Instead, I'm a prisoner between the covers of this squalid little volume, with only one request to make of some compassionate soul:

Burn This Book.

No, no, and still no.

Why are you hesitating? Do you think you'll find some titillating details about the Demonation in here? Something depraved or salacious, like the nonsense you've read in other books about the World Below (Hell, if you prefer)? Most of that stuff is invented. You do know that, don't you? It's just bits of gossip and scraps of superstition mixed up by some greedy author who knows nothing about the Demonation — nothing.

Are you wondering how I know what's being passed off as the truth these days? Well, I'm not completely without friends from the old days. We speak, mind to mind, when conditions permit. Like any prisoner locked up in solitary confinement, I still manage to get news. Not much. But enough to keep me sane.

I'm the real thing, you see. Unlike the impostors who pass themselves off as darkness incarnate, I am that darkness. And if I had a chance to escape this paper prison I would cause such anguish and shed such seas of blood the name Jakabok Botch would have stood as the very epitome of evil.

I was — no, I am — the sworn enemy of mankind. And I take that enmity very seriously. When I was free I did all that I could to cause pain, without regard to the innocence or guilt of the human soul I was damning. The things I did! It would take another book for me to list the atrocities I was happily responsible for. The violations of holy places, and more often than not the accompanying violation of whomever was taking care of the place. Often these poor deluded devotees, thinking the image of their Savior in extremis possessed the power to drive me away, would advance upon me, wielding a crucifix and telling me to be gone.

It never worked, of course. And oh, how they would scream and beg as I pulled them into my embrace.