Mister B. Gone

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