The Devil's Evidence

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  “Okay,” said Marianne, and Fool risked a brief glance over, seeing her holster her weapon. Marianne’s voice was shaky, and at the sound of it the Evidence Man tensed further, one long-nailed hand rising to its twisted nose.

  “No,” said Fool, voice low and careful. “She is an Information Man, one of mine, and if you move against her I shall see it as a move against me, and I will kill you for it. Do you understand?”

  The Evidence Man glared at Marianne a few moments longer, as though memorizing her for future consumption, and then finally nodded and deliberately turned its back on Fool and his troops, going to its fallen companion and gathering the body in its short arms, snarling as it did so. It snapped its teeth together, growling, and tugged its dead companion into a clumsy lift and then, half carrying, half dragging it, backed out of the factory. No one got in its way and no one spoke as it went. The last Fool saw of it was its shadow, stretching down the table toward him, and its silhouette in the factory’s doorway and then it was gone.

  The tension didn’t lessen with its leaving. Instead, the Information Men began to tighten into two ranks, human on one side and demon on the other. Fool watched as claws unsheathed, mouths opened, hands dropped to weapons, and then he stepped between the gathering lines.

  “Does anyone think what I did was wrong?” he asked. No one replied, but he could feel the hate coming at him from the demons, another mark against him, a human who commanded demons, who killed their kind. What have I done? he thought, and hoped the fear he felt didn’t show in his voice.

  “It killed this man without provocation,” he continued, pointing at the mangled corpse, still bleeding on the floor in front of them.

  “It said he was guilty,” said one of the demons, sullen. It was long-faced, its mouth a curve that took up the lower part of its head filled with a mass of square, gray teeth below a snout that flattened back to huge black eyes that had neither iris nor cornea. Orobas, thought Fool, mind flickering over names, lineages, wishing again that Gordie was alive, Gordie with his memory and his understanding and his knowledge. I’m sure it’s called Orobas.

  “He’s not,” replied Fool. Even a few months ago, he could have said, Humans don’t kill humans, and it would have been true, but now? Everyone killed everyone, it seemed, in the new Hell.

  “How do you know?” When Orobas spoke, its teeth clacked together with a sound like dropping plates, punctuating each word, breaking it into pieces. Its ears were curling points reaching up from its flat head, turned as though to catch the sound from everywhere. It should have been comical, something to make it seem preposterous and weak. It didn’t.

  “Because no human could inflict this kind of damage,” said Fool, “not even in a group. This was fast, organized violence. This man isn’t even armed, the footprints don’t look human. You’re Information Men, you have to learn to see this; you have to learn to read the places we visit, to see the truth of them, not the lie of what you want them to be. You are the line that divides truth from lies, and even in Hell the line has to exist. You have to see.”

  “Could have dropped his weapon,” said another voice, this one high and breathy.

  “It could have hidden the weapon, or hired someone,” said Orobas, and now as it clacked and spoke it drooled, strings of thick saliva spilling over the teeth, making them glimmer in the torchlight. It was only short but the body in the ill-fitting uniform was solid, the arms extending from the sleeves capped not with hands but with clumsy, uneven hooves. It flexed them now, the dark curves of solidity that it had instead of fingers splitting, twists of hair tangled between each segment, and then the demons were drawing together, taut and rigid. Orobas took a step forward, lifting its hooves, and the ends of the bony arcs were filthy, looked solid and sharp. It smiled, black lips pulling back without humor.

  Whatever authority Fool had previously had, it was ebbing from the room moment by moment. He had killed not just a demon but a fellow officer of sorts, a mere upstart human thinking he had the authority to challenge the demonkind. How high would this feeling go? he wondered suddenly. All the way to the top? To Elderflower, assuming Elderflower was the top? His usefulness would not, he thought, protect him if Hell thought he had stepped too far. And then there was Mr. Tap to think about, and Fool pondered, not for the first time, whether the most dangerous thing in Hell for Fool was Fool himself.

  “Fine,” he said, thinking fast. “We’ll send him to the Questioning House along with the others and tomorrow morning they’ll ask the flesh what they need to ask, and if this man killed the people here and the Evidence Man was right and I’m wrong, I’ll take whatever punishment is required of me. Agreed?”

  A pause and then nods, an affirmative noise under them, sullen and mistrustful, and Fool saw Orobas hesitate, try to gauge the mood and then decide that now was not the time for open rebellion and it, too, nodded and lowered its arms, and Fool thought, I hope you’re right, little Fool. I hope you’re fucking right.

  —

  Fool returned to his room in the Information House and stripped, trying to shed the stress and fear of the morning but they clung to him, wrapped around his skin like old cobwebs. Dropping his dirty clothes in the hall, where one of his troops would take them away, he washed and dressed in a fresh shirt and trousers, and then looked at his board and tried to ignore the ghosts beneath it.

  The board was mounted on his wall and contained all the information they had gleaned at the fires that had spread across Hell these past weeks. It wasn’t much, a disparate collection of words and thoughts, lists of ideas, of suppositions, of guesses and things crossed out as they were disproved or dismissed. Fool used threads to link resemblances between the various fires, but the only constant was that each fire was man-made; there were more differences than similarities. Some were near water and easily doused, some were miles from the nearest stream or pond. Several of the burned buildings had contained the dead in their seared rooms, others were empty or contained only the things that Hell stored, food or machinery or other, more obscure, items. Some of the information he had discovered or surmised himself, some he had taken from the reports written by Marianne. Recently, she had become his regular companion on the investigations, acting as sounding board but also revealing a useful talent for writing detailed précis of the scenes before them and the stories he drew out of the scenes. She also had a memory, could recite back to him the things he said as he wandered about the burned spaces, had become a repository for his mutterings and thoughts.

  Stepping back and looking at his board, with its crossing threads and pinned pieces of paper, Fool was struck again by the depth of his ignorance while in the gathering shadows below it the ghosts of Summer and Gordie looked on. Summer smiled encouragingly but Gordie merely shook his head slightly, as though disappointed.

  Gordie and Summer, his colleagues, his dead colleagues, the last of the Information Men to die before this new Information Office had been set up, before the Information House had had its derelict upper floors opened up as barracks so that demons and humans now coexisted uneasily, sleeping in quarters that stretched the length of the building. Gordie and Summer, his friends, returned to him these last weeks as these pale and silent ghosts standing in the room’s shadows, as these pallid reflections of the people he had known and still missed.

  Gordie was looking at Fool’s notice board, peering at the ever-expanding diagram detailing the fires. So much information, and so little fact; the number of crossing threads and handwritten notes growing every day, more and more ideas being laid out among the sketches and thoughts, pushing off the corners of the board and spreading across Fool’s walls like some creeping fungus.

  “Can you see something I’m missing?” asked Fool, going to stand by Gordie. When the ghosts, or spirits, or whatever they were, had first appeared, or Fool had first started to imagine them, he had been frightened. Frightened of what they might represent. Now he was almost glad to see them.

  Gordie did not reply, simply car
ried on looking at the board, his pale eyes darting along lines of thread and then returning, trying another tack. His lips were moving soundlessly as he read the board. Fool tried to follow the same lines that Gordie was traveling, tried to watch the man’s face as well as the board, to see the routes the little ghost followed, but he couldn’t keep up and in the end he simply stood and looked for himself. It was like looking into the water of a pool that was filled with floating, whirling debris, trying to see what lay in its muddy depths. Sometimes, Fool would think he was almost grasping the outlines of something and then it would shift, twist, break apart, and he would be looking at meaningless patterns again. It made his head ache and he turned away and went to Summer.

  She was sitting at the small desk by Fool’s bed and was writing despite the fact that she held no pen. Black marks were appearing across the surface of the scarred wood, meaningless marks that faded after a few seconds. Fool watched them closely, hoping to see something recognizable, a word or a sketch of some place or person or thing he could identify, but no; Summer’s scrawls were as shifting and arbitrary as everything else in this fucking investigation.

  Sighing, Fool turned away. Alive, Summer and Gordie had been his friends and his allies; as ghosts, they were just pictures given movement, dumb images without sense or opinion, and he had work to do.

  The Information Office, although still housed only in this one building, expanded seemingly every day, and he had to try to keep track of it. Already there were troops whose names he knew he would never know appearing in the ranks, inventories of equipment to submit and sign off on, lower-ranking officers he had never met sending him reports on crimes he did not know had taken place, and above or below them all the Evidence, a thing under its own control snapping at their heels. Turning to the first of the reports, Fool began to read.

  3

  Hand was on duty.

  “Fool,” Hand said as he walked into the Questioning House’s foyer, “we don’t see you as much as we used to. Are you too important to talk to us now that you hold such a lofty position?”

  Hand and Tidyman were now Hell’s only two Questioners, although Fool suspected that more Questioning Houses would soon be opened to match the increased number of Information Men; more officers meant more crimes being investigated, after all. Neither man liked Fool much. Partly it was, he thought, the reverse of why the demonkind Information Men disliked him; whereas they had to take orders from a mere human, Hand and Tidyman saw him apparently consorting with the demons as though he was their equal or they his. It made him, for them, something other than human, a traitor or a half-breed thing with a foot in both camps but belonging to neither.

  It was more than that, though. The ghost of Morgan stood between them and Fool, the knowledge that Tidyman and Hand had done nothing to help the man when he had been attacked and murdered in the Questioning House, and they knew Fool knew it and that he felt disgust toward them for their inaction.

  “Hand,” he said, uncomfortably aware of the uniform he now wore, its quality compared to the drab smock that Hand wore under the blood-spattered apron. It fit him properly, for one thing, the trousers long enough and the jacket comfortably tight around his chest and belly rather than flapping wide and loose.

  “My, you sent us a lot yesterday,” said Hand, looking over Fool’s shoulder at the bodies lying wrapped in tarpaulins that the porters were laying along the foyer wall. “You’ve been a busy boy! It’s good to see that Hell is using its favorite son well.”

  “I want this one questioned first,” said Fool, ignoring Hand’s jibe and pointing to the dead man at his feet. He had opened several of the tarpaulins, peeling them back like loose skin to reveal the savaged flesh beneath, before finding the man the Evidence had killed.

  “Is he the most important man, like you?” asked Hand. “The first of the victims, the first among the lost and damned? Do you want to know how he died? Or perhaps the question today is who killed him, so that you can hunt the murderer down and slaughter them like the good servant you are?”

  “I know who killed him and how he died,” said Fool. “What I want from you, Hand, is to know if before he died he was a murderer.”

  Hand opened his mouth to speak, but before he could Fool stepped forward, face close to the other man’s, and said, “Think carefully before you say another word, Hand. If I’m so important, perhaps I could shoot you where you stand, don’t you think, without fear of punishment? Or maybe I could speak to my colleague Mr. Tap about you. Even you, Hand, hiding away in the House, must have heard of it, yes? All the rumors, all the terrible little things people are saying? How would you like it if it came to visit you, if the Evidence came calling? Are you so perfect, Hand, that you might be allowed to walk away from Mr. Tap’s men without mark or harm? Shall I call him so that he can join us for these interviews?”

  “No,” said Hand quietly. He looked down at the floor, shuffled his feet, and then spoke without raising his eyes. “There’s no need to be like that. I was simply going to say that I have a new technique that I think will work with this flesh. There’s no need to threaten me.”

  Fool didn’t reply, stepping back and letting Hand walk away. After a moment, he gestured for the porters to pick up the body and he followed, thinking, What have I become?

  Hand had the body placed on the table in the center of the Questioning Room and then wheeled a smaller table over to its side. Instead of setting out the usual paraphernalia that accompanied questionings, the knives and scales and slides and liquids in stoppered bottles, he placed three plain bowls on the table and then filled two of them to their brims with water. Then he took two bottles from one of the cupboards that lined the walls, carrying them to the table carefully. The first he opened very slowly, never letting it tilt or spill, and poured a few drops of its contents, a clear liquid that steamed slightly, into the first bowl. From the second, which he handled with more confidence, he poured a string of thick, brown fluid into the next bowl. The smell of it was awful, shit and dirt and corruption contained in a bottle. Seeing Fool watching, Hand said, “Holy water and diluted excrement. Purity and filth.”

  “The extremes of Heaven and Hell,” said Fool, remembering something that Morgan had once said to him. He glanced to his side as he spoke, half expecting to see Morgan’s ghost nodding at him the way he saw Gordie’s and Summer’s. The room was empty.

  “Yes,” said Hand, a note of grudging, surprised respect in his voice. “I’ll lift the corpse’s hand over the bowls. Make a simple statement and I’ll let the hand fall; if it lands in the clear water, the statement is true, if in the filth it’s false, and if it lands in the empty one it either doesn’t understand what you’ve said or it’s irrelevant.”

  Fool waited until Hand had raised the corpse’s arm and then said, “You did not kill the people in the Seamstress House.”

  The hand splashed into the clear water. Where it spilled out onto the table, the liquid steamed more violently for a moment before evaporating away to nothing.

  True. Hand lifted the arm again.

  Remembering Orobas’s comment about hiring someone, Fool said, “You did nothing to help arrange the deaths.”

  True.

  “You knew nothing about the deaths at all.”

  True.

  “The Evidence killed you without cause.”

  True, and the last of the bowl’s water was gone now and there was only the bowl of filth left, the bowl to confirm falsehoods. Fool wondered if he could try to question the corpse by making only false statements, but the thought of arriving at truth through untruth made his head ache and he decided against it. He stepped back from the table, from the corpse.

  Hand said, “No more? Probably sensible, I think you’ve had all you’re going to get. What do you want from the other bodies?”

  “What do I want? The same as always, Hand; I want the truth.”

  Hand looked at Fool for a long moment and then turned away, muttering. Although Fool couldn’t hear h
im properly, he thought the man might have said, “Some hope.”

  —

  They were on a train.

  The journey back to the Information House was slow and uncomfortable, and Fool felt, despite the apparent confirmation that he had acted correctly, exposed and raw, uncertain. I’ve been stupid, he thought, little stupid Fool, thinking that things are different, that I’m important, that I’m protected. But Mr. Tap’s right, I’m not important, I’m no one. I keep forgetting, and I can’t, I daren’t. I’m a human, in Hell, and I’m no one. Out loud, he said, “I’m a fool.”

  “Sir?” Marianne, sitting across from him, head down and arms loose over her knees. The rest of the humans had seated themselves in the other bench seats, away from Fool and Marianne, opening a gap between them, telling Hell and those who watched them that, look, they weren’t a part of what Fool and Marianne had done the day before, desperate not to be noticed. The demons were clustered together at the end of the carriage, and although none had said anything directly, he knew they were muttering about him, the resentment clear. What Hand had told Fool had made no difference to them.

  “Thank you,” Fool said quietly.

  “What for?”

  “For yesterday,” he said. “For—” and then stopped, not wanting to say it. Saying it felt as though it might free it, somehow, send the truth of it onward and outward, to the eyes and ears of the Bureaucracy.

  “It was nothing,” she said, and he could almost hear the hope in her voice, Let it be nothing, let it be unimportant.

  “It wasn’t nothing, you did the right thing,” he said. “It was interfering in our investigation, had just committed murder.”

  “Do you think they’ll see it like that?” They, the demons they worked with and the demons above them and the Archdeacons above them and finally Elderflower, small and delicate and foul. Was Elderflower watching them still? Taking an interest? Were they still being watched by the thing that might or might not be Satan himself, or had it lost interest in them now?