Mister B. Gone (20 page)

In that house you’re immune from Him. There is no voice speaking in your head; there are no Commandments; no bushes burning but unconsumed outside the window. In that house there is only you and your loved ones, living lives without hurt. All for a very reasonable price. A flame. A tiny flame that will burn these pages away forever.

And isn’t that the way you’ll want it, anyway, when you’re living in the house on the hill? You won’t want this dirty old book that threatened and terrorized you. It’s better gone and gone forever. Why be reminded?

The house is yours. I swear on the wings of the Morningstar.

Yours. All you have to do is burn these words—and me with them—so we are never again seen on the face of the earth.

I can’t decide whether you’re suicidal, mentally deficient, or both? I’ve warned you how close I am. You don’t truly want my knife at your neck, do you? You want to live. Surely.

Take the house on the hill, and be happy there. Forget you ever heard the name of Jakabok Botch. Forget I ever told you my story and—

Oh.

My story. Is that what this is about? The shadow of my pitiful life, flickering on the cave of your skull? Do you ache so much to know how I got from a butcher’s shop in Mainz to the words you’re reading now that you’d give up the house on the hill, and its churning tree, and a life without pain that even the angels—

Ah, why do I bother?

I offer you a piece of Heaven on earth, a life that most people would give their souls to own, and all you do is keep reading the words and turning the pages, reading the words and turning the pages.

You sicken me. You’re stupid, selfish, ungrateful scum. All right, read the damn words! Go on. Turn the pages and see where it gets you. It won’t be a house on a hill, I’ll tell you that. It’ll be a plain wooden box in a hole in the ground, covered with dirt. Is that what you want? Is it? Because you’d better understand, once I take this deal off the table, I won’t ever talk about it again.

This house is a once-in-a-lifetime, never-to-be-repeated offer, you understand me? Of course you do. Why do I keep asking that, as if there was a single thing I’ve said or done that you haven’t understood to the last little syllable. So, do you want it, or not? Make up your mind. My supply of patience is running perilously thin. It can’t fall any further. You hear me?

The house is waiting. Three more words and it’s gone.

Don’t.

Read.

Them.

You know what? I can see the house from here. My Lord, the wind’s strong today. The leaves on the tree are churning, just the way I said they did. But the gusts are so very strong. I never felt a wind quite like this before. The tree isn’t just creaking, it’s breaking. I can’t believe it. After all these years. All the storms.

All the snow, weighing down its branches. But it’s had enough.

Its roots are being torn up out of the ground. Oh, for pity’s sake, why doesn’t somebody do something before it hits the house?

Oh, but of course. There’s nobody in there. The house is empty. There’s no one to protect it.

Lord, that’s a crying shame! Look at that tree falling and falling and—

There goes the wall of the house, cracking like an egg struck by a hammer. That’s tragic. Nothing so beautiful should have to die like this. Alone and unloved. Oh, there goes the roof. The branches have such weight, such ancient, aching weight, and now the whole place is collapsing as the tree strikes it. Every wall, window, and door. I can barely see it for dust.

Ah, well. No use looking really. It’s gone.

As I said: a once-in-a-lifetime, never-to-be-repeated offer.

Which could be said for all of us if you were a sentimentalist.

Which I’m not.

Anyway, it’s gone. And there’s nothing left in my pocket to charm you. So from now on it’s going to have to be tears or nothing, I’m afraid.

That’s all that I’ve got left to tell you see: tears, tears, tears.

When I left the butcher’s shop, the sky was wearing a strange coat of colors. It was though the aurora borealis had been caught hold of and dragged south ’til it hung over the grubby little town like a promise of something greater, soon to come.

I hated it on sight. As if I needed to tell you that, knowing me as you now do. I hated its beauty, certainly; but more than that: its serenity. That’s what made me want to climb up to the nearest steeple and try to pull it down. I had no time, however.

I had to find Quitoon, and let him see what I had become by staying in the company of the angels, instead of fleeing them, as he had. All the genius of cruelty and the anguish of the divine were in me now; I was a laying place for every fly whose infants had an appetite for iniquity and ruination. My skull was a face that concealed scorpions; my excrement was serpents, and the poison of serpents; the air I walked in was glittered with shards of rabidity.

I wanted him to see what I had become. I wanted him to know that whatever he had once been to me, I had ripped out of me the merciless meat of that love, if that’s what it was, and fed it to the feral children of Mainz.

It wasn’t hard to follow where he’d gone. I was alive to the secret signs of the world as I had never been alive before. It seemed I could see his phantom form moving ahead of me through the streets, glancing back over his shoulder as he went, as though he’d been afraid with every stride that the angels would come after him.

His fear had diminished after a time, it seemed. He’d slowed his run to a stumbling walk, and had finally stopped completely to catch his breath. I parted from him there, and went on without need of his phantom guidance. I knew the way.

So did others, many others, all converging on the place where my instinct was leading me. I saw glimpses of them as they made their way through the human throng. Some trailed swarms of black bees from the hives of their heads; some went shamelessly naked, defying the righteous, fearful citizens of Mainz to confess that they witnessed them. Others moved through the thoroughfares by far stranger means. There were bits of light weaving back and forth deep beneath the muddied streets, and in the walls of the houses to the left and right of me other entities made their half-seen way, rising up to the eaves one moment and plunging down to the level of the street the next. There were travelers whose bones blazed through billowing robes of translucent flesh. There were headless, limbless beings that flew through brick and timber on their way to that unknown destination that summoned us all. Of their tribes or their allegiances it was impossible to make any meaningful judgment. I had never seen their like in the Circles of Hell, but that meant nothing, given how narrow my knowledge of that place had been. Perhaps they were higher forms of demon or lower forms of angel; perhaps both. It was not inconceivable. Nothing was, on that day.

And so I turned one last corner and came into the street where Johannes Gutenberg, the most noted goldsmith in Mainz, had his workshop.

It was a commonplace building on a commonplace street, and had it not been for the powers congregating there I would not have looked twice at it. But there was no doubt that this unremarkable place contained something significant. Why else would agents of Heaven and Hell be locked in such brutal combat on the roof, and in the air above the roof, where they tumbled over and over, forms of sun and shadow, wrapped around one another. These weren’t performances, they were life or death struggles. I saw a demon of no little magnificence drop out of the sky with the top half of its head sheared off by an angel’s sword, another torn apart by a gang of four heavenly spirits, each taking a limb. There were other forces battling at far higher altitudes, lightning strikes leaping from cloud to cloud, and flayed anatomies descending in rains of excrement and gold. The citizens of Mainz showed a stubborn refusal to see what was going on above. Their only concession to the fact that today was not like any other was their silence as they made their way past the Gutenberg workshop. They studied their muddy feet as they trudged by, their faces wearing expressions of fake intent, as though their purposefulness would protect them against any kind of rain, sulfuric or seraphic.

I had no more interest in the outcome of these battles than they. What did it matter to me whether Heaven or Hell carried the day? I was my own force on this crowded battlefield: a captain, a soldier, and a drummer boy in an army of one.

That is not to say I would not take advantage of any opportunity the battle might present me with, the first of which came when I climbed the three stone steps that led up from the filth of the street to the workshop door. I rapped on the door with my knuckles: three neat taps. The door remained closed. I was tempted to unleash against it the powers that were fermenting in me, powers I swear had doubled in strength every time I had turned a corner and came closer to this door. But if I did so, then the warring factions would know I was of their number, and I would surely be commandeered by Hell, or assaulted by Heaven. Better they took me for a burned wreck of a man, begging at a goldsmith’s door.

After a time I knocked again, only instead of rapping politely with my knuckles I beat on it with the side of my fist. Nor did I stop this tattoo, but kept on beating and beating until finally I heard the bolts on the door being slid aside, top and bottom, and the door was opened just wide enough for a man of perhaps twenty-five to peer out at me, his pale, lightly freckled face marked with streaks of black. Despite his warpaint, the sight of my own ruin of a face made him regard me with no little horror.

“We don’t give to beggars,” he said.

I replied with just five words. “
I am not a beggar.”
But they emerged from me with such an authority that they astonished even me, their speaker. And if me, then how much more the man on the other side of the door? His hand, with which he had gripped the doorframe when he’d opened up so as to block my entrance, now dropped away, and his grey eyes filled with grief.

“Is it the end?” he said.

“The end?”

“It is, isn’t it?” the man said.

He stepped away from the door, and as though owing to the simple fact of my presence at the threshold the door swung open, showing me the retreating young man, a knife dropping from the hand he’d had out of sight behind the door, and the passageway down which he was running, which led to a large well-lit room where several men were at work.

“Johannes!” the young man called back to one of their number. “Johannes! Your dream! Oh Lord in Heaven! Your dream!”

I was, apparently, expected.

I won’t mislead you and claim I was not surprised. I was, mightily. But just as I had learned how to perform passably as a human being, so it was no great hardship now to act like a visitor—whether I was expected to be human or not I neither knew nor cared—whose imminent arrival had been anticipated.

“Close the door,” I called out to the young man. Again my voice carried the power of an imperative that would not be contradicted. The young man dropped to his hands and knees, turned and crawled past me, his head bowed, his eyes averted, and pushed the door closed.

I had not realized until the door slammed shut how significant this house, where Gutenberg worked his secret work, had become. Here, perhaps, I would have the question that troubles all of us, if we were truthful, answered:
Why am I alive?
I didn’t yet have that answer, but thanks to the few words I’d heard spoken here I was filled up with a light-headed sense of joy. That though the journey here had been long and that more than once I had despaired of ever discovering what purpose I served that here, under this roof, was a man who might relieve me of the soul-rotting fear that I served none at all:
Johannes Gutenberg
had dreamt of me.

“Where are you, Johannes Gutenberg?” I called to him.”

“We have some business, I believe.”

In response to my call, an imposingly tall, expansive-shouldered man with a long broad head of iron and salt stepped into view. He stared at me with bruise-bagged, bloodshot, yet presently astonished eyes.

“The words you utter,” he said, “they’re the same words you spoke in my dream. I know because when I woke I asked my wife what you might mean by unfinished business. I thought perhaps we’d forgotten to pay some bills. She told me to go back to sleep and forget about it. But I couldn’t. I came down here, to the very spot where I had dreamt I was standing when you came in, and where I now stand.”

“And what did you say to me in your dream?”

“I said welcome to my workshop, Mr. B.”

I inclined my head slightly, as though making the subtlest of bows. “I am Jakabok Botch.”

“And I am—”

“Johannes Gutenberg.”

The man made a small, quick smile. He was clearly nervous at my presence, which was appropriate. After all, it wasn’t some common official from the guilds of Mainz who had come knocking at his door, wanting ale and gossip. It was a dream that had strayed from the sleeping world into that of the woken.

“I mean you no harm, sir,” I told him.

“That’s easily said,” Gutenberg replied. “But harder to prove.”