Mister B. Gone Read online

  That deal put a charmless smile on Hacker’s scabrous face.

  “Let’s get it done,” Hacker said. “Where’s the hood?”

  “I’m sitting on it,” Shamit said.

  “Then move! I’m hungry!”

  Shamit stood up and the two men started to lift the hood out of the dirt, giving me a clear look at it. Now I understood why there had been so much gasping from Shamit as he carried it. The hood was not made of burlap or leather, as I’d imagined, but black iron, fashioned into a crude box, its sides two or more inches thick, with a square hinged door at the front.

  “If you try any Demonical trick,” Cawley warned me, “I will bring wood and burn you where you lie. Do you hear me?”

  I nodded.

  “It understands, Cawley said. “All right, do it quick! O’Brien, where are the shackles?”

  “In the wagon.”

  “They’re not much use to me there. You!” He picked the youngest from the two remaining men. “Your name?”

  “William Nycross.”

  The man was a behemoth, limbs as thick as tree trunks, his torso massive. His head, however, was tiny; round, red, and hairless, even to brows and lashes.

  Cawley said, “Go with O’Brien. Fetch the shackles. Are you quick with your hands?”

  “Quick . . .” Nycross replied, as though the question clearly tested his wits “. . . with . . . my hands.”

  “Yes or no?”

  Standing behind Cawley, out of his sight but not out of that of the baby-faced Nycross, the priest guided the simpleton by nodding his head. The child-giant copied what he saw.

  “Good enough,” said Cawley.

  I had by now realized that I was not going to be able to get my tongue to say something cogent, thereby wringing some compassion from Cawley. The only way to avoid becoming his prisoner was by acting like the bestial demon that he’d said I was from the start.

  I unleashed a low noise, which came out louder than I’d anticipated. Cawley instinctively took several steps back from me, catching hold of one of his men he had not so far addressed. The man’s face was grotesquely marked by a pox he’d survived, its most notable consequence the absence of his nose. He swung this pox-ridden man between me and him, pushing his knife point against the Pox’s body to commit the man to his duty.

  “You keep your distance, demon. I’ve got holy water, blessed by the Pope! Two and a half gallons of it! I could drown you in holy water if I chose to.”

  I responded with the only sound I had been able to make my throat produce, that same withered growl. Finally Cawley seemed to realize that this sound was the only weapon in my armory, and laughed.

  “I’m in mortal fear,” he said. “Shamit? Hacker? The hood!”

  He had unhooked his iron bar from his belt and slapped it impatiently against his open palm as he spoke. “Move yourselves.

  There’s still skinning left to do on the other three and ten tails to be boiled clean to the bone!”

  I didn’t like the sound of that last remark at all, being the only one with not one but two tails in that company. And if they were doing this for profit, then my freakish excess of tail gave them a reason to speed up the stoking of the fire beneath their boiling pan.

  Fear knotted my guts. I began to struggle wildly against the confines of the net, but my thrashing only served to entangle me further.

  Meanwhile, my wordless throat gave out ever more outlandish sounds; the beast I had been unleashing mere moments before sounding like a domesticated animal by contrast with the raw and unruly noise that came up out of my entrails now.

  Apparently my captors were not intimidated by my din.

  “Get the hood on him, Shamit!” Cawley said. “What in the name of God are you waiting for?”

  “What if he bites me?” Shamit moaned.

  “Then you’ll die a horrible death, foaming at the mouth like a mad dog,” Cawley replied. “So put the blasted hood on him and be quick about it!”

  There was a flurry of activity as everybody got about their business. The priest instructed the fumbling Nycross in the business of preparing the shackles for my wrists and ankles, while Cawley gave orders from the little distance he had retreated to.

  “Hood first! Watch for his hands, O’Brien! He’ll reach through the net! This is a wily one, no doubt of that!”

  As soon as Shamit and Hacker put the hood over my head Cawley came back at me and struck it sharply with the bar he carried, iron to iron. The noise made the dome of my skull reverberate and shook my thoughts to mush.

  “Now, Pox!” I heard Cawley yelling through his confused thoughts. “Get him out of the net while he’s still reeling.” And just for good measure he struck the iron hood a second time, so that the new echoes through iron and bone caught up with the remnants of the first.

  Did I howl, or only imagine that I did? The noise in my head was so stupefying I wasn’t certain of anything, except my own helplessness. When the reverberations of Cawley’s strikes finally started to die away and some sense of my condition returned, they had me out of the net, and Cawley was giving more orders.

  “Shackles go on the feet first, Pox! You hear me? Feet!”

  My feet, I thought. He’s afraid I’m going to run.

  I didn’t analyze the matter more than that. I simply struck out to the left and right of me, my gaze too restricted by the hood to be sure of who I had struck, but pleased to feel the greasy hands that had been holding me lose their grip. Then I did precisely as Cawley had prompted me to do. I ran.

  I put perhaps ten strides between myself and my assailants.

  Only then did I panic. The reason? The night sky.

  In the short time since Cawley had hauled me up out of the fissure the day had started to die, bleeding stars. And above me, for the first time in my life, was the fathomless immensity of the heaven. The threat Cawley and his thugs presented seemed inconsequential beside the terror of that great expanse of darkness overhead, which the stars, however numerous, could not hope to illuminate. Indeed, there had been nothing that the torturer of Hell had invented that was as terrifying as this: space.

  Cawley’s voice stirred me from my awe. “Get after him, you idiots! He’s just one little demon. What harm can he do?”

  It wasn’t a happy truth, but the truth it was. If they caught up with me again I would be lost. They wouldn’t make the mistake of letting me slip a second time. I leaned forwards, and the let the weight of the iron hood allow it to slide off my head. It hit the ground between my feet. Then I stood up and assessed my situation more clearly.

  To my left was a steep slope, with a spill of firelight illuminating the smoky air at its rim. To my right, and spreading in front of me, were the fringes of a forest, its trees silhouetted against another source of firelight, somewhere within.

  Behind me, close behind me, were Cawley and his men.

  I ran for the trees, fearing that if I attempted the slope one of my tormentors could be quicker and catch up with me before I reached the ridge. Within a few strides I had reached the slim young trees that bordered the forest and began to weave between them, my tails lashing furiously left and right as I ran.

  I had the satisfaction of hearing a note of disbelief in Cawley’s voice as he yelled:

  “No, no! I can’t lose him now! I won’t! I won’t! Move your bones, you imbeciles, or I’ll crack open somebody’s skull!”

  By now I had passed through the young growth and was running between far older trees, their immense girth and the knotty thicket that grew between them concealing me ever more thoroughly. Soon, if I was cautious, I’d lose Cawley and his cohort, if I hadn’t already done so.

  I found a tree of immense girth, its branches so weighed down by the summer’s bounty of leaves and blossoms that they drooped to meet the bushes that grew all around it. I took shelter behind the tree, and listened. My pursuers were suddenly silent, which was discomforting. I held my breath, listening for even the slightest sound that would give me a
clue to their whereabouts. I didn’t like what I heard: voices whispering from at least two directions. Cawley had divided up his gang it seemed, so as to come at me from several directions at once. I took a breath, and set off again, pausing every few steps to listen for my pursuers. They weren’t gaining on me, nor was I losing them. Confident that I was not going to escape him, Cawley began to call out to me.

  “Where’d you think you’re running to, you piece of filth?

  You’re not getting away from me. I can smell your demon dung stench a mile away. You hear me? There’s no place you can go where I won’t come after you, treading on your two tails, you little freak. I’ve got buyers who’ll pay good coins for your whole skeleton with those tails of yours, all wired up so they stand proud. You are going to make me a nice fine profit, when I catch up with you.”

  The fact that I could hear Cawley’s voice so close, and imagined that I knew his whereabouts, made me careless. In listening to him so intently I lost my grasp of where I’d heard the others coming from, and suddenly the Pox lunged out of the shadows. Had he not made the error of announcing that he had me captured before his huge hands had actually caught hold of me, I would have been his captive. But his boast came a few precious seconds too early, and I had time to duck beneath his plagued hand, stumbling back through the thicket as he came in blundering pursuit.

  I had only one direction in which to move away from the Pox, but being smaller and nimbler than he I was able to dart back and forth between the trees, squeezing through narrow places where the diseased titan could not follow.

  My headlong plunge into the undergrowth was far from silent, however, and very soon I heard the voice of the priest and Cawley, of course, giving orders for Hacker and Shamit to:

  “Close in! Close in! Have you got the hood, Shamit?”

  “Yes sir, Mr. Cawley, I got it right here in my hand.”

  “And the face piece?”

  “I got that too, Mister Cawley. And a hammer to slam in those rivets.”

  “So let’s get this done! Close in on him!”

  I gave a quick thought to the notion of scrambling up one of the low-hanging boughs and hiding high up, where they wouldn’t look. But they were so close, to judge by the sounds of shrubbery being hacked away, that I was afraid I’d be seen making my ascent, and then they’d have me cornered in the tree with nowhere to escape to.

  Are you wondering as you read this why I didn’t use some demonic wile of mine, some unholy power inherited from Lucifer, to either kill my enemies or make myself invisible? Easy answer.

  I have no such powers. I have a bastard for a father and a sometime whore for a mother. Such creatures as I are not granted supernatural forces. We are barely given the power to evacuate.

  But most of the time I am cleverer than the enemy, and I can do more harm with my wits and imagination than would be possible with fists or tails. That still left me weaker, however, than I wanted to feel. It was time, I thought, that I learned the magical deceits that my betters wielded so effortlessly.

  If I escaped these pursuers, I swore to myself, I would make it my business to learn magic. The blacker the better.

  But that was for another day. Right now, I was a naked, wingless demon, doing my best to keep Cawley’s mob from catching up with me.

  I saw now a glimpse of firelight between the trees ahead, and my heart sank. They had driven me back to their own encampment. I still had a chance to strike out to my right, and move still deeper into the forest, but curiosity got the better of me. I wanted to see what wickedness they had done.

  So I ran towards the firelight, realizing even as I did so that it was probably a foolish, perhaps even suicidal move. But I was unable to resist knowing the worst. That’s what defines the Demonation, I think. Perhaps it’s a corrupted form of the angelic urge to be all-wise, I don’t know. All I can say with any certainty is that I had to know what Cawley’s cruelties had wrought, and I was willing to risk my sole possession—my life—in order to witness the sight.

  I saw the flames first, between the trees. It had not been left untended. There was one more member of Cawley’s pack feeding it fresh tinder even as I stepped into the grove that the flames illuminated.

  It was Hell on Earth.

  Hanging from the branches around the fire were the stretched skins of several demons like me, except, of course, their skins were not burned as mine was. Their faces had been very carefully eased off the flesh and stretched, so they would dry looking like masks. The resemblance to their living selves was remote, but it seemed perhaps I had known one of them a little; perhaps, two. As for their meat, it was presently being hacked into pieces by Cawley’s last thug. She was a sweet-faced girl of maybe sixteen or seventeen, the expression she wore as she went about her chores of hacking the meat off the dead and chopping it up before tossing it into the larger of two enormous black pots as innocent as that of a child. Now and then she would check on the progress of the tails she was boiling in the other pot. Several tails belonging to other victims were hung from the branches; they were already cleaned and ready to be sold. There were nine, I think, including one which, to judge by its length and the elaborate design which rose from each tailbone, had belonged to a demon of great rank and antiquity.

  When the girl looked up and saw me I expected her to scream for help. But no. She simply smiled.

  How can I express to you the effect that smile had upon me, appearing as it did upon a face completely lacking in flaws?

  Lord, but she was beautiful; the first true thing of beauty I had ever seen. All I wanted to do at that moment was take her away from this charnel-grove, with the stew of demon-meat simmering in one pot and the tails boiling away in the other.

  Cawley had forced her to do this grim, ghastly work; I had no doubt of that. What further proof did I need than that smile of hers as she looked up from her grisly labor? She saw her savior in me, her liberator.

  “Quickly!” I said. With a nimbleness I was surprised to find I owned, I leapt the pile of bones that lay between us and caught hold of her hand. “Come with me, before they catch up.”

  Her smile remained undimmed. “You speak good English,” she said.

  “Yes . . . I suppose I do,” I said, amazed that the power of love had overcome the imperative that had turned my words to growls. What bliss to be able to speak my mind again!

  “What’s your name?” the girl said.

  “Jakabok Botch. What’s yours?”

  “Caroline,” she said. “You’ve got two tails. You must be proud of them. May I touch them?”

  “Later, when we have a little more time.”

  “I can’t go, Jakabok. I’m sorry.”

  “I want to save you.”

  “I’m sure you do,” she said.

  She put down her knife and took hold of my other hand, so that we stood, the two of us, face to face, hand to hand, with only the table of scraped bones between us.

  “But my father wouldn’t allow it, I’m afraid.”

  “Your father’s Cawley?”

  “No. He’s my . . . he’s not my father. My father is the man with the wounds on his face.”

  “The one with the pox, you mean?”

  Her smile died instantly. She attempted to pull her hands from mine, but I would not let her go.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was careless of me, to say such a thing. I didn’t think.”

  “Why would you?” Caroline replied coldly. “You’re a demon.

  You’re not renowned for your intellects.”

  “What then, if not our brain-power”

  “You know very well.”

  “Truly, I don’t.”

  “Your cruelty. Your Godlessness. Your fear.”

  “Our fear? No, Caroline. It’s the other way round. We of the Demonation inspire fear in Humankind.”

  “So what am I seeing in your eyes right now?”

  She had me pinned. There was no squirming out of this. I could only tell the truth.


  “You see fear,” I said.

  “Of what?”

  “Of losing you.”

  Yes, I know how it sounds, believe me. Laughable would be kind, nauseating closer to the truth. But that’s what I said. And if you ever doubted the truth of what I’m telling you, then give up your doubts now, because if I were really deceiving you, I would not admit it, would I? How pathetic I must have sounded, playing the lover. But I had no choice. I was completely her creature at that moment: her slave. I leapt over the table between us, and before she could think to refuse me I kissed her. I know how to kiss, despite my lack of lips. I had practiced for years with the whores that used to loiter down the street from our house. I got them to teach me all their kissing tricks.

  At first, my sleight of tongue seemed to be working like a charm. Caroline’s hands began to investigate my body, giving me license to do the same to her.

  You’re wondering, of course, what happened to Cawley, the Pox, Nycross, O’Brien, Shamit, and Hacker, aren’t you? Of course, you are. And if I’d been less obsessed with Caroline I would have been doing the same. But I was too busy passing on all my kissing tricks.

  Her hand moved around my back now, and slowly, tenderly, she ran her fingers up my spine until they reached the back of my neck. A shiver of pleasure ran through me. I kissed her more passionately than ever, though opening my mouth so very wide made my eyes water. Her hand tightened, pinching my neck. I pressed hard against her, and she responded by digging her fingers and thumb into my nape.

  I tried to kiss her even more deeply in response to her touch, but she was done with kissing. Her fingers gripped my neck even more forcefully, and pulled my head backwards, obliging me to ease my tongue out of her mouth.

  Her face, when it came into focus before me, did not have the dreamy looks others I’ve kissed had. The smile that had made me fall in love with such noteworthy speed had gone from her face. There was still beauty there, but it was a cold beauty.

  “You are quite the little lover, aren’t you?” she said.

  “You like that? I was just beginning. I can—”

  “No, I’ve had enough.”