Mister B. Gone Read online

  “Unless, of course, you’re so tired of the dust and the heat that you want to be put out of your misery. Is that it, Botch? Are you tired of life?”

  “No. Only of you,” I said. “You and your endless, boring talk about machines. Machines, machines! Who cares what men are making? I don’t!”

  “Even if the machine changed the world?”

  I laughed. “Nothing is going to change this,” I said. “Stars.

  Sun. Roads. Fields. On and on. World without end.”

  We stared at one another for a moment, but I did not care to meet his gaze any longer, for all its golden gleam. I turned back the way we’d come, though the road was as empty and unpromising in that direction as it was in the other. I didn’t care. I had no will to go to Mainz, or see whatever Quitoon thought was so very interesting there.

  “Where are you going?” he said.

  “Anywhere. As long as it’s away from you.”

  “You’ll die.”

  “No I won’t. I lived before I knew you and I’ll live again when I’ve forgotten you.”

  “No, Botch. You’ll die.”

  I was six or seven strides from him when with a sudden rush of dread I understood what he was telling me. I dropped the bag of food I was carrying, and without even glancing back at him to confirm my fears I turned to my right, and raced for the only concealment available to me, the corn. As I did so I heard a sound like that of a whip being cracked, and felt a surge of heat come at me from behind, its force sufficient to pitch me forwards. My feet, trapped in those damnable fancy boots, stumbled over themselves, and I fell into the shallow ditch that ran between the road and the field. It was the saving of me. Had I still been standing I would have been struck by the blast of heat that Quitoon had spewed in my direction.

  The heat missed me and found the grain instead. It blackened for an instance, then bloomed fire, lush orange flames rising against the sky’s flawless blue. Had there been more to devour than the wilted grain I might have been scorched to death there in the ditch. But the grain was consumed in a heartbeat, and the fire was obliged to spread in pursuit of further nourishment, racing along the edge of the field in both directions. A veil of smoke rose from the blackened stubble and under its cover I crawled along the ditch.

  “I thought you were a demon, Botch,” I heard Quitoon say.

  “But look at you. You’re just a worm.”

  I paused to look back and saw through a shred in the smoke that Quitoon was standing in the ditch watching me. His expression was one of pure revulsion. I’d seen the same look on his face before, of course, though not often. He reserved it only for the most abject and hopeless filth we had encountered on our travels. Now I was numbered among them in his eyes, which fact stung more than the knowledge that his gaze could kill me before I had time to draw a final breath.

  “Worm!” he called to me. “Prepare to burn.”

  The next moment would certainly have brought the killing fire, but two things saved me from it: one, a number of shouts from the direction of the field, from those who presumably owned it and had come running in the hope of putting out the flames, and, more fortuitous still, the second, a sudden thickening of the smoke that came off the burning grain, which closed the opening through which Quitoon had been watching me, obscuring him completely.

  I didn’t wait for another such chance to come my way. I crawled out of the ditch under the cover of the ever thickening smoke and ran down the road that would carry me away from Mainz with all possible speed. I did not look back until I had put half a mile or more between me and Quitoon, fearing with every step I took that he would have pursued me.

  But no. When I finally allowed my aching lungs some respite, and paused to look back down the road, there was no sign of him. Only a smudge of smoke that concealed the place where we had made our joyless farewells. From what I could see the peasants were having very little success stopping Quitoon’s fire from destroying their desiccated crops. The flames had leapt the road and were now spreading through the grain on the opposite side.

  I continued my retreat, though now I went at a more leisurely pace. I paused only to take off those crippling boots, which I tossed into the ditch, allowing my demonic feet the luxury of air and space. It was strange, at first, to be walking a road barefooted this way after years of being hobbled. But the simplest pleasures are always the best, aren’t they? And there was little simpler than the ease of walking on naked soles.

  When I had put another quarter mile between myself and Quitoon, I paused again and took a moment to look back.

  Though the fields to both sides of the road were still blazing furiously—the fires showing no sign of being contained despite the fact that both conflagrations were sending up columns of black smoke—the road was unpolluted, its length lit here and there by shafts of sunlight that had pierced the smoke. In one of them stood Quitoon, staring down the road at me, his feet set wide apart, his hands behind his back. The hood he had worn to conceal his demonic features was now thrown back, and despite the considerable distance between us, the power of my infernal gaze, aided by the brightness of the sun, allowed me to read the expression on his face. Or rather, the absence of any expression. He no longer stared at me with hatred or contempt, and as I returned his stare I saw, or perhaps it was just that I wanted to see, a hint of puzzlement on his face, as though he could not entirely understand how, after so many years of being together, we had been separated so quickly and so foolishly.

  Then the shaft of sunlight died away, and he disappeared from view.

  Perhaps if I’d had more courage, I would have gone back there and then. I’d have run back to him, calling his name, risking the possibility that he could unleash another fire at me or that he might be ready to forgive me.

  Too late! The sun had gone, and the smoke concealed everything in that direction, Quitoon included.

  I stood in the middle of the road for fully half an hour, hoping that he might emerge from the smoke and wander back towards me, willing to put the foolish tempers between us behind us.

  But no. By the time the smoke had faded away, providing me with a clear view of the road all the way to the wavering horizon, he had gone. Whether he had quickened his pace and simply strode out of sight or forsaken the road in favor of making his way into Mainz by winding through the fields, he was gone, which left me with an unpalatable dilemma. If I continued in the direction in which I’d fled, I would be heading off into a world I had wandered for a century without meeting any member of your kind that I would have trusted. On the other hand, if I turned around and followed the road to Mainz, in the hope of making peace with Quitoon, I was risking my life. From the rational point of view, my future depended on whether I believed he’d truly intended to kill me with that wave of fire or if he’d sought merely to terrorize me for calling him stupid. In the heat of the moment, I had been concerned he wanted to take my life, but now I dared to hope otherwise. After all, hadn’t I seen his face in the sunlight, purged of all the revulsion and rage he’d had for me?

  In truth, it didn’t really matter whether he’d forgiven me or not. There was a very simple reason why I needed to put all my fears of Quitoon’s true intentions out of my head. I could not conceive of living on earth without his companionship.

  So what choice did I have? We’d both behaved like sun-addled fools: Quitoon for asking such an asinine question in the first place, and me for not having the sense to ignore it and move on. After that first exchange, events had moved with speed and ferocity, the escalation aided by the fact that the corn, once alight, had become an apocalyptic inferno in seconds.

  Well, it was done. And now, I knew in my heart, it would have to be undone. I would have to follow him, ready and willing to take the consequences of whatever happened when he and I were reunited.

  So, to Mainz.

  But first I should probably address a question that the events on the road might have raised in your head. Why was Quitoon able to spit fire, or do th
e impersonation of an exploding furnace he’d done a hundred years before, killing the mob, while it was all I could do some days to have a successful bowel movement?

  The answer is breeding. Quitoon had it, I didn’t. He came from a line of demons that could trace its pedigree back to the First Fallen, and the upper crust of Hell have always possessed powers that the rest of us simply aren’t born with. Nor are we readily able to learn to perform what nature did not give us.

  It wasn’t for want of trying, on either my part or his. In the thirty-eighth year of our travels together (or thereabouts), Quitoon, in the midst of a conversation about the swelling number of Humankind, and the threat that they posed us, asked me out of the blue if I would like him to try and teach me some of his “fire tricks,” as he liked to call them.

  “You never know when you might want to quickly burn somebody.”

  “You talking about Humankind?”

  “I’m talking about any form of life that gets in your way, Mister B. Human, demonic, angelic—”

  “You said angelic.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes. Was that a mistake?”

  “Why would it be a mistake?”

  “You haven’t actually killed an angel, have you?”

  “Three. Well, two kills and one probable. At the very least, I left it a paraplegic.”

  He wasn’t lying. By then I knew the little clues—the averted gaze, a subtle deepening of the red scales around his neck—that were signs that he was toying with the truth.

  No, Quitoon had killed an angel or two or three with his unforgiving fire. And nothing excited me more than the prospect of being taught how to kill as he killed. Demonation, he tried!

  For fully half a decade or more he attempted to teach me how to unleash my own fire. But the skill was beyond me, and the more I worked to force my body to do as I was instructing it, the more it gave up signs of petty mutiny. Instead of nurturing lethal fires in my body fluids and my belly, I got kidney stones and an ulcer. I passed the stones in a day and a half of blind agony some months later. The ulcer I still have to this day.

  So much for learning the “fire tricks.” My bloodline, Quitoon eventually decided, was so far from the purity of his own lineage that the methods he used were simply inapplicable to my own ancestry and anatomy. I remember to this day what he said when we finally agreed that trying to teach me his conflagratory genius was a lost cause.

  “Never mind,” he said. “You don’t really need to cause fires anyway. You’ve always got me.”

  “Always?”

  “Didn’t I just say so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Am I a liar?”

  “No.” I lied.

  “Then you’ll always be safe, won’t you? Because even if you can’t be an incendiary yourself, all you have to do is call for me and I’ll be at your side, cremating your enemies without even asking the reason.”

  So, as I said, to Mainz. Even if the signposts had not been adequate to the task, it wouldn’t have been difficult to find my way. Quitoon had left a trail of fires, which were as easy to follow as any map. I lost count of the villages he had destroyed, leaving not one habitable dwelling. He erased with the same thoroughness solitary farmhouses and churches.

  As for the human populous, they either lay littered on the streets of the burned-out villages or, as was the case with many of the farmhouses, their occupants’ fire-withered bodies lay in rows close to their blackened homes, their limbs drawn up to their bodies like charred fetuses. In two of the churches he had somehow managed to persuade the entire congregation of each to assemble outside the building, and then he had cremated them where they stood, so that the congregants fell side by side, some reaching out to those beside them—especially to the children—as the fire ate away all signs of who they had been.

  This rampage had left the landscape I passed through deserted. If there had indeed been survivors, they had fled rather than linger to bury the dead.

  Finally, the scenes of destruction became less regular, and I saw figures in the distance, and heard the sounds of marching feet. I hid behind the scorched remains of a stone wall, and watched as a battalion of uniformed men went by, led by their officer who rode on horseback, his face, unseen by his men, betraying a profound unease as he surveyed the smoky sky and smelt, as I smelt, the stench of cooked Humankind.

  Once the anxious captain and his battalion of equally unhappy men had tromped by, I got up out of my hiding place, and returned to the road. There was a patch of forest ahead of me, but whoever had laid the road had decided against pushing through the dense interior. Instead the road skirted the trees in a leisurely curve. There was no sign of any further fireworks from Quitoon, the reason for which became apparent when the road brought me out the other side of the forest. The outskirts of Mainz lay just a few hundred yards ahead. There was nothing about the town that distinguished it from countless other towns Quitoon and I had seen. Certainly there was no hint that anything world-changing could be conceived there, much less be born. But, that said, the same was probably true of Bethlehem at a certain time.

  I didn’t quicken my step, but rather slowed it to a hobble as I entered the streets, so as to convince any citizen of Mainz who looked my way that the possessor of a face so traumatically unmade by fire was wounded everywhere about my body. Your kind has a superstitious terror of things ugly and broken; you fear that their condition may somehow infect you. The God-fearing citizens of Mainz were no exception to the human rule.

  They called their children off the street as I scuttled by and summoned their dogs to drive me away from their thresholds, though I never met a dog so obedient to its master that it would obey an order to attack me.

  And if, by chance, any of the citizens did get too close to me and my willful tails started to stir in my breeches, I had a gamut of little grotesqueries that invariably drove them off. I would let my mouth loll open like that of a man whose mind had drained away, the spittle running from it freely, while green-grey snot bubbled up from the scabby holes in the middle of my face where my nose had once been many, many fires ago.

  Ha! That disgusted you a little, didn’t it? I caught that little flicker of revulsion on your face. Now you’re trying to cover it up, but you don’t fool me with that oh-so-confident look, as though you knew every secret under Heaven. You don’t fool me for an instant. I’ve been studying you for a long time, now. I can smell your breath, feel the weight of your fingers as they turn the pages. I know more than you’d ever think I know; and a lot more than you’d like me to know. I could give you a list of the masks you put on to cover up things you don’t want me to see.

  But trust me, I see them anyway. I see everything—the lies and, just as clearly, the nasty truth beneath.

  Oh, while we’re having this heart to heart, I should tell you that this is the last piece of my history I will be telling you. Why?

  Because after this there’s no more to tell. After this, the story is in your hands, literally. You will give me my fire, won’t you?

  One last conflagration, in a life that’s been full of them. Then it’ll be over, for both of us.

  Mister B. will be gone.

  First, though, I have the secrets of the Gutenberg house to relate: secrets hidden behind several sturdy, commonplace wooden doors, and behind another door, this one made of light, a Secret greater than even Gutenberg could have invented.

  I’m trusting you not to cheat me once I’ve given you the whole truth of things. You understand me? Though it’s true that a demon born of lowly stock has no aptitude for great magical workings, time, solitude, and anger can teach even the least of creatures the power that simply living a long life can accrue, and the harm and hurt that such power can then cause. In Hell, the Doctors of Torment called those hurts the Five Agonies: Pain, Grief, Despair, Madness, and the Void.

  Having survived the centuries I have sufficient power in me to introduce you to every one of the Five, should you deny me my promised flam
e.

  The air between these words and your eyes has become dangerously unstable. And though when we began you seemed to genuinely imagine you had a place assigned to you in paradise, and that nothing of the Demonation could touch you, now your certainty has slipped away, and it’s taken your dreams of innocence with it.

  I can see in your eyes that there’s no seam of untapped joy left in you. The best of life has come and gone. Those days when sudden epiphanies swept over you, and you had visions of the rightness of all things and of your place amongst them; they’re history. You’re in a darker place now. A place you chose, with me for company. Me, an insignificant demon with a seeping scar for a face and body that even I find nauseating to look at, who has killed your kind countless times, and would kill again, happily, if the opportunity were before me. Think about that. Is it any wonder that the soul you once had—the soul that was granted those moments of epiphany that made the degrading grind of your life easier to bear—has passed from sight? The other you, the innocent, would never have pressed on through stories of patricide and executions and wholesale slaughter. You would have waved it all away, determined to keep such depravities and debaucheries out of your head.

  Your mind is a sewer, running with filth and hurt and anger.

  Its rancor is in your eyes, in your sweat, on your breath. You’re as corrupted as I am, yet filled up with a secret pride that you possess such a limitless supply of wickedness.

  Don’t look at me as though you don’t know what I’m talking about. You know your sins very well. You know the things you’ve wanted, and what you would do to get them if you’d the opportunity.

  You’re a sinner. And if, by some unfortunate chance, you were to perish without dealing with the pain you’ve caused, the fury you’ve unleashed— without making amends—then there is a place for you in the World Below, more certain than any home in paradise.

  I’m mentioning this now because I don’t want you thinking that this is all some game you can play for a while and then put down and forget. It wasn’t at the beginning and, trust me, it certainly won’t be that at the end.