Mister B. Gone

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

No, Quitoon had killed an angel or two or three with his unforgiving fire. And nothing excited me more than the prospect of being taught how to kill as he killed. Demonation, he tried! For fully half a decade or more he attempted to teach me how to unleash my own fire. But the skill was beyond me, and the more I worked to force my body to do as I was instructing it, the more it gave up signs of petty mutiny. Instead of nurturing lethal fires in my body fluids and my belly, I got kidney stones and an ulcer. I passed the stones in a day and a half of blind agony some months later. The ulcer I still have to this day.

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

"Never mind," he said. "You don't really need to cause fires anyway. You've always got me."

"Always?"

"Didn't I just say so?"

"Yes."

"Am I a liar?"

"No." I lied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I didn't quicken my step, but rather slowed it to a hobble as I entered the streets, so as to convince any citizen of Mainz who looked my way that the possessor of a face so traumatically unmade by fire was wounded everywhere about my body. Your kind has a superstitious terror of things ugly and broken; you fear that their condition may somehow infect you. The God-fearing citizens of Mainz were no exception to the human rule. They called their children off the street as I scuttled by and summoned their dogs to drive me away from their thresholds, though I never met a dog so obedient to its master that it would obey an order to attack me.

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

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

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

Oh, while we're having this heart to heart, I should tell you that this is the last piece of my history I will be telling you. Why? Because after this there's no more to tell. After this, the story is in your hands, literally. You will give me my fire, won't you? One last conflagration, in a life that's been full of them. Then it'll be over, for both of us.

Mister B. will be gone.

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

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

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

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

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

Your mind is a sewer, running with filth and hurt and anger. Its rancor is in your eyes, in your sweat, on your breath. You're as corrupted as I am, yet filled up with a secret pride that you possess such a limitless supply of wickedness.

Don't look at me as though you don't know what I'm talking about. You know your sins very well. You know the things you've wanted, and what you would do to get them if you'd the opportunity. You're a sinner. And if, by some unfortunate chance, you were to perish without dealing with the pain you've caused, the fury you've unleashed — without making amends — then there is a place for you in the World Below, more certain than any home in paradise.

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

I've started counting, in my head. I'll tell you why later.

For now, just know that I'm counting, and that the end is in sight. I'm not talking about the end of this book, I'm talking about THE END, as in the end of everything you know, which is to say: only yourself. That's all we can ever know, isn't it? When the rhythm of the dance stops, we're on our own, all of us, damned Humankind and demon-lovers alike. The objects of our affections have been spirited away. We are alone in a wilderness, and a great wind is blowing and a great bell tolling, summoning us to judgment.

Enough morbid talk. You want to know what happens between here and the End, don't you? Of course, of course. It's my pleasure. No, really.

I didn't tell you yet that Mainz, the town where Gutenberg resided, was built beside a river. In fact, there were parts of the town on both banks, and a wooden bridge between the two that looked poorly built, and likely to be swept away should the river get too ambitious.

I didn't make the crossing immediately, even though it was clear from a quick visit to the riverbank that the greater part of the town lay on the far side. First I scoured the streets and alleyways of the smaller part of the town, hoping that if I kept to the shadows, and kept my senses alert, I'd overhear some fragment of gossip, or an outpouring of fear-filled incoherence; signs, in short, that Quitoon was at work here. Once I had located someone who had information it would be quite easy, I knew, to follow them until I had them on some quiet street, then corner them and press them get to spit out all the little details. People were usually quick to unburden themselves of their secrets as long as I promised to leave them alone when they'd done so.

But my search was fruitless. There were gossips to be overheard, certainly, but their talk was just the usual dreary malice that is the stuff of gossiping women everywhere: talk of adultery, cruelty, and disease. I heard nothing that suggested some world-changing work was being undertaken in this squalid, little town.

I decided to cross the river, pausing on my way to the bridge only to coerce food from a maker of meat pies and drink from a vendor of the local beer. The latter was barely drinkable, but the pies were good, the meat rat or dog, at a guess — not bland but spicy and tender. I went back to the beerseller, and told him that his ale was foul and that I had a good mind to slaughter him for not preventing me from buying it. In terror, the man gave me all the money he had had about his person, which was more than enough to purchase three more meat pies from the pieman, who was clearly perplexed that I, the thuggish thief, had returned to make a legitimate purchase, paying for the coerced pie while I bought the others.

Pleased to have my money though he was, he did not hesitate, once he'd been paid, to tell me to go on my way.

"You may be honest," he said, "but you still stink of something bad."

"How bad is bad?" I said, my mouth crammed with meat and pastry.

"You won't take offense?"

"I swear."

"All right, well, let me put it this way, I've put plenty of things in my pies that would probably make my customers puke if they knew. But even if you were the last piece of meat in Christendom, and without your meat I would go out of business, I'd go be a sewer man instead of trying to make something tasty of you."

"Am I being insulted?" I said. "Because if I am — "

"You said you wouldn't take offense," the pieman reminded me.

"True. True." I took another mouthful of pie, and then said: "The name Gutenberg."

"What about them?"

"Them?"

"It's a big family. I don't know much except bits of gossip my wife tells me. She did say Old Man Gutenberg was close to dying, if that's what you've come about."

I gave him a puzzled stare, though I was less puzzled than I appeared.

"What would make you think I was in Mainz to see a dying man?"

"Well, I just assumed, you being a demon and Old Man Gutenberg having a reputation, I'm not saying it's true, I'm just telling you what Marta tells me, Marta's my wife, and she says he's — "

"Wait," I said. "You said demon?"

"I don't think Old Man Gutenberg's a demon."

"Christ in Heaven, pieman! No. I'm not suggesting any member of the Gutenberg clan is a demon. I'm telling you that I'm the demon."

"I know."

"That's my point. How do you know?"

"Oh. It was your tail."

I glanced behind me to see what the pieman was seeing. He was right. I had indeed allowed one of my tails to escape my breeches.

I ordered it to return into hiding, and it scornfully withdrew itself. When it was done, the dullard pieman seemed congenially pleased on my behalf that I should have such an obedient tail.

"Aren't you at least a little afraid of what you just saw?"

"No. Not really. Marta, that's my wife, said she'd seen many celestial and infernal presences around town this last week."

"Is she right in the head?"

"She married me. You be the judge."

"Then no." I replied.

The pieman looked puzzled. "Did you just insult me?" he said.

"Hush, I'm thinking," I told him.

"Can I go, then?"

"No, you can't. First you're going to take me to the Gutenberg house."

"But I'm covered in dirt and bits of pie."

"It'll be something to tell the kids," I told him. "How you led the Angel of Death himself — Mister Jakabok Botch, 'Mister B.' for short — all the way through town."

"No, no, no. I beg you, Mister B., I'm not strong enough. It would kill me. My children would be orphans. My wife, my poor wife — "

"Marta."

"I know her name."

"She'd be widowed."

"Yes."

"I see. I have no choice in the matter."

"None."

Then he shrugged, and we took our way through the streets, the pieman leading, me with my hand on his shoulder, as if I were blind.

"Tell me something," the pieman said matter-of-factly. "Is this the Apocalypse the priest reads to us about? The one from Revelations?"

"Demonation! No!"

"Then why all the presences celestial and infernal?"

"At a guess it's because something important is being invented. Something that will change the world forever."

"What?"

"I don't know. What does this man Gutenberg do?"

"He's a goldsmith, I believe."

I was thankful for his guidance, though not his conversation. The streets of the town all looked alike — mud, people, and grey-and-black houses, many less luxurious than some of the ruins Quitoon and I had slept in as we'd traveled.

Quitoon! Quitoon! Why was my every second thought of him, and of his absence? Rather than free myself of the obsession, I made a game of it, reciting to the pieman a list of the most noteworthy things Quitoon and I had eaten as we'd gone on our way: dog-fish, cat-fish, bladder-fish; potato blood soup, holy water soup with waffles, nettle and needle soup, dead man's gruel thickened with the ash of a burned bishop, and on and on, my memory serving me better rather than I'd expected. I was actually enjoying my recollections, and would have happily continued to share more unforgettable morsels had I not been interrupted by a rising howl of anguish from the streets ahead of us, accompanied by the unmistakable smell of burning human flesh. Seconds later the source of both the noise and the noisome stench came into view: a man and a woman, with flames leaping three feet or more from their lushly coiffed heads, which the fire was consuming with enthusiasm, as it was their backs and buttocks and legs. I stepped out of their path, but the pieman remained there, staring at them, until I took his arm and dragged him out of their way.

When I looked at him I found that he was staring up at the narrow strip of sky visible between the eaves of the houses on either side of the street. I followed the direction of his gaze to discover that despite the brightness of the summer sky there were forms moving overhead that were brighter still. They weren't clouds, though they were as pristine and unpredictable as clouds, schools of amorphous shapes moving across the sky in the same direction that we were traveling.

"Angels," the pieman said.

I was genuinely astonished that he could know such a thing. "Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure," he replied, not without a twinge of irritation. "Watch. They're going to do this thing they do."

I watched. And to my astonishment I saw them converge upon one another, until all the shapeless masses had become a single incandescent form that then began to spin counterclockwise in a spiral motion, its center growing still brighter until it erupted, spitting motes of light like a bursting seed pod. The seeds came twirling down onto the roofs of the houses, where, like a late winter snow, they went to nothing.

"Something of great consequence must be going on," I said to myself. "Quitoon was finally right."

"It's not much farther," the pieman said. "Couldn't I just direct you from here?"

"No. To the door, pieman."

Without further exchange, we made our way on down the street. Though there were plenty of people around, I no longer bothered to add my little grace-note grotesqueries, the lolling mouth, the snot running from my nostrils, to my general appearance. I had no need. With the dung-encrusted pieman leading, we made quite a disgusting pair, and the citizens kept clear of us, their heads down, staring at their feet as they hurried on their way.

It wasn't our presence that was causing this subtle agitation amongst the citizens. Even those who had not yet laid their eyes on us were walking with downcast gazes. Everybody, it seemed, knew that there were angels and demons sharing the thoroughfares with them, and they were doing their best to hurry about their business without having to look up at the soldiers from either army.

We turned a corner, and walked a little way, then turned another corner, each turn bringing us into streets that were more deserted than those we'd left behind. Finally, we turned into a street lined with small businesses: a seller and repairer of shoes; a butcher's shop, a purveyor of fabric. Of all the stores along the street only the butcher's seemed to be open, which was useful because my stomach was still demanding some nourishment. The pieman came in with me more, I think, out of fear of what might happen to him if I left him on his own on this uncannily empty street than out of any great interest in what the butcher had to sell.

The place was poorly kept, the sawdust on the floor gumming with blood, and the air busy with flies.

Then, from the other side of the counter came a pain-thickened voice.

"Take whatever…" the owner of the voice said, his timbre raw. "It doesn't matter… to me… anymore."

The pieman and I peered over the counter. The butcher lay in the sawdust on the other side, his body comprehensively pierced and slashed. There was a large pool of blood around him. Death stared out from his small blue eyes.

"Who did this?" I asked the man.

"It was one of your kind," the pieman said. "Torturing him like that."

"Don't be so quick to judge," I said. "Angels have very nasty tempers. Especially when they're feeling righteous."

"Both… wrong…" the dying man said.

The pieman had gone around the counter and picked up the two knives he found there beside the butcher's body.

"They're neither of them much… much use," the butcher said. "I thought one good stab to my heart would do it. But no. I bled copiously but I was still alive, so I stab all over, looking for some place which will kill me. I mean it was easy with my wife. One good stab and — "

"You killed your own wife?" I said.

"She's back there," the pieman said, nodding through the door that led to the back of the shop. He went to the threshold and took a closer look. "And he cut out her heart."

"I didn't want to," the butcher said. "I wanted her dead, safe with the angels. But I didn't want to be hacking at her like she was a side of pork."

"Then why'd you do it?" the pieman asked him.

"The demon wanted it. I had no choice."

"There was a demon here?" I said. "What was his name?"

"Her name was Mariamorta. She was here because this is the End of the World."

"Today?"

"Yes. Today."

"That's not what you said," the pieman said to me. "If I'd known, I would have gone back to my own family, instead of wandering around with you."

"Just because a suicidal butcher says it's the End of the World, it doesn't mean we have to believe him."

"We do if it's the truth," said somebody at the door.

It was Quitoon. In some other place a nobleman must have been laying dead and naked, because Quitoon was dressed in purloined finery: an outfit of scarlet, gold, and black. His appearance was further enhanced by the way his long black hair had been coiffed with tight, shiny curls and his beard and mustache trimmed.

His changed appearance unnerved me. I had had a dream about him a few nights before in which he had appeared as he was now, in every detail, down to the smallest jewel set in the scabbard of his dagger. In the dream there'd been good reason for his fancification, though I am loathe to speak of it now. For some reason I feel ashamed, in truth. But why not? We've come so far, you and I, haven't we? All right. Here's the truth. I dreamt he was dressed that way because he and I were to be married. Such confections our sleeping minds create! It's meaningless nonsense, of course. But I still found it troubling when I woke.

Now I found the dream had been prophetic. Here was Quitoon in the flesh, standing at the doorway, dressed precisely as he had been dressed in preparation for our union. The only difference was that he had no interest in marriage. He had more apocalyptic talk in mind.

"Didn't I tell you, Mister B.?" he crowed. "Didn't I say there was something going on in Mainz that would bring the world to an end?"

"See?" moaned the butcher at my feet.

"Hush," I said to him. He seemed to take me at my word, and died. I was glad. I don't like to be around things in pain. Now it was over. I had no need to think of him anymore.

"Who's your new friend?" Quitoon said lazily.

"He's just a pieman. You don't need to hurt him."

"It's the end of the world as we know it, Mister B. What does it matter one way or another if a pieman dies?"

"It doesn't. Any more than it matters that he lives."

Quitoon smiled his wicked, shiny smile. "You're right." He shrugged. "It doesn't." He took his malice-gazed eyes off the pieman and turned them on me.

"What made you follow me?" he wanted to know. "I thought we'd parted on the road and that was the end of things between us."

"So did I."

"So what happened?"

"I was wrong."

"About what?"

"About going on without you. There… there didn't seem… any purpose."

"I'm moved."

"You don't sound it."

"Now I disappoint you. Poor Jakabok. Were you hoping for some great moment of reconciliation? Were you hoping perhaps that we'd fall weeping into one another's arms? And that I'd tell you all the tender things I tell you in your dreams?"

"What do you know about my dreams?"

"Oh, a lot more than you imagine," he said to me.

He's been in my dreams, I thought. He's read the book of my sleeping thoughts. He had even written himself into them if it amused him to do so. Perhaps Quitoon was the reason I'd dreamt of that strange wedding. Perhaps it wasn't my unnatural desire surfacing, but his.

There was a curious comfort in this knowledge. If the idyll of our wedding had been Quitoon's invention than I was perhaps safer from his harm than I'd imagined. Only a mind that was infatuated with another could conceive of a joy such as I had dreamt: the trees that lined the path to the wedding place in full blossom, the breeze shaking their perfumed branches so that the air was filled with petals like one-winged butterflies, spiraling earthward.

Well, I would remind Quitoon of this vision when we were alone. I would drag him cursing and screeching out of that room he had somewhere, filled with costumes and disguises: the place where he worked to have power over me.

But for now the only urgent business I had was to keep my sometime friend from setting me on fire where I stood. I could not help but remember him staring at me as I lay in the dirt of the ditch. There had been no smile on his lips then. Just four loveless words:

Worm, he'd said, prepare to burn. Was that what he was thinking now? Was there a murderous fire being stoked in the furnace of his stomach, ready to be spewed out at me when he deemed the moment appropriate?

"You look nervous, Mister B."

"Not nervous, just surprised."

"At what?"

"You. Here. I didn't expect to see you again so soon."

"Then, again I ask you why did you follow me?"

"I didn't."

"You're a liar. A bad liar. A terrible liar." He shook his head. "I despair of you, truly I do. Have you learned nothing over the years? If you can't tell a decent lie, then tell me the truth." He glanced over at the pieman. "Or are you attempting to preserve some fragment of dignity for this imbecile's sake?"

"He's not an imbecile. He makes pies."

"Oh, well." Quitoon laughed, genuinely amused at this. "If he makes pies, no wonder you don't want him knowing your secrets."

"They're good pies," I said.

"Apparently so. As he has sold them all. He's going to need to bake some more."

At this point, the pieman spoke up, which unfortunately won him Quitoon's gaze.

"I'll cook some for you," he said to Quitoon. "Meat pies I can do you, but it's my sweet pies that I'm known for. Honey and apricots, that's a favorite amongst my customers."

"But however do you cook them?" Quitoon said. I'd heard that sing-song tone of mock-fascination in his voice before, and it wasn't a good sign.

"Leave him alone," I said to Quitoon.

"No," he said, keeping his gaze fixed on the man. "I don't think I will. In fact, I'm certain of it. You were saying," he said to the man, "about your pies."

"Just that I cook the sweet ones best."

"But you can't cook them here, can you?"

The pieman looked a little puzzled by the obviousness of this remark. I silently willed him to let puzzlement silence his tongue so that the little death game Quitoon was playing could be brought to a harmless conclusion.

But no. Quitoon had begun the game and would not be content until he was ready to be done.

"What I mean to say is, you don't make cold pies, do you?"

"God in Heaven, no!" The pieman laughed. "I need an oven."

If he'd stopped there, even, the worst might still have been avoided. But he wasn't quite done. He needed an oven, yes…

"And a good fire," he added.

"A fire, you say?"

"Quitoon, please," I begged. "Let him be."

"But you heard what the man wanted," Quitoon replied. "You heard it from his own lips."

I ceased my entreaties. They were purposeless, I knew. The peculiar motion, like a subtle shudder that preceded the spewing forth of fire, had already passed through Quitoon's body.

"He wanted a fire," he said to me, "and a fire he shall have."

At that moment, as the fire broke from Quitoon's lips, I did something sudden and stupid. I threw myself between the fire and its target.

I had burned before. I knew that even on a day such as today, which was full of little apocalypses, that fire couldn't do much damage. But Quitoon's flames had an intelligence entirely their own, and they instantly went where they could do me most harm, which was of course to those parts of my body where the first fire had failed to touch me. I turned my back to him yelling for the pieman to go, go, and went behind the counter where the pool of the butcher's blood was now three times as big as it had been when I'd first laid eyes on him. I threw myself down into the blood as though it were a pool of spring water, rolling around in it. The smell was disgusting, of course. But I didn't care. I could hear the satisfying sizzle of my burning flesh being put out by the good butcher's offering, and a few seconds later I rose, smoking and dripping from behind the counter.

I was too late to intervene again on behalf of the pieman. Quitoon had caught him at the door. He was entirely engulfed in flames, his head thrown back and his mouth wide open, but robbed of sound by his first and last inhalation of fire. As for Quitoon, he was nonchalantly walking around the burning man, plucking an ambitious flame from the conflagration and letting it dance between his fingers a while before extinguishing it in his fist. And while he played, and the pieman blazed, Quitoon asked him questions, dangling as a reward for the man's replies (one nod for yes, two for no) the prospect of a quick end to his suffering. He wanted first to know whether the pieman had ever burned any of his pies.

One nod for that.

"Burned black, were they?"

Another nod.

"But they didn't suffer. That's what you hoped, I'm sure, being a good Christian."

Again, the affirmative nod, though the fire was rapidly consuming the pieman's power of self control.

"You were wrong, though," Quitoon went on. "There's nothing that does not know suffering. Nothing in all the world. So you be happy in your fire, pieman, because — " He stopped, and a puzzled expression came onto his face. He cocked his head, as if listening to something that was hard for him to hear over the noise of burning. But even if the message was incomplete he had caught the general sense of it and he was appalled.

"Damn them," he growled, and, casually pushing the burning man aside, he went to the door.

As he reached the threshold, however, a brightness fell upon it, more intense by far than the sun. I saw Quitoon flinch, and then, putting his hands above his head as though to keep himself from being struck down by a rain of stones, he ran off into the street.

I could not follow. I was too late. Angels were coming into that sordid little shop, and all thoughts of Quitoon went from my head. The Heavenly presences were not with me in the flesh, nor did they speak with words that I could set down here, as I have set down my own words.

They moved like a field of innumerable flowers, each bloom lit by the blaze of a thousand candles, their voices reverberating in the air as they called forth the soul of the pieman. I saw him rise up, shrugging off the blackened remnants of his body — his soul shaped like the babe, boy, youth, and man he'd been, all in one — and went into their bright, loving company.

Need I tell you I could not follow? I was excrement in a place where glories were in motion, the pieman amongst them, his lighted soul instantly familiar with the dance of death to which he'd been summoned. He was not the only human there. What the pieman's wife Marta had called celestial presences had gathered up others, including Quitoon's two earlier victims, who I'd seen ablaze in the street, and the butcher and his spouse. They danced all around me, indifferent to the laws of the physical world, some rising up through the ceiling, then swooping down like jubilant birds, others gracefully moving beneath me in the dirt where the dead were conventionally laid to rot.

Even now, after the passage of centuries, whenever I think of their beatific light and their dances and their wordless songs, each — light, dance, and song — in some exquisite fashion married to a part of the other, my stomach spasms, and it's all I can do to not to vomit. There was such bitter eloquence in the vibrations that moved in the air; and in the angels' light was a mingling of gentility and piercing fury. Like surgeons with incandescence instead of scalpels, they opened a door of flesh and bone in the middle of my chest, by which their spirits came in to study the encrustations of sin that had accrued inside me. I was not prepared for this scrutiny, or for the possibility of some judgment to be delivered. I wanted to be free from this place, from any place where they might find me, which is to say, perhaps, that I wanted to die because I knew, feeling their voice and light, that there was nowhere I would ever be safe again, except in the arms of oblivion.

And then they did something even worse than touching me with their presence. They removed themselves, and left me without them, which was more terrible still. There was no darkness so profound as the simple daylight they left me in, nor any noise so soul-cracking as the silence left when they departed.

I felt such a rage then. By God! There had never been such a rage in me, no, nor in any demon, I swear, from the Fall itself, that was the equal of the fury that seized me then.

I looked around the butcher's shop, which my sight, as if sharpened by the angels' brightness, now saw with a detestable clarity. All the myriad tiny things my gaze would have previously passed over without lingering was now demanding the respect of my scrutiny, and my eyes could not resist them. Every crack in the walls and ceilings sought to seduce me with their lovely particulars. Each bead of the butcher's blood splattered on the tile bid me wait with it while it congealed. And the flies! The gluttonous thousands that had been summoned by the stench of death, circling the room filled, perhaps, with some variation upon the fury that had seized me: their mosaic eyes demanding respectful study from my own gaze, as they in turn studied me.

All that was left of the pieman's physical being was a smoking, blackened form, its limbs drawn up against its body by the heat that had tightened its muscles. The essence of him, of course, had departed with the angelic host to witness glories I would never know and live in a joy I would never taste.

As I stood there, half-crazed, I was seized by a sudden realization, more painful than any cut. I would never be of the angelic class. I would never be adored and hosannaed. And so, if I could never escape my vile, broken condition, I decided that I would do my best to be the worst thing Hell had ever vomited forth. I would be all that Quitoon had been to the power of a thousand. I would be a destroyer, a tormentor, a voice of death in the palaces of the great and the good. I would be a killer of every form of loving innocence: the infant, the virgin, the loving mother, the pious father, the loyal dog, the bird singing up the day. All of them would fall before me.

As the angels had been to light, so I would be to its absence. I would be a thing more supposed than seen, a voice that spoke not in words but in orders of shadows; my two hands, these very hands that I hold up before you now, happily performing the simple cruelties that would keep me from forgetting who I had been before I had become Darkness Incarnate: thumbing out eyes, plucking nerves with my nails, pressing hearts between my palms.

I saw all of this not as I have written it down, with one thing following upon another, but all at once, so that I was that same Jakabok Botch who had entered the butcher's shop a few minutes before and utterly another the next. I was murder and betrayal; I was deceit and bigotry and willful ignorance; I was guilt, I was acquisitiveness, I was revenge; I was despair and hatred and corruption. In time I would become an inciter of stonings in the blaze of noon and of lynchings at midnight. I would teach children how to find the sharpest stones, and young men how to tie slow-death nooses. I would sit with the widow-women at their hearths, and staring into the flames licking the chimney's throat, I'd beg them to tell me the shapes that the Old One had taken, in times before time, so that I would know what face I should make for myself to stir up terror in the bowels of victims yet unborn.

And when at last I was God — that is to say, when the eternal Wheel of Being, ever turning, ever choosing — had used up all the finer souls than mine and given me my Day as Deity, I would know how to drive your species insane with the shadows of terrors they had no hope of reasoning with.

Was it possible that in the brief time it had taken for the nauseating host of angels to enter the butcher's shop, driving Quitoon from its threshold in the process, and then claiming the pieman's soul and departing with him into some unknowable perfection, that I could have sloughed off the lamentable thing I had been, a listless coward lost in a daze of unrequited love, and become the vessel of limitless abominations?

No. Of course, not. The Jakabok Botch who had just come into being had been maturing in the womb of my rage for the better part of a century, swelling like a child I had got upon myself, in defiance of all rational law. And there in that squalid place, with the stares of the flies upon me, I had let the repugnant child kill its father, as I had killed mine. And now it was unleashed, merciless and implacable.

You speak to that same creature now. The murderous, depraved, vengeful, hate-filled inciter of public slayings and domestic slaughters; the rapist, the smotherer, the divinity of carrion-flies and their maggot brood, the vilest, even amongst the vilest. I was cured, in my new infancy, of all the tired wisdom of age. I would never wither into that wearied state again, I swore to myself. I would always be this raw, wet child hereafter, a toxic spring that would flow with small but constant force, until it had poisoned every living thing in its vicinity.

Do you see now why it really would be best for everybody if you simply did what I asked you to do at the beginning?

BURN THIS BOOK.

Oh, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, well, he's almost finished this idiot confession of his. What can the few remaining pages matter?

Let me tell you something. You'll recall my requesting you to keep count of the pages? Well, I've counted out the number of pages to the end of this testament and I am that precise number of strides behind you. Even as you read these very words. Yes. Right now. I'm behind you right now.

Did I feel your fingers gripping the book a little tighter? I did, didn't I?

You don't want to believe me, but there's a little superstitious part of your construction that's older than the human in you, older than the ape in you, and it doesn't matter how many times you tell yourself that I'm just a lying demon and that none of what I'm telling you is true, that part of you whispers something different in your ear.

It says:

He's here. Be very careful. He's probably been here all along, walking behind you.

That voice knows the truth.

If you want proof, all you have to do is keep defying me, keep turning the pages, and for every page you turn in defiance of me I will take one stride towards you. Do you understand me?

One page, one stride. Until you get to the end of the pages.

And what then?

Then I will be standing close enough to reach around and slit your defiant throat.

Which

I

Will

Do.

Don't for a minute believe I won't.

I brought you this far so you could see for yourself how I gave up every last particle of hope I ever had, and became the antithesis of all things that turn their faces to the good and the light; all things, as you would probably say it in your idiot way, that are holy.

I brought you this far so you could see how that part of me that had wanted to love — no, that had loved — was murdered in a butcher's shop in Mainz, and how I saw what I really was, once it was gone. What I really am.

Don't doubt that voice in you that speaks in terrors. It knows the truth. If you want to keep me from coming one step closer to you, don't even think about turning another page. Do what you know you should do.

Burn this book.

Go on.

BURN THE DAMN BOOK!

What's wrong with you? Do you want to die? Is that it? Is death the answer? Then what's the question, monkey? Is the news so bad today you can't imagine getting up tomorrow? I can understand that. All of us are clinging to this dog-eared planet as it falls into the dark behind the shelves. I understand. Better than you give me credit for, probably. I understand. You would like to live without the shadow falling, always falling; without the darkness creeping up on you just when you think everything's going well.

You want happiness.

Of course, you do. Of course. And you deserve it.

So…

Don't let anybody know I'm telling you this, because I'm not supposed to. But we've come so far together, haven't we, and I know how painful it's been for you, how much you've suffered. I've seen it on your face, in your eyes, in the way your mouth turns down at the corners when you're reading me.

Suppose I could make that better. Suppose I could promise you a long, painless life in a house on a high hill, with one great big tree beside it? The house is a thousand years old, at least, and when the wind comes up out of the south, smelling of oranges, the tree churns like a vast green thunderhead, except there is no lightning out of it, only blossoms.

Suppose I could tell you where the keys to that house are waiting, along with all the paperwork of course, just waiting for your signature? I can. I can tell you.

And as I said, you deserve it. You do, truly. You've suffered enough. You've seen others hurt, and you've been hurt yourself. A deep hurt, so don't punish yourself for picking up a book that was half-crazy.

That was just me testing you a little bit. You can understand that, I'm sure. When the prize is a life without pain, lived in a house the angels envy, I had to be careful about my choice. I couldn't give it to just anybody.

But you — oh you're perfect. The house is going to open its arms to you and you're going to think: that Mister B. wasn't such a godless thing after all. All right, he made me jump through a few hoops and had me burn that little book, but what does any of that matter now? I live in a house the angels envy.

Did I tell you that already? I did, didn't I? I'm sorry. I get a little carried away when I talk about the house. There are no words to explain the beauty of the place. You'll be safe there, even from God. Think of that. Safe even from God, who is cruel, just as we would all be cruel if we were Gods, and had no fear of death or judgment.

In that house you're immune from Him. There is no voice speaking in your head; there are no Commandments; no bushes burning but unconsumed outside the window. In that house there is only you and your loved ones, living lives without hurt. All for a very reasonable price. A flame. A tiny flame that will burn these pages away forever.

And isn't that the way you'll want it, anyway, when you're living in the house on the hill? You won't want this dirty old book that threatened and terrorized you. It's better gone and gone forever. Why be reminded?

The house is yours. I swear on the wings of the Morningstar.

Yours. All you have to do is burn these words — and me with them — so we are never again seen on the face of the earth.

I can't decide whether you're suicidal, mentally deficient, or both? I've warned you how close I am. You don't truly want my knife at your neck, do you? You want to live. Surely.

Take the house on the hill, and be happy there. Forget you ever heard the name of Jakabok Botch. Forget I ever told you my story and —

Oh.

My story. Is that what this is about? The shadow of my pitiful life, flickering on the cave of your skull? Do you ache so much to know how I got from a butcher's shop in Mainz to the words you're reading now that you'd give up the house on the hill, and its churning tree, and a life without pain that even the angels —

Ah, why do I bother?

I offer you a piece of Heaven on earth, a life that most people would give their souls to own, and all you do is keep reading the words and turning the pages, reading the words and turning the pages.

You sicken me. You're stupid, selfish, ungrateful scum. All right, read the damn words! Go on. Turn the pages and see where it gets you. It won't be a house on a hill, I'll tell you that. It'll be a plain wooden box in a hole in the ground, covered with dirt. Is that what you want? Is it? Because you'd better understand, once I take this deal off the table, I won't ever talk about it again.

This house is a once-in-a-lifetime, never-to-be-repeated offer, you understand me? Of course you do. Why do I keep asking that, as if there was a single thing I've said or done that you haven't understood to the last little syllable. So, do you want it, or not? Make up your mind. My supply of patience is running perilously thin. It can't fall any further. You hear me?

The house is waiting. Three more words and it's gone.

Don't.

Read.

Them.

You know what? I can see the house from here. My Lord, the wind's strong today. The leaves on the tree are churning, just the way I said they did. But the gusts are so very strong. I never felt a wind quite like this before. The tree isn't just creaking, it's breaking. I can't believe it. After all these years. All the storms. All the snow, weighing down its branches. But it's had enough. Its roots are being torn up out of the ground. Oh, for pity's sake, why doesn't somebody do something before it hits the house?

Oh, but of course. There's nobody in there. The house is empty. There's no one to protect it.

Lord, that's a crying shame! Look at that tree falling and falling and —

There goes the wall of the house, cracking like an egg struck by a hammer. That's tragic. Nothing so beautiful should have to die like this. Alone and unloved. Oh, there goes the roof. The branches have such weight, such ancient, aching weight, and now the whole place is collapsing as the tree strikes it. Every wall, window, and door. I can barely see it for dust.

Ah, well. No use looking really. It's gone.

As I said: a once-in-a-lifetime, never-to-be-repeated offer. Which could be said for all of us if you were a sentimentalist. Which I'm not.

Anyway, it's gone. And there's nothing left in my pocket to charm you. So from now on it's going to have to be tears or nothing, I'm afraid.

That's all that I've got left to tell you see: tears, tears, tears.

When I left the butcher's shop, the sky was wearing a strange coat of colors. It was though the aurora borealis had been caught hold of and dragged south 'til it hung over the grubby little town like a promise of something greater, soon to come.

I hated it on sight. As if I needed to tell you that, knowing me as you now do. I hated its beauty, certainly; but more than that: its serenity. That's what made me want to climb up to the nearest steeple and try to pull it down. I had no time, however. I had to find Quitoon, and let him see what I had become by staying in the company of the angels, instead of fleeing them, as he had. All the genius of cruelty and the anguish of the divine were in me now; I was a laying place for every fly whose infants had an appetite for iniquity and ruination. My skull was a face that concealed scorpions; my excrement was serpents, and the poison of serpents; the air I walked in was glittered with shards of rabidity.

I wanted him to see what I had become. I wanted him to know that whatever he had once been to me, I had ripped out of me the merciless meat of that love, if that's what it was, and fed it to the feral children of Mainz.

It wasn't hard to follow where he'd gone. I was alive to the secret signs of the world as I had never been alive before. It seemed I could see his phantom form moving ahead of me through the streets, glancing back over his shoulder as he went, as though he'd been afraid with every stride that the angels would come after him.

His fear had diminished after a time, it seemed. He'd slowed his run to a stumbling walk, and had finally stopped completely to catch his breath. I parted from him there, and went on without need of his phantom guidance. I knew the way.

So did others, many others, all converging on the place where my instinct was leading me. I saw glimpses of them as they made their way through the human throng. Some trailed swarms of black bees from the hives of their heads; some went shamelessly naked, defying the righteous, fearful citizens of Mainz to confess that they witnessed them. Others moved through the thoroughfares by far stranger means. There were bits of light weaving back and forth deep beneath the muddied streets, and in the walls of the houses to the left and right of me other entities made their half-seen way, rising up to the eaves one moment and plunging down to the level of the street the next. There were travelers whose bones blazed through billowing robes of translucent flesh. There were headless, limbless beings that flew through brick and timber on their way to that unknown destination that summoned us all. Of their tribes or their allegiances it was impossible to make any meaningful judgment. I had never seen their like in the Circles of Hell, but that meant nothing, given how narrow my knowledge of that place had been. Perhaps they were higher forms of demon or lower forms of angel; perhaps both. It was not inconceivable. Nothing was, on that day.

And so I turned one last corner and came into the street where Johannes Gutenberg, the most noted goldsmith in Mainz, had his workshop.

It was a commonplace building on a commonplace street, and had it not been for the powers congregating there I would not have looked twice at it. But there was no doubt that this unremarkable place contained something significant. Why else would agents of Heaven and Hell be locked in such brutal combat on the roof, and in the air above the roof, where they tumbled over and over, forms of sun and shadow, wrapped around one another. These weren't performances, they were life or death struggles. I saw a demon of no little magnificence drop out of the sky with the top half of its head sheared off by an angel's sword, another torn apart by a gang of four heavenly spirits, each taking a limb. There were other forces battling at far higher altitudes, lightning strikes leaping from cloud to cloud, and flayed anatomies descending in rains of excrement and gold. The citizens of Mainz showed a stubborn refusal to see what was going on above. Their only concession to the fact that today was not like any other was their silence as they made their way past the Gutenberg workshop. They studied their muddy feet as they trudged by, their faces wearing expressions of fake intent, as though their purposefulness would protect them against any kind of rain, sulfuric or seraphic.

I had no more interest in the outcome of these battles than they. What did it matter to me whether Heaven or Hell carried the day? I was my own force on this crowded battlefield: a captain, a soldier, and a drummer boy in an army of one.

That is not to say I would not take advantage of any opportunity the battle might present me with, the first of which came when I climbed the three stone steps that led up from the filth of the street to the workshop door. I rapped on the door with my knuckles: three neat taps. The door remained closed. I was tempted to unleash against it the powers that were fermenting in me, powers I swear had doubled in strength every time I had turned a corner and came closer to this door. But if I did so, then the warring factions would know I was of their number, and I would surely be commandeered by Hell, or assaulted by Heaven. Better they took me for a burned wreck of a man, begging at a goldsmith's door.

After a time I knocked again, only instead of rapping politely with my knuckles I beat on it with the side of my fist. Nor did I stop this tattoo, but kept on beating and beating until finally I heard the bolts on the door being slid aside, top and bottom, and the door was opened just wide enough for a man of perhaps twenty-five to peer out at me, his pale, lightly freckled face marked with streaks of black. Despite his warpaint, the sight of my own ruin of a face made him regard me with no little horror.

"We don't give to beggars," he said.

I replied with just five words. "I am not a beggar." But they emerged from me with such an authority that they astonished even me, their speaker. And if me, then how much more the man on the other side of the door? His hand, with which he had gripped the doorframe when he'd opened up so as to block my entrance, now dropped away, and his grey eyes filled with grief.

"Is it the end?" he said.

"The end?"

"It is, isn't it?" the man said.

He stepped away from the door, and as though owing to the simple fact of my presence at the threshold the door swung open, showing me the retreating young man, a knife dropping from the hand he'd had out of sight behind the door, and the passageway down which he was running, which led to a large well-lit room where several men were at work.

"Johannes!" the young man called back to one of their number. "Johannes! Your dream! Oh Lord in Heaven! Your dream!"

I was, apparently, expected.

I won't mislead you and claim I was not surprised. I was, mightily. But just as I had learned how to perform passably as a human being, so it was no great hardship now to act like a visitor — whether I was expected to be human or not I neither knew nor cared — whose imminent arrival had been anticipated.

"Close the door," I called out to the young man. Again my voice carried the power of an imperative that would not be contradicted. The young man dropped to his hands and knees, turned and crawled past me, his head bowed, his eyes averted, and pushed the door closed.

I had not realized until the door slammed shut how significant this house, where Gutenberg worked his secret work, had become. Here, perhaps, I would have the question that troubles all of us, if we were truthful, answered: Why am I alive? I didn't yet have that answer, but thanks to the few words I'd heard spoken here I was filled up with a light-headed sense of joy. That though the journey here had been long and that more than once I had despaired of ever discovering what purpose I served that here, under this roof, was a man who might relieve me of the soul-rotting fear that I served none at all: Johannes Gutenberg had dreamt of me.

"Where are you, Johannes Gutenberg?" I called to him. "We have some business, I believe."

In response to my call, an imposingly tall, expansive-shouldered man with a long broad head of iron and salt stepped into view. He stared at me with bruise-bagged, bloodshot, yet presently astonished eyes.

"The words you utter," he said, "they're the same words you spoke in my dream. I know because when I woke I asked my wife what you might mean by unfinished business. I thought perhaps we'd forgotten to pay some bills. She told me to go back to sleep and forget about it. But I couldn't. I came down here, to the very spot where I had dreamt I was standing when you came in, and where I now stand."

"And what did you say to me in your dream?"

"I said welcome to my workshop, Mr. B."

I inclined my head slightly, as though making the subtlest of bows. "I am Jakabok Botch."

"And I am — "

"Johannes Gutenberg."

The man made a small, quick smile. He was clearly nervous at my presence, which was appropriate. After all, it wasn't some common official from the guilds of Mainz who had come knocking at his door, wanting ale and gossip. It was a dream that had strayed from the sleeping world into that of the woken.

"I mean you no harm, sir," I told him.

"That's easily said," Gutenberg replied. "But harder to prove."

I thought about this for a moment, then, moving very slowly so as not to alarm anyone, I bent down and picked up the knife the young man had dropped. I proffered it to him, handle first.

"Here," I said. "Take it. And if I should do or say anything that troubles you, slice off my tongue and prick out my eyes."

The young man didn't move.

"Take the knife, Peter," Gutenberg said. "But you'll have no need of slicing or pricking."

The young man took back his knife. "I know how to use it," he warned. "I've killed men."

"Peter!"

"I'm just telling him the truth, Johannes. You're the one who wanted this house made into a fortress."

"Yes, that I did," Guttenberg replied, almost guiltily. "But I have much to protect."

"I know," Peter said. "So why are you letting this, this creature in?"

"Don't be cruel, Peter."

"Would killing him be cruel?"

"Not if I deserved it," I interjected. "If I meant harm to anyone or anything under this roof, then I would think you perfectly within your rights to cut me from groin to gullet."

Young Peter looked at me with bewilderment, his mouth opening and closing as though some reply was imminent, though none was forthcoming.

Gutenberg had something to say, however. "Let's not talk of death, not with so much we two have dreamt of finally in sight." He smiled as he spoke, and I got a glimpse of the younger, happier man he had once been, before his invention and the demands of keeping it from being stolen or copied had made him into a man who slept too little and feared too much.

"Please, my friend," I said as I approached, "think of me as a traveler from that dream place where your vision first came."

"You know of the vision that inspired my press?"

"Of course." I was moving into swampy ground here, given that I didn't know whether Gutenberg had designed this "press" of his for the squashing of lice or for taking creases from his trousers. But I wasn't in this house by accident, that much was certain. Gutenberg had dreamt me here. He had dreamt even the words he would say to me, and the words I would say in return.

"I would be very honored," I said, "if I might see the Secret of Fortress Gutenberg." I spoke as I had heard high-brow people speak, with a certain detachment, as though nothing was really of any great significance to them.

"The honor would be mine, Mister Botch."

"Just Mister B. is fine. And shall I call you Johannes, as we've already met?"

"Already met?" Gutenberg said, escorting me through the first room of his workshop. "You mean, you dreamt of me, as I did of you?"

"Regrettably I seldom dream, Johannes," I replied. "My experience of the world and its cruelties and disappointments has erased my faith in such things. I am a soul who chooses to travel the world behind this burned face, simply to test the way Humankind approaches those who suffer."

"Not well, you're going to say."

"That would be an understatement."

"Oh but, sir," Gutenberg said, a sudden passion in his voice and manner, "a new age is about to begin. One which will rid this world of cruelty you've seen by giving men a cure for their ignorance, which is where all cruelty begins."

"That's quite a claim, Johannes."

"But you know why I make it, don't you? You wouldn't be here if you didn't."

"Everybody's here," said a lushly over articulated voice belonging to an enormously obese man, an Archbishop to judge by the lavish cloth of which his vestments were made and the massive jewel-encrusted cross that hung about his neck, which was so fat it gathered in rolls, which were blotchy from an excess of wine. But his appetite for food and drink had not sated that other hunger, the one that had summoned him to serve Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Beneath heavy lids his eyes had a feverish glint about them. This was a man sick with power. His flesh was as white as bled meat, his face covered in a sheen of sweat that had seeped into, and darkened, the rim of his scarlet skullcap. In one hand, he held a staff in the form of a shepherd's crook, made only of gold and decorated with enough rubies and emeralds to buy ten thousand thousand sheep. In the other, held discreetly at his side, was a pork bone with a sizable portion of pig's rump still awaiting his assault.

"And so," he went on, "the question inevitably follows: Whose side are you on?"

I must surely have looked aghast, if only for the blink of an eye, before the answer came, delivered with the same unassailable authority that had carried all my remarks so far.

"Why yours, Excellency," I said, my voice dripping with such an excess of devotion that I hoped the Archbishop would suspect I was mocking him. To drive the joke home, I dropped to my knees and reached for the hand that held the pork bone (which I gave him the impression I did not see, so overcome was I by the chance to prostrate myself before him), and, not knowing which of his many rings church protocol dictated I kiss, I kissed them all, the biggest of them twice. I then relinquished his hand so that it could return the pork meat to his mouth. Remaining on my knees before him, I lifted my ruined face and I said: "I am happy to be of whatever service I may to your Excellency."

"Well, for one, you don't need to stay down there, Mister Botch," he said. "Get up. You've made your allegiance clear. I have just one question."

"It is?"

"Your disfigurement — "

"An accident, when I was a baby. Mother was bathing me on her knee when I was two weeks old. I was born on Christmas Eve, it was bitter cold, and she feared my getting a chill. So she built the fire in the hearth high, so I would stay warm as she washed me. But I became slippery as a fish once I was covered in soap, and I slipped out of her hands."

"No!" said Johannes.

I had got to my feet by now and turned to him to say: "It's true. I fell into the flames, and before my mother could pluck me out I was burned."

"Entirely?" said the Archbishop.

"Entirely, my lord. There is no part of me which is not burned."

"What a terrible thing!"

"It was too much for my mother. Even though I had survived the accident, she could not bear to look at me. And rather than do so she died. When I was eleven I left my father's house, because my brothers were so cruel to me, and went to find somebody in the world who would look past my wounds — which I know are abhorrent to many — and see my soul."

"Such a story!" said another voice, this of a well-rounded woman who had come in behind me at some point in my exchange with Gutenberg. I turned and bowed to her.

"This is my wife, Hannah. Hannah this is Mister B."

"The man you dreamt about," Hannah replied.

"Down to the last…" he seemed lost for the appropriate word. "Last…"

"Scar," I prompted him, smiling the horror of my appearance away.

"He suffered greatly," Gutenberg said to his wife. "His story should be heard. Will you have Peter fetch wine?"

"Might I also respectfully request some bread?" I asked Gutenberg. "I have not eaten since I woke from my dream of this house."

"We can do better than bread," Hannah replied. "I will bring what's left of the pork." Then she threw a less than loving glance at the Archbishop. "And some cheese, with the bread and wine."

"That is most generous," I said. I wasn't faking my gratitude. I was both parched and fiercely hungry.

"I'll be back in a few minutes," Hannah said, her discomfort at being in my presence all too plain. She departed hastily, muttering a prayer as she went.

"My wife is uneasy, I'm afraid," Gutenberg said.

"Because of me?"

"Well… you're part of it, to be truthful. I described you to her when I woke from my dream, and now here you are in my workshop."

"I've told her she has nothing to fear," the Archbishop said. "I am here to protect this house from the workings of the Evil One. They all have their tricks, of course, but I can see right through their guises as clearly as I see you before me, Mister B."

"That's reassuring," I said.

The conversation died away for a time, during which I heard whispered exchanges from beyond the door on the far side of the room.

"I was told you were a goldsmith," I said.

"Once. Before I knew what greater work I had to do."

"And what is that greater work, if I may ask?"

Gutenberg looked troubled. He glanced over at the Archbishop, then back at me, then at the floor between us.

"I understand," I said, "you've invented something of great consequence, yes? Something that must be kept secret."

Gutenberg looked up from the floor, and met my gaze. "I think it will change everything," he said very softly.

"I know it will," I replied, matching his calm tone with a comforting softness of my own. "The world will never be the same again."

"But there are spies, you know."

"I know."

"And thieves."

"Of course. Everywhere. Something like this, something so significant, brings out the predators. It's bound to. But you have friends."

"Fewer than I thought," Gutenberg said, his face taut, his voice grim. "There's corruption wherever I look."

"There's also help from Heaven," I said. "I've seen both sides. They're on your roof right now."

"Both sides, huh…" His gaze strayed to the ceiling for a moment.

"Yes, both. I swear. You're not alone."

"You swear."

"I just did. And there are more warriors in the streets. Moving in the ground beneath people's feet."

"Is he telling the truth?" Gutenberg asked the Archbishop.

Before he could answer the question, his Excellency had to chew and swallow the mouthful of pork he'd surreptitiously bitten off. He made one attempt to reply with his mouth still half-full, but his words were incomprehensible. So we waited another minute or so while he thoroughly emptied his mouth. Then he set the pork bone down on the plate where he'd been served it, wiped his hand and mouth with the fine linen cloth laid beside his plate, and finished off by taking a cleansing mouthful of wine before finally saying:

"For all the sad state of him, this visitor of yours knows whereof he speaks. And I know for a fact that angelic forces are here with us, assembled as a consequence of my request to the Pope. Inevitably their presence here aroused the interest of the Fallen One. We should not be surprised at that. Nor should we be surprised that he sent his vermin to do battle with those the Pope requested to protect you."

"So now they fight on the roof of my workshop," Gutenberg said, shaking his head in disbelief.

"And in the street," the Archbishop added, plucking the detail from my own report to fuel his own. In truth, I doubt the man had ever laid his eyes upon any creature that had not first been spiced and roasted to his taste. But the weight of his robes and crosses and rings seemed to lend their heft to his words.

"We are entirely surrounded by soldiers of the Lord," he told Gutenberg. "These are warrior-angels, Johannes, their one purpose to protect you and what you have made from harm."

"Speaking of which — " I began.

"I am not finished!" The Archbishop snapped, a stringy piece of greasy pork escaping with the words to land upon my cheek. His vulgarity made me reorder my execution list somewhat: this pork-spitting Excellency had just been elevated to second place, directly below Quitoon.

Quitoon. Ha. Though I'd come here in pursuit of him, so much else had happened, or was in the process of happening, that I'd forgotten him for a time, which had been a pleasant release. For too many years I'd thought of him and only of him: I'd been perpetually concerned for his comfort, intimidated by his rages, anguished whenever he staged one of his departures, and pathetically grateful when he returned to me. But paradoxically this final pursuit of him had brought me to a stage where a drama greater than love was being played, a stage where the agent of destruction that my sorrow had made of me was ideally placed to do harm. Indeed, if even a part of what had been claimed on behalf of Gutenberg's creation was true, then by destroying it I would — oh God, how strange to even shape the words, much less consider their reality — be wounding the world.

There was a sweet thought.

"What do you think, Mister B.?"

I had briefly lost track of the conversation as I'd mused on love and destruction. To gain myself a little thinking time, I repeated the question:

"What do I think? Now that you ask, what do I think?"

"How can there be any doubt?" the Archbishop said, slamming the base of his Shepherd's crook on the bare boards of the workshop floor to emphasize his feelings. "The Devil will not carry this day."

Now I understood what I'd missed: Gutenberg had voiced some doubt as to how the battle being raged around his house (and on the roof all the way up to Heaven, and in its bowels all the way down to Hell) would come to an end. To judge by the fretful look he wore, Gutenberg was by no means certain that the angelic legion would triumph. The Archbishop's response was unequivocal.

"Do not doubt the Lord's power, Johannes," he breathed.

Gutenberg offered no reply to this, which further inflamed the Archbishop, who again hammered the floorboards with his dazzling crook.

"You!" he said, turning in my direction and striking the floor a third time, just in case I missed the fact that I was now being blessed with his attentions. "Yes, Mister B., you! What is your opinion on the matter?"

"That we're perfectly safe, your Excellency. Yes, the battle is fierce. But it rages outside. In here, we are protected by your presence. No soldier of Hell would dare enter this fortress with your Excellency's holy presence to drive him off."

"You see?" the Archbishop said. "Even your dream visitor understands."

"Besides," I added, unable to resist the fun of this, "how would he enter? Just knock on the front door and invite himself in?"

Gutenberg seemed to see the sense in this, and was reassured.

"Then nothing can undo what I have made?"

"Nothing," the Archbishop said.

Gutenberg looked at me.

"Nothing," I said.

"Perhaps I should show it to you then," he suggested.

"Only if you wish to," I replied lightly.

He smiled. "I do."

So saying, he led me across the room to the heavy door with DO NOT ENTER carved into it. He knocked, rapping out a code of entry, and the door, which was twice the thickness of any door I'd ever seen, was opened. I could not see what was inside; Gutenberg was blocking my view. But I caught the oily, bitter smell that came through the door like a greasy wave.

"What's that smell?"

"Ink, of course," Gutenberg replied. "To print the words."

I should have taken the warning that "of course" offered me: He expected me to know that he was more than something as commonplace as a copier of books. But I blundered on, stupidly.

"So you copy books?" I said. "What have you invented? A new quill?"

It was meant as a joke, but Gutenberg did not see the humor in it. He stopped on the bottom step, preventing me from descending any further.

"We don't copy books here," he said, his tone far from friendly.

I felt the weight of the Archbishop's hand and rings upon my shoulder. He was behind me, blocking my exit with crook and girth.

"Why so many questions, Botch?" he said.

"I like to learn."

"But you've walked through Gutenberg's dreams. Or at least you claim you have. How could you possibly pass through the mind of a man consumed by one great labor, and not see that labor?"

I was trapped, caught by the His Holiness behind, the genius in front, and my own foolish mouth in the middle.

It was my tongue that had got me into this little mess, so I silently entreated it now to get me out.

"You speak of your Reprodukagraph, I assume," I said, my eyes, I'm certain, registering a certain shock at hearing this five-syllable bizzarity emerge from between my lips unbidden.

"Is that what I should call it?" Gutenberg said, the ice that had been in his voice moments before now melted away. He took the final step down into the workshop floor and turned to look at me. "I was thinking I'd call it a printing press."

"Well, you could, I suppose," I replied, glancing back at the Archbishop as I spoke and giving him a look of aristocratic ill-temper. "Would you be so kind as to lift your hand off my shoulder, your bejewelledness?"

There were a number of barely suppressed guffaws from the workers in the immense room behind Gutenberg, and even the stern genius himself allowed laughter to bloom in his eyes when he heard my addressing the Archbishop in this fashion. His Excellency duly removed his hand, not without first harshly digging his fingers and thumb into my flesh to inform me silently that he would be keeping a close watch on me. Gutenberg, meanwhile, turned at the bottom of the stairs, inviting me to follow. I did so, stepping down into the workshop itself, finally laying eyes on the apparatus that was the cause of all the conflict around, above, and below the Gutenberg house.

The invention looked very remotely like a wine press, but there was a great deal about its construction that was purely of Gutenberg's design. I watched as one of the three men attending to the operation of the press took a sheet of paper and carefully placed it on a bed of ink-stained wood.

"What are you printing now?" I asked the genius.

He arbitrarily plucked a page from the dozen or so that were neatly pegged up to dry on lengths of string above our heads.

"I had wanted to begin with the Bible."

"In the beginning was the Word," I said.

Luckily for me, Gutenberg knew the rest of the line, because all I recalled was those first six words from the Gospel according to John. Not long after reading them, I'd thrown the book back amongst the garbage on the Ninth Circle, where I'd first found it.

"And the Word was with God," Gutenberg went on.

"The Word," I murmured. Then looking back at the Archbishop, I said, "Was it any particular Word, do you think?"

He gave me a silent sneer, as though to reply to me was beneath him.

"Just asking," I said, shrugging.

"This is my foreman. Dieter. Say hello to Mister B., Dieter."

A young bald man working on the press, his apron and hands liberally decorated with smears and handprints of ink, looked up and gave me a quick wave.

"Dieter convinced me that we should start with something more modest in scale than the Bible. So I'm testing the press by printing a school grammar book — "

"The Ares Grammatica?" I said, having spotted the words on the title page, which was drying at the other end of the room. (My demonic vision saw what most human eyes would never have been able to read, so Gutenberg was delighted that I could name the book.)

"You're familiar with it?"

"I studied it, when I was much younger. But, of course, the copy my tutor had was very precious. And expensive."

"My printing press will put an end to the great expense of books, because it will make many in the same way, from a plate, set with all the letters. In reverse of course."

"In reverse! Ha!" This pleased me for some reason.

He reached up and pulled down another of the sheets drying overhead. "I persuaded Dieter that we might print one thing that was not so boring as a grammar book. So we agreed to print out a poem from the Sibylline Prophecies as well."

Dieter was listening to all this. He looked up briefly and cast a loving, brotherly smile in Gutenberg's direction. Clearly Gutenberg was one of those men who inspired devotion in his employees.

"It's beautiful," I said as Gutenberg handed the page to me. The lines of the poem were neat and legible. There was no elaborate illustration on the first letter, such as monks often took months to create on a manuscript. But the page had other virtues. The spaces between the words were precisely the same size and the design of the letters made the poem marvelously easy to read.

"The paper feels slightly damp," I observed.

Gutenberg looked pleased.

"It's a little trick somebody taught me," he said. "The paper is dampened before being printed on. But you know this, of course. You told me in the dream."

"And was I right?"

"Oh yes, sir. You were quite right. I don't know how I would have fared without the gift of your knowledge."

"It was my pleasure," I said, handing the sheet with the poem on it back to Gutenberg and wandering on down the length of the chambers, past the printing press to where two other men worked feverishly to arrange lines of mirror-image letters on wooden trays. All the necessary parts of a sentence — the letters in both upper- and lowercases, the empty spaces between the words, all the numerals, and, finally, of course, all the punctuation — were laid out on four tables, so that both could work without one getting in the way of the other. Unlike Dieter and his colleagues working on the press, all of whom took a moment from their tasks to look up at us when we entered, and even laugh when I made fun of the Archbishop, these two were so profoundly immersed in their work, referring constantly to a hand-scribed copy of the text they were concentrated on, that they did not even glance up. Their labor was as fascinating to watch as it was surely demanding to do. I found myself removed into an almost trancelike state by watching them.

"All the men have signed an oath of silence," Gutenberg said, "so that none but us should have the power of this press."

"Quite right," I replied.

It occurs to me now that the revelations, such as they were, are almost over; that there's only one Secret of any consequence left to tell. And given that fact perhaps a wise soul such as yourself, tired of petty games and schoolyard threats that have on occasion issued from me — mea culpa, mea maxima culpa — that you may think this is not an inappropriate time to forsake the book entirely.

Yes, I'm giving you one last chance, my friend. Call me sentimental but I don't have any great desire to murder you, as you know I will if you get to the final page. I am so much closer to you now than I was when I first told you about matching my strides; to the number of pages you turned, I can hear you muttering to yourself as you turn the page; and, of course, I can smell you and taste your sweat. You're uneasy, aren't you? Part of you wants to do as I have requested and burn the book.

If I may offer a little advice: That's the part to listen to. The other part, the part that feels defiant and is putting your life at risk just to play a dangerous game of dare, that part is just the willful child in you, speaking out, demanding to be heard. That's understandable. We all have these slivers of who we were when we were very, very young left in our heads.

But please, don't listen to that voice. There's nothing left in the pages to come that's of any great interest. It's just the politics of Heaven and Hell from here.

The human story is over. Now you know what the mystery of the Gutenberg workshop was you're probably thinking — and I wouldn't blame you — all this for a printing press? Ludicrous. No, I wouldn't blame you for setting fire to this damn book out of sheer fury, to have been given something at the end of your journey that turns out to be this inconsequential. But you can't say I didn't warn you. God alone knows how many times I told you to do the sensible thing and let the book go. But you insisted on waiting. You obliged me to tell you things, like the curious knot of feelings I had for Quitoon, that I would have preferred to keep to myself, but which I confessed out of respect for the truth, as a thing entire, not scraped together from bits and pieces.

Well, it's over now. You can still burn the book and be satisfied that you read the bulk of it. It's time. There are a few pages remaining, but why waste more of your valuable time? You now know what mysterious invention Quitoon had been in pursuit of — the same one that makes the existence of this very book possible.

Everything comes full circle in the end. You met me in these pages. We learned to understand one another as we went from the garbage heaps of the Ninth Circle up into the World Above, and then from Joshua's Field to the long road I traveled with Quitoon. I didn't bore you with a list of the places we went in search of some new invention Quitoon had heard about. They were mostly instruments of war: cannons and long bows, siege towers and battering rams. Sometimes a thing of beauty would await us at the end of one our searches. I did get to hear the first harpsichord make music, for instance, in the 1390s, I think. I lose track. So many places, so many creations.

But the point really is: Now that journey is over. There are no more roads to take. No more inventions to see. We have arrived back at the pages where we met; or rather at the device that first made such pages. It's such a tight little circle in the end. And I'm trapped in it. You're not.

So go. Go on, while you can, having seen more perhaps than you expected to see.

And as you are leaving, tear these pages out and toss them into a little bonfire you've made. Then get about your business and forget me.

I'm trying hard to be generous here. But it's difficult. You've rejected every offer I've made to you. It doesn't matter how much I open up my heart and soul to you; it's never been enough to satisfy you. More, more, you always want more. There's only one other person in my life who's hurt me as profoundly as you've hurt me, and that's Quitoon. You've changed me so I can hardly even recognize myself. There was kindness in me once, and boundless love. But it's all gone now, gone forever. You killed every particle of joy that was in me, every scrap of hope and forgiveness, gone, all gone.

Yet, here I am, somehow finding it in me, the Devil alone knows how, to reach out from these anguished pages in one last desperate attempt to try to touch your heart.

The fireworks are over. There's nothing more to see. You may as well move on. Find yourself some new victim to corrupt, the way you've corrupted me. No, no, I take that back. You weren't to know how much it has hurt me, how much deeper my bitterness is, to be made to walk again the sad roads I walked to get here, and to confess the feelings that moved through me as I moved through the world.

My journey ended in the prison from which I speak. I've given you plenty of stories to tell, should the occasion come up when it seemed appropriate to tell. Ah, the tales of damned souls and darkness incarnate.

But now, truly, there's nothing left. So get it over with, will you? I have no desire to do harm to you, but if you keep playing around with me I won't be so ready to end your life with a simple slash of my knife across your jugular. Oh no. I'll cut you first. I'll slice off your eyelids to start with, so you won't be able to close them against the sight of my knife cutting and cutting.

The largest number of cuts I ever made on a human body before its owner succumbed was two thousand and nine: that was a woman. The largest number I ever made on a man before he died was one thousand eight hundred and ninety-three. It's hard to judge how many cuts it would take to bring you down. What I do know is that you'll be begging me to kill you off, offering me anything — the souls of your loved ones — anything, anything, you'll say, only kill me quickly. Give me oblivion, you'll beg, I don't care. Anything, so I don't have to see your entrails, purple, veiny, and shiny wet, appearing from the little slices I made in your lower belly. It's a common mistake people make, thinking that once their guts have unraveled around your feet that the happy prospect of death is in sight. That happens to be true, even with a weak specimen of your kind. I murdered two Popes, both of whom were cretinous from the diseases their depravities had given them (but who were still pronouncing dogmas for the Holy Mother Church and its believers), and each took an inordinately long time to die, for all their frailty.

Are you truly prepared to suffer like that for want of a flame?

There's nothing, my friend, left to gain by reading one more word.

And yet you read.

What am I to do? I thought you still had some life to live when we were finished with this book. I thought you had people out there who loved you, who would mourn you if I took your life. But apparently that isn't the case. Am I right? You'd prefer to go on living this half-life with me for a few more pages and then pay the fatal price.

Have I understood correctly? You could step off the ghost-train even now, if you chose to. Think hard. The midnight hour approaches. I don't care if you're reading this at eight in the morning on your way to work, or at noon, lying on a sun-soaked beach. It's still much, much later than you think, and darker than it seems.

But you're unmoved by my desire to be merciful. Even though it's getting later and later, you don't care. Is there some profound metaphysical reason for this? Or are you just more stupid than I thought?

The only profound thing I hear is the silence.

I'm obliged to answer my own questions, in the absence of any reply from you. And I choose…

Stupidity.

You're just willful and stupid.

All right, so much for my gift of mercy. I won't waste my time with any further gestures of compassion. Just don't blame me when you're watching the contents of your bladder spurting into the air, or when you are invited to chew on one of your kidneys, while I dig out the other.

You can't imagine the sounds you'll make. When you're being really hurt by somebody like me, who knows what they're doing, you'll make such noises you'll scarcely believe it's your own throat that is producing them. Some people become shrill and squeal like pigs being ineptly slaughtered. Others sound like animals fighting, like rabid dogs giving throat to guttural growls and ear-tearing howls.

It'll be interesting to find out what kind of animal you sound like, once the deep knife-work starts.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Your kind like stories, don't they? You live for them. And you — my noxious, stubborn, suicidal friend — are apparently ready to die just so you can find out what happens when the siege of the Gutenberg house comes to an end.

Doesn't it sound a little absurd when you hear it put like that? What are you hoping to find? Is it that you're looking for a story that will have you in it? Is that it?

Oh Lord, it is, isn't it? And all this time you've been hoping that when you found that book you'd have a clue as to why you were born. And why you'll die.

This is that book, as far as you're concerned.

Am I right? After all, you're in these pages too. Without you these words would be black marks on white paper, closed up in the dark. I'd been locked up in solitary, talking to myself, probably saying the same things over and over:

Burn this book. Burn this book. Burn this book.

But as soon as you opened the book, my madness passed away. Visions rose up out of the woven pages, like spirits conjured by an invocation, fueled both by the need to be heard that is felt by all confessors, even humble stuff such as my own, plus your own undeniable appetite for things uncanny and heretical.

Enjoy them while you can. You know the price you're paying for them.

Back to the Gutenberg workshop, and then, we'll see what last visions I can find for you here where the air carried the sinus-pricking stench of ink.

There comes a time in any battle between the forces of Heaven and Hell when the number of soldiers becomes so great it's no longer possible for reality as it is perceived by Humankind to bear the weight of the maelstrom raging in its midst. The facade of reality cracks, and however hard Humankind has labored not to see what is all around them, their effort is no longer the equal of the task. The truth will be heard, however strident. The truth will be seen, however raw.

The first sign that this Moment of Truth had arrived was a sudden eruption of cries from the street. Entreaties from the citizens of Mainz — men and women, infants and Methuselahs — all apparently saw the veil that had concealed the battle snatched away at the same moment, and hysteria instantly ensued. I was glad to be inside the workshop at that time, even if I did have his grotesque Excellency, the Archbishop, along with Gutenberg and his workmen for company.

The instant that the cacophony from the street started up, Gutenberg, the soft-voiced genius, departed, and Gutenberg, the loving husband and friend, took his place.

"I think we have trouble," he said, "Hannah? Hannah! Are you all right?" He turned to his workmen. "If any of you fear for your own souls or those of your families, I urge you to go now, and quickly, before this gets any worse."

"There's no riot going on out there," the Archbishop said to the men in the workshop, some of whom were already untying their ink-stained aprons. "You have absolutely no need to fear for the safety of your wives and children."

"How do you know?" I said.

"I have my sources," the Archbishop replied. His smugness nauseated me. I dearly wanted to forsake my impersonation of a man at that moment and unleash Jakabok Botch, the demon of the Ninth Circle. I might have done so, too, had it not been for the fact that Hannah's voice answered her husband's call at that moment.

"Johannes! Help me!"

She came up into the workshop from a direction other than the one the Archbishop, Gutenberg, and I had used earlier, through a small doorway at the far end of the room.

"Johannes! Johannes! Oh Lord!"

"I'm here, wife," Gutenberg said, starting towards his breathless and frantic spouse.

Rather than being relieved of her terror by laying eyes on her husband, Hannah's state grew still more desperate.

"We're damned, Johannes!"

"No, my dear. This is a God-fearing house."

"Johannes, think! If there are demons here, then it's because of this!"

She went to the nearest of the tables laid out with letters, and using her not inconsiderable bulk to aid her natural strength she overturned the table, scattering the trays and their meticulously arranged alphabet over the floor.

"Hannah, stop!" Gutenberg yelled.

"It's the Demon's work, Johannes!" she said to him, her face still wet with tears. "I have to destroy it or we'll all be carried off to Hell."

"Who put that foolish notion in your head?" Gutenberg said.

"I did," a voice I knew said.

And who should come up the shadowy staircase that Hannah had used but Quitoon, his demonic features presently hidden by the hood he was wearing.

"Why have you been scaring to my wife?" Gutenberg said. "She's always been easily frightened."

"I'm not imaging this!" Hannah yelled, seizing hold of another table where the numbers, blank spaces, and punctuation were arrayed. This she overthrew with as much ease as she had the first table.

"I'm afraid she's overwrought," Quitoon allowed, striding from the door to intercept Gutenberg, who was still softly calling to his wife as he made his way towards her.

"Hannah… dearest one… please don't cry… You know how I hate to see you cry."

Quitoon threw back his hood, showing one and all his demonic features. Nobody remarked upon it. Why would they, when he and his like were visible from the window, locked in bitter battle with their angelic counterparts.

In truth, there were members of legions on either side that I had never seen before, even in manuscripts illuminated by monks who painted forms of angels and demons that were entirely new.

Massive creatures, some winged, some not, but all clearly bred, raised, and trained to do exactly what they were doing: make war. Even as I watched, one of the war-demons, caught in a fierce struggle with an angel, seized its enemy's head in both hands and simply crushed it like a huge egg. There was no blood in the divine anatomy of the thing. Just light, which erupted from its broken skull in all directions.

Now the war-demon turned, and looked through the window into the workshop. Even for one such as myself, who'd seen plenty of freakish forms of enemy wandering in the garbage of the Ninth Circle, this demon was of particular vileness. Its eyes were the size of oranges and bulged from red-raw folds of tender flesh. Its gaping mouth was a tunnel lined with needle teeth, from which a black serpentine tongue emerged, weaving back and forth as it licked the glass. Its huge hooked claws, dripping with the last of the slaughtered angel's light, scraped at the glass.

Gutenberg's workmen could keep their terror under control no longer. Some fell to their knees, offering up prayers to heaven; others sought out weapons amongst the tools they used to discipline the press when it was willful.

But neither prayers nor weapons did anything to avert the creature's gaze, or to drive it from the window. It pressed its face to the imperfect glass, releasing a shrill sound that made the window vibrate. Then the glass cracked and abruptly shattered, spitting shards into the workshop. Several of the pieces of glass, smeared by the demon's spittle, were now under its control, and flew with unerring accuracy to shed blood in the workshop. One of the long pieces of glass drove itself into the eye of the bald workman, another two slit the throats of both the men who'd been setting the type. I'd seen so many death scenes over the years that I was beyond feeling any emotion at the sight of this. But for the human witnesses it was an invasion of horrors into a place they had been happy, and the violation made them unleash cries of grief and frustrated rage. One of the men who was still unhurt went to help the first of the demon's victims, the one stabbed through his eye. Ignoring any danger that the proximity of the murderer presented, the unharmed man went down on his knees and cradled his wounded companion's head in his lap. As he did so he quietly recited a simple prayer, which the dying man, his body a mass of tics and spasms, knew and attempted to match his friend's recitation. The tender sadness of the scene clearly revolted the demon, who used his bulging gaze to examine each of the glass shards that his will had arrested in midflight, until he had selected one which was neither the longer nor the largest but had the appearance of strength about its shape.

He used his will to turn its point towards the ceiling, and it rose obediently. It turned as it ascended, so that its sharpest end pointed downwards. I knew what was coming next, and I wanted to be a part of it. The shard was directly above the man who had knelt to take his wounded colleague onto his lap. Now it was he who was about to die. I stepped in and caught hold of the weeping man by his hair, turning his face up for him just in time for him to see his death rushing down upon him. He had neither the time nor the strength to fight off my hold. The glass knife plunged into the man's tear-welted cheek, just beneath his left eye.

The demon's will had failed to drive the weapon very deep, but I knew if ever there was a moment to demonstrate my devotion to unrepentant villainy, it was here and now. I held the man's head back tight against my belly. Then I seized the sliver of glass, indifferent to its slicing my palm, and drove it deep into the man's face. His sobs of sorrow became moans of agony, as I worked the thick glass up under his eye, pushing his eyeball out of its socket from below. It hung from the bloody hole where it had been seated, and lolled there lazily, still attached by a root of tangled nerves. I pressed the blade up into the meat of his thoughts, enjoying immensely the music of his suffering: the sobs, the fragments of prayer that he uttered, his begging for mercy. The latter, needless to say, went unanswered by me, his torturer, and the loving God in whom he'd put his trust.

I leaned over him as I stirred the blade in the pot of his skull and spoke to him. His moan died away. Despite his agony, I still had his attention.

"I am of the Demonation," I told him. "The sworn enemy of life and love and sinlessness. There's no bargaining with me, nor any hope of hope."

The man managed to master the convulsions in his maimed face long enough to say:

"Who?"

"Me? I'm known by all as Mister — "

I was interrupted by the Archbishop.

"Botch," he said. "Your name's Botch, isn't it? It's an English word. It means a mess. A muddle. A completely worthless thing."

"You should be careful, priest," I said, digging out a sizable portion of cranial matter and casting it down on the floor of the workshop. "You're talking to a demon of the Ninth Circle."

"I quake," the Archbishop said, utterly indifferent to my claim. "Do you do anything else besides torment dead men?"

"Dead?" I looked down and found that the mourning man had indeed died in the short time I'd been talking to the Archbishop. I let go of the corpse and it slid onto the tiled floor.

"Was that your idea of pleasure, demon?"

I stood up, wiping the blood off onto my clothes.

"Why would you be interested in my pleasures?" I asked the Archbishop.

"I must know Hell's every trick if I'm to protect my flock from your depravities."

"Depravities?" I said, glancing at Quitoon. "What's he been telling you?"

"That you have insinuated yourself into the wombs of women who are hours from giving birth, and terrify the infants to death before they even see the sky."

I smiled.

"Did you do that, demon?"

"I did, Excellency," I replied, smiling as best my scarred face allowed. "It was my sodomitic friend Quitoon who suggested it. He said I should be in a woman at least once in my life. But that was small stuff. Once, with an ancient grimoire whose owner's entrails we used for the working, we brought back to life all the corpses in a churchyard in Hamburg, and then visited each of the dead in the earth, telling them one by one that the End of the World was at hand, and that they must immediately dig their way out of their graves — we had cracked open the earth to make it easier for them — and dance. Dance and sing, however corrupt their condition."

"The Hamburg Dance of Death was your doing?"

"Yes. Of course." Now I was smiling so hard it hurt. "Did you hear that, Quitoon? He knew about Hamburg! Ha!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Never better!" I snapped.

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

"It's the dust, Quitoon," I replied. "As you well know."

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

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

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

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

"Quitoon!" I yelled. "Do you see her?"

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

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

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

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

The Word was God.

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

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

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

Oh no, no, no; I've been getting closer all the time. I could get this over with right now, in one dash —

I'd make it quick. I've got long, bony-thin fingers, see, and my claws are as sharp as grief. And I'll drive them into your neck — eight long fingers and two long thumbs — driven in so far that they crisscross in your throat.

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

As if you ever did.

Poor little page-turner.

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

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

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

So, whether I have the Secret or you do, it doesn't matter. It won't change anything. Just let me unburden myself of the Secret, then you can burn the book and we'll have the best of both worlds, won't we?"

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

But when it does, you'll have something worth living for. Imagine that! What it will feel like to get up in the morning and think: I know why I'm alive; I have a purpose, a reason to draw breath.

Imagine that.

Imagine thinking, and while you're imagining, listen:

I've got a Secret that the world's going to need one day.

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

— my —

— teacher, was he?

— beloved, was he?

— tormentor, was he?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Get out. Immediately! You've no business here."

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

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

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

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

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

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

With both my substance and my soul slashed wide, I was unable to return the blow. I reeled away, bent double by the pain, stumbling blindly across the uneven boards, until my arm found a wall. Its coldness was welcome. I pressed my face against it, trying to govern the urge to weep like a child. What use was there in that, I reasoned. Nobody would answer. Nobody would come. My pain possessed me; as I, it. We were our other's only reliable companion in that room. Agony my only certain friend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I did not see him, nor did I see anybody, other than the dead. Quitoon, Hannah, Gutenberg, and the Archbishop, even the demon who had been poised outside the window, were gone. So, too, were those few workers who had survived the demon's assault. There were only the bodies, and me. And I was only here because I had been mistaken for one of them. A living demon left amongst the human dead.

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

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

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

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

"Botch," I murmured to myself, remembering the Archbishop's definition. "A mess. A muddle — "

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

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

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

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

There was, however, a table. A large, long table with a sound timer or hourglass in the middle of it, the kind I'd seen at tribunal to control the amount of time any one party could speak. Seated around the table on heavy but well-cushioned chairs were those individuals who had left me for dead. The Archbishop sat at the end nearest to me, his face not visible, while the Angel Hannah sat at the other end. She drew fresh luminescence from the perfect stone, so that now she seemed to my eye like a version of the Hannah Gutenberg I had first encountered in the house, but here she was wearing robes of draped light, which rose and fell about her both slowly and solemnly.

There were five others at the table. Gutenberg himself, who sat a foot or two away from the table than the others, and two devils and two angels, all unknown to me, on either side, their positions reversed, so that Angel faced Devil, and Devil, Angel.

Around the edge of the room, their backs against the wall, were several onlookers, amongst them those who'd been part of the events in the workshop. Quitoon was there, standing on the far side of the table, close to the Archbishop; so, too, was Peter (another angel hidden amongst Gutenberg's circle), as was the demon who'd made such murderous use of broken glass. And the workman-become-angel who had wounded me. There were four or five others I did not know, perhaps players whose performances I'd missed.

I had slipped into the hidden room in the middle of a speech by the Archbishop:

"Ridiculous!" he said, pointing down the table at Hannah. "Do you imagine for one moment that I would believe that you truly intended to destroy the press, when you'd gone to such trouble to protect it?"

There was a round of approving murmurs from various members of the assembled company.

"We didn't know whether we were going to allow the device to exist or not," the Angel Hannah replied.

"You've spent — what? — thirty years, masquerading as his wife."

"I was not masquerading. I was, and I am and always will be his wife, having sworn an oath — "

"As a member of Humankind — "

"What?"

"You swore to your marriage as a human female. You are certainly not human and it would be the subject of a very long and probably unresolvable debate as to your true gender."

"How dare you!" Gutenberg erupted, rising with such speed from his chair that he overturned it. "I don't pretend to understand what exactly is happening here, but — "

"Oh please," the Archbishop growled, "spare us all the weary spectacle of your feigned ignorance. How can you be married to that?" He stabbed a heavily decorated finger at the Angel Hannah. "And then claim that you never once saw it for what it truly is." His voice thickened with revulsion. "It virtually sweats out excremental incandescence from every pore — "

Hannah rose now, the tidal robes of light she wore ebbing and flowing.

"He knew nothing," she told the Archbishop. "I married him in the form of a woman and did not violate that form until today, when I saw that the End was imminent. We were man and wife."

"That's not the point," the Archbishop said. "However realistically you let your dugs sag over the years, you were one of God's messengers, still watching out for the interest of your Lord on High. Can you deny that?"

"I was his wife!"

"Can. You. Deny. That?"

There was a pause. Then the Angel Hannah said: "No."

"Good. Now we're getting somewhere."

The Archbishop tugged at his collar with his forefinger "Is it me, or is it hot in here? Couldn't we put in some windows, get some fresh air coming in?"

I froze hearing this, deathly afraid that if anyone took him at his word they might look to open the door and find me there. But the Archbishop was not so feverish that he was willing to sacrifice the momentum he'd gained in his interrogation of Hannah. Before anybody had a chance to act to cool down the room, he answered the problem more radically.

"Enough of these damn vestments," he said. He tore at his robes of office, which for all their weight and encrustation ripped readily. Then off came the gold crosses that he'd had hanging around his neck, and the rings, those countless rings. He threw them all to the floor, where they were devoured by yet another fire, its flames in countless places beyond the grasp of my paltry sight. The speedy progress of the flames was not unlike rot spreading through all the mock-Holy artifacts, unmaking them with the ease with which an actor might destroy his costume of painted burlap.

Oh, but that was not all the devouring fire was taking. It also leapt up from the bonfire of his finery to scour the skin off his head and hands, and the hair off his scalp. Underneath — why was I surprised — was the scaly skin that I had myself once met in the mirror, while from the base of his knobby spine a single tail, the massive, virile state of which suggesting he was a much, much older demon than he was an Archbishop. It lashed back and forth, the stripes of its scales the color of blood, bile, and bone.

There was plainly no element of revelation in this for anyone at the table. There were a few barely suppressed looks of disgust on the faces of some of the attending angels, seeing the demon naked. But the only audible response was from one of his own, who said:

"Excellency, your robes."

"What about them?"

"There's nothing of them left."

"They wearied me."

"But how will you leave?"

"You'll go fetch more, idiot! And before you ask, yes, I will put my human face back on, down to the last carbuncle on my nose. Though Demonation, it feels good to be free of that wretched stuff. I'm practically stifled in that skin. How do they put up with it?" The company let the question remain rhetorical. "Well, go then," he told his troubled underling. "Fetch me my attire!"

"What shall I say happened to the vestments you were wearing, Excellency?"

The Archbishop, pushed beyond the limits of his patience by the witlessness of his servant, threw back his head and then instantly threw it forwards again. A wad of spittle flew from his lips and missing its target struck the wall no more than a body's length from where I crouched, and ate at the stone. But nobody looked my way. At that moment the Archbishop had the attention of every eye in the room.

"Tell them I gave it all away to those of my flock who are stricken with disease, and if anyone doubts you tell them to go looking in the plague houses down by the river." A bitter laugh erupted from him, raw and joyless. The mere sound of it was enough to make me confer upon him all the hatred I'd felt towards Pappy Gatmuss.

The stirring up of old venom didn't make me forget the dangerous state in which I remained, however. I knew I had to retreat from the door before the Archbishop's lackey made to leave, or I would be spotted. But I could not bring myself to withdraw from the threshold until the very last moment, for fear of missing some exchange that would help me better understand the true nature of this clash of wills divine and demonic. The lackey pushed back his chair. But even as he began to rise, the naked Archbishop gestured for him to sit down again.

"But I thought you wanted — "

"Later," his Unholy Holiness replied. "For now we must be equally matched, if we're to play."

To play. Yes, that's what he said, I swear. And in a sense you have the whole sorry story in those two Words. Ah, Words! They work to confound us. Take, for instance, Printing Press. Can you imagine two less inspiring words? I doubt it. And yet…

"This is not a game," the Angel Hannah said grimly. The colors in the pool of robes in which she floated darkened, reflecting her change of mood. Blue went to purple, gold to crimson. "You know how important this is. Why would your masters send you here?"

"Not just masters," the Archbishop replied with a sultry tone. "I had mistresses, too. Oh, and they are cruel." His hands went to his groin. I could not see what he was doing but it clearly offended all of Heaven's representatives. Nor had the Archbishop finished. "Sometimes I deliberately make a punishable error, just to earn myself the reward of their torments. They know by now, of course. They must. But it's a game. Like love. Like…"

He dropped his voice to a skinned whisper. "War."

"If that's what you want, demon, it's yours for the asking."

"Oh now, listen to yourself," the Archbishop chided her. "Where's your sense of priorities? And while you're mulling that over, ask yourself why we of the Demonation would care about having control of a device that makes insipid copies of books whose only claim to significance in the first place was their rarity? I couldn't imagine a more pointless reason for the two halves of our divided nation to set upon one another, than this." He looked at Gutenberg. "What's it called?"

"A printing press," Hannah said. "As if you didn't know. You don't fool anybody, demon."

"I tell the truth."

"Insipid copies!"

"What else can they ever be?" the Archbishop protested mildly.

"You sound as if you care," Hannah observed.

"I don't."

"Then why are you ready to go to war for this thing you can't even name?"

"I say again: We don't need to be at one another's throats over what Gutenberg had made. It's not worth fighting over, and we both know it."

"Yet you don't return to the comforts of your palace."

"It is scarcely a palace."

"It is scarcely less."

"Well, I won't stoop to trivialities," the Archbishop said, waving this fruitless exchange away. "I admit, I came here because I was curious at the beginning. I was expecting, I don't know, some kind of miracle machine. But now I see it, and it isn't very miraculous at all, is it? No offense to you, Herr Gutenberg."

"So you are leaving?" the Angel Hannah said.

"Yes. We're leaving. We have no further business here. And you?"

"We are also leaving."

"Ah."

"We have business above."

"Pressing, is it?"

"Very."

"Well then."

"Well then."

"We are agreed."

"We are, indeed, agreed."

That said, stillness fell. The Archbishop peered at his warty knuckles. Hannah stood staring into middle distance, her attention absented. The only sound I could hear was the soft murmur of the fabric that surrounded Hannah.

The sound drew my gaze towards it, and I was surprised to see that there were strands of black and red passing through the otherwise placid color and motion of the Angel Hannah's robes. Was I the only one in the chamber noticing this? It was evidence, surely, that for all her calm composure the angel couldn't help but let the truth show itself, even if it was only for a few seconds.

Now, from somewhere, perhaps the workshop behind me, I heard another sound. That of a clock ticking.

And still nobody moved.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

And then, at precisely the same moment — as though they were more alike than not when it came to matters of patience and politics — both the Archbishop and Hannah stood up.

Both set their hands down, knuckles first, on the table and leaning forwards both begin to talk at one another, their voices in their righteous anger so alike that it was difficult to separate one from the other, the words simply one endless, incomprehensible sentence:

— for why you the haven't been the holy oh yes you can holy isn't you right what's swords and this business be harvesting not books aren't we don't futile yellow don't blood on this whole yes gone entirely —

And on and on it went like this, with everybody in the room doing exactly what I was doing, concentrating their attention upon either the Archbishop or upon Hannah in the hope of deciphering what they were saying, and by doing so making it easier to comprehend the other party's contribution to this crazy exchange. If others were having any luck with the tactic, they showed no sign of enlightenment. Their expressions remained puzzled and frustrated.

Nor did the Demon Archbishop and the Angel Hannah show any sign of mellowing their vehemence. Indeed their fury was escalating, the power their rage and suspicion generated causing the geometry of the room, which had seemed to me flawless when I'd just taken it in, to warp out of true. The way it did so may sound crazy, but I will tell you what my eyes told me, as best I can, hoping that the words I use don't crack beneath the paradoxes that I'm obliged to describe.

They were approaching one another — the Devil and the Angel — their heads swelling prodigiously as they did so, the space between their hairlines and their chins easily three or four feet now and growing larger with every heartbeat. But even as their heads grew to such grotesque a size they also narrowed, until it seemed to my outraged eyes that they were barely two or three inches wide, the tips of their noses no more than a finger's length apart. The words they continued to spew out emerged from their grotesquely misshapen mouths like spurts of smoke, no two of the same color, which rose up to form a layer of dead speech on the ceiling. Yet at the same time as this bizarre spectacle was going on — I warned you that some of this would be perilously close to the ravings of a madman — my eyes also reported that they were both still sitting in their seats as they had been all along, unchanged.

I have no explanation for any of this, nor do I understand why, having listened to their vehement exchange for two or three minutes without comprehending a single argument made by either side, my brain now began to decode portions of their dialogue. It wasn't a casual conversation they were having, needless to say, but neither were they spitting escalating threats at one another. I slowly realized that I was listening to the most secret of negotiations. The Angel and the Demon, their species, who had once been joined in celestial love, now enemies. Or so I had understood. Their hatred of one another, I'd been taught, was so deeply felt that they would never contemplate peace. But here they were — adversaries so familiar that they were almost friends — laboring to divide up control of this new power that, despite the Demon's claim that Gutenberg's press was of no great consequence, they all knew to the contrary. The press would indeed change the shape of the world, and each side wanted to possess the lion's share of its creations and their influence. Hannah wanted all holy books to be under Angelic license, but the Archbishop wasn't any more ready to give that up than was Hannah willing to give up all printed materials that related to the erotic impulse of Humankind.

Much of what they were arguing over were forms of writing that I had never heard of: novels and newspapers, scientific journals and political tracts; manuals, guides, and encyclopedias. They traded like two of your kind buying horseflesh at an auction, their bargaining getting faster as some portion of this immense agreement approached closure, the words only agreed upon if some other part of this division of spoils was successfully resolved. There was no system of high-flown principle shaping those parts of the World According to the Universal Word that Hannah pursued, nor was there any special ferocity in the way the Archbishop pursued works in arenas I expected Hell to pursue: lawyerly writings, for instance; or works by doctors and assassins, spreading their wickedness. The Angel fought vehemently for control over the confessions of whores, both male and female, and any other writings designed to inflame the reader, while Hell fought with equal force to possess power over the licensing and distribution of all printing fabrications that their authors had written in such a way as to suggest that they were, in fact, the truth. But then, Hell countered, what happened if the author of such a work of invention happened also to be or to have been a whore?

And so it went on, back and forth, the pair of advisors each Power had brought to the table offering their own subtle qualifications or verbal manipulations to the principals' exchanges. There were references back to earlier arbitrations. To The Matter of the Wheel and to The Threshing Impasse. As for Gutenberg's great work — the reason why Heaven and Hell were so close to war — was dispassionately referred to as The Subject Under Review.

Meanwhile, as the argument became even more complex, the bewildering spectacle of the demon's and the angel's heads swelling and narrowing had become still more elaborate; dozens of extrusions emerging from their ballooning craniums, as thin as finger-bones, wove between one another, their elegant intertwining reflecting, perhaps, the escalating intricacies of their debate.

Everyone continued to watch them as they carved up Humankind's future, but with so much of the negotiation beyond me, the whole thing, for all its Great Significance and so on and so forth, was actually beginning to bore me. The lavish complexities of their interwoven heads were an entirely different matter: They beggared the inventions of my dream-life, seeing the woven heads continue to find new ways to reflect each proposal and counter proposal, each successful barter and failed assault. So elaborate had the process of the argument been, and so exquisite the interweaving of demonic and angelic flesh, that their heads now resembled a tapestry, "Portrait of a Debate Between Heaven and Hell in Order to Prevent War."

Here was a Secret that made Gutenberg's Press a footnote. I was watching the power at work behind the face of the world. What I had always assumed to be a calamitous unseen war, waged in sky and rock and on occasion invading your human world, was not a bloody battle, with legions slaughtering one another; it was this endless fish-market bartering. And why? Because it was the profit that came of these newfound forms that fueled the negotiations. The Angel Hannah was utterly indifferent to the way all this "printed matter," as she dubbed it, might poison or impoverish the spiritual lives of Humankind. Nor were the Demon Archbishop and his advisors concerned that they possess ways the Word might be used to corrupt innocents. It was the pursuit of word power gained from word wealth that moved both sides, inspiring maneuvers of such complexity that the due performance of every tiny portion of this knot of agreements and arrangements was dependent upon the performance of every other part. Far from behaving like enemies, the two sides were making what was doubtless just another marriage contract between their opposing factions, occasioned by the creation of Gutenberg's press. It would make money, this press. And it would control minds at the same time. At least that was as much as I understood of their convoluted talk.

My weary eyes strayed to Quitoon, and they came upon him at the very moment that his wandering gaze found me.

From the expression of shock on his face it was obvious he'd assumed I was long since dead. But the fact that I wasn't pleased him, I could see, the realization of which gave me hope. Quite what of, I can't truly tell you.

No. I can try. Perhaps I hoped that our both getting here, to the end of the world as it had been, and to the beginning of what it was to become, courtesy of Johannes Gutenberg, tied us together, for better or worse, for richer, for —

I never finished reciting these silent vows of devotion because one of Hannah's advisors, sitting next to her on the other side of the table to Quitoon, had seen the look on his face and realized there was a suspicious trace of happiness flickering through his features.

The angel began to rise from its seat in order to better see whatever Quitoon was staring at with such pleasure.

Quitoon was looking at me, of course, looking at me and smiling, the way I was now allowing myself to smile as I looked at him.

Then the angel screamed.

In the beginning was the Word, says John the Christ-lover, and the Word was not only with God, it was God. So why isn't there a word, or a sentence ten thousand words long, that would come anywhere even near to describe the sound of an angel screaming?

You'll just have to take it from me that the angel did indeed scream, and that the sound that emanated from it was such that every scintilla of matter in that room convulsed, hearing the cry. Eyes that had been devoted to an obsessive study of the Principals were suddenly jolted free by the violence of the convulsion. And inevitably several of those in the room saw me.

I had no time to retreat. The entities that filled the room (most likely even the matter of the room itself) were infinitely more sophisticated creatures than I. When their gazes were turned on me, I felt their scrutiny like a bruising blow delivered to every single part of my body at the same time, even the soles of my feet. Their brutal gazes ceased as suddenly as they had begun. The removal should have been a relief but, consistent with the paradoxical nature of the entire room, the aversion of their gazes brought its own strange order of pain, that which comes when the hurt induced by a higher being ceases, and all connection with that being is removed.

But my presence here was not as inconsequential as the removal of their scrutiny might have implied. A quarrel now arose around the table as to whether my presence here was proof of some conspiracy against Gutenberg or his invention, and if so, by which side. There was no attempt to ask my own account of events. They were only concerned that I had witnessed Heaven and Hell's complicity. Whether I had simply seen the Secret in progress, as they knew I had, or whether I was part of a grand Conspiracy against the safety of the Secret was irrelevant to them. I had to be silenced. The only point of contention, apparently was what to do with me.

I knew that I was the problem under debate, because every now and again I heard a fragment of dialogue relating to me and my dispatch.

"No blood should be spilt in here," the Angel Hannah decreed.

Later, I heard someone — was it the Demon I'd known as Peter? — opine that:

"There's no justice in an execution. He's done nothing."

Then, from all sides, counterarguments that had the same two words: The Press! The Press! The Press! And as the words were repeated, and feelings ran higher and higher, so the way they expressed themselves grew steadily more unnatural. The din in the room began cacophonous, loud enough to make my mind shake against my skull.

Audible above the roar was one human contribution to the debate, clearer than all the mightier voices simply because it was human: raw and defenseless. It was Gutenberg who spoke. Only later would I realize what he was saying: that he was voicing his protest at the purpose to which his Press, built to spread the news of salvation, was about to be put.

But nothing he said hushed the vociferous exchanges from around the table. They continued to rise in surges of intensity, until they suddenly quieted. Somebody had made a suggestion that apparently found favor with the assembled company, a decision had been reached. My fate had been decided.

It was no use my attempting to ask for some leniency from this court, if court indeed it was. I was being judged by entities that had no interest in me or my point of view. They just wanted me bloodlessly, guiltlessly silenced.

There was a raveling motion at the heart of the intertwined negotiations: a gathering up, a brightening. I had no reason for thinking it, but think I did, that this was perhaps the final fire of my life, about to be —

no, being —

unleashed.

I caught sight of Quitoon as the blaze grew; his face was no longer touched by that fragment of pleasure at my deliverance, that little smile that was so sweet a reward I would gladly have endured ten wounds like the one I carried to have it bestowed on me again.

But it was too late for smiles now, too late for forgiveness. The knotted exchanges of the negotiators had almost solved themselves, and the flame at their heart was steadily growing stronger, drawing in motes of heat from the other angels and demons in the chamber.

Then it burst free and came at me.

In that same instant the door behind which I had been hiding, along with its frame and several of the flawless blocks of stone that surrounded it, all these were dissolved by a fire of their own, leaving me without any protection whatsoever from the blaze of judgment coming from the negotiators' midst.

It fell about me in blazing veils, preventing me from attempting escape in any direction, even assuming I'd possessed the strength or the will to try. Instead I simply waited, resigned to my death, as the verdict closed around me. In that same moment I heard someone shouting — Johannes Gutenberg again, his voice thick with fury — protesting still, and still unheard.

I had time to think, as the flames rose up around me.

Haven't I been punished enough?

I ask you now, the same question.

Haven't I been punished enough?

Can you see me in your mind's eye. You can, can't you? Surrounded by fires both demonic and divine, dancing coils of heat that climbed up through the trench of my wound to invade my throat and face, their advance relentless, transforming the nature of my meat and blood and bone.

And again I say to you:

Haven't I been punished enough?

Please answer yes. In the name of all that's merciful, tell me you've finally come to understand how terrible the cruelties that I've had visited upon me have been, and that I deserve release from them.

No, don't even say it. Why waste a crumb of energy speaking when you could be using it to do the one thing this burned, cut, and clawed beast you have in your hands deserves.

Burn this book.

If it's the only thing you do in your whole life that's truly compassionate, it'll still be enough to open the paradise gates to you.

I know you don't want to think about it. No living creature is eager to talk of its own demise. But it will come. As sure as night follows day, you will die. And when you're wandering in that grey place that is neither Heaven nor Hell, nor any place on this earth Humankind likes to imagine it owns, and some spirit approaches you in robes of mist and starlight, and from its barely visible face comes a voice that sounds like the wind through a broken window, and says:

"Well now. Here's a quandary. By all rights you should go down to Hell for having dealings with a demon called Jakabok Botch. But I'm told there are extenuating circumstances that I should like to hear you speak to me about in your own words."

What will you say?

"Oh yes, I had a book that was possessed, but I passed it on."

That's not going to win you passage through the Paradise Door. And don't waste your time lying. They know everything, the spirits at the Door. They may ask you questions, but they already know the answers. They want to hear you say:

"I had a book that was possessed by one of the vilest demons in Creation, but I burned it. Burned it 'til it was flakes of grey ash. And then I ground out the ashes 'til they were less than dust, and the wind took them away."

That's your key to the Paradise Door, right there.

I swear, by all things holy and unholy — for they are two parts of one great Secret: God and the Devil, the Light and the Darkness, one indivisible mystery — I swear that this is the truth.

What?

All that and still no fire? I offer up the Mystery of Mysteries, and still my prison is cold. Cold. And so are you, page-turner. You're cold to your marrow, you know that? I hate you. Once again, words fail me. I sit here with my hatred, devoid of the means to express my fury, my revulsion. To say you are excrement insults the product of my bowels.

I thought I was teaching you something about the workings of evil, but I see now that you don't need any education from me. You know evil, all too well you embody it. You are one who stands by while others suffer. You are in the crowd at a lynching, or a blurred face in my memory of people watching slow death pronounced upon some poor nobody by the rule of law.

I will kill you. You know that, don't you? I was going to do it in one swift cut, across your throat from ear to ear. But I see now, that's too kind. I'm going to treat you with my knife the way you've treated my pages with your merciless eyes. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. Whether it's slashing or reading, the motion's the same. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards.

If the job's done well, life comes pouring out, doesn't it? Hot, steaming life, pouring out, splashing on the floor at your feet. Can you imagine how that's going to look, page-turner? Like a vessel of red ink dropped by a clumsy creator.

And there'll be nobody to cry out on your behalf. Nobody in the brightness of the page (it's always day when the book's open; always night when it's closed); nobody to voice one last desperate plea as you're stripped naked — naked and bloody you came into the world, naked and bloody you will leave it — and I wallow in the sight of your gooseflesh, and in the flickering terror in your eyes.

Oh, my page-turner, why did you let it come to this, when there were so many times you could have lit a match?

Now it's all cuts. Backwards and forwards, across your belly and breast, across the place of love; from behind, across your buttocks, opening them until the bright yellow fat parts from its own weight and sags, and before the blood has run down the back of your thigh, I'm slashing your hamstrings, backwards and forwards. Demonation, how that hurts! And how you scream, how you shriek and sob! At least until I come back around the front and finish the job with your face. Eyes. Backwards and forwards. Nose. Off with one stroke. Mouth. Backwards and forwards, opening like a cretin's mouth, as the poor creature tries to beg.

Is that what you want? Because it's all a putrid, fraudulent, heartless pig like you deserves: a long, agonizing death and a quick shoving-off into oblivion in the cheapest box your loved ones could find.

Does that sound about right?

No? Do I hear you protest?

Well, if it doesn't feel right, maybe you should just grab this one last chance. Go on, take it; it's here; the last, the very last, chance to change your destiny. It's not impossible, even now, even for a putrid, fraudulent, heartless pig. You just need to stop your eyes from moving, and I'll stop my knife from doing the same.

Well?

No. I didn't think so. All my talk about knives and eyes doesn't touch you, does it? I could keep promising the hard, dark stuff until my throat was so raw I was talking blood, and you'd not be moved.

You just want me to finish the damn story, don't you? It's as if telling it is going to make sense of your senseless life.

Let me tell you how: It's not. But for what it's worth, I'll give you what's left and you can pay the price.

The penultimate fire.

It had hold of me, inside and out, seizing my skin, my muscle, my bone and marrow. It had my memory and my feelings. It had my breath and my excrement. And it was turning them all into a common language. It was more like an itch, deep, deep down in my being. I lifted up my right hand, and saw the process at work there: light tracing the whorls in my fingertips, and in the layer below the intricate patterns of my veins and nerves: like maps of some secret country hidden in my body, finally made visible.

But, in the instant of seeing them, the power that had uncovered them proceeded to unmake them. The roads which these maps traced were eroded from the landscape of my body, the whorls untwined, and the tracery of throbbing veins beneath unbound. If my body had indeed once been a country, and I its despot King, then I had been deposed by the conjoined labors of Heaven and Hell.

Did I cry out in protest at this sedition? I tried to. Demonation, how I tried! But the same transforming forces that were at work unmaking my hands snatched the sounds from my lips and turned them into sigils of bright fire that fell back against my upturned face, which was also decaying into signs.

Nothing was being stolen from me. It was simply that my nature was being changed by the forces that had judged me.

I stumbled backwards out of the Negotiation Chamber and down into the workshop. But, as above, so below. My feet were no longer able to make commonplace contact with the ground. Like my hands and arms and face, they were being transformed into marks of light.

No, not marks. Letters.

And from the letters, in certain arrangements, words.

I was being turned into words.

God might have been the Word at the beginning. But at the End — at least my end (and who else's does anyone really care about? it's only our own that matters) — the Word was with Mister B. And Mister B. was the Word.

This was the Negotiators' way of silencing me without having to spill blood in a place where holy and unholy had met, upon this most propitious of days.

I didn't need my legs to carry me. The forces that were undoing my anatomy bore me back towards Gutenberg's printing press, which I could hear in motion behind me, its crude mechanism seized by the same engines, demonic and divine, that were carrying me towards it.

I could see with these word-eyes of mine, and I could hear in the dome of my word-skull the rhythm of the press, as it prepared to print its first book.

I remembered that Gutenberg had been laboring on making a copy of Ares Grammatica, a little grammar book he'd chosen to test his creation. Oh yes, and a poem, too: the Sibylline Prophecies. But his modest experiments had ceased with the death or the flight of those who'd been working on the press. The sheet I'd seen earlier was now on the floor, casually pulled off the press and tossed aside. A much more ambitious book was about to be created.

This book, the one in your hands.

This life of mine, such as it was, told by me in my own flesh, blood, and being. And this death, too, which was not a death at all, but simply a sealing-up in the prison where you found me when you opened this book.

I saw for a moment the plates that were being made from me hanging in the air all around the press, like ripe, bright fruit swaying gently from the branches of some invisible tree.

And then the press began its work, printing my life. I will say it one last time: Demonation! The feeling of it! There are no words — how can there be? — to describe what it feels like to become words, to feel your life encoded, and laid out in black ink on white paper. All my love and loss and hatred, melted into in words.

It was like the End of the World.

And yet, I live. This book, unlike any other that came from Gutenberg's press, or from the countless presses that have followed after it, is one of a kind. As I am both in the ink and in the paper, its pages are protean.

No. I'm sorry. That was a mistake in the printing. That whole sentence a few lines above, beginning "As I am…," shouldn't be there. I spoke out of turn.

Ink and paper, me? No, no. That's not right. You know it isn't. I'm behind you, remember? I'm a step closer to you with every page you turn. I've got my knife in my hand ready to cut you the same way —

the same way you read these pages —

backwards and forwards. Backwards and —

oh the blood that's going to flow. And you begging me to stop, but I'm not —

I'm not —

I'm —

not —

DEMONATION!

Enough! Enough! There's no use telling any more lies, trying to convince you of what things I want to half-believe myself, all in a pitiful attempt to get you to burn the book, when you knew (you did, didn't you? I can see by the look on your face) that I was lying to you all along.

I'm not behind you with a knife, coming to cut you. I never was, never could be. I'm here and only here. In the words.

That part wasn't a lie. The pages are protean. I was able to rearrange the words on the pages you had yet to read. They are my only substance now. And through them, I can speak with you, as I am speaking now.

All I ever wanted you to do was burn the book. Was that such a big thing to ask? I know, before you say it, I know: I was my own worst enemy, telling you stories. I should have scattered the words in all directions so that not a sentence, except for my plea to Burn the Book, would have made sense. Then you might have done it.

But it had been so long since I'd had eyes looking down at me, ready to be told a story. And I had such a story to tell: this life I'd lived. And had no one else to tell it to but you. And the more I told, the more I wanted to go on telling and the more I wanted to go on telling, the more I wanted to tell.

I was divided against myself: the part that wanted to tell my life and the part that wanted to be free.

Oh yes, free.

That's what I would have won myself if I'd played a better game, and persuaded you to set fire to these volatile pages, and they would have gone up in smoke.

And in that smoke, I would have risen up, liberated from the words where I'd been imprisoned. I had no illusions that I would have a body of flesh and bones awaiting me. They were gone forever. But I told myself I could have made sense of life. Anybody was preferable to the prison of pages.

But no. You never fell for any of my tricks. I used every deceit and subterfuge in the book, so to speak. Every stratagem I knew.

You want to know how evil works? Just run off a list of the ways I attempted to get you to burn the book. The Seductions (the house and its ancient tree); the Threats (my closing in on you with every page you turned); the Appeals to your compassion, your tender-heartedness, your empathy. They were all lost causes, of course. If any of them had worked, we wouldn't be here now.

Instead I'm here where you found me, with nothing to live for but the possibility that one day somebody else will pick this book up, and open it to read. Only maybe I will have conceived of a better trap by then. Something foolproof. Something that guarantees my escape.

Maybe you could help me, just a little? I've entertained you, haven't I? So do me this little kindness. Don't abandon me on a shelf somewhere, gathering dust, knowing I'm still inside, locked away in the darkness.

Pass me on, please. It's not much to ask. Give me to somebody you hate, somebody you'd be happy to hear had been cut to pieces the way a page is read. Backwards and forwards.

Until then, may I offer a word of advice? What I've told you here concerning the Conspiracy between those above and those below you should perhaps keep to yourself. Their agents are everywhere, and I'm sure their means of tracking down the heretical and the impious is more powerful than ever. It's wisest to keep what you know to yourself. Trust me in this. Or if you don't trust me, then trust your instinct. Walk with care in dark places, and do not put your faith in anyone who promises you the forgiveness of the Lord or a certain place in Paradise.

I don't suppose that advice isn't worth enough to earn me a burnt book, is it?

No, I thought not.

Go on then. Close the prison door and go about your life. My day will come. Paper burns easily.

And words know how to wait.

For Emilian David Armstrong

With my love and thanks to Pamela Robinson