The Devil's Evidence

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  “We don’t need to,” said Benjamin. “We simply go where we are required.”

  “But it’s all changed,” said Fool.

  “Yes.”

  “So how do you find places? How do you know where places are? What if a place you want to go has moved or vanished? Are there maps?”

  “There are no maps,” said Benjamin, “but nowhere vanishes. Places simply move. The roads we use find them, the paths through the air lead to them. It simply is.”

  “This is how God wants it? With everything shifting and moving, I mean?” God. The great enemy of Hell, Fool thought. Why have I brought Him up. Or Her?

  “God? We have no contact with God, and I would not presume to know my Lord’s business or plans.” For the first time, the smile dropped completely from Benjamin’s face. “We are not meant to understand God’s design of Heaven. Ours is simply to carry out God’s will.”

  How do you know God’s will? Fool wondered, but didn’t ask. The smile, he thought, Benjamin’s missing smile, it told him so much. God was as distant and remote to the angels as the Devil was to the human and demonkind inhabitants of Hell. Had Fool ever seen Hell’s Devil, its grandest demon? He wasn’t sure even now, though he suspected he may have, but he knew from Benjamin’s reaction that neither he nor, Fool thought, any of the other angels he’d met had ever been graced with the presence of God. We’re all workers toiling at the face of something we cannot grasp, he thought. Poor Fools all.

  Wambwark said something behind him, voice raised. Fool glanced over in time to see it stand, crash one larval fist on the table between it and the angels in a spray of maggots, and shout again. The two angels simply looked at it until Catarinch placed a hand on its fellow demon’s arm; the torn and dripping demon’s clawed hand sank slightly into the mess of writhing bugs, pallid white shapes falling over the rotten wrist and onto the table. Wambwark remained standing for a few seconds, angels and Catarinch looking at it, and then sat back down. The parts of it that had fallen to the table wriggled back toward its arm, questing snouts burrowing between the other bugs, and rejoined the mass of flesh.

  Fool looked back at Benjamin. The smile had returned to the angel’s face, although it seemed, to Fool’s eyes at least, a little less sure than before. It’s not good when someone shakes the foundations of your world, makes you question, is it? he thought. Those little uncertainties, that little worm of concern and doubt? Aloud, he said, “Does the fairground we were at yesterday still exist?”

  “Of course,” replied Benjamin, “although it may have changed. Everywhere exists in Heaven, the spaces themselves simply appear in different places, that is all.”

  That is all, as though shifting geography was something usual, something normal. It is normal here, he realized, all perfectly normal, to be in a place where geography could not, apparently, be trusted. Fool thought of Hell, of the burning buildings, and of how much harder it would be to investigate if they were constantly moving, if they were constantly changing where they sat in relation to the things around them.

  On the beach, visible more as dots than as individuals, people were standing, moving around slowly, clustering and separating. Some were in the sea or at its edge, white curls of breaking foam clinging to them as the water parted and came back together around thighs and waists. Angels, easier to make out because of their color and the speed at which they moved, arced through the crowd, sometimes stopping behind one of the human dots, never for long, then moving on. Feeding, he thought. Feeding on happiness and joy like bugs, like parasites. He looked again at Benjamin, who smiled more widely, and Fool couldn’t help but see that mouth yawing open, the throat dark and empty.

  “May I ask you a question?” asked Benjamin.

  “Yes,” said Fool, startled. It was, apart from the angel’s initial greeting to Fool, the first time he had sought interaction instead of simply responding to queries.

  “Do you know the two who follow?”

  “ ‘The two who follow’?” Fool repeated, confused.

  “You do not know they are there?”

  “No.” He looked back over his shoulder, uneasy. The room contained nothing unexpected.

  “They are clearly yours, Thomas Fool, tied to you by threads that are thin but strong.”

  “I don’t know,” said Fool, still looking around. His hand, without him telling it to, had drifted to the butt of his gun, was rubbing at it as though unsure of whether to grasp it.

  “If you will allow me, I can show them to you later?”

  Fool hesitated. He had followers? He remembered being followed by a crowd of the Sorrowful, remembered them staring at him in helpless, terrible, cloying hope. Were they like that? “I don’t know,” he said. His hand was still toying with his gun.

  “They are yours, Thomas Fool, you should know about them and own them,” said Benjamin. “Give me permission to bring them to your sight?”

  “I—” said Fool and interrupted himself with his own silence. Then, “I don’t know.”

  “You are fearful,” said Benjamin, a statement. “Do not be. This is Heaven, and no harm can befall you here.” Fool, thinking of bodies on carousels and his own splitting flesh, still bruised and sore, did not reply.

  “Fool,” said Catarinch from behind him. “We’re finished.”

  Fool followed Catarinch to the door, falling in behind Wambwark, walking alongside the scribe. As Benjamin passed him, the angel said softly, “Later, Thomas Fool.”

  They exited the room and started down the corridor, Benjamin leading, as ever. At the end of the corridor, at a T-junction, the members of the Delegation turned right, and as they did so, Fool saw Israfil standing just to the left of the intersection. The angel, head wreathed in flame, nodded recognition at Fool, the expression on her face stern in the fire.

  Wambwark, seeing the nod, reached back and cuffed Fool on the side of the head, knocking him into an ungainly stumble that ended with him kneeling against the corridor wall. Wambwark might look soft, pliable, but its fist was hot and its blow had been as hard as if he’d been hit by stone. Fool’s vision shimmied, blackness creeping in at its edges, and then a hand was on his shoulder and another was under his arm and he was being helped to his feet.

  Israfil’s hands were as wrapped in flames as her head and body, but the flames did not burn Fool or his clothes. She turned him, still unsteady on his feet, to face her and then placed one burning palm at the place where Wambwark’s blow had landed. The pain immediately subsided, its sharpness reduced to a dull throb and then a mild ache. “Thank you,” he said. Israfil merely inclined her head so that her forehead was above Fool’s, her hair hanging down around their faces like a caul.

  “We do not need you or want you here, but you are still our guest,” she said, and then stepped back and was gone. Fool rubbed at the spot she had touched; it was warm, and did not hurt. From behind him came a shriek and a sizzling sound, and then Catarinch cried out in fury. Fool turned, hand automatically going for his gun, to see Benjamin in the center of the corridor, ropes of fire dancing from his hand.

  Wambwark was in pieces on the floor under him.

  The demon was thrashing, struggling toward a detached arm, which was already collapsing, the shape of it becoming simply an elongated mound of white bugs. One leg was also gone, severed and flung away, a pool of maggots spreading behind the demon, dripping from its thigh stump like blood in which each droplet had a will of its own, was crawling to safety.

  “Angel!” shouted Catarinch, and grasped at Benjamin’s shoulder. Benjamin shrugged off the grip, sending Catarinch staggering back.

  “All of you are the guests of Heaven,” Benjamin said, “including Thomas Fool. Aggression against him is aggression against Heaven, and cannot be left unmarked.” His fire dipped, encircled Wambwark’s other arm at the wrist, and then tightened, snipping it off in a sizzle of foul-smelling steam.

  “We are the members of the Delegation of Hell,” said Catarinch, trying to regain its composure, �
��and aggression against a member of the Delegation is an act of aggression against Hell.” The demon’s voice was uneven, fearful.

  “Then Wambwark is itself guilty of aggression against Hell,” said Benjamin, without looking around. His fire curled lazily away from the cauterized wrist and wound around Wambwark’s neck, tightening slowly. The air filled with the sound of popping and crackling as bugs cooked and exploded in the heat, smoke drifting up in loose wraiths. “By striking another member of the Delegation, Wambwark became the aggressor and this is a just retribution.”

  What to do? Fool wondered but knew that he had little choice in the matter. He was here as a representative of Hell, as Hell’s Commander of the Information Office, he was Thomas Fool of Hell, and Wambwark and Catarinch and the scribe were, like it or not, his colleagues and his masters and his responsibility and his peers.

  “Benjamin,” he said, stepping forward. “I appreciate your intervention, yours and Israfil’s both, but please don’t carry on with this or I’ll end up regretting what I have to do next.”

  “And what will you have to do that could cause you regret?” asked Benjamin, still without turning around or looking up from the straining Wambwark. Benjamin’s color had, for the first time, darkened to a dull red, the glow coruscating within him, throwing off light that was almost a shadow, so dark was it. His wings had opened slightly, the whiteness of the feathers shaded pink by his glow.

  “Draw my weapon and point it at you,” Fool said, “and try to get you to leave my colleague alone, which would make us enemies and probably get me killed. Please.” Catarinch opened its mouth to speak; Fool saw the movement from the corner of his eye and shook his head, mouthing an angry No. Catarinch, surprisingly, did as it was told and closed its mouth without sound.

  “You’d side with a demon against me?” asked Benjamin, finally looking around.

  “No,” said Fool. “I’d protect the members of the Delegation of which I am a part against injury or death. I have no choice.”

  “Yes. It is your duty, and possibly your curse, I see that. Very well, Thomas Fool,” said Benjamin after a long moment. His fire whipped away from the fallen demon and disappeared, his glow softening but not entirely vanishing, and he stepped back. As Wambwark rolled and sat up, waiting for the bugs now scattered across the floor to return to it and remake its leg and arm and hand, the angel spoke again.

  “You are guests here, not free souls, none of you, and you need to remember that. The next time you are violent without permission, the next time you attack Thomas Fool or any other person here, I will take my pleasure in separating each part of you from every other part, and this time I will not stop, I will rid Heaven of the evil you represent. Do you understand?”

  Wambwark, still remaking itself on the floor, made a noise that could have been assent, and although it was hard to tell, Fool thought it might have been glaring at him; Catarinch merely nodded, short and sharp, and when it carried on walking, it knocked Fool aside with its seeping elbow as it passed. Even when I help, they hate me, he thought, and then, Fuck it, next time I’ll let Benjamin slice them to nothing.

  The envelope was on the desk in Fool’s room, and the invitation to see Mayall was contained within it.

  —

  The path to Mayall’s home started at a large fence, its bars topped with elaborate metal fleur-de-lis, its gate already open. Benjamin left him at the head of the path and gestured along it.

  “He’s in the building and he’ll meet you there,” was all Benjamin said.

  “You’re not coming?” asked Fool, suddenly nervous. Benjamin and to some extent Israfil had been the only constants during his time in Heaven, and he found that walking away from the angel was oddly difficult, as though he was stepping out onto brittle mud that might break and let him fall through at any moment.

  “I have not been invited, Thomas Fool,” said Benjamin. “No one sees Mayall without an invitation, and no angel is ever invited.”

  “Never?”

  “Never. Mayall is a solitary thing, apart from his own kind, surrounded by the resting inhabitants of Heaven and by his own thoughts. I must stay, Thomas Fool, and you must go. I will meet you here after you and Mayall have finished.”

  Fool went. The path was long and threaded its way between fields of neatly mown grass, lined by tall trees whose caps of green leaves blocked his view of the sky as he walked under them. The path turned gently and his feet made soft sounds on the stone roadway as Fool went among the trees. It was cooler in the shade, the smells of earth and grass thick and clean in his nostrils, and the undergrowth rustled about him. The noise was curiously reassuring. Finally, the path turned back on itself in a gentle sweep before emerging from its ranks of accompanying trees to reveal Mayall’s home.

  The building was facing Fool, the path designed to bring the visitor out of the trees and to be looked at directly by the structure. It was, for the most part, long and low, two wings stretching out on either side of a taller central section like arms open in welcome. It was made of red stone or brick, had ivy creeping across it, the plants verdant green capillaries that shifted slightly in the breeze. The wings were two stories high and topped by a neatly tiled roof, but the central section was at least four or five stories tall, visible before it disappeared into banks of very low cloud, a white puffball mass that crept around the upper windows and cast its shadows on the ground about him. The underside of the cloud was stitched with darker gray patches that made it look heavy and deep, a ceiling above him that was claustrophobic in its proximity.

  Fool approached the building across a graveled forecourt, his footsteps louder here, crunching, and came to a set of doors that were already open. There was a person standing by the doors, head down behind a curtain of long hair, beckoning him, one arm waving slowly at Fool as though the waver was underwater. When Fool got closer, he saw through the hair that it was a man, and his eyes were closed.

  There was a sign on the wall by the doors, weathered wood attached to the stonework by rivets whose heads dripped rust, and although there was writing on the sign, words across the center of some kind of crest, Fool could not read it. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand it because it was in some other language, but the words themselves seemed to shift and slip whenever he tried to focus on them. When he looked away, the words slithered across the sign’s face in his peripheral vision, always retaining their basic shape, almost making some kind of sense but never forming into anything he could properly recognize. The crest also blurred and twisted, refusing to hold any form, simply hinting and suggesting. Was that a lion? A dog? A shield? Fool couldn’t tell. When he looked at the sign directly, everything in it broke apart, became a flurry of gray and brown shapes that held no meaning he could recognize.

  “Thomas Fool,” called a voice from beyond the doors, “enter, please. I am so looking forward to meeting you!”

  The sleeping man beckoned Fool forward again, this time actually going as far as taking a light hold on his elbow and simultaneously pulling and ushering him up the steps toward the doors. Fool allowed himself to be led to the doors, hands nervously brushing down his neat black uniform but feeling the smooth lines of the fabric as a rough and clumsy thing under his fingers, and then he was through them and into the space beyond.

  Fool was in a long corridor with a tiled floor and walls lined up either side by regularly spaced doorways and, between the doorways, rows of wooden cupboards and metal lockers. From the ceiling above hung light fittings, long bars of illumination held by two chains. Dust hung in the air in the thick skeins, caught by the light and curling slowly, chasing themselves around in languid twists. The corridor smelled of wood and chalk and, more faintly, of sweat and old paper and something that Fool could only think of as concentration or intense attention; this was a place where people thought.

  Above the lockers and cupboards strung out along the exposed faces of the walls were posters and pennants, but like the sign outside the words on them were impossi
ble to read and kept rippling, changing whenever Fool looked at them, attaining only a half-formed reality at the edges of his sight.

  Except for the man who had ushered him inside and who was now standing inside the doors with his head bowed and his shoulders slumped, arms hanging loosely, the corridor appeared empty. At its far end was a staircase that rose, widening as it did so to open out into the long horns of two upper corridors. A banner hung across the wide space in front of the staircase, covered in the now-familiar shifting words and shapes.

  Fool, for want of anything else to do, began to walk toward the staircase, glancing at the cupboards and open lockers as he went. Some of the cupboards were glass-fronted and contained shelves on which stood small statuettes in gold or silver, set on plinths with tiny plaques on them; others were wooden-doored, closed and locked. The lockers were in sets, blocks four across and three high, all of them a dull green, most dented and battered. In one or two open lockers, he saw books haphazardly stuffed into the narrow spaces, piled on each other. The books looked old, well worn. Unable to help himself, he took one out and let it fall open in his hands. The pages were crumpled, some torn, covered in yet more of the shifting text as well as diagrams, lines, and angles that blurred and moved constantly. He put the book back, stepped again into the center of the corridor, and then saw them.

  The nearest door had glass panels in its top half, and through them Fool could see rows of people sitting at desks. None were moving but each appeared to be concentrating on something hidden from his view. He moved closer to the door, peering in through the glass, seeing more of the room beyond.

  There were perhaps forty of them, sleeping humans, seated at plain wooden desks. Some had paper in front of them on the desk surfaces and were writing, or at least pretending to write; their hands held pens or pencils and moved across the pages, but the marks they made were simply scrawled lines as far as Fool could see. Others merely stared at the far end of the room where an angel was standing motionless beside a large blackboard, across which white chalk lines were appearing and then vanishing; Fool could dimly hear the faint scratch of the lines being made and the low slosh of them being unmade.