Mister B. Gone by Clive Barker

of his men he had not so far addressed. The man’s face was grotesquely marked by a pox he’d survived, its most notable consequence the absence of his nose. He swung this pox-ridden man between me and him, pushing his knife point against the Pox’s body to commit the man to his duty.
    “You keep your distance, demon. I’ve got holy water, blessed by the Pope! Two and a half gallons of it! I could drown you in holy water if I chose to.”
    I responded with the only sound I had been able to make my throat produce, that same withered growl. Finally Cawley seemed to realize that this sound was the only weapon in my armory, and laughed.
    “I’m in mortal fear,” he said. “Shamit? Hacker? The hood!”
    He had unhooked his iron bar from his belt and slapped it impatiently against his open palm as he spoke. “Move yourselves.
    There’s still skinning left to do on the other three and ten tails to be boiled clean to the bone!”
    I didn’t like the sound of that last remark at all, being the only one with not one but two tails in that company. And if they were doing this for profit, then my freakish excess of tail gave them a reason to speed up the stoking of the fire beneath their boiling pan.
    Fear knotted my guts. I began to struggle wildly against the confines of the net, but my thrashing only served to entangle me further.
    Meanwhile, my wordless throat gave out ever more outlandish sounds; the beast I had been unleashing mere moments before sounding like a domesticated animal by contrast with the raw and unruly noise that came up out of my entrails now.
    Apparently my captors were not intimidated by my din.
    “Get the hood on him, Shamit!” Cawley said. “What in the name of God are you waiting for?”
    “What if he bites me?” Shamit moaned.
    “Then you’ll die a horrible death, foaming at the mouth like a mad dog,” Cawley replied. “So put the blasted hood on him and be quick about it!”
    There was a flurry of activity as everybody got about their business. The priest instructed the fumbling Nycross in the business of preparing the shackles for my wrists and ankles, while Cawley gave orders from the little distance he had retreated to.
    “Hood first! Watch for his hands, O’Brien! He’ll reach through the net! This is a wily one, no doubt of that!”
    As soon as Shamit and Hacker put the hood over my head Cawley came back at me and struck it sharply with the bar he carried, iron to iron. The noise made the dome of my skull reverberate and shook my thoughts to mush.
    “Now, Pox!” I heard Cawley yelling through his confused thoughts. “Get him out of the net while he’s still reeling.” And just for good measure he struck the iron hood a second time, so that the new echoes through iron and bone caught up with the remnants of the first.
    Did I howl, or only imagine that I did? The noise in my head was so stupefying I wasn’t certain of anything, except my own helplessness. When the reverberations of Cawley’s strikes finally started to die away and some sense of my condition returned, they had me out of the net, and Cawley was giving more orders.
    “Shackles go on the feet first, Pox! You hear me? Feet!”
    My feet, I thought. He’s afraid I’m going to run .
    I didn’t analyze the matter more than that. I simply struck out to the left and right of me, my gaze too restricted by the hood to be sure of who I had struck, but pleased to feel the greasy hands that had been holding me lose their grip. Then I did precisely as Cawley had prompted me to do. I ran.
    I put perhaps ten strides between myself and my assailants.
    Only then did I panic. The reason? The night sky.
    In the short time since Cawley had hauled me up out of the fissure the day had started to die, bleeding stars. And above me, for the first time in my life, was the fathomless immensity of the heaven. The threat Cawley and his thugs presented seemed inconsequential beside the terror of that great expanse of darkness overhead,