Mister B. Gone (12 page)

Now, we of the Demonation are a hardy breed. Certainly our bodies bleed, much as yours do. And they give us great pain before they heal, as do yours. The chief difference between us and you is that we can survive extremely vicious maimings and mutilations, as had I had in my childhood, cooked in a fire of words, whereas you will perish if you are stabbed but once in the right place. That said, I was weary now of the incessant assault upon me. I had endured more than my share of cuts and blows.

“No more,” I murmured to myself.

The fight was lost, and so was I. Nothing would have given me more pleasure than to have lifted Quitoon’s sword and sliced every one of my assailants to pieces, but by now my arms were a mass of wounds, and lacked the power to wield Quitoon’s beautiful weapon. The sword seemed to understand my exhausted state, and no longer attempted to raise itself up. I let it slip from my bloody, trembling fingers. None of the mob moved to claim it. They were perfectly content to erase my life slowly, as they were, with blows, cuts, kicks, curses, and wads of phlegm.

Somebody took hold of my right ear, and used a dull blade to slice it off. I raised my hand to swat his stubby fingers away, but another assailant caught hold of my wrist and restrained me, so that I could only writhe and bleed as my mutilator sawed and sawed, determined to have his souvenir.

Seeing how weak I now was, and so incapable of defending myself, others were inspired to look for trophies of their own to cut from me: my nipples, my fingers, my toes, my organs of regeneration, even my tails.

No, no, I silently begged them, not my tails!

Take my ears, my lashless eyelids, even my navel, but please
not my tails
! It was an absurd and irrational vanity on my part, but while I would not protest their further maiming of my face or even of those parts which made me male, I wanted to die with my tails untouched. Was that so much to ask?

Apparently so. Though I let the trophy hunters cut at my most tender parts without argument, and pleaded through my pain to have them be content with what they were already taking, my pleas went unheard. It was little wonder. My throat, which had unleashed my mother’s Nightmare Voice several times, could now barely raise itself above a faltering murmur, which was heard by nobody. I could feel not one but two knives cutting at the root of my tails, sawing at the muscle, as my blood flowing ceaselessly from the widening gash.

“
Enough!”

The command was loud enough to cut through the shouts and laughter of the mob, and more to silence it. For the first time in a while I was not the center of attention. The quieted mob looked around for the source of that word of instruction, blades and bludgeons at the ready.

It was Quitoon who’d spoken. He stepped out of the same shadows into which he had disappeared minutes before, still wearing all his armour, the face guard down, concealing his demonic features.

The mob, though they were thirteen or more, and he alone, were still respectful of him. Not perhaps for his own person, but for the power they assumed he represented—that of the Archbishop.

“You two,” he said, pointing to the pair who were trying to separate me from my tails. “Get way from him.”

“But he’s a demon,” one of the men said quietly.

“I can see what he is,” Quitoon replied. “I have eyes.”

There was something peculiar about the quality of his voice, I thought. It was as if he were barely suppressing some powerful emotion, as if he might suddenly weep or burst into laughter.

“Let . . . him . . . alone . . .” he said.

The two mutilators did as he instructed, stepping away from me through grass that was more red than green. I tentatively reached behind me, afraid of what I would find, but was relieved to discover that though the pair had sawed through my scales to the muscle beneath, they had got no further. If, by some remote chance, I survived this first encounter with Humankind, then I would at least still have my tails.

Quitoon, meanwhile, had emerged from the shadows beneath the trees and was walking towards the middle of the grove. He was shaking, I saw, but not from any frailty. Of that I was perfectly certain.

The mob, however, assumed that he was indeed wounded, his shaking proof of his weakened state. They exchanged smug little looks, and then casually moved to surround him.

Most of them were still carrying the weapons they’d used to wound me.

It didn’t take long for them to take up their positions. When they had done so Quitoon slowly turned on the spot, as though to confirm the fact. The simple act of turning was difficult for him. His trembling was steadily getting worse. It could only be a matter of a few seconds before his legs gave out and he dropped to the ground, at which point the mob would—

I was interrupted in midthought by Quitoon.

“Mister B.?” His voice shook, but there was still strength in it.

“I’m here.”

“Be gone.”

I stared at Quitoon (as did everybody else in the grove), trying to work out what he was up to. Was he presenting himself as a target so that I might slip away while the mob tore off his armour and beat him to death? And why was he shaking in this bizarre fashion?

The order came again, spoken with almost panicky force.

“
Be gone, Mister B.!”

This time his tone stirred me from my bewildered state, and I remembered his instruction to me:
Take cover when I call your
name.

Having already delayed my obeying of his order for perhaps half a minute, I made up for lost time as best as my wounded body would allow. I took five or six backwards steps, until I felt the thicket at my back and realized that I could go no further. I raised my throbbing head and looked at Quitoon again. He was still standing in the midst of the mob, his armoured body shaking more violently than ever. There was a cry emerging from behind his faceplate now, and it was rising in volume and pitch as we all watched and listened. Up and up, louder and louder, until the sound he was making, like the sound I’d learned from Momma, scarcely seemed a plausible product of lungs and throat. Its highest audible notes were as shrill as a bird’s shriek; its lowest made the ground beneath my feet shake, made my teeth and stomach and bladder ache.

But I didn’t have to suffer its effects for long. Barely seconds after I had raised my head, the sounds Quitoon was unleashing became in the same moment both shriller and deeper, their new extremes accompanied by a sudden conflagration inside the armour, which spat shafts of incandescence out through every chink and seam.

Only now—too late, of course—did I understand why he had wanted me to be gone from here. I pushed my body against the knotted thicket, and was reaching behind me to try and pass the barbed branches when Quitoon exploded.

I saw his armour shatter like an egg struck by a hammer and glimpsed for the briefest moment the blazing form of the shatterer himself. Then the wave of the energy that had blown the armour wide open came at me, striking me with such force that I was driven backwards, over the dense thicket, landing amid the briar several yards from the grove. There was a thick, pungent smoke in the air that kept me from seeing the grove. I struggled to get myself up out of the barbed bed in which I lay; finally dragging back towards the grove. I was bruised, dizzied, and bloody, but I was alive, which was more than could be said for the rabble who had surrounded Quitoon. They lay sprawled on the grass, all dead. Some were headless, some hung from the low branches, their bodies pierced by dozens of holes. Besides the more or less complete corpses, there was a large selection of pieces—legs, arms, loops of gut, and the like—festively decorating the branches of every tree around the grove.

And in the middle of this strange orchard was Quitoon. A bluish smoke was rising from his naked body, the substance of which was sewn with seams of brightness that steadily became a little weaker as each seam gave up its intensity. The only place where the brightness remained undimmed was in Quitoon’s eyes, which were like twin lamps blazing in the dome of his skull.

I picked my way through the litter of bodies, revolted not by the blood and body parts, but by the parasites that had flourished in their thousands on the bodies and in the clothes of the mob and were now rapidly exiting in search of living hosts. I had no intention of becoming one, and several times as I crossed the grove I was obliged to brush off some ambitious flea that had leapt upon me.

I called to Quitoon as I approached him, but he didn’t respond. I halted a little distance from him, and tried to rouse him from this distracted state. I was uneasy about those furnace eyes of his. Until some sign of Quitoon himself returned to cool those fires, I was by no means certain that I was safe from the power he had called up. So I waited. The grove was silent, except for the tapping sound of blood as it dripped from one leaf to another, or down into the already sodden ground.

There were noises coming from beyond the grove however, as was a smell that I knew all too well from childhood: the stink of burning flesh. Its pungent presence made sense of the two kinds of cries that accompanied it: one, the agonized shrieks of burning men and women; and the other, the appreciative murmur of the crowd that was witnessing their cremations. I’ve never had a great fondness for human meat; it’s bland and often fatty, but I had not eaten since taking Cawley’s bait, and the smell of the cooking sodomites wafting from Joshua’s Field made me salivate. Drool ran from the corners of my mouth and down my chin. I raised a trembling hand to wipe the spittle off, an absurd touch of fastidiousness given my general condition, and while I was doing so Quitoon said:

“Hungry?”

I looked up at him. The blaze in his head had been extinguished while my mind had wandered off to Joshua’s Field.

Now I was back, and so was Quitoon.

His pupils, like those of every member of the Demonation, were slits, his cornea rays of burnt umber flecked with gold.

There were hints of gold too in the symmetrical arrangement of turquoise and purple patterns that decorated his body, though if they had ever been flawless many years of scarring had taken their toll.

“Are you just going to stand there staring or are you going to answer my question?”

“Sorry.”

“Are you hungry? I’m so starved I could even eat fish.”

Fish. Disgusting. Fish was the Nazarene animal.
I shall make
you fisher of men, it was writ.
Ugh. It was no wonder I’d choked on a bone both times I tried eating it.

“All right, no fish. Bread and meat. How’s that?”

“Better.”

Quitoon shook himself, like a wet dog. Flecks of brightness, remnants of the power he’d unleashed that had been lodged between his scales, now flew off him and died in the sunlight.

“That’s better,” he said.

“I . . . should be . . . no, I mean, I am . . . very . . .”

“What?”

“Grateful.”

“Oh. No problem. We can’t let this human trash kick us around.”

“They made quite a mess of me.”

“You’ll heal,” Quitoon said, matter-of-factly.

“Even if I got two knives in my heart?”

“Yeah, even then. It’s when they start dismembering you that things become difficult. I doubt even Lucifer could have grown himself a second head.” He thought on this for a moment. “Though now I come to think of it nothing’s impossible. If you can dream it, you can do it.” He studied me. “Are you fit to walk?”

I tried to be as casual as he was being. “Sure. No problem.”

“So let’s go see the Archbishop cook.”

Fires. They’ve marked every important moment in my life.

Are you ready to light one last fire then?

Surely, you didn’t think I’d forgotten. I got a little carried away by the story, but all the time I’ve been telling it I’ve been thinking about how it’ll feel when you do what you promised.

You did promise, don’t say you didn’t.

And don’t say you’ve forgotten. That’ll only annoy me. And I’d have every right to be annoyed, after going to all the trouble I’ve gone to, digging through my memories, painful many of them, and sharing what I dug up. I wouldn’t do that for just anybody, you know. Only you.

I know, I know, it’s easily said.

But I mean it. I’ve opened the doors of my heart for you, I really have. It’s not easy for me to admit I’ve been as wounded and weak as I have or foolish or as easily duped. But I told you because when you first opened the prison door and I saw your face there was something about it I trusted. That I still trust.

You’re going to set fire to this book very soon, aren’t you?

I’ll take your silence as consent.