Clive Barker - Mister B. Gone

"You look nervous, Mister B."

"Not nervous, just surprised."

"At what?"

"You. Here. I didn't expect to see you again so soon."

"Then, again I ask you why did you follow me?"

"I didn't."

"You're a liar. A bad liar. A terrible liar." He shook his head. "I despair of you, truly I do. Have you learned nothing over the years? If you can't tell a decent lie, then tell me the truth." He glanced over at the pieman. "Or are you attempting to preserve some fragment of dignity for this imbecile's sake?"

"He's not an imbecile. He makes pies."

"Oh, well." Quitoon laughed, genuinely amused at this. "If he makes pies, no wonder you don't want him knowing your secrets."

"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.