Mister B. Gone

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Shamit went off without further word, leaving me to try and persuade my tongue and throat to make a sound that was more articulate, more civilized, than the noises that had escaped me thus far. I thought if they heard me speak, then I could perhaps persuade them into a conversation with me, and Cawley would see I was no eater of limb or heads, but a peaceful creature. There’d be no need for the shackles and hood once he understood that. But I was still defeated. The words were in my head clearly enough, but my mouth simply refused to speak them. It was as though some instinctive response to the sight and smell of the World Above had made me mute.

“You can spit and growl at me all you like,” Cawley said, “but you’re not going to do no harm to me or to none of my little family, you hear me, demon?”

I nodded. That much I could do.

“Well, will you look at that?” Cawley said, seeming genuinely amazed. “This creature understands me.”

“It’s just a trick to give you that impression,” the priest said. “Trust me, there’s nothing in his head but the hunger to drive your soul into the Demonation.”

“What about the way he’s shaking his head? What does that mean?”

“Means nothing. Maybe he’s got a nest of those Black Blood Fleas in his ears, and he’s trying to shake ’em out.”

The arrogance and the sheer stupidity of the priest’s response made my head fill with thunderous rage. As far as O’Brien was concerned I was no more significant than the fleas he was blaming for my twitches; a filthy parasitic thing that the father would happily have ground beneath his heel if I’d been small enough. I was gripped by a profound but useless fury, given that in my present condition I had no way to make it felt.

“I——I got——I got the hood,” Shamit gasped as he hauled something over the dark dirt.

“Well, lift it up!” Cawley shrugged. “Let me see the damn thing.”

“It’s heavy.”

“You!” Cawley said, pointing to one of the three men now idling by the winch. The trio looked at one another, attempting to press one of the others to step forwards. Cawley had no patience for this idiocy. “You, with the one eye!” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Hacker.”

“Well, Hacker, come give this degenerate half-wit some help.”

“To do what?”

“I want the hood put on the demon, double quick. Come on, stop crossing yourself like a frightened little virgin. The demon’s not going to do you any harm.”

“You sure?”

“Look at it, Hacker. It’s a wretched scrap of a thing.”

I growled at this new insult, but my protest went unheard.

“Just get the hood over its head,” Cawley said.

“Then what?”

“Then as much beer as you can drink and pig meat as you can eat.”

That deal put a charmless smile on Hacker’s scabrous face.

“Let’s get it done,” Hacker said. “Where’s the hood?”

“I’m sitting on it,” Shamit said.

“Then move! I’m hungry!”

Shamit stood up and the two men started to lift the hood out of the dirt, giving me a clear look at it. Now I understood why there had been so much gasping from Shamit as he carried it. The hood was not made of burlap or leather, as I’d imagined, but black iron, fashioned into a crude box, its sides two or more inches thick, with a square hinged door at the front.

“If you try any Demonical trick,” Cawley warned me, “I will bring wood and burn you where you lie. Do you hear me?”

I nodded.

“It understands, Cawley said. “All right, do it quick! O’Brien, where are the shackles?”

“In the wagon.”

“They’re not much use to me there. You!” He picked the youngest from the two remaining men. “Your name?”

“William Nycross.”

The man was a behemoth, limbs as thick as tree trunks, his torso massive. His head, however, was tiny; round, red, and hairless, even to brows and lashes.

Cawley said, “Go with O’Brien. Fetch the shackles. Are you quick with your hands?”

“Quick …” Nycross replied, as though the question clearly tested his wits “… with … my hands.”

“Yes or no?”

Standing behind Cawley, out of his sight but not out of that of the baby-faced Nycross, the priest guided the simpleton by nodding his head. The child-giant copied what he saw.

“Good enough,” said Cawley.

I had by now realized that I was not going to be able to get my tongue to say something cogent, thereby wringing some compassion from Cawley. The only way to avoid becoming his prisoner was by acting like the bestial demon that he’d said I was from the start.

I unleashed a low noise, which came out louder than I’d anticipated. Cawley instinctively took several steps back from me, catching hold of one of his men he had not so far addressed. The man’s face was grotesquely marked by a pox he’d survived, its most notable consequence the absence of his nose. He swung this pox-ridden man between me and him, pushing his knife point against the Pox’s body to commit the man to his duty.

“You keep your distance, demon. I’ve got holy water, blessed by the Pope! Two and a half gallons of it! I could drown you in holy water if I chose to.”

I responded with the only sound I had been able to make my throat produce, that same withered growl. Finally Cawley seemed to realize that this sound was the only weapon in my armory, and laughed.

“I’m in mortal fear,” he said. “Shamit? Hacker? The hood!” He had unhooked his iron bar from his belt and slapped it impatiently against his open palm as he spoke. “Move yourselves. There’s still skinning left to do on the other three and ten tails to be boiled clean to the bone!”

I didn’t like the sound of that last remark at all, being the only one with not one but two tails in that company. And if they were doing this for profit, then my freakish excess of tail gave them a reason to speed up the stoking of the fire beneath their boiling pan.

Fear knotted my guts. I began to struggle wildly against the confines of the net, but my thrashing only served to entangle me further.

Meanwhile, my wordless throat gave out ever more outlandish sounds; the beast I had been unleashing mere moments before sounding like a domesticated animal by contrast with the raw and unruly noise that came up out of my entrails now. Apparently my captors were not intimidated by my din.

“Get the hood on him, Shamit!” Cawley said. “What in the name of God are you waiting for?”

“What if he bites me?” Shamit moaned.

“Then you’ll die a horrible death, foaming at the mouth like a mad dog,” Cawley replied. “So put the blasted hood on him and be quick about it!”

There was a flurry of activity as everybody got about their business. The priest instructed the fumbling Nycross in the business of preparing the shackles for my wrists and ankles, while Cawley gave orders from the little distance he had retreated to.

“Hood first! Watch for his hands, O’Brien! He’ll reach through the net! This is a wily one, no doubt of that!”

As soon as Shamit and Hacker put the hood over my head Cawley came back at me and struck it sharply with the bar he carried, iron to iron. The noise made the dome of my skull reverberate and shook my thoughts to mush.

“Now, Pox!” I heard Cawley yelling through his confused thoughts. “Get him out of the net while he’s still reeling.” And just for good measure he struck the iron hood a second time, so that the new echoes through iron and bone caught up with the remnants of the first.

Did I howl, or only imagine that I did? The noise in my head was so stupefying I wasn’t certain of anything, except my own helplessness. When the reverberations of Cawley’s strikes finally started to die away and some sense of my condition returned, they had me out of the net, and Cawley was giving more orders.

“Shackles go on the feet first, Pox! You hear me? Feet!”

My feet, I thought. He’s afraid I’m going to run.

I didn’t analyze the matter more than that. I simply struck out to the left and right of me, my gaze too restricted by the hood to be sure of who I had struck, but pleased to feel the greasy hands that had been holding me lose their grip. Then I did precisely as Cawley had prompted me to do. I ran.

I put perhaps ten strides between myself and my assailants. Only then did I panic. The reason? The night sky.

In the short time since Cawley had hauled me up out of the fissure the day had started to die, bleeding stars. And above me, for the first time in my life, was the fathomless immensity of the heaven. The threat Cawley and his thugs presented seemed inconsequential beside the terror of that great expanse of darkness overhead, which the stars, however numerous, could not hope to illuminate. Indeed, there had been nothing that the torturer of Hell had invented that was as terrifying as this: space.

Cawley’s voice stirred me from my awe. “Get after him, you idiots! He’s just one little demon. What harm can he do?”

It wasn’t a happy truth, but the truth it was. If they caught up with me again I would be lost. They wouldn’t make the mistake of letting me slip a second time. I leaned forwards, and the let the weight of the iron hood allow it to slide off my head. It hit the ground between my feet. Then I stood up and assessed my situation more clearly.

To my left was a steep slope, with a spill of firelight illuminating the smoky air at its rim. To my right, and spreading in front of me, were the fringes of a forest, its trees silhouetted against another source of firelight, somewhere within.

Behind me, close behind me, were Cawley and his men.

I ran for the trees, fearing that if I attempted the slope one of my tormentors could be quicker and catch up with me before I reached the ridge. Within a few strides I had reached the slim young trees that bordered the forest and began to weave between them, my tails lashing furiously left and right as I ran.

I had the satisfaction of hearing a note of disbelief in Cawley’s voice as he yelled:

“No, no! I can’t lose him now! I won’t! I won’t! Move your bones, you imbeciles, or I’ll crack open somebody’s skull!”

By now I had passed through the young growth and was running between far older trees, their immense girth and the knotty thicket that grew between them concealing me ever more thoroughly. Soon, if I was cautious, I’d lose Cawley and his cohort, if I hadn’t already done so.

I found a tree of immense girth, its branches so weighed down by the summer’s bounty of leaves and blossoms that they drooped to meet the bushes that grew all around it. I took shelter behind the tree, and listened. My pursuers were suddenly silent, which was discomforting. I held my breath, listening for even the slightest sound that would give me a clue to their whereabouts. I didn’t like what I heard: voices whispering from at least two directions. Cawley had divided up his gang it seemed, so as to come at me from several directions at once. I took a breath, and set off again, pausing every few steps to listen for my pursuers. They weren’t gaining on me, nor was I losing them. Confident that I was not going to escape him, Cawley began to call out to me.

“Where’d you think you’re running to, you piece of filth? You’re not getting away from me. I can smell your demon dung stench a mile away. You hear me? There’s no place you can go where I won’t come after you, treading on your two tails, you little freak. I’ve got buyers who’ll pay good coins for your whole skeleton with those tails of yours, all wired up so they stand proud. You are going to make me a nice fine profit, when I catch up with you.”

The fact that I could hear Cawley’s voice so close, and imagined that I knew his whereabouts, made me careless. In listening to him so intently I lost my grasp of where I’d heard the others coming from, and suddenly the Pox lunged out of the shadows. Had he not made the error of announcing that he had me captured before his huge hands had actually caught hold of me, I would have been his captive. But his boast came a few precious seconds too early, and I had time to duck beneath his plagued hand, stumbling back through the thicket as he came in blundering pursuit.