Inside Man

by K. J. Parker

  Gently does it. I drip through his consciousness slowly, like water through limestone, with a view to building stalactites in my own image, when I’ve got five minutes.

  Then I see him. There absolutely shouldn’t be any him yet for me to see. He sees me. Who are you, he asks, and what the hell do you think you’re doing here?

  It says in the code of conduct: Having effected a legitimate entry, an officer shall not desert his post unless relieved by a colleague, ordered to evacuate by a superior, or expelled by a duly authorized agent of the opposition. Desertion is a very serious matter, a court-martial offense, and if you’re found guilty, the punishment is absolutely nothing at all, because what can they possibly do to someone like me? Break my sword and snip my buttons off? They already did that. Demote me and put me on light duties? Yes, please.

  Accordingly, I back away toward the mouth of the eustachian tube, my preferred choice for a speedy getaway. He’s quicker than me, and much stronger. He reaches out and grabs me. It’s absolutely true that we can’t be killed or even damaged, since we’re immutable and not susceptible to any sort of change, while unending ages run. But we can feel pain. Boy, can we feel pain. He gets his fingers round my head, his thumbs in my ears, and squeezes. I feel pain. Lots of it.

  When he’s finished doing that, he lets go. “You’re one of them,” he says.

  I stare at him. I’d assumed he was one of us. His appearance—but you can’t judge by appearances, not when you’re dealing with insubstantial beings. He sounds and acts like one of us. But apparently he isn’t.

  “Who are you?” I somehow manage to ask.

  “Me? I live here.”

  Oh boy.

  * * *

  There’s us, and there’s them. You know by now who we are. They are our opponents: duly authorized officers of the Combined Service, whose job it is to expel us from the minds and bodies of human mortals, using words of command and the power vested in them, et cetera. Don’t call them exorcists. They don’t like it, and as a rule, they’re not the sort of people you want to annoy.

  In one sense, they’re a parallel service to ours. In other respects, they couldn’t be more different. For a start, they’re all freelancers. Once they’ve qualified and got their tickets, they go out into the world and practice their vocation for money, usually a great deal of money. There aren’t very many of them—it’s not something you can simply decide to do, you have to be born to it, with the knack, a very rare gene, a mutation, not something that runs in families, like red hair—so demand for their services always outstrips supply, and the universal scientific principle of Survival of the Richest tends to direct their efforts toward possession victims in the higher income brackets. This is why, when you walk down the street, the crazy people you see frothing at the mouth and talking to people who aren’t there tend to be thin and shabbily dressed.

  I said just now that they’re born with the knack. This used to raise a whole symposium’s worth of interesting questions: when does the knack actually kick in, and so forth. I can claim the honor of settling that issue once and for all. In some cases, particularly strong ones, it kicks in at some point before the end of the tenth week.

  “You’re one of them,” he says.

  He’s knocked all my metaphorical teeth out. Since they’re only metaphorical teeth, I can still manage to speak, just about. “How do you know that?”

  He hits me. Then he jumps on my broken metaphorical ribs.

  “How do you know,” I wheeze—one of the broken metaphorical ribs has punctured my metaphorical lung, “about us?”

  He shrugs. “Don’t know,” he says.

  “Did someone tell you?”

  “May have done.” He stands on my metaphorical windpipe. “Why haven’t you gone away?”

  “You mean, why aren’t I dead?”

  “What’s dead?”

  Oh, for pity’s sake. I tell him.

  “Oh,” he says.

  “I’m not dead,” I explain, “because we can’t be killed. Just hurt a lot.”

  “You’re bad.”

  “What harm did I ever do you?”

  “You’re bad. All of you are bad.”

  “If you say so. How do you know—?”

  “Everybody knows that.”

  I nod—a neat trick with a metaphorical neck broken in two places. “Well,” I say, “nice to have met you and sorry to have bothered you, and I think I’ll go now.” I start to drag myself to my shattered metaphorical feet.

  He kicks me down again. “No, you don’t,” he says. “I haven’t finished with you yet.”

  “Really?”

  “You’re bad. You’re the enemy. Thou shalt not suffer a demon to live.”

  I close my metaphorical eyes, just for a moment. “First, I think you’ll find that should be witches, not demons. Second, we can’t die.”

  He glares at me distrustfully. “You say that,” he says. “I don’t believe you. You’re bad. Bad people tell lies.”

  Now, about pain. For you lot, it’s a useful and positive thing. It tells you when something’s wrong with you. Admittedly, it’s a bit naïve in believing that once you know about the problem, you can invariably put it right, so maybe as a system it could do with a little fine-tuning, and presumably they intend to do that in the Mark 2, which I gather is due for release anytime now, though for some reason my breath remains unheld. For us, it’s a control mechanism. If you have on your books a large number of immortal, undamageable entities of dubious loyalty, you need some way of making them do as they’re told, or at least that’s the theory. They are, of course, missing the point completely. We aren’t treacherous, and we never could be. We are His Divine Majesty’s loyal opposition, and you can’t get more loyal than that. Nevertheless, we come bundled with an array of very delicate, sensitive metaphorical nerve endings and a pain threshold so low it’s practically underground. It means that the opposition, his lot, never have any trouble getting us to shift when they’re serving notice to quit. Just the threat of what they’re capable of making us feel is enough to get us out of there faster than an arrow from a bow—

  “Please,” I beg him, “stop doing that. It hurts.”

  “So what? You’re bad. You’re one of them.”

  “Yes, but I’ve surrendered. I give up. I’ll go quietly.”

  I’m dangling by the metaphorical hair from his fist. “I don’t care. I’m going to hurt you some more. Serves you right for being bad.”

  “Hurting people unnecessarily is bad,” I point out. “Even if they’re bad people. And if you do something bad, that makes you bad too.”

  “Unnessy—?”

  “When you don’t have to.”

  “I have to hurt bad people,” he says. “It’s my duty.”

  His spirit is ever so willing, but eventually his as-yet-unborn flesh grows weak. Worn out with honest toil, he stops for a nap. Very gently I prize apart his metaphorical fingers and extract myself from between them. Time to leave.

  I’m halfway to the earhole when I stop and think about it. Remember what I told you about possessing an infant? Once you’re in, you can’t leave until they’re at least five years old, not unless you want to kill them.

  Do I want to kill the little horror? Need you ask?

  But I can’t. The prime directive of our order, Rule Number One: First, do no harm.

  (Actually, there are two schools of thought about that. One scholarly faction disputes the reading, blaming textual corruption in the manuscript tradition. What it should say, according to them, is: At first, do no harm. Wait a bit, get yourself nicely settled in, and then roll up your sleeves and start laying about you with the poker. It’s an entirely valid reading if you accept the textual emendation, and the philological evidence is ambiguous—a matter of personal choice, basically. Unfortunately, I made my choice a long time ago. I read first; no at.)

  Yes, I urge myself, but just contemplate this monster and ask yourself: Will the world be a better place with him
or without him? To which I give the only possible answer: Not my call to make. For all I know, the Plan has big things lined up for the little bastard to do. Nobody, especially a lowly field-grade officer like me, has the right to go fooling around with the weft of the great tapestry. Decision-making on that scale should be left to the proper authorities. They’re on the fourth floor, incidentally, second level, the other side of the water cooler from the Department for the Regulation of the Fall of Sparrows: a dedicated, hardworking team who are passionate about what they do, and if you screw things up for them, they’re on you like a ton of bricks. Besides, I tell myself, he’s only a kid; he doesn’t know any better. What he needs is someone to straighten him out, explain things, teach him the difference between right and wrong. There would be a certain irony if that person should turn out to be me, but no matter. Someone somewhere presumably knows what He’s doing. Meanwhile, Rule Two: Thou shalt not second-guess the fourth floor.

  * * *

  “You’re going to be in so much trouble,” he says.

  He’d taken the words right out of my mouth, except that at that moment, my metaphorical mouth was full of blood and loose metaphorical teeth, which I spat out onto the floor of his mind. Funny how the first thing he always does is smash my metaphorical teeth in. Force of habit, I suppose.

  “Praying,” he goes on, his voice giddy with delight. “That’s blasphemy. You’ll burn in hell for that.”

  “No, I won’t,” I say wearily. “And I wasn’t praying. I was just admiring a work of art.”

  “On your knees.”

  “You get a better view of the brushwork that way.”

  “I saw your lips move.”

  “You did no such thing. They weren’t lips, they were bluebottles. And I was not praying.”

  By now I should be able to anticipate his moves. Instead, I duck to the left and meet his metaphorical boot halfway. “You’re the one who’s in trouble,” I pant.

  “Really. How’d you make that out?”

  “Unprovoked attack. Excessive force. I wasn’t even inside anyone. You abducted me.”

  “You were engaged in extreme blasphemy. I exercised my discretion under section 6 and placed you in close confinement to avoid further desecration of a scheduled holy place.” He stamps on my metaphorical ear. “Now I’m exercising my discretion under section 6a and preemptively preventing you from resisting arrest. Praying, for crying out loud. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “If I confess that I was praying, will you stop hurting me?”

  “No.”

  “Fine. I wasn’t praying.”

  Being inside his head again brings back memories, not particularly nice ones. I was in there for seventeen years. He was a late developer.

  “Why are you doing this?” I ask after a longish spell of the same old same old.

  “Because you’re bad.”

  “Doing this isn’t going to make me any better,” I point out.

  “You infested my body for seventeen years!” he yells at me. “From before I was born.”

  “All of which time you spent beating me up.”

  “That doesn’t make it any better.”

  Then something rather wonderful happens. At first I’m not entirely sure what is going on. I can feel the hand of constraint on me, but not his—gentler, but firm and insistent. He hasn’t noticed, too busy stamping on my metaphorical fingers. Then we both hear it: a reedy, elderly voice reciting the approved formula for exorcism, only you mustn’t call it that.

  “I bid you depart,” warbles the voice. “Leave this body and return to the foul place from whence you came. I command you, in the name of light, go back to the darkness—”

  I’m out of there like a rat up a drain. He screams at me, grabs at my metaphorical feet, but the magic words are doing their job and doing it blissfully well. I catch a whiff of incense and burnt beeswax, which means I’m out, free and clear. As I uncurdle and gratefully dispel myself into the air, the last thing I see is Brother Eusebius’s beautiful, kind face, smiling at me as though in benediction.

  * * *

  “It’s all right,” he says later. “I owed you one, after all.”

  I pass him the sesame-seed rolls. “You won’t get in trouble, will you?”

  “For casting out a devil from a poor, disturbed pilgrim? I very much doubt it. Last time I saw him, he was shouting something about lodging an official complaint, but I don’t think anybody will take him seriously. We get a lot of unfortunate souls here who aren’t quite right in the head.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.” He looks at me. “Why was he doing that?”

  “Long story.”

  “I have plenty of time.”

  So I tell him the truth, but not the whole truth.

  “Seventeen years,” he says. “I can see his point.”

  I give him a dirty look. “His point.”

  “Oh yes.” He nods. “I had you in my mind for a few seconds, and I was too busy looking at—well, what you showed me—to pay much attention to anything else. But—no offense—”

  “None taken.”

  “It wasn’t pleasant. Like an itch you can’t reach, together with a sort of feeling, I can’t really describe it. . . .”

  “Alien,” I say.

  He nods again. “The knowledge of something being dreadfully wrong. Like touching a slug or a dead body.”

  “You got off lightly,” I tell him. “For most people, it’s like being splashed with acid or mercury. And the brain is the most sensitive part of the body. More nerve endings there than anywhere else.”

  He tries very hard not to let the revulsion show. “I forgive you,” he says.

  “Thank you,” I say gravely. “You’re fighting a losing battle, but it’s a sweet thought.”

  “So,” he continues, “I can see that man’s point. Having you inside his head for seventeen years—”

  “Quite.”

  “Even though he was bashing the stuffing out of you most of the time, still, it can’t have been pleasant for him. I can see where he might be resentful. It’s the difference between victory and forgiveness. His entire childhood spent trying to scratch an unbearable itch.” He gives me a thin smile. “It must be horrible for the itch, having fingernails dug into it, but it rarely gets much sympathy. You can understand why.”

  “Except from you.”

  “Ah. That’s my job.”

  I stand up. The bell is ringing for compline. Duty calls. “Anyhow,” I say, “thank you.”

  “As I said, I owed you one.”

  My turn to nod. “True,” I admit. “But I did you a favor while trying to tempt you into sin. The fact you saw through me like a window is neither here nor there. You, on the other hand—”

  “Quite.” He gives me a gentle smile. “But you see, I’m so much better than you.”

  “There’s that, of course,” I say, and walk away.

  * * *

  I go through the motions, but it’s hard to concentrate when you’re looking over your metaphorical shoulder all the time. Knowing he was out there somewhere, after me, on my trail like a predator, makes disturbing the eternal rest of Sighvat III seem even more pointless than usual, and Brothers Fidelius, Benno, and Hamilcar have no trouble at all shrugging me off as they pursue their devotions. I’m not, in other words, doing my job to my usual exacting standards, and halfway through lauds, I get a snotty memo from Division telling me to pull my metaphorical finger out. Just what I need to cheer me up.

  “Seems to me,” says Division, scowling, “that you’re probably more fragile than we realized. Maybe it’s time to take you out of the field altogether. A short spell at HQ doing simple, undemanding admin—”

  “I’m fine,” I tell him, shuddering. “Really.”

  He looks at the report on his desk. “Says here you were caught praying,” he says, “and then you had to be rescued by a monk. Hardly inspires confidence, does it?” He favors me with a ghastly smile. “No,
if you ask me, what you need is a chance to get away from it all for a while, pull yourself together, doing nice, gentle, stress-free work of equal value where you can’t balls anything up.” His scowl darkens. “I’ll be straight with you,” he says. “We’ve cut you a fair bit of slack over the years, on account of, well, you know, but it can’t go on forever. I’ve got the good name of the Division to think about, for one thing. Naturally, I have every sympathy for a brother officer damaged in the line of duty, but believe it or not, I’ve got other things to do besides explaining to Compliance why one of my people feels the need to seek the intercession of the Holy Mother. Report to the seventh floor oh-six-hundred tomorrow, they’ll tell you what needs doing. And stay away from the Third Horn, understood?”

  “Why?”

  “Your sudden fatal attraction to masterpieces of devotional art,” he says unpleasantly. “Clearly some of us need a little help with not being led into temptation.”

  * * *

  There is, of course, no seventh floor. Instead, there’s a variation on the theme of existence where a faint memory of what I used to be, more a caricature than anything else, drifts in and out of partial consciousness just long enough to compile duty rosters and docket monthly returns. It’s all, they tell you, about efficiency. You don’t actually need memories or a personality or an identity to do routine administrative chores; in fact, you’re better off without them. No distractions. Just the job in hand, and the bare minimum of functionality necessary to get it done. You can see why we snigger behind our hands when we look at your paintings and frescoes of Hell. Is that how you perceive eternal damnation? Brimstone? You people simply don’t have a clue.

  * * *

  Pull yourself together, he said. Oh boy.

  The risk, when you’re reduced to mere essential function for any length of time, is atrophy. If you don’t use it, eventually you lose it. Actually, I can see why so many of my colleagues end up volunteering for clerical duties. The first things to go are memories, and I think I can safely say that all of us who backed the wrong side during the Unfortunate Event have things we’d like to forget: essentially, everything that ever happened between the first syllable of the Word and . . . what’s the date today? We’d prefer not to remember things after the Event, because they’re all horrible, and things before the Event, because they remind—sorry, too weak a word—they rub our noses raw in what we’ve lost. Clerical work is as close as any of us can hope to get to death: oblivion, the untroubled dreamless sleep of the deskbound.