It was a woman, her hair drifting in the water and framing her pale, bloating face. Her eyes were open, the sclera bloodshot, the pupils huge. Fool pulled her toward the shore, watched by Benjamin and Israfil, both surrounded by the usual crowd of swaying, slowly moving sleepers. An unnamed angel, another one of the caretakers Fool assumed, was huddled into itself and standing farther back from the shore, looking on. For the first time since his arrival, he saw an expression on an angelic face that was less than happy. This angel was worried.
“Another accident?” he asked as he brought the woman’s body up onto the sand and laid her carefully down. Water spilled from the dead woman’s mouth, foamy and blood-streaked, and her robes clung to her body. She was older, her stomach and thighs fat, wobbling as Fool moved her. He pulled at the material, trying to lift it from her flesh and give her some dignity, but as soon as he let it go it fell back and molded again to her shape, exposing her.
“What else?” asked Israfil. “She was not being watched carefully enough and she slipped under the water.”
“Let me ask you,” said Fool, remembering what Mayall had said. “In all your time in Heaven, both of you, how many accidents like this have there been?”
“None,” said Benjamin. “Heaven is perfect.”
“And yet here we are. Two accidents, two imperfections, in two days.” No, more, he realized; hadn’t the Malakim said he’d been requested specifically, Mayall had told the Malakim that he, Fool, was needed, meaning that there must have been at least one earlier incident, an earlier mystery, an earlier truth to be uncovered. A death? More than one?
How many?
“I repeat, these are clearly accidents. If they have happened, then they have happened for a reason. They are part of the Plan,” said Israfil, and Fool heard the capital letter that “Plan” began with in Israfil’s voice in the way she emphasized its plosive opening. A wave washed up past her, covering her feet, and Fool was fascinated by the way she still burned even underwater, the flames orange and distorted through the liquid. The sea steamed slightly where the water touched her.
“What if they aren’t?”
“They are, and to question further is to question the perfection of Heaven,” she replied, “and you cannot. The only imperfect thing here is you, and your degraded colleagues, those things of worm and rottenness. If there is foulness here, you have brought it, you are it, and it will leave with you. Out here, there is only that which is supposed to be, which is designed by God.”
It’s hopeless, he thought. Mayall’s right, they can’t see it, can’t or won’t allow themselves to. Instead of replying, Fool moved away from the body, going first to the huddled angel. “What about you? Did you see anything?”
“No, sir,” it said.
Sir?
“Nothing?”
“No, sir, I was tending my flock as always and when I came to tend here, I found her like this.”
“How big is your flock? I mean, how long were you away from the people here, from her?”
“From here to away,” said the angel, waving one perfect hand along the beach in the direction that led away from the cliffs.
“Did you feed?” asked Benjamin. “Were you feeding?”
The angel looked down. “Yes.”
There was a moment then, a tiny space in which it felt to Fool like Heaven paused, that everything froze, and then the angel stood straight, nodded at Benjamin and Israfil, lowered its head so that its chin was resting on its chest, and broke to pieces.
Cracks appeared across its face and hands, light spilling from them, and then light was swelling under robes that were billowing out and a great halo of illumination surrounded the angel. It brightened, intensified to a violent glare, and then a sharp zephyr of dust that burned with yellow flames rose from where the angel had been standing, and it was gone.
“Where is he?” Fool asked, knowing the answer.
“He was negligent,” said Israfil. “And negligence has to be punished. Feeding is permitted only when Heaven’s lives are secure.”
“You said it was part of the Plan,” replied Fool. “It was punished for being a part of the Plan?”
“We have our rules, and we adhere to them. That, too, is part of the Plan.”
“Rules,” said Fool. “Of course. There are always rules, aren’t there? I hadn’t finished talking to him; he might still have had something to say that would have been useful.”
“No,” said Israfil. “There is nothing here of use to you. You are a human, a damned human, and there is nothing for you to hear and nothing useful you can tell us.”
“Really? That’s not what the fucking Malakim think, nor Mayall,” snapped Fool, irritation bubbling through for a moment.
“You will keep a civil tongue in your head,” said Israfil, and her flames brightened for a second before flickering back to their usual hue.
Fool ignored Israfil’s comment, instead turning where he stood and looking around, really looking. The sound of the sea washing in and out was a low susurrus like the sleeping breath of some great creature, oddly calming. He tried to clear his mind, remove the irritation he felt toward Benjamin and Israfil and toward their insistence that the two deaths were accidents, remove his own insistence that these were not accidents, remove the memories of pain that still crawled over his skin and the tiredness following the visit to Mayall, remove everything but the scene before him. What could he see? Really see? What was the scene telling him?
There were no other bodies, but there were gaps on the beach where people had been standing.
Fool could tell where people had been because there were indentations in the sand, sometimes surrounded by arcs dug into furrows. They stood, and sometimes they turned around, he thought, looking at the massed crowd. Yes, there; someone turning on the spot, head tilted back to the sun, eyes still closed. The Joyful, I once called them, but they don’t look Joyful, they look asleep. They look fucking half dead!
He walked rapidly around in an expanding spiral, weaving between what he now knew he would always consider the Joyful, counting. Nine spaces, nine gaps, nine pieces of churned sand, the beach’s dark and wet underbelly exposed.
Nine missing people?
Nine missing, and one dead.
Each space in the crowd was connected by a set of trails in the sand. The trails all led in one direction, closing in on each other, so that by the time Fool was fifty yards from where the gaps were there was a single thick and tangled track. He crouched by it, looking for anything in the mess of sand and wetness that he could use. Was that something? A partial print?
Whatever had left the print had claws that had dug into the sand; the rear of the indentation had collapsed, the sand there too dry to hold its shape. Slightly farther on was something that looked like a wheel print, the thickness uneven, the line of it not straight, a continuous furrow through the grains. The track went on for around six feet through a wetter part of the beach, and in the deepest parts of the furrow were occasional more delicate imprints, distorted hexagons and pentagons. Scales?
Claws? And scales? The longer print, was it some kind of tentacle? It was too consistent, unbroken, to be feet, so something like a snake?
What the fuck was going on here?
Fool followed the trail farther, then turned back. The gaps in the ranks of the Joyful occurred at the edge of the huge crowd of them, in the first people you’d meet if you were walking along the beach from the cliffs. He looked down at the trail again, and then called Israfil and Benjamin to come to him.
When they arrived next to him, Fool told them to stand still and went to look at the tracks they had just left. Both left essentially human footprints, although Israfil’s sometimes had brush marks alongside them. Fool peered at the angel’s legs and saw that her lowest wings, the tiny ones that curled out from her ankles, were not as tightly wrapped around her skin as Benjamin’s were, that they continually flexed in and out in time with the rhythm of the sea.
“Are
all angels’ footprints like this?” he asked.
“Why do you want to know?” asked Israfil.
“Because I’m interested,” snapped Fool, “and you uncreated the only other angel that I could have asked, so now I have to bother you. So I ask again, are all your tracks like this?”
“Yes,” said Benjamin. “We are all alike, or at least, all similar enough to leave similar tracks.”
The trail wasn’t made by angels, then. Fool went back to it, crouching again. Sand stuck to the hems of his trousers and scratched the leather of his boots, crunching underfoot. What was that? He reached forward, then thought better of it and unstrapped his gun. Using the barrel, he dug into the sand and worked out what he had seen: a small blue string of plant material. He lifted it and it came free with a sucking sound, pale and thin white roots hanging from its end, stem and tiny flower bud hanging loose. It smelled, reminding him of the plant he’d found at the fairground the day before. The blue growth of corruption, he thought. Imperfection in a perfect place.
“What’s this?” he asked, holding it out toward Benjamin and Israfil.
“A sea plant,” said Israfil, uninterestedly.
“That’s all?”
“Yes.”
Fool dropped it and went on. More of the long fronds grew in the trail, here and there topped by closed flower buds.
“Have you seen this plant before?” he called over to the angels.
“No,” said Benjamin, “but I rarely attend the beach. My role in Heaven is at the Anbidstow, as is Israfil’s.”
Fool found more prints and elongated tracks within the trail the farther he went along it, and soon came to the conclusion that this was actually two trails, one overlaid across the other. Some of the clawed prints faced the Joyful, some of them the cliffs, and at one place he found a print facing the cliffs pressed over a similar print facing the crowds.
“They came from the cliffs to the crowd,” he said aloud. He had a sudden thought and went rapidly back to where the body was still lying on the beach. Here were his tracks and gradually soaking-away splashes of water he’d made as he brought the dead woman from the water. He looked at the sea, saw that it was flowing slightly along the coast as well as washing in and out, and moved along the surf against the flow. Several yards farther away, he found what he was looking for.
A set of footprints in the sand, leading from a space on the beach to the ocean.
The woman had walked from where she had been standing into the water, a distance of about forty feet. The spaces between the prints grew longer as they approached the water, becoming blurred and oddly wide, irregular. Experimentally, Fool walked a few steps, then turned. His prints were evenly spaced. Why the difference between the way his tracks looked and the way the woman’s looked?
Wondering, Fool started to run, accelerated over thirty feet or so, and then stopped and turned back to look at his tracks. The spaces between individual prints grew larger the farther he had run.
She started running, he thought, but why? And why do her prints get wider toward the water’s edge?
Fool went back to the body, glancing down again at his tracks as he did so. The last of his prints, the ones he’d made as he surveyed the marks he’d pressed into the sand while running, were wider, similar to the woman’s prints near the water’s edge. What had he done?
I turned, he thought. I turned to look at where I’d come from, turned to see behind me. She turned, she was turning as she ran, trying to see behind her.
Trying to see what was behind her?
Fool retraced his steps, looking at the tracks the dead woman had made. He walked along, imagining a woman starting to run, turning as she did so, and then? Then? What happened to her? How did she go from running and living to dead and floating?
Just under the edge of the surf was a rock, jutting up from the sand like a stumped tooth. He judged the distance between her last prints, at the edge of the surf. It was the right distance, assuming that there hadn’t been more prints nearer to the rock that the water had washed away, a body’s length. Was that it? If so, there would be a mark on her. Fool started back to her corpse.
There were six tiny black naked angels around the woman’s body, holding her, wings fluttering so fast they were little more than blurs, and lifting the woman into the air.
“No!” shouted Fool, starting to run, aware he’d just run over the woman’s tracks, obliterating them, confusedly aware that his own tracks would show greater distance between each print as he accelerated and knowing that it wasn’t important, still shouting.
“Put her down!”
The angels carried on raising the woman, wings frenzied, air beating and swirling, sand lifting from the beach in the downdrafts, and then he was at the corpse and grabbing it, trying to pull it back to the earth.
Fool was lifted from the ground. He tried to concentrate his weight downward but it was hopeless; the angels simply continued to rise, carrying him as though he wasn’t there. He wrapped one arm over the woman’s belly, gripping hold of her flesh, dangling below her, and tried to pull again. The body shifted in the angels’ grasp but continued to be borne aloft with Fool its unwilling passenger. “Stop,” he cried again, but his voice sounded weaker, thinner, even to him.
“Do you wish to stop this poor soul from moving along her rightful path?” asked Benjamin. The angel was flapping his wings gently, rising alongside Fool and the woman, one arm reaching out and stroking the head of the nearest black angel.
“Yes,” said Fool, not looking down, breath coming in ragged looping swallows.
“Why? She has surely earned her peace?”
“I need to examine her corpse, to check something. I need to see what the woman can tell me,” said Fool. How high up were they now? How high, and how hard would he hit if he fell? His arm slipped, his grip loose, not wanting to dig into the woman’s dead thigh but having no choice.
“The dead cannot speak, Thomas Fool.”
“Yes, they can,” said Fool, and then he had no more words, had a band of fear running around him, tightening so that he couldn’t speak. His grip slipped again, the wet material of the woman’s robe slithering, his fingers unable to keep a solid grasp of her. He looked down, saw the beach and the Joyful below him, too far below, and then the ground was lifting toward him.
He wasn’t falling. The little black angels were descending, bringing the woman back to earth, Benjamin taking hold of Fool and supporting him, lowering him. As his feet touched the ground, Fool let out a tangled sigh and, as soon as Benjamin let him go, dropped to his knees. He swayed, dizzy, breathing deep, and then managed to lift his head.
“Thank you,” he said.
“I cannot pretend to understand,” said Benjamin, “but my instructions are clear. She is yours until you need her no longer. But please, the angels of the dead should have her flesh as quickly as possible.”
“The angels of the dead?”
Benjamin inclined his head, gesturing slightly at the black angels that were now hovering over their heads. “They have the sacred duty of caring for the flesh as it slips away. They are the kindliest ones, the most revered of the angelic host of Heaven.”
“It should only take a moment,” said Fool, feeling carefully around the woman’s head. He probed her scalp and neck, running his fingers through her still-wet hair, pressing and pulling.
There.
Carefully, Fool rolled her over and parted her hair. There was a long gash, washed clean by the sea, its edges pale, across the rear of her head. The bone below the cut felt loose, shifted in a way that a skull should not. When Fool pulled free some of the strands of hair that had pressed into the gash, they brought tiny flecks of dark stone with them.
“She woke up and ran. She was running,” he said, “turning to see something behind her as she ran. She fell as she turned and hit her head on the rock. I would think that the impact knocked her out and she drowned.” He pressed her chest. Foamy water bubbled up from her lungs an
d spilled down her face, threaded with pink streaks.
“Her lungs are full of water,” he said, watching as the strings of water soaked into the sand.
“Impossible,” said Israfil. “While they inhabit their personal Heavens their bodies sleep here, but it is not the simple sleep of rest, it is the sleep of joy and reward. They cannot wake up.”
“Really?” said Fool. He went to the closest person, a young black man with a beard and short hair, and stood in front of him. He thought about the first body, about the slash across its shoulder, and took hold of the man’s upper arms. If I had claws, long claws, they’d be over his shoulder blades, he thought, and if I pulled forward but lost my grip, I’d cut him from rear to front.
Experimentally, he shook the man.
“Don’t,” said Israfil, but Fool ignored her and shook again, harder. The man’s head wobbled loosely on his neck, rocking back and forth. Fool shook even harder, and then pushed the man, who stumbled back and fell. His head hit the sand with a crunch.
“Fool, stop this now,” said Benjamin, and then the man’s eyes flickered open.
“What?” he said, his voice sounding as though it came from far away, from a place of wooziness and deep, drowning sleep. “What’s this?”
“Where are you?”
“Fool, stop,” said Israfil, and her fire was blazing now, throwing leaping yellow and orange shadows around them, the color at her center darkening to a grim, crackling red.
“Where’s Richard?” said the man, looking around, eyes darting back and forth. “He was just here. Where’s Richard, where’s my boy?”
“Human, I command you to stop,” Israfil said, but Fool ignored the angel, took the man’s hands, and helped him to his feet, guided him back to his space. By the time the man’s feet were planted back in the marks they had made earlier, his eyes were closed again and his head was rotating slowly, rolling on his neck until his face was pointing at the sky. Fool stepped away from the man, letting him return to his Heaven, wherever that was, and whomever he was sharing it with. Richard, presumably. His son? Lover? Fool would never know.
The Devil's Evidence Page 14
