Mister B. Gone

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