The Devil's Detective

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  Vines, or something like them, began to curl around Fool’s feet, humping up over his shoes and catching at the edges of his trousers, tearing the thin cloth as they twisted about him. More of the vines wove themselves around his arms, pulling them out from his body, tugged at his legs, and then lifted him, spreading him out and holding him above the floor. The flying creatures began to screech, chittering to themselves and to the Man and Fool, swooping around him as the Man’s many limbs dug into his skin and more of the mouths rose up, trembling and snapping.

  “No,” said the Man after another long moment during which the mouths came closer and the vines drew tauter. “No, not now. Despite your inquisitiveness, you are too interesting, Fool, what’s happening is too interesting to interrupt it now, and you are such a part of it that if I took you away it might all stop. Besides, you may prove useful yet.” The mouths dropped away, closing and drooping so that they looked like seed pods again, their stems coiling in loose whorls on the floor, and the vines unthreaded themselves from around his arms and legs, springing away so that he fell to the floor. It smelled of dirt and wetness and old, dead blood.

  From somewhere in the Man’s bulk a pale glow reappeared, fractured and torn by his writhing branches, growing brighter as the feather was brought out and held toward Fool. It was clenched in a mouth, unmarked, its barb sticking out from between two thorns. Fool reached out and took it, pulling so that it slipped out from the closed mouth with a low, silken sound. As the Man released the feather, the room around Fool shivered again, violently at first, before calming. Fool had the idea that it was a shiver of release, as though the Man had shuddered his way down from orgasm into relaxation.

  A moment later, a languid stem rose in front of Fool with his gun twisted within it. Fool took the gun and slipped it back in the holster, finding that the Man had torn the straps when it ripped the weapon away and that he could no longer secure it. The stem retreated slowly back into the Man’s mass, which settled all around the room into comfortable, watchful stillness.

  “Fascinating, don’t you think, Fool?” said the Man. Fool didn’t know what to say, so he stayed silent. “Why do you think, Fool, that I told you I was considering killing you? That I know you’ve been asking questions about me?”

  “I don’t know. To toy with me? Because I don’t matter?” Fool’s heart was still beating too fast, his skin clammy with sweat and sick with unused adrenaline. Little helpless Fool, little vulnerable Fool, he thought briefly.

  “Ah, Fool, but you do matter! I told you because I could do no other,” said the Man. “The feather is a tool, I told you that; it is the angelic matter, and it compels the holder to be truthful. It is the stuff of God’s closest, Fool, of God’s trusted servants and mightiest weapons, and it is created of God’s truth and beauty and honor and love. It allows only the truth because it is, itself, absolutely true.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Fool. He understood so little, not Hell nor Heaven, certainly not demons nor angels nor people. Perhaps the only thing I understand is violence, he thought, murder and rape and beatings. Headless corpses and flesh with no soul left within it and babies that burn. Perhaps that’s all I’m allowed to understand.

  “What is there to understand, Fool?” said the Man, interrupting Fool’s thoughts. “What is there to comprehend? This is Hell, and you have been given a piece of Heaven. Treasure it, Fool, for you may not have it long; it has no place here in Hell.”

  “Then why give it back to me at all?”

  “Because it amuses me to leave it with you,” said the Man, “to know that it is out there somewhere out of my ownership, exposed to Hell and Hell exposed to it. It is a spark of order in Hell’s chaos, Fool, and chaos and order do not mix well. They make infernos, Fool, great conflagrations that can burn entire worlds to the ground. I shall enjoy seeing this play out, I think, enjoy watching you dance to tunes you cannot possibly comprehend played by beings you cannot see, lighting flames around you as you go.”

  “And you do?” said Fool, angry and weary and thinking of Gordie, burning. “You understand? You comprehend, do you? You can see everything? So tell me what’s going on, tell me where to look for this demon.”

  “You’re growing brave, Fool, and that’s part of the joy of this situation, and the Bureaucracy is growing nervous and that’s joyful, too! Who would have thought Fool the Information Man could kill demons, would dare to speak to me like that? Would be charged with investigating me? Would venture into an Orphanage, would emerge dragging the corpse of one of Hell’s slain? Oh, Fool, this is fascination itself, and watching it unfold is an endless delight! I could tell you some of this, Fool, but less than you might think or hope. No, this is for you to sort, Fool, to solve!

  “And Fool? Be careful. I have chosen not to kill you, but I can change my mind. My reach is long, Fool, from the great trees that line the Flame Garden to the moss that creeps up the walls where the humans live. My vision may not yet take in all of Hell—there are some places that are not yet available to me—but most places are reachable. You are reachable, Fool, you are takeable, don’t forget that.

  “But still, the feather deserves something, does it not? And I brought you here with the promise of news, yes? Very well. First, a suggestion that you have no doubt considered but that I will make anyway: look to the Heights, Fool, to Crow Heights. It is where Hell’s grandest and oldest live, cloistered together, hidden from Hell’s tawdry delights. Ask yourself, Fool, where would something ancient and violent live? In among the ancient and violent, where it might stay hidden or ignored. Surely this is where the thing you seek must hide itself, in the sight of things that would consider it normal? And a last thing, Fool, a last piece of information for you to take: yesterday, Fool, yesterday there were miseries in one of the boardinghouses out beyond the Houska’s edges, where the Genevieves live. Someone has vanished, Fool, a beautiful someone with young flesh. Purchasable flesh. Beatable flesh, Fool, maybe the beaten flesh that you are investigating and that refuses to talk to you despite Morgan’s most tender ministrations.”

  “A boardinghouse? Which one?”

  “The one with the demons lining its roof, Fool. Now, I have told you what I know and I shall tell you what more I can, when I can, but I expect payment for my wisdom, Fool. I expect amusement, not orders or anger, Fool; remember that. Investigate away, Fool, investigate! Find me a demon that I have not seen before, a murderer of humans and a devourer of souls. Tell me where it is that I might introduce myself. Tell me what the Bureaucracy thinks, what Rhakshasas asks about me, and tell them what you want about me, tell them all of it so that they might fear me more, that the knowledge of me and all I am and might become can sew threads of disquiet about them. I am growing, Fool, every day, and they have reason to fear me and I would have them know it. Tell all, Fool, and catch your demon.”

  It sounded so simple, so compact, put like that. Merely find it and catch it, this demon newly emerged or newly woken and capable of doing such violence to human flesh. Fool closed his eyes for a moment, seeing in the darkness body after torn body, human and demon alike. “Aren’t you worried? Scared? You were human once, and this thing could discover you helping me, could find you, find your soul. Kill you.”

  The Man shook around Fool again, this time with amusement. He was laughing, Fool realized, laughing at Fool’s question. Laughing at Fool. “No, Fool, my soul is a splintered, spreading thing, hidden in the tiny and invisible, in the plants. I am the drab greenery, Fool, and I am spread too wide to be worried about any demon. Parts of me die every day, Fool, torn up or eaten or crushed flat, yet I live on unharmed, and the heart of me is protected. I have weapons and defenses, Fool, more than you or that flesh-draped lickspittle Rhakshasas will ever know. Now, Fool, we are done. I have to eat, and you have to entertain me. Go, Fool, and be amusing.”

  Amusing Fool, little entertaining Fool, thought Fool and turned to go. The Man pulled himself apart, revealing the doorway. Above Fool, darting back and for
th in the humid air, the flying creatures swooped toward the doorway, flashing around his head. One of them came too close and its wing brushed his face, its touch surprisingly soft and smooth, the smell of it powdery and dry. It chirped, high-pitched and shrill, as it went past him, its wings beating, moving the air across his scalp in a warm, anxious breath.

  As Fool stepped out of the room there was a crunch as one of the Man’s mouths caught a flying thing, and a long, moist sigh from the Man.

  11

  It was night when he heard it; someone was crying.

  Fool wasn’t in bed, hadn’t even made it back to his room. Rather, he was in the little kitchen waiting for the water sputtering from the tap to run clear rather than brown so that he could have a large drink. He had spent the time after his visit to the Man walking the streets of the Houska, simply looking. People and demons moved around him in thick, oily streams, the air dense with the smells of candle smoke and sweat, simmering with anticipation and fear. As he had left the Man, another human had been entering the Man’s home, furtive and scurrying. What secret had he been carrying? Fool wondered. What knowledge had he been seeking, and what price would he pay? He imagined the Man’s limbs stretching out through most of Hell, secrets and rumors and knowledge pulsing along the veins of him like sap, allowed to flower in some places and curdled to nothing in others, a network of information and exchange. And him, Fool, where was he in it all? A tiny morsel drifting along the Man’s pathways, or something outside, an irritation to be tolerated until Rhakshasas’s demands on him made the Man choose to remove him? Little moving Fool, Fool thought, seeing himself as a tiny thing being buffeted along streams not of his making, and made his way to the train. There was nothing more he could learn here.

  Summer was the only other person in the offices. Fool went to her room, but even from outside he realized that the crying was not coming from there. He turned, going instead to the doorway of Gordie’s room. The door was shut and he knocked upon it, gently at first and then harder when he received no answer. When he still heard nothing from beyond the door except crying, he opened it slowly, other hand dropping to his gun; it was rare, but not unheard of, for ghosts or demons pretending to be ghosts to take up residency in the rooms of the recently dead and use whatever grief and upset they could generate to feed.

  The door opened onto a room without light. Fool stepped back from the doorway and peered into the gloom, trying to make out something, anything, that would tell him what was in there. “Summer?” he asked, but still there was no reply but tears. A patch of the darkness shifted, something glinting as it moved, and then was gone. A long, low moan came from the darkness, feral and raw, and then a long, rough scratching. His hand tensed on the butt of the gun and then loosened, then tightened again, indecisive; there was little point in drawing it if it was a ghost, bullets would do nothing to it and would be no defense. If it was a demon, though, come to avenge the death of the thing in the bar, or simply to punish Fool for allowing himself to be noticed, for being a human who had the temerity to be something other than a victim, then he might have a moment in which he could defend himself. He stepped back from the doorway and said, trying to keep the catch and shake from his voice, “Show yourself.”

  More scratching, another moan, and then a voice said, “I can’t remember his face.”

  It was Summer’s, almost. Her voice was thick, slurred, and wet. Fool stepped into the room, lighting the lamp and letting its sallow glow curl around the corners of the space. Summer was sitting against the rear wall, knees drawn up to her belly, a pad on her knee. Her face was reddened and puffy, slick with tears and mucus, hair disheveled. She was running her hand back and forth across the paper, sketching furiously. As Fool watched, unsure of what to do, she tore the paper from the pad and crumpled it, casting it aside where it joined others scattered about her.

  “His face,” said Summer, “I can’t remember his face. What did he look like? What did my Gordie look like?”

  Fool sat beside Summer against the wall. She had already started sketching on the blank paper, pencil lining in a face that might have been Gordie but might equally have been a stranger on the street or one of the bodies they sent to the Garden. After a moment, he reached out and gently put his hand over Summer’s, stopping her drawing. She looked at him, more tears flowing, and said, “Please.”

  “He looked like Gordie. He looked like this room,” said Fool, gesturing about him. Unlike his own austere chamber, Gordie’s was cluttered and cramped. The walls were covered in pieces of paper, each piece thick with notes and ideas and morsels of information, all in Gordie’s tidy, efficient hand. Phrases and words leaped out at Fool like sparks jumping up from fires: The Ronwe can speak, The Man builds, an island? Cattle? Food? All Gordie’s thoughts and knowledge and ideas laid out before them. Some of the pieces of paper were connected by pieces of string or cord, links between his suspicions or facts, links between this demon and that murder, this place and that rumor.

  “This is Gordie,” Fool said. “All this, all these things that he knew and learned and wanted to know, these things are him. He gathered so much together, knew so much more than I do. That was Gordie. I don’t know who the Ronwe are, do you? Or the island? What island? We don’t know, but Gordie did. This is Gordie, this is what he was and this is what he did. This is how to remember him.”

  Summer took a deep, ragged breath and looked around the room. “Yes,” she said eventually. She began to sketch again, and this time the face that appeared under her pencil was Gordie, the real Gordie, the man who had been Fool’s treasure trove of information and Summer’s lover for these past months. Fool, watching, felt a sudden clenched ache inside himself, knowing that no one would ever sketch him in the passionate, desperate way Summer was sketching Gordie, and closed his eyes so he could not see.

  In the darkness of his mind, Fool wondered. Gordie had died in the Orphanage, burned and savaged, and he could not help but wonder, was it a punishment for the things on the walls, for the things that Gordie had learned and tried to learn and known that he was not supposed to know?

  Had Fool killed Gordie by asking him to know about Hell?

  With a torn sigh, Summer stopped sketching and collapsed against Fool, weeping again. Fool put his arms around her and pulled her into a hug, the first time he had ever done so, and they sat for a long time in the absence of Gordie.

  12

  NAME OF DECEASED: Unknown

  RESIDENCE OF DECEASED: Unknown–probable resident of a boardinghouse, see IDENTIFYING MARKS below

  LOCATION OF DECEASED: Western Pipe Orphanage

  DESCRIPTION OF DECEASED: Male, early twenties, blond hair. Average height. Average levels of undernourishment. Evidence of vitamin deficiency.

  IDENTIFYING MARKS: None, although there are scars evident to the buttocks, legs, and shoulders consistent with victim having been a Genevieve.

  INJURIES/CAUSE OF DEATH: Severe trauma to body and head; flesh has been torn from skull and one eye punctured. Penis has been removed—likely torn free rather than cut or bitten. Evidence of smaller wounds from postmortem predation, and of older wounds to the buttocks and thighs. Burns to skin. Cause of death: take your pick. Major organ trauma and blood loss are the technical reasons, but each of his injuries alone could well have killed him.

  ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Fool, this one wouldn’t talk much either. He’s had his soul removed—there’s nothing left in him at all. He’s definitely another Genevieve, although he’s not been doing it as long as the first victim. The damage to the buttocks and thighs isn’t as well established and there’s less older, healed trauma. He’s looked after himself, as far as it went, despite a lack of good food. I eventually had to ask questions of his flesh using the four chains, like last time. He told me it was a client but again not one met in the Houska, and also that he didn’t have any suspicions about the client. Whatever hired him didn’t look violent or disturbing, at any rate. The four chains are limited and can generate onl
y yes-or-no responses, of course—although if you have enough bodies from the same event you can sometimes ask the questions of them in sequence and get fuller information. Still, it’s enough for me to be confident this is the same murderer of the man recovered at Solomon Water.

  The violence here is, if anything, worse than that first one, more sustained and wide-ranging. Tearing a penis off at its roots takes not just strength but will, determination, and isn’t something that can be done that easily—muscle and tendon is stronger than you’d imagine. I think the scalp was peeled back by hand as well—there’s damage to the flesh and bone of the skull that might correspond to fingers or claws. He was alive when all this was done to him, incidentally, and he must have been screaming and fighting. There’s damage to his fingernails as though he was scratching against something, but there’s no residue under the nails, which makes sense if the attacker is demonic—they’re rarely soft enough to be harmed by human hands. This is something terrible doing these things, Fool, something very powerful indeed, and I’d imagine old and not keen on being investigated. Be careful.

  Fool read Morgan’s report, what there was of it, on the train out to the flatlands beyond the Houska. It was typed on paper that was thin and gray, the ink smearing as he held it, and it told him nothing that he hadn’t expected. The report had been waiting for him when he awoke, cramped and cold and still sitting against the wall in Gordie’s room after only a couple of hours’ sleep. He had been alone when he awoke, surrounded by Gordie’s memories and thoughts, and he had ached when he stood. Fool had crumpled the flimsy sheet into his pocket without looking at it and gone to rouse Summer, wanting to move, to focus, to keep investigating.