery of a never-before-published demonic ‘memoir’ penned in the year 1438, when it was printed – one copy only – and then buried until now by an assistant who worked for the inventor of the printing press, Johannes Gutenberg.This bone-chilling novel, in which a medieval devil speaks directly to his reader—his tone murderous one moment, seductive the next—is a never-before-published memoir allegedly penned in the year 1438.The demon has embedded himself in the very words of this tale of terror, turning the book itself into a dangerous object, laced with menace only too ready to break free and exert its power.A brilliant and truly unsettling tour de force of the supernatural, Mister B. Gone escorts the reader on an intimate and revelatory journey to uncover the shocking truth of the battle between Good and Evil.
Mister B. Gone
CLIVE BARKER
For Emilian David Armstrong With my love and thanks to Pamela Robinson
Contents
Title Page (#ueb281537-3a07-5c17-816c-a51a206985e5)Dedication (#u88fe0c57-c36a-582d-b0dc-42245d0291af)Burn This Book (#u0936b15f-125a-50ee-9504-a7694cec6383)Also By Clive Barker (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
BURN THIS BOOK.
Go on. Quickly, while there’s still time. Burn it. Don’t look at another word. Did you hear me? Not. One. More. Word.
Why are you waiting? It’s not that difficult. Just stop reading and burn the book. It’s for your own good, believe me. No, I can’t explain why. We don’t have time for explanations. Every syllable that you let your eyes wander over gets you into more and more trouble. And when I say trouble, I mean things so terrifying your sanity won’t hold once you see them, feel them. You’ll go mad. Become a living blank, all that you ever were wiped away, because you wouldn’t do one simple thing. Burn this book.
It doesn’t matter if you spent your last dollar buying it. No, and it doesn’t matter if it was a gift from somebody you love. Believe me, friend, you should set fire to this book right now, or you’ll regret the consequences.
Go on. What are you waiting for? You don’t have a light? Ask somebody. Beg them. It’s a matter of light and death Believe me! Will you please believe me? A little runt of a book like this isn’t worth risking madness and eternal damnation over. Well, is it? No, of course not. So burn it. Now! Don’t let your eyes travel any further. Just stop HERE.
Oh God! You’re still reading? What is it? You think this is some silly little joke I’m playing? Trust me, it isn’t. I know, I know, you’re thinking it’s just a book filled with words, like any other book. And what are words? Black marks on white paper. How much harm could there be in something so simple? If I had ten hundred years to answer that question I would barely scratch the surface of the monstrous deeds the words in this book could be used to instigate and inflame. But we don’t have ten hundred years. We don’t even have ten hours, ten minutes. You’re just going to have to trust me. Here, I’ll make it as simple as possible for you:
This book will do you harm beyond description unless you do as I’masking you to.
You can do it. Just stop reading …
Now.
What’s the problem? Why are you still reading? Is it because you don’t know who I am, or what? I suppose I can hardly blame you. If I had picked up a book and found somebody inside it, talking at me the way I’m talking at you, I’d probably be a little wary too.
What can I say that’ll make you believe me? I’ve never been one of those golden-tongued types. You know, the ones who always have the perfect words for every situation. I used to listen to them when I was just a little demon and——
Hell and Demonation! I let that slip without meaning to. About me being a demon, I mean. Oh well, it’s done. You were bound to figure it out for yourself sooner or later.
Yeah, I’m a demon. My full name is Jakabok Botch. I used to know what that meant, but I’ve forgotten. I used to. I’ve been a prisoner of these pages, trapped in the words you’re reading right now and left in darkness most of the time, while the book sat somewhere through the passage of many centuries in a pile of books nobody ever opened. All the while I’d think about how happy, how grateful, I’d be when somebody finally opened the book. This is my memoir, you see. Or, if you will, my confessional. A portrait of Jakabok Botch.
I don’t mean portrait literally. There aren’t any pictures in these pages. Which is probably a good thing, because I’m not a pretty sight to look at. At least I wasn’t the last time I looked.
And that was a long, long time ago. When I was young and afraid. Of what, you ask? Of my father, Pappy Gatmuss. He worked at the furnaces in Hell and when he got home from the night shift he would have such a temper me and my sister, Charyat, would hide from him. She was a year and two months younger than me, and for some reason if my father caught her he would beat and beat her and not be satisfied until she was sobbing and snotty and begging him to stop. So I started to watch for him. About the time he’d be heading home, I’d climb up the drainpipe onto the roof out of our house and watch for him. I knew his walk [or his stagger, if he’d been drinking] the moment he turned the corner of our street. That gave me time to climb back down the pipe, find Charyat, and the two of us could find a safe place where we’d go until he’d done what he always did when he, drunk or sober, came home. He’d beat our mother. Sometimes with his bare hands, but as he got older with one of the tools from his workbag, which he always brought home with him. She wouldn’t ever scream or cry, which only made him angrier.
I asked her once very quietly why she never made any noise when my father hit her. She looked up at me. She was on her knees at the time trying to get the toilet unclogged and the stink was terrible; the little room full of ecstatic flies. She said: “I would never give him the satisfaction of knowing he had hurt me.”
Thirteen words. That was all she had to say on the subject. But she poured into those words so much hatred and rage that it was a wonder that the walls didn’t crack and bring the house down on our heads. But something worse happened. My father heard.
How he sniffed out what we were saying I do not know to this day. I suspect he had buzzing tell-tales amongst the flies. I don’t remember much of what he did to us, except for his pushing my head into the unclogged toilet——that I do remember. His face is also inscribed on my memory.
Oh Demonation, he was ugly! At the best of times the sight of him was enough to make children run away screaming, and old devils clutch at their hearts and drop down dead. It was as if every sin he’d ever committed had left its mark on his face. His eyes were small, the flesh around them puffy and bruised. His mouth was wide, like a toad’s mouth, his teeth stained yellowish-brown and pointed, like the teeth of a feral animal. He stank like an animal too, like a very old, very dead animal.
So that was the family. Momma, Pappy Gatmuss, Charyat, and me. I didn’t have any friends. Demons my age didn’t want to be seen with me. I was an embarrassment, coming from such a messed-up family. They’d throw stones at me, to drive me away, or excrement. So I kept myself from becoming a lunatic by writing down all my frustrations on anything that would carry a mark——paper, wood, even bits of linen——which I kept hidden under a loose floorboard in my room. I poured everything into those pages. It was the first time I understood the power of what you’re looking at right now. Words. I found over time that if I wrote on my pages all the things I wished I could do to the kids who humiliated me, or to Pappy Gatmuss [I had some fine ideas about how I would make him regret his brutalities], then the anger would not sting so much. As I got older and the girls I liked threw stones at me just like their brothers had only a few years before, I’d go back home and spend half the night writing about how I’d have my revenge one day. I filled page after page after page with all my plans and plots, until there were so many of them that I could barely fit them into my hidey-hole under the floorboard.
I should have thought of another place, a bigger place, to keep them safe, but I’d been using the same hole for so long I didn’t worry about it. Stupid, stupid! One day I get home from school and race upstairs only to find that all my secrets, my Pages of Vengeance, had been unearthed. They were heaped up in the middle of the room. I’d never risked taking them all out of their hiding place together, so this was the first time I’d seen all of them at once. There were so many of them. Hundreds. For a minute I was amazed, proud even, that I’d written so much.
Then my mother comes in, with such a look of fury on her face I knew I was going to get the beating of my life for this.
“You are a selfish, vicious, horrible creature,” she said to me. “And I wish you’d never been born.”
I tried to lie.
“It’s just a story I’m writing,” I told her. “I know there are real names in it right now, but they were only there until I could find something better.”
“I take it back,” my mother said, and for a second I thought what I’d said had worked. But no. “You’re a lying, selfish, vicious, horrible creature.” She took a big metal spoon from behind her back. “I’m going to beat you so hard you will never——never, doyou hear me?——waste your time inventing cruelties again!”
Her words brought another lie to mind. I thought: I’ll try it, why not? She’s going to beat me anyhow so what’s to lose? I said to her:
“I know what I am, Momma. I’m one of the Demonation. Maybe just a little one, but I’m still a Demon. Well? Aren’t I?”
She didn’t answer. So I went on. “And I thought we were supposed to be selfish and vicious and whatever else you said I was. I hear other kids talking about it all the time. The terrible things they’re going to do when they get out of school. The weapons they’re going to invent, and sell to Humankind. And the execution machines. That’s what I’d really like to do. I’d like to create the best execution machine that was ever——”
I stopped. Momma had a puzzled look on her face.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m just wondering how long I’m going to let you go on talking nonsense before I slap some sense into you. Execution machines! You don’t have the brains to make any such thing! And take the ends of your tails out of your mouth. You’ll prick your tongue.”
I took the tail tips, which I always chewed on when I was nervous, out from between my teeth, all the while trying to remember what I’d overheard other Demon kids saying about the art of killing people. “I’m going to invent the first mechanical disemboweler,” I said.
My mother’s eyes grew wide, more I think from the shock of hearing me speak such long words than from the notion itself.
“It’s going to have a huge wheel to unwind the condemned man’s guts. And I’m going to sell it to all the most fancy, civilized kings and princes of Europe. And you know what else?”
My mother’s expression didn’t alter. Not a flicker of her eye, or a twitch of her mouth. She just said, in a monotone: “I’m listening.”
“Yes! That’s right! Listening!”
“What?”
“People who pay for a good seat at an execution deserve to hear something better than a man screaming as he’s disemboweled. They need music!”
“Music.”
“Yes, music!” I said. I was completely besotted by the sound of my own voice now, not even certain what the next word out of my mouth was going to be, just trusting the inspiration of the moment. “Inside the great wheel there’ll be another machine that will play some pretty tunes to please the ladies, and the louder the man’s screams become the louder the music will play.”
She still looked at me without so much as a twitch. “You’ve really thought about this?”
“Yes.”
“And these writings of yours?”
“I was just noting down all the horrible thoughts in my head. For inspiration.”
My Momma studied me for what seemed like hours, searching every inch of my face as though she knew the word LIAR was written there somewhere. But finally, her scrutiny ceased and she said:
“You are a strange one, Jakabok.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” I asked her.
“It depends on whether you like strange children,” she replied.
“Do you?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“But I gave birth to you, so I suppose I have to take some of the responsibility.”
It was the sweetest thing she’d ever said. I might have shed a tear if I’d time, but she had orders for me.
“Take all these scrawlings of yours down to the bottom of the yard and burn them.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You can and you will!”
“But I’ve been writing them for years.”
“And they’ll all burn up in two minutes, which should teach you something about this World, Jakabok.”
“Like what?” I said, with a sour look on my face.
“That it’s a place where whatever you work for and care about is bound to be taken away from you sooner or later, and there isn’t a thing you can do about it.” For the first time since this interrogation had begun, she took her eyes off me. “I was beautiful once,” she said. “I know you can’t imagine that now, but I was. And then I married your father, and everything that was beautiful about me and the things that were all around me went up in smoke.” There was a long silence. Then her eyes slowly slid back in my direction. “Just like your pages will.”
I knew there was nothing I could say to her that would persuade her to let me keep my treasures. And I also knew that it was approaching the time that Pappy G. would be coming back from the Furnaces and that my situation would be a lot worse if he picked up any of my Revenge Stories, because all the most terrible things I’d invented I’d saved for him.
So I started to throw my beautiful precious pages into a large sack my mother had already laid beside them for this very purpose. Every now and then I would catch sight of a phrase I’d written, and with one glance I would instantly remember the circumstances which had caused me to write it, and how I’d felt when I’d scrawl the words down; whether I’d been so enraged that the pen had cracked under the pressure of my fingers, or so humiliated by something somebody had said that I’d been close to tears. The words were a part of me, part of my mind and memory, and here I was throwing them all——my Words, my precious words, along with whatever piece of me was attached to them——into a sack, like so much garbage.
Once in a while I thought of attempting to slip one of the special pages into my pocket. But my mother knew me too well. Not once did she take her eyes off me. She watched me fill up the sack, she followed me down the yard, step for step, and stood by while I upturned the sack, picking up those pages that had cartwheeled away from the others and tossing them back onto the main pile.
“I don’t have any matches.”
“Step aside, child,” she said.
I knew what was coming, and I stepped away quickly from the pile of pages. It was a wise move, because as I took my second step I heard my mother noisily hawking up a wad of phlegm. I glanced back as she spat the wad towards my precious journals. If she’d simply been spitting on them that wouldn’t have been so bad, but my mother came from a long line of powerful pyrophantics. As the phlegm flew from her lips, it brightened and burst into flames, dropping with horrible accuracy into the chaotic pile of journals.
If there’d simply been a match tossed onto my young life’s work it would have burned black from end to end without igniting a page. But it was my mother’s fire that landed upon the journals and as it struck them it threw out streamers of flame in all directions. One moment I was looking at the pages onto which I had poured all the anger and the cruelty I had cooked up inside me. The next moment those same pages were being consumed, as my mother’s fire ate through the paper.
I was still standing just a step and a half away from the bonfire, and the heat was something ferocious, but I didn’t want to move away from it, even though my little mustache, which I’d been carefully nurturing [it was my first] shriveled up in the heat, the smell making my sinuses sting and my eyes water. There was no way in Demonation I was going to let my mother see tears on my face. I raised my hand to quickly wipe them off, but I needn’t have bothered. The heat had evaporated them.
No doubt had my face been——like yours——covered in tender skin instead of scales, it would have blistered as the fire continued to consume my journals. But my scales protected me for a little while at least. Then it began to feel as though my face were frying. I still didn’t move. I wanted to be as close to my beloved words as I could be. I just stayed where I was, watching the fire do its work. It had a systematic way of unmaking each of the books page by page, burning away one to expose the one beneath, which was then quickly consumed in its turn, giving me glimpses of death-machines and revenges I had written about before the fire took them too.
Still I stood there, inhaling the searing air, my head filling up with visions of the horrors I had conjured up on those pages; vast creations that were designed to make every one of my enemies [which is to say everyone I knew, for I liked no one] a death as long and painful as I could make it. I wasn’t even aware of my mother’s presence now. I was just staring into the fire, my heart hammering in my chest because I was so close to the heat; my head, despite the weight of atrocities that was filling it up, strangely light.
And then:
“Jakabok!”
I was still sufficiently in charge of my thoughts to recognize my name and the voice that spoke it. I reluctantly took my eyes off the cremation and looked up through the heat-crazed air towards Pappy Gatmuss. I could tell his temper was not good by the motion of his two tails, which were standing straight up from their root above his buttocks, wrapping themselves around one another, then unwrapping, all at great speed and with such force behind their intertwining it was as though each tail wanted to squeeze the other until it burst.
I inherited the rare double-tail by the way. That was one of the two gifts he gave me. But I wasn’t feeling any great measure of gratitude now, as he came lumbering towards the fire, yelling at my mother as he did so, demanding to know what she was doing making bonfires, and what was she burning anyway? I didn’t hear my mother’s response. The blood in my head was whining now so loud that it was all I could hear. Their fights and rages could go on for hours sometimes, so I cautiously returned my gaze to the fire, which, thanks to the sheer volume of paper that was being consumed, still blazed as furiously as ever.
I had been breathing short shallow breaths for several minutes now, while my heart beat a wild tattoo. Now my consciousness fluttered like a candle flame in a high wind; any moment, I knew, it would go out. I didn’t care. I felt strangely removed from everything now, as though none of this was really happening.
Then, without any warning, my legs gave way, and I fainted, falling facedown——
into——
the——
fire.
So there you are. Satisfied now? I have never told anybody that story in the many hundreds of years since it happened. But I’ve told it to you now, just so you’d see how I feel about books. Why I need to see them burned.
It’s not hard to understand, is it? I was a little demon-child who saw my work go up in flames. It wasn’t fair. Why did I have to lose my chance to tell my story when hundreds of others with much duller tales to tell have their books in print all the time? I know the kind of lives authors get to live. Up in the morning, doesn’t matter how late, stumbles to his desk without bothering to bathe, then he sits down, lights up a cigar, drinks his sweet tea, and writes whatever rubbish comes into his head. What a life! I could have had a life like that if my first masterwork had not been burned in front of me. And I have great works in me. Works to make Heaven weep and Hell repent. But did I get to write them, to pour my soul onto the pages? No.
Instead, I’m a prisoner between the covers of this squalid little volume, with only one request to make of some compassionate soul:
Burn This Book.
No, no, and still no.
Why are you hesitating? Do you think you’ll find some titillating details about the Demonation in here? Something depraved or salacious, like the nonsense you’ve read in other books about the World Below [Hell, if you prefer]? Most of that stuff is invented. You do know that, don’t you? It’s just bits of gossip and scraps of superstition mixed up by some greedy author who knows nothing about the Demonation: nothing.
Are you wondering how I know what’s being passed off as the truth these days? Well, I’m not completely without friends from the old days. We speak, mind to mind, when conditions permit. Like any prisoner locked up in solitary confinement I still manage to get news. Not much. But enough to keep me sane.
I’m the real thing, you see. Unlike the impostors who pass themselves off as darkness incarnate, I am that darkness. And if I had a chance to escape this paper prison I would cause such anguish and shed such seas of blood the name Jakabok Botch would have stood as the very epitome of evil.
I was——no, I am——the sworn enemy of mankind. And I take that enmity very seriously. When I was free I did all that I could to cause pain, without regard to the innocence or guilt of the human soul I was damning. The things I did! It would take another book for me to list the atrocities I was happily responsible for. The violations of holy places, and more often than not the accompanying violation of whomever was taking care of the place. Often these poor deluded devotees, thinking the image of their Savior in extremis possessed the power to drive me away, would advance upon me, wielding a crucifix and telling me to be gone.
It never worked, of course. And oh, how they would scream and beg as I pulled them into my embrace. I am, needless to say, a creature of marvelous ugliness. The front of my body from the top of my head to those precious parts between my legs had been seared so badly in the fire into which I had fallen——and where Pappy Gatmuss had left me to burn for a minute or two while he slapped my mother around——that my reptilian appearance had become a mass of keloid tissue, shiny and seared. My face was——still is——a chaos of bubbles, little hard red domes of flesh where I’d fried in my own fat. My eyes are two holes, without lashes or brows. So is my nose. All of them, eyeholes and nostrils, constantly run with grey-green mucus so that there isn’t a moment, day or night, when I don’t have rivulets of foul fluids running down my cheeks.
As to my mouth——of all my features, I wish I could possess my mouth again, just as it had been before the fire. I had my mother’s lips, generous below and above, and what kissing I had practiced, mainly on my hand or on a lonely pig, had convinced me that my lips would be the source of my good fortune. I would kiss with them, and lie with them; I would make victims and willing slaves of anyone my eyes desired, simply by talking a little, and following the talk with kisses, and the kisses with demands. And they’d melt into compliance, every one of them, happy to perform the most demeaning acts as long as I was there to reward them with a long, tongue-tied kiss when they were done.
But the fire didn’t spare my lips. It took them too, erasing them utterly. My mouth is now just a slot that I can barely open an inch because the scarred flesh around it is too solid.
Is it any wonder that I’m tired of my life? That I want it erased by fire? You’d want the same thing. So, in the name of empathy, burn this book. Do it for compassion’s sake, if you have the heart, or because you share my anger. There’s no saving me. I’m a lost cause, trapped forever between the covers of this book. So finish me.
Why the hesitation? I’ve done as I promised, haven’t I?
I’ve told you something about myself. Not everything, of course. Who could tell everything? But I have told you enough that I’m surely more than just words on a page, ordering you about. Oh yes, while I think of it, please allow me to apologize for that brutish, bullying way I started out. It’s something I inherited from Pappy G. and I’m not proud of it. It’s just that I’m impatient to have the flame licking these pages and burning up this book as soon as possible. I didn’t take account of your very human curiosity. But I hope I’ve satisfied that now.
So it remains only for you to find a flame and get this wretched business over with. I’m certain that will be a great relief to you and I assure you an even greater relief to me. The hard part’s over. All we need now is that little fire.
Come on, friend. I’ve unburdened myself; my confession is made. It’s over to you.
I’m waiting. Doing my best to be patient.
Indeed, I will go so far as to say that I’m being more patient right now than I’ve ever been in my life. Here we are on page 18 and I’ve trusted you with some of the most painful confessions I have ever made to anyone, simply so that you would know this wasn’t some fancy trick. It was a real and true account of what happened to me, which, were you ever to have seen me in the flesh, would be instantly verified. I am burned. Oh, how I am burned.
It’s a sign of your mercy that I’m really waiting for. And your courage, which I’ve somehow sensed from the beginning was like your mercy, a quality you possessed. It does take courage to set a flame to your first book, to defy the sickly wisdom of your elders and preserve words as though they were in some way precious.
Think of the absurdity of that! Is there anything in your world or mine, Above or Below, that is so available as words? If the preciousness of things is bound in some measure to their rarity, then how precious can the sounds we make, waking or sleeping, in infancy or senility, sane, mad, or simply trying on hats, be? There’s a surfeit of them. They spew from tongues and pens in their countless billions every day. Think of all that words express: the seductions, threats, demands, entreaties, prayers, curses, omens, proclamations, diagnoses, accusations, insinuations, testaments, judgments, reprieves, betrayals, laws, lies, and liberties. And so on, and on, words without end. Only when the last syllable has been spoken, whether it’s a joyous hallelujah or someone complaining about their bowels, only then is it that I think we can reasonably assume the world will have ended. Created with a word, and——who knows?——maybe destroyed by one. I know about destruction, friend. More than I care to tell. I’ve seen such things, such foul and unspeakable things …
Never mind. Just the flame, please.
What’s the delay? Oh wait. It isn’t that remark I made back there about knowing destruction that’s got you twitchy, is it? It is. You want to know what I’ve seen.
Why in Demonation can’t you be satisfied with what you’ve been given? Why do you always have to know more?
We had an agreement. At least I thought we did. I thought all you needed was a simple confession and in return you’d cremate me: ink, paper, and glue consumed in one merciful blaze.
But that’s not going to happen yet, is it?
Damn me for a fool. I shouldn’t have said anything about my knowledge of destruction. As soon as you heard that word your blood started to quicken.
Well …
I suppose it won’t hurt to tell you a little more, as long as we understand one another. I’ll give you just one more piece of my life and then we’re going to get this book cooked.
Yes?
All right, as long as we agree. There has to be an end to this or I’m going to start getting angry, and I could make things very unpleasant for you if I decided to do that. I can get this book to fly out of your hands and beat at your head ’til you’re bleeding from every hole in your head. You think I’m bluffing? Don’t tempt me. I’m not a complete fool. I half-expected that you’d want to hear a little bit more of my life. Don’t think it’s going to get bright and happy anytime soon. There was never a happy day in my whole life.
No, that’s a lie. I was happy on the road with Quitoon. But that was all so long ago I can barely remember the places we went, never mind our conversations. Why does my memory work in such irrational ways? It remembers all the words to some stupid song I sang when I was an infant, but I forget what happened to me yesterday. That said, there are some events that are still so painful, so life changing, that they stay intact, despite all attempts by my mind to erase them.
All right. I surrender, a little. I’ll tell you how I got from there to here. It’s not a pretty sequence of events, believe me. But once I’ve unburdened myself any doubts you still have about what I’ve asked you to do will be forgotten. You’ll burn the book when I’m finished. You will put me out of my misery, I swear.
So …
As is self-evident, I survived my fall into the fire and the minute or longer that Pappy Gatmuss left me to struggle there in my bed of flames. My skin, despite the toughness of my scales, melted and blistered while I attempted to get up. By the time Pappy G. caught hold of my tails, and unceremoniously dragged me out of the fire, then kicked me over, there was barely any life left in me. [I heard all this later from my mother. At the time I was mercifully unconscious.]
Pappy Gatmuss woke me up, however. He brought a pail of ice water from the house and drenched me. The shock of water dowsed the flames and brought me out of my faint in an instant. I sat up, gasping.
“Well look at you, boy,” Pappy Gatmuss said. “Aren’t you a sight to make a father weep?”
I looked down at my body, at the raw blistered and black flesh of my chest and belly.
Momma was yelling at Pappy. I didn’t hear all she said but she seemed to be accusing him of deliberately leaving me in the fire in the hopes of killing me. I left them arguing, and crawled away into the house, grabbing a big serrated knife out of the kitchen in case I had to later defend myself from Gatmuss. Then I went up the stairs to the mirror in my mother’s room and looked at my face. I should have prepared myself for the shock of what I saw, but I didn’t give myself time. I stared at the bubbling, melting masterwork of burns that my face had become, and spontaneously vomited at my own reflection.
I was very gently wiping the vomit off my chin when I heard Gatmuss’ yowl from the bottom of the stairs.
“Words, boy?” he yelled. “You were writing words about me?”
I peered over the banister, and saw the enraged behemoth below. He was carrying a few partially burned sheets covered with my scrawled writing. Obviously he’d plucked them from the fire, and had found some reference to himself. I knew my own work well enough to be certain that there was no mention of Gatmuss in any of those books that was not accompanied by clots of insulting adjectives. He was too stupid to know the meaning of “malodorous” and “heinous,” but he wasn’t so dense as to not be able to grasp the general tone of my feelings. I hated him with all my heart, and that hatred poured out of the pages he carried. He dragged his lumpen carcass up the stairs, calling to me as he came:
“I’m not a cretin, boy! I know what these here words mean. And I’m going to make you suffer for them, you hear me? I’m going to make a new fire and cook you in it, one minute for every bad word about me you wrote here. That’s a lot of words, boy. And a lot of cooking, you are going to be burned black, boy!”
I didn’t waste breath and time talking back at him. I had to get out of the house and into the darkened streets of our neighborhood, which was called the Ninth Circle. All the worst of Humankind’s damned——the souls that neither bribes nor beatings could control——lived by their wits in its parasite-infested wastelands.
The source of all parasitic life was the maze of refuse at the back of our house. In return for our occupancy of the house, which was in a state of near decrepitude, Pappy G. was responsible for keeping watch on the garbage heaps and to discipline any souls who in his opinion were deserving of punishment. The freedom to be cruel suited Pappy G. hugely, of course. He’d go out every night armed with a machete and a gun, ready to maim in the name of the law. Now as he came up after me it was with that same machete and gun. I had no doubt that he would kill me if [or more likely, when]he caught up with me. I knew I had no chance of out-running him on the streets, so throwing myself out the window [my body curiously indifferent to pain in its present state of shock] and heading for the steep-sided heaps of refuse, where I knew I could lose him in the endless canyons of trash, was my only option.
Pappy G. fired from the window I’d just jumped out of a minute or two after I’d started to climb the heap of trash, and then he fired again when I reached the top. Both bullets missed me, but not by much. If he managed to make the jump himself, and then closed the distance between us, he would shoot me, in the back, I knew, without giving the deed a second thought. And as I stumbled and rolled down the far side of the hill of stinking refuse, I thought to myself that if the choice was between dying out here, shot down by Pappy G., and being taken back to the house to be beaten and mocked, I would prefer the former.
It was a little early to be entertaining thoughts of death, however. Even though my burned body was emerging from its shocked state and starting to pain me, I was still nimble enough to move over the mounds of rotted food and discarded furniture with some speed, whereas Pappy G.’s sheer height and cumbersome body made the garbage heaps far more treacherous. Two or three times I lost all sight of him, and even dared believe I had slipped him. But Gatmuss had the instincts of a hunter. He tracked me through the chaos, up one slope and down another, the troughs getting deeper and the peaks higher, as I ventured farther from the house.
And I was slowing down. The effort of climbing the heaps of refuse was taking its toll, the garbage sliding away beneath my feet as I attempted to scramble up their ever-steeper slopes.
It was only a matter of time now, I knew, before the end came. So I decided to stop once I reached the summit of the pile I was climbing, and give Pappy G. a good clear shot of me. My body was fast approaching collapse, the muscles of my calves spasming so painfully I cried out, my hands and arms a mass of gashes from slitting my cooked flesh on the shards of glass and the raw edges of tin cans as I sought a handhold.
My mind was now made up. Once I reached the top of this hillock I would give up the chase and, keeping my back to Gatmuss so that he couldn’t see the despair upon my face and take some pleasure from it, I would await his bullet. With the decision made I felt curiously unencumbered and climbed easily up to my chosen death site.
Now all I had to do was——
Wait! What was that hanging in the air in the trench between this summit and the next? It looked to my weary eyes like two beautiful shanks of raw meat, with——could I believe what I was seeing?——cans of beer attached to each piece of meat.
I had heard stories of people who, lost in great deserts, seemed to see the very image of what they wanted most at that moment: a glittering pool of refreshing water, most likely, surrounded by date palms lush with ripe fruit. These mirages are the first sign that the wanderer is losing his grip on reality, I knew, because the faster he chases this phantom pool with its shady bower of fruit-laden trees, the faster it recedes from him.
Was I now completely crazy? I had to know. Forsaking the spot where I had intended to perish, I slid down the incline towards the place where the steak and beer hung, moving just a little on a creaking rope that disappeared into the darkness high above us. The closer I got, the more certain I became that this was not, as I’d feared, an illusion, but the real thing; a suspicion that was confirmed moments later when my salivating mouth closed round a nice lean portion of the steak. It was better than good, it was exceptional, the meat melting in my mouth. I opened the chilly can of beer, and raised it to my lipless mouth, which had dealt well with the challenge of biting into the steak and now had their hurts soothed by a bathing of cold beer.
I was silently thanking whatever kindly soul had left these refreshments to be found by a lost traveler when I heard a bellowing from Pappy G., and from the corner of my eye I saw him at the very spot I’d chosen to die.
“Leave some of that for me, boy!” he yelled, and having seemingly forgotten the enmity between us, so moved was he by the sight of the steak and beer, he came down the steep slope in great strides. As he did so he yelled:
“If you touch that other steak and beer, boy, I will kill you three times over, I swear!”
In truth, I had no intention of eating into the other steak. I’d eaten all I could. I was happy to nibble at my steak bone, which still had a hook around it, the hook attached to one of the two ropes that hung so closely together that I’d assumed they were one.
Now, however, with my stomach filled, I could afford to be inquisitive. This wasn’t a single rope holding both beer cans. There was a second rope, much darker than the bright yellow of the food provider, which hung innocently beside the others. Nothing I saw hung from it. My gaze followed it down past my shoulder, hand, leg, knee, and foot, only to find that it disappeared into the mass of garbage on which I stood.
I bent over at my hips, my fire-stiffened torso almost touching my legs, and went on searching for the continuation of the rope amongst the trash.
“You drop a bone, did you, idiot?” Pappy Gatmuss said, his words accompanied by a shower of spittle, gristle, and beer. “Don’t you take too much longer down there, you hear me? Just because you ordered me a steak and beer doesn’t mean … Oh wait! Ha! You stay right where you are, boy. I’m not going to put my cold gun in your ear to blow off your head. I’m going to put it in your rear and blow off your …”
“It’s a trap,” I said quietly.
“What ’ya talkin’ about?”
“The food. It’s bait. Somebody’s trying to catch——”
Before I could speak the syllable that would finish my sentence, my prophecy was proved.
The second rope, the dark stranger that had lingered so close to its bright yellow companion that had been almost invisible, was suddenly jerked eight or ten feet into the air, pulling the two dark ropes taut and hauling into view two nets, which were large enough and spread widely enough that whoever was fishing from Above was knowledgeable enough about the Underworld to know about the presence here of the remnants of the Demonation.
Seeing the immensity of the nets, I took some comfort from the fact that even if I’d comprehended the trap in which we were standing more quickly, we would never have been able to get beyond the perimeter of the net before those in the World Above——The Fishermen as I had already mentally dubbed them——sensed some motion on their bait-lines and scooped up their catch.
The holes in the net were large enough for one of my legs to be somewhat uncomfortably hanging out, dangling above the chaos below. But such discomfort meant little when I had the pleasure of seeing the net beneath Gatmuss also tightening around him, and lifting him up as I was being lifted. There was one difference. While Gatmuss was cursing and struggling, attempting and failing to tear a hole in the net, I was feeling curiously calm. After all, I reasoned, how much worse could my life in the World Above be than the life I was leaving in the World Below, where I had known very little comfort, and no love, and had no future for myself beyond the kind of bitter, joyless lives that Momma and Pappy G. lived?
We were being lifted at quite a speed now, and I could see the landscape of my young life laid out below. The house, with Momma standing on the doorstep——a diminutive figure, far beyond the range of my loudest cries, even if I’d cared to try, which I didn’t. And there, spreading in all directions as far as my eyes could see, was the dismal spectacle of the wastelands, the peaks of trash that had seemed so immense when I’d been in their shadows, now inconsequential, even when they rose to mountainous heights as they defined the perimeter of the Ninth Circle. Beyond the Circle there was nothing. Only a void, an immense emptiness, neither black nor white, but an unfathomable grey.
“Jakabok! Are you listening to me?”
Gatmuss was haranguing me from his net, where, thanks in part to his own struggles, his huge frame was squashed up in what looked like a very uncomfortable position. His knees were pressed up against his face, while his arms stuck out of the net at odd angles.
“Yes, I’m listening,” I said.
“Is this something you set up? Something to make me look stupid?”
“You don’t need any help to do that,” I told him. “And no, of course I didn’t set this up. What an asinine question.”
“What’s asinine?”
“I’m not going to start trying to educate you now. It’s a lost cause. You were born a brute and you’ll die a brute, ignorant of anything but your own appetites.”
“You think you’re very clever, don’t you, boy? With your fancy words and your fancy manners. Well, they don’t impress me. I got a machete and a gun. And once we’re out of this stupid thing I’m going to come after you so fast you won’t have time to count your fingers before I cut them off. Or your toes. Or your nose.”
“I could scarcely count my nose, you imbecile. I only have one.”
“There you go again, sounding like you’re so high and mighty. You’re nothing, boy. You wait! You wait until I find my gun. Oh, the things I can do with that gun! I could shoot off what’s left of your babymaker, clean as a whistle!”
And so he went on, an endless outpouring of contempt and complaint, spiced with threats. In short, he hated me because when I’d been born Momma lost all interest in him. In past times, he said, when for some reason or another Momma’s attention had been distracted, he’d had a foolproof way of getting it back, but now he was afraid of using that trick again because he’d been happy to have a daughter, but another accidental son would only be a waste of breaths and beatings. One mistake was enough, more than enough, he said, and ranted about my general stupidity.
Meanwhile, we continued our ascent, which having begun a little jerkily was now smooth and speedy. We passed through a layer of clouded darkness into the Eighth Circle, emerging from a ragged crater in its rocky desolation. I had never strayed more than half a mile from my parents’ house, and had only the vaguest notion of how life was lived in other circles. I would have liked time to study the Eighth. But we were now traveling too fast for me to gain anything more than a fleeting impression of it: the Damned in their thousands, their naked backs bent to the labor of hauling some vast faceless edifice across the uneven terrain. Then I was temporarily blinded once again, this time by the darkness of the Eighth’s sky, only to emerge moments later spluttering and spitting, having been doused in the fetid fluid of some weed-throttled waterway of the swampy landscape of the Seventh. Perhaps it was the drenching in swamp water that got him mad or, simply, that the fact of what was happening to us had finally broken through his thick skull, but whichever it was, at this stage Pappy Gatmuss began to vilify me in the most foul language, blaming me, of course, for our present predicament.
“You are a waste of my seed, you witless moron, you bonehead, you jackass, you putrid little rattlebrain. I should have throttled the life out of you years ago, you damn retard! If I could reach my machete, I swear I’d hack you to pieces right here and now.”
He struggled as he accused me, attempting to get his arms to reach back towards the net, where I presume he had the machete. But he had been trapped by the net in such a way as to make any such movement impossible. He was stuck.
I, however, was not. I still had in my possession the knife I had picked up in the kitchen. It wasn’t a very large knife, but it was serrated, which was useful. It would do the job.
I reached out and started to saw at the rope that was holding up the net containing Pappy G. I knew I would have to be quick. We had already passed through the Sixth Circle and were rising through the Fifth. I paid no attention to the details of their topographies now. I just kept a mental count of their number. All the rest of my concentration went into working on the rope.
The outpouring of nauseating filth from the mouth of Pappy G. was growing more obscene, of course, as my little knife finally began to have some effect upon the rope. We were passing through the Fourth Circle now, but I couldn’t tell you a thing about it. I was sawing for my life, literally. If I failed to cut the rope before we reached our destination, which I assumed to be the World Above, and Gatmuss was freed from his net by whoever was hauling us up, he would slaughter me without need of machete or gun. He’d simply pull me limb from limb. I’d seen him do it to other demons, a lot larger than me.
It was powerful motivation, let me tell you, to hear my father’s threats and insults becoming ever more incomprehensible with fury until they finally turned into an incoherent outpouring of hatred. Once in a while I would glance down at his face, which was pressed tight against the confines of the net. His porcine features were turned up at me, his eyes fixed on me.
There was death in those eyes. My death, needless to say, rehearsed over and over in that testicle-sized brain of his. While it seemed to him he suddenly had my attention, he stopped piling insult upon insult and tried, as though I hadn’t heard all the obscenities he’d been spewing, to move me with absurdities.
“I love you, son.”
I had to laugh. I’d never been so entertained by something in my entire life. And there was more to come; all priceless idiocies.
“We’re different, sure. I’m mean, you’re a little guy and I’m …”
“Not?” I offered.
He grinned. Clearly we understood one another. “Right. Not. And when you’re not, like me, and your son is, then it’s not fair for me to be slapping him around night and day?”
I thought I’d confuse him by playing the demon’s advocate.
“Are you sure?” I asked him.
His grin withered a little now, and panic infected his tiny glittering eyes. “Shouldn’t I be?” he said.
“Don’t ask me. I’m not the one who’s telling me what he thinks is——”
“Ah!” he said, cutting me off in his haste to keep a thought he’d seized from escaping him, “that’s it! It isn’t right?”
“Isn’t it?” I said, still sawing away at the rope as the banter continued.
“This,” Pappy G. said. “It isn’t right. A son shouldn’t kill his own father.”
“Why not if his father tried to murder him?”
“Not murder, boy. Never murder. Toughen up a little, maybe. But murder? No, never. Never.”
“Well, Pappy, that makes you a better father than it does me a son,” I said to him. “But it isn’t going to stop me cutting this rope and it’s a very long fall from here. You’ll break in pieces, if you’re lucky.”
“If I’m lucky?”
“Yes. I wouldn’t want you to be lying down in that refuse with your back broken, but still alive. Not with all the hungry Demons and Damned that wander around down there. They’ll eat you alive. And that would be too terrible, even for you. So maybe you should make your peace and pray for death because it’ll be so much easier to die that way. Just a long fall, and nothing. Blackness. The end of Pappy Gatmuss, once and for always.”
We had passed through several Circles as we’d talked and, to be honest, I’d lost count of how many remained before we emerged into the World Above. Three perhaps. My knife was becoming dulled from the labor I’d put it to, but the rope was now cut through three quarters of the way, and the weight it was supporting put the remaining strands under such tension that they began to snap with the merest stroke of my blade.
Now I knew we were close to the surface because I could hear voices from somewhere overhead; or rather one particular voice, yelling orders:
“Keep hauling, all of you! Yes, that means you, too. Work! We’ve caught something big here. It’s not one of the giants, but it’s big!”
I looked up. There was a layer of rock a few hundred feet above us, with a crack in it which widened in one place. It was through this wider portion of the fissure that the four ropes——the two supporting Pappy G. and myself and the pair that had held the bait, disappeared. The brightness through the crack was more powerful than anything I’d ever seen Below. It pricked my eyes, so I looked away from it and put all my energies into cutting the last stubborn strands of rope. The image of the crack was still burned into my sight, however, like a lightening strike.
Throughout these last two or three minutes Pappy G. gave up both his litany of insults and the absurd attempt to appeal to my love for him as his son. He simply looked straight up at the hole in the heavens of the First Circle. The sight of it had apparently unleashed a primal terror in him, which found expression in a spewing forth of entreaties, which were steadily eroded by the sounds I’d never have imagined him capable of making: whimpers and sobs of terror.
“No, can’t go Above can’t go can’t——”
Tears of snot were streaming from his nostrils, which were enormous I realized for the first time, larger than his eyes.
“——in the dark, down deep, that’s where we have to, no, no you can’t you mustn’t.”
He became suddenly crazed with hysteria. “YOU KNOW WHAT’S UP THERE, BOY? IN THE LIGHT, BOY? THE LIGHT OF GOD IN HEAVEN. THE LIGHT WILL BURN OUT MY EYES. I DON’T WANT TO SEE! I DON’T WANT TO SEE!”
He thrashed around in terror as he vented all these feelings, trying his best to get his hands to cover his eyes, though this was a complete anatomical impossibility. Still he tried, writhing around within the confines of the net, his terrified cries so loud that when he took one short break for breath I heard somebody from the World Above saying: “Listen to that thing! What’s it saying?”
And then another voice: “Don’t listen. We don’t want our heads filled with demon talk. Block your ears, Father O’Brien, or he’d talk you out of your mind.”
That was all I had a chance to hear, because Pappy G. started sobbing and struggling again. The rope of his net creaked as it was tested by his antics. But it was not the net that broke. It was the few strands of the rope that still supported him. Given how little there was to snap, the noise it made was astonishingly loud, echoing up off the roof of rock above us.
The expression on Pappy Gatmuss’ face turned from one of metaphysical terror to something simpler. He was falling. And falling and falling.
Just before he struck the layer of lichen-covered rock that was scattered over the ground of the First Circle he gave vent to this simpler terror that his face now wore, unleashing a bellow of despair. Apparently, neither rising nor falling was to his liking. Then he broke through the layer of moss and disappeared.
His bellow continued to be audible however, dimming somewhat as he dropped through the Second Circle, and still more as he fell through the Third, only fading away once he passed into the Fourth.
Gone. Pappy G. was finally gone from my life! After so many years of fearing his judgment, fearing his punishment, he was out of my life, dying by degrees, I hoped, as he struck each new ground. His limbs broken, his back broken, and his skull smashed like a dropped egg, probably long before he landed back in the canyons of trash where we’d first been baited. I had not been inventing horrors when I’d talked about how terrible it would be to be helpless in that place, crawling as it was with the most pitiful, the most hopeless of those amongst the Demonation. I know many of them. Some were Demons who had once been the most scholarly and sophisticated amongst us, but who had now come to realize in their researches that we meant nothing in the scheme of Creation. We floated in the void beyond all purpose or meaning. They had taken this knowledge badly; certainly worse than most of my fellows, who had long since given up thinking about such lofty notions in favor of finding amongst the tiny numbers of lichens that grew in the gloom of the Ninth a palliative for hemorrhoids.
But the scholars’ desolation was not immune to hunger. In the years I’d lived in the house in the garbage dunes I had heard plenty of stories of wanderers who had perished in the wastes of the Ninth, their bones found picked clean, if they were found at all. That, most likely, would be Pappy G.’s fate: He would be eaten alive, until every last morel of marrow had been sucked out.
I strained to hear some sound from the World Below——a last cry from my murdered father——but I heard nothing. It was the voices from the World Above that were now demanding attention. The rope from which Pappy G.’s net had hung had been hauled up out of sight as soon as he’d fallen. I slid my little knife into a small pocket of flesh I had taken great pains to slowly dig for myself over a period of months for the express purpose of hiding a weapon.
There was clearly great disappointment and frustration amongst those who were hauling me up.
“Whatever we lost was five times the weight of this little thing,” said someone.
“It must have bitten through the ropes,” opined the voice I recognized as the Father’s. “They have such ways, these demons.”
“Why don’t you shut up and pray?” said a third whinier voice. “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? To protect our immortal souls from whatever we’re hauling up?”
They’re frightened, I thought, which was good news for me. Frightened men did stupid things. My job was going to be to keep them in a state of fear. Perhaps I might intimidate them with my sickly frame and my burned face and body, but I doubted it. I would have to use my wits.
I could see the sky more clearly now. There were no clouds in the blue, but there were several dispersing columns of black smoke, and two smells fighting for the attention of my nostrils. One was the sickly sweet odor of incense, the other the smell of burning flesh.
Even as I inhaled them my racing thoughts remembered a childhood game that would perhaps help me defend myself against my captors. As an infant, and even into my early teens, whenever Pappy Gatmuss came home at night with female company Momma was obliged to vacate the marriage bed and sleep in my bed, relegating me to the floor with a pillow [if she was feeling generous] and a stained sheet. She would lay down her head and instantly be asleep, wearied to the bone by life with Pappy G.
And then she’d start to talk in her sleep. The things she said——angrily elaborate and terrifying curses directed at Pappy G.——were enough to make my heart quicken with fear, but it was the voice in which she spoke them that truly impressed itself upon me.
This was another Momma speaking, her voice a deep, raw growl of murderous rage that I listened to so many times over the years that without ever consciously deciding to try and emulate it I unleashed in private the fury I felt towards Pappy G. one day and the voice just spilled out. It wasn’t simply imitation. I had inherited from Momma a deformity she had in her throat that allowed me to re-create the sound. Of that I became certain.
For several weeks following my discovery of the gift my bloodline had bestowed, I made the mistake of taking a shortcut on my way home that obliged me to walk through territory that had long been the dominion of a murderous gang of young demons who liked to slaughter those who refused to pay the toll they demanded. Looking back on this, I’ve often wondered if my own trespass was not truly accidental as I’d told myself at the time, but a test. Here was I—Jakabok, the perpetually terrorized runt of the neighborhood——deliberately inviting a confrontation with a gang of thugs who wouldn’t think twice about killing me in the street outside my house.
The short version of how it went is easily told. I spoke in my Momma’s Nightmare Voice, using it to assault the enemy with an outpouring of the most vicious, venomous curses I could lay my mind upon.
It worked instantly upon three of my four assailants. The fourth, who was the largest, was stone deaf. He took a moment to watch the retreat of his comrades, and then, seeing my wide-open mouth he sensed that I was making some sound that had driven the others off. He immediately came at me, grabbing hold of the back of my neck with one of his immense hands and reaching into my mouth to pull out my troublesome tongue. He caught it by the root, digging his nails into the wet muscle, and would have left me as dumb as he was deaf if my tails——entirely without my conscious instruction——had not come to my aid. They rose up behind me side by side, then parted company, each speeding past my head and driving their points into my assailant’s eyes. They lacked the bone to blind him, but there was sufficient force in their gristle that the points still hurt him. He let go of me, and I staggered away from him, spitting out blood, but otherwise unharmed.
Now you have a full account of the weapons I took up in the World Above: one small dulled knife, my mother’s Nightmare Voice, and the twin tails I had inherited from my recently devoured father.
It wasn’t much, but it would have to do.
So, there you have it. Now you know how I got up out of the World Below, and how my adventurings there began. Surely you’re satisfied. I’ve told you things that I never told anyone before, even if I was about to disembowel them. What I did to Pappy G., for instance. I’ve never admitted to that until now. Not once. And let me tell you, it wasn’t an easy confession to make, even after all these centuries. Patricide—especially when it’s brought about by dropping your father into the maws of hungry lunatics——is a primal crime. But you wanted me to sing for my supper, and I have sung.
You don’t need to hear any more, believe me. I’d been hauled up out of the rock, you can figure that out for yourselves. Obviously they didn’t put an end to me or I wouldn’t be sitting on this page talking to you. The details don’t matter. It’s all history now, isn’t it?
No, no. Wait. I take that back. It isn’t history. How can it be? Nobody ever wrote any of it down. History’s what the books say, isn’t it? And when it comes to the sufferings of the likes of me, a burned-up, ugly-as-sin demon whose life means less than nothing, there is no history.
I’m Jakabok the Nobody. As far as you’re concerned, Jakabok the Invisible.
But you’re wrong. You’re wrong. I’m here.
I’m right here on the page in front of you. I’m staring out of the words right now, moving along behind the lines as your eyes follow them.
You see the blur between the words? That’s me moving.
You feel the book shake a little? Come on, don’t be a coward. You felt it. Admit it.
Admit it.
You know what, my friend? I think maybe I should tell you a little bit more, for the sake of the truth. Then there’ll be at least one place where the misfortunes of a runty demon like me are put into words, put into history.
So you can put the flame away for a few minutes, while I tell you what happened to me in the World Above. Then, even though you will have burned the book, you’ll at least have heard the story, right? And you can pass it on, the way all stories worth telling get handed down. And maybe one day you’ll write a book, about how you once met this demon called Jakabok, and the things he told you about Demons and History and Fire. A book like that could make you famous, you know. It could. I mean you humans are more interested in evil than in good, right? You could invent all kinds of vile details and claim it was all just stuff that I told you. Why not? The money you could make, telling The Story of Jakabok. If you’re a little afraid of the consequences, then just give some of your profits to the Vatican, in exchange for a twenty-four-hour priest patrol, in case a crazy demon decided to come and knock on your door.
Think about it. Why not? There’s no reason why you shouldn’t profit from our little arrangement, is there? And while you’re thinking about it, I’ll tell you what happened to me once I got up out of the earth and finally saw the sun.
You should listen really carefully to what comes next, friend, because it’s full of dark stuff, and every word of it is true, I swear on my Momma’s Voice. There’s plenty in here for your book, believe me. Just make sure you remember the details because it’s the details that make people believe what they’re being told.
And never forget: They want to believe. Not everything, obviously. Flat earths, for one, are out of favor. But this, my friend, this venomous stuff they want to believe. No, strike that. They don’t simply want to believe it. They need to. What could be more important to a species who live in a world of evils than that those evils not be their responsibility? It was all the work of the Demon and his Demonation.
No doubt, you’ve had the same experience yourself. You’ve witnessed abominations with your own eyes, and I’m sure they drove you half-crazy seeing it all, whether you were watching a child torture a fly or a dictator commit genocide. In fact——oh this is good, this is a nice twist!——you could say that the only way you stayed sane was by writing it all down, word for word, exorcising it by setting it down on the pages, purging all that you witnessed. That’s good, even if I do say it myself. Purgingwhat you’d witnessed. That’s very good.
Of course, there’ll be plenty of people who’ll put their noses in the air and pretend they wouldn’t be caught dead with a Book of Demonations in their sanctified hands. But it’s all a sham. Everyone loves a measure of fright in their stories; a revulsion that makes the release into love all the sweeter. All you have to do is listen to me carefully, and remember the horrors for later. Then you’ll be able to tell people hand on heart that you got it all from a completely reliable source, can’t you? You can even tell them my name, if you like. I don’t care.
But you should be warned, friend. The things I witnessed in the World Above, some of what I’m going to tell you about now, it’s not for the squeamish. On occasion you might find yourself feeling a little sick to your stomach. Don’t let the grisly details upset you. Think of it this way: Each little horror is money in the bank. That’s what I’m giving you in exchange for your burning this book; a fortune in horrors. That’s not such a terrible deal, now, is it?
No, I thought not. So, let me pick up my story where I left off, with me appearing from the World Below for the first time in my life.
It wasn’t the most dignified of entrances, to be honest, hauled up out of the crack in the rock in a net.
“What in the name of Christendom is that?” said a man who with a large beard and an even larger belly was sitting some distance away on a boulder. This large man had a large dog, which he held on a tight leash, for which I was grateful as it was clear the cur didn’t like me. It bared its teeth to their mottled gums and growled.
“Well, Father O’Brien?” said a much thinner man with long blond hair and a blood-stained apron. “Any answers?”
Father O’Brien approached the net, a wine flagon in his hand, and scrutinized me for a few seconds before declaring, “It’s just a minor demon, Mister Cawley.”
“Not another!” the large man said.
“You want me to throw it back?” said yellow-hair, glancing over at the three men who were holding the rope from which I dangled. All three were sweaty and tired. Between the rim of the hole and this exhausted trio was a twelve-foot-tall tower made of timber and metal, its base weighed down with several huge boulders, so as to keep it from toppling over. Two metal arms extended from the top of the tower, so that it resembled a gallows designed to hang two felons at a time. The rope to which my net was attached ran up and around one of the grooved wheels at the end of one of the arms, and back along that arm, thence down to the three large men who were presently holding my rope [and life] in their huge hands.
“You told me there’d be giants, O’Brien?”
“And there will be. There will, I swear. But they’re rare, Cawley.”
“Can you see any reason why I should keep this one?”
The priest observed me. “He’d make poor dog meat.”
“Why?” said Cawley.
“He’s covered in scars. He must be quite the ugliest demon I have set eyes on.”
“Let me see,” Cawley said, raising his wide rear from the doubtless grateful boulder and approaching me, the stomach first, the man some distance behind.
“Shamit,” Cawley said to the yellow-hair. “Take Throat’s leash.”
“She bit me last time.”
“Take the leash, fool!” Cawley bellowed. “You know how I hate to ask for anything twice.”
“Yes, Cawley. I’m sorry, Cawley.” The yellow-haired Shamit took Throat’s leash, plainly afraid he was going to be bitten a second time. But the dog had other dinner plans: me. Not for a moment did it take its huge black eyes off me, drool running in streaming rivulets from its mouth. There was something about its gaze, perhaps the flames flickering in its eyes, that made me think this was a dog that had a touch of the hell-hound in its blood.
“What you staring at my dog for, demon?” Cawley said. Apparently it displeased him that I did so, because he drew an iron bar from his belt and struck me with it two or three times. The blows hurt, and for the first time in many years I forgot the power of speech and screeched at him like an enraged ape.
My noise incited the dog, who began to bark, his huge frame shaking with every sound it made.
“Stop that noise, demon!” Cawley yelled. “And you too, Throat!”
Immediately the dog fell silent. I scaled down my screeches to little moans.
“What shall we do with it?” Shamit said. He had taken out a little wooden comb and was running it through his golden locks over and over, as though he barely knew that he was doing it. “He’s no good for skinning. Not with so many scars.”
“They’re burns,” said the priest.
“Is that your Irish humor again, O’Brien?”
“It’s no joke.”
“Oh Lord, O’Brien, put away your wine and think about the foolishness of what you’re saying. This is a demon. We’ve snatched it out of Hell’s eternal fires. How could a thing that lives in such a place be burned?”
“I don’t know. I’m just saying …”
“Yes …”
O’Brien’s eyes went from Cawley’s face to the iron bar and back to Cawley again. It seemed I was not the only one who’d endured some hurt from the thing.
“Nothing, Cawley, nothing at all. Just the wine talking. You’re probably right. I should put it aside a while.” Having spoken, he did precisely the opposite, upending the flagon as he turned his back on Cawley and stumbled away.
“I am surrounded by drunkards, idiots, and——”
His eyes came to rest on Shamit, who was still combing and combing, staring wide eyed at nothing, as though the ritual had lulled him into a trancelike state. “And whatever this is.”
“I’m sorry,” Shamit said, snapping out of his delirium. “Were you asking me something?”
“Nothing you could have answered,” Cawley replied. And then, after giving me an unsavory glance he said, “All right, haul him up and get him out of the net. But be careful, you know what happens when you rush things and you give the demons room to cause trouble, don’t you?”
There was silence, but for the creaking of the rope that was now hauling me up again.
“Mister C. just asked you a question, you witless thugs,” Cawley yelled.
This time there were grunts and muffled responses from all sides. It wasn’t enough to satisfy Cawley.
“Well, what did I say?”
All five men mumbled their own half-remembered versions of Cawley’s inquiry.
“And what’s the answer?”
“You lose things,” Father O’Brien replied. He raised his arms as he spoke, to offer proof of the matter. His right hand had been neatly bitten off, it appeared to be many years before, leaving only the cushion of his thumb and the thumb itself, which he used to hook the handle of the flagon. His left hand was missing entirely, as was his wrist and two-thirds of his forearm. Six or seven inches of bone had been left jutting from the stump at his elbow. It was yellow and brown, except for the end of it, which was white where it had been recently sharpened.
“That’s right,” said Cawley. “You lose things——hands, eyes, lips. Whole heads sometimes.”
“Heads?” said the priest. “I never saw anybody lose——”
“In France. That wolf-demon we brought up out of a hole very much like this one, except there was water——”
“Oh yes, that sprang out of the rock. I remember now. How could I forget that monstrous thing? The size of its jaws. They just opened up and took the head off that student who was with it then. What was his name?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“But I was on the road with him for a year or more and now can’t remember his name.”
“Don’t start getting sentimental.”
“Ivan!” O’Brien said. “His name was Ivan!”
“Enough, priest. We’ve work to do.”
“With that?” Shamit said, looking at me down the narrow length of his pimply nose. I met him stare for stare, trying to bring a few contemptuous remarks to my lips, to be uttered in my best condescending tone. But for some reason my throat wouldn’t shape the words in my head. All that emerged was an embarrassing stew of snarls and jabbering.
Meanwhile, Cawley inquired, “When does the burning of the Archbishop and his sodomitic animals begin?”
“Tomorrow,” said O’Brien.
“Then we’ll have to work fast if we’re to make some money from this sorry excuse for a monster. O’Brien, fetch the shackles for the demon. The heavier ones, with the pins on the inside.”
“You want them for his hands and his feet?”
“Of course. And Shamit, stop flirting with it.”
“I’m not flirtin’.”
“Well, whatever you’re doing, stop it and go into the back of the wagon and bring out the old hood.”
Shamit went off without further word, leaving me to try and persuade my tongue and throat to make a sound that was more articulate, more civilized, than the noises that had escaped me thus far. I thought if they heard me speak, then I could perhaps persuade them into a conversation with me, and Cawley would see I was no eater of limb or heads, but a peaceful creature. There’d be no need for the shackles and hood once he understood that. But I was still defeated. The words were in my head clearly enough, but my mouth simply refused to speak them. It was as though some instinctive response to the sight and smell of the World Above had made me mute.
“You can spit and growl at me all you like,” Cawley said, “but you’re not going to do no harm to me or to none of my little family, you hear me, demon?”
I nodded. That much I could do.
“Well, will you look at that?” Cawley said, seeming genuinely amazed. “This creature understands me.”
“It’s just a trick to give you that impression,” the priest said. “Trust me, there’s nothing in his head but the hunger to drive your soul into the Demonation.”
“What about the way he’s shaking his head? What does that mean?”
“Means nothing. Maybe he’s got a nest of those Black Blood Fleas in his ears, and he’s trying to shake ’em out.”
The arrogance and the sheer stupidity of the priest’s response made my head fill with thunderous rage. As far as O’Brien was concerned I was no more significant than the fleas he was blaming for my twitches; a filthy parasitic thing that the father would happily have ground beneath his heel if I’d been small enough. I was gripped by a profound but useless fury, given that in my present condition I had no way to make it felt.
“I——I got——I got the hood,” Shamit gasped as he hauled something over the dark dirt.
“Well, lift it up!” Cawley shrugged. “Let me see the damn thing.”
“It’s heavy.”
“You!” Cawley said, pointing to one of the three men now idling by the winch. The trio looked at one another, attempting to press one of the others to step forwards. Cawley had no patience for this idiocy. “You, with the one eye!” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Hacker.”
“Well, Hacker, come give this degenerate half-wit some help.”
“To do what?”
“I want the hood put on the demon, double quick. Come on, stop crossing yourself like a frightened little virgin. The demon’s not going to do you any harm.”
“You sure?”
“Look at it, Hacker. It’s a wretched scrap of a thing.”
I growled at this new insult, but my protest went unheard.
“Just get the hood over its head,” Cawley said.
“Then what?”
“Then as much beer as you can drink and pig meat as you can eat.”
That deal put a charmless smile on Hacker’s scabrous face.
“Let’s get it done,” Hacker said. “Where’s the hood?”
“I’m sitting on it,” Shamit said.
“Then move! I’m hungry!”
Shamit stood up and the two men started to lift the hood out of the dirt, giving me a clear look at it. Now I understood why there had been so much gasping from Shamit as he carried it. The hood was not made of burlap or leather, as I’d imagined, but black iron, fashioned into a crude box, its sides two or more inches thick, with a square hinged door at the front.
“If you try any Demonical trick,” Cawley warned me, “I will bring wood and burn you where you lie. Do you hear me?”
I nodded.
“It understands, Cawley said. “All right, do it quick! O’Brien, where are the shackles?”
“In the wagon.”
“They’re not much use to me there. You!” He picked the youngest from the two remaining men. “Your name?”
“William Nycross.”
The man was a behemoth, limbs as thick as tree trunks, his torso massive. His head, however, was tiny; round, red, and hairless, even to brows and lashes.
Cawley said, “Go with O’Brien. Fetch the shackles. Are you quick with your hands?”
“Quick …” Nycross replied, as though the question clearly tested his wits “… with … my hands.”
“Yes or no?”
Standing behind Cawley, out of his sight but not out of that of the baby-faced Nycross, the priest guided the simpleton by nodding his head. The child-giant copied what he saw.
“Good enough,” said Cawley.
I had by now realized that I was not going to be able to get my tongue to say something cogent, thereby wringing some compassion from Cawley. The only way to avoid becoming his prisoner was by acting like the bestial demon that he’d said I was from the start.
I unleashed a low noise, which came out louder than I’d anticipated. Cawley instinctively took several steps back from me, catching hold of one of his men he had not so far addressed. The man’s face was grotesquely marked by a pox he’d survived, its most notable consequence the absence of his nose. He swung this pox-ridden man between me and him, pushing his knife point against the Pox’s body to commit the man to his duty.
“You keep your distance, demon. I’ve got holy water, blessed by the Pope! Two and a half gallons of it! I could drown you in holy water if I chose to.”
I responded with the only sound I had been able to make my throat produce, that same withered growl. Finally Cawley seemed to realize that this sound was the only weapon in my armory, and laughed.
“I’m in mortal fear,” he said. “Shamit? Hacker? The hood!” He had unhooked his iron bar from his belt and slapped it impatiently against his open palm as he spoke. “Move yourselves. There’s still skinning left to do on the other three and ten tails to be boiled clean to the bone!”
I didn’t like the sound of that last remark at all, being the only one with not one but two tails in that company. And if they were doing this for profit, then my freakish excess of tail gave them a reason to speed up the stoking of the fire beneath their boiling pan.
Fear knotted my guts. I began to struggle wildly against the confines of the net, but my thrashing only served to entangle me further.
Meanwhile, my wordless throat gave out ever more outlandish sounds; the beast I had been unleashing mere moments before sounding like a domesticated animal by contrast with the raw and unruly noise that came up out of my entrails now. Apparently my captors were not intimidated by my din.
“Get the hood on him, Shamit!” Cawley said. “What in the name of God are you waiting for?”
“What if he bites me?” Shamit moaned.
“Then you’ll die a horrible death, foaming at the mouth like a mad dog,” Cawley replied. “So put the blasted hood on him and be quick about it!”
There was a flurry of activity as everybody got about their business. The priest instructed the fumbling Nycross in the business of preparing the shackles for my wrists and ankles, while Cawley gave orders from the little distance he had retreated to.
“Hood first! Watch for his hands, O’Brien! He’ll reach through the net! This is a wily one, no doubt of that!”
As soon as Shamit and Hacker put the hood over my head Cawley came back at me and struck it sharply with the bar he carried, iron to iron. The noise made the dome of my skull reverberate and shook my thoughts to mush.
“Now, Pox!” I heard Cawley yelling through his confused thoughts. “Get him out of the net while he’s still reeling.” And just for good measure he struck the iron hood a second time, so that the new echoes through iron and bone caught up with the remnants of the first.
Did I howl, or only imagine that I did? The noise in my head was so stupefying I wasn’t certain of anything, except my own helplessness. When the reverberations of Cawley’s strikes finally started to die away and some sense of my condition returned, they had me out of the net, and Cawley was giving more orders.
“Shackles go on the feet first, Pox! You hear me? Feet!”
My feet, I thought. He’s afraid I’m going to run.
I didn’t analyze the matter more than that. I simply struck out to the left and right of me, my gaze too restricted by the hood to be sure of who I had struck, but pleased to feel the greasy hands that had been holding me lose their grip. Then I did precisely as Cawley had prompted me to do. I ran.
I put perhaps ten strides between myself and my assailants. Only then did I panic. The reason? The night sky.
In the short time since Cawley had hauled me up out of the fissure the day had started to die, bleeding stars. And above me, for the first time in my life, was the fathomless immensity of the heaven. The threat Cawley and his thugs presented seemed inconsequential beside the terror of that great expanse of darkness overhead, which the stars, however numerous, could not hope to illuminate. Indeed, there had been nothing that the torturer of Hell had invented that was as terrifying as this: space.
Cawley’s voice stirred me from my awe. “Get after him, you idiots! He’s just one little demon. What harm can he do?”
It wasn’t a happy truth, but the truth it was. If they caught up with me again I would be lost. They wouldn’t make the mistake of letting me slip a second time. I leaned forwards, and the let the weight of the iron hood allow it to slide off my head. It hit the ground between my feet. Then I stood up and assessed my situation more clearly.
To my left was a steep slope, with a spill of firelight illuminating the smoky air at its rim. To my right, and spreading in front of me, were the fringes of a forest, its trees silhouetted against another source of firelight, somewhere within.
Behind me, close behind me, were Cawley and his men.
I ran for the trees, fearing that if I attempted the slope one of my tormentors could be quicker and catch up with me before I reached the ridge. Within a few strides I had reached the slim young trees that bordered the forest and began to weave between them, my tails lashing furiously left and right as I ran.
I had the satisfaction of hearing a note of disbelief in Cawley’s voice as he yelled:
“No, no! I can’t lose him now! I won’t! I won’t! Move your bones, you imbeciles, or I’ll crack open somebody’s skull!”
By now I had passed through the young growth and was running between far older trees, their immense girth and the knotty thicket that grew between them concealing me ever more thoroughly. Soon, if I was cautious, I’d lose Cawley and his cohort, if I hadn’t already done so.
I found a tree of immense girth, its branches so weighed down by the summer’s bounty of leaves and blossoms that they drooped to meet the bushes that grew all around it. I took shelter behind the tree, and listened. My pursuers were suddenly silent, which was discomforting. I held my breath, listening for even the slightest sound that would give me a clue to their whereabouts. I didn’t like what I heard: voices whispering from at least two directions. Cawley had divided up his gang it seemed, so as to come at me from several directions at once. I took a breath, and set off again, pausing every few steps to listen for my pursuers. They weren’t gaining on me, nor was I losing them. Confident that I was not going to escape him, Cawley began to call out to me.
“Where’d you think you’re running to, you piece of filth? You’re not getting away from me. I can smell your demon dung stench a mile away. You hear me? There’s no place you can go where I won’t come after you, treading on your two tails, you little freak. I’ve got buyers who’ll pay good coins for your whole skeleton with those tails of yours, all wired up so they stand proud. You are going to make me a nice fine profit, when I catch up with you.”
The fact that I could hear Cawley’s voice so close, and imagined that I knew his whereabouts, made me careless. In listening to him so intently I lost my grasp of where I’d heard the others coming from, and suddenly the Pox lunged out of the shadows. Had he not made the error of announcing that he had me captured before his huge hands had actually caught hold of me, I would have been his captive. But his boast came a few precious seconds too early, and I had time to duck beneath his plagued hand, stumbling back through the thicket as he came in blundering pursuit.
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