Mister B. Gone Read Online Free PDF Page B

nothing. Blackness. The end of Pappy Gatmuss, once and for always.”
    We had passed through several Circles as we’d talked and, to be honest, I’d lost count of how many remained before we emerged into the World Above. Three perhaps. My knife was becoming dulled from the labor I’d put it to, but the rope was now cut through three quarters of the way, and the weight it was supporting put the remaining strands under such tension that they began to snap with the merest stroke of my blade.
    Now I knew we were close to the surface because I could hear voices from somewhere overhead; or rather one particular voice, yelling orders:
    “Keep hauling, all of you! Yes, that means you, too. Work!
    We’ve caught something big here. It’s not one of the giants, but it’s big!”
    I looked up. There was a layer of rock a few hundred feet above us, with a crack in it which widened in one place. It was through this wider portion of the fissure that the four ropes—the two supporting Pappy G. and myself and the pair that had held the bait, disappeared. The brightness through the crack was more powerful than anything I’d ever seen Below. It pricked my eyes, so I looked away from it and put all my energies into cutting the last stubborn strands of rope. The image of the crack was still burned into my sight, however, like a lightening strike.
    Throughout these last two or three minutes Pappy G. gave up both his litany of insults and the absurd attempt to appeal to my love for him as his son. He simply looked straight up at the hole in the heavens of the First Circle. The sight of it had apparently unleashed a primal terror in him, which found expression in a spewing forth of entreaties, which were steadily eroded by the sounds I’d never have imagined him capable of making: whimpers and sobs of terror.
    “No, can’t go Above can’t go can’t—”
    Tears of snot were streaming from his nostrils, which were enormous I realized for the first time, larger than his eyes.
    “—in the dark, down deep, that’s where we have to, no, no you can’t you mustn’t.”
    He became suddenly crazed with hysteria. “YOU KNOW WHAT’S UP THERE, BOY? IN THE LIGHT, BOY? THE LIGHT OF GOD IN HEAVEN. THE LIGHT WILL BURN OUT MY EYES. I DON’T WANT TO SEE! I DON’T WANT TO SEE!”
    He thrashed around in terror as he vented all these feelings, trying his best to get his hands to cover his eyes, though this was a complete anatomical impossibility. Still he tried, writhing around within the confines of the net, his terrified cries so loud that when he took one short break for breath I heard somebody from the World Above saying: “Listen to that thing!
    What’s it saying?”
    And then another voice: “Don’t listen. We don’t want our heads filled with demon talk. Block your ears, Father O’Brien, or he’d talk you out of your mind.”
    That was all I had a chance to hear, because Pappy G. started sobbing and struggling again. The rope of his net creaked as it was tested by his antics. But it was not the net that broke. It was the few strands of the rope that still supported him. Given how little there was to snap, the noise it made was astonishingly loud, echoing up off the roof of rock above us.
    The expression on Pappy Gatmuss’ face turned from one of metaphysical terror to something simpler. He was falling. And falling and falling.
    Just before he struck the layer of lichen-covered rock that was scattered over the ground of the First Circle he gave vent to this simpler terror that his face now wore, unleashing a bellow of despair. Apparently, neither rising nor falling was to his liking. Then he broke through the layer of moss and disappeared.
    His bellow continued to be audible however, dimming somewhat as he dropped through the Second Circle, and still more as he fell through the Third, only fading away once he passed into the Fourth.

    Gone. Pappy G. was finally gone from my life! After so many years of fearing his judgment, fearing