The Devil's Evidence

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  “No.” Israfil again. “There is no body.”

  “Go and look.”

  “No. There can be no body in the state you describe, because this is Heaven and events like this do not occur, little lying human.”

  “Why would I lie?”

  “Who knows, Commander of Hell’s Information Office, consorter with demons and ghosts, who knows why you might lie in Heaven.” Israfil’s voice dripped sarcasm and dislike. Fuck her.

  Fool looked at Benjamin, who smiled at him. “Perhaps you’re mistaken?” asked the angel.

  “No,” said Fool, “I’m not.” There was no help there, no information to be found.

  Behind him, Fool heard the flap of wings but did not turn around. The black angels, the kindliest ones, the ones that looked like infants, would be taking the body away but he did nothing to stop them. There was no way to talk to the body, and instinct told him he had learned all he could from it; without Hand or Tidyman or Morgan, the poor dead man’s flesh would remain mute and secretive. Instead, ignoring the angels, he crossed the foyer and went outside.

  Heaven’s day was still warm, still sunny, and Fool’s shadow stretched ahead of him as he walked along the side of the building. It was joined by the shades of Summer and Gordie, heads at his shadow’s waist, walking behind him. He stopped, waiting until they caught up with him, and then the three went around the building’s corner together.

  There was a field along the side of the building that housed the pool, its grass short, covered with white painted marks over which another crowd of the Joyful swayed and stood and walked. There were differences here, though; some of the Joyful seemed to be moving together, not simply around each other. There was a definite sense of them moving in packs, the packs sometimes almost meeting as they moved, never touching but flowing against and through and around each other. Fool stopped and watched, fascinated, Summer and Gordie standing next to him, watching without understanding. More patterns, he thought. I know there are patterns there, just like there are patterns to the movements and spacing in the pool, but I can’t see them properly. I can see the outline of them but not the content. There must be reasons why they move like that, why they move around the pool like they do, but I can’t understand them.

  Fool carried on walking, going to the next corner and then around to the rear of the building and to the outside of the broken window.

  From inside, it had been hard to see the ground, and Fool had underestimated the number of prints and tracks. The ground was churned and thick with them, with indentations and scars, with tears and rips. Standing by the window, Fool looked along the lines of marks, the track they formed, following it back until it disappeared into a thick copse of trees. His hand rose without thinking to his face, touching the wounds that in the heat of the investigation he had been able to forget for a few minutes. Now they reacted angrily, as though to remind him of his presence, and he saw again a set of claws at the end of an arm that was dark and spindly rising toward him. He flinched, stepping back, and bumped into Summer. She placed a hand on his shoulder, both stopping him from taking another step and squeezing reassuringly. She smiled at him.

  “I wish you could talk,” Fool said.

  Summer made a sound that might have been a word, half formed and shallow, and then smiled again, shaking her head. He turned to the window.

  There were scratches under the frame, long striations cut into the wooden side of the building that reminded him of something. He tried to find the memory but it was just out of reach and he let it go; it would come back soon enough, he was sure. Instead of pushing, he turned again, looking back at the tracks. He crouched, looking closely at the torn earth.

  The tracks were similar to the ones that he had seen on the beach. There were some that might have been made by clawed feet, others that were unbroken irregular lines that, when he got on his hands and knees, had the impressions of scales or some other kind of segmented skin at the base. Familiar blue flowers had started to bud in the rich, dark earth; as he watched, one of the tiny flowers opened, the petals angling toward the sun and trembling slightly. The smell of it reached his nostrils. Without thinking, Fool reached forward and crushed the open flower head between his finger and thumb. It popped unpleasantly, leaving a greasy, foul-smelling residue across his fingers, which he wiped on the clean earth by the churned trail.

  Following the prints back to the trees, Fool came to the same conclusion as he had come to on the beach: that the trail was in fact two trails, one lying over the top of the other, leading from the trees and then back to them. The returning trail had additional marks, a series of twin parallel lines cutting all around the track. Heel marks, from the dragged Joyful? Fool thought so. Here and there, blood puddled along the trail. Not much, but enough to let him know that at least one of the vanished Joyful was injured. Another glass cut from the window? Again, he thought yes, although when he thought about the dead woman on the beach and remembered the slash around her shoulder, he realized that it could equally be an injury from the snatch itself.

  He stopped to think, let his head fall back and his vision fill with Heaven’s sky. In the distance, a shape that he thought might be the dead body being carried by six small angels floated across the blue, growing smaller and smaller. Another silent, vanished corpse, another thing that couldn’t exist but did, and where was he?

  Nowhere. Worse than nowhere; each step he took made things more confusing. In Hell, at least, the lines of cause and effect were clear-cut, but here he had no one even to acknowledge the deaths, let alone help him see the bigger pictures that the dead formed.

  No one? No, that wasn’t true, there was one thing that knew more about what was happening here than they were telling, Fool was sure. There was one person who knew about the trails and the Joyful and the dead.

  Mayall. Mayall saw things. Mayall would know about the dead.

  —

  “You cannot demand to see Mayall.”

  Israfil was standing outside the pool house, her silent flames flickering a thick, curdled orange. She was angry—angrier than usual, looking down at Fool through her face of fire and scowl.

  “Why?”

  “Because we are not bound to obey your requests, Fool, because you are not our master and we do not have to jump to the call of a human.”

  “That’s not good enough. I need to see Mayall, and I need to see him now. He has information. If he sees things, he may be able to tell me what’s going on here.”

  “Little human, you aren’t listening. You cannot see Mayall simply because you wish to, because Mayall does not see anyone. Mayall stays in his house and never leaves, Mayall summons, Mayall is the one who sees, not the one seen. He sends us messages telling us where to look and what to think. Mayall is the angel in hiding. He has already indicated he will come to you soon; wait for him and be patient. Better yet, take your stain of corruption and leave. Leave this, Fool. Leave this, join your Delegation, and go back to Hell.”

  Fool sighed, letting the breath out in a long, weary roll. Even in Hell, where obstructions were common, he rarely came across anyone as objectionable as Israfil. “What,” he asked slowly, “is your fucking problem?”

  The swearing this time was deliberate, baiting the angel, and probably unwise. For a second, she simply stared at him and then, very slowly, she reached out and with a casual flick of her hand slapped his uninjured cheek. His head snapped sideways, the neck wrenching, the gashes on his other cheek splitting, starting to weep.

  “Israfil,” said Benjamin quietly. “That is not the way.”

  “ ‘Not the way’?” asked the angel. “Then what is? This thing, this monkey, dares to challenge me? It comes to Heaven not even one of the raised, not even one of the beloved of God, yet thinks to question us, to order us?”

  “Monkey?” asked Fool, grinning but unable to help himself. “I’m a monkey?”

  “Of course,” said Israfil. “You and all the other inhabitants of Hell, nothing but monkeys,
foul things flinging their excrement at each other.”

  “We’re monkeys,” said Fool, looking around at Summer and Gordie, still grinning. Both of them smiled, although neither appeared to understand what they were hearing, assuming they were hearing anything at all. They were still holding hands, he saw. Fool turned back to Israfil, still grinning.

  “This monkey is investigating deaths in Heaven, Israfil, investigating mysteries.”

  “Accidents.”

  “Deaths, angel, mysterious deaths. I do so at the request of the Malakim and at the specific instruction of Mayall, and I expect your help. Now, take me to Mayall.”

  “We cannot,” said Benjamin, sounding, at least, apologetic. “The clown angel does not see anyone except at his own request. His home moves, and we cannot know where he is unless he allows us to know. I’m sorry, Thomas Fool, but it cannot be permitted. He will find you soon, that is the best we can offer.”

  “Can you ask him?”

  “No. No one speaks to Mayall, no one asks Mayall, Mayall is the asker and the speaker.”

  “But if Mayall sees things, surely he can tell me what he saw and this whole situation can be sorted out?”

  “There is no situation, Fool; there are simply accidents, a series of coincidences.” Israfil again, chipping in, voice disdainful.

  “One of the Joyful did the impossible and woke up, accidentally climbed out of the pool, broke the window from the fucking outside, tried to climb through, and stabbed himself to death.”

  “Assuming the body was there, then perhaps that’s what happened.” Airy, uninterested.

  “And what of the things before?”

  “Before?”

  “Before I came to Heaven. There were things before, incidents, things that can’t be explained. That’s why I’m here, after all.”

  “No,” said Israfil, but Fool saw her eyes dart away from his as she spoke, recognized the sign of a truth avoided.

  “Then why am I here?” he asked. “Why did Mayall and the Malakim ask for me?”

  “I don’t know,” said Israfil, eyes back on Fool now, glow rippling and raging, and that was the truth; she didn’t know and it burned her, caustic and bitter and scalding. “Possibly they felt it amusing to see a monkey from Hell perform tricks and scurry after its own tail?”

  It’s pointless, Fool thought. They’re worse than the demons in Hell, so blind and determined that this place is perfect. And it should be perfect, shouldn’t it? This is Heaven, the place of perfection, so why isn’t it?

  Why isn’t it perfect?

  Fool didn’t know, but he saw one thing clearly: whatever was happening in Heaven was getting worse. He turned away from the angels, facing away from the building, and saw movement at the edge of the far fields. Something stepped back, drawing itself into the tall grass that grew there, becoming part of the shadows, but not before Fool had seen it clearly.

  The scribe. The scribe, watching him again.

  15

  Before Fool’s head gave the command, his feet were moving.

  He covered the space between the building and the edge of the grassy area quickly, accelerating as he went, muscles unused to this kind of action and beginning already to protest. From the corner of his eye he saw Summer and Gordie follow, saw the crowds of the Joyful fall away from them as they ran, felt the heat of the sun above him, and this was good, this was right, this was action after all the uncertainty and inactivity, this was movement both literal and figurative, and he ran.

  He hit the grass and pushed in among the high stalks, stepping into a place of shadow and fractures. Something snagged at the healing lines of pain across his cheek and tugged and he jerked back, fearing an attack, but it was simply the stalks reaching for him, their high tips above his head, their edges stiff and sharp. It dragged against him as he pushed farther in, rough and stiff across his body, grass with tiny serrations along its edges. Fool raised his gun hand and used it to shield his face, trying to work out where the scribe had gone.

  “Stand still,” he said to the still-moving Summer and Gordie, and then waited until the sound of them had settled to nothing. At first, there was only the sound of the grass rubbing against itself, a low hiss like the distant exhalations of some slumbering creature, and the near silence was like a living thing curling around him and caressing his skin. Then, on the edge of his hearing, Fool heard the faint sound of feet hitting the earth and a body crashing through the grass somewhere ahead, stumbling. Ahead? No, not quite. He listened again.

  Ahead and to his right.

  Fool turned slowly in that direction, moving forward and peering through waving stems that were now above his head. It was impossible to move quietly; the grass stems tugged against his clothes as he passed them and brushed together, making a surprisingly harsh, bitter sound. To his rear, Fool heard Summer and Gordie following and he motioned for them to stay behind him.

  Was the scribe still running? He couldn’t hear it anymore, but surely it hadn’t gotten so far ahead of him that it was out of earshot? No, there it was again, the sound of something driving itself forward, crashing and breaking thick stems as it went. It sounded clumsy, desperate but slow, hampered by the vegetation, thrashing.

  Fool followed.

  Farther into the field the grass was denser, harder than ever to push through, but the denseness worked in Fool’s favor. He could see the scribe’s trail now, a path marked in broken plants and churned earth below. Why was it running from him? It should know he posed no threat.

  Only he did, didn’t he? He had killed demons, killed them fairly regularly, in fact. He was Fool, the killer of demons, and it probably feared for its life and whatever soul it possessed. Should he call to it, reassure it that he meant it no harm, he simply needed to talk? No, he didn’t know the thing’s name, or if it even had one, and simply calling out “scribe” would feel wrong. He pushed on, following the trail the small demon had left for him.

  Something was standing in the grass to his side, watching him.

  Fool froze. He could see the figure in his peripheral vision, motionless, a thing of shade, feet back from him in the stems and made into an abstraction by an interlocking crosshatch pattern created by the grass stems and their shadows. Fool cautiously dropped a hand to his gun, withdrawing it slowly. As he did a breeze blew, ruffling Fool’s hair, and the figure shifted slightly, a fractional spinning movement. Fool jerked back, bringing the gun up fully but not firing.

  There was another figure behind the first one, and more behind that one, ranks of them standing in pools of shade, hidden by the thick growths. The grass was course here, old, the stems knotted and tangled, dense clusters of it twisting together to form shapes that looked almost like stunted trees. All the figures were still, seeming to watch him, a forest of them, arms outstretched and hands dangling like the scarecrows he had sometimes seen in Hell’s fields, although what purpose they served he had never been able to ascertain.

  The scribe forgotten for a moment, Fool approached the first figure. Still it didn’t move, resolving out of the patterns of light and dark first into a human rather than angel or demon, and then into a woman, another of the sleeping Joyful. Her hair was wild, standing out from her head in knotted tangles and twists, and her skin was a rich ocher color. She was older, her face lined, her eyes closed, and she was dressed in a loose smock. It was baggy around her outstretched wrists, and her feet, emerging from below the hem, were bare and sunk several inches into the soil.

  She was being lost to the plants.

  Grasses had pushed up between her legs and had grown up under her clothing, the tops of one or two of the stems emerging from the neck of the dress and tangling into her hair. More stems emerged from the open expanse of her sleeves, green tips tickling around the woman’s wrists. Fool could track the growth and travel of them by the way the material of the dress bulged over the woman’s shoulders as the grass was forced to turn by the material barrier, some toward the neck, some pushing along her arms. Th
e seam of the dress had split in one place and small tendrils of greenery had pushed their way out of the opening, the questing face of the plants turned up to the sun.

  How long had this woman been standing here?

  Fool went past her, seeing that all the other figures were the same, men and women standing in the field, sleeping and dreaming or being somewhere else or whatever it was that Heaven allowed the Joyful to do, and the grasses had grown up through their clothes and their feet had sunk into the earth. The farther back Fool went, the older he thought the Joyful were. Or, at least, the longer they had been there; the deeper he went, the less of the human he could see and the more they were festooned with growths. One of the figures’ faces was completely lost behind a thick mass of plant material, the fronds covering him and burrowing into the hair of his head like some twisting green crown. Fool let his gun hand drop as he walked among the Joyful, and put the gun in its holster. Whatever was happening here, he didn’t think these people were a threat.

  They looked different from the others he had seen, their skin tanned by the sun and somehow thicker, rougher. Where their hands were visible and not lost, the growths were gnarled and callused, fingers thick with skin pads, nails squared and chipped. Here, their clothes were often splitting away entirely, forced into torn rags by the pressures of the plants growing between cloth and skin. One or two of the figures were entirely naked except for the growths, and Fool was reminded uncomfortably of the Man, sitting in the corner of his room and gradually becoming lost to another form. Was this how he started? wondered Fool. By simply staying in one place too long and dreaming? But of what? Of change? Of the earth? Do these Joyful love the earth so much they want to be a part of it?

  Finally, Fool found himself standing in the middle of a group of Joyful, all almost gone beneath the growths now. They were cruciform masses of green and brown, tangling stems and vines smothering the humans at their core. Insects buzzed around them and the air was warm and smelled sweet, of honey and healthy wood and the rich musk of soil and growth and light.