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than the sun. I saw Quitoon flinch, and then, putting his hands above his head as
though to keep him-self 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 gath-ered 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 in-candescence 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, per-haps, 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 dark-ness 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 detest-able clarity. All the myriad tiny things my gaze
would have previously passed over without lingering was now demand-ing 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 con-gealed. 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 they in turn
studied me.
All that was left of the pieman's physical being was a smok-ing, 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 realiza-tion, 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 pal-aces 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 eter-nal 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 nau-seating 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, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
