Mister B. Gone (25 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 fl owing.

“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 . . .