“Hello, Fool.”
The voice came from inside his stomach, the vibrations of it running along his torso and arms and legs, making his teeth clench. The voice was different yet familiar, the mouth something he recognized, the pain still crashing over him but slower now, receding. The eye blinked again, rolled, slit pupil widening and then narrowing as it took in the room around Fool.
“They treat you well, I see.”
Mr. Tap. Mr. Tap’s voice, coming from Fool’s belly, Mr. Tap’s eye staring out at him from his own flesh. He tried to cry out, reached for the eye, not knowing if he was hoping to close it and hold it together or poke at it, fight it off. The mouth snapped at his hand, the edges of his stomach pulsing as the teeth forced themselves forward, sending another yelp of pain through him and out of his own mouth. He pulled his hand back, weeping, and waited.
“That’s better, Fool. Try to remember, you were told that we would need to communicate, and this is our chosen way of doing it. This way, Fool, Heaven has no part of our little chats, and cannot listen in. I can be honest with you and you can be honest with me, yes?”
“Yes,” said Fool, lying back, partly through sheer pained exhaustion and partly so he didn’t have to see the edges of his stomach move and flap, forming Mr. Tap’s words. The sound of them, and the feel of them, were bad enough, but seeing them was somehow worse, his own body manipulated and torn, his skin curled under itself to create lips, warped and distorted like putty.
“So, Fool, what news?”
If Fool lay still, the pain was almost gone, almost a memory, except for the throbbing around the edges of Mr. Tap’s eye and mouth and an itch that crawled across the rest of his skin. Were the rest of the tattoos moving, forming into new shapes that could open, talk? Little talking Fool, he thought fleetingly, trying to keep his tears at bay, and said aloud, “About what?”
“The Delegation, of course. How does it fare?”
“We got here safely,” he replied. “I didn’t burn up in the Flame Garden. We didn’t get eaten by the things from the place outside of everywhere.”
“And the discussions?” asked Mr. Tap. Fool risked another look at his chest. The eye blinked at him, the pupil inside the eyelids slicked with pale blood, the mouth an open tube with teeth, Mr. Tap’s teeth, impossible yet real, clicking and clacking together.
“I didn’t understand them, but they seemed to go well,” replied Fool. Talking was wearying and he collapsed and closed his eyes.
“Good,” said Mr. Tap, sounding uninterested. “And now, tell me about Heaven. What have you seen? What have you heard?”
“Nothing,” said Fool, and immediately a fresh wave of pain bloomed within him. He jerked up, looked at himself, and saw that the mouth had started to gnaw at its lower lip, was pulling on the skin of Fool’s upper chest. The skin stretched, was pulled toward the mouth, one nipple coming close to the teeth, and he screamed again, hearing his own hopelessness in the sound, and said, “Stop! I don’t understand what you want to know!”
“Everything,” said Mr. Tap, letting go of Fool’s skin. Blood welled and trickled, rolling down his lower rib to the edge of the mouth. From inside him, a tongue emerged and licked at the blood, slurping it. The mouth grinned, the edges of the grin disappearing into Fool’s flanks.
“You taste good, Fool,” said Mr. Tap. “You taste wonderful. I must eat you again sometime.”
“Heaven is in people’s heads,” said Fool, trying to sort through the dense fog of his pain for what the demon using his skin wanted to know. What could he tell Mr. Tap?
What should he tell it?
“We know that,” said Mr. Tap. “They don’t share like we do in Hell. More.”
“It changes. They…dream, or remember or think, I’m not sure, but they bring places into existence, when enough of them are thinking about something similar. I think that’s how it works.”
“Interesting,” said Mr. Tap. “That may prove useful one day. And what about you, Fool?”
“What about me?”
“You know by now that the Bureaucracy of Heaven requested that you be sent with the Delegation, requested you specifically?”
“Yes,” said Fool.
“Good. We’d like to know why, Rhakshasas and I.”
“I don’t know.”
Pain, just a tiny wave of it, as the mouth took an edge of skin and pulled on it, nibbling. “Come now, Fool,” said Mr. Tap, said Fool’s torso, the words slightly muffled as the mouth clenched a morsel of skin between its front teeth.
“I think it was to thank me,” said Fool, thinking fast. For some reason, he didn’t want to tell Mr. Tap or the Archdeacons, in the shape of Rhakshasas, about the mystery, the accident, the whatever it was. This was Heaven, and Hell would use any weakness to infiltrate, to attack, to gain advantage. “Because of what happened, I mean. The angel who greeted me mentioned it, as did the Malakim later.”
“The Malakim?” asked Mr. Tap, voice suddenly serious, darker, colder. “You’ve spoken to the Malakim?”
“Yes,” replied Fool. That was a mistake, little Fool, he thought. He was struggling to concentrate, struggling not to simply tell Mr. Tap everything, just to stop the pain, make it go away.
“Why? Why did the Malakim speak to you?”
“For the same reason. They came to my room, appeared in it, actually, scared me, then told me I had their gratitude.” Almost truthful Fool, little lying Fool.
“Gratitude? That may be useful, Fool. See that you don’t lose it.”
“No.”
“Is there anything else, any other snippet you can give me?”
“No. Yes, wait, there’s one more thing. Catarinch, it’s scared of the angels here. It’s rude to them.”
Why had he added that? Why make trouble? Because my skin is being abused, and because Catarinch is a problem for me, even if I’m not sure how yet.
“And Wambwark?”
“It doesn’t say much. It seems calmer, less afraid.”
“Your comments are noted, Fool,” said Mr. Tap. “You’ve been useful tonight. We shall speak again tomorrow. Have something else to tell me or I may decide to eat you again and this time simply not stop.”
Fool didn’t speak, just lay there as the mouth and the eye closed and the flesh knitted back together. It itched, a maddening burn below the surface of his skin, and when he touched the area tentatively after it was sealed it hurt, was bruised, but at least the sharp, slicing pain had gone. Even as he looked, the tattoos were swirling apart, the eye and mouth now irregular patterns that contained only faint hints of the things they had just been.
There was now a clearly drawn mouth and a pair of eyes on his inner left forearm that hadn’t been there earlier, and Fool had only a brief moment to steel himself before they, too, ripped apart and opened.
The pain wasn’t as bad as Mr. Tap had been, the holes created smaller, but it still knocked him back. He let his arm fall across his bruised stomach, waiting for the mouth to speak. The eyes blinked, bloody tears weeping from them and dribbling down onto his navel, and then the mouth opened, wide. For a second it was silent, and then a voice he recognized said, “Mr. Fool? Sir?”
“Marianne?” he asked, startled beyond pain. “Is that you?”
“Yes. Where are you?”
“Heaven. Where are you?”
“In your room in the Information House. In Hell. Are you really in Heaven? They said to expect a contact from you, but not like this.”
“How am I talking to you?” asked Fool, suddenly worried that Marianne’s flesh had split as his own had, that she was feeling the same kind of roiling pain he was.
“There’s a drawing of you,” said Marianne. “It’s moving, speaking. I can hear your voice.”
Fool closed his eyes, concentrated. He could feel the link to Hell, some great chain he couldn’t understand but at whose end was a throb unlike anything else he’d experienced, this link to the place of his birth, the place he hated. He let it fill him,
the throb of fires and pain and fear, and then he could see Marianne. She was blurry, as though he was looking at her from behind a thin curtain of greasy material. Or from within a thin sheet of paper, he thought, but it was her, Marianne with her soft face and short hair.
“They tell me you picked me to act as your liaison with the Information Office while you’re away? I got a canister telling me. Why me?”
“Because I trust you,” Fool said, “and you’re about the only one of my troops I can say that about.”
There was a moment’s silence. Fool looked at Marianne, and wondered what expression was on his face in the picture. The same as his face in reality? Or had they given him a different one, twisting him into what they wanted him to be?
Was it a picture of him that Summer had drawn, saved by the Bureaucracy for a purpose like this?
“What’s been happening?”
“There’ve been more fires, arson,” said Marianne. “Another warehouse, not empty. It had had workers in it. They were all dead by the time we got there.”
“Did you look at the scene, look at it the way I showed you?”
“Yes. It was another set fire, started in the corner near the entrance so that the workers couldn’t get out. We found some of them huddled together at the back, all dead. They hadn’t burned, they’d suffocated on the smoke. There was vomit and they’d tried to shield each other, made masks but it hadn’t worked. Their faces were black and purple and their eyes were bugged out.” She stopped, swallowed. Fool’s image of her faded as she moved away, and then she was back, leaning over him, close, whispering. “We’re being told to investigate, but no one knows how to do it, and we found something, sir.”
“Something?”
“A pincer, a huge pincer or claw.”
“Have you got it?” Thinking that, perhaps, Marianne could hold it up in front of his paper self so that he could see it.
“No. The Evidence have taken it, but they’re not letting us near it. They’re all over everything. They try to look like they’re investigating but they’re not, not really. They’re useless, they don’t know anything.”
“No, they won’t, not anything real anyway,” said Fool, thinking. “Describe the claw.”
“It’s big, and solid. We found it on the edge of the fire. I think whatever it was that left it got burned, it’s charred around the edges. No one I asked when I still had it remembered seeing anything like it before. It’s strange.”
“ ‘Strange?’ ”
“I can’t explain it,” said Marianne, “but it feels like it isn’t really made of bone or flesh exactly. It feels wrong.”
Did that help? No, not really, not without seeing it. Some of the older demons had claws, was this something old turned arsonist? He thought for another second and then said, “Have there been any more murders like the one we were at before—” He paused. What could he call this?
“Before this?” he finished, eventually.
Marianne shook her head, then, thinking he couldn’t see her, said, “No.”
“I can see you,” he said. Experimentally, he opened his eyes in Heaven and Marianne vanished; there was simply his arm and its tattoo. He closed his eyes again, Marianne filling his view.
“No, no murders…” she said, one hand appearing and scratching at her head, brushing at her hair.
“There’s a ‘but’ there,” he said. It was obvious in the way she’d paused, the way she drew the words out longer than they needed to be. Even through the blear of the paper, he could see that she was thinking, struggling to work out how to say something, or whether she should even say it at all.
“Just say it,” he said, wincing as his arm-eyes blinked, squeezed shut as she thought, and then gasping a little as she spoke again.
“We’ve had reports of people seeing things in the distance.”
“ ‘Things’?”
“Things dancing,” she said. “The man, the supervisor, he said something about them dancing, didn’t he?”
“He did,” said Fool. “Where have the dancers been seen?”
“All over,” said Marianne. “There’s no logic to it, as far as I can tell. They’ve been in alleys on the outskirts of Eve’s Harbor, at the back of a boardinghouse, once in the middle of a farm. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“No,” said Fool again, and let out a short, ragged breath. His arm was throbbing, the pain a sleeve that stretched from wrist to shoulder.
“Are you okay?” asked Marianne. In his vision, she looked concerned.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Keep an eye open for any more reports of dancers. Try to plot them on a map if you can get one, see if there are any common elements or obviously central points.”
“I will.”
“And Marianne?”
“Yes?”
“Be careful. Watch out for the bauta. Mr. Tap is dangerous and his Evidence Men aren’t to be trusted. Stay away from them if you can, give them what they ask for only if you have no other choice.”
“Yes,” she said and yawned. The mouth in Fool’s arm stretched and he groaned. He was a single ball of pain now, limbs heavy, eyes clenched against more agonies.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Marianne said.
I’m talking to you through my arm, through a tattoo that was burned into me and is now using my flesh to create a moving mouth and eyes—no, I’m not okay. “Yes. Marianne, I need to go. I’ll be in touch again. Be careful, Marianne, please. You’re my eyes in Hell now, the only ones I have.”
“I will. Good-bye, sir, and you take care, too.”
“I’m in Heaven, Marianne, what could possibly happen to me here?” he said and concentrated, broke the connection between him and her apart. Even before the mouth and eyes in his arms had sealed themselves, Fool had fainted and dropped into a sleep that was blacker than any he’d known before.
9
Fool noticed the pictures the following morning, on the walk from their rooms to the next Delegation meeting. They lined the walls of the Anbidstow, all near-identical, dark-framed paintings of hooded figures. The pictures were large, filling the walls from floor to near the top of the ceiling, and the figure in every painting was facing away from Fool, the broad expanse of its back the central element of each picture. The backgrounds were dark, unclear, although there were sometimes hints of landscape, twisted bushes or stunted trees, grasslands or expanses of heath or moorland. The figures were wearing robes, dark and plain, and they seemed somehow sad, their shoulders slumped. None had wings, or if they did, they were hidden beneath their robes. The air of the pictures and the people they contained was somber.
Fool stepped close to one of the pictures, looking for a plaque or mark to tell him who or what it might portray. The glass was dusty and he reached to rub at it, but Benjamin caught his hand, gently, and stopped him.
“No,” said the angel. “They should rest uninterrupted.”
“Who are they? Are they all one person?”
“No,” said Benjamin. “These are the saddest of God’s angels. They are the Estedea.”
“Estedea?”
“Do not ask about them, Thomas Fool,” said Benjamin, still smiling that smile, delicate and slight, a curl to the edges of his lips and a crinkle in the perfect skin around his eyes. “To ask about them might attract their attention.”
“And that’s bad, I assume?”
“It would increase their sadness,” said Benjamin. “They are created to carry the sadness of the worst days, and they come only when they are most needed and least wanted. They are the Estedea, Thomas Fool. Pray their sadness never reaches you.”
They carried on walking, kept passing the pictures, and Fool couldn’t stop himself from asking, “How many of them are there?”
“As many as are needed,” said Benjamin, and the kindness in his voice had become chill, the absoluteness of knowing what Fool needed to do even if Fool himself did not. “Now let them be. Let them rest and hold their sadness.” He doesn’t l
ike them, thought Fool, doesn’t like them at all. It’s not their attention on me he’s bothered about, it’s their attention falling on him that worries him. He did not mention the figures in the pictures again.
They had arrived at the room, Benjamin opening the door for them. Wambwark, now without its cloak and hat, and Catarinch, still rotting and dripping, took their places at the table, where they were joined by the same angels from the day before.
“So. Day two,” said the first angel, and gestured behind it. Its scribe came forward and pulled a piece of parchment from the air, began reading a report of the previous day’s agreements.
“Do you agree with the record?” asked the angel when the scribe had finished reading.
“Yes,” said Catarinch, “with one exception.” Fool tuned them out and moved across to his usual space when attending Delegation meetings, by the window. Benjamin, as before, joined him.
The view from the window had changed. Gone was the patchwork of fields and dark green hedges or fences, and where they had been was now a rolling swath of gorse-scattered lowland fields that dropped to a gently undulating ocean. Was it the same ocean Fool had seen on the journey here from the gate? He couldn’t tell. It was shaped into a sickle bay that was lined with a fat strip of sandy beach, and at its far edge it pressed against tall gray cliffs topped with woodland. Had the ocean yesterday come up against cliffs? A beach, certainly, that he remembered, but the cliffs he was less sure about.
“How do you know where things are?” he asked Benjamin, quietly. Behind him, Wambwark, Catarinch, and the two angels were talking again about borders, the scribe standing at Catarinch’s shoulder, its equivalent standing behind Heaven’s representatives. Both scribes were now holding books, writing notes; presumably the dispute about the record had been solved. Neither scribe had, as far as Fool could tell, spoken apart from the initial reading.
The Devil's Evidence Page 11
