Mister B. Gone Read Free Page A

you’ve read in other books about the World Below (Hell, if you prefer)? Most of that stuff is invented. You do know that, don’t you? It’s just bits of gossip and scraps of superstition mixed up by some greedy author who knows nothing about the Demonation: nothing .
    Are you wondering how I know what’s being passed off as the truth these days? Well, I’m not completely without friends from the old days. We speak, mind to mind, when conditions permit.
    Like any prisoner locked up in solitary confinement I still manage to get news. Not much. But enough to keep me sane.
    I’m the real thing, you see. Unlike the impostors who pass themselves off as darkness incarnate, I am that darkness . And if I had a chance to escape this paper prison I would cause such anguish and shed such seas of blood the name Jakabok Botch would have stood as the very epitome of evil.
    I was—no, I am—the sworn enemy of mankind. And I take that enmity very seriously. When I was free I did all that I could to cause pain, without regard to the innocence or guilt of the human soul I was damning. The things I did! It would take another book for me to list the atrocities I was happily responsible for. The violations of holy places, and more often than not the accompanying violation of whomever was taking care of the place.
    Often these poor deluded devotees, thinking the image of their Savior in extremis possessed the power to drive me away, would advance upon me, wielding a crucifix and telling me to be gone.
    It never worked, of course. And oh, how they would scream and beg as I pulled them into my embrace. I am, needless to say, a creature of marvelous ugliness. The front of my body from the top of my head to those precious parts between my legs had been seared so badly in the fire into which I had fallen—and where Pappy Gatmuss had left me to burn for a minute or two while he slapped my mother around—that my reptilian appearance had become a mass of keloid tissue, shiny and seared.
    My face was—still is—a chaos of bubbles, little hard red domes of flesh where I’d fried in my own fat. My eyes are two holes, without lashes or brows. So is my nose. All of them, eyeholes and nostrils, constantly run with grey-green mucus so that there isn’t a moment, day or night, when I don’t have rivulets of foul fluids running down my cheeks.
    As to my mouth—of all my features, I wish I could possess my mouth again, just as it had been before the fire. I had my mother’s lips, generous below and above, and what kissing I had practiced, mainly on my hand or on a lonely pig, had convinced me that my lips would be the source of my good fortune. I would kiss with them, and lie with them; I would make victims and willing slaves of anyone my eyes desired, simply by talking a little, and following the talk with kisses, and the kisses with demands. And they’d melt into compliance, every one of them, happy to perform the most demeaning acts as long as I was there to reward them with a long, tongue-tied kiss when they were done.
    But the fire didn’t spare my lips. It took them too, erasing them utterly. My mouth is now just a slot that I can barely open an inch because the scarred flesh around it is too solid.
    Is it any wonder that I’m tired of my life? That I want it erased by fire? You’d want the same thing. So, in the name of empathy, burn this book. Do it for compassion’s sake, if you have the heart, or because you share my anger. There’s no saving me. I’m a lost cause, trapped forever between the covers of this book. So finish me.

    Why the hesitation? I’ve done as I promised, haven’t I?
    I’ve told you something about myself. Not everything, of course. Who could tell everything? But I have told you enough that I’m surely more than just words on a page, ordering you about. Oh yes, while I think of it, please allow me to apologize for that brutish, bullying way I started out. It’s something I inherited from Pappy G. and I’m