The Devil's Detective

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  “Oh,” Gordie replied, obviously upset. Summer touched his hand, briefly, and Fool understood that she was telling him, It’s okay, he’s right, I’ll see it later.

  “It’s from Balthazar, isn’t it?” asked Gordie after a moment.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s a warrior, one of the angels that patrolled the borders of Heaven when Hell was different, when there was a war. He’s one of Heaven’s greatest weapons.”

  “Yes,” said Fool again, thinking of the heat of him, the flame that climbed from his hands. He touched the feather again, just for a fragment of time, and felt its strength, its purity. Creatures of beauty that were weapons, blue flashes, dead bodies with no souls and eyes that pleaded from somewhere back in the past, from when they were alive and whole; it was too big, made no sense. The feather was cool against his fingertips, and he said, “We’re here.” The train had brought them to Hell’s battered, sordid heart.

  The Houska was quiet. The train disgorged, along with Fool and Gordie and Summer, most of its night staff, the Genevieves and Marys and barmen and musicians joining the thieves and beggars who already lined the streets. The demons would start arriving soon, when full night had fallen. When the Houska had started to generate its sour, rank heat.

  Summer had spent the day drawing the dead man, healing him in her sketch as best she could so that his face was whole and unmarked and recognizable. She and Gordie had then made as many copies of the sketch as they could, sitting at the small table in the kitchen; Fool had arrived back from the Elevation meeting and stood in the doorway as they worked and had spent a moment watching them, at the way they touched at the shoulders and hips, before turning away. This thing they had was new, delicate, and he had not wanted to intrude on their privacy. Instead, he had retreated from the room and then returned more noisily, and by the time he reached it they were sitting on opposite sides of the table and not looking at each other as they traced and copied.

  Both Gordie and Summer now held sheaves of paper, a hundred sketched versions of the man; young, eyes whole, lips untorn, flat and lifeless and dead. Would anyone look at them? Fool wondered. Anyone see the man’s image and recognize him, tell them who he was? Probably not, despite the number of people who even now filled the Houska’s streets. The crowds moved about them, stragglers from the factories that were the Houska’s daytime employers climbing wearily onto the train, taking the stink of their unwashed skin and the chemicals they worked with into the miasma of cheap perfume and sweat within the carriages.

  The Houska was the last place Fool wanted to come, especially after a day with Elderflower and Adam and Balthazar, but he had no choice; if he was to investigate the body from Solomon Water, it had to be now. The tubes that had gathered during the day were all ones he could legitimately ignore, stamp with his DNI mark, and send back to Elderflower. They were a normal day’s story for Hell, rapes and assaults and robberies that the victims probably hadn’t even reported but that Hell knew about anyway. Each stamp bit at him, a mark of his uselessness, but today he was grateful for them; he could not shift that battered face from his memory. The man’s four teeth were still wrapped in a handkerchief, in Fool’s drawer, waiting for the chance to put them back with the body and take it to the Flame Garden. At present, the body itself was wrapped back in its dirty sheet and was in the office basement, which was cold enough to act as a morgue and which had few rats. How long before something came through with orders to investigate that he could not ignore, though? Not long, he knew. Not long enough.

  “We’ll try the parlors first, before they get busy,” said Summer, and Fool nodded. They had arranged to meet later, to work the bars along the main street together for safety, but the parlors were slightly less dangerous and he hoped that the two of them would be okay. He didn’t tell them to be careful as they walked off; there was little point. Neither was that long from being fished out of Limbo, but neither was stupid, and both had survived this far as Information Men. If anything, Summer was safer than Gordie, as she tended to back away from trouble, whereas he still thought that his office should mean something, should be respected, and tended to push back when challenged. There was no real advice or guidance he could give them, even if he wanted to, that he had not already passed on, and he could not go with them. There had been a message waiting for him at the office when he had returned earlier. He had been summoned; he had to visit the Man of Plants and Flowers.

  The Man of Plants and Flowers lived in the center of the Houska in a building set back off one of the small side streets and that looked to be held together by the Man himself, by his growths. Its stonework was crumbling and most of the windows gaped, glassless and blind. Roots and vines squirmed out from between the bricks, displacing the mortar and covering the building’s fascia. There was no door to the Man’s home, only a doorway whose wooden frame was torn and splintered, although the damage was old. The wood was pulpy with damp, not from outside but from within; the house breathed, and each exhalation was moist.

  Inside, the building seemed to be made from angles that buckled and twisted as Fool looked at them. It was partly the lack of light, but also that the walls and floor and ceiling were covered in roots and stems and leaves; plants and flowers grew everywhere. Some had small petals, some had leaves, and some had vast, open cups lined with thick hairs and rimmed with heavy, fibrous stems. “Most of me is safe,” the Man had warned Fool during an earlier visit, “but parts of me are not. Don’t approach the openmouthed ones, Fool, not ever.” On another visit Fool had seen one of the cups suddenly lunge and close around a scuttling thing as it ran past, and the near-human scream that the thing made, choking off with a sizzle like burning hair, made him glad he had heeded the Man’s advice. Sometimes the thick vines that covered the floor moved languidly, wriggling, coiling and uncoiling, as he passed; he tried not to tread on them. In some places, roots emerged from the plants and disappeared into the stone of the walls, and Fool thought that the stone itself looked desiccated around the roots, friable and brittle, as though he could crumble it with the least pressure.

  The Man lived in the room farthest back from the door; the part of the Man that usually spoke to Fool did, anyway. Fool walked cautiously along the hallway, making sure that he didn’t go near the open cups as he went. He didn’t bother to call to the Man, who had known Fool intended to respond to the summons as soon as Fool had spoken the words aloud back in the office. It was what the Man did, was why Fool was here; the Man knew things. He stretched across great swathes of Hell, and he saw and he heard, and sometimes he told Fool things. The Man very rarely allowed Fool to visit, so his summoning must mean something. Hopeful Fool, Fool thought as he reached the doorway to the Man’s room. Even before he stepped through, the Man was calling out, “Hello, my friend! The demon killer arrives!”

  When Fool had first visited the Man of Plants and Flowers, he was still recognizably human, although even then his corpulent shape was being lost to the mass of growths. Before he took to his current existence, he must have been vastly fat; on that first visit, the rolling topography of his belly, with its pale and hairless stretched skin, had bulged out through the thin covering of leaves and stalks and mosses like the lips of some endlessly flapping mouth. The Man’s arms had still had movement then; now they were thick cables of greenery, held out from his sides and clinging to the walls, motionless and cruciform. His voice had sounded human then, but now it did not.

  “My home is a simple place, Fool, hardly a fitting venue for a slayer of demons,” said the Man. The words sounded as though they were being formed by rubbing pieces of leather together, liquid and hoarse, and Fool wondered how long the Man would be able to carry on talking. Not long, probably, and after that, would he communicate by rasping his leaves together? Or would one of those cups start to flap, forming words without breath or tongue? He was almost completely lost now, Fool saw, entirely buried beneath a riot of plants and flowers that filled the entire back half of the room. The Man of Plan
ts and Flowers, he thought. It was what the Man had introduced himself to Fool as, was what he had been then and what he was now, more so than ever, and then what the Man had said filtered through Fool’s brain and he was brought up short.

  “Demon killer?” he asked. “What?”

  “Haven’t you heard?” asked the Man, laughter bubbling under his words like things being torn from mud. “You killed a demon at Solomon Water yesterday.”

  “I didn’t,” said Fool, “I—” and then he stopped. Killed a demon?

  “Of course you did,” said the Man. “The humans are talking about it. They bring me the news, Fool, all my human friends, who need favors from me or want information in return for information. I hear them, Fool! You were seen, my old friend, and if only I had grown that far I would surely have seen it for myself. You tussled over the sad remains of a poor, dead human, fighting to give him the dignity in death that he lacked in life, and killed the demon that challenged you. It’s everywhere, this tale of Fool the demon killer.”

  “But I didn’t,” said Fool again, suddenly feeling the world yaw beneath his feet. Demon killer? It made no sense, it wasn’t even close to what had happened, and he had no idea how the other demons might react, or the Bureaucracy, if they thought he had killed one of their own. The Man’s flesh whispered around him, drifts of light and dark fragmenting in the air as he moved, the noise of him soft and sly. I didn’t, thought Fool, and he felt suddenly hot and cold and tiny and lost and yet somehow terribly, awfully visible.

  Was this it? Was this where Hell noticed him?

  “Of course you didn’t,” said the Man, still slipping about him. “I’d imagine that you didn’t even scare that minor thing, did you? And how is your head, beaten Fool?”

  “Sore,” said Fool truthfully. The pain was melting now, losing its fresh sharpness and becoming the dull bloom of bruised flesh.

  “But even that, Fool, even that is something to the watching crowds. You were injured, and yet still you stood your ground against the little nameless thing. A human standing against a demon? Unheard of! Not and surviving anyway, Fool, you know that; this is Hell, and no human ever challenges a demon, but you did. Demons are Hell’s original inhabitants, and they hate us for our very existence and for invading their domain, and they kill that which stands against them and that which they feel like killing. But not you, Fool. You stood against them, killed one of them, and yet you live.

  “Whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter, of course, because those humans saw what they have waited for a long time to see, a human challenge a demon and win. Who cares about the truth when they have a story like that, Fool, eh? And stories, like me, they grow, don’t they? You, above all, should know that.”

  It was true, Fool knew. On the rare occasions that he and the others managed to investigate one of the crimes whose details were contained in the canisters, every witness, every person, gave them different information. The greater the time that elapsed between the crime and the investigation, the more disparate the stories became, fed by the fear and the uncertainty that everyone in Hell felt, each version gathering weight, increasing in size, until finding the truth at its core became almost impossible. The job of the Information Men, he often thought, was not so much to gather information as to sift through it, trying to find the common threads among all the differences.

  The mass in the corner of the room shook slightly, the fronds rustling, and although Fool could see no face within it, he had the impression that the Man was peering at him intently. Around him, the stems and cables of greenery twisted, as though there were a breeze in the room, the leaves and flowers and fringed open cups turning toward him.

  “Give, Fool,” said the Man, and the cup nearest Fool’s head seemed to open even wider, the raw purple of its interior gleaming wetly. “I hear strange tales about the body, about what was done to it.”

  “The man’s soul was gone,” said Fool. “Completely consumed.”

  The Man made a noise like a sigh, and the room itself trembled around Fool as he absorbed the information. Fool waited until the trembling had subsided, watching as the last vestiges of it made their way along the branches and shimmered out of the petals and leaves that filled the room, and then asked, “What can do that? Have you heard of anything?”

  “It would have to be big, and old,” said the Man. “I haven’t heard of anything, haven’t felt anything like that. Hell was full of them once, but not for a long time. I suppose it may only just have raised itself, or have been asleep for these last years. There’s a delegation from Heaven down at the moment.” It wasn’t a question, so Fool didn’t reply.

  “Sometimes, delegations rattle the balances of Hell, and things emerge from the mud and the dirt because of them. This is a small place, Fool, inhabited mostly by humans who are little more than a moving feast and the demons who live off their nightmares and pain and misery but whose appetites are weak. There’s little real evil left. Most of it has retreated, lives in the darkness at Hell’s heart, and rarely emerges. There’s savagery there, Fool, savagery that makes the everyday cruelties you see look like mere love bites.”

  Fool listened in silence, thinking of the people he saw every day, their eyes always wary, the heads down, and wondered about how much worse a greater evil could be. How much more fear could people feel? How much more terror and pain could they carry? As if to punctuate his thoughts, one of the Man’s mouths lunged and grasped an unseen creature, clenched around it with a crunch of splintering bones and a wet spray of blood.

  “I’ll listen for it, Fool,” said the Man a moment later. “If there is something, it shouldn’t be hard to find, should it? It’ll wear its horrors like a suit of clothes, don’t you think, and nothing it goes near will remain untouched, human or demon or plant.”

  The Man’s bulk shifted again, this time away from Fool. The tangle of him, of the things that sprouted from his flesh and grew away from him, filled the space from floor to ceiling. In the corner of his eye, Fool saw a flying thing alight on the edge of one of the cups. It bent, sniffing cautiously at the fleshy palms within. The Man made a sound, almost inaudible, wet with desire, his attention now completely off Fool. Fool turned to leave, not wanting to see or hear what would come next, but he was too late; another wet, ragged crunch came to him as he reached the doorway, accompanied by the Man’s own gasp of delight. As Fool stepped back into the dim corridor, the Man, once a human but now something that Fool did not have a word for, called, “Come back soon, Fool, and I’ll tell what there is to be told.”

  There was a dead man in the road.

  His head was missing and blood still spilled slowly from the ragged stump of neck, spreading in a clotting pool around him. Two small demons, little bigger than the missing head, were perched on his back, picking at his flesh; a third was lying in the gutter, covered in blood and rubbing at its swollen, stubby genitalia. Fool went toward the dead man, shooing away the demons. They hopped back from the corpse, glaring at Fool, not retreating far. His feet on the bloodstained dust, Fool knelt, and as he did so the one masturbating ejaculated, making a hooting, whistling sound. The other two darted over and began licking at it but neither, Fool saw, ever moved its attention from the dead body for more than a moment, even as they sucked at the strings of yellow semen that rolled across their companion’s belly.

  The headless man was barefoot and wearing thin trousers; his top half, what remained of it, was bare. There was dirt, old and black, ground into the man’s skin; a factory worker, then. There were scratches across his back, some shallow (from the little demons’ claws, Fool supposed) and several deeper, more aggressive wounds. The soles of the man’s feet were scored and raw, and his left heel had a piece of glass impaled into it. A trail of bloody footprints led to the fallen figure, winding raggedly back across a few feet of cracked pavement to a cluster of buildings, bars, and closed factories. These were the straggler bars, out on the edge of the Houska, violent in a grimy, small way, dressed in less glit
ter and with fewer attractions than the larger establishments closer in to the center.

  As Fool looked along the trail of footprints, someone appeared from between the buildings, saw the body and Fool crouched over it, and stopped. It was a human. The three little demons chattered to each other and one, taking advantage of Fool’s shifted attention, darted toward the body and tried to snatch another piece of flesh from the sundered neck. Fool saw it coming and hit out with the back of his hand, sending it skittering back. Its body was hot, the heat sending a flash of pain across his knuckles, and the demon snarled at him, baring tiny, blood-streaked teeth.

  Fool looked at the three warily; they probably couldn’t hurt him—they were too small and had fed too well on fresh flesh and old fear to be a serious threat—but still. He drew his gun and pointed it at the snarling one, gesturing with the barrel. It snarled again, and the one in the gutter made another whistling sound; the third, finding no more ejaculate on its companion’s belly to suck up, started to lick the blood from its companion’s face. Fool glanced over at the figure by the buildings. Whoever he was, he had started to jitter, hopping from foot to foot, and Fool suddenly understood that he wanted to tell him something, needed to tell him, but not where he could be seen or heard, that he was frightened of the telling and that the fear was growing and he was preparing to run. Fool had to get to him now.

  When he looked back, the first demon had returned to the neck, was harrying at the flesh with tiny, pincered claws. Even as Fool cried out angrily and hit at it with his gun, the demon popped a tiny piece of dripping skin into its mouth and started to chew. As it tasted the things caught in the skin, released by the rapid movement of its tiny jaws, a triumphant look came over its face. Fool made one last effort, poking at it with his gun, but the thing merely snarled again, baring teeth that had pieces of torn human between them, and batted at the end of Fool’s gun barrel, trying to knock it away. If there was danger, it was from this one, not the other two; it was the leader of the little pack, stupid as dirt, trying to face down Fool. Silly thing, he thought briefly and remembered the crunch of things being eaten by the Man, and pulled the trigger.