Clive Barker - Mister B. Gone

I took advantage of their terrified state and deliberately unleashed another of Momma's Nightmare Cries, one so loud that blood ran copiously from the ears of many of those around me. I seized the opportunity to run, deliberately heading towards the woman who'd begun all this. She was still shrieking A demon! A demon! when I came to her. I caught her by the neck and threw her down into the gaping earth, put my mud-clogged claw on her face to silence her and, yes, smother her at the same time. She had wasted too much salvable breath with her accusations. The life went out of her in less than a minute.

With the job done I drove my way into the crowd, still trailing the last of my ear-popping shriek. The crowd before me parted as I ran. With my head down I had no idea of my direction, but I was certain that if I ran in a more or less straight line I would eventually reach the edge of the crowd, and open ground. Indeed I thought I had done so when the noise of the crowd suddenly diminished. I looked up. The crowd had not disappeared from around me because I had reached its limits but because two soldiers, armoured and helmeted, had arrived and had their halberds pointed directly at me. I slid to a mud-splattered halt a few inches short of their weapons' points, the last of my Momma's shriek faltering, then dying into silence.

The larger of the two soldiers, who was easily a foot and a half taller than his companion, lifted up the hinged faceplate on his helmet to see me better. His features were barely less imbecilic than those of the crowd surrounding me. The only light flickering in his gaze was fed by the knowledge that with the one lunge he could run me through and pin me to the ground, allowing the crowd to do their worst.

"What's your name?" he said.

"Jakabok Botch," I told him. "And please believe me — "

"Are you a demon?"

There was a burst of accusations from the rabble. I'd murdered an innocent woman, whom I'd cursed into Hell. And I'd made sounds that had left people deaf.

"Shut up, all of you!" the soldier yelled.

The noise diminished, and the soldier repeated his question. There seemed little point in denying what would be only too apparent if he obliged me to remove my clothes. So I owned up.

"Yes," I said, raising my arms as though in surrender. "I am a demon. But I'm here because I was tricked."

"Oh, the pity of it," the soldier said. "The poor little devil was tricked."

He poked me with the point of his halberd, aiming for the bloody stain where the original owner of these clothes had stabbed me. It was only a minor wound, but the soldier's prodding made it bleed afresh. I refused to let out a single sound of complaint. I knew from overhearing the idle chatter of Pappy G.'s torturer friends that nothing satisfied them more than to hear the shrieks and pleas of those whose nerve endings were beneath their gouges and brands.

The only problem with my silence was that it inspired the soldier to further invention in pursuit of some response. He pushed the halberd's blade still deeper, turning it as he did so. The flow of blood increased considerably, but I still refused to give voice to a single plea in pursuit of mercy.

Again, the soldier dug and twisted; again there was an issuing of blood; again I remained silent. By now my body had started to shake violently as I struggled to repress the urge to cry out. Taking these spasms as proof that I was in swift decay and as such no longer a threat to them, a few of the crowd, mostly women, hags of twenty or less, came at me, clawing at my clothes to tear them off me.

"Let's see you, demon!" one of them shrieked, catching hold of the shirt collar behind my head and tearing it away.

The burn scars on the front of my body were virtually indistinguishable from those on the body of a man; it was my unharmed back that told the true story, with its array of yellow and vermillion scales and the tiny black spines that ran up the middle of my back to the base of my skull.

The sight of my scales and spines brought cries of revulsion from the crowd. The soldier put the point of his halberd at my throat now, pricking me with sufficient enough force that blood ran from there too.

"Kill it!" somebody in the crowd yelled. "Saw off its head!"

The cry for my execution quickly spread, and I'm certain the soldier would have slit my throat then and there had his companion soldier, the shorter of the two, not come to his side and whispered something to him. The other made some reply, which apparently carried the day because my tormentor raised his armoured hand and yelled to the crowd:

"Quiet! All of you! I said BE QUIET , OR WE WILL ARREST EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU!"

The threat worked wonders. Every man and woman in the vicious circle surrounding me shut their mouths.

"That's better," the soldier said. "Now, you all need to back away and give us some room here, because we're going to take this demon to his Excellency the Archbishop, who will make a judgment about the way this creature will be executed."

The other soldier, his face hidden, nudged my tormentor, who listened for a moment, then replied to his comrade, loudly enough for me to hear. "I was getting to that," he said. "I know what I'm doing!"

Then, addressing the crowd again: "I'm formally arresting this demon in the name of his Excellency the Archbishop. If any of you get in our way you will be directly contradicting the will of His Excellency, and therefore of God himself. You understand? You will be condemned to the eternal fires of Hell if you make any attempt to prevent us from taking this creature to the Archbishop."

The soldier's pronouncement was clearly understood by the mob, who would have torn my executed corpse into tiny pieces and each pocketed a scrap of me for a souvenir if they'd had their way. Instead they kept silent, parents covering their children's mouths for fear that one of them make a sound, however innocent.

Absurdly proud of his little show of power, the soldier glanced back at his comrade. The two men exchanged nods, and the second soldier drew his sword (which he'd surely stolen, for it was of exceptional size and beauty) and came 'round behind me, poking me with the tip just above the root of my tails. He didn't need to tell me to move; I stumbled forwards, following the other soldier, who walked backwards for a few yards, his weapon still at my neck. The only sound the crowd made was the shuffling of their footsteps as they moved to make way for me and my captors. Smugly satisfied that his threats had made the crowd compliant and apparently certain he had nothing to fear from me, my tormentor turned around so as to lead our little party out through the crowd.

He strode confidently, for all the world like a man who knew where he was going. But he didn't, because when the crowd started to thin out I saw that we'd emerged on the other side of Joshua's Field, where there was another slope, much milder than the one I had descended, and crowned by a forest as dense as the one on the opposite side.

It was now, as our leader paused to consider his error, that I felt the soldier behind me poke me several times, not to do me harm but to draw my attention. I turned around. The soldier had raised his face guard just high enough to let me get a glimpse of him. Then, lowering his sword until the tip was almost in the mud, he nodded towards the slope.

I got the message. For the third time that day I started to run, pausing only to butt my tormentor with the halberd so hard that he lost his balance and fell sprawling in the mud.

Then I was away, across the remaining stretch of the field and up the slope towards the trees.

There was a fresh burst of shouting from the crowd behind me, but above it the voice of my savior, ordering the hoi-polloi to stay back.