“Come here,” said Mayall. His voice was rising again, crackling with laughter, bubbling with a barely restrained hysteria. Already, his feet were kicking up, starting to palsy into a ragged dance that set his whole body into rhythm. Fool nodded at his companions when they stayed still, wary but knowing there was no more choice for any of them here than there was in Hell.
Summer moved first, Gordie following her, never letting go of her hand. By the time they reached Mayall, the angel was practically jittering, the dance lifting him from the ground in long, slow risings that were almost flight but not quite. Each time he came down, he did so on the flowers that grew from the scribe’s decaying flesh, trampling them into the ground, and Fool did not suppose it was an accident. The smell rose around them, thick and heady and corpulent.
“Bal Koth did such a good job, didn’t she?” asked Mayall when Summer and Gordie reached him. “She has pulled them from the darkness and created them in the light so wonderfully. They are growing, so close to perfect, so very close, the perfection of humans made in the image of the brightest being in all of Heaven or Hell, but they have not quite achieved it, have they?”
“I don’t know,” said Fool. Even to himself, his voice sounded dead and toneless.
“Don’t sulk, Thomas Fool, it’s a lazy man’s way of letting his feelings be known! Be angry or be happy or be sad, don’t be this turgid middle ground of pointed silences and wearying frowns. Turn that frown inside out, turn it into a smile, Thomas Fool, I’m about to help you!”
Fool didn’t move, head bowed, suddenly too tired to care.
“I’m waiting,” said Mayall, that singsong voice now sharper, breaking in its upper regions to a harsh and strident demand. Fool looked up and saw that Mayall was staring at him, a pointed expression on his face, an exaggerated glare of attention. His lips were pursed, his brow furrowed, eyes wide, hands on his hips. “This is you, Thomas Fool, Mr. Grumpy-Face Information Man. Now, smile!”
Fool smiled. It felt like a scream without sound.
“That’s better, so much better. Now, shall I begin?”
Without waiting for a reply, Mayall turned back toward Summer and Gordie. Some of his mania fell away and his movement slowed even if it didn’t stop entirely.
“Such a beautiful pair,” he said quietly, as though to himself. He reached out, ignoring the flinches his touch generated, and placed his hands on Summer’s and Gordie’s necks. “So nearly perfect, but Bal Koth didn’t have all the power, did she? No, not enough, but clowns do, clowns have a piece of the power that the serious do not.
“Tell me, Thomas Fool,” said Mayall, calling back over his shoulder without looking around, “what do jokes need?”
“I don’t fucking know,” said Fool, angry and sad and hurt and confused. “I don’t know anything.”
“Jokes need voices to be told,” said Mayall, either not hearing or ignoring Fool’s anger and the swearing. “Jokes need sound. Tell me a joke, Thomas Fool.”
“I don’t know any,” said Fool. “I’ve told you, I don’t know anything. I know less than nothing.”
“Nonsense, Thomas,” replied Mayall, still holding the throats of Summer and Gordie. His grip didn’t look tight but it did look firm, unyielding. “Everyone knows a joke or two. Everyone except my companion angels, that is. Tell me a joke.”
“I don’t even know what a joke is,” said Fool.
“Something funny, Thomas, something to make us laugh or see the absurdity of the situations we find ourselves in. Something witty, something stupid, something that makes us roar.”
Fool thought for a minute and then said, “Me. I’m your joke, the little Fool you expect to investigate but who knows less than nothing and who even the angels think is a monkey, investigating things that the same angels do not see. I’m the joke.”
“Bitter, but good enough,” said Mayall, “although you underestimate yourself, Thomas Fool. You may be a joke, but it is not one of idiocy or ignorance. You may not know it, but yours is the humor of the unexpected, of the sudden jump and shock. You are the thing that keeps everything else spinning, the joke that makes us see the changes needed and the changes too far and the changes lost and missed. Have faith, Thomas, have faith in yourself. Now, your reward.”
Mayall let go of Summer and Gordie and stepped back. Already, his dance was picking up, as though once he was not touching anything else he became untethered, was set loose. He opened his wings and flapped, lifting himself into the air and spinning. “Good-bye, Thomas Fool. I’ll no doubt be in touch soon. Enjoy your rewards.”
“Rewards?”
“Perfection, Thomas, the perfections of completion,” and then he was gone, there and then suddenly not there.
“Rewards?” asked Fool, speaking to himself. He rose to his feet, feeling the weariness of old and souring energy ripple through him, the weariness of frustrations and not understanding. He felt hungry and wondered when he had last eaten. Today? Yesterday? Did days even mean anything when his time was so fractured?
“Rewards,” he said again. “There’s nothing, Mayall. What is there?”
“Hello, Fool,” said a voice, and it took a moment to recognize the voice as Summer’s.
16
“Summer?” Fool asked, feeling slow and stupid. “You can talk?”
“Yes,” she replied. “I can talk.” She smiled as she spoke and it was good to hear her again, it was fucking wonderful to hear her again, hear that voice that he had last heard in a scream.
“I can, too,” said Gordie, sounding surprised, and he was laughing and then Fool was across the clearing and holding them both, arms around them and neck buried against their shoulders, pulling them into a clasp that he never wanted to release. Mayall had made them complete, given them their voices back, and it was so good, it was perfect, and Fool was crying, the first time he had ever cried tears of joy rather than pain or fear or sorrow.
“It’s okay,” said Summer, stroking the back of Fool’s head, her touch gentle. “It’s okay, we’re here, we’re with you.”
“Yes,” said Fool and could say no more. Gordie’s hand clasped Fool’s shoulder and for another long, warm instant they hugged before breaking apart. Fool wiped at his face, the wipe triggering a flash of pain from his cheek.
“It’s really you,” said Fool. “Really?”
“Of course,” said Gordie, as though there was no question, that it couldn’t be anyone else.
“It’s us,” confirmed Summer. Fool saw her hand clasp Gordie’s tighter for a brief moment, their fingers whitening as they gripped.
“Where—” said Fool, and stopped. How could he ask it?
“Where were we? I don’t know,” said Summer. “I remember darkness. I remember pain and then nothing.”
“I remember fire,” said Gordie, his face creasing slightly. “Then nothing until I woke up here. In Heaven, I mean.”
“I remember losing you,” said Summer to Gordie and there was pain there, and loss. She leaned in to kiss him and after a slight resistance, Gordie returned the kiss. They stayed connected for seconds, lips touching, eyes closed, before breaking apart.
“Never again,” she said. “Never again.”
“Why didn’t you go on, or out, or wherever?” asked Fool, unable to stop himself. He felt light, like he could burst into laughter for no reason. Was this how Mayall felt, this euphoria, this sheer joy, this need to somehow explode, to show the amazement of it all?
“Because of you,” said Gordie. “Because we were tied to you. I don’t know why, but we were. I couldn’t move on because of you.”
“Me either,” said Summer.
“I’m sorry,” Fool said.
“Don’t be,” Summer replied. Her voice sounded light, lilting, like a song that Fool had never heard before but had known all his life. It sounded as though it could lift him, create wings for him. “You didn’t do it, we know that. Maybe it was Hell, or maybe it was Heaven planning to move us to this point.”
&nb
sp; “You know what happened after…” After you died, Fool almost said but stopped himself.
“No,” said Gordie. “I just know I’m back.”
“I know we’re here to help you, that we’re linked, everything’s linked, you and us and the murders.”
That brought Fool back. “Murders,” he repeated. “You agree with me? They’re not accidents?”
“Of course they’re not,” said Gordie.
“Israfil thinks they are,” said Fool, pushing against Gordie’s certainty to test his own.
“Israfil thinks we’re monkeys,” said Summer, grinning. “I couldn’t speak but I could hear. Fuck her. Now, should we see what we’ve got?”
“ ‘What we’ve got’?”
“What we’ve got,” repeated Summer. “Let’s investigate. There are crimes to solve.”
“Yes,” said Gordie, and Fool nodded without speaking and went with his friends to investigate murders in Heaven.
—
Fool had forgotten that he’d demanded Mr. Tap find him a map of Hell.
He found it on his desk when the three of them returned to his room later that day, tired and despondent and elated all at the same time. They had spent the preceding hours simply walking and talking, going over what they knew and thought they knew and needed to know, throwing ideas out and then pulling them back in when they proved unworkable or leaving them out there to see if they could gain a coating of fact as the investigation proceeded. It was, perhaps, the happiest Fool could remember being, because although there was urgency within the investigation, for the first time he felt the urgency had been diluted and that he could share it with someone.
Part of the problem was, of course, that they were out of the places they knew and understood. At least in Hell they could predict and delineate some, if not all, of the parameters they were supposed to function within, but here? Everything was confusing, from the geography that shifted to the angels that refused to see the evidence in front of their eyes to the Joyful who were apparently asleep and dreaming of Heavens inside themselves even as they stood in Heaven itself. He didn’t know whether to turn or stand still, felt like they were spinning without moving, like the trails they might follow all eventually turned back in on themselves to become looped and endless things.
Why had he wanted the map?
It was drawn on old parchment and scrolled tight, tied with a thick hank of cord. When he cut the cord, the map unfurled slowly, spreading its tired arms across his desk, letting loose a faint aroma of dirt and burning. Its face was covered in dense black drawings, notations, indicators of scale and direction and inhabitants. Gordie was immediately fascinated and started poring over the document in excitement, pointing out things with comments like “I knew it!” or “There! See?” At one point, he looked at a vast black patch in the center of the map, finger hovering above a series of white spots, and said, “Look, there are islands in Solomon Water. Little ones, all connected by spits of land. I kept hearing rumors about them, but I could never prove it.”
Summer stroked Gordie’s back as he leaned over the map, the expression on her face somewhere between pride and interest. Fool tried to remember, and then did. He had asked for the map because of the places that burned, hadn’t he?
“Gordie, Summer,” he said. “I need you to sit away from the map and just watch for a while. Don’t worry, and don’t interfere.”
“Interfere with what?”
“You’ll see. It’s fine, though. Just sit and listen and watch and let me talk, yes?”
“Okay,” said Gordie and withdrew from the map, clearly reluctant to do so.
Fool had no choice in what he did next; rolling up his sleeve, he rubbed the skin around the tattoo of Marianne’s face and said, “Marianne.”
There was no reply. He spoke her name again, louder as though it would make a difference; perhaps it would. Still nothing.
“Marianne,” again. What time was it in Hell? As far as he knew it was the same time as it was in Heaven, late evening but not yet night, so she was unlikely to be asleep. Was she busy, in a place where she couldn’t hear him?
Had something happened to her?
Fool looked at the tattoo, wondering. Unlike Mr. Tap’s shifting, angular illustration on his skin that broke apart after their conversations, Marianne’s image seemed permanently etched upon him. Did that mean something? Over these past days, the art of the tattoo seemed to have refined itself so that what had originally been a blocky version of Marianne, almost a caricature, was now an accurate, carefully drawn representation of how she looked, or at least how he remembered her looking. Her face, outlined and shaded on his forearm, was a delicate tracery of line and shadow that caught how she was in his mind—hair short, jaw firm but not square, eyes sharp and intelligent. Where are you, Marianne? he thought, and then the skin under the marks itched violently and the eyes blinked and the mouth opened.
The pain was as startling and sharp as it ever was; Fool had hoped that it would lessen, or he would somehow become used to it over time, but no. It was agony, the skin tearing open along fault lines created by a demon’s entrails burning into him, dribbling blood as the eyes flickered and the mouth formed itself into the shape of the black-drawn lips.
“Thomas?” Marianne’s voice, wafting out from his arm on a breeze of misted blood and an exhalation that should not exist. “Sorry, sir. Sir.”
“Thomas is fine. Marianne, are you okay?”
A pause, then, “I think so.”
“You think so?”
“There’s been another fire, Thomas, another slaughter.” Another pause, longer this time, and then, “The Evidence are here. Mr. Tap is here.”
Fool’s belly clenched, the skin preparing itself for the ripping, as though the mere sound of the demon’s name would summon him, give him a voice to talk, but thankfully nothing happened.
“In the building?”
“Yes.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Nothing. The Evidence Men are going through all the offices looking at the paperwork but I don’t think they understand it, it’s like they’re playing at being proper Information Officers, pretending to read and talk to each other about what they’ve read without actually understanding any of it. Mr. Tap is sitting in the mess taking their reports, but most of the reports seem to be nonsense, more of the game they’re playing. He gathered us all together and told us their presence was merely to support us, but it feels more permanent. It feels like we’re being removed, pushed out.”
“It would, and I suspect you are,” said Fool. “He’s taking over. Are you safe?”
A third pause, the longest of all. “Yes. I think so, I mean. For now. I’m in your room. So far, they haven’t been in any of the bedrooms or your office but it won’t take them long, I don’t think.”
“Then we need to work quickly. Look at my board, tell me where all the fires have occurred.”
For the next few minutes, Fool plotted the positions of the fires on the map of Hell, using an angel’s feather dipped in ink. When the end of the feather’s calamus touched the map, the thick paper wrinkled and tiny scorch marks appeared within the ink, but it did not burn through and the damage was light enough for him to still use the document as he wanted to. When he had finished, the map had more than twenty new marks, twenty places where fire had eaten its way through wood and flesh and drywall. The pattern of them seemed random, the scatter to have no real order that he could discern. There was a cluster here but only individual fires there, a smaller group here, one out on its own there, a larger grouping there. He sighed, frustrated.
What had this shown him? Nothing. Why had he wanted this? He’d thought of something last night, something about how the fires had been started.
No, not about how they were started, he already knew that, about how the sites for the fires might have been chosen.
Fool looked at the map again, staring at the marks, looking at the things around them marked out in old, faded
colors. At first it wasn’t clear, and then it came into focus as though someone had twisted his view around and brought it to the right angle for him to see it clearly.
The site of each of the fires was close to an area of old growth, forest or farmland allowed to go fallow or simply abandoned.
Fool tried to think about it from the perspective of the arsonist. You want to set something on fire, he thought, but you don’t want to be caught. So you…what? Hide in the forests and farmlands where the undergrowth is at its thickest, you come through it, and when you emerge, you go to the nearest building and you set your fire, then you escape back into the shadows and you watch it burn from a distance.
Yes. Yes, that sounds right.
“Marianne?”
“Yes?”
“Where did the slaughters take place?”
She gave him three more areas, which Fool plotted, and saw that they were the same. Each backed onto or was close to an area of wilderness. Were they carried out by the same creatures? Creatures growing in confidence, moving between fires and murders and the wholesale slaughter of workers, depending on how their whim took them?
“Thomas?”
“Yes?”
“About the fires and the murders?”
“Yes?”
“There were more of the crowds around them today. Remember I said that it felt as though the crowds had been brought together somehow? Deliberately, so that they could see the fire and be encouraged to make things up about it?”
“Yes?”
“It was the same today. It was as though someone had set the fire, and murdered people, as an act, as a way of getting people to talk about it, to be scared. Even today, I heard three or four stories about who was doing it, from old demons to mysterious black assassins to creatures that haven’t got a name but that even the Devil himself is frightened of, creatures from nowhere in Hell or Heaven or any other world. It’s like a coordinated campaign designed to cause uncertainty.”
The Devil's Evidence Page 21
