Mister B. Gone

back broken, and his skull smashed like a dropped egg, probably long before he landed back in the canyons of trash where we'd first been baited. I had not been inventing horrors when I'd talked about how terrible it would be to be helpless in that place, crawling as it was with the most pitiful, the most hopeless of those amongst the Demonation. I know many of them. Some were Demons who had once been the most scholarly and sophisticated amongst us, but who had now come to realize in their researches that we meant nothing in the scheme of Creation. We floated in the void beyond all purpose or meaning. They had taken this knowledge badly; certainly worse than most of my fellows, who had long since given up thinking about such lofty notions in favor of finding amongst the tiny numbers of lichens that grew in the gloom of the Ninth a palliative for hemorrhoids.

But the scholars' desolation was not immune to hunger. In the years I'd lived in the house in the garbage dunes I had heard plenty of stories of wanderers who had perished in the wastes of the Ninth, their bones found picked clean, if they were found at all. That, most likely, would be Pappy G.'s fate: He would be eaten alive, until every last morel of marrow had been sucked out.

I strained to hear some sound from the World Below — a last cry from my murdered father — but I heard nothing. It was the voices from the World Above that were now demanding attention. The rope from which Pappy G.'s net had hung had been hauled up out of sight as soon as he'd fallen. I slid my little knife into a small pocket of flesh I had taken great pains to slowly dig for myself over a period of months for the express purpose of hiding a weapon.

There was clearly great disappointment and frustration amongst those who were hauling me up.

'Whatever we lost was five times the weight of this little thing,' said someone.

'It must have bitten through the ropes,' opined the voice I recognized as the Father's. 'They have such ways, these demons.'

'Why don't you shut up and pray?' said a third whinier voice. 'That's what you're here for, isn't it? To protect our immortal souls from whatever we're hauling up?'

They're frightened, I thought, which was good news for me. Frightened men did stupid things. My job was going to be to keep them in a state of fear. Perhaps I might intimidate them with my sickly frame and my burned face and body, but I doubted it. I would have to use my wits.

I could see the sky more clearly now. There were no clouds in the blue, but there were several dispersing columns of black smoke, and two smells fighting for the attention of my nostrils. One was the sickly sweet odor of incense, the other the smell of burning flesh.

Even as I inhaled them my racing thoughts remembered a childhood game that would perhaps help me defend myself against my captors. As an infant, and even into my early teens, whenever Pappy Gatmuss came home at night with female company Momma was obliged to vacate the marriage bed and sleep in my bed, relegating me to the floor with a pillow (if she was feeling generous) and a stained sheet. She would lay down her head and instantly be asleep, wearied to the bone by life with Pappy G.

And then she'd start to talk in her sleep. The things she said — angrily elaborate and terrifying curses directed at Pappy G. — were enough to make my heart quicken with fear, but it was the voice in which she spoke them that truly impressed itself upon me.

This was another Momma speaking, her voice a deep, raw growl of murderous rage that I listened to so many times over the years that without ever consciously deciding to try and emulate it I unleashed in private the fury I felt towards Pappy G. one day and the voice just spilled out. It wasn't simply imitation. I had inherited from Momma a deformity she had in her throat that allowed me to re-create the sound. Of that I became certain.

For several weeks following my discovery of the gift my bloodline had bestowed, I made the mistake of taking a shortcut on my way home that obliged me to walk through territory that had long been the dominion of a murderous gang of young demons who liked to slaughter those who refused to pay the toll they demanded. Looking back on this, I've often wondered if my own trespass was not truly accidental as I'd told myself at the time, but a test. Here was I — Jakabok, the perpetually terrorized runt of the neighborhood — deliberately inviting a confrontation with a gang of thugs who wouldn't think twice about killing me in the street outside my house.

The short version of how it went is easily told. I spoke in my Momma's Nightmare Voice, using it to assault the enemy with an outpouring of the most vicious, venomous curses I could lay my mind upon.

It worked instantly upon three of my four assailants. The fourth, who was the largest, was stone deaf. He took a moment to watch the retreat of his comrades, and then, seeing my wide open mouth he sensed that I was making some sound that had driven the others off. He immediately came at me, grabbing hold of the back of my neck with one of his immense hands and reaching into my mouth to pull out my troublesome tongue. He caught it by the root, digging his nails into the wet muscle, and would have left me as dumb as he was deaf if my tails — entirely without my conscious instruction — had not come to my aid. They rose up behind me side by side, then parted company, each speeding past my head and driving their points into my assailant's eyes. They lacked the bone to blind him, but there was sufficient force in their gristle that the points still hurt him. He let go of me, and I staggered away from him, spitting out blood, but otherwise unharmed.

Now you have a full account of the weapons I took up in the World Above: one small dulled knife, my mother's Nightmare Voice, and the twin tails I had inherited from my recently devoured father.

It wasn't much, but it would have to do.

* * *

So, there you have it. Now you know how I got up out of the World Below, and how my adventurings there began. Surely you're satisfied. I've told you things that I never told anyone before, even if I was about to disembowel them. What I did to Pappy G., for instance. I've never admitted to that until now. Not once. And let me tell you, it wasn't an easy confession to make, even after all these centuries. Patricide — especially when it's brought about by dropping your father into the maws of hungry lunatics — is a primal crime. But you wanted me to sing for my supper, and I have sung.

You don't need to hear any more, believe me. I'd been hauled up out of the rock, you can figure that out for yourselves. Obviously they didn't put an end to me or I wouldn't be sitting on this page talking to you. The details don't matter. It's all history now, isn't it?

No, no. Wait. I take that back. It isn't history. How can it be? Nobody ever wrote any of it down. History's what the books say, isn't it? And when it comes to the sufferings of the likes of me, a burned-up, ugly-as-sin demon whose life means less than nothing, there is no history.

I'm Jakabok the Nobody. As far as you're concerned, Jakabok the Invisible.

But you're wrong. You're wrong. I'm here.

I'm right here on the page in front of you. I'm staring out of the words right now, moving along behind the lines as your eyes follow them.

You see the blur between the words? That's me moving.

You feel the book shake a little? Come on, don't be a coward. You felt it. Admit it.

Admit it.

* * *

You know what, my friend? I think maybe I should tell you a little bit more, for the sake of the truth. Then there'll be at least one place where the misfortunes of a runty demon like me are put into words, put into history.

So you can put the flame away for a few minutes, while I tell you what happened to me in the World Above. Then, even though you will have burned the book, you'll at least have heard the story, right? And you can pass it on, the way all stories worth telling get handed down. And maybe one day you'll write a book, about how you once met this demon called Jakabok, and the things he told you about Demons and History and Fire. A book like that could make you famous, you know. It could. I mean you humans are more interested in evil than in good, right? You could invent all kinds of vile details and claim it was all just stuff that I told you. Why not? The money you could make, telling The Story of Jakabok. If you're a little afraid of the consequences, then just give some of your profits to the Vatican, in exchange for a twenty-four-hour priest patrol, in case a crazy demon decided to come and knock on your door.

Think about it. Why not? There's no reason why you shouldn't profit from our little arrangement, is there? And while you're thinking about it, I'll tell you what happened to me once I got up out of the earth and finally saw the sun.

You should listen really carefully to what comes next, friend, because it's full of dark stuff, and every word of