The Devil's Evidence

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  “They’re in school,” said a voice from behind Fool, the breath of the words brushing across his ear. He started, jumped, and banged into the door, his forehead knocking against the glass panel sharply. Whoever it was behind him laughed, loud and delighted, and clapped its hands. Fool turned, rubbing his forehead, and found himself looking at an angel who was grinning more widely than anyone Fool had seen before.

  “Thomas Fool,” the angel said, “welcome, welcome! I’m Mayall, and this is my home, and you are welcome to roam its corridors at will!”

  Before Fool could speak, Mayall reached forward and grasped his hand, shaking it furiously. The shake became almost frenzied, Fool’s arm being yanked up and down until Mayall suddenly let it go and spun away, turning the rhythm of the shake into a kind of loose caper, his feet beating a jig on the floor. He laughed as he spun, the sounds echoing along the corridor and layering so that for a moment it sounded as though the corridor was filled with hundreds of laughing creatures rather than simply one. Mayall finally came to an uneven halt, gasping and still laughing, facing Fool and wobbling slightly as though he was dizzy. He panted, his tongue hanging from his mouth, a pink worm wriggling delightedly around his chin.

  Mayall was unlike any angel Fool had seen before. He was dressed differently, clothed neither in flame nor feather, and not in robes but in trousers and an old shirt that was stained and wrinkled. His hair was long and so thick it looked almost greasy, swept back from his head, bouncing manically as he moved and dropping in lank strings that he continually had to brush back. His feet were bare and filthy, dirt in black swathes between his toes and disappearing up under the trouser cuffs, and his eyes were huge in a face that was handsome but not perfect in the way that other angels’ were. He had lines across his forehead, although whether of frown or laughter Fool couldn’t tell, and his mouth had an odd set to it, almost a pout of petulant humor.

  He looked human.

  At least, human apart from the wings that beat the air behind him, outstretched and constantly flapping, although even they looked somehow less than angelic, the feathers not aligned perfectly, noisy as they moved. Mayall had little of the stillness of the other angels Fool had met and none of the calmness; he jittered, constantly moving, his hands rising and falling as he spoke, his eyes darting around, taking everything in.

  “It’s such a pleasure,” said Mayall, “such a pleasure. Thomas Fool, the investigator from Hell, here in Heaven. We are honored.”

  “Israfil doesn’t think so,” said Fool without thinking.

  “Israfil’s a fool,” said Mayall and then roared with laughter again. “A fool! No offense intended, Fool, you’re your own fool, as Israfil is hers! Both fools but different fools, Heaven’s fool and Hell’s Fool! Perhaps you should be friends, yes? Do you see?”

  “Yes,” said Fool, not doing so, trying to keep up. “You wanted to see me?”

  “See you, meet you, touch you, smell you!” said Mayall. “I told the Malakim we needed you, and I was right. We need your help, Fool, we’ve lost the skills that you have so recently gained.” Mayall suddenly spun and launched himself down the corridor, leaping up into the space and roaring with laughter and swooping through the air in front of the staircase, cycling around the banner before crashing back to the floor in front of Fool. His landing was clumsy and he staggered, arms flailing, into the wall, knocking a set of lockers down and sending their contents across the corridor in a scatter of paper and dust.

  “Damage,” shouted Mayall, “there’s damage in Heaven! Heavenly damage!” He began to dance again, spreading the paper more widely. Fool watched, utterly confused, as the angel kicked and slapped at the mess, tearing and ripping at the books and throwing small pieces of paper into the air to float above them, wavering in the updrafts of his wings.

  “Paper in the air, paper on the floor,” the angel said as he danced among the chaos, “paper in the lockers and paper by the door!” He carried on chanting lines of doggerel and poetry as he kicked and leaped, all interspersed with laughter and hand claps and snatches of hummed tunes. The paper snowstormed around him, the air filled with torn pieces and battered dust, never allowed to rest because of the angel’s dervish movements and agitations. He went on for maybe two or three minutes before finally coming to a halt, panting, letting the fragments of page fall to the floor in drifts around him.

  “This is the only place in Heaven where things get damaged,” he said, his voice suddenly low, serious. “We’re frightened of it, of damage, we’ve become too perfect, we’ve forgotten how to face imperfection.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Fool. Being with Mayall was exhausting; even after the scant minutes of his visit, he was tired.

  “Come with me,” said Mayall and set off down the corridor. He walked rapidly, speaking in a constant stream as he went.

  “Heaven is a place of joys, Fool, that’s the point of it. We gather them together, the people who have earned their place here, we fish them out of Limbo after their lives of toil and we let them experience the places of their most private dreams, the places they were happiest. Those places become real around them, and so Heaven mirrors their loves and becomes their loves, and they stay until they’re ready to move on. Look at them here, in school. They remember school as a place of safety, enough of them, so Heaven creates a school for them to be safe in while they dream their own Heavens into existence.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” said Fool.

  “No,” replied Mayall, leaping and turning with another roar of that manic laughter, “you don’t, because what I’ve told you isn’t true. It’s maybe half true, or a quarter, or a fraction or even mostly true, but it’s not the actual truth. Nothing in Heaven is actually true.”

  “ ‘Actually’?” Mayall’s emphasis was odd, and Fool thought it was deliberate, a test to see if he was listening properly.

  “Every person here has a truth that they can see but no one else can. Even the angels, Benjamin and Israfil and all the others, only see the Heaven they believe should exist, the Heaven they have walked every day of their existence. They see the everyday, Fool, but none of them sees things actually, none of them sees truthfully, no one sees the actual truth of things. Israfil and Benjamin and all their angelic kin cannot see that Heaven has a need for you, cannot accept that Heaven has imperfections, that things are going wrong, that there are mysteries! The Malakim see a need for you because their view has the breadth of vision that most angels do not possess, but even they cannot see the danger of letting you loose in Heaven because they see this as a mere clerical exercise. There’s the everyday, and then there’s the actual.”

  “I’m a danger?”

  “Of course. You aren’t fettered by the shackles Israfil and the others wear, so you have no reason to avoid seeing the actual Heaven around us.”

  “But if I’m a danger, why ask for me? Why bring me here?”

  They had reached the staircase but they didn’t start up it. “Why?” repeated Mayall, his voice quiet now, almost reflective. He reached out and touched Fool’s cheek, just a brush of his fingertips, gentle. “Why? Because we need you, Fool, even if we don’t wish to admit it. We need you.”

  Mayall shook himself suddenly, as though shaking off a mood, and started to dance again, twirling on the spot and making little gavotte steps up and then back down the first few risers. His shirttails came free from his pants and flapped, revealing a belly that was smooth and hairless but stretched by a small paunch. After several increasingly fast ascents and descents, each time getting farther up the staircase before coming back down, Mayall practically bounced up to just past halfway but turned too fast and slipped, falling and rolling down the steps toward Fool. His wings wrapped around him, protecting his head and upper body as he fell, but when he reached the bottom of the staircase they whipped open to reveal that the angel was still grinning, still exposing teeth that were huge and white and even.

  “Ta-daaaaa!” Mayall said loudly, rolling and some
how coming up onto one knee and throwing his arms wide in a sweeping, grandiloquent gesture. Fool took a step back.

  “Why ask for you? Haven’t you realized? Because I like the risk you pose, Fool. I like the danger you represent. I like the chaos of you, Fool, and I like what you’ll do when you see what you’re supposed to see.”

  “Supposed to see? What am I supposed to be seeing?”

  “The truth,” said Mayall. He strode purposefully to the nearest locker and removed three books from it, began juggling them, head back as he flung them faster and faster through the air. Once he had them moving in a swift, easy arc above him, he started to remove more books from the locker, snatching them with sharp, darting gestures and adding them to the juggle. Four books, five, six, eight, now ten and still he added, panting and laughing, starting to dance as he threw, legs kicking out in a rhythm that counterpointed the books’ movement. Finally, one of the books went too high and hit a hanging light, setting it swinging, then fell back and hit Mayall on the forehead. The angel made a show of shrieking and collapsing, rolling exaggeratedly on the floor as the books fell around him, and then suddenly springing up again with a roar of laughter. He landed and dropped to one knee again, making the same open-armed gesture and shouting “Ta-DAAAAAA!” louder and longer than before.

  “What truth?” Fool asked, trying to ignore the angel’s antics, wondering if it was somehow mad, an insane thing.

  “Any truth you care to find,” said Mayall. “Any truth that Benjamin or Israfil or any of the others cannot or will not see.”

  “ ‘Any of the others’?” repeated Fool. “You aren’t one of them?”

  “Of course not,” said Mayall, his tone indignant. “Haven’t they told you? Haven’t you guessed? I’m Mayall, and I am the only clown angel, the one and only. I am the thing that dances as the worlds collapse. I am the thing that throws the worlds up to see where they fall. I am the thing that finds the joke in the hurt and the hurt in the joke. I am the only one of the Host prepared to see the truth, the whole truth, the whole ugly and breaking truth.”

  “Then why do you need me? If you can see the truth?”

  “Because no one listens to clowns, Fool,” said Mayall, finally stilling, looking at Fool again. He smiled, a sad little moue that pulled at the corners of his mouth and tugged at the tips of his eyes. “Clowns are ever the most truthful and honest but the most ignored of all creatures, even angelic ones. We fall and get hit, we laugh and point, we show where the absurdities and the truths are but are dismissed as fools. Fools, Fool, we’re all fools but you more so than most!” Mayall leaped forward and into the air, wings flapping. One wingtip clipped a cupboard and it sent the angel yawing, crashing over, closely followed by the cupboard, which split open and spilled hundreds of old notebooks across the floor. Prone, wings splayed across the corridor, the angel said, “I am the only angel of accidental destruction, Fool, I am the slip and trip, the drop and crash, the mistake and the groan, and they prefer me to stay in here for fear I might cause damage out there, but I see things, Fool, I see everything.”

  “How?”

  “That’s the wrong question, Fool,” said Mayall, climbing to his feet, and in standing he underwent another of those dizzying shifts, became serious, and when he spoke his voice was quiet and slow and the expression on his face was calm. He looked into the nearest room, seemed to be concentrating on something, and then said, “You have to go, there’s something I have seen that you need to see also. Word has been sent and Benjamin has gone on ahead. Israfil is waiting outside to take you. Quickly, Fool, quickly now, think about the very wrongest question you could ask, and then ask the very rightest one.”

  Fool thought for a minute, sure that asking Mayall how he saw things wasn’t wrong at all but playing along because he had little choice, and then said, “All right, if not how then what. What do you see?”

  “Better, Fool, so much better. I knew you were the right one to bring,” said Mayall, clapping again, feet already beginning to shuffle into another dance. “What do I see, Fool? I see stains, Fool, I see corruptions. You found the blue flowers? They’re the blooms of corruption, growing here, growing in Heaven, where such things should be impossible, little buds of foulness growing in the purest earth there is. Heaven is being invaded, Fool, just skirmishes on the borders so far, but it will get worse, so much worse, and I see it happening now and I see it happening in the future but I cannot see who, Fool, I cannot see the who of it. Make no mistake, though, Fool, be clear; in the most perfect place of all, I can see the one thing that should not exist.

  “I see imperfection.”

  10

  Israfil was, as promised, waiting for Fool outside Mayall’s house by a small, gleaming transport.

  They journeyed in silence, Israfil looking out of the small vehicle’s window at the landscape beyond the glass and Fool thinking about Mayall. Being in the angel’s presence had made him feel dizzy, as though his cycle of frenzy and seriousness was somehow contagious, a hysterical whirl communicated by proximity and only now slowly fading. Fool found that he was tired, not physically but mentally, his thoughts slipping and unable to stay on one thing, refusing to focus. He felt drained, weary inside himself in a way he’d never felt before. Has Mayall fed off me somehow? he wondered. Without touching me, without me realizing? Yes. Yes, I think he has.

  Fool sat back in the seat and let the rhythm of the road, seeping up through the vehicle’s wheels, lull him into something that wasn’t a sleep but wasn’t wakefulness either, something in between where his body felt heavy and colors splashed across the inside of his closed eyes in sinuous waves. His limbs felt stiff, leaden, and his head bobbed down and lolled to the side despite his efforts to keep it up. What’s wrong with me? he thought. What’s the angel done? He thought of the sleeping humans and wondered if he was becoming like them, forced his eyes open and tried to focus on the landscape passing outside the window.

  Instead of land, Fool saw only mist that held, in its depth, dark shadows that might have been hills and fields that might instead have been forests and buildings. Was this the truth, hidden behind the façade?

  Was this Heaven?

  Fool’s eyes dropped closed again despite his struggles to keep them open; they felt like rough balls of lead in his head, his eyelids weighted blinds that pulled ever downward. He dozed, dreaming of carousel horses ridden by grinning, laughing angels, and was woken only by the change of rhythm as the transport came to a halt.

  Their journey ended at the edge of a beach, where the transport had pulled off the road and onto a long stretch of coarse sand fringed by dunes and scattered with patches of sea grass. It took Fool a moment to pull himself back from the place he had collapsed to, dragging himself out of the fairground in his dreams and back into the transport, back to what Mayall had called “the everyday,” and even then he felt dislocated and slow. When he moved, it was draggy and clumsy, his fingers feeling thick and senseless. It took him three tries to open the vehicle’s door, and when he climbed out he had to hold the top of the door to steady himself.

  “Are you unwell?” asked Benjamin from ahead of them, where he waited with the usual smile on his face, now tempered by a moue of concern.

  “Mayall,” said Israfil simply, emerging from the transport behind Fool.

  “Ah, of course,” said Benjamin, understanding flitting across his face. “I should have realized. You spent time with the capering one, and now you feel the weight of your visit with him?”

  Fool realized that the question was being addressed to him, brought his eyes around and tried to focus on the angel. “Yes,” he said, and Heaven blurred and then came back into sharpness before him. He felt himself grow heavier, fell to his knees and then onto all fours. The thought that Benjamin didn’t like Mayall, didn’t like that Fool had been invited to see the clown angel, flashed briefly across his mind and was then gone, replaced by a wave of tiredness and the image of books being juggled, circling higher and higher above h
im while something vast and grinning danced just out of reach. Was he going insane?

  Was he dying?

  “It’ll be fine, Thomas Fool,” Benjamin said, but it didn’t feel fine, not at all. Fool slumped, the strength gone from his arms and legs completely now, leaving him prostrate on the beach. He inhaled grains of sand and the smell of brine, coughed but couldn’t seem to clear his throat of the obstruction. I’m dying, he thought, dying in Heaven and not in Hell, and found he was strangely disappointed by the realization. Marianne, he thought. Marianne, be safe, and then Israfil yanked him up and poured a cupped handful of seawater on his face.

  It was cold, bitterly cold, and it snapped through the feelings of lethargy like a falling icicle. Fool gasped, his throat shockingly, suddenly open and his lungs remembering how to breathe. Some of the liquid went into his mouth and he tasted the rich, uneven tang of salt. Blinking, he focused his eyes on the burning angel that held him. Her face was expressionless behind the caul of flames, and when she saw that he was alert again, she let him go.

  “Pull yourself back together, Information Man,” Israfil said. “There’s a task that needs your attention.”

  Fool stood, unsteady but feeling stronger, more awake. He saw Israfil’s disdainful look and said, “Mayall said there was something I should see,” emphasizing the angel’s name, wearing it like armor. “Perhaps you can take me to it?”

  Whereas the first body had, possibly, fallen from the carousel horse and snapped its neck when it hit the floor, this one was floating facedown in the water several feet out from the shore. It bobbed with the waves, rising up as they crested and then dropping into the troughs as the ocean washed over it. Fool waded out and grasped this body and rolled it, the body’s shoulder breaking the water like the fin of some undersea creature before the corpse settled to float on its back.