The Devil's Evidence

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  “They’re not,” said the demon without thinking and then, “Thomas Fool is dead. He killed demons and now he’s dead. You aren’t him. Fuck off.”

  Fool removed his gun from its holster and looked at it, studying its long lines and the dark mouth at the center of its barrel. They had picked up an audience, he knew, everything in the foyer staring at them while trying to not look like they were doing so. The movement about them had slowed.

  “My name is Thomas Fool,” Fool said carefully, “and I am not dead. My gun fires only for me. Would you like me to prove it works?” He turned it toward the demon behind the desk, not pointing it exactly at it but intimating, letting it appear a casual gesture full of intent.

  “You’ve picked that up from the street,” said the demon.

  “Are you sure?” Fool twitched the barrel, was pleased to see the demon flinch, and then he fired. The shot was loud in the walled space, the sound of it echoing back and forth in waves. A piece of ancient plasterwork above the desk exploded into a spray of dust and fragments that rained down on the demon’s head. Fool, still casual, brought the gun back around so it was pointing directly at the thing’s chest. Now, he thought, let’s save its face.

  “I understand you’re busy and I don’t want to cause you trouble, but Rhakshasas and anything else that’s available need to see me. I have news they need.”

  “Give it to me, I’ll pass it on.”

  “I can’t. It’s information for Mr. Tap and Rhakshasas and the Archdeacons only. I mentioned I have returned from Heaven?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what do you think the information I have may be about?”

  The demon paused, and then understanding flared in its eyes and it almost leaped back from the desk, from Fool, as though burned. “The war?”

  “I can’t say,” said Fool, playing hard on its fears, “but I can tell you that what I know may change the events of the next few hours and days dramatically, and I’ll be sure to tell Rhakshasas and the others personally how helpful you’re being. Assuming you’re going to be helpful, of course.” Another twitch of the barrel, another flinch as it weighed its options, as it felt the weight of various potentialities settle on its finned and bony shoulders.

  “Rhakshasas?” it asked eventually.

  “Rhakshasas. And the others, if possible.”

  “I’ll pass the message on.”

  “Thank you. And get someone to show us the courtyard, if you please.” Fool put the gun away as the demon held a clawed finger up to a scuttling thing and, with obvious relief, sent Fool away to be someone else’s responsibility.

  —

  “Why the courtyard and not one of the offices?”

  They were sitting on one of the stone benches on the courtyard, waiting. They had been there for maybe an hour and they were being stared at. Three sides of the courtyard were walled by the Assemblies House’s windowed sides, and demon faces appeared at the windows to peer down at them every few seconds. Fool wasn’t sure about the other floors, but the ground floor was a corridor and the demons that walked it could stare at them for the length of their journeys. The fourth wall was blank brick that, if Fool’s grasp of Hell’s architecture was correct, was the rear of the garage space in which the transports were kept.

  “It’s the best place,” said Fool to Gordie after a few seconds. He was leaning forward on the bench, head down, and even to himself, his voice sounded like an old man’s.

  “We’re a talking point,” said Summer, and Fool knew she was watching the demons watching them.

  “We’ve been noticed,” he said. “We made an entrance.” Marianne was lying dead in a pool of her own blood, a dead bauta behind her, just meat abandoned on the floor.

  “Why is it the best place?” Gordie again, always searching, always wanting to know.

  “Look around you.” Even speaking seemed hard, each word aching as it emerged.

  “It’s a courtyard,” said Gordie. “Is it safer than a room inside? I don’t understand.”

  “Fool means it’s the best place because I’m here,” said the Man of Plants and Flowers, his speech an oily rasp of leaves and branches. The overgrown bushes that grew around the courtyard’s walls and in ornamental beds that had been made by lifting flags from various points around the courtyard shivered slightly as the Man arrived. Or maybe he’d been here all along and was simply showing himself now; Fool didn’t know.

  “Hello,” said Fool, still not looking up. Just in front of him one of the ornamental beds was filled with oddly colored flowers and they turned toward him; he made them out in the upper edge of his vision but did not look up at them. One of the plants stretched out from the bed and pushed itself between his feet, its single open bud a mass of fleshy petals that tilted back to face him, as though peering at him.

  “Fool,” said the plant, and the voice from it was high and lisping and strangely feminine, the petals moving to form the words, the leaves below it trembling.

  “Yes.”

  “ ‘Yes’? Is that all? You are returned from Heaven, Fool, you must have so much to tell me.”

  “No. I’ve got nothing for you. You keep your end of our agreement and help me persuade Rhakshasas and then I’ll tell you.”

  “You’ve come so far, haven’t you, my little dancing Information Man? Making deals, standing against demons, standing against angels. You worry that you’re moving in tracks left by others but you aren’t, Fool; you’re hacking your own trail through Heaven and Hell now. You’re wonderful!”

  “Am I? No. Not wonderful. I’m tired, is all. There’s no wonder left in me.”

  “Ah, but you’re grieving, aren’t you? For the lovely Marianne, left on the floor with her thoughts exposed in the meat of her brain? You should be used to death now, Fool. You’ve been in the graves of books, Fool, seen so much pain on the island, so why does this one death bother you so much? It can’t matter, not in the grander picture, can it?”

  “Fuck off,” Fool replied.

  “For pity’s sake, can’t you let him be?” asked Summer.

  Fool looked up in time to see the Man’s bodies twist, his attention shifting to Summer and then Gordie. The plants were still for a long, drawn-out moment and then there was a rustle that Fool could have sworn was surprise spread out along his branches and stems. For the first time, when he spoke, the Man seemed unsure, confused.

  “But you’re dead,” he said. “The two of you, dead. And yet, here you are, alive. How has that occurred, I wonder?”

  “You were dead and now you’re not,” said Fool.

  “Touché, Fool, touché. You didn’t tell me about them, though. You’ve been keeping things from me.”

  “Of course. You taught me well.”

  “Ha! You’re priceless, Fool, priceless! You make things so interesting! We’ll talk about this in more detail later, I hope. And now, I think we need to prepare. Who’s coming to this little friendly meeting?”

  “Rhakshasas. I hope.”

  “No one else?”

  “I asked for Rhakshasas and Mr. Tap and the other Archdeacons, but Mr. Tap and the others aren’t here, so they tell me. They’re out getting ready to fight the war, I suppose.”

  “Rhakshasas it is, then. It’s a start. Well, I’ll wait for your sign, Fool. It’s up to you now.”

  A start? Fool was about to ask the Man what he meant when another voice spoke.

  “This had better be fucking good, Fool, you little grubbing shit,” said Rhakshasas. The demon was emerging from a doorway in the corridor, pushing itself into the courtyard, its intestines wriggling as it came, surging and thinning to allow it access through the gap. The demon was wreathed in a cloud of flies, dark with them, and its face was twisted into an expression that was beyond rage or any other recognizable human emotion. Its eyes glowed a bursting yellow, the color of infection and pus, of bile and vomit. Fool stood.

  “Good? No, it’s not good, Rhakshasas, but it’s important.”

  “
How do you know what’s important, little thing? How could you have the first comprehension of what matters to Hell? Or to Heaven, for that matter? How could you know anything?”

  “I know that the war you’re about to go to is based on a lie. I know Heaven is wrong and that you’ll battle each other over a mistake.”

  This brought Rhakshasas up short, and even in this grandest, foulest demon Fool could see uncertainty take root, blossom. “A lie?”

  “A lie, or a mistake, it doesn’t matter what you call it. I told Mr. Tap but maybe he’s not passed the message on. Heaven thinks you attack it, you think Heaven attacks you, but neither of you is right. You’ve been manipulated into war, Rhakshasas, you and Heaven both.”

  Rhakshasas stepped into the courtyard fully, dripping, its flies buzzing, and seated itself on the bench opposite Fool. Even sitting down, its head was level with Fool’s. The demon turned its burning eyes to Gordie and Summer and asked, “Who the piss are these two? They’re not Hell’s, are they?”

  “They used to be. I don’t know whose they are now.”

  “Then they do not belong. Remove them, or I will.”

  “No. They’re with me.”

  “No? Who the fuck do you believe you are, Thomas Fool? You exist because I and the other Archdeacons allow you to, you and every other little piece of human scum in Hell.” Rhakshasas’s guts began to slither loose from it, heading for Summer, who was closest to it. She stepped back and the guts moved faster and Fool lifted his gun and fired.

  He didn’t hit Rhakshasas; he hit a point in front of the moving guts so that chips of stone and sparks sprang away from the impact as the bullet ricocheted up and tore through the bushes before burying itself in the wall. Rhakshasas’s guts reared back, curled, pulsing tubes of it lifting from the ground like worms.

  “You dare?” asked Rhakshasas. “You dare to attack me?”

  “No,” said Fool, “but I dare to try to save Hell from the mess it’s about to find itself in. Listen to me, Rhakshasas, listen. Please.”

  The demon considered Fool and then said, “Very well. Talk, but talk quickly and be aware that if I am not convinced when you’ve finished, I will tear you into pieces, you and your friends.”

  “That’s fine,” said Fool and started to talk.

  He told Rhakshasas everything, everything that he’d seen and heard, everything he’d done, the conclusions he’d reached. Gordie got the pincer and the scooped-out demon and the scale and the claw and the torn books out of the sack and showed them to Rhakshasas, setting them on the ground in front of it. Finally, Fool told Rhakshasas what he thought had happened, about the secret place on the island and the incursions from the island to Hell’s mainland, about the thefts of the Joyful for food, about the demons in boxes and what it all meant.

  “It’s the things from outside of everywhere,” he said finally. “It’s them, they’re doing this.”

  Rhakshasas didn’t move or speak, sitting on the bench, its eyes dimmed to a pale flicker as it thought. Fool, exhausted, sat back as Gordie gathered the things from the ground and placed them back in the crude bag. There was just the Man now, his contribution to the story; then it would be over. Fool nodded at the bushes and then sat back, waiting.

  “It’s true,” said the plants, rising up in front of Rhakshasas. “I never died. I’ve been here all along. Allow me to be the thing that confirms Fool’s story, Rhakshasas. Something has used Hell’s empty spaces to plan this attack, and it isn’t Heaven. The island exists and the graves Fool saw have all been emptied.”

  There. It was done. They’d said all they could now, and showed everything they had. Either they’d be believed or they wouldn’t, either the war would be averted or it wouldn’t.

  Either the things from outside would win or they’d be beaten.

  As he sat waiting for Rhakshasas to respond, Fool thought about everything. Setting it out for the demon had churned it up in his mind, thrown the pieces into the air, and now they were drifting down, settling into new patterns, and something started to feel wrong, started to nag at him like an aching tooth that needed probing with a tongue to find the gap, find the rottenness. What was it?

  It didn’t fit.

  Fool’s head was suddenly filled with questions, all clamoring for his attention at once, yammering and squawking and flapping their panic at him. He groaned and placed his hands to his temples, pressing, trying to reduce the noise in his brain, trying to see it one piece at a time.

  If the things were from outside, were so other, why did they need the Joyful to feed on?

  If they used the boats to come from the island, why the filled-in tunnels in Hell’s deserted spots? Why use boats at all if they had tunnels?

  “Fool,” said Gordie.

  “Not now,” said Fool, thinking furiously.

  “Now,” said Gordie insistently, “listen. Look. This isn’t a pincer.”

  “What?”

  Gordie held it out in front of him. “Pincers are hollow when they’re not attached to the living creature, they’re made of shell with meat and veins and blood inside them. This is solid. It’s like a carving of a pincer.”

  How did the Man know about the graves and the island? How did he know how Marianne’s body had been left?

  Gordie reached into the bag and took out the scale and began to bend it; it snapped, breaking into two pieces. “I’ve realized it, the thing that’s wrong. This isn’t a real scale, like the pincer isn’t a real pincer; real scales are flexible,” he said urgently.

  Orobas. The thing that had pushed itself through the dirt at them on the island, the blind thing, was the demon Orobas. It was an Information Man, one of Fool’s troops.

  The demons in the crates, they weren’t being fed on, they were being used.

  The Man knew because he’d seen them. Because he’d been there.

  “Fool, these are imitations,” said Gordie.

  “It’s you,” whispered Fool, turning to look at the Man, the shape of him in the bushes.

  “Of course it is,” said the Man and tore Rhakshasas in half.

  The ground under the demon churned as the plants there burst violently up and plunged into its flesh. Stems grew from Rhakshasas’s eyes and mouth and pulled away from each other, splitting its head apart with a wet, sloppy noise. In the now-exposed flesh of the neck, tendrils of vine turned and twisted, slicing through the meat. More, thicker stems pushed out of the demon’s belly and cracked its ribs as they forced their way out from between its bones, the pop of them breaking as wet as the sound of its head splitting had been. Fool jumped back as a spray of Rhakshasas’s blood arced through the air and only just managed to avoid being caught in it.

  Summer screamed and a part of the Man lashed out and wrapped around her neck, choking her to silence. Gordie dropped the two parts of the scale and tried to simultaneously pick up his window frame club and go to Summer, but a thick branch whipped around and caught him across the forehead so hard that it broke, a section of it falling at Fool’s feet and Gordie spinning back across the courtyard and slamming into the wall, his club flying into the bushes and lost from view. His head hit the bottom edge of a windowpane and it cracked, the crack starring through the glass as Gordie slid down, unconscious.

  Rhakshasas’s guts reacted fast, flinging themselves away from the attack and landing on the ground in a greasy slither. They moved rapidly across the courtyard but were not fast enough; as they went over one of the beds, shoots exploded from the earth and tore into them, the tubes punctured and ripped. Brown liquid and semi-digested chunks of something unidentifiable spilled from the intestines as more growths burst through them, lifting them from the ground so that they hung, suspended and oozing, two or three feet above the earth. Rhakshasas’s flies abandoned the body, but again the Man was too quick; hundreds of stems and branches rose from the bushes around the courtyard to form a thick, impenetrable ceiling, each lined with buds shaped like mouths that opened and snapped closed rapidly, eating the insects.r />
  Rhakshasas’s now-naked body slumped, one part falling from the bench and the other tilting back and flopping loosely. Thick ichor spattered to the ground below, a rainbow pool of red and yellow and green that stank and that almost immediately congealed into a thick scum.

  The courtyard was dark, the only light in it that which came in from the windows of Assemblies House, through which demons looked on as they continued to scurry and dart. None reacted to the scene below them, because this was Hell and who was to say what was normal and what was wrong here?

  “Now, Fool,” said the Man. “Shall we talk?”

  29

  “It was you,” said Fool again, not asking, watching blue flowers sprout in the earth around his feet.

  “Oh, Fool, of course it was. I spent my death exploring and I found that I can tunnel, Fool, when left alone I can build the most beautiful tunnels between all the worlds, can go anywhere! I’m not angel or demon, Fool, nor human anymore, and I’m not tethered to any world. I’m strongest in Hell, of course, but I can reach everywhere, Fool, everywhere! So I thought about what I wanted, and what I would have to do to get it, and then I started.

  “I lit my fires to cause worry, and I slaughtered to do the same thing, to make the Bureaucracy feel the sting of uncertainty, I took the Joyful from Heaven and I imprisoned them in Hell. I took demons and nameless angels and I unearthed the old books and I burned them. I did it all. Everything to this point and beyond, me, just me. I want this war, Fool. I want it to rage and howl and I want the dead to pile up in drifts, and I will make it happen, Information Man. I will make it explode.

  “But you were always a danger, Fool, always the thing that might right the balances I was trying so hard to upset. You being sent to Heaven was a godsend, if you’ll pardon the pun, because it focused angelic eyes on the presence of Hell and made them more prepared to see the blasphemies being committed, but you might also have shown them that it wasn’t Hell committing them. You’re better than you realize, Fool, more aware than you give yourself credit for, so I kept as good a track of you as I could and then I distracted you by letting you think that the things from outside were breaking through and I set you chasing your tail.”