The Devil's Evidence

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  Somewhere in the distance there was a terrible low ripping sound and a leap of orange as something else caught aflame. As Fool and the others turned to watch, tongues of fire reached into the sky as though to scorch Heaven’s feet before falling back, muttering angrily.

  Starting toward where the new fire was birthing, Thomas Fool, Commander of the Information Office of Hell, thought, It’s an irony, of course. Hell, the place is flames, is burning and I don’t know why.

  PART ONE

  REMAINS

  1

  The transport pulled to a halt before the building, and for a moment, Fool simply sat and looked at it. It was small, old, its paint peeling, nestling back against a series of smaller hills covered in a thick mess of scrub and trees, and its front door was open and its windows were broken. The glass was still lying along the sides of the building, he saw, its broken faces clean, catching the morning light and spitting it back toward him. Newly broken windows, he thought as he exited the transport, waving a hand backward to halt the emergence of the other Information Men he had brought with him.

  The canister had arrived that morning wrapped with tangled red and two yellow threads, one bright and the other paler. As near as he could make out from the guide to thread colors in the New Information Man’s Guide to the Rules and Offices of Hell, ten fat leather-bound volumes filled with dense, tightly packed script setting out the rules in a layering of clause and sub-clause and counter-clause that had been issued to him to replace his old Guide as part of the growing of the Information Office, it meant that several murders had taken place and that the deaths were quick rather than prolonged—no torture or eating of the corpses, at least. He had nodded to himself then, almost relieved to be back investigating murder rather than one of the increasing number of fires that had been burning recently and slightly disgusted at himself for the relief, and put on his uniform jacket and buckled the holster and the gun it contained to his leg. This was murder, and murder he understood.

  Out of the vehicle, he could smell the blood. The scent of it was baking in the day’s growing heat, thickening into veins drifting through the air that Fool felt like he could touch if only he reached out and pressed his fingers together. He moved through it, going first to the corner of the building. There were fresh scratches on the wall, scrabbles under the window that meant…what? Something had clambered up the side of the building to the window, broken the glass, and entered that way. Several somethings, he thought; there were similar marks below each of the three windows on this side. When he crossed the front of the building and looked at the three windows on the other side, he found the same things there. At least six, then, he thought, and finally waved his troops from the transport.

  “You,” he said, pointing to a demon whose name he couldn’t remember but who he knew could sketch, “go and draw the marks under the windows.” He could look at them later, set them side by side to look for hints about what might have made them.

  “You and you,” to two other demons, “go and see if there’s anyone about, anyone who saw anything. Marianne and the rest of you, with me.” Then, taking a deep breath, he led the woman and the remainder of his troops inside, to where the dead were waiting for him.

  Inside, the stink of blood was far stronger, curdled like overboiled soup. It was dark despite the six windows and the gas lamps strung along the wall in fixed brackets. The flames, sputtering, added the scents of burning tallow and wick to the miasma. The glow the lanterns gave out was sallow and weak, even with the flow of gas set at its highest, giving shape to the shadows filling the room rather than banishing them.

  The space that lay before Fool was long, stretching back from the entrance, and he realized that the building was cut back into one of the hills, its rear end burrowing into the earth like a grub. Down the center of its length were two long rows of trestle tables, surfaces scarred and pitted. Wooden racks lined the walls, simple frames filled with folded clothes and piled bolts of rough linen. Needles and threads and large bobbins of twine on stands were spaced regularly down the center of the trestles, knots of frayed twine like old snakeskins gathering dust on the floor under them. Chairs were pushed up under the tables, the spaces in front of them neat. Fool saw that the needles were connected to the table with thin chains, delicate locks threaded through the needles’ eyes and the chains’ links.

  It was a Seamstress House. His uniform came from a factory like this one, all the uniforms did, all Hell’s inhabitants’ smocks and trousers and thin underwear did. Working in a Seamstress House was considered to be a good job because it was generally warm and safe. He wondered if the dead had had a chance to appreciate the irony of that, and doubted it.

  The first body was seated halfway down the table; it was a man and he had been decapitated. His head had been placed on the table, turned so that it was looking back at the body it had come from, and the floor and chair and table were thick with drying blood. The body was rigid, the left hand still clamped around a needle and the right around a piece of cloth now soaked red. The man was naked. Beyond him, a second figure was sprawled on the floor, another man, judging by the hairiness of the part of the back and single arm that were visible. Whatever he had been stitching together had fallen on him and covered him like a shroud, reminding Fool of the gray tarpaulins the porters used to take bodies to the Questioning House or the Flame Garden. Patches of blood showed through the material, odd blooms like the petals of a flower he hadn’t seen before. He didn’t bother to peel the cloth back; there were other bodies to investigate, two or three of them on either side of the tables and more beyond them.

  The worst were gathered in a pile at the far end of the table: a tangled mess of naked limbs and blood and pieces of material. The attack had happened toward the end of the night shift, had caught only the straggler workers, those who hadn’t finished their jobs for that shift and hadn’t yet been allowed to leave. There was space at the tables for at least fifty workers, but Fool could see only nine or ten distinct bodies in total, counting torsos to find the tally. All of them were naked, and his first thought was that they had been stripped after death until he remembered that nudity was a condition of working for the seamstresses to prevent the theft of material. He had been to a Seamstress House once before, somewhere on the other side of the industrial area. He had visited during the day and had found it unbearably hot, the air dry and hard to inhale because of the dust of tiny fibers hanging in the atmosphere, but still a better place than most of Hell. At least it’s covered, he had thought, at least they’re not wet and cold. Most of the workers’ hands had been bleeding, he remembered, covered in cuts and peeling dry skin and punctures that left spots across the clothes they were stitching. The supervisor, a painfully thin woman, had told him that was normal even as she beat the workers’ shoulders with a flat stick for getting blood on the garments they sewed. Everything we wear is bound in blood, he remembered thinking, little bloody Fool. Despite their bleeding hands and the beatings, most of the workers had looked, if not happy, then at least less miserable than the heavy-industry workers or farmhands.

  Calling Marianne to his side, pulling her away from her study of the table and what lay under it, but noting her interest and hoping he’d remember to ask her about it later, Fool said, “So. Tell me.”

  Marianne looked around, visibly gathered herself, and said, “Whatever happened here happened quickly. There’s no blood near the door, meaning that the dead hadn’t had time to run. Something came in through the windows fast and savaged the workers, tore them apart.”

  She paused, waiting. He nodded at her, encouraging her to go on, thinking, She saw the windows. Good. She’s getting sharp, seeing it clearly, learning to understand the story.

  “It was fast and brutal but not about torture. The dead have been killed but not too badly mistreated.”

  “Apart from being murdered?”

  “Apart from being murdered,” she replied, ignoring his sarcasm, the ghost of a smile twitching across
her face and then vanishing. “There are bodies at the back of the room, piled, but there’s still no sign of mutilation or torture, they were simply killed.”

  “Were they driven to the back of the room and slaughtered like cattle, or did they simply run that way because the other direction was toward their attackers?”

  “Neither. They were killed close to where they were sitting or standing, then piled at the back. There’s blood beneath the table where there are no bodies, and bloody footprints on the floor.”

  “Human?”

  “No. Maybe. No, I don’t think so, they’re distorted, smeared, but I still think demon, although what sort I can’t tell.”

  “Good, you’ve done well,” he said, then turned to the rest of the troops and called out.

  “This is a Seamstress House, a place of sewing and repairs. Look around, see what’s here, decide whether it should be, and if it shouldn’t, or it looks wrong in any way, tell me. Do you understand?”

  There were muttered responses and the Information Men began to spread out, scattering through the space and peering about themselves in exaggerated shows of looking around. So far, apart from Marianne, who was now back to looking beneath the table, few of the demons or humans that had been given a role as Information Men showed any aptitude for the tasks it entailed, simply carrying out Fool’s orders in stolid silence. They could sketch, some of them; others took accurate notes, could encourage people to talk, or even managed to drag information from the demons that walked Hell’s streets, but it was still Fool who collated everything, tried to discern the patterns that lay below the surface.

  Fool went to the pile of bodies at the end of the room, trying to take in the whole scene as he did so, trying to let it talk to him. As Marianne had said, the bodies were, by Hell’s standards, not badly abused. Most seemed to have been beheaded or torn apart, but there was something almost surgical about the injuries; there were no defensive wounds and little sign that the bodies had been interfered with following their deaths. They had simply fallen where they stood or sat, set upon by assailants who murdered them and moved on. Even the pile of dead flesh seemed to have been created more as a convenience than anything, the shoving together of the dead so that a walkway around the end of the table was still passable. A small horde of flies droned about the splashes of part-coagulated blood in noisy hunger, landing and alighting in delicate waves. Streaks and gashes through the liquid might have been made by the feet of the attackers, but if so, it would be impossible to gain any knowledge about them as the blood had seeped back in before drying, the edges of the marks furred and unreadable.

  What else? There had to be more, more openings leading away from this initial scene, paths that he could follow.

  The dead were all naked and few, so he knew it had occurred at the end of the shift. He could find the time the shift usually finished and pinpoint the violence to sometime around then. What else? There was more, there was always more, it was what he had learned these last months, more trails unfurling from every point that he could try to track his way along. There were blood streaks under the windows and on the frames, so the assailants had left the building the same way they had come in. Why? What would be the purpose in that? Coming in that way Fool could almost understand, it would be shocking, fear carried on the sound of breaking glass, but leaving that way? It made little sense. “Think, little Fool,” he said aloud, ignoring the look the nearest Information Man gave him, “think.”

  These were workers, sewing the clothes that they all wore, naked so that no thefts could occur and, he suspected, to rob these workers of what little dignity and safety their job might offer them. What had the supervisor in the last place like this he had been told him? About clothes?

  No, not told him, shown him, her seniority marked out by the fact that she had been clothed, that she was not a worker and therefore not naked. He looked again at the corpses and saw that all were bare, clothed only in blood and flies. Workers, but no supervisor. Had the supervisor fled? How could he? The swiftness of the attack, the carnage around him, seemed to show that no one had escaped. Fool tilted one of the gas lanterns, casting its light about him as widely as he could. How long had the dead been dead? An hour? At least that. The blood was crusty and dry at the edge of the pools, but in the center of the mass it was still thickly sticky where the flies landed and lifted off, so no longer than three or four hours. The tube had arrived at the office around two hours ago, so between two and four hours, he thought.

  There was no more blood in the room, nothing near the door, just these overlapping pools that formed a single irregular mess across the factory floor. What else was there? Racks of finished clothing along either side, their contents folded neatly, next to fresh cloth rolled around huge poles and piles of cut fabric awaiting stitching. An open tub containing new bobbins of thread, another next to it containing the empty bobbin centers. If he couldn’t see, could he listen?

  No. It was pointless, the distant thrum of heavy machinery and the sound of his Information Men, demon and human both, cluttered the room. He had to keep looking.

  There was nothing, just the racks, each four shelves high containing pile after identical pile of folded articles of clothing with separate sections for the bolts of cloth.

  Identical? No, the rack closest to him was different, wasn’t completely neat. The clothes on the lowest shelf were ruffled up, bunched into a lump toward the wall at its rear. Nearby, a chair lay on its side and a whistle was on the floor by the chair, its bell cracked. The chair was bigger than those by the long table, had a padded seat and arms. Not a worker’s chair, but a supervisor’s one. So where was the supervisor?

  Fool approached the rack and crouched by it, staring at the bulge of messy clothes. From out of a shadowy gap, a pale eye stared at him, and then the mound took a hoarse breath.

  Fool started and fell back off his haunches and onto his ass, hand jerking automatically toward his gun. The mound took another breath, the clothes shifting slightly. The inhalation sounded as though it was coming from a long way underwater, was thick and phlegmy.

  “Who’s that?” said Fool, finally wresting his gun loose from its holster. His hand was shaking, the barrel of the gun jerking back and forth as though unable to decide where to focus its attention. The mound shifted again, the top piece of clothing slipping, gliding sideways. It slithered off the shelf and to the floor, revealing the top of a head, hair thin and tangled and dark. Fool scrambled around, flapping back his Men, wanting them to stay away. “On with your work,” he said loudly, but most ignored him, standing and watching him with thick, uninterested eyes.

  Fool turned back to the mound, crouching again. “It’s okay,” he said, knowing it wasn’t okay, this was Hell and things were never okay. He put his gun away, holding both hands out in front of him in a gesture that he hoped was unthreatening, safe and secure.

  There was another soggy inhalation. The eye blinked and something at the base of the mound began to move, pushing out from the inside, knocking the clothes aside. A hand emerged, pale and old, the skin dry and cracking. Fool took it and the hand clenched tight; carefully, he began to knock the remaining clothing aside.

  It was an old man. He had crawled onto the shelf and wedged himself against the wall at its rear, pulling the thin jackets and trousers up over himself. Fool brought the man into the room’s dirty light, seeing as he did so that his face was pale and greasy with sweat, froth bubbling at his lips with each shallow, moist breath. He tried to speak but what emerged was a long, low groan. His eyes stuttered, leaping from Fool to a place over Fool’s shoulder and then back again, and the fear in them was clear.

  “It’s okay,” Fool repeated, “they’re gone.” He looked over his shoulder, the fear in the old man’s eyes contagious, suddenly convinced that he’d see some demon swooping down toward him, but the room was empty. He leaned in, wrapping his free arm around the man and taking as gentle a hold as he could. The man groaned again as Fool began to pull him
out, and the man began to tremble.

  It wasn’t a uniform tremble; it was as though each part of the man was reacting to a different pressure, shivering at a different rate. Fool felt the man’s heartbeat under thin ribs, its rhythm ragged and loping. The man’s eyes rolled again and, close to, Fool smelled breath that was sour and harsh. More spittle bubbled over his lips as he tried to breathe and he tightened his grip on Fool’s hand. His skin was rough and hard, calluses grating against Fool’s palm, nails tearing into the skin on the back of his hand, more injuries, the tales of Hell written in crescents of his blood. Fool tugged again, wincing as the man groaned a second time and clenched his fingers tighter, and then managed to drag him free from the shelf.

  He was tiny, a bone and skin person, and he was dying. His breath was coming in shorter and shorter bursts, his skin yellowing almost as Fool watched. His other hand came up and pulled at Fool’s jacket, fingers dragging at the material and then falling away. His knuckles struck the floor with a dull, grisly crunch. People in Hell didn’t die like this in front of Fool, and he had no idea how to react or whether there was anything he could do. He dealt with the dead, not the living, not the almost-dead.

  The man’s face was coloring further, becoming a darker red, veins bulging in his neck and visible across his scalp through his thin hair. He opened his mouth, breath rattling, liquid slathering his lips, eyes terrified and pained. Fool wished he could do something, that he had some skills or knowledge that would be useful. The man’s eyes jumped from Fool’s face and looked along the room, then came back.

  “What did you see?” asked Fool, the Information Man in him taking over. “What was it?”