Mister B. Gone

BURN THIS BOOK.

Go on. Quickly, while there's still time. Burn it. Don't look at another word. Did you hear me? Not. One. More. Word.

Why are you waiting? It's not that difficult. Just stop reading and burn the book. It's for your own good, believe me. No, I can't explain why. We don't have time for explanations. Every syllable that you let your eyes wander over gets you into more and more trouble. And when I say trouble, I mean things so terrifying your sanity won't hold once you see them, feel them. You'll go mad. Become a living blank, all that you ever were wiped away, because you wouldn't do one simple thing. Burn this book.

It doesn't matter if you spent your last dollar buying it. No, and it doesn't matter if it was a gift from somebody you love. Believe me, friend, you should set fire to this book right now, or you'll regret the consequences.

Go on. What are you waiting for? You don't have a light? Ask somebody. Beg them. It's a matter of light and death Believe me! Will you please believe me? A little runt of a book like this isn't worth risking madness and eternal damnation over. Well, is it? No, of course not. So burn it. Now! Don't let your eyes travel any further. Just stop HERE.

Oh God! You're still reading? What is it? You think this is some silly little joke I'm playing? Trust me, it isn't. I know, I know, you're thinking it's just a book filled with words, like any other book. And what are words? Black marks on white paper. How much harm could there be in something so simple? If I had ten hundred years to answer that question I would barely scratch the surface of the monstrous deeds the words in this book could be used to instigate and inflame. But we don't have ten hundred years. We don't even have ten hours, ten minutes. You're just going to have to trust me. Here, I'll make it as simple as possible for you:

This book will do you harm beyond description unless you do as I'm asking you to.

You can do it. Just stop reading…

Now.

What's the problem? Why are you still reading? Is it because you don't know who I am, or what? I suppose I can hardly blame you. If I had picked up a book and found somebody inside it, talking at me the way I'm talking at you, I'd probably be a little wary too.

What can I say that'll make you believe me? I've never been one of those golden-tongued types. You know, the ones who always have the perfect words for every situation. I used to listen to them when I was just a little demon and

Hell and Demonation! I let that slip without meaning to. About me being a demon, I mean. Oh well, it's done. You were bound to figure it out for yourself sooner or later.

Yeah, I'm a demon. My full name is Jakabok Botch. I used to know what that meant, but I've forgotten. I used to. I've been a prisoner of these pages, trapped in the words you're reading right now and left in darkness most of the time, while the book sat somewhere through the passage of many centuries in a pile of books nobody ever opened. All the while I'd think about how happy, how grateful, I'd be when somebody finally opened the book. This is my memoir, you see. Or, if you will, my confessional. A portrait of Jakabok Botch.

I don't mean portrait literally. There aren't any pictures in these pages. Which is probably a good thing, because I'm not a pretty sight to look at. At least I wasn't the last time I looked.

And that was a long, long time ago. When I was young and afraid. Of what, you ask? Of my father, Pappy Gatmuss. He worked at the furnaces in Hell and when he got home from the night shift he would have such a temper me and my sister, Charyat, would hide from him. She was a year and two months younger than me, and for some reason if my father caught her he would beat and beat her and not be satisfied until she was sobbing and snotty and begging him to stop. So I started to watch for him. About the time he'd be heading home, I'd climb up the drainpipe onto the roof out of our house and watch for him. I knew his walk (or his stagger, if he'd been drinking) the moment he turned the corner of our street. That gave me time to climb back down the pipe, find Charyat, and the two of us could find a safe place where we'd go until he'd done what he always did when he, drunk or sober, came home. He'd beat our mother. Sometimes with his bare hands, but as he got older with one of the tools from his workbag, which he always brought home with him. She wouldn't ever scream or cry, which only made him angrier.

I asked her once very quietly why she never made any noise when my father hit her. She looked up at me. She was on her knees at the time trying to get the toilet unclogged and the stink was terrible; the little room full of ecstatic flies. She said: "I would never give him the satisfaction of knowing he had hurt me."

Thirteen words. That was all she had to say on the subject. But she poured into those words so much hatred and rage that it was a wonder that the walls didn't crack and bring the house down on our heads. But something worse happened. My father heard.

How he sniffed out what we were saying I do not know to this day. I suspect he had buzzing tell-tales amongst the flies. I don't remember much of what he did to us, except for his pushing my head into the unclogged toilet — that I do remember. His face is also inscribed on my memory.

Oh Demonation, he was ugly! At the best of times, the sight of him was enough to make children run away screaming, and old devils clutch at their hearts and drop down dead. It was as if every sin he'd ever committed had left its mark on his face. His eyes were small, the flesh around them puffy and bruised. His mouth was wide, like a toad's mouth, his teeth stained yellowish-brown and pointed, like the teeth of a feral animal. He stank like an animal too, like a very old, very dead animal.

So that was the family. Momma, Pappy Gatmuss, Charyat, and me. I didn't have any friends. Demons my age didn't want to be seen with me. I was an embarrassment, coming from such a messed-up family. They'd throw stones at me, to drive me away, or excrement. So I kept myself from becoming a lunatic by writing down all my frustrations on anything that would carry a mark — paper, wood, even bits of linen — which I kept hidden under a loose floorboard in my room. I poured everything into those pages. It was the first time I understood the power of what you're looking at right now. Words. I found over time that if I wrote on my pages all the things I wished I could do to the kids who humiliated me, or to Pappy Gatmuss (I had some fine ideas about how I would make him regret his brutalities), then the anger would not sting so much. As I got older and the girls I liked threw stones at me just like their brothers had only a few years before, I'd go back home and spend half the night writing about how I'd have my revenge one day. I filled page after page after page with all my plans and plots, until there were so many of them that I could barely fit them into my hidey-hole under the floorboard.

I should have thought of another place, a bigger place, to keep them safe, but I'd been using the same hole for so long I didn't worry about it. Stupid, stupid! One day I get home from school and race upstairs only to find that all my secrets, my Pages of Vengeance, had been unearthed. They were heaped up in the middle of the room. I'd never risked taking them all out of their hiding place together, so this was the first time I'd seen all of them at once. There were so many of them. Hundreds. For a minute I was amazed, proud even, that I'd written so much.

Then my mother comes in with such a look of fury on her face I knew I was going to get the beating of my life for this.

"You are a selfish, vicious, horrible creature," she said to me. "And I wish you'd never been born."

I tried to lie.

"It's just a story I'm writing," I told her. "I know there are real names in it right now, but they were only there until I could find something better."

"I take it back," my mother said, and for a second I thought what I'd said had worked. But no. "You're a lying, selfish, vicious, horrible creature." She took a big metal spoon from behind her back. "I'm going to beat you so hard you will never — never, do you hear me? — waste your time inventing cruelties again!" Her words brought another lie to mind. I thought: I'll try it, why not? She's going to beat me anyhow so what's to lose? I said to her:

"I know what I am, Momma. I'm one of the Demonation. Maybe just a little one, but I'm still a Demon. Well? Aren't I?"

She didn't answer. So I went on. "And I thought we were supposed to be selfish and vicious and whatever else you said I was. I hear other kids talking about it all the time. The terrible things they're going to do when they get out of school. The weapons they're going to invent, and sell to Humankind. And the execution machines. That's what I'd really like to do. I'd like to create the best execution machine that was ever — "

I stopped. Momma had a puzzled look on her face.

"What's wrong?"

"I'm just wondering how long I'm going to let you go on talking nonsense before I slap some sense into you. Execution machines! You don't have the brains to make any such thing! And take the ends of your tails out of your mouth. You'll prick your tongue."

I took the tail tips, which I always chewed on when I was nervous, out from between my teeth, all the while trying to remember what I'd overheard other Demon kids saying about the art of killing people. "I'm going to invent the first mechanical disemboweler," I said.

My mother's eyes grew wide, more I think from the shock of hearing me speak such long words than from the notion itself.

"It's going to have a huge wheel to unwind the condemned man's guts. And I'm going to sell it to all the most fancy, civilized kings and princes of Europe. And you know what else?"

My mother's expression didn't alter. Not a flicker of her eye, or a twitch of her mouth. She just said, in a monotone: "I'm listening."

"Yes! That's right! Listening!"

"What?"

"People who pay for a good seat at an execution deserve to hear something better than a man screaming as he's disemboweled. They need music!"

"Music."

"Yes, music!" I said. I was completely besotted by the sound of my own voice now, not even certain what the next word out of my mouth was going to be, just trusting the inspiration of the moment. "Inside the great wheel there'll be another machine that will play some pretty tunes to please the ladies, and the louder the man's screams become the louder the music will play."

She still looked at me without so much as a twitch. "You've really thought about this?"

"Yes."

"And these writings of yours?"

"I was just noting down all the horrible thoughts in my head. For inspiration."

My Momma studied me for what seemed like hours, searching every inch of my face as though she knew the word LIAR was written there somewhere. But finally, her scrutiny ceased and she said: "You are a strange one, Jakabok."

"Is that a good thing or a bad thing?" I asked her.

"It depends on whether you like strange children," she replied.

"Do you?"

"No."

"Oh."

"But I gave birth to you, so I suppose I have to take some of the responsibility."

It was the sweetest thing she'd ever said. I might have shed a tear if I'd time, but she had orders for me.

"Take all these scrawlings of yours down to the bottom of the yard and burn them."

"I can't do that."

"You can and you will!"

"But I've been writing them for years."

"And they'll all burn up in two minutes, which should teach you something about this world, Jakabok."

"Like what?" I said, with a sour look on my face.

"That it's a place where whatever you work for and care about is bound to be taken away from you sooner or later, and there isn't a thing you can do about it." For the first time since this interrogation had begun, she took her eyes off me. "I was beautiful once," she said. "I know you can't imagine that now, but I was. And then I married your father, and everything that was beautiful about me and the things that were all around me went up in smoke." There was a long silence. Then her eyes slowly slid back in my direction. "Just like your pages will."

I knew there was nothing I could say to her that would persuade her to let me keep my treasures. And I also knew that it was approaching the time that Pappy G. would be coming back from the Furnaces and that my situation would be a lot worse if he picked up any of my Revenge Stories, because all the most terrible things I'd invented I'd saved for him.

So I started to throw my beautiful precious pages into a large sack my mother had already laid beside them for this very purpose. Every now and then I would catch sight of a phrase I'd written, and with one glance I would instantly remember the circumstances which had caused me to write it, and how I'd felt when I'd scrawl the words down; whether I'd been so enraged that the pen had cracked under the pressure of my fingers, or so humiliated by something somebody had said that I'd been close to tears. The words were apart of me, part of my mind and memory, and here I was throwing them all — my Words, my precious words, along with whatever piece of me was attached to them — into a sack, like so much garbage.

Once in a while I thought of attempting to slip one of the special pages into my pocket. But my mother knew me too well. Not once did she take her eyes off me. She watched me fill up the sack, she followed me down the yard, step for step, and stood by while I upturned the sack, picking up those pages that had cartwheeled away from the others and tossing them back onto the main pile.

"I don't have any matches."

"Step aside, child," she said.

I knew what was coming, and I stepped away quickly from the pile of pages. It was a wise move, because as I took my second step I heard my mother noisily hawking up a wad of phlegm. I glanced back as she spat the wad towards my precious journals. If she'd simply been spitting on them that wouldn't have been so bad, but my mother came from a long line of powerful pyrophantics. As the phlegm flew from her lips, it brightened and burst into flames, dropping with horrible accuracy into the chaotic pile of journals.

If there'd simply been a match tossed onto my young life's work it would have burned black from end to end without igniting a page. But it was my mother's fire that landed upon the journals and as it struck them it threw out streamers of flame in all directions. One moment I was looking at the pages onto which I had poured all the anger and the cruelty I had cooked up inside me. The next moment those same pages were being consumed, as my mother's fire ate through the paper.

I was still standing just a step and a half away from the bonfire, and the heat was something ferocious, but I didn't want to move away from it, even though my little mustache, which I'd been carefully nurturing (it was my first) shriveled up in the heat, the smell making my sinuses sting and my eyes water. There was no way in Demonation I was going to let my mother see tears on my face. I raised my hand to quickly wipe them off, but I needn't have bothered. The heat had evaporated them.

No doubt had my face been — like yours — covered in tender skin instead of scales, it would have blistered as the fire continued to consume my journals. But my scales protected me for a little while at least. Then it began to feel as though my face were frying. I still didn't move. I wanted to be as close to my beloved words as I could be. I just stayed where I was, watching the fire do its work. It had a systematic way of unmaking each of the books page by page, burning away one to expose the one beneath, which was then quickly consumed in its turn, giving me glimpses of death-machines and revenges I had written about before the fire took them too. Still I stood there, inhaling the searing air, my head filling up with visions of the horrors I had conjured up on those pages; vast creations that were designed to make every one of my enemies (which is to say everyone I knew, for I liked no one) a death as long and painful as I could make it. I wasn't even aware of my mother's presence now. I was just staring into the fire, my heart hammering in my chest because I was so close to the heat; my head, despite the weight of atrocities that was filling it up, strangely light.

And then:

"Jakabok!"

I was still sufficiently in charge of my thoughts to recognize my name and the voice that spoke it. I reluctantly took my eyes off the cremation and looked up through the heat-crazed air towards Pappy Gatmuss. I could tell his temper was not good by the motion of his two tails, which were standing straight up from their root above his buttocks, wrapping themselves around one another, then unwrapping, all at great speed and with such force behind their intertwining it was as though each tail wanted to squeeze the other until it burst.

I inherited the rare double-tail by the way. That was one of the two gifts he gave me. But I wasn't feeling any great measure of gratitude now, as he came lumbering towards the fire, yelling at my mother as he did so, demanding to know what she was doing making bonfires, and what was she burning anyway? I didn't hear my mother's response. The blood in my head was whining now so loud that it was all I could hear. Their fights and rages could go on for hours sometimes, so I cautiously returned my gaze to the fire, which, thanks to the sheer volume of paper that was being consumed, still blazed as furiously as ever. I had been breathing short shallow breaths for several minutes now, while my heart beat a wild tattoo. Now my consciousness fluttered like a candle flame in a high wind; any moment, I knew, it would go out. I didn't care. I felt strangely removed from everything now, as though none of this was really happening.

Then, without any warning, my legs gave way, and I fainted, falling facedown —

into —

the —

fire.

So there you are. Satisfied now? I have never told anybody that story in the many hundreds of years since it happened. But I've told it to you now, just so you'd see how I feel about books. Why I need to see them burned.

It's not hard to understand, is it? I was a little demon-child who saw my work go up in flames. It wasn't fair. Why did I have to lose my chance to tell my story when hundreds of others with much duller tales to tell have their books in print all the time? I know the kind of lives authors get to live. Up in the morning, doesn't matter how late, stumbles to his desk without bothering to bathe, then he sits down, lights up a cigar, drinks his sweet tea, and writes whatever rubbish comes into his head. What a life! I could have had a life like that if my first masterwork had not been burned in front of me. And I have great works in me. Works to make Heaven weep and Hell repent. But did I get to write them, to pour my soul onto the pages? No.

Instead, I'm a prisoner between the covers of this squalid little volume, with only one request to make of some compassionate soul:

Burn This Book.

No, no, and still no.

Why are you hesitating? Do you think you'll find some titillating details about the Demonation in here? Something depraved or salacious, like the nonsense you've read in other books about the World Below (Hell, if you prefer)? Most of that stuff is invented. You do know that, don't you? It's just bits of gossip and scraps of superstition mixed up by some greedy author who knows nothing about the Demonation — nothing.

Are you wondering how I know what's being passed off as the truth these days? Well, I'm not completely without friends from the old days. We speak, mind to mind, when conditions permit. Like any prisoner locked up in solitary confinement, I still manage to get news. Not much. But enough to keep me sane.

I'm the real thing, you see. Unlike the impostors who pass themselves off as darkness incarnate, I am that darkness. And if I had a chance to escape this paper prison I would cause such anguish and shed such seas of blood the name Jakabok Botch would have stood as the very epitome of evil.

I was — no, I am — the sworn enemy of mankind. And I take that enmity very seriously. When I was free I did all that I could to cause pain, without regard to the innocence or guilt of the human soul I was damning. The things I did! It would take another book for me to list the atrocities I was happily responsible for. The violations of holy places, and more often than not the accompanying violation of whomever was taking care of the place. Often these poor deluded devotees, thinking the image of their Savior in extremis possessed the power to drive me away, would advance upon me, wielding a crucifix and telling me to be gone.

It never worked, of course. And oh, how they would scream and beg as I pulled them into my embrace. I am, needless to say, a creature of marvelous ugliness. The front of my body from the top of my head to those precious parts between my legs had been seared so badly in the fire into which I had fallen — and where Pappy Gatmuss had left me to burn for a minute or two while he slapped my mother around — that my reptilian appearance had become a mass of keloid tissue, shiny and seared. My face was — still is — a chaos of bubbles, little hard red domes of flesh where I'd fried in my own fat. My eyes are two holes, without lashes or brows. So is my nose. All of them, eyeholes and nostrils, constantly run with grey-green mucus so that there isn't a moment, day or night, when I don't have rivulets of foul fluids running down my cheeks.

As to my mouth — of all my features, I wish I could possess my mouth again, just as it had been before the fire. I had my mother's lips, generous below and above, and what kissing I had practiced, mainly on my hand or on a lonely pig, had convinced me that my lips would be the source of my good fortune. I would kiss with them, and lie with them; I would make victims and willing slaves of anyone my eyes desired, simply by talking a little, and following the talk with kisses, and the kisses with demands. And they'd melt into compliance, every one of them, happy to perform the most demeaning acts as long as I was there to reward them with a long, tongue-tied kiss when they were done.

But the fire didn't spare my lips. It took them too, erasing them utterly. My mouth is now just a slot that I can barely open an inch because the scarred flesh around it is too solid.

Is it any wonder that I'm tired of my life? That I want it erased by fire? You'd want the same thing. So, in the name of empathy, burn this book. Do it for compassion's sake, if you have the heart, or because you share my anger. There's no saving me. I'm a lost cause, trapped forever between the covers of this book. So finish me.

Why the hesitation? I've done as I promised, haven't I?

I've told you something about myself. Not everything, of course. Who could tell everything? But I have told you enough that I'm surely more than just words on a page, ordering you about. Oh yes, while I think of it, please allow me to apologize for that brutish, bullying way I started out. It's something I inherited from Pappy G. and I'm not proud of it. It's just that I'm impatient to have the flame licking these pages and burning up this book as soon as possible. I didn't take account of your very human curiosity. But I hope I've satisfied that now.

So it remains only for you to find a flame and get this wretched business over with. I'm certain that will be a great relief to you and I assure you an even greater relief to me. The hard part's over. All we need now is that little fire.

Come on, friend. I've unburdened myself; my confession is made. It's over to you.

I'm waiting. Doing my best to be patient.

Indeed, I will go so far as to say that I'm being more patient right now than I've ever been in my life. Here we are on page 18 and I've trusted you with some of the most painful confessions I have ever made to anyone, simply so that you would know this wasn't some fancy trick. It was a real and true account of what happened to me, which, were you ever to have seen me in the flesh, would be instantly verified. I am burned. Oh, how I am burned.

It's a sign of your mercy that I'm really waiting for. And your courage, which I've somehow sensed from the beginning was like your mercy, a quality you possessed. It does take courage to set a flame to your first book, to defy the sickly wisdom of your elders and preserve words as though they were in some way precious.

Think of the absurdity of that! Is there anything in your world or mine, Above or Below, that is so available as words? If the preciousness of things is bound in some measure to their rarity, then how precious can the sounds we make, waking or sleeping, in infancy or senility, sane, mad, or simply trying on hats, be? There's a surfeit of them. They spew from tongues and pens in their countless billions every day. Think of all that words express: the seductions, threats, demands, entreaties, prayers, curses, omens, proclamations, diagnoses, accusations, insinuations, testaments, judgments, reprieves, betrayals, laws, lies, and liberties. And so on, and on, words without end. Only when the last syllable has been spoken, whether it's a joyous hallelujah or someone complaining about their bowels, only then is it that I think we can reasonably assume the world will have ended. Created with a word, and — who knows? — maybe destroyed by one. I know about destruction, friend. More than I care to tell. I've seen such things, such foul and unspeakable things…

Never mind. Just the flame, please.

What's the delay? Oh wait. It isn't that remark I made back there about knowing destruction that's got you twitchy, is it? It is. You want to know what I've seen.

Why in Demonation can't you be satisfied with what you've been given? Why do you always have to know more?

We had an agreement. At least I thought we did. I thought all you needed was a simple confession and in return you'd cremate me: ink, paper, and glue consumed in one merciful blaze.

But that's not going to happen yet, is it?

Damn me for a fool. I shouldn't have said anything about my knowledge of destruction. As soon as you heard that word your blood started to quicken.

Well…

I suppose it won't hurt to tell you a little more, as long as we understand one another. I'll give you just one more piece of my life and then we're going to get this book cooked.

Yes?

All right, as long as we agree. There has to be an end to this or I'm going to start getting angry, and I could make things very unpleasant for you if I decided to do that. I can get this book to fly out of your hands and beat at your head 'til you're bleeding from every hole in your head. You think I'm bluffing? Don't tempt me. I'm not a complete fool. I half-expected that you'd want to hear a little bit more of my life. Don't think it's going to get bright and happy anytime soon. There was never a happy day in my whole life.

No, that's a lie. I was happy on the road with Quitoon. But that was all so long ago I can barely remember the places we went, never mind our conversations. Why does my memory work in such irrational ways? It remembers all the words to some stupid song I sang when I was an infant, but I forget what happened to me yesterday. That said, there are some events that are still so painful, so life changing, that they stay intact, despite all attempts by my mind to erase them.

All right. I surrender, a little. I'll tell you how I got from there to here. It's not a pretty sequence of events, believe me. But once I've unburdened myself any doubts you still have about what I've asked you to do will be forgotten. You'll burn the book when I'm finished. You will put me out of my misery, I swear.

So…

As is self-evident, I survived my fall into the fire and the minute or longer that Pappy Gatmuss left me to struggle there in my bed of flames. My skin, despite the toughness of my scales, melted and blistered while I attempted to get up. By the time Pappy G. caught hold of my tails, and unceremoniously dragged me out of the fire, then kicked me over, there was barely any life left in me. (I heard all this later from my mother. At the time I was mercifully unconscious.)

Pappy Gatmuss woke me up, however. He brought a pail of ice water from the house and drenched me. The shock of water dowsed the flames and brought me out of my faint in an instant. I sat up, gasping.

"Well look at you, boy," Pappy Gatmuss said. "Aren't you a sight to make a father weep?"

I looked down at my body, at the raw blistered and black flesh of my chest and belly.

Momma was yelling at Pappy. I didn't hear all she said but she seemed to be accusing him of deliberately leaving me in the fire in the hopes of killing me. I left them arguing, and crawled away into the house, grabbing a big serrated knife out of the kitchen in case I had to later defend myself from Gatmuss. Then I went up the stairs to the mirror in my mother's room and looked at my face. I should have prepared myself for the shock of what I saw, but I didn't give myself time. I stared at the bubbling, melting masterwork of burns that my face had become, and spontaneously vomited at my own reflection.

I was very gently wiping the vomit off my chin when I heard Gatmuss' yowl from the bottom of the stairs.

"Words, boy?" he yelled. "You were writing words about me?"

I peered over the banister, and saw the enraged behemoth below. He was carrying a few partially burned sheets covered with my scrawled writing. Obviously he'd plucked them from the fire, and had found some reference to himself. I knew my own work well enough to be certain that there was no mention of Gatmuss in any of those books that was not accompanied by clots of insulting adjectives. He was too stupid to know the meaning of "malodorous" and "heinous," but he wasn't so dense as to not be able to grasp the general tone of my feelings. I hated him with all my heart, and that hatred poured out of the pages he carried. He dragged his lumpen carcass up the stairs, calling to me as he came:

"I'm not a cretin, boy! I know what these here words mean. And I'm going to make you suffer for them, you hear me? I'm going to make a new fire and cook you in it, one minute for every bad word about me you wrote here. That's a lot of words, boy. And a lot of cooking, you are going to be burned black, boy!"

I didn't waste breath and time talking back at him. I had to get out of the house and into the darkened streets of our neighborhood, which was called the Ninth Circle. All the worst of Humankind's damned — the souls that neither bribes nor beatings could control — lived by their wits in its parasite-infested wastelands.

The source of all parasitic life was the maze of refuse at the back of our house. In return for our occupancy of the house, which was in a state of near decrepitude, Pappy G. was responsible for keeping watch on the garbage heaps and to discipline any souls who in his opinion were deserving of punishment. The freedom to be cruel suited Pappy G. hugely, of course. He'd go out every night armed with a machete and a gun, ready to maim in the name of the law. Now as he came up after me it was with that same machete and gun. I had no doubt that he would kill me if (or more likely, when, he caught up with me. I knew I had no chance of out-running him on the streets, so throwing myself out the window (my body curiously indifferent to pain in its present state of shock) and heading for the steep-sided heaps of refuse, where I knew I could lose him in the endless canyons of trash, was my only option.

Pappy G. fired from the window I'd just jumped out of a minute or two after I'd started to climb the heap of trash, and then he fired again when I reached the top. Both bullets missed me, but not by much. If he managed to make the jump himself, and then closed the distance between us, he would shoot me, in the back, I knew, without giving the deed a second thought. And as I stumbled and rolled down the far side of the hill of stinking refuse, I thought to myself that if the choice was between dying out here, shot down by Pappy G., and being taken back to the house to be beaten and mocked, I would prefer the former.

It was a little early to be entertaining thoughts of death, however. Even though my burned body was emerging from its shocked state and starting to pain me, I was still nimble enough to move over the mounds of rotted food and discarded furniture with some speed, whereas Pappy G.'s sheer height and cumbersome body made the garbage heaps far more treacherous. Two or three times I lost all sight of him, and even dared believe I had slipped him. But Gatmuss had the instincts of a hunter. He tracked me through the chaos, up one slope and down another, the troughs getting deeper and the peaks higher, as I ventured farther from the house.

And I was slowing down. The effort of climbing the heaps of refuse was taking its toll, the garbage sliding away beneath my feet as I attempted to scramble up their ever-steeper slopes.

It was only a matter of time now, I knew, before the end came. So I decided to stop once I reached the summit of the pile I was climbing, and give Pappy G. a good clear shot of me. My body was fast approaching collapse, the muscles of my calves spasming so painfully I cried out, my hands and arms a mass of gashes from slitting my cooked flesh on the shards of glass and the raw edges of tin cans as I sought a handhold.

My mind was now made up. Once I reached the top of this hillock I would give up the chase and, keeping my back to Gatmuss so that he couldn't see the despair upon my face and take some pleasure from it, I would await his bullet. With the decision made I felt curiously unencumbered and climbed easily up to my chosen death site.

Now all I had to do was —

Wait! What was that hanging in the air in the trench between this summit and the next? It looked to my weary eyes like two beautiful shanks of raw meat, with — could I believe what I was seeing? — cans of beer attached to each piece of meat.

I had heard stories of people who, lost in great deserts, seemed to see the very image of what they wanted most at that moment: a glittering pool of refreshing water, most likely, surrounded by date palms lush with ripe fruit. These mirages are the first sign that the wanderer is losing his grip on reality, I knew, because the faster he chases this phantom pool with its shady bower of fruit-laden trees, the faster it recedes from him.

Was I now completely crazy? I had to know. Forsaking the spot where I had intended to perish, I slid down the incline towards the place where the steak and beer hung, moving just a little on a creaking rope that disappeared into the darkness high above us. The closer I got, the more certain I became that this was not, as I'd feared, an illusion, but the real thing; a suspicion that was confirmed moments later when my salivating mouth closed round a nice lean portion of the steak. It was better than good, it was exceptional, the meat melting in my mouth. I opened the chilly can of beer, and raised it to my lipless mouth, which had dealt well with the challenge of biting into the steak and now had their hurts soothed by a bathing of cold beer.

I was silently thanking whatever kindly soul had left these refreshments to be found by a lost traveler when I heard a bellowing from Pappy G., and from the corner of my eye I saw him at the very spot I'd chosen to die.

"Leave some of that for me, boy!" he yelled, and having seemingly forgotten the enmity between us, so moved was he by the sight of the steak and beer, he came down the steep slope in great strides. As he did so he yelled:

"If you touch that other steak and beer, boy, I will kill you three times over, I swear!"

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 hauling 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 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 rope 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.

For several weeks following my discovery of the gift my bloodline had bestowed, I made the mistake of taking a shortcut on my way home that obliged me to walk through territory that had long been the dominion of a murderous gang of young demons who liked to slaughter those who refused to pay the toll they demanded. Looking back on this, I've often wondered if my own trespass was not truly accidental as I'd told myself at the time, but a test. Here was I — Jakabok, the perpetually terrorized runt of the neighborhood — deliberately inviting a confrontation with a gang of thugs who wouldn't think twice about killing me in the street outside my house.

The short version of how it went is easily told. I spoke in my Momma's Nightmare Voice, using it to assault the enemy with an outpouring of the most vicious, venomous curses I could lay my mind upon.

It worked instantly upon three of my four assailants. The fourth, who was the largest, was stone deaf. He took a moment to watch the retreat of his comrades, and then, seeing my wide open mouth he sensed that I was making some sound that had driven the others off. He immediately came at me, grabbing hold of the back of my neck with one of his immense hands and reaching into my mouth to pull out my troublesome tongue. He caught it by the root, digging his nails into the wet muscle, and would have left me as dumb as he was deaf if my tails — entirely without my conscious instruction — had not come to my aid. They rose up behind me side by side, then parted company, each speeding past my head and driving their points into my assailant's eyes. They lacked the bone to blind him, but there was sufficient force in their gristle that the points still hurt him. He let go of me, and I staggered away from him, spitting out blood, but otherwise unharmed.

Now you have a full account of the weapons I took up in the World Above: one small dulled knife, my mother's Nightmare Voice, and the twin tails I had inherited from my recently devoured father.

It wasn't much, but it would have to do.

So, there you have it. Now you know how I got up out of the World Below, and how my adventurings there began. Surely you're satisfied. I've told you things that I never told anyone before, even if I was about to disembowel them. What I did to Pappy G., for instance. I've never admitted to that until now. Not once. And let me tell you, it wasn't an easy confession to make, even after all these centuries. Patricide — especially when it's brought about by dropping your father into the maws of hungry lunatics — is a primal crime. But you wanted me to sing for my supper, and I have sung.

You don't need to hear any more, believe me. I'd been hauled up out of the rock, you can figure that out for yourselves. Obviously they didn't put an end to me or I wouldn't be sitting on this page talking to you. The details don't matter. It's all history now, isn't it?

No, no. Wait. I take that back. It isn't history. How can it be? Nobody ever wrote any of it down. History's what the books say, isn't it? And when it comes to the sufferings of the likes of me, a burned-up, ugly-as-sin demon whose life means less than nothing, there is no history.

I'm Jakabok the Nobody. As far as you're concerned, Jakabok the Invisible.

But you're wrong. You're wrong. I'm here.

I'm right here on the page in front of you. I'm staring out of the words right now, moving along behind the lines as your eyes follow them.

You see the blur between the words? That's me moving.

You feel the book shake a little? Come on, don't be a coward. You felt it. Admit it.

Admit it.

You know what, my friend? I think maybe I should tell you a little bit more, for the sake of the truth. Then there'll be at least one place where the misfortunes of a runty demon like me are put into words, put into history.

So you can put the flame away for a few minutes, while I tell you what happened to me in the World Above. Then, even though you will have burned the book, you'll at least have heard the story, right? And you can pass it on, the way all stories worth telling get handed down. And maybe one day you'll write a book, about how you once met this demon called Jakabok, and the things he told you about Demons and History and Fire. A book like that could make you famous, you know. It could. I mean you humans are more interested in evil than in good, right? You could invent all kinds of vile details and claim it was all just stuff that I told you. Why not? The money you could make, telling The Story of Jakabok. If you're a little afraid of the consequences, then just give some of your profits to the Vatican, in exchange for a twenty-four-hour priest patrol, in case a crazy demon decided to come and knock on your door.

Think about it. Why not? There's no reason why you shouldn't profit from our little arrangement, is there? And while you're thinking about it, I'll tell you what happened to me once I got up out of the earth and finally saw the sun.

You should listen really carefully to what comes next, friend, because it's full of dark stuff, and every word of it is true, I swear on my Momma's Voice. There's plenty in here for your book, believe me. Just make sure you remember the details because it's the details that make people believe what they're being told.

And never forget: They want to believe. Not everything, obviously. Flat earths, for one, are out of favor. But this, my friend, this venomous stuff they want to believe. No, strike that. They don't simply want to believe it. They need to. What could be more important to a species who live in a world of evils than that those evils not be their responsibility? It was all the work of the Demon and his Demonation.

No doubt, you've had the same experience yourself. You've witnessed abominations with your own eyes, and I'm sure they drove you half-crazy seeing it all, whether you were watching a child torture a fly or a dictator commit genocide. In fact — oh this is good, this is a nice twist! — you could say that the only way you stayed sane was by writing it all down, word for word, exorcising it by setting it down on the pages, purging all that you witnessed. That's good, even if I do say it myself. Purging what you'd witnessed. That's very good.

Of course, there'll be plenty of people who'll put their noses in the air and pretend they wouldn't be caught dead with a Book of Demonations in their sanctified hands. But it's all a sham. Everyone loves a measure of fright in their stories; a revulsion that makes the release into love all the sweeter. All you have to do is listen to me carefully, and remember the horrors for later. Then you'll be able to tell people hand on heart that you got it all from a completely reliable source, can't you? You can even tell them my name, if you like. I don't care.

But you should be warned, friend. The things I witnessed in the World Above, some of what I'm going to tell you about now, it's not for the squeamish. On occasion you might find yourself feeling a little sick to your stomach. Don't let the grisly details upset you. Think of it this way: Each little horror is money in the bank. That's what I'm giving you in exchange for your burning this book; a fortune in horrors. That's not such a terrible deal, now, is it?

No, I thought not. So, let me pick up my story where I left off, with me appearing from the World Below for the first time in my life.

It wasn't the most dignified of entrances, to be honest, hauled up out of the crack in the rock in a net.

"What in the name of Christendom is that?" said a man who with a large beard and an even larger belly was sitting some distance away on a boulder. This large man had a large dog, which he held on a tight leash, for which I was grateful as it was clear the cur didn't like me. It bared its teeth to their mottled gums and growled.

"Well, Father O'Brien?" said a much thinner man with long blond hair and a blood-stained apron. "Any answers?"

Father O'Brien approached the net, a wine flagon in his hand, and scrutinized me for a few seconds before declaring, "It's just a minor demon, Mister Cawley."

"Not another!" the large man said.

"You want me to throw it back?" said yellow-hair, glancing over at the three men who were holding the rope from which I dangled. All three were sweaty and tired. Between the rim of the hole and this exhausted trio was a twelve-foot-tall tower made of timber and metal, its base weighed down with several huge boulders, so as to keep it from toppling over. Two metal arms extended from the top of the tower, so that it resembled a gallows designed to hang two felons at a time. The rope to which my net was attached ran up and around one of the grooved wheels at the end of one of the arms, and back along that arm, thence down to the three large men who were presently holding my rope (and life) in their huge hands.

"You told me there'd be giants, O'Brien?"

"And there will be. There will, I swear. But they're rare, Cawley."

"Can you see any reason why I should keep this one?"

The priest observed me. "He'd make poor dog meat."

"Why?" said Cawley.

"He's covered in scars. He must be quite the ugliest demon I have set eyes on."

"Let me see," Cawley said, raising his wide rear from the doubtless grateful boulder and approaching me, the stomach first, the man some distance behind.

"Shamit," Cawley said to the yellow-hair. "Take Throat's leash."

"She bit me last time."

"Take the leash, fool!" Cawley bellowed. "You know how I hate to ask for anything twice."

"Yes, Cawley. I'm sorry, Cawley." The yellow-haired Shamit took Throat's leash, plainly afraid he was going to be bitten a second time. But the dog had other dinner plans: me. Not for a moment did it take its huge black eyes off me, drool running in streaming rivulets from its mouth. There was something about its gaze, perhaps the flames flickering in its eyes, that made me think this was a dog that had a touch of the hell-hound in its blood.

"What you staring at my dog for, demon?" Cawley said. Apparently it displeased him that I did so, because he drew an iron bar from his belt and struck me with it two or three times. The blows hurt, and for the first time in many years I forgot the power of speech and screeched at him like an enraged ape.

My noise incited the dog, who began to bark, his huge frame shaking with every sound it made.

"Stop that noise, demon!" Cawley yelled. "And you too, Throat!"

Immediately the dog fell silent. I scaled down my screeches to little moans.

"What shall we do with it?" Shamit said. He had taken out a little wooden comb and was running it through his golden locks over and over, as though he barely knew that he was doing it. "He's no good for skinning. Not with so many scars."

"They're burns," said the priest.

"Is that your Irish humor again, O'Brien?"

"It's no joke."

"Oh Lord, O'Brien, put away your wine and think about the foolishness of what you're saying. This is a demon. We've snatched it out of Hell's eternal fires. How could a thing that lives in such a place be burned?"

"I don't know. I'm just saying…"

"Yes…"

O'Brien's eyes went from Cawley's face to the iron bar and back to Cawley again. It seemed I was not the only one who'd endured some hurt from the thing.

"Nothing, Cawley, nothing at all. Just the wine talking. You're probably right. I should put it aside a while." Having spoken, he did precisely the opposite, upending the flagon as he turned his back on Cawley and stumbled away.

"I am surrounded by drunkards, idiots, and — "

His eyes came to rest on Shamit, who was still combing and combing, staring wide-eyed at nothing, as though the ritual had lulled him into a trancelike state. "And whatever this is."

"I'm sorry," Shamit said, snapping out of his delirium. "Were you asking me something?"

"Nothing you could have answered," Cawley replied. And then, after giving me an unsavory glance he said, "All right, haul him up and get him out of the net. But be careful, you know what happens when you rush things and you give the demons room to cause trouble, don't you?"

There was silence, but for the creaking of the rope that was now hauling me up again.

"Mister C. just asked you a question, you witless thugs," Cawley yelled.

This time there were grunts and muffled responses from all sides. It wasn't enough to satisfy Cawley.

"Well, what did I say?"

All five men mumbled their own half-remembered versions of Cawley's inquiry.

"And what's the answer?"

"You lose things," Father O'Brien replied. He raised his arms as he spoke, to offer proof of the matter. His right hand had been neatly bitten off, it appeared to be many years before, leaving only the cushion of his thumb and the thumb itself, which he used to hook the handle of the flagon. His left hand was missing entirely, as was his wrist and two-thirds of his forearm. Six or seven inches of bone had been left jutting from the stump at his elbow. It was yellow and brown, except for the end of it, which was white where it had been recently sharpened.

"That's right," said Cawley. "You lose things — hands, eyes, lips. Whole heads sometimes."

"Heads?" said the priest. "I never saw anybody lose — "

"In France. That wolf-demon we brought up out of a hole very much like this one, except there was water — "

"Oh yes, that sprang out of the rock. I remember now. How could I forget that monstrous thing? The size of its jaws. They just opened up and took the head off that student who was with it then. What was his name?"

"It doesn't matter."

"But I was on the road with him for a year or more and now can't remember his name."

"Don't start getting sentimental."

"Ivan!" O'Brien said. "His name was Ivan!"

"Enough, priest. We've work to do."

"With that?" Shamit said, looking at me down the narrow length of his pimply nose. I met him stare for stare, trying to bring a few contemptuous remarks to my lips, to be uttered in my best condescending tone. But for some reason my throat wouldn't shape the words in my head. All that emerged was an embarrassing stew of snarls and jabbering.

Meanwhile, Cawley inquired, "When does the burning of the Archbishop and his sodomitic animals begin?"

"Tomorrow," said O'Brien.

"Then we'll have to work fast if we're to make some money from this sorry excuse for a monster. O'Brien, fetch the shackles for the demon. The heavier ones, with the pins on the inside."

"You want them for his hands and his feet?"

"Of course. And Shamit, stop flirting with it."

"I'm not flirtin'."

"Well, whatever you're doing, stop it and go into the back of the wagon and bring out the old hood."

Shamit went off without further word, leaving me to try and persuade my tongue and throat to make a sound that was more articulate, more civilized, than the noises that had escaped me thus far. I thought if they heard me speak, then I could perhaps persuade them into a conversation with me, and Cawley would see I was no eater of limb or heads, but a peaceful creature. There'd be no need for the shackles and hood once he understood that. But I was still defeated. The words were in my head clearly enough, but my mouth simply refused to speak them. It was as though some instinctive response to the sight and smell of the World Above had made me mute.

"You can spit and growl at me all you like," Cawley said, "but you're not going to do no harm to me or to none of my little family, you hear me, demon?"

I nodded. That much I could do.

"Well, will you look at that?" Cawley said, seeming genuinely amazed. "This creature understands me."

"It's just a trick to give you that impression," the priest said. "Trust me, there's nothing in his head but the hunger to drive your soul into the Demonation."

"What about the way he's shaking his head? What does that mean?"

"Means nothing. Maybe he's got a nest of those Black Blood Fleas in his ears, and he's trying to shake 'em out."

The arrogance and the sheer stupidity of the priest's response made my head fill with thunderous rage. As far as O'Brien was concerned I was no more significant than the fleas he was blaming for my twitches; a filthy parasitic thing that the father would happily have ground beneath his heel if I'd been small enough. I was gripped by a profound but useless fury, given that in my present condition I had no way to make it felt.

"I–I got — I got the hood," Shamit gasped as he hauled something over the dark dirt.

"Well, lift it up!" Cawley shrugged. "Let me see the damn thing."

"It's heavy."

"You!" Cawley said, pointing to one of the three men now idling by the winch. The trio looked at one another, attempting to press one of the others to step forwards. Cawley had no patience for this idiocy. "You, with the one eye!" he said. "What's your name?"

"Hacker."

"Well, Hacker, come give this degenerate half-wit some help."

"To do what?"

"I want the hood put on the demon, double quick. Come on, stop crossing yourself like a frightened little virgin. The demon's not going to do you any harm."

"You sure?"

"Look at it. Hacker. It's a wretched scrap of a thing."

I growled at this new insult, but my protest went unheard.

"Just get the hood over its head," Cawley said.

"Then what?"

"Then as much beer as you can drink and pig meat as you can eat."

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 tail-bone, 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."

"But there's so much — "

She turned me towards the vat where the tails were being boiled clean.

"Wait!" I said. "I'm here to set you free."

"Don't be such a cretin, darling," she said. "I am free."

"Do it, Caroline." I heard somebody say, and looking towards the voice saw my beloved's father, the Pox, stepping out of the shadows between the trees. "Boil off that ugly face of his."

"Doesn't Cawley want him for the freak show?"

"Well, he'll be even freakier with the meat gone from his face. Just do it!"

If she had obeyed her father, my face would have been pushed down into that boiling vat. But she hesitated. I don't know why. I like to think it was the memory of one of my kisses. But the point is that whatever the reason she didn't immediately do as the Pox had ordered. And in that moment of indecision her grip on my neck became just a little looser. That was all I needed. I moved suddenly and swiftly, pulling myself free of her and running in one and a half strides until I was behind her. Then I pushed her, hard, leaving it to fate as to where she fell.

Fate was as unkind to her as it had always been to me, which was some small comfort. I saw her legs give out beneath her, and heard her call my name.

"Jakabok!"

And then:

"Save me!"

It was too little too late. I stepped back and let her fall face-down into the vat where the bones boiled. It was so immense and so weighed down by its contents that nothing would overturn it. Not her toppling in, or her flailing wildly as her long, bloodied linen apron grazed the flames and was instantly caught alight.

I stayed, of course, to drink it all in despite my approaching pursuers. I wasn't going to miss one twitch or shudder from this Lilith: the fire between her legs turning to steam as she lost control of her bladder; the bone-busied waters tossing her around as she tried vainly, of course, to clamber back out; the mouth-watering smell of her hands frying against the sides of the vat; the wet, tearing sound that came when her poxy father finally reached her and her palms tore off as he pulled her out of the vat.

Oh, the sight of her! My Caroline, my once beautiful Caroline! Just as I had gone from love to hatred in a matter of moments so had she gone just as quickly from perfection to a thing like myself, only worthy of repugnance. The Pox carried her a little distance from the fire, and set her down to extinguish the remains of her apron. It took him but a moment; then he slid his arm beneath her and lifted her up. As he did so the grey oversteamed meat of her brow, cheeks, nose, and lips slid off the gleaming young bone beneath, leaving only her eyes boiled blind in their lidless sockets.

"Enough," I told myself. I'd had my revenge for the hurt she'd done me. Though it would have been highly entertaining to watch the Pox's anguish, I didn't dare indulge another moment of voyeurism. It was time to depart.

So now you know about my love affair. It was brief and bitter, and all the better for that.

Love is a lie; love of every shape and size, except perhaps the love of an infant for its mother. That's real. At least until the milk dries up.

Thus I was delivered from the love of beautiful women, and traveled all the quicker for its unloading. I had no trouble losing Hacker and Shamit as they attempted to pursue me into the depths of the forest. I was lighthearted, or rather lighter by the measure of two hearts, mine and hers, and I ran so easily through the thicket, bounding up the trunks of the antediluvian trees and jumping from branch to branch, tree to tree, that I quickly lost my confused pursuers completely.

The sensible thing would have been for me to get out of the area there and then, under cover of darkness. But I couldn't do that. I'd heard too many tantalizing hints about what was going to happen back down on Joshua's field come the dawn. Cawley had talked about the burning of some Archbishop, along with, if I'd understood him correctly, a number of sodomitic animals, who were apparently found culpable under holy law for passively allowing these perversions to be performed upon them. A spectacle such as this would surely draw a sizable crowd of Humankind, amongst whose numbers I hoped I might hide while I educated myself in their ways.

I passed the remainder of the night in a tree some distance from the grove where I'd met poor Caroline. I lay along the length of a branch and was lulled to sleep by the creak of the ancient limbs and the soft murmur of the wind in the leaves. I was wakened by the rattle and boom of drums. I leapt down from my bed, taking a moment to thank the tree for its hospitality by vigorously pissing on and poisoning those small upstarts in its vicinity that might have competed for the older tree's share of earth. Then I followed the sound of the drumming out to the fringes of the forest. As the trees thinned I found that I had emerged close to the edge of a boulder-strewn slope, at the bottom of which lay a broad muddy field lit by a purple-grey light that steadily brightened, as though summoned by the vigorous tattoo of the drums. Shortly, the sun appeared, and I saw that there were great numbers of people gathered in the field below, many rising from the misty ground where they'd passed the night like Lazarus' kin, stretching, yawning, scratching, and turning up their faces to the radiant sky.

I couldn't go amongst them yet, of course. Not in my naked state. They'd see the curious configuration of my feet and, more importantly, my tails. I'd be in trouble. But with some mud to cover my feet and some simple garments to wear, I could pass, I hoped, for any human who'd been burned as calamitously as I. So all I needed in order to venture down onto the field and have my first encounter with Humankind were clothes.

I used the gloom of the cloudy dawn to cautiously descend the slope, moving from boulder to boulder as I got closer to the field itself. As I slid out of sight behind a stone twice my height and three times my length were I to have lain in its shadow, I discovered that the place had already been claimed by not one, but two people. They were lying down, but they weren't interested in assessing the length of the rock.

They were young, these two; young enough to be ready for love at such an early hour, and indifferent to the discomforts of their hiding place: the littered stone shards, the dew-wet grass.

Though I was crouched no more than three strides from where they lay, neither the girl, who to judge by her fine clothes was a good thief or came of a rich family, or her lover, who was either a bad thief or came of a poor family, noticed me. They were too busy removing all outward sign of fortune and family, and, equal in their nakedness, played that blissful game of matching their bodies, part to part.

They quickly found what fit best. Their laughter gave way to whispers and solemnity, as though this common deed had something holy in it; that in marrying their flesh this way they were performing some holy rite.

Their passion riled me, especially when I was obliged to view it so soon after the fiasco with Caroline. That said, I want to tell you I had no intention of killing them. I just wanted the youth's clothes, to cover the evidence of my own ancestry. But they were using his clothes and hers to lie more comfortably on the uneven ground, and it was quickly apparent that they would not be finished any time soon. If I wanted the clothes I would have to pull them out from under the pair.

I crept towards them, hands outstretched, hoping, I swear, that I'd be able to snatch his clothes out from under them while they were glued together, and be away before —

Never mind. The point is, it didn't happen the way I planned it. Nothing ever has now that I think of it. Nothing in my whole existence has come out the way I wanted it to.

The girl, idiot beauty that she was, whispered something in the youth's ear, and they rolled over, away from the boulder behind which all three of us were concealed, and off the very clothes I wanted. I didn't give them time to roll back, but reached out and very slowly, so as not to draw their attention, began to pull them towards me. At that moment the girl did as she'd doubtless whispered she wanted to do. She rolled them over again and clambered on top of him, sitting on his loins to take her pleasure. In doing so her gaze found me, and she opened her mouth to scream, only to remember before the sound emerged that she was in hiding here.

Luckily she had her heroic partner beneath her, and sensing through the girl's sudden tightening of her muscles that all was not well he opened his eyes and looked directly at me.

Even then, if I could have snatched the youth's clothes and made my escape I would have done so. But no. Nothing in my life has been easy and this little business was no exception. The heroic fool — no doubt seeking to win the girl's undying devotion — slid out from under her and reached for the knife lying amongst his clothes.

"Don't!" I said.

I did, I swear on all things unholy, I warned him with that one word.

He didn't listen, of course. He was doing this in full sight of his lady-love. He had to be brave, whatever the cost.

He pulled the knife from its sheath. It was a stubby little thing, like his bobbing manhood.

Even then I said, "There's no need to fight. I just want your shirt and pants."

"Well, you can't have them."

"Be careful, Martin," the girl said, looking at me now. "He's not human."

"Yes, he is," the lover said, jabbing at me with his knife. "He's just burned is all."

"No, Martin! Look! He's got tails! He's got two tails!"

Apparently the hero had missed this detail, so I helped him by raising them up to either side of my head, their points directed at him.

"Jesus protect me," he said, and before his courage failed him he lunged at me.

Much to my surprise, he actually sank that little knife of his into my chest, all the way to the hilt, then twisted it as he drew it out. It pained me and I cried out, which only made him laugh.

That was too much. The knife I could take, even when he turned it. But to laugh? At me? Oh no. That marked an unforgivable level of insult. I reached out and caught hold of the blade, seizing it with all my strength. Even though it was slick with my blood, I only had to twist it sharply in his grip and I had it from him, easy as tying a knot in a baby's tongue.

I glanced down at the little blade and tossed it away. The youth looked puzzled.

"I don't need that little thing to kill you. I don't even need my hands. My tails can strangle you both, while I chew on my fingernails."

Hearing this the youth sensibly dropped to his knees, and even more sensibly proceeded to beg.

"Please, sir," he said, "have mercy. I see the error of my ways now. I do! We both do! We shouldn't have been fornicating. And on a Holy Day!"

"What makes this day holy?"

"The new Archbishop declared it a holiday in celebration of the great fires which will be lit at eight to consume twenty-nine sinners, including — "

"The former Archbishop," I guessed.

"He's my father," the girl said, and perhaps out of some tardy respect for her parentage she did her best to cover her nakedness.

"Don't bother," I told her. "I couldn't care less about you."

"All demons are sodomites, aren't they? That's what my father says."

"Well, he's wrong. And how is it a man of the church has a daughter?"

"He has many children. I'm just his favorite." She became briefly distracted, as if by memories of his indulgences. Then she said: "You're not a sodomite?"

"No. My soul lost its one true companion but a few hours ago, in that forest. It will be days, perhaps even a week, before I recover the appetite to look at another woman."

"My father would have you cut to pieces by children. That's what he did with the last demon that came here."

"Children?"

"Yes. Tots of three and four. He gave them little knives, and told them there'd be sweetmeats for the one who was the cruelest."

"He's quite the innovator, isn't he?"

"Oh, he's a genius. And much loved by the Pope. He expects soon to be raised to high office in Rome. I want so much for it to happen, so that I can go with him."

"Then shouldn't you be at Mass, praying for some heavenly intercession, instead of hiding behind a rock with…" I glanced at the youth while searching for an appropriate word of contempt. But before I could finish my sentence the idiot charged at me, his head down, butting me in the stomach. He was quick, I'll give him that. I was caught off guard, and his blow threw me to the ground.

Before I could get up, he dug his heel into the wound he had made with that stubby little blade of his. It hurt, more than a little, and my cry of pain drew laughter from him.

"Is that paining you, little demon?" he crowed. "Then how about this?" He drove his foot down on my face, grinding away while I continued to cry out. He was having a fine time. The girl, meanwhile, had started to offer up chaotic entreaties to any heavenly agent who might intercede on her behalf:

"Please Angels of Mercy, Virgin Mother, Martyrs on High, give me your protection, O God in Heaven, forgive me my sins, I beg you, I don't want to burn in hell."

"Shut up!" I yelled to her from beneath her lover's heel.

But on she went: "I will say ten thousand Hail Marys; I will pay for a hundred flagellants to crawl on their knees to Rome. I will live in celibacy if that's what you want from me. But please, don't let me die and my soul be taken by this abomination."

That was too much. I may not be the loveliest thing the girl had laid her eyes on, but an abomination! No. That I was not.

Enraged, I caught hold of the foot of the youth, and pushed it into the air, shoving him backwards with all the force I possessed. I heard a crack as his head struck the boulder, and quickly got to my feet, ready to exchange further blows with him. But none was needed. He was sliding down the face of the boulder, the back of his head trailing blood from the place where his skull had burst against the stone. His eyes were open, but he saw neither me nor his lady-love, nor any other thing in this world.

I quickly snatched his clothes off the ground before his corpse sank down and bled upon them.

The girl had stopped her entreaties and was staring at the dead youth.

"It was an accident," I told her. "I had no intention of…"

She opened her mouth.

"Don't scream," I said.

She screamed. Christ, how she screamed. It was a wonder the birds didn't drop from the sky, slaughtered by that scream. I didn't try and stop her. I would have only ended up knocking the life out of her, and she was too lovely, even in her hysterical state, to lose her young life.

I put the dead youth's clothes on as quickly as I could. They stunk of his humanity, his doubt, his lust, his stupidity; all of it was in the threads of his shirt. I don't even want to tell you what his trousers stunk of. Still, he was bigger than I, which was useful. I was able to curl up my tails and stuff them down the trousers, one against each buttock, which effectively concealed them. While his clothes had been too big for me, his boots were too small, so I was obliged to leave them and go barefoot. My feet were recognizable demonatic, scaly and three clawed, but I would have to take the risk of their being noticed.

The girl — do I have need to mention? — was still screaming, though I'd done nothing to make her fear me beside my casual remark about strangling her with my tail and accidentally smashing her lover-boy's skull. It was only when I approached her that she ceased her din.

"If you torture me — "

"I have to — "

"My father will send assassins after you, all the way back to Hell. They'll crucify you upside down and roast you over a slow fire."

"I have no fear of nails," I said. "Or of flames. And your father's assassins will not find me in Hell, so don't send them looking. They'll only be eaten alive. Or worse."

"What's worse than being eaten alive?" the girl said, her eyes widening, not with horror but with curiosity.

Her question tested my memory and found it wanting. As a child I'd been able to rattle off the Forty-seven Torments in ascending order of agony at such speed and so completely free of error that I had been considered something of a prodigy. But now I could barely recall more than a dozen agonies on the list.

"Just take it from me," I said, "there's much worse than being eaten. And if you want to save innocents from suffering, then you'll keep your mouth shut and pretend you never laid eyes on me."

She stared back at me with all the sparkling intelligence of a maggot. I decided to waste no further time with her. I picked her clothes up from the ground.

"I'm taking these with me," I told her.

"I'll freeze to death."

"No, you won't. The sun's getting warm now."

"But I'll still be naked."

"Yes, you will. And unless you want to walk through the crowd down there in your present state, you'll stay here, out of sight, until somebody comes to find you."

"Nobody will find me here."

"Yes they will." I assured her. "Because I'll tell them, in half an hour or so, when I'm on the far side of the field."

"You promise?" she said.

"Demons don't make promises. Or if we do, we don't keep them."

"Just this once. For me."

"Very well. I promise. You stay here, and somebody will come to fetch you in a while with this." I lifted up the dress she'd so willingly removed just a few minutes before. "Meanwhile, why don't you do some good for your soul and offer up some prayers to your martyrs and your angels?"

To my astonishment, she fell instantly to her knees, clasping her hands together and closing her eyes, and began to do exactly as I had suggested.

"O Angels, hear me! I am in jeopardy of my soul — "

I left her to it and, dressed in my purloined clothes, I strode out from behind the boulder and down the slope towards the field.

So, now you know how I came to walk the earth. It's not a pleasant story. But every word of it is true.

So now are you satisfied? Have you had enough confessions out of me? I've admitted to patricides. I've told you how I fell in love, and how quickly and tragically my dreams of Caroline's adoration were snatched from me. And I've told you how I kept myself from killing off the Archbishop's daughter, though I'm sure most of my kind would have slaughtered her on the spot. They would have been right to do so, as it turned out. But you don't need to hear that. I've told you enough. Nor do you need to hear about the Archbishop and the bonfires on Joshua's Field. Believe me, it wouldn't please you. Why not? Because it's a very unflattering picture of your kind.

On the other hand… maybe that's exactly why I should tell you. Yes, why not? You've obliged me to uncover the flaws in my soul. Maybe you should hear the naked truth about your own people. And before you protest and tell me that I'm talking about distant days, when your species was far cruder and crueler than it is now, think.

Consider how many genocides are under way as you sit reading this, how many villages, tribes, even nations, are being erased. Good. So listen and I'll tell you about the glorious horrors of Joshua's Field. This one's on me.

As I descended the slope, I took in the vista below. There were hundreds of people assembled for the eight o'clock fire lighting, kept in check by a line of soldiers, their halberds pointed at the crowd so as to slit from navel to neck anyone foolish enough to try and get a closer look at the scene. In the large open space the soldiers were guarding a semicircle of woodpiles that had been raised, twice as tall as their builders. The three woodpiles in the center of the crescent were distinguished by having inverted wooden crosses raised above them.

Facing this grim array were two viewing stands. The larger of the two was a simple construction resembling a flight of deep, tall stairs, which was already almost full of God-fearing lords and ladies who had no doubt paid well for the privilege of watching the executions in such comfort. The other construction was very much smaller, and draped and canopied with lush red velvet, to protect those who would be seated inside from wind or rain. A large cross was raised above the canopy in case anyone would be in doubt that this was where the new Archbishop and his entourage would be seated.

Once I got down to the base of the slope, however, my own view was entirely blocked. Why? Because though it irks me to admit it, I was shorter than the peasants all around me. It wasn't only my vision that was besieged; so was my sense of smell. I was pressed upon from all sides by filthy, flea-infested bodies, whose breath was sickening and whose flatulence, its source of which I was regrettably closer than most, barely short of toxic.

Panic seized me, like a snake weaving its way up my spine from bowels to brain, turning my thoughts to excrement. I began to flail wildly and the sound my mother made in the depths of her nightmares escaped me, as shrill as a spitted baby. It opened cracks in the mud beneath me.

My noise inevitably drew the unwelcome attention of those in my vicinity who knew where it had issued from. People retreated from me on every side. Their eyes, in which I had until now only seen the dull luster of ignorance and inbreeding, now gleamed with a superstitious horror.

"Look, the earth cracks beneath his feet!" one woman yowled.

"His feet! God in heaven, look at his feet!" another yelled.

Though the mud had done something to disguise my feet, it wasn't enough to conceal the truth.

"It's not human!"

"Hell! It's from Hell!"

A frenzy of terror immediately seized hold of the crowd. While the woman who'd begun this furor shrieked the same few words over and over — "A demon! A demon! A demon!" — others began to gabble prayers, crossing themselves in a desperate attempt to protect themselves from me.

I took advantage of their terrified state and deliberately unleashed another of Momma's Nightmare Cries, one so loud that blood ran copiously from the ears of many of those around me. I seized the opportunity to run, deliberately heading towards the woman who'd begun all this. She was still shrieking A demon! A demon! when I came to her. I caught her by the neck and threw her down into the gaping earth, put my mud-clogged claw on her face to silence her and, yes, smother her at the same time. She had wasted too much salvable breath with her accusations. The life went out of her in less than a minute.

With the job done I drove my way into the crowd, still trailing the last of my ear-popping shriek. The crowd before me parted as I ran. With my head down I had no idea of my direction, but I was certain that if I ran in a more or less straight line I would eventually reach the edge of the crowd, and open ground. Indeed I thought I had done so when the noise of the crowd suddenly diminished. I looked up. The crowd had not disappeared from around me because I had reached its limits but because two soldiers, armoured and helmeted, had arrived and had their halberds pointed directly at me. I slid to a mud-splattered halt a few inches short of their weapons' points, the last of my Momma's shriek faltering, then dying into silence.

The larger of the two soldiers, who was easily a foot and a half taller than his companion, lifted up the hinged faceplate on his helmet to see me better. His features were barely less imbecilic than those of the crowd surrounding me. The only light flickering in his gaze was fed by the knowledge that with the one lunge he could run me through and pin me to the ground, allowing the crowd to do their worst.

"What's your name?" he said.

"Jakabok Botch," I told him. "And please believe me — "

"Are you a demon?"

There was a burst of accusations from the rabble. I'd murdered an innocent woman, whom I'd cursed into Hell. And I'd made sounds that had left people deaf.

"Shut up, all of you!" the soldier yelled.

The noise diminished, and the soldier repeated his question. There seemed little point in denying what would be only too apparent if he obliged me to remove my clothes. So I owned up.

"Yes," I said, raising my arms as though in surrender. "I am a demon. But I'm here because I was tricked."

"Oh, the pity of it," the soldier said. "The poor little devil was tricked."

He poked me with the point of his halberd, aiming for the bloody stain where the original owner of these clothes had stabbed me. It was only a minor wound, but the soldier's prodding made it bleed afresh. I refused to let out a single sound of complaint. I knew from overhearing the idle chatter of Pappy G.'s torturer friends that nothing satisfied them more than to hear the shrieks and pleas of those whose nerve endings were beneath their gouges and brands.

The only problem with my silence was that it inspired the soldier to further invention in pursuit of some response. He pushed the halberd's blade still deeper, turning it as he did so. The flow of blood increased considerably, but I still refused to give voice to a single plea in pursuit of mercy.

Again, the soldier dug and twisted; again there was an issuing of blood; again I remained silent. By now my body had started to shake violently as I struggled to repress the urge to cry out. Taking these spasms as proof that I was in swift decay and as such no longer a threat to them, a few of the crowd, mostly women, hags of twenty or less, came at me, clawing at my clothes to tear them off me.

"Let's see you, demon!" one of them shrieked, catching hold of the shirt collar behind my head and tearing it away.

The burn scars on the front of my body were virtually indistinguishable from those on the body of a man; it was my unharmed back that told the true story, with its array of yellow and vermillion scales and the tiny black spines that ran up the middle of my back to the base of my skull.

The sight of my scales and spines brought cries of revulsion from the crowd. The soldier put the point of his halberd at my throat now, pricking me with sufficient enough force that blood ran from there too.

"Kill it!" somebody in the crowd yelled. "Saw off its head!"

The cry for my execution quickly spread, and I'm certain the soldier would have slit my throat then and there had his companion soldier, the shorter of the two, not come to his side and whispered something to him. The other made some reply, which apparently carried the day because my tormentor raised his armoured hand and yelled to the crowd:

"Quiet! All of you! I said BE QUIET, OR WE WILL ARREST EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU!"

The threat worked wonders. Every man and woman in the vicious circle surrounding me shut their mouths.

"That's better," the soldier said. "Now, you all need to back away and give us some room here, because we're going to take this demon to his Excellency the Archbishop, who will make a judgment about the way this creature will be executed."

The other soldier, his face hidden, nudged my tormentor, who listened for a moment, then replied to his comrade, loudly enough for me to hear. "I was getting to that," he said. "I know what I'm doing!"

Then, addressing the crowd again: "I'm formally arresting this demon in the name of his Excellency the Archbishop. If any of you get in our way you will be directly contradicting the will of His Excellency, and therefore of God himself. You understand? You will be condemned to the eternal fires of Hell if you make any attempt to prevent us from taking this creature to the Archbishop."

The soldier's pronouncement was clearly understood by the mob, who would have torn my executed corpse into tiny pieces and each pocketed a scrap of me for a souvenir if they'd had their way. Instead they kept silent, parents covering their children's mouths for fear that one of them make a sound, however innocent.

Absurdly proud of his little show of power, the soldier glanced back at his comrade. The two men exchanged nods, and the second soldier drew his sword (which he'd surely stolen, for it was of exceptional size and beauty) and came 'round behind me, poking me with the tip just above the root of my tails. He didn't need to tell me to move; I stumbled forwards, following the other soldier, who walked backwards for a few yards, his weapon still at my neck. The only sound the crowd made was the shuffling of their footsteps as they moved to make way for me and my captors. Smugly satisfied that his threats had made the crowd compliant and apparently certain he had nothing to fear from me, my tormentor turned around so as to lead our little party out through the crowd.

He strode confidently, for all the world like a man who knew where he was going. But he didn't, because when the crowd started to thin out I saw that we'd emerged on the other side of Joshua's Field, where there was another slope, much milder than the one I had descended, and crowned by a forest as dense as the one on the opposite side.

It was now, as our leader paused to consider his error, that I felt the soldier behind me poke me several times, not to do me harm but to draw my attention. I turned around. The soldier had raised his face guard just high enough to let me get a glimpse of him. Then, lowering his sword until the tip was almost in the mud, he nodded towards the slope.

I got the message. For the third time that day I started to run, pausing only to butt my tormentor with the halberd so hard that he lost his balance and fell sprawling in the mud.

Then I was away, across the remaining stretch of the field and up the slope towards the trees.

There was a fresh burst of shouting from the crowd behind me, but above it the voice of my savior, ordering the hoi-polloi to stay back.

"This is the Archbishop's business," he yelled at them. "Not yours. You keep away, all of you!"

Finally, when I was just a few strides from the top of the slope, I looked back to see that his orders were being obeyed by most of the crowd, but not by all. Several men and women pursued me up the incline, though they were several strides behind the two soldiers.

I reached the trees without anyone catching up with me, and plunged into the cover of the thicket. Panicked birds let out warning cries as they deserted the branches over my head to retreat into the depths of the forest, while in the undergrowth rodents and snakes found bolt-holes of their own. Even wild pigs fled away squealing.

Now there was only the noise of my own coarse, pained breath, and the din of bushes being torn out of the earth if they blocked my way.

But I had done far too much running since the previous night, and had not eaten, nor drunk so much as a cup of rainwater, in that time. Now I was light-headed, the scene before me perilously close to flickering out. I could run no longer. It was time to turn and face my pursuers.

I did so in a small grove between the trees, lit by the brightening sky. I ran my last paces across the flower-littered grass and leaned my aching body against a tree so old it had surely sprouted the day the Flood retreated. There I waited, determined to endure with dignity whatever fate the soldiers and the lynch-mob on their heels had in mind for me.

The first of my pursuers to appear on the far side of the grove was the soldier clad in mud as well as armour. He took his helmet off so as to see me better, showing me in doing so his own muddy, sweaty, raging face. His hair was cropped to little more than a shadow; only his dark beard had been allowed to grow.

"Well you've given me quite an education, demon," he said. "I knew nothing about your people."

"The Demonation."

"What?"

"My people. We're the Demonation."

"Sounds more like a disease than a people," he said, curling his lip with contempt. "Luckily, I've got the cure." Pointing his halberd in my direction, he tossed down his helmet and unsheathed his sword. "Two cures, in fact," he said, moving towards me. "Which shall I stick you with first?"

I looked up from the roots of the tree, idly wondering how deep into the earth they went; how far short of Hell. The soldier was halfway across the grove.

"Which shall it be, demon?"

My dizzied gaze went from one weapon to the other.

"Your sword…"

"All right. You've made your choice."

"No, your sword… it looks cheap. Your friend has a much finer sword. The blade is nearly twice as long as yours, and so heavy, so large, I think he could probably drive it all the way through you from behind, armour and all, and the mere length of what came out of your belly would be longer than that ridiculous weapon of yours."

"I'll show you ridiculous!" the soldier said. "I'll cut — "

He stopped midsentence, his body convulsing as the claim I'd just made was proved, the sword his companion wielded emerging from the armour intended to protect his abdomen. It was bright with his blood. He dropped his halberd, but continued, though his fist trembled, to cling to his sword.

All the color had gone from his cheeks, and all trace of rage or murderous intent had gone with it. He didn't even attempt to look back at his executioner. He simply lifted his own paltry sword up so as to compare its length with the visible portion of the blade that had run him through. He drew one last, blood-clogged breath, which gained him a few seconds more in which to lay the two blades side by side.

Having done so he lifted his gaze and, fighting to keep his leaden eyelids from closing, he looked at me and murmured:

"I would have killed you, demon, if I'd had a bigger sword."

Upon the uttering of which, his hand dropped to his side, the length-impaled blade slipping from his fingers.

The soldier behind him now withdrew his own impressive weapon, and the corpse of my tormentor fell forwards, his head no more than a yard from my mud-encrusted feet.

"What's your name?" he said to me.

"Jakabok Botch. But everybody calls me Mister B."

"I'm Quitoon Pathea. Everybody calls me Sir."

"I'll remember that, sir."

"You got hooked by The Fisherman, I'll bet."

"The Fisherman?"

"His real name's Cawley."

"Oh. Him. Yes. How did you work that out?"

"Well, you're obviously not part of the Archbishop's guard."

Before I could question him further he put his finger to his lips, hushing me while he listened. My human pursuers had not turned back once they had reached the fringes of the forest. To judge by the way their clamor knitted, they had become a small mob, with one thought on their minds and tongues.

"Kill the demon! Kill the demon!"

"This isn't good, Botch. I'm not here to save your tail."

"Tails."

"Tails?"

"I have two," I said tearing off the dead lover's trousers and letting my tails uncoil.

Quitoon laughed.

"Those are as fine a pair of tails as I ever saw, Mister B.," he said, with genuine admiration. "I was of half a mind to let them finish you off, but now I see those — "

He looked back towards the torn undergrowth where the mob would soon appear. Then back at me:

"Here," he said, casually tossing his glorious sword in my direction.

I caught it, or more correctly, the sword caught me, convulsing in the air between its owner's confident hand and my own fumbling fingers so as to place itself in my grip. The soldier was already turning his back on me.

"Where are you going?"

"To raise the heat in this," he said, slamming his fist against the chest plate of his armour.

"I don't understand."

"Just take cover when I call your name."

"Wait!" I said. "Please. Wait! What am I supposed to do with your sword?"

"Fight, Mister B. Fight for your life, your tails, and the Demonation!"

"But — "

The soldier raised his hand. I shut my mouth. Then he disappeared into the shadows off to the left of the grove, leaving me, the sword, a corpse which was already drawing summer flies eager to drink his blood and the noise of the approaching mob.

Let me pause a moment, not just to take a breath before I attempt to describe what happened next, but because in revisiting these events I see with a fresh clarity how the words uttered and the deeds done in that little grove changed me.

I had been a creature of little consequence, even to myself. I'd lived unremarkably (excepting perhaps the patricide) but I would not, I was suddenly determined, die that way.

The shape of the world changed in that place and moment. It had always seemed to me like a Palace that I would never know the joy of entering, for I had been marked as a pariah when I was still in my mother's womb. I was wrong, wrong! I was my own Palace, every room of which was filled with splendors that only I could name or enumerate.

This revelation came in the little time between Quitoon Pathea's disappearance into the shadows and the arrival of the mob, and even now, having thought about the event countless times, I am still not certain as to why. Perhaps it was simply having escaped death so many times that day, first at the hands of Cawley's gang, then from the lover-boy's knife attack and later from the crowd on Joshua's Field, and that I was now facing it yet again — this time with a weapon in my hands that I had no knowledge of how to wield, and therefore expecting to die — that I gave myself the freedom to see my life clearly just this once.

Whatever the reason, I remember the most exquisite rush of pleasure with which that vision of the world blossomed in my skull, a rush that wasn't spoiled in the least by the appearance of the human enemy. They appeared not only from the spot where I had entered the grove, but also from between the trees to left and right of it. There were eleven of them; and they all had weapons of some description. Several had knives, of course, while others carried makeshift clubs of living wood, hacked off trees.

"I am a Palace," I said to them, smiling.

There were a lot of puzzled stares from my executioners.

"The demon's crazy," one of them remarked.

"I got a cure for that," said another, brandishing a long and much nicked blade.

"Cures, cures," I said, remembering the dead soldier's boasts. "Everybody has cures today. And you know what?"

"What?" said the man with the nicked blade.

"I don't feel in need of a doctor."

A toothless virago snatched the nicked blade from the man's hand.

"Talk, talk! Too much talk!" she said, approaching me. She paused to pick up the small sword the dead soldier had left in the grass. She picked up his halberd too, tossing both of them back towards the mob, where they were caught by two members of a quartet who had just appeared to swell the crowd: Cawley, the Pox, Shamit, and Father O'Brien. It was the Pox who caught the halberd, and seemed well pleased with what circumstance had handed him.

"This creature murdered my daughter!" he said.

"I want him taken alive," Cawley said. "I'll pay good coin to whoever brings him down without killing him."

"Forget the money, Cawley!" the Pox cried. "I want him dead!"

"Just think of the profit — "

"To hell with profit," the Pox said, shoving Cawley in the chest so hard that he fell back into the thorny briars that prospered around the grove.

The priest attempted to haul Cawley out of his bed of barbs, but before he could raise the man up, the Pox started across the grove towards me, the halberd that had first been used to goad and prick me once again pointed in my direction.

I looked down at Quitoon's sword. My weary body had let it droop until its point was hidden in the grass. I looked up at the Pox, then down at the sword again, murmuring as I did so the words I'd used to speak of my revelation.

"I am a Palace."

As if woken by my words, the sword raised itself up out of the grass, its point cleansed of blood by the damp earth where it had settled. The sun had risen above the trees, and caught the sword's tip as my own sinews took up the duty of raising the weapon. By some trick known only to the sword, the sun's light reflected off it and momentarily filled the entire grove with its incandescence. The blaze held everything and everybody still for several heartbeats, and I saw everything before me with a clarity the Creator Itself would have envied.

I saw it all — sky, trees, grass, flowers, blood, sword, spear, and mob — all one lovely view from the windows of my eye.

And yet even as I saw the sight before me as a single glory, I also saw its every detail, however insignificant, the vision so clear I could have made an inventory of it. And every part of it was beautiful. Every leaf, whether perfect or eaten at; flower, whether pristine or crushed; every glistening sore on the Pox's face, and every lash upon his gummy eyes: My awakened gaze made no distinction between them. Both were all exquisite, all perfectly themselves.

The vision didn't last. In just a few heartbeats it had gone. But it didn't matter. I owned it forever now, and with a shout of death-loving joy I ran at the Pox, raising Quitoon's sword above my head as I did so. The Pox came to meet me, the point of his spear preceding him. I brought the sword down in one lovely arc. It cut off a foot or more of the Pox's spear. His step faltered, and he might have retreated had the chance been offered, but the sword and I had other plans for him. I lifted the sword and brought it down again with a second swoop, bisecting the length of halberd that the Pox still held. Before he had time to drop the remains of his weapon I again lifted the sword and struck a third blow, slicing the Pox's hands off at the wrist.

Oh Demonation, the noise he made! Its colors — blue and black with streaks of orange — were as bright as the blood that gushed from his arms. There was such beauty hidden in his agony; my delight knew no bounds. Even when cries of vengeful rage rose from the crowd behind him I saw more loveliness in their venomous colors — sour-apple greens and bilious yellows — that my own jeopardy seemed remote, inconsequential. When it came it too would be beautiful I knew.

Quitoon's glorious sword was not distracted by these visions, however. It sent a vicious shock wave up through my arms and shoulders and into my dreaming head. It hurt so much it stirred me from my reverie. The colors I'd been glorying in withered and I was abandoned in the dull lie of life as it is commonly seen, smothered and sorrowful. I tried to draw a clear breath, but the air tasted dead in my throat and leaden in my lungs.

A sagging, but dogged hag amongst the mob started to goad the men around her:

"What are you afraid of?" she said. "He's one. We're many. Are you going to let him go back to Hell and crow about how you all stood in terror of him? Look at him! He's just a little freak! He's nothing! He's nobody!"

She had the courage of her convictions, it must be said. Without waiting to discover whether her words stirred the others into action, she started towards me, wielding a crooked branch. Crazy though she surely was, the way she diminished me (I was nothing, I was nobody) gave the rabble fresh fury. They came after her, every last one of them. The only thing that stood between their ferocity and me was the Pox, who turned as they approached, extending his gouting arms as if one amongst the mob might heal him.

"Out of the way!" the harridan yelled, striking his massive torso with her crooked branch. Her blow was enough to make the weakened man stagger, his blood splattering those who crossed his path. Another of the women, disgusted that the Pox had bled on her, cursed him ripely and struck him herself. This time he went down. I did not see him rise again. I saw nothing, in fact, but angry faces screaming a mixture of pieties and obscenities as they swarmed around me.

I lofted up Quitoon's sword, holding it in both hands, intending to keep the mob at blade's length. But the sword had more ambitious ideas. It pulled itself up above my head, the paltry muscles of my arms twitching with complaint at having to lift such a weight. With my hands high I was exposed to the mob's assaults, and they took full advantage of the opportunity. Blow after blow struck my body, branches breaking as their wielders smashed them against me, knives slashing at my belly and my loins.

I wanted to defend myself with the sword, but it had a will of its own, and refused to be subjugated. Meanwhile the cuts and blows continued, and all I could do was suffer them.

And then, entirely without warning, the sword cavorted in my hands, and started its descent. If I'd had my way I would have sliced at the mob sideways, and cut a swathe through them. But the sword had timed its descent with uncanny accuracy, for there in front of me, holding two glittering weapons, stolen no doubt from some rich assassin, was Cawley. To my bewilderment he actually smiled at me in that moment, exposing two rows of mottled gums. Then he drove both of the blades into my chest, twice piercing my heart.

It was the next to last thing he ever did. Quitoon's sword, apparently more concerned with the perfection of its own work than the health of its wielder, made one last elegant motion, so swift that Cawley didn't have time to lose his smile. Meeting his skull at its very middle, not a hair to left or right, I swear, it descended inexorably towards his feet, cutting through head, neck, torso, and pelvis so that once his manhood had been bisected, he fell apart, each piece wearing half a smile, and dropped to the ground. In the frenzy of the assault, the Cawley bisection earned little response. Everybody was too busy kicking, beating, and cutting me.

Now, we of the Demonation are a hardy breed. Certainly our bodies bleed, much as yours do. And they give us great pain before they heal, as do yours. The chief difference between us and you is that we can survive extremely vicious maimings and mutilations, as had I had in my childhood, cooked in a fire of words, whereas you will perish if you are stabbed but once in the right place. That said, I was weary now of the incessant assault upon me. I had endured more than my share of cuts and blows.

"No more," I murmured to myself.

The fight was lost, and so was I. Nothing would have given me more pleasure than to have lifted Quitoon's sword and sliced every one of my assailants to pieces, but by now my arms were a mass of wounds, and lacked the power to wield Quitoon's beautiful weapon. The sword seemed to understand my exhausted state, and no longer attempted to raise itself up. I let it slip from my bloody, trembling fingers. None of the mob moved to claim it. They were perfectly content to erase my life slowly, as they were, with blows, cuts, kicks, curses, and wads of phlegm.

Somebody took hold of my right ear, and used a dull blade to slice it off. I raised my hand to swat his stubby fingers away, but another assailant caught hold of my wrist and restrained me, so that I could only writhe and bleed as my mutilator sawed and sawed, determined to have his souvenir.

Seeing how weak I now was, and so incapable of defending myself, others were inspired to look for trophies of their own to cut from me: my nipples, my fingers, my toes, my organs of regeneration, even my tails.

No, no, I silently begged them, not my tails!

Take my ears, my lashless eyelids, even my navel, but please not my tails! It was an absurd and irrational vanity on my part, but while I would not protest their further maiming of my face or even of those parts which made me male, I wanted to die with my tails untouched. Was that so much to ask?

Apparently so. Though I let the trophy hunters cut at my most tender parts without argument, and pleaded through my pain to have them be content with what they were already taking, my pleas went unheard. It was little wonder. My throat, which had unleashed my mother's Nightmare Voice several times, could now barely raise itself above a faltering murmur, which was heard by nobody. I could feel not one but two knives cutting at the root of my tails, sawing at the muscle, as my blood flowing ceaselessly from the widening gash.

"Enough!"

The command was loud enough to cut through the shouts and laughter of the mob, and more to silence it. For the first time in a while I was not the center of attention. The quieted mob looked around for the source of that word of instruction, blades and bludgeons at the ready.

It was Quitoon who'd spoken. He stepped out of the same shadows into which he had disappeared minutes before, still wearing all his armour, the face guard down, concealing his demonic features.

The mob, though they were thirteen or more, and he alone, were still respectful of him. Not perhaps for his own person, but for the power they assumed he represented — that of the Archbishop.

"You two," he said, pointing to the pair who were trying to separate me from my tails. "Get way from him."

"But he's a demon," one of the men said quietly.

"I can see what he is," Quitoon replied. "I have eyes."

There was something peculiar about the quality of his voice, I thought. It was as if he were barely suppressing some powerful emotion, as if he might suddenly weep or burst into laughter.

"Let… him… alone…" he said.

The two mutilators did as he instructed, stepping away from me through grass that was more red than green. I tentatively reached behind me, afraid of what I would find, but was relieved to discover that though the pair had sawed through my scales to the muscle beneath, they had got no further. If, by some remote chance, I survived this first encounter with Humankind, then I would at least still have my tails.

Quitoon, meanwhile, had emerged from the shadows beneath the trees and was walking towards the middle of the grove. He was shaking, I saw, but not from any frailty. Of that I was perfectly certain.

The mob, however, assumed that he was indeed wounded, his shaking proof of his weakened state. They exchanged smug little looks, and then casually moved to surround him. Most of them were still carrying the weapons they'd used to wound me.

It didn't take long for them to take up their positions. When they had done so Quitoon slowly turned on the spot, as though to confirm the fact. The simple act of turning was difficult for him. His trembling was steadily getting worse. It could only be a matter of a few seconds before his legs gave out and he dropped to the ground, at which point the mob would —

I was interrupted in mid thought by Quitoon.

"Mister B.?" His voice shook, but there was still strength in it.

"I'm here."

"Be gone."

I stared at Quitoon (as did everybody else in the grove), trying to work out what he was up to. Was he presenting himself as a target so that I might slip away while the mob tore off his armour and beat him to death? And why was he shaking in this bizarre fashion?

The order came again, spoken with almost panicky force.

"Be gone, MisterB.!"

This time his tone stirred me from my bewildered state, and I remembered his instruction to me: Take cover when I call your name.

Having already delayed my obeying of his order for perhaps half a minute, I made up for lost time as best as my wounded body would allow. I took five or six backwards steps, until I felt the thicket at my back and realized that I could go no further. I raised my throbbing head and looked at Quitoon again. He was still standing in the midst of the mob, his armoured body shaking more violently than ever. There was a cry emerging from behind his faceplate now, and it was rising in volume and pitch as we all watched and listened. Up and up, louder and louder, until the sound he was making, like the sound I'd learned from Momma, scarcely seemed a plausible product of lungs and throat. Its highest audible notes were as shrill as a bird's shriek; its lowest made the ground beneath my feet shake, made my teeth and stomach and bladder ache.

But I didn't have to suffer its effects for long. Barely seconds after I had raised my head, the sounds Quitoon was unleashing became in the same moment both shriller and deeper, their new extremes accompanied by a sudden conflagration inside the armour, which spat shafts of incandescence out through every chink and seam.

Only now — too late, of course — did I understand why he had wanted me to be gone from here. I pushed my body against the knotted thicket, and was reaching behind me to try and pass the barbed branches when Quitoon exploded.

I saw his armour shatter like an egg struck by a hammer and glimpsed for the briefest moment the blazing form of the shatterer himself. Then the wave of the energy that had blown the armour wide open came at me, striking me with such force that I was driven backwards, over the dense thicket, landing amid the briar several yards from the grove. There was a thick, pungent smoke in the air that kept me from seeing the grove. I struggled to get myself up out of the barbed bed in which I lay; finally dragging back towards the grove. I was bruised, dizzied, and bloody, but I was alive, which was more than could be said for the rabble who had surrounded Quitoon. They lay sprawled on the grass, all dead. Some were headless, some hung from the low branches, their bodies pierced by dozens of holes. Besides the more or less complete corpses, there was a large selection of pieces — legs, arms, loops of gut, and the like — festively decorating the branches of every tree around the grove.

And in the middle of this strange orchard was Quitoon. A bluish smoke was rising from his naked body, the substance of which was sewn with seams of brightness that steadily became a little weaker as each seam gave up its intensity. The only place where the brightness remained undimmed was in Quitoon's eyes, which were like twin lamps blazing in the dome of his skull.

I picked my way through the litter of bodies, revolted not by the blood and body parts, but by the parasites that had flourished in their thousands on the bodies and in the clothes of the mob and were now rapidly exiting in search of living hosts. I had no intention of becoming one, and several times as I crossed the grove I was obliged to brush off some ambitious flea that had leapt upon me.

I called to Quitoon as I approached him, but he didn't respond. I halted a little distance from him, and tried to rouse him from this distracted state. I was uneasy about those furnace eyes of his. Until some sign of Quitoon himself returned to cool those fires, I was by no means certain that I was safe from the power he had called up. So I waited. The grove was silent, except for the tapping sound of blood as it dripped from one leaf to another, or down into the already sodden ground.

There were noises coming from beyond the grove however, as was a smell that I knew all too well from childhood: the stink of burning flesh. Its pungent presence made sense of the two kinds of cries that accompanied it: one, the agonized shrieks of burning men and women; and the other, the appreciative murmur of the crowd that was witnessing their cremations. I've never had a great fondness for human meat; it's bland and often fatty, but I had not eaten since taking Cawley's bait, and the smell of the cooking sodomites wafting from Joshua's Field made me salivate. Drool ran from the corners of my mouth and down my chin. I raised a trembling hand to wipe the spittle off, an absurd touch of fastidiousness given my general condition, and while I was doing so Quitoon said:

"Hungry?"

I looked up at him. The blaze in his head had been extinguished while my mind had wandered off to Joshua's Field. Now I was back, and so was Quitoon.

His pupils, like those of every member of the Demonation, were slits, his cornea rays of burnt umber flecked with gold. There were hints of gold too in the symmetrical arrangement of turquoise and purple patterns that decorated his body, though if they had ever been flawless many years of scarring had taken their toll.

"Are you just going to stand there staring or are you going to answer my question?"

"Sorry."

"Are you hungry? I'm so starved I could even eat fish."

Fish. Disgusting. Fish was the Nazarene animal. I shall make you fisher of men, it was writ. Ugh. It was no wonder I'd choked on a bone both times I tried eating it.

"All right, no fish. Bread and meat. How's that?"

"Better."

Quitoon shook himself, like a wet dog. Flecks of brightness, remnants of the power he'd unleashed that had been lodged between his scales, now flew off him and died in the sunlight.

"That's better," he said.

"I… should be… no, I mean, I am… very…"

"What?"

"Grateful."

"Oh. No problem. We can't let this human trash kick us around."

"They made quite a mess of me."

"You'll heal," Quitoon said, matter-of-factly.

"Even if I got two knives in my heart?"

"Yeah, even then. It's when they start dismembering you that things become difficult. I doubt even Lucifer could have grown himself a second head." He thought on this for a moment. "Though now I come to think of it nothing's impossible. If you can dream it, you can do it." He studied me. "Are you fit to walk?"

I tried to be as casual as he was being. "Sure. No problem."

"So let's go see the Archbishop cook."

Fires. They've marked every important moment in my life.

Are you ready to light one last fire then?

Surely, you didn't think I'd forgotten. I got a little carried away by the story, but all the time I've been telling it I've been thinking about how it'll feel when you do what you promised.

You did promise, don't say you didn't.

And don't say you've forgotten. That'll only annoy me. And I'd have every right to be annoyed, after going to all the trouble I've gone to, digging through my memories, painful many of them, and sharing what I dug up. I wouldn't do that for just anybody, you know. Only you.

I know, I know, it's easily said.

But I mean it. I've opened the doors of my heart for you, I really have. It's not easy for me to admit I've been as wounded and weak as I have or foolish or as easily duped. But I told you because when you first opened the prison door and I saw your face there was something about it I trusted. That I still trust.

You're going to set fire to this book very soon, aren't you?

I'll take your silence as consent.

You have a slightly puzzled look on your face. What's that about? Oh. Wait. I get it. You're expecting everything to be wrapped up neat and tidy, yes, like a story. This isn't a story. Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends.

This doesn't work like that. It's just some scraps of memory, that's all. Well no, that's not really right. I've told you things that were very important to me, because those are the things I've remembered. The Bonfire, The Bait, Killing Pappy, My First Love (though not my last), What Happened on Joshua's Field, Meeting Quitoon, and How He Saved My Life. That's about it.

But I can see from your expression that isn't what you expected. Did you think I was going to be telling you about the Great War between Heaven and Hell? Easy answer to that: There wasn't one. All papal propaganda.

And me? Well, I survived my wounds obviously, or I wouldn't be sitting in these pages telling you all this.

Huh. That makes me wonder — the idea of me telling you makes me wonder. What do I sound like in your head? Did you give me the voice of somebody you've always hated, or someone you love?

Oh wait, do I sound like you? No, do I? That would be weird, that would be so weird. It'd be like I didn't really exist, except in your head.

I, Mister Jakabok Botch, presently residing inside your skull…

No, I don't like that. I don't like that at all, for obvious reasons.

What reasons? Oh, come on, don't make me spell it out for you, friend. If I do, then I'm going to tell you the truth, and sometimes the truth isn't pretty. I might bruise your tender human feelings, and we wouldn't want that, would we?

On the other hand, I'm not going to start telling you lies now, not when we're so close to our little book-burning.

All right, I'll tell you. I'm just saying that I don't think anybody in their right mind would think of your head as prime location, that's all.

Your head's a slum. I've been here long enough to see it for myself. You're up to your skull lid with dirt and desperation. Oh, I'm sure you fool your more gullible friends and relatives with little tricks. I've seen them on your face, so don't try to deny it. You'd be surprised at how much I've seen looking up at you from these pages. The smile you put on when you're not sure what's true and what isn't. You don't want to show your ignorance, so on goes this little smile to cover up your confusion. You put it on when you're reading something you're not sure about. I bet you didn't know that. You put that little smile on for a book, believe it or not.

But you're not fooling me. I see all your guilty little secrets scurrying around behind your eyes, desperately trying to keep out of sight. They make your eyes flicker, did you know that? They jiggle back and forth really quickly whenever the conversation we've been having has moved on to something you're uncomfortable about. Let's see, when did I first notice it? Was it when I was talking about the family fighting and me picking up a kitchen knife to use on my father? Or was it when I first talked about the corrupt priest, Father O'Brien? I can't remember. We've talked about so much. But take it from me, your eyes put on quite a performance when you're nervous.

I can see right through you. There's nothing you can hide from me. Every vicious, corrupt notion that passes through your mind is there on your face, for all the world to see. No, I shouldn't say all the world. It's just me, really, isn't it? I get the private view. The only one who maybe knows you better than me is your mirror.

Wait, wait. How did I get on to talking about your mind. Oh yeah, me being resident inside your skull, your slummy skull.

Is it full enough now? Demonation knows, I've told you plenty. Sure, there are some details I've neglected. Most of the rest of the stuff is self-evident, isn't it? Obviously I didn't die, even with two wounds to my heart. Just as Quitoon had prophesied, every knife wound and cracked bone had healed eventually, leaving me with a constellation of small scars to accompany the Great Burn.

Speaking of burns, when we, that would be Quitoon and me, wandered back to the fringes of the forest and looked down over Joshua's Field, we discovered that while most of the condemned had long since gone up in smoke, the three sinners who were nailed upside down on the crosses in the middle of the half-circle of fires had yet to be put to the flame. The Archbishop was addressing them, enumerating their sins against the Laws of Heaven. Two of the condemned were men, the third a very young and very pregnant woman, her swollen belly, its skin shiny-tight, hanging down, decorated with rivulets of blood that ran from her crudely nailed feet. It was only when the Archbishop had finished his speech, and the three executioners carefully lit the base of each of the tinder piles that the crosses began to slowly rotate.

"That's clever," I remarked.

Quitoon shrugged. "I've seen better."

"Where?"

"Anywhere they're causing harm to one another. That's where you really see human genius at work; war machines, torture instruments, execution devices. It's incredible what they create. They had the spinning crosses last October, for the execution of the previous Archbishop."

"His women were nailed upon crosses, too?"

"No. Just the Archbishop, on the circling device. Anyway, it didn't work. It started to move, a bit jerkily, and then halfway round it stopped. But look at the skill of these people, they've solved the problem in just a few months. Those crosses are going 'round so smoothly." He smiled. "Look at them."

"I'm looking."

"It's a machine. Botch, a device for doing what Humankind can't do for itself! I swear, it will make a machine to fly, if it lives long enough."

"It has enemies?"

"Only one. Itself. But the machines it makes are usually free of the stupidities of its inventors. I love machines, whatever they're for. I never get tired of watching them. Oh Demonation, listen to that screaming." His smile grew broader still.

"It's the girl."

"I suppose it's understandable. She's screaming for two." He chuckled. "Still, it's making my teeth ache. I think I'm going to take my leave. It's been quite a day, Mister B. Thank you."

"Where are you going?"

"Right now, away from here."

"But after that?"

"No particular plans. If I hear something interesting is being invented somewhere — whether it's a better rat trap or a machine that beats women who talk back to their husbands, I don't care — I'll just go. I've got plenty of time. Like I heard rumors yesterday that an angel had been caught in the Low Countries, helping someone invent a flower."

"Do you know what an angel looks like?"

"I have no idea. What about you? Have you ever seen one?"

I shook my head.

"You want to see this angel?" Quitoon asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Demonation, you are dense! I'm asking if you want to come with me. It's a nomadic existence but every now and then you see somebody working on a project, usually in secret."

The word sounded strange when he said it. He seemed to realize this fact, because he said:

"It's not really important, The Secret Thing. Things! I mean Things."

"No, you don't." I said. "You mean a Thing. A single Thing. You can't fool me."

Quitoon was plainly impressed. "Yes!" he said. "It is a single thing I'm hearing rumors about. Somebody's working to invent this secret thing that will…" He left the sentence unfinished.

"That will?" I said.

"Are you coming or staying? I need an answer, Botch!"

"That will what?"

"That will change the nature of Humankind forever."

Now I was intrigued. Quitoon had a secret. A big secret.

"This is the biggest Secret since that thing about Christ," Quitoon went on. "I mean it."

I glanced back across the Field to the woods on the far side. I knew it wouldn't be difficult to find my way back through the trees to the crack in the rocks where Cawley and his mob had hauled me up. Nor would it be that hard to make the descent. In a matter of hours I could be back in the comforting familiarity of the World Below.

"Well, Botch?"

"You really think there's an angel in the Low Countries?"

"Who knows? That's half the fun of it, not knowing."

"I think maybe I need to chew it over for a little while."

"Then I'll leave you to your chewing, Jakabok Botch. Did I tell you what a mouthful that name of yours is, by the way?"

He didn't wait long enough for me to tell him I heard that observation often. He just turned his back on the field, saying that he couldn't take another second of the girl's screams.

"Her hair's on fire."

"That's no excuse," he replied, and strode off into the forest.

This was an important moment, I knew. If I chose wrongly I could end up regretting the decision I made now, and here, for the rest of my life. I looked down at the Field again, and then back towards the trees. Bright though the designs on Quitoon's scales were, the shadows were already obscuring them. Just a few more steps and he'd be out of sight, and my opportunity for some adventure would have disappeared.

"Wait!" I yelled to him. "I'm coming with you."

So now you know how I went traveling with Quitoon. We had a fine time in the years that followed, moving from place to place, playing what he liked to call the Old Games: causing the dead to talk, and babies to turn to dust as they suckled; tempting holy men and women (usually with sex); even getting into the Vatican through the sewers and smearing excrement on some new frescoes that had been painted using a device that allowed the artist to achieve the illusion of depth. Quitoon was irritated not to have been there when the invention had been used, his bad temper making him fling the dung around with particular gusto.

I learned a lot from Quitoon. Not just how to play the Old Games, but how he always said the sport of invention chasing was keener if the human you were playing who really had a chance — just a little one, maybe, but nevertheless a real chance — of outwitting him.

"You didn't give the mob in the forest much of a chance of winning," I reminded him. "In fact, you didn't give them any."

"That's because we were outnumbered. I had no choice. If we'd been able to go up against them one by one it would have been an entirely different story."

That was the one time I ever really pressed him on any matter of significance. After that we were a much neater match than I would ever have believed. Like long-parted brothers who'd been finally reunited.

Well, that's the end. Not of my life, obviously, but certainly the end of my confessions to you. I never intended to tell you so much. But now that it's done, I don't regret it. I feel lighter, unburdened I suppose you'd say.

Perhaps, in some misbegotten fashion, I owe you my thanks. If you hadn't kept staring at me with those puzzled expressions on your face, I would never have told you one of my guilty little secrets. Not The Secret, of course. That Secret I got from adventuring with Quitoon and, if I gave it away, it would be like giving him away. At least, the good bits.

So, no Secret. Don't even bother to hope. I never promised it to you, and it wouldn't even have come up if I hadn't been telling you what Quitoon said.

All right? Are we clear?

No Secret.

Just burn the book.

Please.

Take pity on me.

Damn you! Damn you!

What do you want from me?

WHAT IN THE NAME OF THE DEMONATION DO YOU WANT?

Just stop reading. That's not too much to ask is it? I've paid the price for getting into this infernal book. You've used me up, demanding my confessions.

And don't say you didn't. You just read and read and what was I going to do? I could have erased the words if I'd chosen to. Or worse I could have erased every other word, so ____ wouldn't ____ what ____ was ____ you. ____ only ____ you ____ be ____ to ____ was ____ a ____ game. ____ would ____ liked ____. He ____ so ____ of ____ righteous ____ about ____ Humankind ____ chance ____ winning ____ bent ____ of ____ ____ ____ armadillos.

See how easy it would have been to frustrate you? I should have started doing that right after you first kept reading. But the words got their hook in me, and once I began telling the truth, it was as though I couldn't stop. I could see the shape of the stories ahead of me. Not just the big stuff — How I Got Burned, How I Got Out of Hell, How I Met Quitoon — but the little anecdotes I picked up, or minor characters who appeared along the way and had some business with me, whether it was bloody or benign, before heading off to get on with their lives. If I was a really good storyteller, I mean a real professional, I would have been able to make up some clever twist to finish their stories off, so you weren't left wondering what happened to this one or that one. Shamit, for instance. Or the Archbishop who'd burned his predecessor. But I don't know how to invent things. I can only tell you the things I saw and the things I felt. Whatever happened to Cawley's people, or the Archbishop who was the father of the girl behind the rock I never found out. So I cannot tell you.

Yet you still stare. Still you look backwards and forwards along the lines as though I'm going to suddenly turn into a master storyteller and invent wonderful ways to bring things to a conclusion. But I've told you, I'm burned out, so to speak. I've got nothing left.

Why don't you make this easy. Just take pity on me, I'm begging you. I'm on my knees in the gutter of the book, entreating you.

Burn the book, please, just burn the book. I'm tired. I just want to die away into the darkness and you're the only one who can give me that gift. I've cried too long I've seen too much I'm just tired and lost and ready to go to my death so please, please let me burn.

Please —

let —

me —

burn.

No?

I see. All right, you win.

I know what you want. You want to know how I got from wandering with Quitoon into the pages of a book. Am I right? Is that what you're waiting for? I should never have mentioned that damnable Secret. But I did. And here we are, still looking at one another.

I suppose it's understandable, now I think about it. If the situation was reversed, and I'd picked up a book and found somebody already possessing it, I'd want to know the Why and the When and the Where and the Who.

Well, the Where was a little town in Germany called Mainz. And the Who was a fellow named Johannes Gutenberg. The When I'm not so sure about: I've never been good with dates. I know it was summer., because it was unpleasantly humid. As to the year, I'm going to guess it was 1439, but I could be wrong by a few years in either direction. So that's Where, Who, and When. What was the other one? Oh, Why. Of course. The big one. Why.

That's easy. Quitoon took us there, because he'd heard a rumor that this fellow Gutenberg had made some kind of machine and he wanted to see it. So we went. As I said earlier, I've never been much good with dates, but I think by then Quitoon and I had been traveling together for something like a hundred years. That's not long in the life of a demon. Some of the Demonation are virtually deathless, because they're the offspring of a mating between Lucifer and another of the First Fallen. I'm not so pure bred, unfortunately. My mother always claimed that her grandmother had been one of the First Fallen, which if it's true means I might have lived four or five thousand years if I hadn't got myself in a mess of words. Anyway, the point is this: Neither Quitoon nor I aged. Our muscles didn't begin to ache or atrophy, our eyes didn't fail, or our hearing become unreliable. We lived out that century indulging in every excess the World Above had to offer us, denying ourselves nothing.

I learned from Quitoon in the first few months how to stay out of trouble. We traveled by night, on stolen horses, which we'd change every few days. I have no great fondness for animals. I don't know a demon that does. Perhaps we're afraid their condition is a little too close to ours for comfort, and it wouldn't take more than a whim on the part of the God of Genesis and of Revelations, creator and destroyer, to have us down on all fours, with Humankind's collars around our necks and leashes on those collars. After a time I came to feel some measure of sympathy for those animals that were little more than slaves, their inarticulate state denying them the power to protest their enslavement, or tell their stories at least. Oxen yoked and straining as they labored to plow the unyielding ground; blinded songbirds in their plain little cages, singing themselves into exhaustion believing that they were making music to pleasure an endless night; the unwanted offspring of bitches or she-cats taken from their mother's teats and slaughtered while she looked on, all unable to comprehend this terrible judgment.

Nor was life so very different for those men who wearily trudged behind the oxen, or who caught the songbirds and blinded them or those who dashed out the brains of unweaned kittens on the nearest stone, only thinking as they did of what labors lay ahead once they'd tossed the corpses to the pigs.

The only difference between the members of your species and those I saw suffering every day of that hundred years was that your people, though they were peasants who could neither read nor write, had a very clear notion of Heaven and Hell, and of the sins that would exile them forever from the presence of their Creator. All this they learned every Sunday, when the tolling of bells summoned them to church. Quitoon and I attended whenever we could, secreting ourselves in some high hidden place to listen to the pontifications of the local priest. If he spent his sermon telling his congregation what shameful sinners they were, and how they would suffer unending agony for their crimes, we would make it our business to secretly watch the priest for a day or so. If by Tuesday he had not committed any of the felonies he'd railed against on Sunday, we would go on our way. But if behind closed doors the priest ate from tables that creaked under a great weight of food and wine the likes of which his congregation would never even see, much less taste; or, if he turned private prayer meetings into seductions and told the girls or boys, once he'd violated them, that to speak of what he'd done would certainly damn them to the eternal fires, then we would make it our business to prevent him from further hypocrisies.

Did we kill them? Sometimes, though when we did so we were careful to make the circumstances of their slaughter so outlandish that none of the shepherd's flock would be accused of his murder. Our skill of inventing ways to torture and dispatch the priests was elevated to a kind of genius as the decades past.

I remember we nailed one particularly odious and overfed priest to the ceiling of his church, which was so high nobody could understand how the deed had been done. Another priest, who we had watched unleash his perverted appetite upon tiny children, we cut into one hundred and three pieces, the labor of which fell to Quitoon, who was able to keep the man alive (and pleading to die) until he severed the seventy-eighth part from the seventy-ninth.

Quitoon knew the world well. It wasn't just Humankind and its works he knew, but all manner of things without any clear connection between them. He knew about spices, parliaments, salamanders, lullabies, curses, forms of discourse and disease; of riddles, chains, and sanities; ways to make sweetmeats, love, and widows; tales to tell to children, tales to tell their parents, tales to tell yourself on days when everything you know means nothing. It seemed to me that there wasn't a single subject he did not know something about. And if he was ignorant about a certain subject, then he lied about it with such ease that I took every word he said as gospel.

He liked chiefly the torn and ruined places in the world, where war and neglect had left wilderness behind. Over time I learned to share his taste. Such places had a great practical advantage for us, of course. They were largely shunned by your kind, who believed that such places were the haunts of malicious spirits. Your superstitions were, for once, not so far from the truth.

What Quitoon and I found alluring about a particular piece of desolation was often appealing to other night-wanderers like us who had no hope of ever being invited over the threshold of a Christian soul. They were the usual gang of minor fiends and bloodsuckers. Nothing we ever had any trouble kicking out if we found some of them still in residence in a ruin we'd decided to haunt for ourselves.

It may seem strange to say but when I think back on those years and the life we two made for ourselves in the ruins of houses, they almost resembled the arrangement between a husband and wife; our century-long friendship became an unblessed and unconsummated marriage before half its span was over.

That is as much of happiness as I know.

It seemed to me, while I was talking of the brief, harsh years of those who plowed fields and blinded birds, that life — any life — is not unlike a book. For one thing, it has blank pages at both ends.

But there's generally just a few at the start. After a matter of time the words appear. "In the beginning was the Word," for instance. On that detail, at least, God's Book and I agree.

I started this brief story of my far from brief life with a plea for a flame and a quick end. But I was asking for too much. I see that now. I should never have expected you to do as I asked. Why would you destroy something that you had not even seen?

You have to taste the sour urine before you break the jug. You have to see the sores on the woman before you kick her out of bed. I understand that now.

But the consuming flame cannot remain unignited forever.

I will tell you one more tale to earn myself that fire. And it will not be, believe me, another like the ones in the pages that came before. My last confession is one that nobody but me could tell, a once-in-a-lifetime story that will end this book. And I will tell you — if you are good and attentive — the nature of that Secret I spoke of earlier.

So, one day in a year I've already admitted to forgetting, Quitoon said to me:

"We should go to Mainz."

I had never heard of Mainz. Nor at that moment had I any desire to go anywhere. I was soaking in a bath of infants' blood, which had taken no little time to fill, the bath being large and the infants hard to acquire (and keep alive so the bath was hot) in the numbers required. It had taken me half a day to find thirty-one infants, and another hour or more to slit their squealing throats and drain their contents into the bath. But I'd finally done the job and had barely settled into my soothing bath, inhaling the honey and copper scent of infants' blood, when Quitoon came in and, kicking aside the littered providers of my present comfort, came to the edge of the bath and told me to get dressed. We were off to Mainz.

"Why do we need to move on so quickly?" I protested. "This house is perfect for us. We're in the forest, out of human sight. When was the last time we spent so long a time in one place and were not troubled?"

"Is that your idea of a life, Jakabok?" (He only called me Jakabok when he was spoiling for an argument; when feeling fond, he called me Mister B.) "Spending time in some place where we won't be troubled?"

"Is that so terrible?"

"The Demonation would be ashamed of you."

"I don't give a fig for the Demonation! I only care about — "

I stared up at him, knowing he could finish the sentence without any help from me. "I like it here. It's quiet. I was thinking I might buy a goat."

"What for?"

"Milk. Cheese. Company."

He got up and started back towards the door, kicking drained corpses ahead of him as he went.

"Your goat will have to wait."

"Just because you want to go to someplace called Mainz? To see another failure of a man make another failure of a machine?"

"No. Because one of these bloodless brats under my feet is the grandchild of one Lord Ludwig von Berg, who has raised a small army of all the mothers who lost their babies, plus a hundred men and seven priests. And they are even now coming this way."

"How did they find out we're here?"

"There was a hole in one of your sacks. You left a trail of wailing children from the town into the forest."

Cursing my ill luck, I lifted myself up out of the bath. "So, no goat," I said to Quitoon. "But maybe in the next place?"

"Wash the blood off with water."

"Must I?"

"Yes, Mister B.," he said, smiling indulgently. "You must. I don't want them sending dogs after you because we smell of — "

"Dead babies."

"So shall we go to Mainz, or not?" Quitoon asked.

"If you really want to go so much."

"I do."

"Why?"

"There is a machine I have to see. If it does what I'm hearing, then it will change the world."

"Really?"

"Really."

"Well, spit it out," I said. "What does it do?"

Quitoon only smiled. "Wash quickly, Mister B.," he said. "We have places to go and sights to see."

"Such as The End of the World?"

Quitoon surveyed the litter of innocents around my bath. "I said change, not end."

"Every change is an end," I said.

"Well, listen to you. The naked philosopher."

"Do you mock me, Mister Q.?"

"Do you care, Mister B.?"

"Only if you mean to hurt me."

"Ah."

He looked up from the dead babies, the gold flecks in his eyes blazing like suns, scorching all trace of the darker hues. All was gold, in his eyes and in his words.

"Hurt you?" he said. "Never. Bring me popes, saints, or a messiah and I'll torment them until their minds crack. But never you, Mister B., never you."

We vacated the house through the back door while von Berg's legion of soldiers, priests, and vengeful mothers came in at the front. Had the forest's depths not been so familiar to me from the many hours I'd wandered there, naively imagining my idyllic life with Quitoon and the goat, we would doubtless have been chased down by our pursuers and cut to pieces. But my meanderings had given me a greater grasp of the forest's labyrinthine ways than I'd known I knew and following them we gradually put a comfortable distance between the von Berg's legion and ourselves. We slowed our pace a little, but didn't stop until every last cry they made had faded away.

We rested awhile, not speaking. I was listening to the birds calling to one another, their music far more intricate than the simple bright notes the birds who lived in the sun-filled trees at the fringes of the forest sang. Darkness changes everything. Quitoon was apparently thinking about Mainz, because much later, as we emerged from the other side of the forest, easily thirty miles from our point of entry, and he spied three huntsmen on horses, he immediately suggested we hunt the hunters, take whatever clothes, weapons, and bread and wine they were carrying, along with their horses.

With this done, we sat amongst the naked dead while we ate and drank.

"We should probably bury them," I said.

I knew as I made the suggestion that Quitoon would not want to waste time digging graves. But I had not foreseen the solution he had in mind. It was impressive, I will admit that. At his instruction we dragged the three dead men perhaps fifty yards deeper into the forest, where the trees grew high and the canopy thick. Then, to my astonishment, Quitoon cradled one of the corpses in his arms and dropping to his haunches suddenly sprang up, throwing the body up into the branches with such force that it pierced the heavy canopy. It was quickly gone from sight, but I heard its continued ascent for several seconds until it finally lodged in some high place where bigger, hungrier birds than those that sang in the lower branches would quickly strip the flesh from it.

He did the same thing with the two other bodies, choosing a different spot for each. When he was done he was a little breathless, but well pleased with himself.

"Let those who finally find them make sense of that," he said. "What does that expression mean, Mister B.?"

"I am merely amazed," I said. "A hundred years together and you've still got new tricks up your sleeve."

He did not disguise his satisfaction, but smiled smugly.

"Whatever would you do without me?" he said.

"Die."

"For want of food?"

"No. For want of your company."

"If you had never met me, you would have no reason to mourn my absence."

"But I did and I would," I said, and turning from his scrutiny, which made my burned cheeks burn again, I headed back towards the horses.

We took all three animals, which allowed for each to have some respite from being ridden, which speeded our way. It was late July and we traveled by night, which was not only cautious but also had the advantage of allowing us to rest in some secret place by day, when the air, unmoved by even the faintest of breezes, grew fiercely hot.

Limiting our traveling to the short summer nights made Quitoon foul-tempered, though, and rather than endure his company I agreed that we should travel by both day and night so as to be in Mainz sooner. The horses soon sickened from lack of rest, and, when one of them literally died beneath me, we left the survivors with their dead companion (about whose corpse they displayed not even the slightest curiosity) and taking our weapons and what little food remained from a theft of the previous day we proceeded on foot.

The horse had perished just after dawn, so as we walked the heat of the climbing sun, which was at first balmy, steadily became more oppressive. The empty road stretching before us offered no prospect of shade beneath roof or tree, while to each side of us stretched fields of motionless grain.

The clothes I'd taken from the huntsmen, which fitted well enough and were the garments of a moneyed man, stifled me. I wanted to tear them all off, and go naked, as I had in the World Below. For the first time since Quitoon and I had left the blood-red grove together, I wanted to be back in the Ninth Circle, amongst the troughs and peaks of the garbage. "Was this how it felt?" Quitoon asked me. I cast him a puzzled glance.

"Being in the fire," he said, by way of explanation, "where you got your scars."

I shook my head, which was throbbing. "Stupid," I muttered.

"What?" There was a hint of threat in the syllable. Though we had argued innumerable times, often vehemently, our exchanges had never escalated into violence. I had always been too intimidated by him to let that happen. Even a century of thieving, killing, traveling, eating, and sleeping together had never erased the sour certainty that under the right stars he would kill me without hesitation. Today there was just one star in the Heavens, but oh how it burned. It was like a blazing unblinking eye frying our rage in our brain pans as we walked the empty road.

Had I not felt the fever of its gaze upon me, and the weight of its judgment within that gaze, I would have muzzled my anger and offered some words of apology to Quitoon. But not today; today I answered him truthfully.

"I said stupid."

"Meaning me?"

"What do you think? Stupid questions, stupid mind."

"I think the sun's made you crazy, Botch."

We were no longer walking but standing facing one another, no more than an arm's length apart.

"I'm not crazy," I said.

"Then why would you do something so idiotic as to call me stupid?" His volume dropped to little more than a whisper. "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 unpromsing 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 exression 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 the 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."