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his punishment, he was out of my life, dying by degrees, I hoped, as he struck each new ground. His limbs broken, his back broken, and his skull smashed like a dropped egg, probably long before he landed back in the canyons of trash where we’d first been baited. I had not been inventing horrors when I’d talked about how terrible it would be to be helpless in that place, crawling as it was with the most pitiful, the most hopeless of those amongst the Demonation. I know many of them. Some were Demons who had once been the most scholarly and sophisticated amongst us, but who had now come to realize in their researches that we meant nothing in the scheme of Creation. We floated in the void beyond all purpose or meaning. They had taken this knowledge badly; certainly worse than most of my fellows, who had long since given up thinking about such lofty notions in favor of finding amongst the tiny numbers of lichens that grew in the gloom of the Ninth a palliative for hemorrhoids.
    But the scholars’ desolation was not immune to hunger. In the years I’d lived in the house in the garbage dunes I had heard plenty of stories of wanderers who had perished in the wastes of the Ninth, their bones found picked clean, if they were found at all. That, most likely, would be Pappy G.’s fate: He would be eaten alive, until every last morel of marrow had been sucked out.
    I strained to hear some sound from the World Below—a last cry from my murdered father—but I heard nothing. It was the voices from the World Above that were now demanding attention. The rope from which Pappy G.’s net had hung had been hauled up out of sight as soon as he’d fallen. I slid my little knife into a small pocket of flesh I had taken great pains to slowly dig for myself over a period of months for the express purpose of hiding a weapon.
    There was clearly great disappointment and frustration amongst those who were hauling me up.
    “Whatever we lost was five times the weight of this little thing,” said someone.
    “It must have bitten through the ropes,” opined the voice I recognized as the Father’s. “They have such ways, these demons.”
    “Why don’t you shut up and pray?” said a third whinier voice.
    “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? To protect our immortal souls from whatever we’re hauling up?”
    They’re frightened, I thought, which was good news for me. Frightened men did stupid things. My job was going to be to keep them in a state of fear. Perhaps I might intimidate them with my sickly frame and my burned face and body, but I doubted it. I would have to use my wits.
    I could see the sky more clearly now. There were no clouds in the blue, but there were several dispersing columns of black smoke, and two smells fighting for the attention of my nostrils.
    One was the sickly sweet odor of incense, the other the smell of burning flesh.
    Even as I inhaled them my racing thoughts remembered a childhood game that would perhaps help me defend myself against my captors. As an infant, and even into my early teens, whenever Pappy Gatmuss came home at night with female company Momma was obliged to vacate the marriage bed and sleep in my bed, relegating me to the floor with a pillow (if she was feeling generous) and a stained sheet. She would lay down her head and instantly be asleep, wearied to the bone by life with Pappy G.
    And then she’d start to talk in her sleep. The things she said—angrily elaborate and terrifying curses directed at Pappy G.—were enough to make my heart quicken with fear, but it was the voice in which she spoke them that truly impressed itself upon me.
    This was another Momma speaking, her voice a deep, raw growl of murderous rage that I listened to so many times over the years that without ever consciously deciding to try and emulate it I unleashed in private the fury I felt towards Pappy G. one day and the voice just spilled out. It wasn’t simply imitation. I had inherited from Momma a deformity