The Devil's Detective

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  Fool pulled the transport over to the side of the road, a cracked track that threaded its way between two fields. One of the fields was full of the crop, a grass that would eventually be turned into the food that every human in Hell ate. The other was fallow, a gray expanse stretching away from them and covered in a writhing heat haze.

  “Who are they?” asked Adam, getting out of the vehicle and standing by the collapsing wooden fence that surrounded the field. “What are they doing?” He was looking at a line of naked humans crouched in the cropless field, crawling slowly across it. Fool joined Adam, as did Balthazar. As they watched, one of the humans defecated, the semiliquid excrement spattering down his legs and into the dirt. He turned, churning the shit into the earth with his fingers, digging it down and then covering it with the dusty topsoil. Before he turned back, he lifted a handful of the dirt and fed himself with it, chewing and swallowing with a look of determination on his face. Then he turned back and joined the others making their way slowly across the fields. As they watched, another one of the line shit and turned, carrying out the same ritual.

  “I ask again, Fool: who are they and what are they doing?” said Adam, and for the first time, his voice contained something other than patience and compassion. He sounded disgusted, horrified, his nose wrinkling as though the smell of the effluvia had reached him. Maybe it had, although Fool could smell nothing.

  “They’re fertilizing the ground,” said Fool. “They’re Aruhlians. They are born to the task, as we all are in Hell, given our roles when we are brought in from outside. They eat the dust and earth and drink rainwater and use what they produce from themselves as food for the ground. All Hell’s farms are kept alive by them. They hope to achieve absolution by eating enough of Hell’s dirt.” Fool knew about the Aruhlians because he had been called to them not long after his own birth, after several of their number had vanished. The investigation hadn’t taken long; Fool had followed a set of churned and broken tracks and eventually found the missing workers; they had been dead, buried in one of the fields like the shit whose remains stained their companions’ fingers.

  Up close, the Aruhlians stank, a lurid stench that had an almost physical presence forming a ring around them. Their skin had been almost as gray as the earth they ate, he remembered, and had sagged from them like old sacking. They had clustered together, nestling into each other for safety as one of them had asked, “Why us? We make no trouble. Why should something wish to hurt us?” Their chief, if that’s what he was, had looked at Fool with troubled eyes, tears tracking down the dirt on his face. His eyes were yellow around pupils of a watery, bloodshot blue.

  Something, Fool had noted, not someone. They already suspected what he knew, that their compatriots had been murdered by a demon, probably one of the farm overseers, bored and hungry. Why you, he wanted to say, why you? Why not? Because you have hope, perhaps. Even amid this terrible life you have hope, hope that if you eat enough dust and shit, you will be Elevated, and to demons it must taste as sweet as your flesh is foul, but he didn’t. Instead, he arranged for the bodies to be removed to the Garden and left the Aruhlians to mourn and to continue eating dirt, chewing their way, they hoped, to salvation. He had not investigated, and he sent a tube to Elderflower stamped NO FOLLOW-UP and had not thought about them since.

  “Christ’s love,” said Adam softly. “You see, Balthazar, how Hell’s very earth is seeded by misery and foulness?”

  “It’s Hell,” Balthazar said. “How else should it be?” He unfurled his wings and beat them lazily. In the distance, one or two of the Aruhlians had seen them and had stopped, were looking in their direction. Fool wondered whether they were the group he had spoken to those years earlier, whether any of them had survived on their diet of dirt and roots and rain. He supposed not.

  With a noise that sounded weary with pity, Adam returned to the transport and, after a moment, Fool followed.

  The sea swelled, a wave rolling forward to crash into the wall and then falling back, the surface undulating just below the upper edge of the thick stone barrier, and the faces in it twisted and roiled, mouths opening and closing silently. Fool had never been sure whether those faces meant the souls in Limbo were in pain, or whether it was simply the way souls were when they were cleaved from flesh, constantly moving and searching and wanting. This is Hell, he thought as he looked down from the wall, they’re in pain. Of course they’re in pain.

  “My Christ,” said Adam almost inaudibly.

  “They suffer,” said Balthazar. “The souls of sinners. Good.”

  “Why are you so cruel? You’re an angel, aren’t you?” asked Fool, unable to help himself and stunned at his words. What’s happening to me? he wondered. What’s happening to me, that I’m being like this? Little brave, stupid Fool.

  Balthazar, surprisingly, gave Fool’s question a moment’s thought and then replied in a calm voice. “Am I cruel?”

  “Yes,” said Fool, entertaining a sudden image of Balthazar’s flame curling around him and slicing him in two.

  “Perhaps so,” said Balthazar. “I am angelic flesh, Information Man Fool, created for the purposes of flame and strength. In Heaven, my job is to patrol the walls, to be a soldier in the armies of light and good. I am created not for showing grand mercies, nor much compassion, but for the muscular brutalities of goodness.”

  “There are so many,” said Adam, still almost inaudible. “I had not realized.” Another wave rose from the ocean, the water’s shifting surface a splintered and bucking mosaic of faces that shrieked without sound. It was impossible to tell whether the faces were male or female, young or old, and their edges blurred into each other in places, making larger images with myriad eyes and countless mouths, all open and wretched.

  “How are they given flesh?” asked Balthazar. “Brought in from Limbo to suffering?”

  “They are fished,” said Fool, pointing along the top of the wall. Farther along it, on a ledge sticking out over the water’s surface, was a crouched figure, hunched down over its haunches and with long arms dangling in front of it. It was peering intently into the waters of Limbo, watching the flow and eddy of the ocean at its feet.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. A demon, I presume. Even among demons, these are supposed to be the eldest. They inhabited Hell first, so it’s said, and never talk to anyone, human or demon. For most demons we’re food, or slaves, or sport, or all three, but these never acknowledge our existence except once, at the beginning.”

  As they watched, the thing on the ledge reached into the water; its hands were huge and webbed. It swirled them around in the water and then withdrew them. Water dripped from the long, curved claws and something gray and sodden hung in its grasp. The thing sniffed at it, let out a long, black tongue to lick at it, and then gently placed it back into the water. After another moment, it withdrew a second dripping thing that it sniffed and tasted; this one, it placed at the side of itself on the ground.

  The gray thing trembled and then began to inflate. It bulged, fluttering and swelling, gaining color so that it lost its gray pallor and became a pale pink. Tendrils unfurled from it, rolling across the ground and then filling, forming into arms and legs, as the air above it filled with dust motes and shadows that swirled and descended into the growing flesh. A sound like the dragging of blades across metal and glass shrieked about them, setting Fool’s teeth on edge. Adam and Balthazar watched, not reacting, as the soul accreted flesh about itself, bulging and rippling into a semblance of life. As it grew, the demon crouched next to it, also watching.

  Finally, the soul formed a complete human about itself, a young man who gasped and rolled over onto his front, spewing water from his lungs. The demon watched him, impassive.

  The demon finally rose, lifting the man to his feet.

  “What will happen to him?” asked Adam.

  “He’ll become a Genevieve or a laborer,” said Fool. “The younger ones usually do. I was older, less beautiful, so I was created
as an Information Man. He’ll know where he is but not why, know he is punished but not the reason.”

  “And this is how it always is?”

  “Sometimes they come from deeper,” said Fool and pointed out at the fragile surface of the sea. Far out, a tiny coracle floated, another of the demons crouched in it. This one had a net clenched in its hands that it was trailing through the water, occasionally twitching it.

  “How do they know which ones to bring, and how many to bring?”

  “I don’t know,” said Fool, thinking about the canisters that fell from the tubes. “Hell has ways of communicating. Rhakshasas and the other archdeacons, the elders in the Bureaucracy, they make the decisions and we are informed about what they decide.”

  “We? You are a human, Fool, yet you equate yourself with the demons of Hell?” Adam was smiling as he spoke. Do I? thought Fool. Do I? I don’t know, I’m just me, little Fool, little Fool in Hell.

  Back on the wall, the demon began to lead the young man away, pushing him none too gently along the path atop the wall back toward one of the warehouses where he would be clothed and given his new life. “Where am I?” the man asked as he walked.

  “Hell,” replied the demon. “You are in Hell.”

  As Fool and the angels turned to go, they heard the man start to sob.

  10

  The Sorrowful were different today.

  At first, Fool couldn’t decide what it was about them that had changed, but then he realized: they were moving. Not all of them, certainly, but enough to give the watching masses a motion like the movement of the ocean beyond the wall, creating human eddies in front of Assemblies House.

  Behind him, the process of Elevation was in full flow, the back-and-forth between Elderflower and Adam a background noise that he had learned to ignore. If he was needed, he would be called, but until then he waited and as he waited, he watched.

  Through the dirt on the windows it was impossible to make out individuals in the crowd of the Sorrowful, but he saw how they shifted. They pushed, had an urgency to them that was not normal. Although he couldn’t read them, and they were never raised for long, one or two people in the crowd had brought along painted signs on the end of poles. Perhaps most unusually, he could hear the crowd’s voice whereas normally it was silent; its communication was a low rumble, not speech exactly but the thing that happened before speech, the sound of a throat being cleared, of something attracting attention before announcing or requesting.

  Before demanding.

  What was happening here? The Sorrowful were helpless, desperate, not this moving, volatile thing. Volatile? Yes, he realized, they were volatile in a way they hadn’t been before, restless and tense. He could see it, see the change in them; these weren’t the crowds of Hell he was used to. Even as he watched, someone threw something; whatever it was looped through the air before falling short of the building, landing in one of the abandoned courtyards that stood, railed off, in the space between it and the crowd. The missile was a chunk of masonry, its edges jagged. More signs were fluttering about the crowd’s heads now, dotted across the mass like speckles. Fool rubbed at the dirt on the window, trying to clear a space, but it helped little; the words on the signs remained little more than shifting blurs. Another lump of something rose from the crowd, arced over their heads, and fell inelegantly to the ground near its earlier companion. The crowd surged around the place it had emerged from, the surge’s ripples flowing out to the edges before dissipating. The volume was rising, a chant forming from the mass, growing higher in pitch.

  Another missile came from the crowd, this one thrown from closer and with more force, hitting the wall of the building somewhere to the left of the window Fool was peering through. Another, and although he didn’t see it connect, Fool heard the sharp crack of breaking glass. Someone cheered and, as though some secret symbol had finally been recognized and a code broken, the Sorrowful found their voice.

  He still had the shouts ringing in his ears when he arrived at the Man’s house.

  Fool didn’t enter immediately. Instead, he walked around the property and looked at it, really looked, for the first time. It was large and rambling, and its foundations and the lower parts of its walls were lost behind thick tangles of plants and bushes. Although there were none of the mouths that Fool had become used to seeing within the house, he saw an awful lot of chalkis’ skeletons caught in the foliage, strands and leaves and branches twisted around the tiny bones, emerging from eye sockets and disappearing into fleshless mouths. Blooms grew on some of the plants, large red buds that stank of something like burned and rotted flesh. Was that how he attracted the chalkis outside? By a smell that made them think of torn flesh bleeding emotions and memories?

  The rear of the house opened onto what had probably been a walled garden at some point in the past but was now little more than a thick, furious wasteland filled with more of the Man. He had grown bigger here, stunted trees emerging from the hectic greenery, bent and dark. Through the remains of the gate, rusted bars bent to odd angles by the pressure of the growth from within, Fool watched as the Man moved in a constant undulation, the sound of him like paper constantly being drawn across paper. There were shapes in the tangles of the Man, larger ones; whiteness showed as the Man moved, bones long since stripped clean glimmering into view and then disappearing again.

  Were they the skeletons of humans? Fool wondered. Or of larger chalkis, the ones that were as large as men or larger? Or were they the skeletons of something else entirely?

  Was the Man eating demons? Was that what Gordie had intended to tell him, just before they entered the Orphanage?

  “Fool,” said a voice that was not, truly, a voice, “what are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” said Fool, almost truthfully. “Thinking.”

  “Indeed? Well, I would prefer you come inside and speak, Fool. I have need of entertainment. Oh, and Fool?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you bring it?”

  Inside the Man’s home, it was dark, the shadows bristling and shifting about Fool as he entered. Things rolled and slipped under his feet as he went to the far room, the skin of them rough and warm through the thin soles of the boots. Once, something gasped in the blackness above Fool’s head, the gasp accompanied by a sound like dry twigs snapping and a tiny, sickly flash of blue. The Man, ever hungry, ever eating.

  Once Fool was in the room, the Man stretched his ever-growing limbs around him, the fronds and branches covering all the walls now. The doorway to the room, to Fool’s back, was the only space left empty, an open mouth spitting him into the Man’s foliage and flesh. He stepped toward the mass in the corner, where he assumed the Man to be, where the human skin and bone of him had been in those first visits, and finally replied, a low “Yes.” He took the feather from his inner pocket, marveling even now at the way its light filled the room, and held it out.

  One of the Man’s mouths rose up before Fool like a snake, the furred head split wide and with the purpled flesh of its maw showing. Curled thorns along its edges looked like teeth, and although the mouth had no eyes above it, Fool was suddenly convinced it was looking closely at him, that it was licking lips that it did not have with a tongue that did not exist. “Give, Fool,” said the Man, the words elongating as though he were breathing as much as speaking, the sound coming from all around the room. Fool hesitated, knowing he had little choice but reluctant nonetheless.

  “Give,” said the Man again, the word stretching out even further, and Fool placed the feather into the open mouth. It snapped shut, trembling, locking the glow into itself, and then whipped back into the Man’s mass.

  There was a stillness in the room, and then the Man’s bulk began to shake, shivering vibrations dancing along the stems that surrounded Fool and setting the room about him into a palsy that continued for several minutes. As the Man pulsed around Fool, he made a noise like bubbling water that Fool realized, after a moment, was laughter. The movement alarmed the creatures that clu
ng to the room’s ceiling, setting them fluttering, dropping away from perches on water-slicked cornices and in the holes in the plaster to dart through the air above him.

  The feather’s glow was traveling along the Man, traveling through the Man; Fool tracked it by watching the pale gleam as it moved around the room, sometimes close to the Man’s surface and at others almost disappearing, visible only as a fragmentary glimmer or as a set of leaping, shifting shadows.

  “Fool, it’s magnificent!” said the Man eventually. “Truly magnificent! In all my time here, in all the places I have grown into, and in all the things I have consumed, I have never held anything so magnificent. And to think, this is a thing of mass and weight and touch! Sometimes, just sometimes, I can see the attraction of the meat and flesh, of remaining tightly bound in a single shape, if this is the way in which that binding can be. Although, of course, this isn’t really from a thing of mass, of bound flesh, is it? This is something else, something above and beyond, the gristle and bone and skin of an angel that is neither truly gristle nor bone nor truly skin, but something more, a thing of Heaven’s lightness and Heaven’s grace. Fool, do you understand what you have been given here? Understand its power?”

  “No,” said Fool, “but I know it’s beautiful.”

  “It is, it is,” said the Man, “but it is so much more, Fool, so much greater than mere beauty. It is a tool, Fool, so powerful that I do not like the idea of giving this back to you, of you possessing this when I do not. I am considering killing you so that I may own it, Fool. You entertain me, it’s true, but you also investigate me, peering around my home and setting your quisling to ask questions about me so that you can tell Hell all about me, and I worry, Fool, I worry that you are becoming a nuisance.”

  Mouths rose up around Fool, opening, purpled inner surfaces and thorn teeth rustling like dry leather. They swayed as they rose, hypnotic, sinuous, their stems curling back and forth, writhing around each other. Fool dropped a hand to his gun but one of the mouths was quicker, darting forward and tearing the weapon from Fool’s leg and sending it spinning across the room. It clattered against the far wall and he went to follow it, but the stems came together and stopped him, fatter limbs threading through the barrier so that he could not tear his way through. He stepped back, hoping to find the doorway without turning, but bumped into another moving wall of fronds and jagged, hard edges and knew he was surrounded.