“They’re good pies,” I said.
“Apparently so. As he has sold them all. He’s going to need to bake some more.”
At this point, the pieman spoke up, which unfortunately won him Quitoon’s gaze.
“I’ll cook some for you,” he said to Quitoon. “Meat pies I can do you, but it’s my sweet pies that I’m known for. Honey and apricots, that’s a favorite amongst my customers.”
“But however do you cook them?” Quitoon said. I’d heard that sing-song tone of mock-fascination in his voice before, and it wasn’t a good sign.
“Leave him alone,” I said to Quitoon.
“No,” he said, keeping his gaze fixed on the man. “I don’t think I will. In fact, I’m certain of it. You were saying,” he said to the man, “about your pies.”
“Just that I cook the sweet ones best.”
“But you can’t cook them here, can you?”
The pieman looked a little puzzled by the obviousness of this remark. I silently willed him to let puzzlement silence his tongue so that the little death game Quitoon was playing could be brought to a harmless conclusion.
But no. Quitoon had begun the game and would not be content until he was ready to be done.
“What I mean to say is, you don’t make cold pies, do you?”
“God in Heaven, no!” The pieman laughed. “I need an oven.”
If he’d stopped there, even, the worst might still have been avoided. But he wasn’t quite done. He needed an oven, yes . . .
“And a good fire,” he added.
“A fire, you say?”
“Quitoon, please,” I begged. “Let him be.”
“But you heard what the man wanted,” Quitoon replied.
“You heard it from his own lips.”
I ceased my entreaties. They were purposeless, I knew. The peculiar motion, like a subtle shudder that preceded the spewing forth of fire, had already passed through Quitoon’s body.
“He wanted a fire,” he said to me, “and a fire he shall have.”
At that moment, as the fire broke from Quitoon’s lips, I did something sudden and stupid. I threw myself between the fire and its target.
I had burned before. I knew that even on a day such as today, which was full of little apocalypses, that fire couldn’t do much damage. But Quitoon’s flames had an intelligence entirely their own, and they instantly went where they could do me most harm, which was of course to those parts of my body where the first fire had failed to touch me. I turned my back to him—yelling for the pieman to go, go, and went behind the counter where the pool of the butcher’s blood was now three times as big as it had been when I’d first laid eyes on him. I threw myself down into the blood as though it were a pool of spring water, rolling around in it. The smell was disgusting, of course. But I didn’t care. I could hear the satisfying sizzle of my burning flesh being put out by the good butcher’s offering, and a few seconds later I rose, smoking and dripping from behind the counter.
I was too late to intervene again on behalf of the pieman.
Quitoon had caught him at the door. He was entirely engulfed in flames, his head thrown back and his mouth wide open, but robbed of sound by his first and last inhalation of fire. As for Quitoon, he was nonchalantly walking around the burning man, plucking an ambitious flame from the conflagration and letting it dance between his fingers a while before extinguishing it in his fist. And while he played, and the pieman blazed, Quitoon asked him questions, dangling as a reward for the man’s replies (one nod for yes, two for no) the prospect of a quick end to his suffering. He wanted first to know whether the pieman had ever burned any of his pies.
One nod for that.
“Burned black, were they?”
Another nod.
“But they didn’t suffer. That’s what you hoped, I’m sure, being a good Christian.”
Again, the affirmative nod, though the fire was rapidly consuming the pieman’s power of self-control.
“You were wrong, though,” Quitoon went on. “There’s nothing that does not know suffering. Nothing in all the world. So you be happy in your fire, pieman, because—”
He stopped, and a puzzled expression came onto his face. He cocked his head, as if listening to something that was hard for him to hear over the noise of burning. But even if the message was incomplete he had caught the general sense of it and he was appalled.
“Damn them,” he growled, and, casually pushing the burning man aside, he went to the door.
As he reached the threshold, however, a brightness fell upon it, more intense by far than the sun. I saw Quitoon flinch, and then, putting his hands above his head as though to keep himself from being struck down by a rain of stones, he ran off into the street.
I could not follow. I was too late. Angels were coming into that sordid little shop, and all thoughts of Quitoon went from my head. The Heavenly presences were not with me in the flesh, nor did they speak with words that I could set down here, as I have set down my own words.
They moved like a field of innumerable flowers, each bloom lit by the blaze of a thousand candles, their voices reverberating in the air as they called forth the soul of the pieman. I saw him rise up, shrugging off the blackened remnants of his body—his soul shaped like the babe, boy, youth, and man he’d been, all in one—and went into their bright, loving company.
Need I tell you I could not follow? I was excrement in a place where glories were in motion, the pieman amongst them, his lighted soul instantly familiar with the dance of death to which he’d been summoned. He was not the only human there. What the pieman’s wife Marta had called celestial presences had gathered up others, including Quitoon’s two earlier victims, who I’d seen ablaze in the street, and the butcher and his spouse. They danced all around me, indifferent to the laws of the physical world, some rising up through the ceiling, then swooping down like jubilant birds, others gracefully moving beneath me in the dirt where the dead were conventionally laid to rot.
Even now, after the passage of centuries, whenever I think of their beatific light and their dances and their wordless songs, each—light, dance, and song—in some exquisite fashion married to a part of the other, my stomach spasms, and it’s all I can do to not to vomit. There was such bitter eloquence in the vibrations that moved in the air; and in the angels’ light was a mingling of gentility and piercing fury. Like surgeons with incandescence instead of scalpels, they opened a door of flesh and bone in the middle of my chest, by which their spirits came in to study the encrustations of sin that had accrued inside me. I was not prepared for this scrutiny, or for the possibility of some judgment to be delivered. I wanted to be free from this place, from any place where they might find me, which is to say, perhaps, that I wanted to die because I knew, feeling their voice and light, that there was nowhere I would ever be safe again, except in the arms of oblivion.
And then they did something even worse than touching me with their presence. They removed themselves, and left me without them, which was more terrible still. There was no darkness so profound as the simple daylight they left me in, nor any noise so soul-cracking as the silence left when they departed.
I felt such a rage then. By God! There had never been such a rage in me, no, nor in any demon, I swear, from the Fall itself, that was the equal of the fury that seized me then.
I looked around the butcher’s shop, which my sight, as if sharpened by the angels’ brightness, now saw with a detestable clarity. All the myriad tiny things my gaze would have previously passed over without lingering was now demanding the respect of my scrutiny, and my eyes could not resist them. Every crack in the walls and ceilings sought to seduce me with their lovely particulars. Each bead of the butcher’s blood splattered on the tile bid me wait with it while it congealed. And the flies! The gluttonous thousands that had been summoned by the stench of death, circling the room filled, perhaps, with some variation upon the fury that had seized me: their mosaic eyes demanding respectful study from my own gaze, as the
y in turn studied me.
All that was left of the pieman’s physical being was a smoking, blackened form, its limbs drawn up against its body by the heat that had tightened its muscles. The essence of him, of course, had departed with the angelic host to witness glories I would never know and live in a joy I would never taste.
As I stood there, half-crazed, I was seized by a sudden realization, more painful than any cut. I would never be of the angelic class. I would never be adored and hosannaed. And so, if I could never escape my vile, broken condition, I decided that I would do my best to be the worst thing Hell had ever vomited forth. I would be all that Quitoon had been to the power of a thousand.
I would be a destroyer, a tormentor, a voice of death in the palaces of the great and the good. I would be a killer of every form of loving innocence: the infant, the virgin, the loving mother, the pious father, the loyal dog, the bird singing up the day. All of them would fall before me.
As the angels had been to light, so I would be to its absence.
I would be a thing more supposed than seen, a voice that spoke not in words but in orders of shadows; my two hands, these very hands that I hold up before you now, happily performing the simple cruelties that would keep me from forgetting who I had been before I had become Darkness Incarnate: thumbing out eyes, plucking nerves with my nails, pressing hearts between my palms.
I saw all of this not as I have written it down, with one thing following upon another, but all at once, so that I was that same Jakabok Botch who had entered the butcher’s shop a few minutes before and utterly another the next. I was murder and betrayal; I was deceit and bigotry and willful ignorance; I was guilt, I was acquisitiveness, I was revenge; I was despair and hatred and corruption. In time I would become an inciter of stonings in the blaze of noon and of lynchings at midnight. I would teach children how to find the sharpest stones, and young men how to tie slow-death nooses. I would sit with the widow-women at their hearths, and staring into the flames licking the chimney’s throat, I’d beg them to tell me the shapes that the Old One had taken, in times before time, so that I would know what face I should make for myself to stir up terror in the bowels of victims yet unborn.
And when at last I was God—that is to say, when the eternal Wheel of Being, ever turning, ever choosing—had used up all the finer souls than mine and given me my Day as Deity, I would know how to drive your species insane with the shadows of terrors they had no hope of reasoning with.
Was it possible that in the brief time it had taken for the nauseating host of angels to enter the butcher’s shop, driving Quitoon from its threshold in the process, and then claiming the pieman’s soul and departing with him into some unknowable perfection, that I could have sloughed off the lamentable thing I had been, a listless coward lost in a daze of unrequited love, and become the vessel of limitless abominations?
No. Of course, not. The Jakabok Botch who had just come into being had been maturing in the womb of my rage for the better part of a century, swelling like a child I had got upon myself, in defiance of all rational law. And there in that squalid place, with the stares of the flies upon me, I had let the repugnant child kill its father, as I had killed mine. And now it was unleashed, merciless and implacable.
You speak to that same creature now. The murderous, depraved, vengeful, hate-filled inciter of public slayings and domestic slaughters; the rapist, the smotherer, the divinity of carrion-flies and their maggot brood, the vilest, even amongst the vilest. I was cured, in my new infancy, of all the tired wisdom of age. I would never wither into that wearied state again, I swore to myself. I would always be this raw, wet child hereafter, a toxic spring that would flow with small but constant force, until it had poisoned every living thing in its vicinity.
Do you see now why it really would be best for everybody if you simply did what I asked you to do at the beginning?
BURN THIS BOOK.
Oh, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, well, he’s almost finished this idiot confession of his. What can the few remaining pages matter?
Let me tell you something. You’ll recall my requesting you to keep count of the pages? Well, I’ve counted out the number of pages to the end of this testament and I am that precise number of strides behind you. Even as you read these very words. Yes.
Right now. I’m behind you right now.
Did I feel your fingers gripping the book a little tighter? I did, didn’t I?
You don’t want to believe me, but there’s a little superstitious part of your construction that’s older than the human in you, older than the ape in you, and it doesn’t matter how many times you tell yourself that I’m just a lying demon and that none of what I’m telling you is true, that part of you whispers something different in your ear.
It says:
He’s here. Be very careful. He’s probably been here all along, walking behind you.
That voice knows the truth.
If you want proof, all you have to do is keep defying me, keep turning the pages, and for every page you turn in defiance of me I will take one stride towards you. Do you understand me?
One page, one stride. Until you get to the end of the pages.
And what then?
Then I will be standing close enough to reach around and slit your defiant throat.
Which
I
Will
Do.
Don’t for a minute believe I won’t.
I brought you this far so you could see for yourself how I gave up every last particle of hope I ever had, and became the antithesis of all things that turn their faces to the good and the light; all things, as you would probably say it in your idiot way, that are holy.
I brought you this far so you could see how that part of me that had wanted to love—no, that had loved—was murdered in a butcher’s shop in Mainz, and how I saw what I really was, once it was gone. What I really am.
Don’t doubt that voice in you that speaks in terrors. It knows the truth. If you want to keep me from coming one step closer to you, don’t even think about turning another page. Do what you know you should do.
Burn this book.
Go on.
BURN THE DAMN BOOK!
What’s wrong with you? Do you want to die? Is that it? Is death the answer? Then what’s the question, monkey? Is the news so bad today you can’t imagine getting up tomorrow? I can understand that. All of us are clinging to this dog-eared planet as it falls into the dark behind the shelves. I understand.
Better than you give me credit for, probably. I understand. You would like to live without the shadow falling, always falling; without the darkness creeping up on you just when you think everything’s going well.
You want happiness.
Of course, you do. Of course. And you deserve it.
So . . .
Don’t let anybody know I’m telling you this, because I’m not supposed to. But we’ve come so far together, haven’t we, and I know how painful it’s been for you, how much you’ve suffered.
I’ve seen it on your face, in your eyes, in the way your mouth turns down at the corners when you’re reading me.
Suppose I could make that better. Suppose I could promise you a long, painless life in a house on a high hill, with one great big tree beside it? The house is a thousand years old, at least, and when the wind comes up out of the south, smelling of oranges, the tree churns like a vast green thunderhead, except there is no lightning out of it, only blossoms.
Suppose I could tell you where the keys to that house are waiting, along with all the paperwork of course, just waiting for your signature? I can. I can tell you.
And as I said, you deserve it. You do, truly. You’ve suffered enough. You’ve seen others hurt, and you’ve been hurt yourself.
A deep hurt, so don’t punish yourself for picking up a book that was half-crazy.
That was just me testing you a little bit. You can understand that, I’m sure. When the prize is a life without pain, lived in
a house the angels envy, I had to be careful about my choice. I couldn’t give it to just anybody.
But you—oh you’re perfect. The house is going to open its arms to you and you’re going to think: that Mister B. wasn’t such a godless thing after all. All right, he made me jump through a few hoops and had me burn that little book, but what does any of that matter now? I live in a house the angels envy.
Did I tell you that already? I did, didn’t I? I’m sorry. I get a little carried away when I talk about the house. There are no words to explain the beauty of the place. You’ll be safe there, even from God. Think of that. Safe even from God, who is cruel, just as we would all be cruel if we were Gods, and had no fear of death or judgment.
In that house you’re immune from Him. There is no voice speaking in your head; there are no Commandments; no bushes burning but unconsumed outside the window. In that house there is only you and your loved ones, living lives without hurt. All for a very reasonable price. A flame. A tiny flame that will burn these pages away forever.
And isn’t that the way you’ll want it, anyway, when you’re living in the house on the hill? You won’t want this dirty old book that threatened and terrorized you. It’s better gone and gone forever. Why be reminded?
The house is yours. I swear on the wings of the Morningstar.
Yours. All you have to do is burn these words—and me with them—so we are never again seen on the face of the earth.
I can’t decide whether you’re suicidal, mentally deficient, or both? I’ve warned you how close I am. You don’t truly want my knife at your neck, do you? You want to live. Surely.
Take the house on the hill, and be happy there. Forget you ever heard the name of Jakabok Botch. Forget I ever told you my story and—
Oh.
My story. Is that what this is about? The shadow of my pitiful life, flickering on the cave of your skull? Do you ache so much to know how I got from a butcher’s shop in Mainz to the words you’re reading now that you’d give up the house on the hill, and its churning tree, and a life without pain that even the angels—