Mister B. Gone Read Online Free PDF

reach my machete, I swear I’d hack you to pieces right here and now.”
    He struggled as he accused me, attempting to get his arms to reach back towards the net, where I presume he had the machete. But he had been trapped by the net in such a way as to make any such movement impossible. He was stuck.
    I, however, was not. I still had in my possession the knife I had picked up in the kitchen. It wasn’t a very large knife, but it was serrated, which was useful. It would do the job.
    I reached out and started to saw at the rope that was holding up the net containing Pappy G. I knew I would have to be quick.
    We had already passed through the Sixth Circle and were rising through the Fifth. I paid no attention to the details of their topographies now. I just kept a mental count of their number. All the rest of my concentration went into working on the rope.
    The outpouring of nauseating filth from the mouth of Pappy G. was growing more obscene, of course, as my little knife finally began to have some effect upon the rope. We were passing through the Fourth Circle now, but I couldn’t tell you a thing about it. I was sawing for my life, literally. If I failed to cut the rope before we reached our destination, which I assumed to be the World Above, and Gatmuss was freed from his net by whoever was hauling us up, he would slaughter me without need of machete or gun. He’d simply pull me limb from limb. I’d seen him do it to other demons, a lot larger than me.
    It was powerful motivation, let me tell you, to hear my father’s threats and insults becoming ever more incomprehensible with fury until they finally turned into an incoherent outpouring of hatred. Once in a while I would glance down at his face, which was pressed tight against the confines of the net. His porcine features were turned up at me, his eyes fixed on me.
    There was death in those eyes. My death, needless to say, rehearsed over and over in that testicle-sized brain of his.
    While it seemed to him he suddenly had my attention, he stopped piling insult upon insult and tried, as though I hadn’t heard all the obscenities he’d been spewing, to move me with absurdities.
    “I love you, son.”
    I had to laugh. I’d never been so entertained by something in my entire life. And there was more to come; all priceless idiocies.
    “We’re different, sure. I’m mean, you’re a little guy and I’m . . .”
    “Not?” I offered.
    He grinned. Clearly we understood one another. “Right.
    Not. And when you’re not, like me, and your son is, then it’s not fair for me to be slapping him around night and day?”
    I thought I’d confuse him by playing the demon’s advocate.
    “Are you sure?” I asked him.
    His grin withered a little now, and panic infected his tiny glittering eyes. “Shouldn’t I be?” he said.
    “Don’t ask me. I’m not the one who’s telling me what he thinks is—”
    “Ah!” he said, cutting me off in his haste to keep a thought he’d seized from escaping him, “that’s it! It isn’t right?”
    “Isn’t it?” I said, still sawing away at the rope as the banter continued.
    “This,” Pappy G. said. “It isn’t right. A son shouldn’t kill his own father.”
    “Why not if his father tried to murder him?”
    “Not murder, boy. Never murder. Toughen up a little, maybe.
    But murder? No, never. Never.”
    “Well, Pappy, that makes you a better father than it does me a son,” I said to him. “But it isn’t going to stop me cutting this rope and it’s a very long fall from here. You’ll break in pieces, if you’re lucky.”
    “If I’m lucky?”
    “Yes. I wouldn’t want you to be lying down in that refuse with your back broken, but still alive. Not with all the hungry Demons and Damned that wander around down there. They’ll eat you alive. And that would be too terrible, even for you. So maybe you should make your peace and pray for death because it’ll be so much easier to die that way. Just a long fall, and