The Devil's Detective

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  Even detached from the wing, from its host, the feather glimmered with some internal glow. Flakes of light drifted away from the shaft, spun lazily, and then fell and landed on Adam’s outstretched hand. Fool reached out, then hesitated. It was an angel’s feather, and although he could feel no heat coming from it, he had the impression that it would burn him if he touched it, that its wonder was a raging, pure thing that would be too much for his Hell-born flesh to cope with.

  “Please,” repeated Adam. His smile widened, and in his face Fool saw a kindness that would accept no denial, a compassion that had no end. The thought of standing against it was more terrifying than the thought of taking the feather, even if its touch caused his flesh to burst into flame. Helpless, he reached out and grasped it.

  It still shone, even after Adam let it go, but it did not burn; Fool looked at it wonderingly, waving it gently in front of his face. It left trails in the air, little constellations of light like the birthing of distant stars, and he couldn’t help but smile. It was almost weightless, despite its size, and felt soft against his fingers. To have these as a part of you, he thought, to know that these things are you, must be the most glorious sensation imaginable. He waved the feather again, his eyes following the arc of glittering sparkles that it left behind. He felt he could look at it forever, be lost in its twinkling distances. Little mesmerized Fool, he thought, and then Adam said, “It is beautiful, is it not? Keep it, and may it bring you Heaven’s truth. And now, please, we must go. There is work to be done. We have Elevations to decide upon.”

  Carrying a feather from an angel’s wing, Fool took the four angels into Hell.

  1

  The day began with Gordie, who knocked on Fool’s door and entered the room without waiting. He bustled over to Fool, waving a blue-ribboned canister in front of him like a torch that had lost its light as Fool pulled himself up onto an elbow, rubbing one hand across eyes that were thick with sleep. He was pleased to see that in Gordie’s other hand was a mug, steam curling out from it and bringing with it the smell of weak, thin coffee. Gordie set the mug down on the table by Fool’s bed and said, “One came through. It’s blue. I’ve never seen a blue before.”

  Fool picked up the mug and sipped, glad of the heat of the coffee on his tongue even if the taste was buried beneath its scald. He twisted, careful not to spill his drink, and looked up at the high, small window, trying to work out from the light coming in around the grimy linen blind what time of day it was. Beams of gray, sickly illumination crawled across the wall at low angles, throwing shadows from right to left, meaning it was still morning. Escort duty hadn’t finished until … when? Sometime between the bars starting to close and the factories starting to open, he thought. He had returned in darkness, that he remembered, although his eyes had populated the nighttime shadows with after-images of light, shifting and dancing at the corners of his vision. If it was still morning, he had had only a few hours’ sleep. He groaned and sipped more of his coffee.

  “It’s blue,” said Gordie again, helpfully, holding out the canister, its tangle of blue ribbon hanging down in loops. “It’s a blue, it’s just arrived. I saw it was a blue; we never get them, so I thought I’d better bring it to you. I wouldn’t have woken you otherwise, you know. It might be a Fallen.” As he spoke, Gordie was doing the thing he thought Information Men should do, darting his eyes around the room and looking for things. For clues, although what they might be, Fool had no idea. His room was tiny, as all theirs were, and usually contained little other than his bed, a table, a small set of open-faced drawers, a rail for his smock shirts and trousers, and a tiny bookcase that held no books except for his Information Man’s Guide to the Rules and Offices of Hell.

  Today, however, it also contained the feather.

  Gordie saw it as Fool sat up fully and took the canister from his colleague’s hand. The younger man’s mouth fell open and his hands dropped to his sides and Fool smiled despite himself, despite the early morning and the lack of sleep, because Gordie looked, for the shortest moment, like a child, a thing of innocence and joy. There was awe on his face, and his skin looked clean and smooth, youthful, his eyes opening wide.

  The feather was lying on the top shelf of the bookcase, alongside the Guide and Fool’s gun, and it was beautiful. Curved, the shaft and barbs gleaming, it was perhaps a foot long and whiter than bone and it shivered lightly as Gordie walked toward it and reached out.

  “Where …?” he started, and then stopped loosely. “Where …,” he started again and then, again, stopped. Fool didn’t reply. He looked at the feather and his eyes watered mildly, as though the brightness of the previous day had returned to the room for a moment.

  “It was a gift,” said Fool, “from one of the angels.” Even saying it made him feel foolish, little silly Fool, because in Hell no one received gifts.

  “Can I?” asked Gordie and Fool nodded. His colleague lifted the feather, gasped slightly, and turned to Fool.

  “It’s beautiful, like Summer,” he said and then started, glancing down at the feather with a look on his face that Fool thought was almost suspicion.

  “Yes,” Fool replied. What else was there to say? Gordie was still holding the feather and suddenly, sharply, he wanted him to put it down, to let it alone, so that he could pick it back up himself. He took another sip of his coffee and nodded at the tube.

  “A blue?”

  “A blue!” said Gordie, the excitement coming back to his voice. He placed the feather back on the bookcase and twisted the cap off the tube, emptying out the roll of paper from within.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got,” said Fool. “Let’s see what Hell wants to show us today.”

  The body bobbed facedown in the water about six feet out from the shore, snagged on a clump of branches and leaves. It spun as it bobbed, caught in eddies that sent the water at the lake’s edge into choppy arrhythmia. Despite the dark oiliness of Solomon Water, it was obvious that the naked corpse was human; its skin was pale and torn, hanging in loose ribbons that exposed the darker meat of muscles and flesh.

  “I saw it on my way to work,” the man by Fool was saying. “I mean, I saw the flash as I passed the lake, but I didn’t see the body until a few minutes later.”

  “The flash?” asked Fool.

  “There was a blue flash, I was up on the road and I saw a flash from down here, but I couldn’t see what it was because of the trees. It was a blue flash, and then lots of blue light went up into the sky. I came down here to see what it was.”

  “Do you normally check out the things you see on your way to work?” asked Fool.

  “If there’s a chance that it might be a Fallen,” replied the man. “It was a blue flash, I’ve told you. I thought it might have been a Fallen and I could claim it as mine. But it was only a body.”

  Ah yes, thought Fool. This is only a body, so it’s not important, just a dead human, but it could have been a Fallen. Finding a Fallen was rumored to be a way of guaranteeing an Elevation, of escaping Hell’s grip. “You must have been disappointed,” said Fool. The man, whose name Fool had already lost but which would be in Gordie’s notebook, tensed, hearing Fool’s irritation.

  “Look, I’m sorry he’s dead, but people die all the time, every day, don’t they? We’re never safe, are we? It’s not unusual, is it? And I’ve missed work waiting for you, and I’ll lose food for missing a day. At least I waited.”

  “True,” said Fool, unable to disagree with anything the man had said. There were murders every day and every night in Hell, too many to count, more than they could ever hope to investigate. Most went unreported except for the details in the canisters that fell from the pneumatic pipes, wrapped in red ribbon or thread, which Fool normally read and then marked with a “DNI” stamp for Did Not Investigate before putting them back into a canister and firing them up the pipe, sending them on to Elderflower. The only reason he was here now was that the Bureaucracy had registered the blue flash and had also wondered about the possibility
of it being a Fallen. The canister had been blue ribbon–wrapped, and they had standing orders to investigate any of those that came through as a priority; it was in his Guide. Blue canisters arrived irregularly, and in all Fool’s time in Hell, over five years now, there had never been a Fallen and he suspected there never would be. The rebel angels were already here, and the only ones left in Heaven were surely the followers and the trusted now, the arms of fury like Balthazar and of mercy like Adam; none of them would fall.

  “We need the body,” said Fool to Gordie, turning away from the man at his side, focus shifting, “before the things in there take him.” Already, the body had jerked several times, and Fool suspected it was being eaten from below. Solomon Water was vast and full, its inky depths home to things that Fool hoped never to see. Not long ago, one had come ashore; it had eaten hundreds before being driven back into the water by a crowd of demons and humans in one of the rare moments when the two groups had worked together, brandishing flame and hurling rocks against it. This close to shore, and with only one body, it was unlikely that anything bigger than scavengers would approach, but there was always a chance. It was a chance that Fool did not want to take.

  Gordie went to the water’s edge and stepped gingerly in, the liquid lapping over his shoes as he moved out from the shore. As Fool waited, he turned back to the man. “Did you see anything when you got here?” he asked. He knew Gordie had already asked this, but the man might remember something new, describe it differently, or reveal something extra.

  “No, just the body,” the man replied. What was his name? “There were clothes near the water, but that was it.” The clothes were in a bag by Fool’s feet; he would look them over later. They were torn and bloody, that much he had seen already, and smeared with mud. Just up the slope, in among the trees, he had found a patch of churned and damaged ground, the earth freshly torn. Blood was puddled in the newly created hollows and had started to coagulate into a thick, brittle mess. Four teeth had been scattered around the saturated ground like frozen tears; Fool had picked them up and placed them in his pocket, wrapped in a handkerchief. One still had a piece of gum attached to it, dangling pinkly from the root, bloody and wormlike.

  A crowd had gathered farther up the slope, perhaps ten or fifteen people massed beyond the trees and standing in loose clumps. They had also come in case it was a Fallen, he suspected, had seen the blue flash but hadn’t been as close as the nameless man, or had heard about it afterward and come anyway. They looked lost, aimlessly staring down the slope, their features impossible to make out at this distance. They were all human, though, that Fool could tell; there were no demons among them, although if the crowd remained long enough those others would come, attracted by the crumpling hope and the disappointment and the smell of sweat and despair. They would come to feed.

  “Sir,” said Gordie from behind Fool. He had the body at the edge of the water but was struggling to pull it onto the land, and Fool went to help him, taking a grip on the corpse’s legs and lifting as Gordie clambered onto the lakeside and dragged it by the shoulders. Fool didn’t like the way the flesh felt, cold and clammy and loose, shifting under his fingers, and he was glad to be able to drop it on the ground once Gordie had made his way out from the water. It landed bonelessly on its back, and Fool winced at the state of it.

  “Oh fuck,” the man breathed from behind Fool. Fool had forgotten he was there, and now he went to the man (West, he thought, suddenly remembering the man’s name, West), ushering him back and pointing at the others near the trees. West had gone pale, paler than before, and was gulping helplessly, staring at the battered body.

  “Please, go up there and wait for me,” Fool said.

  “Who could have done that?” asked West, and then doubled over and was sick, vomiting explosively onto the ground by Fool’s feet. The smell of it was sharp and sour, the vomit itself watery and gray. West hadn’t eaten much recently; no one had.

  “I don’t know,” said Fool, but suspected he did.

  The dead person was, had been, male. There were bite marks around the base of the flaccid penis, scabbed and angry red gashes that covered the scrotum and the lower belly; more lined the stomach and chest. One nipple was gone, the breast topped by an open wound. There were one or two smaller, circular marks on the dead man’s skin, and he thought that these were probably the marks from Solomon’s inhabitants, small questing bites from the things at the bottom of the water’s food chain taken before the larger creatures came to feed. The other bites, Fool recognized. They came from demons, were marked by a puckering of the flesh around the wound where the skin had scorched from the demon’s heat. There were crescent marks across the dead man’s face and neck from where his attacker had punched and hit him, these marks fresher, still not budded into full bruises. One cheek was torn open and flapping, revealing a lacerated gum and bloody holes for the missing teeth that currently sat in Fool’s pocket. He crouched, peering at the ruined face.

  The water had already started to bloat and wrinkle the corpse’s skin, the eyelids pulling away from the eyeballs slightly. More of the small circular bites were dotted around the eyes, almost lost in the angry marks from the beating. The sclera of the left eye was blood-filled and the eye itself turned out, as though the force of the blows had snapped it from its moorings. Tears that were tinged with blood wept from the eyes in slow trickles.

  “Do we take him to the Garden?” asked Gordie.

  “No,” said Fool. Something about the body bothered him. It wasn’t the violence inflicted upon it, exactly; he saw similarly damaged bodies most days. No, it was the eyes, he thought; not their bloodiness or the fact that one had been so savagely abused that it had turned away from its companion, but the expression they contained. They were helpless, the helplessness of someone who saw his own death, or something worse, approaching and could do nothing about it. “I want Morgan to see him. I want him questioned.”

  “Questioned? Why?”

  Fool’s hand went to the feather that was safely tucked into his inner pocket, the feel of it reassuring him for some reason. “Because I want to know who did this to him,” he said, and he did not add and catch them and punish them because he knew that, hope for it though he might, it was unlikely to happen. This was Hell, and sins here went often unnoticed and almost always unpunished. The best he could hope for was knowledge, something to put in a report to Elderflower so that he could pass it on to his masters, for information. He put his hand in his pocket, not the one containing the teeth or the feather, and fingered his badge of office, feeling the indentations that formed the words “Information Man,” and grinned humorlessly. “I want to know,” he said again.

  “I’ll arrange transport,” said Gordie.

  “No,” said a new voice, “he is mine.”

  Trouble, little Fool, Fool had time to think, and then something hit him and sent him sprawling into the mud beside the body.

  2

  It was a demon, a tall, scrawny thing without a skin. Fool slithered away, trying to put space between it and him so that he could draw his gun, but it stepped with him, keeping close. The exposed flesh of its face and hands glistened wetly, a rich and startling red. Its skinlessness, Fool saw, was entire, and the musculature that crossed its head and chest flexed as it came toward him. Its fingers ended in curved and yellowing claws, smeared blisters of white-boned knuckles emerging from the rawness behind them, the strips of muscle that formed its lips drawing back from teeth the size and shape of river-rolled stones.

  “It comes from the lake,” the demon said, gesturing at the body. The words were distorted, warped into new shapes by its lack of lips, and it spat flecks of blood as it tried to form the sounds. “It is mine.”

  “No,” said Fool, still trying to back away from the thing but prevented from going any farther by the body, “he belongs to Hell, to the Bureaucracy. As representative of the Bureaucracy, he is mine.” Fool’s head throbbed where the demon had hit him and he could feel something war
m trickling around his ear. He managed to get a hand to his weapon but the demon dropped suddenly, its knees digging into the mud on either side of Fool, leaning forward so that it trapped Fool’s arm across his stomach. Its leering face came close to Fool’s, the smell of it rich and dense and sour. Dribbles fell from its mouth, from its weeping skin, dotting across Fool’s face.

  “It is mine,” it said again. “Things in the lake are mine.”

  Fool tried to twist his gun free but his arm was pinned. The demon felt his movements and reached down, gripping Fool’s wrist with a hand that was fevered and greasy, as though it wasn’t just blood that flowed through its veins (assuming it has veins, he thought randomly), but blood and oil. His wrist slipped in the thing’s grip as he tried to writhe away, but the hold did not loosen enough to free him. Behind the demon, just visible over its shoulder, Gordie appeared, his gun held out and trembling. Fool shook his head slightly, and the demon saw it.

  It was fast despite its spindle limbs, whirling and slashing out at Gordie in a scuttle of spattering droplets and broomstick arms. Gordie, staggered by the thing’s thrust, went back down the slope and overbalanced, falling into the water. The demon shrieked, wheeled back, moving on all fours like some terrible insect, scuttling past Fool until it was perched over the body. Fool rolled over, trying to move and rise at the same time and achieving neither successfully. His skin burned where the thing’s blood had spattered down on him and where it had grasped him, and he wanted to wipe it, to scald himself clean, but instead he tugged his gun from its holster and pointed it at the demon, shouting, “No!”

  It gave him a contemptuous look and then its face flexed as its jaws glided open on hinges that moved sideways. It turned, lowering itself down over the dead man, its mouth yawning wide, the glistening flesh stretching back and clamping around the dead man’s head. Fool pressed the barrel of the gun to the back of the demon’s skull, not liking the way its flesh slithered away from the muzzle, and said, as firmly as his pain and fear and adrenaline would allow him, “Stop that.” To his astonishment, the demon jerked back from the body, knocking into Fool and banging his arm up. His finger tightened automatically and he loosed a shot, the bullet passing over the demon and entering Solomon Water with a sizzle.