“Come and get them.”
The shape of grass collapsed. All Fool could do now was wait.
—
Mr. Tap arrived first, traveling in a dusty black transport with holes in its windows and a series of dents up one wing, its paint cracked and the bare metal beneath exposed. Twin columns of bauta followed behind, hundreds of the Evidence Men trying to keep ranks like soldiers but failing, their lines ragged and ever distorting. Some of them were injured, others covered in blood that Fool thought probably wasn’t theirs. One of the bauta at the head of the procession carried a damaged angel’s wing, small and limp, and waved it like a flag.
Mr. Tap climbed out of the car, its long limbs casting arachnid shadows on the ground, and came to stand in front of Fool.
“Thomas Fool, Commander of the Information Office of Hell,” the demon said, and it drawled the words, the warped lips drawing back from its distorted mouth. The tattoo on Fool’s belly twitched, and for a moment the voice came from his own body as well as from the thing in front of him, and then the demon waved its hand and the tattoo sealed again. Fool was briefly grateful for the unsundering of his flesh and then Mr. Tap leaned in and whispered, “Should I slaughter you now?”
“No,” said Fool, gun still in its holster. “Save your energy.”
“For what, Fool? For what?”
“For your real enemy. For the Man of Plants and Flowers. He’s behind this, the whole war, not the things from outside. I was wrong.”
That brought Mr. Tap up short. It reared back and peered at Fool. “You’re lying,” it said after blinking several times. “The Man is dead.”
“Tell him that,” said Fool and pointed behind the bauta.
The Man was coming along the road.
The fields were bursting with plants as the Man forced the bushes and grasses to explode into frenzied life so that he could knot the stems together into vines, could force branches out and keep his horde of puppet demons moving. There was a mass of them jerking along the road, and they were the dancers, their gait uneven, convulsive and leaping as the Man controlled them. All of them at once, Fool marveled even as his fear flowered. All of them, but he’s not doing it perfectly. That’s why they dance, that’s why they’re irregular and uneven. The connecting cables between them, which Fool recognized now as branches, roots, and vines, constantly broke and fell away as new growth shoots snapped out of the fields and attached themselves, pulling the mass on, keeping it moving. It was like watching bitter poetry in motion.
The Man was fast, faster than the bauta had been, and fell upon the rearmost Evidence Men with a noise like a thousand dull knives being drawn.
It was what Fool had hoped and counted on: that the Man was strong when he was at his most diffuse because he could slip around unseen, but that when he was forced to act, when he was forced to concentrate himself, he became a target, could be fought against; that Mr. Tap would respond to Fool’s summons because it wanted to win the war and revenge for the slight of Fool’s insults, and it would bring its army with it. Fool had brought them together and hoped, and now their natures had taken over, the violence in them having sway over the situation.
They joined battle.
Mr. Tap reacted quickly, darting away and shrieking orders to its troops, trying to get them to organize, but it had little chance of attaining any real control. The bauta, aggressive and feral, responded to the attack as a disorganized pack, and soon the demons controlled by the Man and the Evidence Men were fighting in the dust, scrappy and vicious and filthy.
More of the Man’s slaves were coming up the road behind the first mass, more bushes exploding from the dirt of the fields to allow the Man to keep control of them. He must be using so much energy, Fool thought as he backed away, stepping onto the path into the Garden. The new captive demons joined the battle as Mr. Tap climbed on top of the vehicle and tried again to make itself heard. It clapped its hands and a spiral of what looked like old fur and hair twisted out from it and lanced rapidly into the melee, snapping taut around one demonic part of the Man’s force and severing it from the main body. The slave demon immediately collapsed and Evidence Men fell on it, tearing it to pieces.
Mr. Tap howled, the sound joyous and wild in the hot afternoon, and sent another lash into the struggling crowd. With an audible sizzle, another part of the Man’s army fell away and was torn to shreds.
The Man couldn’t have stolen that many demons or Hell would have noticed, and some had presumably fallen in the other battles of the war; his plan had to depend on waiting until the two armies were weakened and stepping in then, but Fool had, he hoped—and there was that word again, that fucking word—forced his hand. By making him try to take the Archdeacons and putting him in conflict with the Evidence, the Man was, perhaps for the first time, at risk.
The Man and the Evidence were tearing each other apart.
The bauta had the advantage of speed and ferocity and numbers and a mindless lack of fear, but the Man had mass. He could also use the plants on either side of the road as additional weaponry, and Fool saw several of the Evidence Men snared or speared by his forced growths, tangled by them or impaled and pulled into pieces.
The Evidence Men swarmed the mass of captive demons, their tusks piercing and goring, snapping the connecting cable of branch and stem. The disconnected demonkind fell to the roadway and were trampled or set upon by their enemies. Mr. Tap’s strings of hair, or fur, or whatever they were, snaked through the battle, snapping and tearing at the Man’s troops, lopping off limbs or heads or snipping through the mass and cleaving it into pieces. Sometimes the Man managed to send new growths out from the fields to reconnect the severed section, but for each time he managed it there was a section he failed to reach before Mr. Tap’s piglike troops ripped it away and harried it down to nothing. The Man, for his part, set his demons to crowd the smaller things, slashing at them, tearing them, ripping them piece from piece, surrounding groups of them and tightening like some terrible, grand noose, pressing in, leaving the things in its center dead.
Soon, the road was filled with the dead, bauta and captive demons and plants, the sides not exactly equal but neither managing to gain any kind of true advantage over the other. They fought, and they weakened each other amid the stench of spilling blood and baking entrails and sap and shit and hair and fear and rage, and they carried on and on, until what was left were pale shadows of the numbers that had started the battle.
Eventually the two opposing sides had little choice but to draw apart and face each other across the churned bodies of their dead and injured, gathering themselves.
Now.
Fool finally drew his gun. He pointed at one of the demons in the Man’s tattered web and fired, shooting the thing in the forehead. The back of its skull exploded and it collapsed in a shower of brain and meat. He fired again and another fell.
“Fool,” said the Man from in the field, the shape of him rising up, larger than Fool had ever seen him before. He was still human, or at least, retained a human form, a huge fat man made of greenery sitting in a field overlooking a battle like some malevolent scarecrow. “What are you doing? We had a deal.”
“We still have,” said Fool. “Come and get the Archdeacons if you want them. I’m waiting. I’m just clearing myself a path out of here. It looks like you’ll have to come yourself, though; your demons can’t get past the Evidence. Can you do it, do you think?” He fired again and this time a bauta fell, the Evidence Man’s face torn away by the bullet.
“Fool,” hissed Mr. Tap, turning, and the Man struck.
A mass of wooden stems burst from the center of the Man’s bulk and spat across the space between it and Mr. Tap. The longest of them punctured the center of Mr. Tap’s back and the rest slapped across its shoulders and wrapped around the demon tightly, creating a shifting carapace of greenery about the demon’s chest. The stems stretched between the Man and Mr. Tap and they pulsed, bulging and shivering, and then they snapped, the broken ends co
nnected to Mr. Tap contracting, violently slamming into it, tightening and holding on to the demon’s back. Mr. Tap let out a strange gasp, elongated and raw, took a single step, and fell from the vehicle to land, hard, on the road with a crack.
Nothing moved and then the mass of the Man’s demons collapsed. They fell together, suddenly lifeless. Being used this way must exhaust them, thought Fool as he watched the bodies roll apart, remembering the trapped demons in the crates, the Man’s supply. They needed to feed, needed the strength the tainted memories of the suffering Joyful gave them to survive, and they had no access to that in the war and it had killed them. He’s taken them too far. It was only being a part of the Man that’s kept them alive in the battle, and now he’s gone and they’ve died.
The Evidence Men, thinking this meant victory, sent up a collective whoop and leaped on the now-lifeless enemy, tearing into the bodies, chewing at them, worrying into bellies and chests with their tusks, gnawing them into bloodied chunks. Fool tried to ignore them, watching for Mr. Tap. He hadn’t expected it to be this way, hadn’t really known what to expect; he just had a sort of diffuse, helpless hope. His hand tightened on the butt of his gun, fear hot and sour in his mouth. This was it, this was the end, everything turned on what happened now.
Mr. Tap stood up.
The demon rose unsteadily. Its left arm was broken above the elbow, snapped from the landing, and was held awkwardly across its body. It turned, its head rolling, mouth opening and closing, three eyes blinking, body shaking. Fool took another step back into the heat of the Garden and then another, passing the still-recumbent Gordie. “Wait,” he hissed. Gordie didn’t reply.
Mr. Tap took a step forward, unsteady. It stretched out one leg and then the other, placing each on the ground and bouncing up onto its clawed toes and then down again. It was, thought Fool, like watching a man try on new clothes. In a way, that’s exactly what it was.
“Fool,” said Mr. Tap, taking another step, steadier now. The mass on its back shifted, tightening, and the next step it took was more confident.
Fool took another step back. “Hello,” he said.
“You’ll suffer for this,” said Mr. Tap. Its voice was hoarse, the teeth in its throat clicking, wriggling, making its neck undulate. “You’ve been an interesting thing to watch and I might have stuck to the deal if you’d been fair with me, but you’ve not. You orchestrated this.”
“Yes,” said Fool. Another step back.
“You’ve made me inhabit this thing,” Mr. Tap said, its voice thick with disgust.
“You chose to,” said Fool. Another step. “I simply created a situation where you had to, but you always had a choice. You could have walked away. Flowed, grown away. Whatever it is you do.”
“This is your doing, Fool.”
“Yes. I suppose it is.”
“I’ll kill the Archdeacons, and then I’ll kill you.”
“No,” said Fool. Mr. Tap took another step forward, steadier again, and then another, faster now.
“No?”
“No. I’m stopping this now.”
Another step back.
“It isn’t yours to stop, Fool.”
“As Hell’s Chief Information Officer, as Commander of the Information Office, I’m stopping it. This is over. Go, now, and we might yet still be able to make a deal.”
“I think not,” said Mr. Tap. “I think not, indeed, Fool. Your time has come.”
Mr. Tap started running, ungainly but fast, covering the distance between them alarmingly quickly. Fool managed to snap off a shot, the bullet tearing into Mr. Tap’s shoulder and spinning the demon that was now functioning as the Man’s vehicle. It dropped to one knee, turning to glare at Fool as he took another step back and then another. Was the Man far enough in yet?
No.
“I’m going to rule Heaven and Hell,” said the Man, and his voice sounded less like Mr. Tap now and more like the voice Fool was used to, the voice of the Man of Plants and Flowers. It was hoarse, scratched, and blood spilled from the demon’s mouth as it spoke and Fool thought that maybe the Man wasn’t using the vocal cords properly, that he was simply forcing the demon’s throat to form the words by grinding it together as it forced air through the constricted tube. It was probably painful, and he wondered if the demon could still feel or if the Man had overtaken it completely.
He felt no pity for Mr. Tap.
“You could have had a peaceful life, Fool, but that choice is closed to you now,” said the Man and rose. Blood dribbled from the wound in its shoulder and Fool fired again, but this time it was too fast, the Man was too fast, and it dodged away, still scrambling forward.
The Man hit Fool hard, its bony shoulder striking him in the stomach and tearing open the clotted wound in his side; Fool felt it rip, felt the planes of himself tear away from each other as he flailed back and fell. He lost his grip on his gun and it skittered back toward the Archdeacons, who still hadn’t moved. They’re bureaucrats, he thought, almost incoherent. They’ve forgotten how to fight because they haven’t had to in an age or more. They’ve not been threatened before, only been the ones doing the threatening.
Mr. Tap stood over Fool, staring down at him. The Man, tight on its back, had sent more growths burrowing in the demon’s flesh, Fool watching as the greenery burrowed under its skin, Mr. Tap’s worms crawling along the ridges and furrows, and the wounds dripped an oily blood on the ground around Fool. Under the warped skin of Mr. Tap’s face the vines burrowed, fat and hungry, the worms in Mr. Tap’s creased face dropping away, knocked loose by the invaders beneath.
“You’ve lost, Fool,” said the Man, using the demon’s mouth. “This day is mine, this world is mine, and soon all the other worlds will be mine, too.”
“Fuck you,” said Gordie behind him and scattered the paper in a fat line across the path.
As Gordie threw himself down, the paper sparked and then burst into flame, the tainted earth of Hell befouling the paper and setting it afire in a violent burst that was almost white. The smoke that rose from the torn books formed into faces and words, twisting and writhing, black and dense, and it screamed and screamed and screamed.
The heat from the burning books was greater even than that of the Garden, Heaven burning in Hell, and it scorched Fool’s skin and he tried to crawl away without taking his eyes from Mr. Tap. The demon, standing over Fool, took the force of the blast harder and it shrieked and shielded its eyes from the glare. It turned its back to the flames and hunched itself over, staring at Fool. Flames played across it, gaining little purchase on the thick, solid cage of the Man’s flesh, burning out as quickly as they caught.
“This is it? Your plan?” the Man asked. “To trap me here behind a wall of flames? Why, Fool? Even Heaven’s flames can’t last forever. They’ll burn low soon and then I’m free again and we revert to where we were and everything is mine.”
Fool crabbed farther back, found his gun, took hold of it, and brought it around. “No,” he said, “that was only the first part of the plan. This is the second part.”
He fired, the shot tearing into Mr. Tap’s knee and spilling the demon and its rider to the ground. It thrashed, trying to stand, but Fool had pulled himself to standing and fired again, this time at its other leg. It took the shot in the thigh and the leg buckled sideways, the bone splintering, the flesh tearing. Mr. Tap screamed in the Man’s voice. It can feel pain. Good.
“And this,” said Fool, gasping and dropping to his knees, “is the third part.” He took the feather from his pocket and used it to scratch into the ground a single word written in large and jagged letters:
Mayall
Mr. Tap screamed again. The Man forced the demon to stand despite its broken limbs and it managed to achieve a kind of uneven, ungainly balance. The Man used Mr. Tap’s good hand to brace its damaged knee, bent low, and began to hobble away. The fire from the books was still burning, lower now, and Mr. Tap turned toward it, the mass on its back loosening and slithering up to its shoulde
rs. Fool fired again but his shot went wild and cracked into the low wall at the side of the path, sending chips and sparks into the air.
Mr. Tap shuffled on, approaching the wall of fire. It had burned so hot that the ground itself was buckling and bubbling, cracks zigzagging through the stone. The Man stumbled, Mr. Tap’s flesh giving up the uneven battle with its injuries, and fell. It rolled and came up, still holding its knee together, blood trickling from between its long fingers. It groaned as it stood. More pain. Good, good, it hurts good good good.
Gordie, clothes charred from being close to the burning books, the material smoking, skin and hair scorched, stepped into Mr. Tap’s path.
“Move,” said Mr. Tap.
Gordie didn’t immediately reply, instead tilting his head to one side and studying the rippling mass of the Man that controlled the demon. The skin of Gordie’s face was red and blistered, some of the blisters popped and weeping. “You killed Summer,” he said eventually.
Mr. Tap lashed out at him but Gordie stepped back and avoided the blow easily. Separated from the main mass of his body, split away from the soil, forced to inhabit a demon’s flesh, injured, the Man was slower, easier to dodge.
Weaker.
But still dangerous. The Man risked letting go of Mr. Tap’s knee and clapped its hands together, and although what emerged wasn’t as strong or even as fast as the weapon the demon had been able to produce in the battle, the line of filthy hair that rose from it and coiled toward Gordie was fast enough to score across his shoulder, tearing through his blackened clothes and into the flesh beneath.
The Devil's Evidence Page 41
