Mister B. Gone (22 page)

“Nothing,” the Archbishop said.

Gutenberg looked at me.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Perhaps I should show it to you then,” he suggested.

“Only if you wish to,” I replied lightly.

He smiled. “I do.”

So saying, he led me across the room to the heavy door with Do Not Enter carved into it. He knocked, rapping out a code of entry, and the door, which was twice the thickness of any door I’d ever seen, was opened. I could not see what was inside; Gutenberg was blocking my view. But I caught the oily, bitter smell that came through the door like a greasy wave.

“What’s that smell?”

“Ink, of course,” Gutenberg replied. “To print the words.”

I should have taken the warning that “of course” offered me: He expected me to know that he was more than something as commonplace as a copier of books. But I blundered on, stupidly.

“So you copy books?” I said. “What have you invented? A new quill?”

It was meant as a joke, but Gutenberg did not see the humor in it. He stopped on the bottom step, preventing me from descending any further.

“We don’t copy books here,” he said, his tone far from friendly.

I felt the weight of the Archbishop’s hand and rings upon my shoulder. He was behind me, blocking my exit with crook and girth.

“Why so many questions, Botch?” he said.

“I like to learn.”

“But you’ve walked through Gutenberg’s dreams. Or at least you claim you have. How could you possibly pass through the mind of a man consumed by one great labor, and not see that labor?”

I was trapped, caught by the His Holiness behind, the genius in front, and my own foolish mouth in the middle.

It was my tongue that had got me into this little mess, so I silently entreated it now to get me out.

“You speak of your Reprodukagraph, I assume,” I said, my eyes, I’m certain, registering a certain shock at hearing this five-syllable bizzarity emerge from between my lips unbidden.

“Is that what I should call it?” Gutenberg said, the ice that had been in his voice moments before now melted away. He took the final step down into the workshop floor and turned to look at me. “I was thinking I’d call it a printing press.”

“Well, you could, I suppose,” I replied, glancing back at the Archbishop as I spoke and giving him a look of aristocratic ill-temper. “Would you be so kind as to lift your hand off my shoulder, your bejewelledness?”

There were a number of barely suppressed guffaws from the workers in the immense room behind Gutenberg, and even the stern genius himself allowed laughter to bloom in his eyes when he heard my addressing the Archbishop in this fashion. His Excellency duly removed his hand, not without first harshly digging his fingers and thumb into my flesh to inform me silently that he would be keeping a close watch on me. Gutenberg, meanwhile, turned at the bottom of the stairs, inviting me to follow. I did so, stepping down into the workshop itself, finally laying eyes on the apparatus that was the cause of all the conflict around, above, and below the Gutenberg house.

The invention looked very remotely like a wine press, but there was a great deal about its construction that was purely of Gutenberg’s design. I watched as one of the three men attending to the operation of the press took a sheet of paper and carefully placed it on a bed of ink-stained wood.

“What are you printing now?” I asked the genius.

He arbitrarily plucked a page from the dozen or so that were neatly pegged up to dry on lengths of string above our heads.

“I had wanted to begin with the Bible.”

“
In the beginning was the Word,”
I said.

Luckily for me, Gutenberg knew the rest of the line, because all I recalled was those first six words from the Gospel according to John. Not long after reading them, I’d thrown the book back amongst the garbage on the Ninth Circle, where I’d first found it.

“
And the Word was with God,”
Gutenberg went on.

“The
Word
,” I murmured. Then looking back at the Archbishop, I said, “Was it any particular Word, do you think?”

He gave me a silent sneer, as though to reply to me was beneath him.

“Just asking,” I said, shrugging.

“This is my foreman. Dieter. Say hello to Mister B., Dieter.”

A young bald man working on the press, his apron and hands liberally decorated with smears and handprints of ink, looked up and gave me a quick wave.

“Dieter convinced me that we should start with something more modest in scale than the Bible. So I’m testing the press by printing a school grammar book—”

“The
Ares Grammatica
?” I said, having spotted the words on the title page, which was drying at the other end of the room.

(My demonic vision saw what most human eyes would never have been able to read, so Gutenberg was delighted that I could name the book.)

“You’re familiar with it?”

“I studied it, when I was much younger. But, of course, the copy my tutor had was very precious. And expensive.”

“My printing press will put an end to the great expense of books, because it will make many in the same way, from a plate, set with all the letters. In reverse of course.”

“In reverse! Ha!” This pleased me for some reason.

He reached up and pulled down another of the sheets drying overhead. “I persuaded Dieter that we might print one thing that was not so boring as a grammar book. So we agreed to print out a poem from the
Sibylline Prophecies
as well.

Dieter was listening to all this. He looked up briefly and cast a loving, brotherly smile in Gutenberg’s direction. Clearly Gutenberg was one of those men who inspired devotion in his employees.

“It’s beautiful,” I said as Gutenberg handed the page to me.

The lines of the poem were neat and legible. There was no elaborate illustration on the first letter, such as monks often took months to create on a manuscript. But the page had other virtues. The spaces between the words were precisely the same size and the design of the letters made the poem marvelously easy to read.

“The paper feels slightly damp,” I observed.

Gutenberg looked pleased.

“It’s a little trick somebody taught me,” he said. “The paper is dampened before being printed on. But you know this, of course. You told me in the dream.”

“And was I right?”

“Oh yes, sir. You were quite right. I don’t know how I would have fared without the gift of your knowledge.”

“It was my pleasure,” I said, handing the sheet with the poem on it back to Gutenberg and wandering on down the length of the chambers, past the printing press to where two other men worked feverishly to arrange lines of mirror-image letters on wooden trays. All the necessary parts of a sentence—the letters in both upper- and lowercases, the empty spaces between the words, all the numerals, and, finally, of course, all the punctuation—were laid out on four tables, so that both could work without one getting in the way of the other. Unlike Dieter and his colleagues working on the press, all of whom took a moment from their tasks to look up at us when we entered, and even laugh when I made fun of the Archbishop, these two were so profoundly immersed in their work, referring constantly to a hand-scribed copy of the text they were concentrated on, that they did not even glance up. Their labor was as fascinating to watch as it was surely demanding to do. I found myself removed into an almost trancelike state by watching them.

“All the men have signed an oath of silence,” Gutenberg said, “so that none but us should have the power of this press.”

“Quite right,” I replied.

It occurs to me now that the revelations, such as they were, are almost over; that there’s only one Secret of any consequence left to tell. And given that fact perhaps a wise soul such as yourself, tired of petty games and schoolyard threats that have on occasion issued from me—
mea culpa, mea maxima
culpa
—that you may think this is not an inappropriate time to forsake the book entirely.

Yes, I’m giving you one last chance, my friend. Call me sentimental but I don’t have any great desire to murder you, as you know I will if you get to the final page. I am so much closer to you now than I was when I first told you about matching my strides; to the number of pages you turned, I can hear you muttering to yourself as you turn the page; and, of course, I can smell you and taste your sweat. You’re uneasy, aren’t you? Part of you wants to do as I have requested and burn the book.

If I may offer a little advice: That’s the part to listen to.

The other part, the part that feels defiant and is putting your life at risk just to play a dangerous game of dare, that part is just the willful child in you, speaking out, demanding to be heard. That’s understandable. We all have these slivers of who we were when we were very, very young left in our heads.

But please, don’t listen to that voice. There’s nothing left in the pages to come that’s of any great interest. It’s just the politics of Heaven and Hell from here.

The human story is over. Now you know what the mystery of the Gutenberg workshop was you’re probably thinking—and I wouldn’t blame you—all this for a
printing press
? Ludicrous.

No, I wouldn’t blame you for setting fire to this damn book out of sheer fury, to have been given something at the end of your journey that turns out to be this inconsequential. But you can’t say I didn’t warn you. God alone knows how many times I told you to do the sensible thing and let the book go. But you insisted on waiting. You obliged me to tell you things, like the curious knot of feelings I had for Quitoon, that I would have preferred to keep to myself, but which I confessed out of respect for the truth, as a thing entire, not scraped together from bits and pieces.

Well, it’s over now. You can still burn the book and be satisfied that you read the bulk of it. It’s time. There are a few pages remaining, but why waste more of your valuable time? You now know what mysterious invention Quitoon had been in pursuit of—the same one that makes the existence of this very book possible.

Everything comes full circle in the end. You met me in these pages. We learned to understand one another as we went from the garbage heaps of the Ninth Circle up into the World Above, and then from Joshua’s Field to the long road I traveled with Quitoon. I didn’t bore you with a list of the places we went in search of some new invention Quitoon had heard about. They were mostly instruments of war: cannons and long bows, siege towers and battering rams. Sometimes a thing of beauty would await us at the end of one our searches. I did get to hear the first harpsichord make music, for instance, in the 1390s, I think. I lose track. So many places, so many creations.

But the point really is: Now that journey is over. There are no more roads to take. No more inventions to see. We have arrived back at the pages where we met; or rather at the device that first made such pages. It’s such a tight little circle in the end.

And I’m trapped in it. You’re not.

So go. Go on, while you can, having seen more perhaps than you expected to see.

And as you are leaving, tear these pages out and toss them into a little bonfire you’ve made. Then get about your business and forget me.

I’m trying hard to be generous here. But it’s difficult. You’ve rejected every offer I’ve made to you. It doesn’t matter how much I open up my heart and soul to you; it’s never been enough to satisfy you. More,
more
, you always want more. There’s only one other person in my life who’s hurt me as profoundly as you’ve hurt me, and that’s Quitoon. You’ve changed me so I can hardly even recognize myself. There was kindness in me once, and boundless love. But it’s all gone now, gone forever. You killed every particle of joy that was in me, every scrap of hope and forgiveness, gone, all gone.

Yet, here I am, somehow finding it in me, the Devil alone knows how, to reach out from these anguished pages in one last desperate attempt to try to touch your heart.

The fireworks are over. There’s nothing more to see. You may as well move on. Find yourself some new victim to corrupt, the way you’ve corrupted me. No, no, I take that back. You weren’t to know how much it has hurt me, how much deeper my bitterness is, to be made to walk again the sad roads I walked to get here, and to confess the feelings that moved through me as I moved through the world.

My journey ended in the prison from which I speak. I’ve given you plenty of stories to tell, should the occasion come up when it seemed appropriate to tell. Ah, the tales of damned souls and darkness incarnate.

But now, truly, there’s nothing left. So get it over with, will you? I have no desire to do harm to you, but if you keep playing around with me I won’t be so ready to end your life with a simple slash of my knife across your jugular. Oh no. I’ll cut you first. I’ll slice off your eyelids to start with, so you won’t be able to close them against the sight of my knife cutting and cutting.

The largest number of cuts I ever made on a human body before its owner succumbed was two thousand and nine: that was a woman. The largest number I ever made on a man before he died was one thousand eight hundred and ninety-three. It’s hard to judge how many cuts it would take to bring you down. What I do know is that you’ll be begging me to kill you off, offering me anything—the souls of your loved ones—anything, anything, you’ll say, only kill me quickly. Give me oblivion, you’ll beg, I don’t care. Anything, so I don’t have to see your entrails, purple, veiny, and shiny wet, appearing from the little slices I made in your lower belly. It’s a common mistake people make, thinking that once their guts have unraveled around your feet that the happy prospect of death is in sight. That happens to be true, even with a weak specimen of your kind. I murdered two Popes, both of whom were cretinous from the diseases their depravities had given them (but who were still pronouncing dogmas for the Holy Mother Church and its believers), and each took an inordinately long time to die, for all their frailty.