Czytaj książkę: «Mister B. Gone»

BURN THIS BOOK.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can do it. Just stop reading …

Now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I tried to lie.

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

“I take it back,” my mother said, and for a second I thought what I’d said had worked. But no. “You’re a lying, selfish, vicious, horrible creature.” She took a big metal spoon from behind her back. “I’m going to beat you so hard you will never——never, do you hear me?——waste your time inventing cruelties again!”

Her words brought another lie to mind. I thought: I’ll try it, why not? She’s going to beat me anyhow so what’s to lose? I said to her:

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

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

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

“What’s wrong?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes! That’s right! Listening!”

“What?”

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

“Music.”

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

She still looked at me without so much as a twitch. “You’ve really thought about this?”

“Yes.”

“And these writings of yours?”

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

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

“You are a strange one, Jakabok.”

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

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

“Do you?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

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

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

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

“I can’t do that.”

“You can and you will!”

“But I’ve been writing them for years.”

“And they’ll all burn up in two minutes, which should teach you something about this World, Jakabok.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t have any matches.”

“Step aside, child,” she said.

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

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

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

No doubt had my face been——like yours——covered in tender skin instead of scales, it would have blistered as the fire continued to consume my journals. But my scales protected me for a little while at least. Then it began to feel as though my face were frying. I still didn’t move. I wanted to be as close to my beloved words as I could be. I just stayed where I was, watching the fire do its work. It had a systematic way of unmaking each of the books page by page, burning away one to expose the one beneath, which was then quickly consumed in its turn, giving me glimpses of death-machines and revenges I had written about before the fire took them too.

Still I stood there, inhaling the searing air, my head filling up with visions of the horrors I had conjured up on those pages; vast creations that were designed to make every one of my enemies [which is to say everyone I knew, for I liked no one] a death as long and painful as I could make it. I wasn’t even aware of my mother’s presence now. I was just staring into the fire, my heart hammering in my chest because I was so close to the heat; my head, despite the weight of atrocities that was filling it up, strangely light.

And then:

“Jakabok!”

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

I inherited the rare double-tail by the way. That was one of the two gifts he gave me. But I wasn’t feeling any great measure of gratitude now, as he came lumbering towards the fire, yelling at my mother as he did so, demanding to know what she was doing making bonfires, and what was she burning anyway? I didn’t hear my mother’s response. The blood in my head was whining now so loud that it was all I could hear. Their fights and rages could go on for hours sometimes, so I cautiously returned my gaze to the fire, which, thanks to the sheer volume of paper that was being consumed, still blazed as furiously as ever.

I had been breathing short shallow breaths for several minutes now, while my heart beat a wild tattoo. Now my consciousness fluttered like a candle flame in a high wind; any moment, I knew, it would go out. I didn’t care. I felt strangely removed from everything now, as though none of this was really happening.

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

into——

the——

fire.

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

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

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

Burn This Book.

No, no, and still no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never mind. Just the flame, please.

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

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

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

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

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

Well …

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

Yes?

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

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

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

So …

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

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

“Well look at you, boy,” Pappy Gatmuss said. “Aren’t you a sight to make a father weep?”

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

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