'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
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.
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
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.'
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…
