Mister B. Gone Read online

  In truth, I had no intention of eating into the other steak. I’d eaten all I could. I was happy to nibble at my steak bone, which still had a hook around it, the hook attached to one of the two ropes that hung so closely together that I’d assumed they were one.

  Now, however, with my stomach filled, I could afford to be inquisitive. This wasn’t a single rope holding both beer cans.

  There was a second rope, much darker than the bright yellow of the food provider, which hung innocently beside the others.

  Nothing I saw hung from it. My gaze followed it down past my shoulder, hand, leg, knee, and foot, only to find that it disappeared into the mass of garbage on which I stood.

  I bent over at my hips, my fire-stiffened torso almost touching my legs, and went on searching for the continuation of the rope amongst the trash.

  “You drop a bone, did you, idiot?” Pappy Gatmuss said, his words accompanied by a shower of spittle, gristle, and beer.

  “Don’t you take too much longer down there, you hear me? Just because you ordered me a steak and beer doesn’t mean . . . Oh wait! Ha! You stay right where you are, boy. I’m not going to put my cold gun in your ear to blow off your head. I’m going to put it in your rear and blow off your . . .”

  “It’s a trap,” I said quietly.

  “What ’ya talkin’ about?”

  “The food. It’s bait. Somebody’s trying to catch—”

  Before I could speak the syllable that would finish my sentence, my prophecy was proved.

  The second rope, the dark stranger that had lingered so close to its bright yellow companion that had been almost invisible, was suddenly jerked eight or ten feet into the air, pulling the two dark ropes taut and hauling into view two nets, which were large enough and spread widely enough that whoever was fishing from Above was knowledgeable enough about the Underworld to know about the presence here of the remnants of the Demonation.

  Seeing the immensity of the nets, I took some comfort from the fact that even if I’d comprehended the trap in which we were standing more quickly, we would never have been able to get beyond the perimeter of the net before those in the World Above—The Fishermen as I had already mentally dubbed them—sensed some motion on their bait-lines and scooped up their catch.

  The holes in the net were large enough for one of my legs to be somewhat uncomfortably hanging out, dangling above the chaos below. But such discomfort meant little when I had the pleasure of seeing the net beneath Gatmuss also tightening around him, and lifting him up as I was being lifted. There was one difference. While Gatmuss was cursing and struggling, attempting and failing to tear a hole in the net, I was feeling curiously calm. After all, I reasoned, how much worse could my life in the World Above be than the life I was leaving in the World Below, where I had known very little comfort, and no love, and had no future for myself beyond the kind of bitter, joyless lives that Momma and Pappy G. lived?

  We were being lifted at quite a speed now, and I could see the landscape of my young life laid out below. The house, with Momma standing on the doorstep—a diminutive figure, far beyond the range of my loudest cries, even if I’d cared to try, which I didn’t. And there, spreading in all directions as far as my eyes could see, was the dismal spectacle of the wastelands, the peaks of trash that had seemed so immense when I’d been in their shadows, now inconsequential, even when they rose to mountainous heights as they defined the perimeter of the Ninth Circle. Beyond the Circle there was nothing. Only a void, an immense emptiness, neither black nor white, but an unfathomable grey.

  “Jakabok! Are you listening to me?”

  Gatmuss was haranguing me from his net, where, thanks in part to his own struggles, his huge frame was squashed up in what looked like a very uncomfortable position. His knees were pressed up against his face, while his arms stuck out of the net at odd angles.

  “Yes, I’m listening,” I said.

  “Is this something you set up? Something to make me look stupid?”

  “You don’t need any help to do that,” I told him. “And no, of course I didn’t set this up. What an asinine question.”

  “What’s asinine?”

  “I’m not going to start trying to educate you now. It’s a lost cause. You were born a brute and you’ll die a brute, ignorant of anything but your own appetites.”

  “You think you’re very clever, don’t you, boy? With your fancy words and your fancy manners. Well, they don’t impress me. I got a machete and a gun. And once we’re out of this stupid thing I’m going to come after you so fast you won’t have time to count your fingers before I cut them off. Or your toes. Or your nose.”

  “I could scarcely count my nose, you imbecile. I only have one.”

  “There you go again, sounding like you’re so high and mighty. You’re nothing, boy. You wait! You wait until I find my gun. Oh, the things I can do with that gun! I could shoot off what’s left of your babymaker, clean as a whistle!”

  And so he went on, an endless outpouring of contempt and complaint, spiced with threats. In short, he hated me because when I’d been born Momma lost all interest in him. In past times, he said, when for some reason or another Momma’s attention had been distracted, he’d had a foolproof way of getting it back, but now he was afraid of using that trick again because he’d been happy to have a daughter, but another accidental son would only be a waste of breaths and beatings. One mistake was enough, more than enough, he said, and ranted about my general stupidity.

  Meanwhile, we continued our ascent, which having begun a little jerkily was now smooth and speedy. We passed through a layer of clouded darkness into the Eighth Circle, emerging from a ragged crater in its rocky desolation. I had never strayed more than half a mile from my parents’ house, and had only the vaguest notion of how life was lived in other circles. I would have liked time to study the Eighth. But we were now traveling too fast for me to gain anything more than a fleeting impression of it: the Damned in their thousands, their naked backs bent to the labor of hauling some vast faceless edifice across the uneven terrain. Then I was temporarily blinded once again, this time by the darkness of the Eighth’s sky, only to emerge moments later spluttering and spitting, having been doused in the fetid fluid of some weed-throttled waterway of the swampy landscape of the Seventh. Perhaps it was the drenching in swamp water that got him mad or, simply, that the fact of what was happening to us had finally broken through his thick skull, but whichever it was, at this stage Pappy Gatmuss began to vilify me in the most foul language, blaming me, of course, for our present predicament.

  “You are a waste of my seed, you witless moron, you bonehead, you jackass, you putrid little rattlebrain. I should have throttled the life out of you years ago, you damn retard! If I could reach my machete, I swear I’d hack you to pieces right here and now.”

  He struggled as he accused me, attempting to get his arms to reach back towards the net, where I presume he had the machete. But he had been trapped by the net in such a way as to make any such movement impossible. He was stuck.

  I, however, was not. I still had in my possession the knife I had picked up in the kitchen. It wasn’t a very large knife, but it was serrated, which was useful. It would do the job.

  I reached out and started to saw at the rope that was holding up the net containing Pappy G. I knew I would have to be quick.

  We had already passed through the Sixth Circle and were rising through the Fifth. I paid no attention to the details of their topographies now. I just kept a mental count of their number. All the rest of my concentration went into working on the rope.

  The outpouring of nauseating filth from the mouth of Pappy G. was growing more obscene, of course, as my little knife finally began to have some effect upon the rope. We were passing through the Fourth Circle now, but I couldn’t tell you a thing about it. I was sawing for my life, literally. If I failed to cut the rope before we reached our destination, which I assumed to be the World Above, and Gatmuss was freed from his net by whoever was hauli
ng us up, he would slaughter me without need of machete or gun. He’d simply pull me limb from limb. I’d seen him do it to other demons, a lot larger than me.

  It was powerful motivation, let me tell you, to hear my father’s threats and insults becoming ever more incomprehensible with fury until they finally turned into an incoherent outpouring of hatred. Once in a while I would glance down at his face, which was pressed tight against the confines of the net. His porcine features were turned up at me, his eyes fixed on me.

  There was death in those eyes. My death, needless to say, rehearsed over and over in that testicle-sized brain of his.

  While it seemed to him he suddenly had my attention, he stopped piling insult upon insult and tried, as though I hadn’t heard all the obscenities he’d been spewing, to move me with absurdities.

  “I love you, son.”

  I had to laugh. I’d never been so entertained by something in my entire life. And there was more to come; all priceless idiocies.

  “We’re different, sure. I’m mean, you’re a little guy and I’m . . .”

  “Not?” I offered.

  He grinned. Clearly we understood one another. “Right.

  Not. And when you’re not, like me, and your son is, then it’s not fair for me to be slapping him around night and day?”

  I thought I’d confuse him by playing the demon’s advocate.

  “Are you sure?” I asked him.

  His grin withered a little now, and panic infected his tiny glittering eyes. “Shouldn’t I be?” he said.

  “Don’t ask me. I’m not the one who’s telling me what he thinks is—”

  “Ah!” he said, cutting me off in his haste to keep a thought he’d seized from escaping him, “that’s it! It isn’t right?”

  “Isn’t it?” I said, still sawing away at the rope as the banter continued.

  “This,” Pappy G. said. “It isn’t right. A son shouldn’t kill his own father.”

  “Why not if his father tried to murder him?”

  “Not murder, boy. Never murder. Toughen up a little, maybe.

  But murder? No, never. Never.”

  “Well, Pappy, that makes you a better father than it does me a son,” I said to him. “But it isn’t going to stop me cutting this rope and it’s a very long fall from here. You’ll break in pieces, if you’re lucky.”

  “If I’m lucky?”

  “Yes. I wouldn’t want you to be lying down in that refuse with your back broken, but still alive. Not with all the hungry Demons and Damned that wander around down there. They’ll eat you alive. And that would be too terrible, even for you. So maybe you should make your peace and pray for death because it’ll be so much easier to die that way. Just a long fall, and nothing. Blackness. The end of Pappy Gatmuss, once and for always.”

  We had passed through several Circles as we’d talked and, to be honest, I’d lost count of how many remained before we emerged into the World Above. Three perhaps. My knife was becoming dulled from the labor I’d put it to, but the rope was now cut through three quarters of the way, and the weight it was supporting put the remaining strands under such tension that they began to snap with the merest stroke of my blade.

  Now I knew we were close to the surface because I could hear voices from somewhere overhead; or rather one particular voice, yelling orders:

  “Keep hauling, all of you! Yes, that means you, too. Work!

  We’ve caught something big here. It’s not one of the giants, but it’s big!”

  I looked up. There was a layer of rock a few hundred feet above us, with a crack in it which widened in one place. It was through this wider portion of the fissure that the four ropes—the two supporting Pappy G. and myself and the pair that had held the bait, disappeared. The brightness through the crack was more powerful than anything I’d ever seen Below. It pricked my eyes, so I looked away from it and put all my energies into cutting the last stubborn strands of rope. The image of the crack was still burned into my sight, however, like a lightening strike.

  Throughout these last two or three minutes Pappy G. gave up both his litany of insults and the absurd attempt to appeal to my love for him as his son. He simply looked straight up at the hole in the heavens of the First Circle. The sight of it had apparently unleashed a primal terror in him, which found expression in a spewing forth of entreaties, which were steadily eroded by the sounds I’d never have imagined him capable of making: whimpers and sobs of terror.

  “No, can’t go Above can’t go can’t—”

  Tears of snot were streaming from his nostrils, which were enormous I realized for the first time, larger than his eyes.

  “—in the dark, down deep, that’s where we have to, no, no you can’t you mustn’t.”

  He became suddenly crazed with hysteria. “YOU KNOW WHAT’S UP THERE, BOY? IN THE LIGHT, BOY? THE LIGHT OF GOD IN HEAVEN. THE LIGHT WILL BURN OUT MY EYES. I DON’T WANT TO SEE! I DON’T WANT TO SEE!”

  He thrashed around in terror as he vented all these feelings, trying his best to get his hands to cover his eyes, though this was a complete anatomical impossibility. Still he tried, writhing around within the confines of the net, his terrified cries so loud that when he took one short break for breath I heard somebody from the World Above saying: “Listen to that thing!

  What’s it saying?”

  And then another voice: “Don’t listen. We don’t want our heads filled with demon talk. Block your ears, Father O’Brien, or he’d talk you out of your mind.”

  That was all I had a chance to hear, because Pappy G. started sobbing and struggling again. The rope of his net creaked as it was tested by his antics. But it was not the net that broke. It was the few strands of the rope that still supported him. Given how little there was to snap, the noise it made was astonishingly loud, echoing up off the roof of rock above us.

  The expression on Pappy Gatmuss’ face turned from one of metaphysical terror to something simpler. He was falling. And falling and falling.

  Just before he struck the layer of lichen-covered rock that was scattered over the ground of the First Circle he gave vent to this simpler terror that his face now wore, unleashing a bellow of despair. Apparently, neither rising nor falling was to his liking. Then he broke through the layer of moss and disappeared.

  His bellow continued to be audible however, dimming somewhat as he dropped through the Second Circle, and still more as he fell through the Third, only fading away once he passed into the Fourth.

  Gone. Pappy G. was finally gone from my life! After so many years of fearing his judgment, fearing his punishment, he was out of my life, dying by degrees, I hoped, as he struck each new ground. His limbs broken, his back broken, and his skull smashed like a dropped egg, probably long before he landed back in the canyons of trash where we’d first been baited. I had not been inventing horrors when I’d talked about how terrible it would be to be helpless in that place, crawling as it was with the most pitiful, the most hopeless of those amongst the Demonation. I know many of them. Some were Demons who had once been the most scholarly and sophisticated amongst us, but who had now come to realize in their researches that we meant nothing in the scheme of Creation. We floated in the void beyond all purpose or meaning. They had taken this knowledge badly; certainly worse than most of my fellows, who had long since given up thinking about such lofty notions in favor of finding amongst the tiny numbers of lichens that grew in the gloom of the Ninth a palliative for hemorrhoids.

  But the scholars’ desolation was not immune to hunger. In the years I’d lived in the house in the garbage dunes I had heard plenty of stories of wanderers who had perished in the wastes of the Ninth, their bones found picked clean, if they were found at all. That, most likely, would be Pappy G.’s fate: He would be eaten alive, until every last morel of marrow had been sucked out.

  I strained to hear some sound from the World Below—a last cry from my murdered father—but I heard nothing. It was the voices from the World Above that were now demanding attention. The ro
pe from which Pappy G.’s net had hung had been hauled up out of sight as soon as he’d fallen. I slid my little knife into a small pocket of flesh I had taken great pains to slowly dig for myself over a period of months for the express purpose of hiding a weapon.

  There was clearly great disappointment and frustration amongst those who were hauling me up.

  “Whatever we lost was five times the weight of this little thing,” said someone.

  “It must have bitten through the ropes,” opined the voice I recognized as the Father’s. “They have such ways, these demons.”

  “Why don’t you shut up and pray?” said a third whinier voice.

  “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? To protect our immortal souls from whatever we’re hauling up?”

  They’re frightened, I thought, which was good news for me. Frightened men did stupid things. My job was going to be to keep them in a state of fear. Perhaps I might intimidate them with my sickly frame and my burned face and body, but I doubted it. I would have to use my wits.

  I could see the sky more clearly now. There were no clouds in the blue, but there were several dispersing columns of black smoke, and two smells fighting for the attention of my nostrils.

  One was the sickly sweet odor of incense, the other the smell of burning flesh.

  Even as I inhaled them my racing thoughts remembered a childhood game that would perhaps help me defend myself against my captors. As an infant, and even into my early teens, whenever Pappy Gatmuss came home at night with female company Momma was obliged to vacate the marriage bed and sleep in my bed, relegating me to the floor with a pillow (if she was feeling generous) and a stained sheet. She would lay down her head and instantly be asleep, wearied to the bone by life with Pappy G.

  And then she’d start to talk in her sleep. The things she said—angrily elaborate and terrifying curses directed at Pappy G.—were enough to make my heart quicken with fear, but it was the voice in which she spoke them that truly impressed itself upon me.

  This was another Momma speaking, her voice a deep, raw growl of murderous rage that I listened to so many times over the years that without ever consciously deciding to try and emulate it I unleashed in private the fury I felt towards Pappy G. one day and the voice just spilled out. It wasn’t simply imitation. I had inherited from Momma a deformity she had in her throat that allowed me to re-create the sound. Of that I became certain.