Come on, friend. I've unburdened myself; my confession is made. It's over to you.
I'm waiting. Doing my best to be patient.
Indeed, I will go so far as to say that I'm being more patient right now than I've ever been in my life. Here we are on page 18 and I've trusted you with some of the most painful confessions I have ever made to anyone, simply so that you would know this wasn't some fancy trick. It was a real and true account of what happened to me, which, were you ever to have seen me in the flesh, would be instantly verified. I am burned. Oh, how I am burned.
It's a sign of your mercy that I'm really waiting for. And your courage, which I've somehow sensed from the beginning was like your mercy, a quality you possessed. It does take courage to set a flame to your first book, to defy the sickly wisdom of your elders and preserve words as though they were in some way precious.
Think of the absurdity of that! Is there anything in your world or mine, Above or Below, that is so available as words? If the preciousness of things is bound in some measure to their rarity, then how precious can the sounds we make, waking or sleeping, in infancy or senility, sane, mad, or simply trying on hats, be? There's a surfeit of them. They spew from tongues and pens in their countless billions every day. Think of all that words express: the seductions, threats, demands, entreaties, prayers, curses, omens, proclamations, diagnoses, accusations, insinuations, testaments, judgments, reprieves, betrayals, laws, lies, and liberties. And so on, and on, words without end. Only when the last syllable has been spoken, whether it's a joyous hallelujah or someone complaining about their bowels, only then is it that I think we can reasonably assume the world will have ended. Created with a word, and — who knows? — maybe destroyed by one. I know about destruction, friend. More than I care to tell. I've seen such things, such foul and unspeakable things…
Never mind. Just the flame, please.
What's the delay? Oh wait. It isn't that remark I made back there about knowing destruction that's got you twitchy, is it? It is. You want to know what I've seen.
Why in Demonation can't you be satisfied with what you've been given? Why do you always have to know more?
We had an agreement. At least I thought we did. I thought all you needed was a simple confession and in return you'd cremate me: ink, paper, and glue consumed in one merciful blaze.
But that's not going to happen yet, is it?
Damn me for a fool. I shouldn't have said anything about my knowledge of destruction. As soon as you heard that word your blood started to quicken.
Well…
I suppose it won't hurt to tell you a little more, as long as we understand one another. I'll give you just one more piece of my life and then we're going to get this book cooked.
Yes?
All right, as long as we agree. There has to be an end to this or I'm going to start getting angry, and I could make things very unpleasant for you if I decided to do that. I can get this book to fly out of your hands and beat at your head 'til you're bleeding from every hole in your head. You think I'm bluffing? Don't tempt me. I'm not a complete fool. I half-expected that you'd want to hear a little bit more of my life. Don't think it's going to get bright and happy anytime soon. There was never a happy day in my whole life.
No, that's a lie. I was happy on the road with Quitoon. But that was all so long ago I can barely remember the places we went, never mind our conversations. Why does my memory work in such irrational ways? It remembers all the words to some stupid song I sang when I was an infant, but I forget what happened to me yesterday. That said, there are some events that are still so painful, so life changing, that they stay intact, despite all attempts by my mind to erase them.
All right. I surrender, a little. I'll tell you how I got from there to here. It's not a pretty sequence of events, believe me. But once I've unburdened myself any doubts you still have about what I've asked you to do will be forgotten. You'll burn the book when I'm finished. You will put me out of my misery, I swear.
So…
As is self-evident, I survived my fall into the fire and the minute or longer that Pappy Gatmuss left me to struggle there in my bed of flames. My skin, despite the toughness of my scales, melted and blistered while I attempted to get up. By the time Pappy G. caught hold of my tails, and unceremoniously dragged me out of the fire, then kicked me over, there was barely any life left in me. (I heard all this later from my mother. At the time I was mercifully unconscious.)
Pappy Gatmuss woke me up, however. He brought a pail of ice water from the house and drenched me. The shock of water dowsed the flames and brought me out of my faint in an instant. I sat up, gasping.
"Well look at you, boy," Pappy Gatmuss said. "Aren't you a sight to make a father weep?"
I looked down at my body, at the raw blistered and black flesh of my chest and belly.
Momma was yelling at Pappy. I didn't hear all she said but she seemed to be accusing him of deliberately leaving me in the fire in the hopes of killing me. I left them arguing, and crawled away into the house, grabbing a big serrated knife out of the kitchen in case I had to later defend myself from Gatmuss. Then I went up the stairs to the mirror in my mother's room and looked at my face. I should have prepared myself for the shock of what I saw, but I didn't give myself time. I stared at the bubbling, melting masterwork of burns that my face had become, and spontaneously vomited at my own reflection.
I was very gently wiping the vomit off my chin when I heard Gatmuss' yowl from the bottom of the stairs.
"Words, boy?" he yelled. "You were writing words about me?"
I peered over the banister, and saw the enraged behemoth below. He was carrying a few partially burned sheets covered with my scrawled writing. Obviously he'd plucked them from the fire, and had found some reference to himself. I knew my own work well enough to be certain that there was no mention of Gatmuss in any of those books that was not accompanied by clots of insulting adjectives. He was too stupid to know the meaning of "malodorous" and "heinous," but he wasn't so dense as to not be able to grasp the general tone of my feelings. I hated him with all my heart, and that hatred poured out of the pages he carried. He dragged his lumpen carcass up the stairs, calling to me as he came:
"I'm not a cretin, boy! I know what these here words mean. And I'm going to make you suffer for them, you hear me? I'm going to make a new fire and cook you in it, one minute for every bad word about me you wrote here. That's a lot of words, boy. And a lot of cooking, you are going to be burned black, boy!"
I didn't waste breath and time talking back at him. I had to get out of the house and into the darkened streets of our neighborhood, which was called the Ninth Circle. All the worst of Humankind's damned — the souls that neither bribes nor beatings could control — lived by their wits in its parasite-infested wastelands.
The source of all parasitic life was the maze of refuse at the back of our house. In return for our occupancy of the house, which was in a state of near decrepitude, Pappy G. was responsible for keeping watch on the garbage heaps and to discipline any souls who in his opinion were deserving of punishment. The freedom to be cruel suited Pappy G. hugely, of course. He'd go out every night armed with a machete and a gun, ready to maim in the name of the law. Now as he came up after me it was with that same machete and gun. I had no doubt that he would kill me if (or more likely, when, he caught up with me. I knew I had no chance of out-running him on the streets, so throwing myself out the window (my body curiously indifferent to pain in its present state of shock) and heading for the steep-sided heaps of refuse, where I knew I could lose him in the endless canyons of trash, was my only option.