Mister B. Gone (14 page)

Take pity on me.

Damn you! Damn you!

What do you want from me?

WHAT IN THE NAME OF THE DEMONATION DO YOU WANT?

Just stop reading. That’s not too much to ask is it? I’ve paid the price for getting into this infernal book. You’ve used me up, demanding my confessions.

And don’t say you didn’t. You just read and read and what was I going to do? I could have erased the words if I’d chosen to.

Or worse I could have erased every other word, so _____ wouldn’t _____ what _____ was _____ you. _____ only _____ you _____ be _____ to _____ was _____ a _____ game. _____would _____ liked _____. He _______ so _____ of _____ righteous _______ about_____ Humankind _____ chance _____ winning _____ bent _____ of _____ _____ _____ armadillos.

See how easy it would have been to frustrate you? I should have started doing that right after you first kept reading. But the words got their hook in me, and once I began telling the truth, it was as though I couldn’t stop. I could see the shape of the stories ahead of me. Not just the big stuff—How I Got Burned, How I Got Out of Hell, How I Met Quitoon—but the little anecdotes I picked up, or minor characters who appeared along the way and had some business with me, whether it was bloody or benign, before heading off to get on with their lives. If I was a really good storyteller, I mean a real professional, I would have been able to make up some clever twist to finish their stories off, so you weren’t left wondering what happened to this one or that one. Shamit, for instance. Or the Archbishop who’d burned his predecessor. But I don’t know how to invent things. I can only tell you the things I saw and the things I felt. Whatever happened to Cawley’s people, or the Archbishop who was the father of the girl behind the rock I never found out. So I cannot tell you.

Yet you still stare. Still you look backwards and forwards along the lines as though I’m going to suddenly turn into a master storyteller and invent wonderful ways to bring things to a conclusion. But I’ve told you, I’m burned out, so to speak. I’ve got nothing left.

Why don’t you make this easy. Just take pity on me, I’m begging you. I’m on my knees in the gutter of the book, entreating you.

Burn the book, please, just burn the book. I’m tired. I just want to die away into the darkness and you’re the only one who can give me that gift. I’ve cried too long I’ve seen too much I’m just tired and lost and ready to go to my death so please, please let me burn.

Please—

let—

me—

burn.

No?

I see. All right, you win.

I know what you want. You want to know how I got from wandering with Quitoon into the pages of a book. Am I right?

Is that what you’re waiting for? I should never have mentioned that damnable Secret. But I did. And here we are, still looking at one another.

I suppose it’s understandable, now I think about it. If the situation was reversed, and I’d picked up a book and found somebody already possessing it, I’d want to know the Why and the When and the Where and the Who.

Well, the Where was a little town in Germany called Mainz.

And the Who was a fellow named Johannes Gutenberg. The When I’m not so sure about: I’ve never been good with dates.

I know it was summer, because it was unpleasantly humid. As to the year, I’m going to guess it was 1439, but I could be wrong by a few years in either direction. So that’s Where, Who, and When. What was the other one? Oh, Why. Of course. The big one.
Why
.

That’s easy. Quitoon took us there, because he’d heard a rumor that this fellow Gutenberg had made some kind of machine and he wanted to see it. So we went. As I said earlier, I’ve never been much good with dates, but I think by then Quitoon and I had been traveling together for something like a hundred years. That’s not long in the life of a demon. Some of the Demonation are virtually deathless, because they’re the offspring of a mating between Lucifer and another of the First Fallen.

I’m not so pure bred, unfortunately. My mother always claimed that her grandmother had been one of the First Fallen, which if it’s true means I might have lived four or five thousand years if I hadn’t got myself in a mess of words. Anyway, the point is this: Neither Quitoon nor I aged. Our muscles didn’t begin to ache or atrophy, our eyes didn’t fail, or our hearing become unreliable. We lived out that century indulging in every excess the World Above had to offer us, denying ourselves nothing.

I learned from Quitoon in the first few months how to stay out of trouble. We traveled by night, on stolen horses, which we’d change every few days. I have no great fondness for animals. I don’t know a demon that does. Perhaps we’re afraid their condition is a little too close to ours for comfort, and it wouldn’t take more than a whim on the part of the God of Genesis and of Revelations, creator and destroyer, to have us down on all fours, with Humankind’s collars around our necks and leashes on those collars. After a time I came to feel some measure of sympathy for those animals that were little more than slaves, their inarticulate state denying them the power to protest their enslavement, or tell their stories at least. Oxen yoked and straining as they labored to plow the unyielding ground; blinded songbirds in their plain little cages, singing themselves into exhaustion believing that they were making music to pleasure an endless night; the unwanted offspring of bitches or she-cats taken from their mother’s teats and slaughtered while she looked on, all unable to comprehend this terrible judgment.

Nor was life so very different for those men who wearily trudged behind the oxen, or who caught the songbirds and blinded them or those who dashed out the brains of unweaned kittens on the nearest stone, only thinking as they did of what labors lay ahead once they’d tossed the corpses to the pigs.

The only difference between the members of your species and those I saw suffering every day of that hundred years was that your people, though they were peasants who could neither read nor write, had a very clear notion of Heaven and Hell, and of the sins that would exile them forever from the presence of their Creator. All this they learned every Sunday, when the tolling of bells summoned them to church. Quitoon and I attended whenever we could, secreting ourselves in some high hidden place to listen to the pontifications of the local priest. If he spent his sermon telling his congregation what shameful sinners they were, and how they would suffer unending agony for their crimes, we would make it our business to secretly watch the priest for a day or so. If by Tuesday he had not committed any of the felonies he’d railed against on Sunday, we would go on our way. But if behind closed doors the priest ate from tables that creaked under a great weight of food and wine the likes of which his congregation would never even see, much less taste; or, if he turned private prayer meetings into seductions and told the girls or boys, once he’d violated them, that to speak of what he’d done would certainly damn them to the eternal fires, then we would make it our business to prevent him from further hypocrisies.

Did we kill them? Sometimes, though when we did so we were careful to make the circumstances of their slaughter so outlandish that none of the shepherd’s flock would be accused of his murder. Our skill of inventing ways to torture and dispatch the priests was elevated to a kind of genius as the decades past.

I remember we nailed one particularly odious and overfed priest to the ceiling of his church, which was so high nobody could understand how the deed had been done. Another priest, who we had watched unleash his perverted appetite upon tiny children, we cut into one hundred and three pieces, the labor of which fell to Quitoon, who was able to keep the man alive (and pleading to die) until he severed the seventy-eighth part from the seventy-ninth.

Quitoon knew the world well. It wasn’t just Humankind and its works he knew, but all manner of things without any clear connection between them. He knew about spices, parliaments, salamanders, lullabies, curses, forms of discourse and disease; of riddles, chains, and sanities; ways to make sweetmeats, love, and widows; tales to tell to children, tales to tell their parents, tales to tell yourself on days when everything you know means nothing. It seemed to me that there wasn’t a single subject he did not know something about. And if he was ignorant about a certain subject, then he lied about it with such ease that I took every word he said as gospel.

He liked chiefly the torn and ruined places in the world, where war and neglect had left wilderness behind. Over time I learned to share his taste. Such places had a great practical advantage for us, of course. They were largely shunned by your kind, who believed that such places were the haunts of malicious spirits.

Your superstitions were, for once, not so far from the truth.

What Quitoon and I found alluring about a particular piece of desolation was often appealing to other night-wanderers like us who had no hope of ever being invited over the threshold of a Christian soul. They were the usual gang of minor fi ends and bloodsuckers. Nothing we ever had any trouble kicking out if we found some of them still in residence in a ruin we’d decided to haunt for ourselves.

It may seem strange to say but when I think back on those years and the life we two made for ourselves in the ruins of houses, they almost resembled the arrangement between a husband and wife; our century-long friendship became an unblessed and unconsummated marriage before half its span was over.