The Devil's Evidence

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  Marianne’s voice had attained a tone of flat resignation. “And then I heard it, or them, come upstairs and I ran. I used the other staircase but the foyer was full of figures and shapes and screams and I came in here.

  “You didn’t come,” said Marianne. The barrel of her gun steadied, facing the door, which banged again.

  “Marianne, be ready,” Fool said as the door smashed open again. This time, the broom snapped with a single clean sound and the door flew all the way open. Marianne shouted and Fool opened his eyes without thinking to see the mouth of his tattoo yanking apart and exposing the meat of his arm. Summer, still bailing, cried out as Gordie rowed furiously, trying to get them to the shore now visible over his shoulder. Fool gasped, gripped the arm below the tattoo to try to stifle the pain and throbbing, and closed his eyes again.

  Marianne’s gun had gone, removed from his sight, and there was an Evidence Man standing in the doorway.

  It was crouched low, head swinging, tusks dripping blood and saliva, and its piggy eyes mad with fury. It saw something to Fool’s side, presumably Marianne, and Fuck I need to see I need to see I can’t turn I’m paper I need to see it leaped into the room. Marianne shouted again, furious now, and then there was the sound of a gunshot. A part of the door frame blew apart behind the Evidence Man as it landed several feet inside the room, its face feral and wild.

  “Be calm, Marianne!” shouted Fool. “Be calm and aim!”

  The Evidence Man crouched as Marianne fired again, the shot tugging at its hair but doing no damage. More screams came from the corridor beyond the door now, and then a new thing filled the doorway.

  Marianne screamed, the tattoo shrieking, and fired, the shot going wide as the bauta turned to watch the thing from outside flow in. The front part of it leaped at the bauta, clumsily, springing sideways and slamming into the smaller demon in a flail of limbs, the black tubes connecting it to the central mass throbbing and tangling behind it.

  The Evidence Man yowled from under the thing from outside, scrabbling against it. Blood sprayed but the thing carried on attacking, arms slashing mechanically at the Evidence Man, striking it again and again. When it was weak enough, the outside thing turned the bauta over and battened on to the back of its head and started to feed.

  The rest of the creature moved into the room behind the front part of it, and for a moment there was an opportunity. “Marianne, move!” shouted Fool. “Move now!”

  She moved, appearing at the edge of his vision briefly, but it was already too late. The creature darted, each part of the web moving out, stretching, so that the far side of the room was blocked off. Marianne backed away and knocked against whatever it was that Fool’s paper self was balanced on. Upended, he fell, spiraling, and the last thing he saw before he opened his eyes as the boat ran aground was the thing from outside leaping to where Marianne had been standing, and the last thing he heard was Marianne scream his name.

  —

  The office was in ruins.

  They had come to land as Fool had screamed Marianne’s name, and then screamed it again, to no avail. His view through the paper Fool little paper Fool, little helpless Fool circled down and ended up as one of darkness, the paper having landed facedown against the floor, and when he opened his eyes the darkness came with him and clouded about him, hemming him in. He blinked, trying to flush it away, and managed to focus on the tattoo of Marianne’s face.

  “Marianne,” he said, hoping that she had managed to dodge the thing, had managed to run, but she did not reply. Already, the split skin along the lines of the tattoo was knitting, healing, the itch and burn of it like the scurrying of poisonous ants along his arm.

  “Marianne,” again, hope as forlorn as torn clouds in his voice. The edges of the tattoo closed together, the final part to seal Marianne’s mouth, leaving her looking at him, silent and still. “Marianne?

  “Marianne?” and still nothing and the skin was smooth now, the tattoo just a tattoo, and he knew she was gone and Fool threw back his head and howled, howled to try to tear the pain from him, howled to try to spit it out in blood and bile, howled to bring her back, howled to sing her on her way.

  Howled because she was gone.

  Finally, Fool stopped, his throat raw. Pulling the sleeve of his jacket together over Marianne’s face, he said without looking up, “We need the pincer. We can check on her while we get it.”

  “Fool,” said Summer, “I—”

  “Don’t. She’s gone, that’s all. This is Hell, this is the way it is, let’s go.” She did not speak again, and neither did Gordie, as they climbed from the boat and started walking.

  Gordie had been right, they had beached somewhere in the hinterland between the farmlands and the Bureaucracy, and it didn’t take them long to walk back to the place they had worked and lived in. For Fool, the journey was a fragmented thing, a time of single steps and feeling as though he was looking at everything from behind a thick sheet of glass. Marianne, he thought, I failed you. I said I’d be there and I wasn’t, I made a promise and I broke it. He cried as he walked, letting the tears come, welcoming the bitter sting of them.

  The three of them went along quiet streets, streets normally filled with demons or humans, past closed bars and a Seamstress House whose doors were shut and locked. Hell was quiet, eerily so, and even the usual background lament of the factories and the groan of the train wheels against stone was absent.

  “Where is everyone?” asked Summer.

  “Preparing for war,” said Gordie, pointing to a large sign that had been nailed across the front of a brothel. The sign simply read:

  Gather

  The edge of the sign flapped in the breeze as they drew alongside it, and the noise of it followed them down the street like sardonic applause as they walked away. They passed more of the signs en route, some standing nailed to poles like dead and suffering Joyful, others strung across alleyways or painted across the front of buildings. They were all single-word messages, mostly GATHER but also with several repetitions of PREPARE and once the confusing FIELDS. During the walk, they saw no one and heard nothing, and above them the clouds were still and high.

  Finally, they came to the street containing the Information Office and slowed, the understanding unspoken but clear between them that whatever had happened here might still be happening. Fool went first, gun outstretched, still feeling as though this was happening to someone else, that this was someone else’s life he had accidentally stumbled into, and knowing it wasn’t. This was his and his alone.

  The door to the office was intact but the windows were all broken, glass littering the sidewalks, and he could hear no sounds from within. He opened the door slowly, letting it swing back to reveal the foyer beyond, standing away so that nothing could come out at him. Would I care if it did? he thought. Would it matter?

  Yes. Yes, because I failed Marianne but I may still keep my promise to Israfil and I may still protect Hell and Heaven and everything and everyone in them. I may still do some good, even in Hell. Tightening his grip on his gun, he went in.

  There was more glass on the floor of the lobby, masses of it sparkling in sharp patterns atop the floorboards. There were bloody footprints in the glass and a handprint on the wall. Blood had trickled from the heel of the handprint in a long, thin string. “Hello?” Fool called. “Is anyone still here?”

  There was no response.

  “Gordie, go and find the pincer,” Fool said. “It’s in the evidence room.”

  “We didn’t have an evidence room when I was alive,” he said.

  “On the first floor. It used to be your room. Be careful and don’t take any chances, you aren’t armed. If you see anything you can use as a weapon for you or Summer, bring it. Summer, with me.”

  Fool led Summer through a set of double doors off the foyer as Gordie peeled off to the far staircase in search of the pincer. The corridor beyond the doors led to a second set of doors that Fool pushed open with his foot, peering into the darkened space
beyond. Here, the signs of damage were more obvious. Something had scored along both walls, leaving long, torn trails in its wake, and a number of room doors had been broken in or torn from their hinges and pulled out. More blood had sprayed across the floor and ceiling, and a bauta’s head gazed at Fool and Summer from the base of the wall. There was no sign of its body and it blinked, once, as they passed. Summer stepped away from it, feet crunching across broken wood, and then they were at the mess.

  Summer arrived at the door just before Fool, looking in the room and then turning before Fool could enter, pulling the door closed behind her. It hung awkwardly, the bottom grating against the frame, the top pulled away from the hinge. “Fool, don’t. Stay here. Let me go in,” she said, her hand gentle on his shoulder.

  “Summer,” he said, “thank you, but no. I need to go in.” She was standing, deliberately blocking his access to the room, and when he moved to go around her, she moved in counterpoint, staying in his way. What had she seen through that open door?

  What had she seen?

  Fool tried to move forward but again she blocked him, reaching up and taking his face in both of her hands, pulling his attention down to her face. She smiled at him, sadly, and said, “No.

  “There’s no point, Fool, Thomas, let me. You don’t need to do this, you already know what you’ll find in there. Do you really want to see?”

  “Want? No,” he said, “of course I don’t. But I should, and I will. I owe her that much at least. I wasn’t here, I didn’t protect her. I need to see, to remember her.”

  “Not like this.”

  “Exactly like this,” he said and stepped past her. This time, she didn’t try to stop him.

  The mess floor looked as though it had been washed with blood, a huge puddle of it filling the room and smeared from one wall almost to the other. Most of the tables and chairs that the Information Men had eaten at were stacked against the far wall, except for a single table that now lay on its side in the middle of the blood. Was that what I was standing on, he thought, little perching paper Fool? Was I on that when I watched her die?

  But he hadn’t watched her die, had he? And he still had hope, still had that faint glimmer of something almost too weak to be called hope but there nonetheless, that she might somehow have survived. He stepped into the pool of blood, so fresh that it hadn’t started to thicken yet, was still thin and slippery, and saw the body of the bauta.

  It was lying crumpled against the far wall, back upright and knees drawn up and fallen sideways. Its chest had been torn open to reveal the matter within, the rib ends startlingly white in the redness. Something that might have been its heart had tumbled out and was lying in its lap, and its head had been wrenched sideways and was facing down as though peering at the organ in surprise. One of its tusks was gone, the other slick with blood, and its eyes were open wide. Fool turned away from it, feeling no sympathy. “You died free and moving,” he said aloud and then he was looking at Marianne.

  She was lying in the far corner of the room, and at first he thought she might simply be unconscious; she didn’t seem to have been marked. Her head was lost in the shadows of the room’s corner and he walked toward her, saying her name.

  “Marianne? Marianne?”

  No reply, and then the shadow wasn’t shadow, it was a thick pool of blood, staining her short hair and smearing the floor around her. The back of her head was open and pieces of her brain flecked the blood, fragments of bone scattered among them. The thing had fed on her, rough, had bitten through her skull and shredded the skin of her head. Fool crouched by her and reached out, taking one hand, the first and last time he would ever touch her. The skin of her hand was soft, the fingers still flexible. She was still warm.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, almost whispering. “I’m so sorry.”

  Summer’s hand fell on his shoulder. “Gordie’s got the pincer,” she said.

  “Just give me a minute,” he said. He let go of Marianne’s hand, closing his eyes. He inhaled through his nose, hoping to catch her scent, but all he smelled was blood and death.

  “Fool,” said Summer.

  “I know,” he said. “I know. Let’s go, then. Let’s go and find Rhakshasas. Let’s go and stop this fucking war.”

  28

  They went back through the Information Office and out into Hell’s deserted streets. Gordie, as well as finding the pincer, had found a piece of window frame that had broken off during the attack and that was smooth enough to hold at one end. The other was studded with broken glass fragments and would make a good club if they were attacked. Before they left, Summer picked up Marianne’s gun and fired it experimentally; as expected, it refused to work. It was Marianne’s, would work only for her, and they left it on her body.

  Outside, the wind had picked up and paper blew along the streets. A piece caught against Fool’s leg and he picked it up. Like the signs, it contained a single word:

  Prepare

  Fool looked at the paper and wondered, Was this war preordained? Had this paper sat in one of Hell’s warehouses for months or years, awaiting the time someone would open the doors and the wind would whip it all away, carry it and the message it contained out to seed?

  Summer, seeing Fool look at the paper, said, “It doesn’t matter.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “You’re wondering if all this is part of a plan, aren’t you? Everything, I mean? The things outside, the war, the deaths, whether everything’s been planned to happen this way.”

  “Yes.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You were right, we have to do this, and if we’re part of a plan, fine. Plans can change, Fool, or be part of bigger plans. How do you know that your disrupting this plan, if you can, isn’t part of an even bigger plan in which the disruption is the right outcome? You can’t give up.”

  Fool considered what Summer had said, thought about it and felt the shape of it, and then felt it turn in his mind so that he was looking at it from the other side, from Summer’s side, and grinned. At first he tried to keep it to himself but he couldn’t, it was too big to contain, and he grinned at Summer as well. Something in his face scared her, because she stepped back, eyes hooding. He tried to turn down the grin but it wouldn’t go, crawled across his face like a sickness, aching in his cheeks and rippling around his eyes.

  He was the plan within the plan, the joke within the seriousness. He was Thomas Fool, and he would not stop, because he no longer could, even if he’d wanted to.

  There were no trains in evidence, so they walked. The Information Office was on the outskirts of the Bureaucracy, somewhere in the blending point between that area and the Houska and the nearest edge of Eve’s Harbor, and Assemblies House was perhaps a couple of miles away. They had decided to try to find Rhakshasas there, reasoning that it was likely to be preparing for war with the other Archdeacons rather than at its dwelling in Crow Heights. They covered the distance quickly, without incident, and soon found themselves at the entrance to the Bureaucracy’s headquarters in Hell.

  For once, the building’s main doors were open, and Fool was able to walk in unchallenged, Summer and Gordie behind him. The foyer beyond the doors was a mass of movement, with what looked to be hundreds of small, nameless demons scuttling back and forth clutching pieces of paper and scrolls and ledgers. Fool saw at least one holding a map pinned to a board nearly as big as it was, peering over the top of it as it exited one corridor and made its way to the entrance to another. The war, it seemed, took some serious organization.

  “Wait here,” said Fool. “Keep small.”

  He left Gordie and Summer standing as unobtrusively as possible against the wall of the foyer and went to the main desk. Usually there was nothing behind the raised wooden reception, but today there was an officious little demon there, staring down on the scurrying before it and nodding in pleasure. An administrator, thought Fool, a consumer of pointless information, a lover of the process.

  “What?” said the demon as Fool approach
ed. It was wearing a jacket styled for a human shape, torn to accommodate the fins of bone and gristle that emerged from its shoulders. Its face was a mass of ridges and overlapping bony plates that grated together as it spoke, giving its voice an unpleasant strained quality.

  “I need to see Rhakshasas.”

  “Ha! Fuck off!”

  “I need to see Rhakshasas,” Fool repeated. He reached into his pocket to find his badge of office but it wasn’t there; at some point he’d lost it. Suddenly panicking, he reached into his other pocket and, thankfully, found the feather still safe in its depths. He’d forgotten it in the horrors of the last few hours, and touching it calmed him, reassured him.

  “I don’t give a black enameled shit what you need,” said the demon, leaning down so that its face was mere inches from Fool’s. “Rhakshasas has better things to do than parlay with little people. Besides, why aren’t you at your staging post?”

  “Staging post?”

  “Why aren’t you in the fields?” it shrieked, its voice rising, wobbling, as it found a thing out of place, a thing out of order. “Why aren’t you preparing?”

  “Preparing?”

  “For the war, you muzzlescum? There’s a curfew! There are rules! You should be with the others!” Muzzlescum? It wasn’t an insult Fool had heard before, and he wondered if the demon had made it up.

  “Get me Rhakshasas.” Fool was tired of this now, tired of the obstructions, tired of the struggle.

  “I’ll have you pulled to pieces, you little deserting bastard!” the demon screamed, and the plates on its face were vibrating, it was so angry.

  Enough. This had gone on long enough. He straightened as best he could and spoke.

  “I am Thomas Fool, Commander of the Information Office of Hell, and I have returned from Heaven. Tell Rhakshasas that I require it meet me in the courtyard in the center of Assemblies House. You can tell Mr. Tap the same thing, and the other Archdeacons, if they’re around.”