Mister B. Gone Read online

  “There’s no triumph in such detestable obscenities,” the Archbishop raged. “You are as loathsome of a soul as you are of flesh! Odious, repugnant filth. That’s all you are. Less than a worm in the bowels of a dog.”

  He spoke this righteous stuff with great vigor, his lips spattered with spittle. But there was something about it that seemed forced and fake. I looked over at Hannah, then at Gutenberg, and finally at Quitoon. Of the three only Gutenberg looked like a believer.

  “Pray, Hannah!” he said. “And thank the Lord God that we have the Archbishop here to protect us.”

  Gutenberg turned his back to the broken window where the demon still clung, its entrance apparently blocked by the Archbishop’s presence, and going to the wall behind the press took down a plain wooden cross. If it had been hung there to protect the men who worked on the press, then it had performed poorly; the evidence of that lay sprawled and pooled around the printer’s feet. But Gutenberg still had faith in its efficacy, it seemed.

  As he took the cross down there was an eruption of violent noises from every direction: glass shattering, wood splintering, hinges being ripped out of door frames, and bolts torn from windows. The house shook, its foundation growling. From behind me came a crack like summer thunder, and I looked around the room to see that a jagged black crack, like lightening to accompany the thunder, had appeared on the wall behind the press. It instantly threw out more of its kind: lightening children, which ran in all directions across the ceiling in places, and dropping to the floor in others, throwing down veils of plaster dust as they reduced the room to chaos.

  The dust felt like flecks of glass beneath my eyelids. They pricked my eyes and tears came. I tried to resist them but they refused to be quelled. They coursed down my cheeks, their display the kind of thing Quitoon had always taken pleasure in mocking me for.

  “Are you all right, Mister B.?” he asked me, as though genuinely concerned for my well-being.

  “Never better!” I snapped.

  “But look at your tears, Mister B.! How they fall!”

  “It’s the dust, Quitoon,” I replied. “As you well know.”

  At this moment Hannah—who though she had been dispatched by her husband to fetch food and drink for his guests returned empty-handed, but with Quitoon for company—started to speak, but there was nothing in her voice that recalled the confounded but obedient hausfrau she had seemed to be when I’d first met her.

  She was something else entirely. Her deep-set eyes were fixed on the genius she had protected, and her arms open wide. It seemed for a miraculous moment that the whole room—every flake of plaster that spiraled from the ceiling and speck of dust that rose off the floor, every gaze and every heartbeat, every gleam off the scattered lead letters and off the press—was drawn into the flux around her.

  Wings! She seemed to have wings, exquisite arcs of light and dust, that rose high above her head. What a perfect disguise this angel had chosen in order to protect the man marked to do something of great consequence. She’d married him, so as to innocently watch over the genius Gutenberg, at least until his Great Work had been done, and the key in the door of history turned.

  I wasn’t certain that anyone else in the room was seeing Hannah as I was saw her. I suspected not, for there was no response, no murmur of wonderment from those in the room who still had heartbeats.

  “Quitoon!” I yelled. “Do you see her?”

  As soon as the syllables departed my lips the Angel Hannah’s presence claimed my lumpen words and turned them into strands of pearly incandescence, which danced as they went from me, a shamanic belly-dance celebrating their release from the lead weight of particularity—the cry of O, the ego of I—into cosmic commonality.

  Demonation! How poorly language describes its own death; its choices pitifully sparse when it comes to finding words to express their own unknitting. I find myself close to being silenced for want of the right words to say.

  Silenced. Ha! Maybe that’s the answer. Maybe I should stop filling the airwaves with stinking schools of dead fish words, never eaten or understood. Maybe silence is the ultimate form of rebellion; the truest sign of our contempt for the cheating Brute on High. After all, don’t words belong to Him? It’s there in the gospel that the disciple John wrote (and I trust him more than the rest because I think he felt about his Jesus the way I felt about my Quitoon); he opens his report on the life of his love with:

  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

  The Word was God.

  You see now? Silence is all we’ve got left. It’s our last, desperate chance to rebel against the One who has the Word.

  The problem is, whether God owns the Words or not, they’re all I’ve got with which to tell you what’s left to tell. There’s a Secret waiting to be told and it can’t be told by silence. We’re right on its threshold now. Just a few more pages for you and a few more strides for me.

  You thought I’d forgotten that little threat of mine?

  Oh no, no, no; I’ve been getting closer all the time. I could get this over with right now, in one dash—I’d make it quick. I’ve got long, bony-thin fingers, see, and my claws are as sharp as grief. And I’ll drive them into your neck—eight long fingers and two long thumbs—driven in so far that they crisscross in your throat.

  Of course you’ll struggle. Any animal does, even when it’s lost.

  You watch a buffalo taken by a crocodile. That iron-hoofed thing will kick and thrash around, its eye barely showing above its lower lid, the rest all white, and it’ll keep kicking and thrashing even when the reptile’s taken a second bite so that it’s got the beast’s whole neck in its jaws. Even then, when it doesn’t have a hope.

  As if you ever did.

  Poor little page-turner.

  In a way I’m glad you’ve chosen to read and perish, because I feel I’ve got to unburden myself of what I know, so I can be done with it, once and for all. Then I can lie down somewhere comfortable and dream I’m back in Joshua’s Field, with the people all gone, and the fear gone with them, along with the smell of burning men. And Quitoon will lie down beside me, and new grass will grow out of the mud all around us, while the stars go out . . .

  But first, the Secret. It’s important stuff I’m passing on to you, the kind of stuff that could change the world if the world would listen.

  But no. The rings on the hands of the Popes just get larger and more polished over the passage of years, and the spittle on the lips of the men who kiss those rings—the men who rule in public places puppeteered by private hands—becomes more toxic and turns to pure poison by the lies and obfuscations they utter.

  So, whether I have the Secret or you do, it doesn’t matter.

  It won’t change anything. Just let me unburden myself of the Secret, then you can burn the book and we’ll have the best of both worlds, won’t we?”

  But be very quiet now. Because even when nobody wants to hear it, a Secret’s still a Secret. It still has power. Maybe it’s just that its moment hasn’t come yet. Ha! Yes. That’s possible. Perhaps even probable. Yes, I think probable. Its moment hasn’t come.

  But when it does, you’ll have something worth living for.

  Imagine that! What it will feel like to get up in the morning and think: I know why I’m alive; I have a purpose, a reason to draw breath.

  Imagine that.

  Imagine thinking, and while you’re imagining, listen: I’ve got a Secret that the world’s going to need one day.

  Demonation! How lucky I was to have a father who hated me. A father who left me burning in that fire of confessions ’til I was a walking scar. Because if that had never happened, then I’d never have been able to pass through crowds of Humankind the way I did. I would never have dared go down into Joshua’s Field if I’d been whole. And without Joshua’s Field there would have been no meeting with my—

  —my—

  —teacher, was he?

  —beloved, was he?r />
  —tormentor, was he?

  Yes. That he was. No doubt of that. I swear he created five New Agonies, made just for me, and all made of love.

  I’m talking about Quitoon, of course. Until him I hadn’t known it possible to have a God in your private Heaven: or to love and hate him with such intensity. To want him so close sometimes that in the throes of my telling him I wish I could just dissolve away into him, so that the two of us would never again be parted. And then he says something to hurt me: a deep hurt, a bitter hurt, the kind of hurt that only someone who knows me better than I know myself could say.

  And even as I think of this, as I do now, I realize that the Secret that was hidden in Gutenberg’s house had been with me all the way along.

  I didn’t see it, of course, because I was too busy feeling sorry for myself, thinking I was the only one who’d ever loved and hated the same soul at the same time. Not until Gutenberg’s workshop did I realize that the scrawl of contradiction that caused my head and heart to roar and blaze was writ large in the very workings of the world.

  It was love that moved all things. Or rather, it was love and its theft, its demise, its silence, that moved all things. From a great fullness—a sense that all was well with things, and could be kept so, with just a little love—to an emptiness so profound that your bones whined when the wind blew through them: The coming and going between these states was the engine of all things. Is this making sense to you, not just as words, but as feeling; yes, and truth; truth undeniable, truth irresistible? I’m watching your eyes following the lines of my memories and my musings, and I wonder: Are we connected, you and I?

  We might only have each other now. Have you considered that? True, you may have friends who insist on telling you their petty little aches and pains. But you’ve never had an intimate who was demon, have you? Any more than I’ve ever reached out to one of your kind to ask for anything, as I have reached out to you. Not once have I requested a single thing, even a donation as inconsequential as a flame.

  Anyway, the workshop. Or, more particularly, the Archbishop (who had, by the way, the rankest breath I have ever been obliged to inhale) who told me to:

  “Get out. Immediately! You’ve no business here.”

  “He’s my business!” I said, pointing at Quitoon. “And that woman beside him, she’s not a woman at all she’s—

  “Been possessed by an angel,” the Archbishop said. “Yes, so I see. There’s another one behind you, demon, if you care to look.”

  I turned, in time to see light spilling from another of the men who had been working on the press. It poured from his eyes, and from his mouth, and from the tips of his fingers. As I watched him he picked up a simple metal rod, which he lifted up, intending, I’m sure, to beat out my brains. But once the rod was held high it caught the contagion of light from his eyes, and became a length of spiraling fire, which threw off flames that fluttered overhead like a swelling cloud of burning butterflies.

  Their strangeness momentarily claimed my attention, and in that moment the man-becoming-angel struck me with his sword.

  Fire, again. Always fire. It had marked every crossroad in my life. Its agonies, its cleansings, its transformations. All of them were gifts of fire.

  And now, this wound, which the man-becoming-angel delivered in its less than perfected state half a step short. It was the saving of me. Any closer and the blade would have cut through me from shoulder to my right hip, and would certainly have brought my existence to an end. Instead it inscribed a line across my body but only sliced into my scarred flesh an inch at most. It was nevertheless a dire wounding, the fire cutting not only my flesh but some fleshless part of me too; the pain of it was worse than even the cut, which was itself enough to make me cry out.

  With both my substance and my soul slashed wide, I was unable to return the blow. I reeled away, bent double by the pain, stumbling blindly across the uneven boards, until my arm found a wall. Its coldness was welcome. I pressed my face against it, trying to govern the urge to weep like a child.

  What use was there in that, I reasoned. Nobody would answer.

  Nobody would come. My pain possessed me; as I, it. We were our other’s only reliable companion in that room. Agony my only certain friend.

  Darkness closed in around the limits of my sight, and my knowledge of myself went out like a candle, which then lit flickered back into life again, and again went out, and was again lit, this time staying alight.

  In the meantime, I had sunk down against the wall, my legs folded up beneath me and my face pressed to the wall. I looked down. Fluids blue-black and scarlet came out of me, running down over my legs. I turned my face away from the wall a few inches to see that the two fluids, unwilling to be intertwined, were forming a marbled pool around me.

  My thoughts went to Quitoon, who had been standing beside Hannah when last I’d seen him. Had the angel already smothered him in her brightness, or was there something I, a wound within wound, might still do to help him?

  I willed my shaking arms to rise, my hands to open, and my palms to push me from the wall. It was hard work. There wasn’t a sinew in my body that wanted to play this fool’s game. My body shook so violently I doubted I would even be able to stand, much less walk.

  But first I had to see the state of the battlefield.

  I turned my unruly head towards the workshop, hoping I would quickly locate Quitoon, and that he would be alive.

  But I did not see him, nor did I see anybody, other than the dead. Quitoon, Hannah, Gutenberg, and the Archbishop, even the demon who had been poised outside the window, were gone.

  So, too, were those few workers who had survived the demon’s assault. There were only the bodies, and me. And I was only here because I had been mistaken for one of them. A living demon left amongst the human dead.

  Where had they gone? I turned my stuttering vision towards the door that led back to the way I’d come, through to the front door, but I neither heard the moans of wounded men nor the voices of demons or of angels. I then looked towards the door through which Hannah and Quitoon had come, which led, I’d supposed, to the kitchen, but there was no sign of lives natural or supernatural in that direction either.

  Now sheer curiosity lent an unanticipated vigor to my body, dulling the pain and allowing my senses to sharpen. I didn’t delude myself that this was a permanent reprieve, but I would take what I was given. There were, after all, only two ways to come and go, so whichever way I chose I had at least half a chance of finding those who’d been here no more than a minute or two before.

  Wait, though. Perhaps it had not been a minute; no, nor even two. There were flies congregating in the thousands around the blood spilled by the man I’d murdered, and thousands more by the men who’d been taken by the flying glass. And for every ten flies feeding there were twenty scrawling on the air above, looking for a place to land and feed.

  Seeing this, I realized that I had been wrong to assume that my consciousness had flickered out for moments only. It was clearly much longer. Long enough for human blood to have congealed a little, and for its smell to have caught the attention of all these hungry flies. Long enough too for everyone who had played a part in the drama of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press to have departed, leaving me forsaken. The fact that the emissaries of Lucifer and those of the Lord God had gone was a matter of indifference to me. But that Quitoon had left—the only soul I had ever longed to be loved by—who, even here, with all possible reason to believe that all hope had been erased, I had still hoped would see my devotion and love me for it—had gone.

  “Botch,” I murmured to myself, remembering the Archbishop’s definition. “A mess. A muddle—”

  I stopped in midcondemnation. Why? Because though I may be a muddle and a mess, I had still managed to catch a glimpse of the workshop’s third door. The only reason I did so was because someone had left it open half a thumb’s length. Indeed, others with less knowledge of the occult might have not have seen it as an
open door at all, but as a trick of the sun, for it seemed to hang in the air, a narrow length of light that started a foot and a half or so off the ground and stopped six feet above that.

  I had no time to waste, not in my wounded state. I went directly to it. Subtle waves of the supernatural forces that had opened this door—and created whatever lay beyond it—broke against me as I approached. Their touch was not unkind. Indeed, they seemed to understand my sickened state, and kindly bathed my wound in balm. Their ministerings gave me the strength and the will to reach up to the narrow strip of light and push it open. I didn’t let it swing wide. I opened it just far enough for me to raise my leg and slide myself—with the greatest caution, having no idea of what lay on the other side—through the opening.

  I entered a large chamber, perhaps twice the size of the workshop where the door through which I was passing stood. What kind of space it occupied exactly, given that the room in which the door was contained was smaller than this one, I have no idea, but such paradoxes are everywhere, believe me. They are the rule not the exception. That you do not see them is a function of your expectations of the world, and only that.

  The chamber, though it existed in an incomprehensible space, seemed solid enough, its walls, floor, and ceiling made of a milky stone, apparently worked by master masons, so that the enormous slabs fitted together without flaw. There were no decorations of any kind on the walls and no windows. Nor was there a rug upon the floor.

  There was, however, a table. A large, long table with a sound timer or hourglass in the middle of it, the kind I’d seen at tribunal to control the amount of time any one party could speak.

  Seated around the table on heavy but well-cushioned chairs were those individuals who had left me for dead. The Archbishop sat at the end nearest to me, his face not visible, while the Angel Hannah sat at the other end. She drew fresh luminescence from the perfect stone, so that now she seemed to my eye like a version of the Hannah Gutenberg I had first encountered in the house, but here she was wearing robes of draped light, which rose and fell about her both slowly and solemnly.