The Devil's Evidence

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  Fool saw movement to his side. At first, he thought it was one of the Joyful turning again, making one of those tiny, shivering rotations, but it was not. Something pale was approaching from deeper in the field, glimmering light emerging from the shadows. He stepped behind one of the motionless people, using them as cover and peering around them to watch what was happening. Was it the scribe? No, not the demon, it was small and dark and this was definitely light, and there were two of them, delicate shapes coming toward him through the forest of grass and people. He wondered then if it might be Summer and Gordie, but quickly dismissed the idea. They were still somewhere behind him; he could hear them moving through the crowd of the Joyful, the noise of them the harsh rustle of disturbed stems and of careful, crackling footsteps.

  The figures were pallid, twinkling in the shadow, moving slowly but not, he thought, furtively, and as he watched, the shapes came closer and then he saw them for what they were and two angels stepped out from between the grass.

  They were smaller angels, the sort that Fool had seen at the beach and outside the pool and at the fairground, the kind he had come to think of as caretakers. They moved silently, managing to pass among the grass without disturbing it, apparently slipping without difficulty through spaces that were far narrower than they appeared to be. Silently, they walked around several of the Joyful before finally coming to a halt in front of a figure who Fool could tell was male only by the fact that a part of a bearded chin was still visible between the growths, and whose clothes were little more than fragments of cloth discarded to the ground and whose presumed nudity was covered from view by thick growths of green and brown grass.

  Fool carefully stepped back from the figure he was hiding behind, retreating as silently as possible to hide behind another shape. If the angels heard him, they gave no sign. One of them began to sniff at the Joyful, starting at his head and then descending, sliding across the man’s belly and then down his legs before coming back up the man’s rear, taking constant stretching inhalations as it went. The other began to run its hands over the man’s body, delving into the grass to touch the skin beneath, stroking and pulling and tweaking as it did so. There was no aggression in either’s actions; both were gentle and slow. Eventually, the sniffing angel unhinged its face, expanding itself and taking the rear of the man’s head, grass and all, into its mouth. The angel’s eyes closed in pleasure as it fed, its throat working as it swallowed and its light pulsing to a rhythm Fool couldn’t feel.

  Finally, the angel broke the contact. Looking at its companion, still without speaking, it nodded and as it did so its face drew back in. Fool watched, fascinated, as the mouth collapsed back to something approaching normality, the throat rippling as it smoothed and narrowed, becoming a normal neck again. Light flickered in its open mouth, tiny sparkles of yellow and blue, and then it swallowed a last time and they were gone. A flush bloomed over its skin, a roseate glow that shone briefly and then was gone. While it lasted, it sent warm shadows into the space around it that turned the Joyful into delicate pink statues.

  In response to the nod, and the end of the feeding, the second angel stopped running its hands over the man and produced a long, curved blade from the air, the knife appearing from nothing. It began to cut at the grasses by the man’s feet, tugging away the plants as it did so. As the grass was removed, the man’s body became visible, a pale and wasted thing that seemed to be all skin and joints with little flesh around the skeletal frame. Without the supporting strength of the plants to anchor it upward, the man collapsed back, unable to bear his own weight, and fell into the first angel’s arms. The angel laid the man on the ground gently, folding his arms over his chest and straightening his legs, brushing fragments of grass from his face and his hair back from off his forehead so that his closed eyes and mouth were exposed. The man did not move and the two angels stood over him for a moment, heads bowed. It was impossible to tell whether the angels were male or female, they were sexless and smooth in their grace, and then they moved on.

  The two went to the next Joyful and repeated the process.

  Soon, as Fool watched, the angels had gathered four of the Joyful, each laid alongside the others as though they were crops being harvested, stopping when the fifth person the angel fed from was obviously different and it shook its head after it detached. The two then stood and waited until eventually, after what could have been minutes or could have been a few seconds, a flurry of smaller angels drifted down from the sky and surrounded the four prostrate figures.

  These weren’t the blackest angels Fool had seen at the beach but were similar, small cherublike things that reminded him of the Orphans, but Orphans remade into perfect beings. They were a pale brown, their skin gleaming in the sunlight, and they hovered on wings that weren’t feathered but were gossamer, thin membranes that reflected the sun in a rainbow of flashing colors. They had pudgy fingers, fat little bellies that jounced as they flew, and their eyes were entirely white, without pupil or iris.

  These new angels clutched at the Joyful and then, when each of the tiny figures had a solid grip, beat their delicate wings and lifted the men and women into the air. Fool watched as they rose, spiraling upward and away until they vanished. The two caretaker angels stepped silently back into the grass, merging with the shadows until they, too, were gone. Fool let out his breath, kept trapped inside until then to avoid detection, and stepped out into the small clearing that had been created in the field. He placed his feet where the feet of a Joyful had been until only recently and looked back into the now-clear and flawless sky.

  What had he just watched?

  Beside Fool, Summer stepped out into the clearing and looked into the sky. She was crying but didn’t appear to be upset, her face turning to follow the path that the angels and the Joyful had taken, the tears that streaked her cheeks glinting. Behind her, Gordie was crouching and looking at the ground, moving the cut grass about with a hand as though stirring a pot of stew. What was he looking for, or looking at? Fool wondered. Was he trying to become an Information Man again, or remembering what he had been before his death, looking for clues? Clues to what? How could anything explain the things they had seen? Heaven was proving more unknowable than Hell had ever been.

  Of course it is, he thought. We’re from Hell, all three of us, what chance have we got of understanding?

  As Fool watched Gordie, he remembered that he had been chasing the scribe before this oblique distraction had occurred, and he turned back to the trail left by the small demon. How far had he let the thing get by forgetting about it? He cocked his head, listening, but heard nothing. Was it so far away that he would be unable to pick up the sound of it again? Fool took several slow steps along the broken path, still listening.

  Nothing.

  He had the physical trail, at least. He’d follow that as far as he could and hope either that he caught up with the demon or that he found something to explain what the scribe had been doing. He started walking, pushing his way through the already broken grass, forcing his way through clumps that had twisted around each other and whose tops were above his own head. It was hot in among the plants and Fool was soon sweating, the salt stinging his eyes and making his ears and mouth and nose warm and slippery. He wiped at his forehead, felt the scratch of chaff against his skin, and then something ahead of him screamed.

  The sound rose into the air like a flock of ragged birds from somewhere down the trail where the scribe had run, and Fool knew instinctively that the scream was coming from the demon. The noise had no human elements, had a pitch and tone that could be made only by the throat of one of the demonkind. It was distorted, rough, had no cadence of humanity in it. It sounded not just lost but damned, giving shape to a misery that Fool could only imagine in his nightmares. He started to run, pushing through the tough stems, feeling them tear at his clothes, and another scream sounded, this one closer and, if anything, more hopeless.

  Ahead of Fool, the field’s growths were finally thinning, the spac
es opening out so that movement became easier, and then he was into a larger clearing, and the fleeting image of a huge pile of harvested Joyful cut down and lying stacked like cordwood flickered in his mind and then he saw the scribe.

  —

  The demon was lying in the center of the clearing, grass trampled beneath it, old and broken stems jutting up from the ground while motes of dust and fragments of chaff floated in the air, catching the sun in yellow flickers. Mayall was standing over the fallen demon.

  The clown angel was still, his feet not jigging that clumsy dance, but motionless in the dry, rolling dust. He was dressed in the same brown trousers and white shirt but this time had a baggy coat on, its tails flapping, his hair hanging in loose strings over his face.

  “It’s not where it’s supposed to be,” said Mayall in a somber voice as Fool came to a halt, confused. “Hello, Fool. Have you come along to watch? Watch the judgment for the thing that’s somewhere out and about but that’s where it isn’t supposed to be? Shall we judge together?” As the angel said “judge,” he leaned forward and calmly slapped the recumbent demon, straightening again afterward so that his shadow fell across the fallen thing.

  “No,” said Fool, walking slowly across the space toward the angel and the demon. The scribe looked terrible, sprawled on the ground with its limbs outstretched. The ruff of feathers that wrapped the demon’s neck had peeled away and stretched out into wings that were sticking up from its back, and Fool wondered if it had been attempting to fly; now it would have no chance. One wing’s thin, feather-dotted leather membrane was torn and bleeding and the other wing had been broken halfway along its length and was hanging lopsidedly down. Fresh blood oozed from the broken section of wing, thick and dark, and the smell of it reached Fool as a burning, corrupted stench. Where it spilled to the earth, tiny blue flowers were already emerging, buds opening and turning toward the sun. The scribe raised its head and looked at Fool and its eyes were alien and haunted and lost.

  The clown angel leaned down and cuffed the demon’s head, hard. The movement was shocking in its simplicity, the blow meticulous, graceful, using the minimum of movement to effect a maximum of force. The scribe’s head jerked to the side and smacked against the ground, and Fool heard a crack as something in its neck wrenched. Blood and drool spilled from the scribe’s mouth and it groaned as it tried to raise its head again, the liquid spattering to the dry earth beneath it, more flowers struggling and growing up from the dank liquid. After a second, it gave up and let its head flop down, helpless and broken.

  “Stop,” said Fool.

  “No,” said Mayall, stepping around the figure in front of him, voice chill. “It’s out and about instead of hidden and closed in where it is supposed to be, so it is a thing without rights and without chances.” There was no humor in the angel’s voice now, none of the manic capering, only a low menace. He clapped his hands once, arms darting forward like snakes, simultaneously striking either side of the demon’s head with flat palms, then moved back and howled as though he were the one in pain. Mayall’s head rocked back, exposing a neck that worked as he howled, spitting out each ululation with greater and greater volume.

  “Have mercy?” asked Fool.

  “Mercy?” He turned to Fool, looking at him for the first time since he had arrived. “No, Fool, this thing has broken the rules and deserves nothing but condemnation and punishment.”

  Another blow, followed by another howl. Mayall turned on the spot again, letting his arms drop to his sides, tilting his face to the sun and howling again.

  “Mayall, it doesn’t deserve this,” said Fool quietly, trying to inject calm into the situation with just his voice. He stayed still, hands out from his side, head down, deferential and small.

  Mayall came back around, slowing, and peered at the demon in front of him as though he’d never seen it before. “Everything in Heaven is deserved, Fool; every last thing is needed and required and deserved. Ah, the thing is broken,” the angel said, and shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat, bringing them up and angling his arms so that they mimicked the scribe’s broken wings. The action was strangely humorless and sad. “Poor, broken thing. Poor, foolish thing.”

  After a moment, the angel removed his hands from his coat and reached out, plucking feathers from the demon’s wings. They were unlike angel’s feathers, not long and elegantly pale but gnarled and black, looking like burned twists of wood. Mayall began to drop them, letting them scatter around him like charcoal tears. When there were no feathers left in the scribe’s wings, the angel stood and trod on each where it had come to rest against the earth. Even from where he was standing, Fool heard the tiny things crack under the angel’s feet. The scribe winced at each sound, the battered face jerking, and Fool wondered if it could still feel, if it was still linked to those parts of itself despite their separation from it.

  “Let it be,” said Fool, not demanding but not exactly pleading either.

  “No,” said Mayall, walking around the demon.

  “Please,” said Fool. “The scribe may have broken the rules, but it may also have seen something that will help me in the task you’ve asked me to complete and I need to speak to it.”

  That brought up Mayall short. He stopped moving and looked at Fool for a long moment.

  “You’re not alone,” the angel said eventually. Fool glanced behind him to see Summer and Gordie standing on the edge of the clearing, now holding hands again.

  “No, I’m not. And the scribe is part of my Delegation and I need to talk to it and I am responsible for it. It is Hell’s.”

  Mayall seemed to give this some thought, stepping over the crumpled demon and walking toward Fool. When he was close enough, he leaned in so that his face was mere inches from Fool’s and said, “Do you know the difference between a demon and a rock?”

  “What?” asked Fool, startled. “A demon and a rock? Now what? I don’t understand.”

  “A rock cannot be redeemed,” said Mayall and then walked away, turning and crouching in one simple movement, grasping the scribe in arms that looked, suddenly, huge. The coat flapped away from his back and became wings, vast and brown, and then he was circling up into the sky holding the demon and his laughter was filling the sky, becoming a cloud of sound like thunder. “But,” Mayall’s voice rumbled from above them, “they both fall so very, very well!”

  And then the demon was falling.

  The scribe screamed as it dropped, a scream that lasted for seconds and a lifetime before stopping abruptly as it hit the ground with a solid, shuddering crunch. Blood and dirt sprayed up in equal measure, a crown forming in the air above the mangled thing, before it, too, fell. A blue streak, small and crumpled, rose from the dead demon and expanded into the sky above it until it was so dissipated that it vanished.

  Mayall floated down and hovered above the body, his face serious, his expression calm.

  “I have redeemed it, set it free,” he said, “but no black angels will come for this. It is all alone.”

  Alone, thought Fool. We’re all alone at the end, aren’t we? Really?

  Ignoring Mayall, Fool went to the scribe’s body and sat beside it. It was already rotting, crumping in on itself in a pool of slime and heat, a haze rising from it. The smell was terrible and the rapidly blooming blue flowers were adding to the odor, more and more of them growing where the demon’s blood had hit the earth, petals shivering as they peeled back from stamens that looked like long, thin phalluses. They opened wide, grasping at the sun, twisting on their delicate, foul stalks so that their faces were fully exposed.

  “Why did you kill it?” asked Fool when Mayall finally stopped spinning and flying. “I told you I needed to talk to it. You asked me to investigate, you told me to find out what was happening, yet you block me when I try to do what you’ve asked.”

  Mayall sat cross-legged in front of Fool, leaning forward, oddly conspiratorial. “Because I decided it was the just thing to do,” said the angel. “You were given perm
ission to leave your rooms, but it was not. It was a wrong thing in a wrong place, and I dealt with it.”

  “You murdered it!”

  “I redeemed it,” said Mayall. “I released it from its sin, from the body of evil it inhabited. It is free now, Thomas Fool. Surely I did it a service, performed a mercy?”

  How could you argue with it, this merciful blindness? “I needed to speak to it,” Fool repeated. “It could have helped.”

  “No,” said Mayall, and his tone was gentle. “Ask your Delegation colleagues what it was doing out of their rooms, the explanation lies there.”

  “You know?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “No. You and Elderflower spoke about this, Thomas Fool, you should understand. Elderflower and I, we may see but know that we cannot tell or the plan falls sundered. This is Heaven, the glory that Hell is a red and burning reflection of, and things are necessarily this way for reasons you will never be told and would never understand even if you were. What we may know, you may not. This is the role you have been assigned, Thomas Fool. You are the question in the absolute, you are the chaos in the order, the hunchback in the line of soldiers, you are the joke in the seriousness. You are the Fool in the line of the sensible, and I cherish you for it.”

  “Help me,” said Fool, head sagging. He was tired, his face hurt and felt thick with dried blood and new scabs, and his brain hurt. Dead Joyful, angels that wouldn’t or couldn’t see, the hectic and confusing and violent Mayall, it was all mustering in his head, mixing and crashing and bitter.

  “Yes, you deserve something,” said Mayall, and that light was in his eyes again, that glitter of the approaching storm of movement and noise. He sprang to his feet, the mania returning, his feet starting to prance, and gestured to Summer and Gordie. Fool felt his hand move toward his gun and forced it to stop, move away. Whatever would happen here, there was nothing he could do to stop it.