The Devil's Evidence (13 page)

“I'm not sure I understand,” said Fool.

“No,” replied Mayall, leaping and turning with another roar of that manic laughter, “you don't, because what I've told you isn't true. It's maybe half true, or a quarter, or a fraction or even mostly true, but it's not the actual truth. Nothing in Heaven is
actually
true.”

“ ‘Actually'?” Mayall's emphasis was odd, and Fool thought it was deliberate, a test to see if he was listening properly.

“Every person here has a truth that they can see but no one else can. Even the angels, Benjamin and Israfil and all the others, only see the Heaven they believe should exist, the Heaven they have walked every day of their existence. They see the everyday, Fool, but none of them sees things
actually,
none of them sees truthfully, no one sees the
actual
truth of things. Israfil and Benjamin and all their angelic kin cannot see that Heaven has a need for you, cannot accept that Heaven has imperfections, that things are going wrong, that there are mysteries! The Malakim see a need for you because their view has the breadth of vision that most angels do not possess, but even they cannot see the danger of letting you loose in Heaven because they see this as a mere clerical exercise. There's the everyday, and then there's the actual.”

“I'm a danger?”

“Of course. You aren't fettered by the shackles Israfil and the others wear, so you have no reason to avoid seeing the actual Heaven around us.”

“But if I'm a danger, why ask for me? Why bring me here?”

They had reached the staircase but they didn't start up it. “Why?” repeated Mayall, his voice quiet now, almost reflective. He reached out and touched Fool's cheek, just a brush of his fingertips, gentle. “Why? Because we need you, Fool, even if we don't wish to admit it. We need you.”

Mayall shook himself suddenly, as though shaking off a mood, and started to dance again, twirling on the spot and making little gavotte steps up and then back down the first few risers. His shirttails came free from his pants and flapped, revealing a belly that was smooth and hairless but stretched by a small paunch. After several increasingly fast ascents and descents, each time getting farther up the staircase before coming back down, Mayall practically bounced up to just past halfway but turned too fast and slipped, falling and rolling down the steps toward Fool. His wings wrapped around him, protecting his head and upper body as he fell, but when he reached the bottom of the staircase they whipped open to reveal that the angel was still grinning, still exposing teeth that were huge and white and even.

“Ta-daaaaa!” Mayall said loudly, rolling and somehow coming up onto one knee and throwing his arms wide in a sweeping, grandiloquent gesture. Fool took a step back.

“Why ask for you? Haven't you realized? Because I
like
the risk you pose, Fool. I
like
the danger you represent. I
like
the chaos of you, Fool, and I like what you'll do when you see what you're supposed to see.”

“Supposed to see? What am I supposed to be seeing?”

“The truth,” said Mayall. He strode purposefully to the nearest locker and removed three books from it, began juggling them, head back as he flung them faster and faster through the air. Once he had them moving in a swift, easy arc above him, he started to remove more books from the locker, snatching them with sharp, darting gestures and adding them to the juggle. Four books, five, six, eight, now ten and still he added, panting and laughing, starting to dance as he threw, legs kicking out in a rhythm that counterpointed the books' movement. Finally, one of the books went too high and hit a hanging light, setting it swinging, then fell back and hit Mayall on the forehead. The angel made a show of shrieking and collapsing, rolling exaggeratedly on the floor as the books fell around him, and then suddenly springing up again with a roar of laughter. He landed and dropped to one knee again, making the same open-armed gesture and shouting “Ta-DAAAAAA!” louder and longer than before.

“What truth?” Fool asked, trying to ignore the angel's antics, wondering if it was somehow mad, an insane thing.

“Any truth you care to find,” said Mayall. “Any truth that Benjamin or Israfil or any of the others cannot or will not see.”

“ ‘Any of the others'?” repeated Fool. “You aren't one of them?”

“Of course not,” said Mayall, his tone indignant. “Haven't they told you? Haven't you guessed? I'm Mayall, and I am the only clown angel, the one and only. I am the thing that dances as the worlds collapse. I am the thing that throws the worlds up to see where they fall. I am the thing that finds the joke in the hurt and the hurt in the joke. I am the only one of the Host prepared to see the truth, the whole truth, the whole ugly and breaking truth.”

“Then why do you need me? If you can see the truth?”

“Because no one listens to clowns, Fool,” said Mayall, finally stilling, looking at Fool again. He smiled, a sad little moue that pulled at the corners of his mouth and tugged at the tips of his eyes. “Clowns are ever the most truthful and honest but the most ignored of all creatures, even angelic ones. We fall and get hit, we laugh and point, we show where the absurdities and the truths are but are dismissed as fools. Fools, Fool, we're all fools but you more so than most!” Mayall leaped forward and into the air, wings flapping. One wingtip clipped a cupboard and it sent the angel yawing, crashing over, closely followed by the cupboard, which split open and spilled hundreds of old notebooks across the floor. Prone, wings splayed across the corridor, the angel said, “I am the only angel of accidental destruction, Fool, I am the slip and trip, the drop and crash, the mistake and the groan, and they prefer me to stay in here for fear I might cause damage out there, but I see things, Fool, I see
everything
.”

“How?”

“That's the wrong question, Fool,” said Mayall, climbing to his feet, and in standing he underwent another of those dizzying shifts, became serious, and when he spoke his voice was quiet and slow and the expression on his face was calm. He looked into the nearest room, seemed to be concentrating on something, and then said, “You have to go, there's something I have seen that you need to see also. Word has been sent and Benjamin has gone on ahead. Israfil is waiting outside to take you. Quickly, Fool, quickly now, think about the very wrongest question you could ask, and then ask the very rightest one.”

Fool thought for a minute, sure that asking Mayall
how
he saw things wasn't wrong at all but playing along because he had little choice, and then said, “All right, if not how then what.
What
do you see?”

“Better, Fool, so much better. I knew you were the right one to bring,” said Mayall, clapping again, feet already beginning to shuffle into another dance. “What do I see, Fool? I see stains, Fool, I see corruptions. You found the blue flowers? They're the blooms of corruption, growing here, growing in Heaven, where such things should be impossible, little buds of foulness growing in the purest earth there is. Heaven is being invaded, Fool, just skirmishes on the borders so far, but it will get worse, so much worse, and I see it happening now and I see it happening in the future but I cannot see
who,
Fool, I cannot see the
who
of it. Make no mistake, though, Fool, be clear; in the most perfect place of all, I can see the one thing that should not exist.

“I see imperfection.”

Israfil was, as promised, waiting for Fool outside Mayall's house by a small, gleaming transport.

They journeyed in silence, Israfil looking out of the small vehicle's window at the landscape beyond the glass and Fool thinking about Mayall. Being in the angel's presence had made him feel dizzy, as though his cycle of frenzy and seriousness was somehow contagious, a hysterical whirl communicated by proximity and only now slowly fading. Fool found that he was tired, not physically but mentally, his thoughts slipping and unable to stay on one thing, refusing to focus. He felt drained, weary inside himself in a way he'd never felt before.
Has Mayall fed off me somehow?
he wondered.
Without touching me, without me realizing? Yes. Yes, I think he has.

Fool sat back in the seat and let the rhythm of the road, seeping up through the vehicle's wheels, lull him into something that wasn't a sleep but wasn't wakefulness either, something in between where his body felt heavy and colors splashed across the inside of his closed eyes in sinuous waves. His limbs felt stiff, leaden, and his head bobbed down and lolled to the side despite his efforts to keep it up.
What's wrong with me?
he thought.
What's the angel done?
He thought of the sleeping humans and wondered if he was becoming like them, forced his eyes open and tried to focus on the landscape passing outside the window.

Instead of land, Fool saw only mist that held, in its depth, dark shadows that might have been hills and fields that might instead have been forests and buildings. Was this the truth, hidden behind the façade?

Was this Heaven?

Fool's eyes dropped closed again despite his struggles to keep them open; they felt like rough balls of lead in his head, his eyelids weighted blinds that pulled ever downward. He dozed, dreaming of carousel horses ridden by grinning, laughing angels, and was woken only by the change of rhythm as the transport came to a halt.

Their journey ended at the edge of a beach, where the transport had pulled off the road and onto a long stretch of coarse sand fringed by dunes and scattered with patches of sea grass. It took Fool a moment to pull himself back from the place he had collapsed to, dragging himself out of the fairground in his dreams and back into the transport, back to what Mayall had called “the everyday,” and even then he felt dislocated and slow. When he moved, it was draggy and clumsy, his fingers feeling thick and senseless. It took him three tries to open the vehicle's door, and when he climbed out he had to hold the top of the door to steady himself.

“Are you unwell?” asked Benjamin from ahead of them, where he waited with the usual smile on his face, now tempered by a moue of concern.

“Mayall,” said Israfil simply, emerging from the transport behind Fool.

“Ah, of course,” said Benjamin, understanding flitting across his face. “I should have realized. You spent time with the capering one, and now you feel the weight of your visit with him?”

Fool realized that the question was being addressed to him, brought his eyes around and tried to focus on the angel. “Yes,” he said, and Heaven blurred and then came back into sharpness before him. He felt himself grow heavier, fell to his knees and then onto all fours. The thought that Benjamin didn't like Mayall, didn't like that Fool had been invited to see the clown angel, flashed briefly across his mind and was then gone, replaced by a wave of tiredness and the image of books being juggled, circling higher and higher above him while something vast and grinning danced just out of reach. Was he going insane?

Was he dying?

“It'll be fine, Thomas Fool,” Benjamin said, but it didn't feel fine, not at all. Fool slumped, the strength gone from his arms and legs completely now, leaving him prostrate on the beach. He inhaled grains of sand and the smell of brine, coughed but couldn't seem to clear his throat of the obstruction.
I'm dying,
he thought,
dying in Heaven and not in Hell,
and found he was strangely disappointed by the realization.
Marianne,
he thought.
Marianne, be safe,
and then Israfil yanked him up and poured a cupped handful of seawater on his face.

It was cold, bitterly cold, and it snapped through the feelings of lethargy like a falling icicle. Fool gasped, his throat shockingly, suddenly open and his lungs remembering how to breathe. Some of the liquid went into his mouth and he tasted the rich, uneven tang of salt. Blinking, he focused his eyes on the burning angel that held him. Her face was expressionless behind the caul of flames, and when she saw that he was alert again, she let him go.

“Pull yourself back together, Information Man,” Israfil said. “There's a task that needs your attention.”

Fool stood, unsteady but feeling stronger, more awake. He saw Israfil's disdainful look and said, “Mayall said there was something I should see,” emphasizing the angel's name, wearing it like armor. “Perhaps you can take me to it?”

Whereas the first body had, possibly, fallen from the carousel horse and snapped its neck when it hit the floor, this one was floating facedown in the water several feet out from the shore. It bobbed with the waves, rising up as they crested and then dropping into the troughs as the ocean washed over it. Fool waded out and grasped this body and rolled it, the body's shoulder breaking the water like the fin of some undersea creature before the corpse settled to float on its back.

It was a woman, her hair drifting in the water and framing her pale, bloating face. Her eyes were open, the sclera bloodshot, the pupils huge. Fool pulled her toward the shore, watched by Benjamin and Israfil, both surrounded by the usual crowd of swaying, slowly moving sleepers. An unnamed angel, another one of the caretakers Fool assumed, was huddled into itself and standing farther back from the shore, looking on. For the first time since his arrival, he saw an expression on an angelic face that was less than happy. This angel was worried.

“Another accident?” he asked as he brought the woman's body up onto the sand and laid her carefully down. Water spilled from the dead woman's mouth, foamy and blood-streaked, and her robes clung to her body. She was older, her stomach and thighs fat, wobbling as Fool moved her. He pulled at the material, trying to lift it from her flesh and give her some dignity, but as soon as he let it go it fell back and molded again to her shape, exposing her.

“What else?” asked Israfil. “She was not being watched carefully enough and she slipped under the water.”

“Let me ask you,” said Fool, remembering what Mayall had said. “In all your time in Heaven, both of you, how many accidents like this have there been?”

“None,” said Benjamin. “Heaven is perfect.”

“And yet here we are. Two accidents, two imperfections, in two days.” No, more, he realized; hadn't the Malakim said he'd been requested specifically, Mayall had told the Malakim that he, Fool, was needed, meaning that there must have been at least one earlier incident, an earlier mystery, an earlier truth to be uncovered. A death? More than one?

How many?

“I repeat, these are clearly accidents. If they have happened, then they have happened for a reason. They are part of the Plan,” said Israfil, and Fool heard the capital letter that “Plan” began with in Israfil's voice in the way she emphasized its plosive opening. A wave washed up past her, covering her feet, and Fool was fascinated by the way she still burned even underwater, the flames orange and distorted through the liquid. The sea steamed slightly where the water touched her.

“What if they aren't?”

“They are, and to question further is to question the perfection of Heaven,” she replied, “and you cannot. The only imperfect thing here is you, and your degraded colleagues, those things of worm and rottenness. If there is foulness here, you have brought it, you
are
it, and it will leave with you. Out here, there is only that which is supposed to be, which is designed by God.”

It's hopeless,
he thought.
Mayall's right, they can't see it, can't or won't allow themselves to.
Instead of replying, Fool moved away from the body, going first to the huddled angel. “What about you? Did you see anything?”

“No, sir,” it said.

Sir?

“Nothing?”

“No, sir, I was tending my flock as always and when I came to tend here, I found her like this.”

“How big is your flock? I mean, how long were you away from the people here, from her?”

“From here to away,” said the angel, waving one perfect hand along the beach in the direction that led away from the cliffs.

“Did you feed?” asked Benjamin. “Were you feeding?”

The angel looked down. “Yes.”

There was a moment then, a tiny space in which it felt to Fool like Heaven paused, that everything froze, and then the angel stood straight, nodded at Benjamin and Israfil, lowered its head so that its chin was resting on its chest, and broke to pieces.

Cracks appeared across its face and hands, light spilling from them, and then light was swelling under robes that were billowing out and a great halo of illumination surrounded the angel. It brightened, intensified to a violent glare, and then a sharp zephyr of dust that burned with yellow flames rose from where the angel had been standing, and it was gone.

“Where is he?” Fool asked, knowing the answer.

“He was negligent,” said Israfil. “And negligence has to be punished. Feeding is permitted only when Heaven's lives are secure.”

“You said it was part of the Plan,” replied Fool. “It was punished for being a part of the Plan?”

“We have our rules, and we adhere to them. That, too, is part of the Plan.”

“Rules,” said Fool. “Of course. There are always rules, aren't there? I hadn't finished talking to him; he might still have had something to say that would have been useful.”

“No,” said Israfil. “There is nothing here of use to you. You are a human, a damned human, and there is nothing for you to hear and nothing useful you can tell us.”

“Really? That's not what the fucking Malakim think, nor Mayall,” snapped Fool, irritation bubbling through for a moment.

“You will keep a civil tongue in your head,” said Israfil, and her flames brightened for a second before flickering back to their usual hue.

Fool ignored Israfil's comment, instead turning where he stood and looking around,
really
looking. The sound of the sea washing in and out was a low susurrus like the sleeping breath of some great creature, oddly calming. He tried to clear his mind, remove the irritation he felt toward Benjamin and Israfil and toward their insistence that the two deaths were accidents, remove his own insistence that these were not accidents, remove the memories of pain that still crawled over his skin and the tiredness following the visit to Mayall, remove everything but the scene before him. What could he see?
Really
see? What was the scene telling him?

There were no other bodies, but there were gaps on the beach where people had been standing.

Fool could tell where people had been because there were indentations in the sand, sometimes surrounded by arcs dug into furrows.
They stood, and sometimes they turned around,
he thought, looking at the massed crowd. Yes, there; someone turning on the spot, head tilted back to the sun, eyes still closed.
The Joyful, I once called them, but they don't look Joyful, they look asleep. They look fucking half
dead
!

He walked rapidly around in an expanding spiral, weaving between what he now knew he would always consider the Joyful, counting. Nine spaces, nine gaps, nine pieces of churned sand, the beach's dark and wet underbelly exposed.

Nine missing people?

Nine missing, and one dead.

Each space in the crowd was connected by a set of trails in the sand. The trails all led in one direction, closing in on each other, so that by the time Fool was fifty yards from where the gaps were there was a single thick and tangled track. He crouched by it, looking for anything in the mess of sand and wetness that he could use. Was that something? A partial print?

Whatever had left the print had claws that had dug into the sand; the rear of the indentation had collapsed, the sand there too dry to hold its shape. Slightly farther on was something that looked like a wheel print, the thickness uneven, the line of it not straight, a continuous furrow through the grains. The track went on for around six feet through a wetter part of the beach, and in the deepest parts of the furrow were occasional more delicate imprints, distorted hexagons and pentagons. Scales?

Claws? And scales? The longer print, was it some kind of tentacle? It was too consistent, unbroken, to be feet, so something like a snake?

What the fuck was going on here?

Fool followed the trail farther, then turned back. The gaps in the ranks of the Joyful occurred at the edge of the huge crowd of them, in the first people you'd meet if you were walking along the beach from the cliffs. He looked down at the trail again, and then called Israfil and Benjamin to come to him.

When they arrived next to him, Fool told them to stand still and went to look at the tracks they had just left. Both left essentially human footprints, although Israfil's sometimes had brush marks alongside them. Fool peered at the angel's legs and saw that her lowest wings, the tiny ones that curled out from her ankles, were not as tightly wrapped around her skin as Benjamin's were, that they continually flexed in and out in time with the rhythm of the sea.

“Are all angels' footprints like this?” he asked.

“Why do you want to know?” asked Israfil.

“Because I'm interested,” snapped Fool, “and you uncreated the only other angel that I could have asked, so now I have to bother you. So I ask again, are all your tracks like this?”

“Yes,” said Benjamin. “We are all alike, or at least, all similar enough to leave similar tracks.”