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words! Go on. Turn the pages and see where it gets you. It won't be a house on a
hill, I'll tell you that. It'll be a plain wooden box in a hole in the ground, covered with
dirt. Is that what you want? Is it? Because you'd better understand, once I take this
deal off the table, I won't ever talk about it again.
This house is a once-in-a-lifetime, never-to-be-repeated offer, you understand me?
Of course you do. Why do I keep asking that, as if there was a single thing I've said
or done that you haven't understood to the last little syllable. So, do you want it, or
not? Make up your mind. My supply of patience is running perilously thin. It can't
fall any further. You hear me?
The house is waiting. Three more words and it's gone.
Don't.
Read.
Them.
You know what? I can see the house from here. My Lord, the wind's strong today.
The leaves on the tree are churning, just the way I said they did. But the gusts are so
very strong. I never felt a wind quite like this before. The tree isn't just creaking, it's
breaking. I can't believe it. After all these years. All the storms. All the snow,
weighing down its branches. But it's had enough. Its roots are being torn up out of
the ground. Oh, for pity's sake, why doesn't somebody do something before it hits
the house?
Oh, but of course. There's nobody in there. The house is empty. There's no one to
protect it.
Lord, that's a crying shame! Look at that tree falling and falling and
There goes the wall of the house, cracking like an egg struck by a hammer. That's
tragic. Nothing so beautiful should have to die like this. Alone and unloved. Oh,
there goes the roof. The branches have such weight, such ancient, aching weight,
and now the whole place is collapsing as the tree strikes it. Every wall, window, and
door. I can barely see it for dust.
Ah, well. No use looking really. It's gone.
As I said: a once-in-a-lifetime, never-to-be-repeated offer. Which could be said for
all of us if you were a sentimentalist. Which I'm not.
Anyway, it's gone. And there's nothing left in my pocket to charm you. So from now
on it's going to have to be tears or nothing, I'm afraid.
That's all that I've got left to tell you see: tears, tears, tears.
 *
When I left the butcher's shop, the sky was wearing a strange coat of colors. It was
though the aurora borealis had been caught hold of and dragged south 'til it hung
over the grubby little town like a promise of something greater, soon to come.
I hated it on sight. As if I needed to tell you that, knowing me as you now do. I
hated its beauty, certainly; but more than that: its serenity. That's what made me want
to climb up to the nearest steeple and try to pull it down. I had no time, however. I
had to find Quitoon, and let him see what I had become by staying in the company
of the angels, instead of fleeing them, as he had. All the genius of cruelty and the
anguish of the divine were in me now; I was a laying place for every fly whose
infants had an appetite for iniquity and ruination. My skull was a face that concealed
scorpions; my excrement was serpents, and the poison of serpents; the air I walked
in was glittered with shards of rabidity.
I wanted him to see what I had become. I wanted him to know that whatever he had
once been to me, I had ripped out of me the merciless meat of that love, if that's
what it was, and fed it to the feral children of Mainz.
It wasn't hard to follow where he'd gone. I was alive to the secret signs of the world
as I had never been alive before. It seemed I could see his phantom form moving
ahead of me through the streets, glancing back over his shoulder as he went, as
though he'd been afraid with every stride that the angels would come after him.
His fear had diminished after a time, it seemed. He'd slowed his run to a stumbling
walk, and had finally stopped completely to catch his breath. I parted from him
there, and went on with-out need of his phantom guidance. I knew the way.
So did others, many others, all converging on the place where my instinct was
leading me. I saw glimpses of them as they made their way through the human
throng. Some trailed swarms of black bees from the hives of their heads; some went
shame-lessly naked, defying the righteous, fearful citizens of Mainz to confess that
they witnessed them. Others moved through the thoroughfares by far stranger
means. There were bits of light weaving back and forth deep beneath the muddied
streets, and in the walls of the houses to the left and right of me other enti-ties made
their half-seen way, rising up to the eaves one moment and plunging down to the
level of the street the next. There were travelers whose bones blazed through
billowing robes of translucent flesh. There were headless, limbless beings that flew
through brick and timber on their way to that unknown destination that summoned us
all. Of their tribes or their allegiances it was impossible to make any meaningful
judgment. I had never seen their like in the Circles of Hell, but that meant nothing,
given how narrow my knowledge of that place had been. Perhaps they were higher
forms of demon or lower forms of angel; per-haps both. It was not inconceivable.
Nothing was, on that day.
And so I turned one last corner and came into the street where Johannes Gutenberg,
the most noted goldsmith in Mainz, had his workshop.
It was a commonplace building on a commonplace street, and had it not been for the
powers congregating there I would not have looked twice at it. But there was no
doubt that this unremarkable place contained something significant. Why else would
agents of Heaven and Hell be locked in such brutal combat on the roof, and in the air
above the roof, where they tumbled over and over, forms of sun and shadow,
wrapped around one another. These weren't performances, they were life or death
struggles. I saw a demon of no little magnificence drop out of the sky with the top
half of its head sheared off by an angel's sword, another torn apart by a gang of four
heavenly spirits, each taking a limb. There were other forces battling at far higher
altitudes, lightning strikes leaping from cloud to cloud, and flayed anatomies
descending in rains of excrement and gold. The citizens of Mainz showed a
stubborn refusal to see what was going on above. Their only concession to the fact
that today was not like any other was their silence as they made their way past the
Gutenberg workshop. They studied their muddy feet as they trudged by, their faces
wearing expressions of fake intent, as though their purposefulness would protect
them against any kind of rain, sulfuric or seraphic.
I had no more interest in the outcome of these battles than they. What did it matter to
me whether Heaven or Hell carried the day? I was my own force on this crowded
battlefield: a cap-tain, a soldier, and a drummer boy in an army of one.
That is not to say I would not take advantage of any oppor-tunity the battle might
present me with, the first of which came when I climbed the three stone steps that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]