Mister B. Gone Read Free

my journals. But my scales protected me for a little while at least. Then it began to feel as though my face were frying. I still didn’t move. I wanted to be as close to my beloved words as I could be. I just stayed where I was, watching the fire do its work. It had a systematic way of unmaking each of the books page by page, burning away one to expose the one beneath, which was then quickly consumed in its turn, giving me glimpses of death-machines and revenges I had written about before the fire took them too.
    Still I stood there, inhaling the searing air, my head filling up with visions of the horrors I had conjured up on those pages; vast creations that were designed to make every one of my enemies (which is to say everyone I knew, for I liked no one) a death as long and painful as I could make it. I wasn’t even aware of my mother’s presence now. I was just staring into the fire, my heart hammering in my chest because I was so close to the heat; my head, despite the weight of atrocities that was filling it up, strangely light.
    And then:
    “ Jakabok!”
    I was still sufficiently in charge of my thoughts to recognize my name and the voice that spoke it. I reluctantly took my eyes off the cremation and looked up through the heat-crazed air towards Pappy Gatmuss. I could tell his temper was not good by the motion of his two tails, which were standing straight up from their root above his buttocks, wrapping themselves around one another, then unwrapping, all at great speed and with such force behind their intertwining it was as though each tail wanted to squeeze the other until it burst.
    I inherited the rare double-tail by the way. That was one of the two gifts he gave me. But I wasn’t feeling any great measure of gratitude now, as he came lumbering towards the fire, yelling at my mother as he did so, demanding to know what she was doing making bonfires, and what was she burning anyway? I didn’t hear my mother’s response. The blood in my head was whining now so loud that it was all I could hear. Their fights and rages could go on for hours sometimes, so I cautiously returned my gaze to the fire, which, thanks to the sheer volume of paper that was being consumed, still blazed as furiously as ever.
    I had been breathing short shallow breaths for several minutes now, while my heart beat a wild tattoo. Now my consciousness fluttered like a candle flame in a high wind; any moment, I knew, it would go out. I didn’t care. I felt strangely removed from everything now, as though none of this was really happening.
    Then, without any warning, my legs gave way, and I fainted, falling facedown—
    into—
    the—
    fire.

    So there you are. Satisfied now? I have never told anybody that story in the many hundreds of years since it happened. But I’ve told it to you now, just so you’d see how I feel about books.
    Why I need to see them burned.
    It’s not hard to understand, is it? I was a little demon-child who saw my work go up in flames. It wasn’t fair. Why did I have to lose my chance to tell my story when hundreds of others with much duller tales to tell have their books in print all the time?
    I know the kind of lives authors get to live. Up in the morning, doesn’t matter how late, stumbles to his desk without bothering to bathe, then he sits down, lights up a cigar, drinks his sweet tea, and writes whatever rubbish comes into his head. What a life! I could have had a life like that if my first masterwork had not been burned in front of me. And I have great works in me.
    Works to make Heaven weep and Hell repent. But did I get to write them, to pour my soul onto the pages? No .
    Instead, I’m a prisoner between the covers of this squalid little volume, with only one request to make of some compassionate soul:
    Burn This Book.

    No, no, and still no.
    Why are you hesitating? Do you think you’ll find some titillating details about the Demonation in here? Something depraved or salacious, like the nonsense