Mister B. Gone by Clive Barker

Author:Clive Barker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Horror, fiction
ISBN: 9780007303304
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 2008-10-20T22:00:00+00:00

We vacated the house through the back door while von Berg’s legion of soldiers, priests, and vengeful mothers came in at the front. Had the forest’s depths not been so familiar to me from the many hours I’d wandered there, naively imagining my idyllic life with Quitoon and the goat, we would doubtless have been chased down by our pursuers and cut to pieces. But my meanderings had given me a greater grasp of the forest’s labyrinthine ways than I’d known I knew and following them we gradually put a comfortable distance between the von Berg’s legion and ourselves. We slowed our pace a little, but didn’t stop until every last cry they made had faded away.

We rested awhile, not speaking. I was listening to the birds calling to one another, their music far more intricate than the simple bright notes the birds who lived in the sun-filled trees at the fringes of the forest sang. Darkness changes everything.

Quitoon was apparently thinking about Mainz, because much later, as we emerged from the other side of the forest, easily thirty miles from our point of entry, and he spied three huntsmen on horses, he immediately suggested we hunt the hunters, take whatever clothes, weapons, and bread and wine they were carrying, along with their horses.

With this done, we sat amongst the naked dead while we ate and drank.

“We should probably bury them,” I said.

I knew as I made the suggestion that Quitoon would not want to waste time digging graves. But I had not foreseen the solution he had in mind. It was impressive, I will admit that.

At his instruction we dragged the three dead men perhaps fifty yards deeper into the forest, where the trees grew high and the canopy thick. Then, to my astonishment, Quitoon cradled one of the corpses in his arms and dropping to his haunches suddenly sprang up, throwing the body up into the branches with such force that it pierced the heavy canopy. It was quickly gone from sight, but I heard its continued ascent for several seconds until it finally lodged in some high place where bigger, hungrier birds than those that sang in the lower branches would quickly strip the flesh from it.

He did the same thing with the two other bodies, choosing a different spot for each. When he was done he was a little breathless, but well pleased with himself.

“Let those who finally find them make sense of that,” he said. “What does that expression mean, Mister B.?”

“I am merely amazed,” I said. “A hundred years together and you’ve still got new tricks up your sleeve.”

He did not disguise his satisfaction, but smiled smugly.

“Whatever would you do without me?” he said.

“Die.”

“For want of food?”

“No. For want of your company.”

“If you had never met me, you would have no reason to mourn my absence.”

“But I did and I would,” I said, and turning from his scrutiny, which made my burned cheeks burn again, I headed back towards the horses.

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