The Devil's Evidence

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  “There are no things from outside?”

  “I’m sure there are, Fool. You told me you’d seen them the first time we spoke with you in Heaven, after all, but inside the beautiful kingdom of Heaven or this foul place? No. They remain where they have always been, outside. I just pushed you in the direction of thinking they weren’t. You gave me the idea, Fool, gave me the means to so easily fool you, little Fool. A pincer here, a claw there, a scale in a bed. Simple.

  “And my demons, those sad things I turned into puppets, they helped, too. I never got their movement right but they gave me ears and eyes and fingers and teeth in Heaven and in Hell, in the places I couldn’t reach, and you thought their movement was something wrong, didn’t you? And you made up your own stories, gave it details I could never hope for. You’ve been so helpful, Fool!”

  Helpful Fool, little helpful betrayed Fool. “And you killed Marianne?”

  “I did. I wish I could tell you I felt some sorrow, Fool, but I don’t. She was a useful way of keeping you off balance, so I killed her when I knew you were back in Hell. I smelled you through that demon, Fool, and decided to make sure you were distracted. You introduced us, Fool, you let me see her and see how much you liked her, and I used that information at the point where it was most useful, where you presented the most danger, where if you had been thinking clearly you might have still got ahead of me and turned this all around. I always said, Fool. I always said that information gives power, and you’ve started to learn it, haven’t you, in the secrets you kept from me in Heaven, but you aren’t a good enough liar. I could always tell there were gaps, tell the untruths. I can always judge where you are on the journey, Fool, better than you can yourself, and I watched as you wandered the trail I’d laid for you and I knew you’d try, you’d try so hard, but that ultimately it would be to no avail.

  “It’s too late. This day is mine, Fool.”

  “Why? Why do you want this war?”

  “Why?” replied the Man. “Why not? Because I can have it, Fool, just because I can and because I want. Because I want to see Heaven and Hell burned to the earth and see the burned earth salted with the bodies of their dead.”

  “But why?”

  “Why anything? You tell me, Fool.”

  “Because you want to take over.” It seemed so obvious now that he said it, the part he’d been right about all along, not about the things from the places outside but the Man all along, a manipulation within the wheels of other manipulations, a third element that he had missed, been tricked into missing.

  “Of course I do, and what better way than to have Heaven and Hell war with each other?”

  “And you’ll step in at the end, when things are at their most awful, and you’ll be unstoppable,” said Gordie, sitting up. His face was a mask of blood, his forehead torn open by a gash that stretched from temple to temple. A flap of skin hung down and covered one eye, and broken glass glittered in the wound.

  “You’ve trained them well, Fool; they’re almost as observant and smart as you are, even the ones that have been dead,” said the Man and sent a branch, almost casually, to wrap around Gordie’s neck. It tightened and he, like Summer, began to choke, twin sets of breathing on either side of Fool that whistled and caught.

  “So, Fool, the question is, what now? The war is almost begun and I am ready to ascend, but what do I do with you?”

  “Let me go. Let us go?”

  “I think not,” said the Man. “You’re still dangerous. Until the war is in full spate you might still, by some miracle, stop it. There are Archdeacons other than Rhakshasas who might be persuaded to listen.” As he spoke, the Man sent tendrils out from his base and snared the pincer and claw and pieces of scale, dragging them back into the denseness of his growths. The demon and torn books he left.

  “And now you don’t have those. I feel better this way,” he said.

  “You can have my feather,” said Fool, removing the angel’s feather from his pocket and holding it out.

  “Fool, if I wanted your feather, I’d have taken it. Besides, I have a whole angel I can take feathers from.”

  “You tore her wings off,” said Fool. “She hasn’t any feathers left.”

  “There are more angels coming, Fool, a whole Heaven’s worth of angels, and they all have feathers. It’s over. It has been a genuine pleasure, but now I have other things to attend to.”

  Fool thought, trying to force his brain to speed up, to fucking concentrate, but it was so hard, too hard to push through. Nearly everything he’d thought was true was a lie, and again he’d been manipulated and played, sent like a spinning top into the worlds about him and snapped back at the twitch of a cord. What did the Man want? Power? Control? No, not just that, he wanted to be the thing at the tip of the hierarchy, that everyone and everything else looked up to and relied on. Everything the Man had ever done or been, Fool saw, had been building to this point, the point where he could take over.

  And he’d helped, keeping Heaven and Hell focused on him as the Man crawled around in the background, setting things into play that were now almost beyond stopping.

  “We’re done now, Fool. This is my time and I intend to savor it,” said the Man. The limbs of plant began to tighten around Gordie’s and Summer’s necks, lifting them up onto their toes and then farther so that they were dangling, suffocating.

  In the distance, Fool heard horns, clear and sharp.

  The Man relaxed some of his limbs and the ceiling above them fell away, revealing the sky again. The vine holding Gordie, which had reached down from the ceiling to grasp him, relaxed but did not let go, and he slumped back to a seated position by the wall, whooping, his face blue under its mask of drying blood.

  Tiny black spots were swarming across the underside of the clouds, and Fool at first thought it was flies from Rhakshasas that the Man had missed, that were making their escape, but then he realized with a sudden perspective shift that these were far away, high above them. The Man’s parts all twisted to see, eyes that didn’t exist turning toward the sky and watching and mouths made of buds and stems opening as the black spots grew larger. “It begins,” he said, his voice quiet, anticipatory.

  This was Fool’s only chance.

  The courtyard was large, and although there were plenty of flowers and bushes for the Man to occupy around the edges and in the spaces left by the lifted flags, there were still large open areas that he could try to move through. Fool knelt and swiftly grasped a mass of the ragged paper from the bag in one hand and the broken part of the branch used to strike Gordie in the other. Moving swiftly, he wiped the books into the remains of Rhakshasas, jamming them hard into the exposed innards of the demon, and then slapped them onto the end of the stick, working them around the wood so that the tip was covered in them. Rhakshasas’s fluids burned Fool’s skin and he wiped them on his jacket and then all he could do was wait, wait and hope.

  “What are you doing?” The Man, attention down again, peering at Fool.

  “Fuck you,” said Fool, brave Fool, wishing Fool, and then the books, the holy texts, reacted to Rhakshasas’s drying and unclean fluids and burst into flame. The end of the branch caught alight and Fool thrust it at the nearest mass of the Man. He reacted immediately, the branches coiling away, and Fool stepped forward, pressing his advantage, thrusting the flames into the greenery. It caught in a mass of sparks and thick smoke, the burning plants whipping back and forth in an approximation of pain. A vine lashed away from the wall and struck at Fool, who jumped back, stumbling and ducking at the same time, just avoiding being hit. The Man roared, but his attention was now on the fires that had caught within him and he lost his grip on Summer, the wooden noose loosening and letting her tumble out of its grasp.

  She fell and Fool managed somehow to hold her in his free arm, backing away, still holding the torch in front of him. Something whipped toward him and he ducked, the movement awkward with an unconscious woman in his arms, waving the burning branch low in a circle around him. T
here was a path back toward Gordie and the door and he started to move along it, half dragging, half carrying Summer. She moaned dully and spat, the drool thick, landing on his shoulder and rolling slowly down his arm.

  “Fool, this is pointless,” said the Man. A thick branch speared forward, missing Fool’s head only because he saw it coming and dodged at the last second, shoving the torch at it and making it retreat in wisps of smoke and the smell of burning bark.

  “Really, Fool? You think I can be killed by fire?”

  “No, but I think you can be hurt,” said Fool and again jammed the torch into the nearest mass of greenery, occupying one of the missing flagstone beds. The flames snatched at the plants there immediately and they writhed, and they screamed, a high-pitched agony that sounded like steam escaping from a narrow spout. The Man threw another spear of wood forward and it slammed into Fool’s side, skewering him, and he felt it punch out of his back. He screamed and slammed the torch against the wood, which lashed back out of him in a spray of blood.

  Fool dropped to one knee, feeling his foot bang against Gordie behind him, losing his grip on Summer and trying to hold the torch up. She moaned again and rolled onto her knees. A writhing mass of plants came at her side, and Fool leaned over her and thrust the torch at them, singeing the closest few, making them retreat. The move sent a spike of pain through his stomach, less abrupt than the splitting of the tattoos, deeper, a tearing and rolling pain that branched out in waves.

  Fool clambered to his feet as another spike burst from the mass, not a javelin of wood thrown, he saw, but a branch forced to grow grotesquely fast, its tip bulging and expanding toward him. He stepped out of its path as another came at him from the side, puncturing his wrist and forcing its way between the bones of his forearm. He gasped and staggered sideways as it yanked itself out. He kept hold of the torch, barely, and swung it, forcing the Man back. He had to move, and move now; the torch was already burning down, the wood little more than a charred remnant.

  The Man was all around him now, every part of him moving, approaching, bursting from the beds and surging from the walls. Fool stepped over Gordie, shouting, “Get up!” Gordie grunted and started to rise, and a part of the Man, a curling scythe of greenery, burst out of the bushes. It laced through the air with a noise like tearing silk, heading for Gordie’s neck. Fool managed to get the torch in its way and it tangled around the wooden stave, snapping it, the flaming tip falling to the ground and rolling to the gutter, harmlessly, in the center of a stone flag.

  Gordie grabbed Summer by the shoulder as Fool drew his gun, although how he’d shoot plants he did not know. They backed toward the door as the Man roared and tried to follow, still burning, the flames catching and leaping from part to part of him. Blue flowers in the nearest bed began to slither over the stone toward them, the flag next to the bed bucking up as their roots swelled, grew, and forced the flowers on. As they came close they rose up and spat, red globules spraying them. Where they hit Fool’s exposed skin, the globules burned.

  The attack was unnervingly silent, the only noise their own breathing and the rustle of leaf and root and stem as they moved.

  Fool stamped on the nearest plant head, the fleshy bulb bursting in a mass of thick red slime under his heel. Stamping caused another wave of pain to ripple across Fool’s midriff, the upper edges of it meeting the pain flowing back along his arm, and he grimaced and gritted his teeth. He loosed a single shot into the Man, the noise terribly loud and echoing, and then his back hit something.

  Fool thought it was the Man at first, but it gave against him and he realized it was the door back into the corridor. He pushed harder, still moving backward, calling Gordie and Summer. His heel caught against the bottom of the doorway and he fell, crashing across the space and hitting the far wall hard. He dropped his gun, scrabbled for it feeling woozy and sick, as Gordie appeared in the doorway, a patch of dark shadow against the sky beyond. He was still pulling on Summer’s shoulder, dragging at her.

  Demons, little ones carrying the administration of the war, skittered around Fool and studiously ignored what was happening as he pulled himself around and up, wincing again as the pain in his arms and stomach flared, and then Gordie was in the corridor and Summer was behind him. Plants surged up to the edge of the doorway, tendrils slashing through the air into the corridor, their reach falling short of Gordie and Summer. Another red flower appeared and spat as the Man roared Fool’s name, a long and furious echo of sound. Fool fired past Gordie and Summer into the Man, not because it would achieve anything but because he was angry, he was fucking livid at the pain and the manipulation and the deaths, and then another of those wooden stems, fat and jagged, burst from the mass in the doorway and punched into Summer’s back and tore out between her breasts and pinned her to the far wall of the corridor.

  There was a pause that lasted a sliver of a heartbeat and forever and then Gordie shrieked, not just a scream but a scream torn raw and inside out, and grabbed at the part of the Man that had transfixed Summer. He pulled and his hands slipped in her blood and he cried out again and pulled again and this time the Man drew back, roaring again. Fool grabbed at Gordie and yanked him down as the spike burst out of the mass in the courtyard again, missing Gordie by inches and slapping back when it failed to find its target.

  Summer collapsed to the floor, her eyes rolling back in her head to white before closing, and a gout of blood sprayed from the ragged tear in her chest. She hit the corridor’s tiled floor with a wet thud, and a pool of dark blood immediately began to spread out from her, so much blood, too much. Gordie scrambled over to her as the Man attacked a third time, and this time the spike impaled a little demon that was too inquisitive and that had come too close, lifting it as it slammed through it in a spray of dark gray fluid. The Man roared again and started whipping the spike back and forth, trying to dislodge the demon as Fool pulled Gordie away. Summer’s hand came up and held Fool’s wrist for a second and then fell away, leaving a last print of her blood on his skin.

  “Come on,” he gasped. “Come on, Gordie.”

  “Fool, no, she could be alive!”

  “She’s dead, Gordie,” said Fool, still watching as the blood pool expanded, Summer and Marianne both left lying in puddles of their own wet insides, both invaded by the Man. Both dead. He pulled on Gordie again, hating it, hating to separate them but knowing that the Man wouldn’t stop. As if to prove him right, the Man shook the dead demon off and sent another spear toward them. It fell short, the two of them finally out of his range, but stabbed into Summer’s neck, jerking her head and snapping her eyes open in a look of startled wakefulness. Instead of withdrawing the spike, the Man curled it around like a hook and began to drag Summer’s body back toward the courtyard.

  Gordie, seeing her begin to move toward the doorway, howled and tried to go after her but Fool pulled him back again, arm screaming its own lament now, blood dripping from the hole above his wrist. He pulled a last time and the two of them fell back, farther away from the door and the Man, and watched as Summer slipped into the roiling mass of plants. The last they saw of her was her legs and then she was gone.

  There was a moment of silence as the few demons in the corridor skittered away and then the Man let his plants fall back, retreating into the soil and leaving torn pieces of Summer scattered in a bloody swathe behind him.

  Gordie cried out and tried to scramble toward her again.

  “No,” Fool said, unable to shout, voice on the crumbling edge of tears, still holding his friend but with no strength. “No, Gordie, it’s what he wants, to get us back into his range. Gordie, we have to let her go.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can. You have to. We will have revenge for her, but not now. Not here. I have a plan, a thing that might work. We can still stop this. Please, help me.”

  “How?”

  Fool stood. “I need a room with a tube, and I need a canister and paper and thread,” he said. “I need to summon the Archdeacons.”<
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  Fool staggered along the corridor, opening doors at random, until he found one that contained a desk and a chair and a pneumatic tube in the corner, this one dropping into the floor rather than rising into the ceiling. There was a pile of canisters on the desk and he took one, unscrewing its lid and emptying out the message it contained.

  “I need paper,” he said. Gordie, who had followed him into the room in a kind of hopeless shuffle, ignored him and sat in the room’s chair.

  “Gordie, help!” Fool said, insistent. “Mourn her after. We’ll mourn her and Marianne together, but now, for fuck’s sake, help. I need paper and ink.”

  Gordie looked at him dully and then got up and began to empty the other canisters, tipping out the messages they contained until he found one that was short, holding it out wordlessly. Fool, meanwhile, was rooting through the desk drawers until he found a bottle of ink. Removing the feather from his pocket, he opened the bottle and dipped the feather’s end in the liquid it contained.

  Taking the paper from Gordie, Fool scribbled out the message written upon it and then wrote his own message there. His writing was untidy and large, wavering, but he didn’t care. As long as it could be read.

  Come to the flame garden now

  Message complete, he wafted the paper in the air to dry the ink and then rolled it and inserted it back into the canister. He couldn’t tighten it because of his arm, so Gordie took it from him and finished sealing it.

  “Thank you,” said Fool and then knelt in front of Gordie. The man’s white shirt was filthy, but some cleaner threads hung from the seam up the side, and he took one of these and pulled on it, dragging loose a long white cotton string. This he wrapped around the canister and tied with a clumsy knot and then carried the canister to the tube. Dropping it in, he said, “This goes to all the Archdeacons. All of them.”

  The tube sucked the canister away and it was gone.