“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.
Pappy G. fired from the window I’d just jumped out of a minute or two after I’d started to climb the heap of trash, and then he fired again when I reached the top. Both bullets missed me, but not by much. If he managed to make the jump himself, and then closed the distance between us, he would shoot me, in the back, I knew, without giving the deed a second thought. And as I stumbled and rolled down the far side of the hill of stinking refuse, I thought to myself that if the choice was between dying out here, shot down by Pappy G., and being taken back to the house to be beaten and mocked, I would prefer the former.
It was a little early to be entertaining thoughts of death, however. Even though my burned body was emerging from its shocked state and starting to pain me, I was still nimble enough to move over the mounds of rotted food and discarded furniture with some speed, whereas Pappy G.’s sheer height and cumbersome body made the garbage heaps far more treacherous. Two or three times I lost all sight of him, and even dared believe I had slipped him. But Gatmuss had the instincts of a hunter. He tracked me through the chaos, up one slope and down another, the troughs getting deeper and the peaks higher, as I ventured farther from the house.
And I was slowing down. The effort of climbing the heaps of refuse was taking its toll, the garbage sliding away beneath my feet as I attempted to scramble up their ever-steeper slopes.
It was only a matter of time now, I knew, before the end came. So I decided to stop once I reached the summit of the pile I was climbing, and give Pappy G. a good clear shot of me. My body was fast approaching collapse, the muscles of my calves spasming so painfully I cried out, my hands and arms a mass of gashes from slitting my cooked flesh on the shards of glass and the raw edges of tin cans as I sought a handhold.
My mind was now made up. Once I reached the top of this hillock I would give up the chase and, keeping my back to Gatmuss so that he couldn’t see the despair upon my face and take some pleasure from it, I would await his bullet. With the decision made I felt curiously unencumbered and climbed easily up to my chosen death site.
Now all I had to do was——
Wait! What was that hanging in the air in the trench between this summit and the next? It looked to my weary eyes like two beautiful shanks of raw meat, with——could I believe what I was seeing?——cans of beer attached to each piece of meat.
I had heard stories of people who, lost in great deserts, seemed to see the very image of what they wanted most at that moment: a glittering pool of refreshing water, most likely, surrounded by date palms lush with ripe fruit. These mirages are the first sign that the wanderer is losing his grip on reality, I knew, because the faster he chases this phantom pool with its shady bower of fruit-laden trees, the faster it recedes from him.
Was I now completely crazy? I had to know. Forsaking the spot where I had intended to perish, I slid down the incline towards the place where the steak and beer hung, moving just a little on a creaking rope that disappeared into the darkness high above us. The closer I got, the more certain I became that this was not, as I’d feared, an illusion, but the real thing; a suspicion that was confirmed moments later when my salivating mouth closed round a nice lean portion of the steak. It was better than good, it was exceptional, the meat melting in my mouth. I opened the chilly can of beer, and raised it to my lipless mouth, which had dealt well with the challenge of biting into the steak and now had their hurts soothed by a bathing of cold beer.
I was silently thanking whatever kindly soul had left these refreshments to be found by a lost traveler when I heard a bellowing from Pappy G., and from the corner of my eye I saw him at the very spot I’d chosen to die.
“Leave some of that for me, boy!” he yelled, and having seemingly forgotten the enmity between us, so moved was he by the sight of the steak and beer, he came down the steep slope in great strides. As he did so he yelled:
“If you touch that other steak and beer, boy, I will kill you three times over, I swear!”
In truth, I had no intention of eating into the other steak. I’d eaten all I could. I was happy to nibble at my steak bone, which still had a hook around it, the hook attached to one of the two ropes that hung so closely together that I’d assumed they were one.
Now, however, with my stomach filled, I could afford to be inquisitive. This wasn’t a single rope holding both beer cans. There was a second rope, much darker than the bright yellow of the food provider, which hung innocently beside the others. Nothing I saw hung from it. My gaze followed it down past my shoulder, hand, leg, knee, and foot, only to find that it disappeared into the mass of garbage on which I stood.
I bent over at my hips, my fire-stiffened torso almost touching my legs, and went on searching for the continuation of the rope amongst the trash.
“You drop a bone, did you, idiot?” Pappy Gatmuss said, his words accompanied by a shower of spittle, gristle, and beer. “Don’t you take too much longer down there, you hear me? Just because you ordered me a steak and beer doesn’t mean … Oh wait! Ha! You stay right where you are, boy. I’m not going to put my cold gun in your ear to blow off your head. I’m going to put it in your rear and blow off your …”
“It’s a trap,” I said quietly.
“What ’ya talkin’ about?”
“The food. It’s bait. Somebody’s trying to catch——”
Before I could speak the syllable that would finish my sentence, my prophecy was proved.
The second rope, the dark stranger that had lingered so close to its bright yellow companion that had been almost invisible, was suddenly jerked eight or ten feet into the air, pulling the two dark ropes taut and hauling into view two nets, which were large enough and spread widely enough that whoever was fishing from Above was knowledgeable enough about the Underworld to know about the presence here of the remnants of the Demonation.
Seeing the immensity of the nets, I took some comfort from the fact that even if I’d comprehended the trap in which we were standing more quickly, we would never have been able to get beyond the perimeter of the net before those in the World Above——The Fishermen as I had already mentally dubbed them——sensed some motion on their