The Devil's Evidence

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

The man exhaled, his lips working, chewing at the words but failing to form them. He was trying, though, his tongue licking out and trying to remove the spittle from around his mouth, his throat clenching and unclenching. It was painful to watch. He tried again, gulping at the air and then exhaling, tongue and lips writhing around words that the air from his lungs was too weak to create.

  Do something, stupid Fool, do something now or he’ll be gone, thought Fool, brushing the man’s hair back from a brow that seemed both feverish and clammy at the same time. The man’s eyes rolled again, carried on rolling, the pupils contracting and expanding as though he was trying to focus on Fool but failing, his vision slipping to some other depth, some other place.

  The trembles were spreading more widely across the man’s body, becoming shudders, rippling out from some place inside him and shaking him apart. It was coming quicker and quicker now, this thing. Was this what death was like when it was allowed to occur naturally, Fool wondered. Was this what it was like shriven of the terrors of Hell and the freedom of Heaven and its host of angels? Was this freedom, to be able to die like this?

  And ultimately, did it matter? That wasn’t the job, the deaths were the job, the deaths and the reasons for them. Fool needed answers.

  “Hold on,” said Fool, brushing back the man’s hair again, trying to soothe him. “Please, try to hold on.”

  Behind him, one of the Information Men said something and there was laughter. Fool looked back over his shoulder, saw the speaker was a demon whose name he did not know, and decided that, when they were finished here, the demon was finished as an Information Man. He pointed at one of his other troops and said, “Bring water. Now.”

  A moment later, the man brought Fool a glass of cloudy, warm water, which he held to the supervisor’s lips, gently tipping it into his mouth and letting the liquid roll down his throat around the struggling exhalations.

  “What did you see?” asked Fool. The man grimaced, tongue darting out wetly and lips pulling back from teeth that were little more than brown stubs.

  “Please,” said Fool, trickling a little more water into the man’s mouth. The man was calmer but his breathing was still shallow and uneven, choppy, its smell wretched; he was still dying. The man blinked and tears rolled from the corners of his eyes. He nodded at Fool gently.

  “Thank you,” the old man said, the words stretched and half formed, almost unrecognizable. He lifted a hand and stroked Fool’s face, his touch like being caressed by twigs wrapped in parchment.

  “What did you see? Can you describe them to me? Please?”

  The old man nodded again, took a deep breath, and then let it out. A terrible shudder racked him as he exhaled, almost shaking him loose from Fool’s hold, the words “They danced” slipping past Fool on a tide of torn and stinking air.

  “What did?” asked Fool. “What danced? What?” The old man did not reply, his body shivering violently until it became stilled and limp. Cradled in Fool’s arms, he died and was gone, more anonymous flesh, more death.

  “Fuck,” said Fool. “Fuck and shit.” He let the man’s corpse down to the floor slowly, freeing his arms from the man’s tight grip, and then sat back on his haunches.

  Fool looked at the piled dead around him, and then back at the man’s corpse. He’d need more men with tarpaulins and stretchers. The corpse might talk; Tidyman or Hand might get something from it yet. From him, Fool amended.

  It was as he was walking to the pneumatic tube in the corner of the room to send a message to the porters that Fool heard the noise. A scream from outside, a crash, and then the babble of voices that Fool had come to know only too well these last weeks.

  The Evidence was coming.

  2

  If the door to the Seamstress House had not been open, they’d have kicked it in and entered in a rush of sound and splinters, Fool was sure of that. It was, he had come to realize over these last weeks, how the Evidence operated—grand gestures, visible, thrusting themselves in front of everything so that they became the foreground of Hell in those moments, everything else falling to scenery. The Evidence was the expression on the face of the new Hell, one of scrutiny without pity and judgment without thought. And now, they were at Fool’s crime scene.

  Even without a door to crash through they contrived to make an entrance. First their shadows appeared in the doorway, three of them, stretching across the factory floor and creeping up the edge of long tables, as the sound of their gibbering swelled. Behind the shadows and noise shapes formed against Hell’s glaring light, furred at the edges at first and then sharpening into solidity. They were small, bristling, and hopping, two shapes dragging a third between them. The other Information Men stepped back from them, Fool saw, pressing themselves into the racks so that there was no way they could be accused of getting in the Evidence’s way. Although the Evidence held equivalent rank to the Information Men, there was no doubt who had the power, who had Hell’s favor. There was no doubt who would be noticed if a conflict occurred, and what that notice might mean.

  The Evidence was the latest development in the ranks of Hell, one that had emerged from the Bureaucracy almost fully formed with little fanfare, as though they had been standing on some sideline merely waiting for their call. A message had arrived one day several weeks previously in a tube without a ribbon, dropping into Fool’s office with a sound like teeth clicking together on air, a missed bite. The message inside the canister read simply, There is a new department. They are the Evidence. They will investigate. Fool wasn’t sure whether the Information Office was equal to the Evidence, whether as Commander of the Information Office he should have some authority over them, but he knew that in reality he had no control over them at all.

  Worse, he was as frightened of them as the rest of his troops were.

  The first time Fool had seen the Evidence was several days after the arrival of the canister that heralded their formation. They had come to the crime scene he was investigating. He had been trying to determine where the murderer of a Genevieve had entered and left the room the body had been found in, when the door had crashed open and two demons entered.

  They strode through the crime scene as though it wasn’t there, driving a wedge through the room until they came to a halt in front of Fool. The first was smaller, coming up to just above Fool’s waist, and was nearly naked except for a cloth hanging around its waist that covered its groin. After peering at him for a moment, it grunted and turned away, muttering as it went around the room, pulling furniture away from the walls and tearing up the grimy floor covering, throwing pieces of it over its shoulders. When one of the Information Men got in its way, he was pushed aside and then snarled at when he protested. The little demon had huge tusks that pushed their way out from behind lips that were torn and scratched by the teeth, and strings of bloody saliva ran down its chin and dripped to the floor.

  The second Evidence Man was Mr. Tap.

  The demon seemed even taller, as though its new role had increased it, its head bowing to prevent it from banging against the ceiling. It was thin, terribly thin, like corpse branches and decayed bones wrapped in leathery skin, and its face was warped as though it had existed in some vast heat, melting and then resetting as the flesh dripped down so that its three eyes were unevenly spaced and its mouth was a thin slit in which Fool could just make out the hundreds of needle teeth ridged in uneven rows that descended back down its throat and that moved in waves as it spoke.

  “Hello, Fool,” it said, coming over, its voice like dusty ratchets grinding. “I told you I’d come back.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, Fool, good. It’s important you know me. It’s important that you understand that my word, Fool, my word is absolute and you can trust me. It’s important that you understand that I am everything and that you are nothing. I am Mr. Tap, Fool, and I am head of the Evidence.”

  “ ‘The head’?” repeated Fool, watching as behind Mr. Tap the other demon crashed away from them and carried on des
troying the crime scene. “And that’s the body?”

  “One of them, one of many, Fool, with me as brain and guide. The head of the Evidence,” said Mr. Tap.

  “Good for you,” said Fool, “and I’m Commander of the Information Office of Hell.”

  “You are,” said Mr. Tap, leaning in very close to Fool’s face so that his watery, sour eyes filled Fool’s vision. “You’re Commander of the Information Office, commander of facts and details, but I am the head of the things that are coming, Fool, the head of what is already here. The Evidence is mine, Fool, all of the Evidence is mine. I intend to put those valuable things, those facts and details I learned watching you, to good use in running it. After all, I had lessons from a master, didn’t I?” And then it turned, ignoring Fool and watching the thing it had brought with it.

  The littler demon went to the body and yanked it up, wrenching it so hard that the dead boy’s head crunched dully against the wall. The demon licked the dead flesh, sucking at the blood that was coagulating on the boy’s skin.

  “What—” Fool said, but Mr. Tap interrupted him, reaching out a long arm and wrapping a thin, rough hand around Fool’s neck without looking at him. Fool’s hand, dropping without thought to his gun, was immediately gripped in the demon’s other claw, tight enough to leave marks that lasted into the next day. Mr. Tap finally turned back to Fool and pushed its face close to his, close enough that Fool could smell its breath, smell the rank odor of excrement and blood wafting from its mouth, see the striations across its skin and the tiny worms wriggling within them, tearing into each other. At the lowest edge of his vision he could see the teeth in Mr. Tap’s mouth undulating back and forth, more worms writhing in the narrow gaps between them.

  Mr. Tap peered at him for a moment as though he was a piece of half-chewed food that he had discovered on his fingers, and then it spoke. “We are the Evidence,” it said, “and we will find the things that need to be found, and you will not ever stand in our way unless you want us to find you. Unless you want me to find you.”

  Its voice rasped, as though the hundreds of teeth lining its throat and mouth were tearing the words before they emerged from it, and it was hot, a heat that came off its flesh in waves like dry sweat. Mr. Tap squeezed Fool’s throat just a little tighter so that he felt the pressure against his breathing and then the demon let go, turning back to its little companion and watching it with a smile on its face that seemed oddly delicate and soft, Fool and the others now dismissed. Burning with embarrassment and anger but knowing he could do nothing, Fool had left Mr. Tap’s little demon to its search and returned to the Information House.

  And now they were in the Seamstress House.

  Mr. Tap wasn’t with them, which was how things generally were; it was as though, that first time, it had attended so that it could impose itself on Fool and the others, but since then it had been seen only on rare occasions and had mostly left its Evidence Men, as Fool supposed they must be called, to investigate for themselves. Only, they didn’t investigate, they simply tore things apart and reached conclusions that made little or no sense, and then executed justice on the spot.

  Fool had seen them take people from the street for infractions of minor rules, things buried in the pages of the new Guide that Fool managed to find reference to only after searching carefully. People had been vanished for things like walking in front of a demon without acknowledging it or wearing the wrong type of clothing for that day or showing disrespect by having a dirty face or hands, for the infringement of rules that they didn’t even know existed. Where before the people of Hell had feared its lack of justice, the violence that came and went without check, now they feared the laws themselves.

  Fool wasn’t even sure what the Evidence Men were, demons or something else. Certainly, they were solid when they needed to be, but he had heard stories of them leaning out of the shadows, emerging from thick walls or closed doorways, and grasping people, leaning back and vanishing and taking the person with them. Were they ghosts, or something between ghost and demon? He supposed it didn’t matter, not really; they were real, actual, whether or not they were solid all the time.

  There were two of them today, dragging a semiconscious human between them. It was a man, his hair hanging down in front of his face and blood seeping from an ugly gash that ran across his scalp. A flap of skin hung down, revealing the white and pink fleck of bloodied bone. They dragged the man before Fool and looked at him, expectantly.

  “What?” asked Fool.

  “Did it,” one said, its voice liquid through blood and spittle and tusk.

  “Did what?”

  “This,” said the thing, jerking its head in a tight circle to indicate the dead flesh scattered around them.

  “No, this was done by something that wasn’t human. Besides, there were lots of attackers, not one man,” said Fool and pointed at the piled dead at the rear of the room. “And a man couldn’t do this.”

  “Not alone?” said the Evidence Man, and turned back to the drooping human still held tight in its grasp. It leaned in so that its face was close to the man’s head and said, “Who?”

  The man mumbled, tried to raise his head, lifting a face that was battered and swollen to his questioner. One of his eyes was a protruding, angry swollen bulge that wept blood.

  “Who?” asked the Evidence Man again and the man shook his head.

  The little demon leaned in closer still, its mouth opening wide. A tongue the color of old turds slipped out and licked the blood from the man’s scalp, lapping wetly at the liquid as it oozed from the torn skin. The man groaned and tried to twist away, but the other demon holding him pushed him forward and the first kept lapping, digging its tongue under the flap of skin, burrowing into the man’s head. Fool stepped toward them, hand going for his gun, but before he could do anything else the little demon’s jaws opened wider, cracking audibly and stretching obscenely apart, and then it clamped its tusks into either side of the man’s head, biting. Something ground for a second and then there was a crunch like the splintering of old wood.

  The man screamed.

  There was another crack, blood squirting out from the side of the demon’s mouth, and Fool could still see the tongue working its way through the blood, ragging at the skin. The man’s head was changing shape, squeezed thin, forehead and rear bulging as the pressure increased. Fool drew his gun, feeling the demons among his troops tense, sensing their hunger, their envy, their anger, their desire.

  “Let him go,” said Fool, pressing the barrel of the gun against the Evidence Man’s neck. The demon ignored him, kept sucking and licking, its jaws grinding, those tusks splintering their way through the man’s skull. Can he even be alive now? Fool thought, and as if in answer, the man made a noise that might have been a weak, torn shriek.

  It was the shriek that decided it, really. It was hopeless, less a cry for help than an acknowledgment that this was it, the end that everyone in Hell faced sooner or later, that they all knew was coming to them. Fool angled the gun up, faced it away from the man, and pulled the trigger.

  The demon’s head exploded.

  The other Evidence Man let go of the man and leaped back, the man collapsing to the floor, and Fool knew that somewhere between the intention and the shot he had died, knew it from the loose way he fell and from the gray and red morsels that spilled in torn chunks from the wounds in his head. The dead demon, head now simply two flapping wings of flesh covered with coarse hair, spun away and crashed into the edge of the trestle, banging back from it and ending up collapsed in the blood pool, another body decorating the factory floor.

  For a brief, tense moment no one in the room moved, and then the remaining Evidence Man sprang. It was nimble and agile, seeming to rise straight into the air, hair standing out from its head in a shock wave of bristle, its claws extended and its mouth wide open. Fool, expecting the attack, had already stepped back, arm swinging around, gun extended and new bullet formed. The Evidence Man landed in front of him and Fo
ol fired again, not at the demon itself but at the floor at its feet, the shot driving it back as the wood splintered and the sound wave exploded around them.

  “Stop!” Fool shouted. “Stop, in the name of the Information Office of Hell!”

  The Evidence Man kept coming, scuttling on. Marianne stepped forward but, hemmed in by the other Information Men, couldn’t get her gun out and instead yanked a bag off the arm of the demon next to her and swung it in a wide, fast arc that caught the demon in the face. Whatever was in the bag broke with a crash as the demon was shunted back, tumbling in an ungainly sprawl to the floor. Fool stepped between it and Marianne, pushing her behind him as she drew her gun, and then the other Information Men, the humans at least, were moving, surrounding the demon, pinning it and holding it.

  None of the demon Information Men joined in the melee.

  Fool shouted again, wordless, and pushed his way into the mess of struggling bodies. He managed to force his gun against the demon’s forehead and then, twisting the barrel so that it drew its flesh into a tight circle around the muzzle, said, “Everyone be quiet.”

  The silence that fell was brittle, fragile, and Fool thought that the demon might not have much life. Speaking quickly, he said, “You’re not stupid, you know I’ll fire if you keep attacking me, don’t you?”

  The demon nodded, the gesture cut short by the force with which Fool was pushing the gun against its head.

  “When my men let you go, stay calm or I’ll kill you. Do you understand?” Another nod.

  “Then we’re doing well,” said Fool. He stepped back, still keeping the gun trained on the Evidence Man, feeling rather than seeing Marianne step to his side, gun also outstretched, and then motioned his Men away. They let go of their captive carefully, each of them moving out of the thing’s reach as soon as they had let go of it. It clambered to its feet, eyes never leaving Fool, its chest rising and falling in ragged anger, breechclout swaying. It raised a hand to its nose, ruined and pouring blood from the impact of the bag Marianne had swung, and then bared its huge teeth at him, bloodied spittle dribbling down the ivory curves and spattering to the floor. Fool kept the gun pointing at it and, over his shoulder, said, “Marianne, put your gun away.”