The Devil's Detective

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  The gun boomed, the sound rolling across the expanses of road and then bouncing back in a flat plosive, and the demon vanished in spray of orange. This close, the bullet tore through its belly, the vacuum of its passing reducing to steaming vapor what intestines it did not drag out and spatter in a wide fan across the road. The other two demons screeched, darting away, pleasures forgotten as shadows leaped, startled, away from the corpse and then snapped back into it.

  In the flash of angry light from the gun’s blast, the figure between the buildings was revealed as a young man, his face wide and moonlike as he watched the little demon disintegrate. He looked at Fool, his expression one of terror, terror and something else that Fool couldn’t identify, and then he turned and ran.

  Fool gave chase without much hope of catching the man; he was younger than Fool and looked like a factory worker, thin and cordlike. Not healthy, maybe, but healthier than Fool, who did little physical exercise, who had noticed his muscles becoming less taut in these past months.

  The man darted back between the rows of shuttered doorways, and Fool went after him, already feeling the stitch of lost breath punching into his side. Instead of escaping, however, the man slowed by the entrance to a small bar. In the pallid, streaked light falling through the glass door, the blood that lay across him in a spray stretching from his waist to his neck was clear. He looked back at Fool, then at the bar, and then he ran again, this time fast, and when he disappeared around a corner, Fool didn’t bother to follow.

  The man had slowed by the bar, looked at it. It was as clear a message as Fool could ever remember getting, information unbidden, unforced. He didn’t know the bar, but then, he didn’t know many of them that well. He sometimes went to one of the few Sorrowful bars, places where humans could drink without demons bothering them, but most of the places in the Houska were demon places where humans were mere staff or chattel. Some of the ones on the outskirts, like this one, nameless and small, were places where uneasy crossovers occurred, where the factory workers drank on their way home, mingling with demons starting their night’s entertainments, and mostly the two groups left each other alone. No one would talk to him, no one would welcome him there. What was the point of entering? he wondered.

  The dead man’s head had been torn from his neck.

  Fool shook his gun, feeling the reassuring weight of the next bullet forming, another of Hell’s random gifts; only Information Men had guns, and their ammunition was created from the air by the Bureaucracy according to a system only they understood. Fool thought about Hell, about nameless death, about a human brave enough to try to show him something even as he ran, and about bodies on streets. How many have I investigated during my time here? he wondered. How many haven’t I investigated? It was impossible to remember. How many of those deaths had he given reason to, solved? That was easier to remember: perhaps fifteen or twenty, and for those few, how many had he brought to justice? Even easier: none. Whether it was the predation by a demon powerful enough to tear a person’s soul loose in a flash of blue light, or the savaging of a factory worker and a set of footprints that marked out the last walk they had taken, death was a constant here, and all of them, Fool included, were merely links in the chains it formed.

  Fool didn’t have the luxury of believing what he did was of any use; he had seen too many of Hell’s leavings for that, and was honest enough to recognize that his own activities were rarely more than ineffectual scuttling around the edges. When he looked in the mirror, he saw someone tired, someone trying to find his way through Hell without creating waves but who wanted more, an indefinable, elusive more. He had been part of the crowd that drove the thing back into Solomon Water, yes, but that was different; there hadn’t been a crime to solve. There had been no malicious intent there, merely a demon grown huge and bloated and hungry but still stupid, following its instincts. There had been nothing to consider, no clues; the thing had simply slaughtered its way from the water into Hell and had retreated only when the resistance to it became too much for it.

  Solving crimes was the purpose of the Information Men, yet they almost never achieved it and even when they did, the facts they scraped free were lost, buried again in the labyrinthine mess of the Bureaucracy. You do nothing, little purposeless Fool, he thought bitterly, and then remembered the soulless flesh by the lake’s edge, the shit-stained wafer being pressed into its anus, the missing head and demons that ate their fill and masturbated afterward. He remembered the feather that nestled in his pocket glowing with an internal light as clean as anything he had known, and thought, No.

  Clasping his gun and trying to ignore the lope of his heart, Fool entered the bar.

  5

  It was holding the head.

  The demon was sitting at a table in the bar’s gloomy depths holding the head, using it like it was something it had bought over the bar’s counter, chewing at the dripping neck and smacking its lips like this was a particularly pleasant drink, and Fool walked up and shot it without pause and without thought.

  The head bounced from the demon’s hands and rolled, disappearing into the shadows as the other demons and humans scattered, shrieking. Even as his gun began to grow slowly heavier, the new bullet forming, Fool was approaching the splayed, injured thing on the floor, and it backed away from him, blood like liquid dirt spilling from the ragged hole in its belly.

  The air stank of gunpowder and of the demon’s insides. One of the other demons, descended from the same ancient father as the injured one by the looks of it, started toward Fool when he pivoted toward it, pointing his gun. It hesitated, its lips drawn back from a mouth that was little other than a dark hole in which unseen things writhed, and then darted away, circling wide around Fool and making for the door.

  “Why?” asked Fool.

  He knelt down next to the demon to be heard. He wished he could remember all the little details and add names to things; Gordie would see the suggestion of feathers around its shoulders, of fur around its legs, would see the skin that peeled and the dull and cherry and angry light that came from within, and simply know what it was, what its name was and history was, what it could and could not do. Fool couldn’t do that, had no idea about this thing that he just shot. It looked up at him, a tongue like a string of purple threads spilling from its mouth, and hissed, “I was hungry. It was food.”

  The gun was heavy again, heavy enough. Fool raised it and pulled the trigger and the demon’s head exploded in a hammersplash of bone and flesh and fountaining liquid that was thicker than blood and clung together like wet rags even as it spattered back across the wooden floor and forward across his hands and shirt. Something shrieked; Fool didn’t know whether it was him or another of the bar’s inhabitants.

  Is this what it feels like? Fool asked himself as he walked down the road. Is this how it feels to have the fire burning in you? Is this what Balthazar feels like? Adam? Elderflower? Those little nameless demons, feeding on scraps that they find in the street or floating in Solomon Water?

  Fool was at the upper edge of the Houska, at the point where the bars began to grow larger and brighter and the streets busier. Gordie and Summer would be waiting for him somewhere down there, in among the tangles of people and demons and the things that scurried and walked and ran, all of them pushed up close and sweating and stinking and shouting and rutting, and how could they stand it? It was all around them, all the time, all this chaos and noise, pressing in on them. How were they so numb to it? he wondered. How could they not see it? Hear it? Feel it? He looked down, saw that he still had his gun in his hand, and put it back in his holster. His hands felt clumsy and nerveless and it took him three tries to drop the barrel of the weapon into the holster’s leather throat and another two to cross the strap over the top of the gun and tie it. His hands were spotted with dried and flaking blood that was dark, itching against his skin, and he looked at it wonderingly before turning and bending and vomiting into the gutter.

  Vomiting made Fool feel more alert, as tho
ugh it had ripped through a caul that he hadn’t known was draped across his face. Kicking some of the road’s dust across the thin gruel of his puke, he carried on walking down into the Houska, thinking hard. What had he just done? What trouble had he caused, for himself and for Gordie and Summer, for the rest of Hell’s human inhabitants? He looked down as he walked, seeing more clearly the dark spatters of blood that had soaked into his trousers. He rubbed at them, scrubbing the blood away as best he could. He should be bothered, he thought, that he couldn’t remove it completely before getting into the center of the Houska, about what it signified and about who or what would see it, about who or what might already have seen it, but found that he wasn’t. There seemed to be little space in his head for any sort of concern, only a kind of narrow, firing attentiveness that made his memories hard-edged with clarity. He felt warm inside, burning.

  Alive.

  There were few lusts in evidence on the pavements at this hour, only the tidal movement of living and unliving things heading for bars and brothels, to fuck or be fucked, to drink or be drunk, the tides thickening as he came closer to the center. Most of the humans ignored him as he walked, but some of the demons looked at Fool curiously, seeing the blood on him or perhaps smelling it; one came in close, blocking his path and sniffing at him, darting a tongue out to taste the air close to his face, but Fool merely waved an irritated hand at it and stepped around it. It released him, confusion evident on features that didn’t seem to quite fit around the warped and horned skull, although whether from the smell or from Fool’s refusal to show the normal human reactions of fear and passivity and deference, Fool did not stop to find out. The internal, burning attentiveness stretched to more than memories, he realized; he seemed better able to read things, to know that the demon was only intrigued rather than aggressive and that the humans around him were studiously avoiding seeing the blood, avoiding being seen as seeing it.

  Into the Houska proper now, its rhythms bucking around him, watching for Gordie and Summer, aware of the smell of death upon him, aware of the glittering swords of revenge and punishment that must be hovering above him. Foolish Fool, he thought, but still couldn’t stop the sense of exhilaration from racing through him. He had pulled the trigger not for defense, nor even for revenge, but for something else, something harder to define. He wanted to—what? To balance things, he thought, to balance scales that are almost never weighted against the demons in Hell. The humans had cheered, he suddenly remembered, as the demon’s head had spattered out across the floor and dribbled away through the cracks between the rough boards. Cheered, despite the fact that they might be seen, and one had clapped.

  What had he done?

  Even forty-eight hours after it had been taken from Balthazar’s wing, the feather still held light. Fool wondered whether it would ever truly fade; he hoped not. In his room, naked, Fool held it and let its gleam play across his skin. His feet ached from the traipse around the bars with Gordie and Summer, and his skin felt raw where he had scrubbed the blood from it in the shower after their return. Under the slow crawl of warm water, Fool had cleaned himself as best he could, using a rough cloth to make sure his skin was free of both demon and human blood. Gordie and Summer had accepted his “It’s nothing” comment without further question, but in Summer’s eyes at least, Fool had seen the recognition that it was far from nothing.

  They had searched until they had only a few of Summer’s sketches left, and gotten nowhere. When they could get the bars’ staff or customers to look at the paper, they received only blank looks in return; mostly, they were ignored. Fool, uncomfortably aware of how he looked and smelled, stayed behind Gordie and Summer, but it didn’t work and by the time they went back toward the train, most of the demons around them were staring openly at him. None of them approached him, though, and for that he allowed himself to feel grateful.

  Returning to the office on the train, they sat in silence. The feeling of clarity, of confidence, had left Fool, dissipating on their trek around the bars and brothels, and he felt slow and exhausted. When Gordie spoke he missed it at first. “Pardon,” he said, looking at his colleague’s lined, weary face.

  “No one knows him,” Gordie had said, looking dolefully at Summer’s sketch.

  “Of course they do,” said Summer, putting a gentle hand on Gordie’s arm without, thought Fool, realizing she had done so. “They just won’t tell us anything. They never talk to us.” Fool, thinking about cheers and applause and a man who stopped outside a bar, said nothing.

  Later, with the cool, calming light from the feather playing across his skin, Fool tried to stitch together the pieces of his day into something coherent but found he couldn’t recall much of it except in a way that was both fragmentary and uneven. There seemed to be messages for him, things of significance, in everything that he had seen or heard, but he couldn’t fit them together to form a coherent whole.

  There was a knock at his door. He put the feather on the shelf and stared at it for a moment. His gun was on the shelf as well, and it made him uneasy to see two things next to each other. He didn’t like the way the gun glinted, oily and metallic, in the feather’s glow and he moved it, putting it on a lower shelf. The knock came on his door again, more urgent. Pulling on a pair of clean trousers, Fool went to the door and opened it to find Gordie outside. He, like Fool, was only partly dressed and looked exhausted, and in his hand was a tube. Tied around the metal canister was a torn and dirty white ribbon.

  6

  It told him that it was called Rhakshasas and was the head of the archdeacons of Hell, and it was dressed in entrails.

  The demon was sitting behind a long table, peering at Fool as though he were a new bug, fascinating but ultimately unimportant. Which, Fool supposed, he was. Little nothing Fool, he thought, and then Rhakshasas leaned forward. As he did so, the loops of gut tightened around him, sliding about his chest and shoulders like snakes. “You shot one of the guards of Hell,” it said, and its voice was like air rising through decaying mud, emerging in wafts of stink and heat. Beside it, the other archdeacons leaned forward; one, whose hands burned with blue, dancing flames, hissed.

  The archdeacons were the judges of Hell, the face of the Bureaucracy, and Fool’s white ribbon was a summoning. He had initially considered running rather than attending at the time stated on the scroll within the canister, but where would he run to? How long would it have been before they caught him, the demons or the humans? Not long, he knew; so here he was, called to the court of Hell to face the closest thing it had to an inquisition.

  “You killed one of the guards of Hell,” said Rhakshasas again. A gray curl of gut loosed itself from his shoulder and uncoiled languidly, drooping to the table. After a second, it tightened, drawing itself back into the demon’s chest, and Fool suddenly had the idea that the intestines weren’t a part of Rhakshasas but were something independent of him, something alive in their own right that chose to live on the demon. “You shot it.”

  “Yes,” said Fool. There was no point in denying it; the corpse of the demon he had shot was lying on the floor between Fool and the table. It had already started to blacken and dry out, its skin flaking around it, drifting to the floor in ashy clumps. The mess of its head and the hole in its belly stared at Fool; he tried not to look back at it, keeping his eyes on Rhakshasas.

  “A human, killing a demon, one of the owners of Hell,” said Rhakshasas, his voice low. The flaming one hissed again, its mouth opening to reveal a tongue that curled about itself and that also burned. “Why, I wonder?”

  “Because he killed a human,” said Fool, unable to help himself, remembering the way the demon had spoken about the dead man. “Because he had committed a crime.”

  “No,” said Rhakshasas, “little human, you misunderstand. I wonder, why have we allowed you to live untouched since this transgression? Why are you still breathing, Information Man Fool? Have you wondered this?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what conclusions have you r
eached?”

  “None,” said Fool. He wished Elderflower were here; the little man always seemed to be able to talk to the archdeacons, his masters in the Bureaucracy, without becoming tongue-tied or nervous, whereas Fool could not.

  “We are interested, Information Man Fool; interested in watching to see how far you will go.”

  The thing on fire hissed a third time, flame spattering from its mouth and sizzling against the table’s surface. One of the other demons on the panel, something wrapped in shadows that billowed like black oilcloth, made a noise like two rocks being ground together.

  “Ah, yes,” said Rhakshasas, leaning back in his chair, the entrails around him loosening. “Information Man Fool, we have a job for you. A task, if you will, to carry out in recompense for your sins.” The archdeacons laughed at this, their voices loud and harsh.

  “A task?”

  “A task,” agreed Rhakshasas. “You are, we know, acquainted with a human currently in the process of becoming something new. We wish you to investigate him for us.”

  “I don’t—” said Fool, and then stopped because he did; of course he did. The Man.

  “Yes, you do,” said Rhakshasas. “He is a concern to us. We have been Hell’s administrators for a vast number of years, have seen all its various faces and appetites, and yet he is something new; or at least, something unremembered. We wish to understand him, and you have been suggested as a way of achieving this without attracting undue attention to the fact of our interest. If he proves to be nothing, then no matter.”

  “What do you want me to look for?” asked Fool, his fists clenching. “How can I investigate the Man without being discovered? He, it, has eyes and ears all over Hell.”