The Devil's Evidence (18 page)

“It's not working,” he said aloud. Maybe he'd seen all the truth there was to see here? He looked up, watching the reflected ripples swirl across the ceiling, the shadows and lines of light moving around each other in a gentle gavotte. It was beautiful, made him think of the slow roll of clouds or the way the grasses in the fields full of the Joyful had moved in unfelt breezes. The patterns drifted down the walls around the pool, their shifting edges sliding over the tiles, the movement constant around him. The shapes of the Joyful were sometimes visible in the reflections as black spaces, their robes swaying out from their arms like angels' wings, flying in the water.

What were the Joyful being pushed out of the window for? Who was waiting to receive them outside the pool?

Just what were they being pushed out to?

“Wake up,” he called, loud, standing and moving to the pool's edge. “Wake up. Did anyone see what happened here?”

For a second, none of the Joyful moved, and then one of them closest to him, a younger girl who was standing still rather than spinning or floating, opened her eyes. She wore the bleary expression of a drunk or someone who'd been hit on the head and just regained consciousness, her eyelids flickering up and then dropping as she tried to open them.

“What did you see?” asked Fool.

The girl didn't reply, then her shoulders tensed up and her head jerked back, flicking her hair back off her face, eyes suddenly wide, suddenly
open
. “No, no,” she screamed, backing away, arms flailing, “no! They're coming! They're coming! The leaping things!” She took another ungainly step, the water slowing her, and then tripped and disappeared in a splash of swirl and wave. The surface roiled, bucked, and then she reemerged several feet from where she had gone under.

“Tell me,” Fool said, but the girl merely stood, and her eyes were closed again. Her chin dropped toward her chest, shoulders slumped low, and she walked with vague steps back to her original place in the pool. Her robes were wet, clinging to her, but she didn't appear to notice as she settled back to motionless, and nothing Fool said could rouse her again.

“Hopeless,” he said, and let out a long sigh. What next?

What had the Joyful been pushed out
to
?

“Come with me,” said Fool. He went quickly past the body, past Summer and Gordie, their hands still intertwined, and went back to the door. When he looked behind him, his two followers had begun to walk after him, still holding on to each other. Good.
Let them keep each other,
he thought.
Let them be each other's follower.

Israfil and Benjamin were waiting in the foyer, if that's what it was, looking at him expectantly. “What do you know about what's happened here?” asked Fool.

“Nothing, we are simply sent the message from Mayall,” said Israfil, and her tone was like the crash of stone doors slamming shut.

“There's a body in there,” said Fool, pointing back to the pool. “Can it be questioned?”

“Another accident?” said Benjamin, and the pity in his voice was absolute, was total.

“No,” said Fool. “Murder, or at least, someone accidentally killed while something else was going on.”

“There can be no body,” said Israfil.

“It's right in the other fucking room!” Fool shouted, patience finally snapping. All the pain, all the fear, all the uncertainty, all of it crashed out of him as he screamed at the two angels. “It's dead,
he's
dead, some poor bastard who was punctured with glass from the window as someone or something tried to shove him through it. He's in there now!”

“No.” Israfil again. “There is no body.”

“Go and look.”

“No. There can be no body in the state you describe, because this is Heaven and events like this do not occur, little lying human.”

“Why would I lie?”

“Who knows, Commander of Hell's Information Office, consorter with demons and ghosts, who knows why you might lie in Heaven.” Israfil's voice dripped sarcasm and dislike.
Fuck her.

Fool looked at Benjamin, who smiled at him. “Perhaps you're mistaken?” asked the angel.

“No,” said Fool, “I'm not.” There was no help there, no information to be found.

Behind him, Fool heard the flap of wings but did not turn around. The black angels, the kindliest ones, the ones that looked like infants, would be taking the body away but he did nothing to stop them. There was no way to talk to the body, and instinct told him he had learned all he could from it; without Hand or Tidyman or Morgan, the poor dead man's flesh would remain mute and secretive. Instead, ignoring the angels, he crossed the foyer and went outside.

Heaven's day was still warm, still sunny, and Fool's shadow stretched ahead of him as he walked along the side of the building. It was joined by the shades of Summer and Gordie, heads at his shadow's waist, walking behind him. He stopped, waiting until they caught up with him, and then the three went around the building's corner together.

There was a field along the side of the building that housed the pool, its grass short, covered with white painted marks over which another crowd of the Joyful swayed and stood and walked. There were differences here, though; some of the Joyful seemed to be moving together, not simply around each other. There was a definite sense of them moving in packs, the packs sometimes almost meeting as they moved, never touching but flowing against and through and around each other. Fool stopped and watched, fascinated, Summer and Gordie standing next to him, watching without understanding.
More patterns,
he thought.
I know there are patterns there, just like there are patterns to the movements and spacing in the pool, but I can't see them properly. I can see the outline of them but not the content. There must be
reasons
why they move like that, why they move around the pool like they do, but I can't understand them.

Fool carried on walking, going to the next corner and then around to the rear of the building and to the outside of the broken window.

From inside, it had been hard to see the ground, and Fool had underestimated the number of prints and tracks. The ground was churned and thick with them, with indentations and scars, with tears and rips. Standing by the window, Fool looked along the lines of marks, the track they formed, following it back until it disappeared into a thick copse of trees. His hand rose without thinking to his face, touching the wounds that in the heat of the investigation he had been able to forget for a few minutes. Now they reacted angrily, as though to remind him of his presence, and he saw again a set of claws at the end of an arm that was dark and spindly rising toward him. He flinched, stepping back, and bumped into Summer. She placed a hand on his shoulder, both stopping him from taking another step and squeezing reassuringly. She smiled at him.

“I wish you could talk,” Fool said.

Summer made a sound that might have been a word, half formed and shallow, and then smiled again, shaking her head. He turned to the window.

There were scratches under the frame, long striations cut into the wooden side of the building that reminded him of something. He tried to find the memory but it was just out of reach and he let it go; it would come back soon enough, he was sure. Instead of pushing, he turned again, looking back at the tracks. He crouched, looking closely at the torn earth.

The tracks were similar to the ones that he had seen on the beach. There were some that might have been made by clawed feet, others that were unbroken irregular lines that, when he got on his hands and knees, had the impressions of scales or some other kind of segmented skin at the base. Familiar blue flowers had started to bud in the rich, dark earth; as he watched, one of the tiny flowers opened, the petals angling toward the sun and trembling slightly. The smell of it reached his nostrils. Without thinking, Fool reached forward and crushed the open flower head between his finger and thumb. It popped unpleasantly, leaving a greasy, foul-smelling residue across his fingers, which he wiped on the clean earth by the churned trail.

Following the prints back to the trees, Fool came to the same conclusion as he had come to on the beach: that the trail was in fact two trails, one lying over the top of the other, leading from the trees and then back to them. The returning trail had additional marks, a series of twin parallel lines cutting all around the track. Heel marks, from the dragged Joyful? Fool thought so. Here and there, blood puddled along the trail. Not much, but enough to let him know that at least one of the vanished Joyful was injured. Another glass cut from the window? Again, he thought yes, although when he thought about the dead woman on the beach and remembered the slash around her shoulder, he realized that it could equally be an injury from the snatch itself.

He stopped to think, let his head fall back and his vision fill with Heaven's sky. In the distance, a shape that he thought might be the dead body being carried by six small angels floated across the blue, growing smaller and smaller. Another silent, vanished corpse, another thing that couldn't exist but did, and where was he?

Nowhere. Worse than nowhere; each step he took made things more confusing. In Hell, at least, the lines of cause and effect were clear-cut, but here he had no one even to acknowledge the deaths, let alone help him see the bigger pictures that the dead formed.

No one? No, that wasn't true, there was one thing that knew more about what was happening here than they were telling, Fool was sure. There was one person who knew about the trails and the Joyful and the dead.

Mayall. Mayall saw things. Mayall would know about the dead.

“You cannot demand to see Mayall.”

Israfil was standing outside the pool house, her silent flames flickering a thick, curdled orange. She was angry—angrier than usual, looking down at Fool through her face of fire and scowl.

“Why?”

“Because we are not bound to obey your requests, Fool, because you are not our master and we do not have to jump to the call of a human.”

“That's not good enough. I need to see Mayall, and I need to see him now. He has information. If he sees things, he may be able to tell me what's going on here.”

“Little human, you aren't listening. You cannot see Mayall simply because you wish to, because Mayall does not see anyone. Mayall stays in his house and never leaves, Mayall summons, Mayall is the one who
sees,
not the one seen. He sends us messages telling us where to look and what to think. Mayall is the angel in hiding. He has already indicated he will come to you soon; wait for him and be patient. Better yet, take your stain of corruption and leave. Leave this, Fool. Leave this, join your Delegation, and go back to Hell.”

Fool sighed, letting the breath out in a long, weary roll. Even in Hell, where obstructions were common, he rarely came across anyone as objectionable as Israfil. “What,” he asked slowly, “is your fucking problem?”

The swearing this time was deliberate, baiting the angel, and probably unwise. For a second, she simply stared at him and then, very slowly, she reached out and with a casual flick of her hand slapped his uninjured cheek. His head snapped sideways, the neck wrenching, the gashes on his other cheek splitting, starting to weep.

“Israfil,” said Benjamin quietly. “That is not the way.”

“ ‘Not the way'?” asked the angel. “Then what is? This thing, this
monkey,
dares to challenge me? It comes to Heaven not even one of the raised, not even one of the beloved of God, yet thinks to question us, to order us?”

“Monkey?” asked Fool, grinning but unable to help himself. “I'm a monkey?”

“Of course,” said Israfil. “You and all the other inhabitants of Hell, nothing but monkeys, foul things flinging their excrement at each other.”

“We're monkeys,” said Fool, looking around at Summer and Gordie, still grinning. Both of them smiled, although neither appeared to understand what they were hearing, assuming they were hearing anything at all. They were still holding hands, he saw. Fool turned back to Israfil, still grinning.

“This monkey is investigating deaths in Heaven, Israfil, investigating
mysteries
.”

“Accidents.”

“Deaths, angel, mysterious deaths. I do so at the request of the Malakim and at the specific instruction of Mayall, and I expect your help. Now, take me to Mayall.”

“We cannot,” said Benjamin, sounding, at least, apologetic. “The clown angel does not see anyone except at his own request. His home moves, and we cannot know where he is unless he allows us to know. I'm sorry, Thomas Fool, but it cannot be permitted. He will find you soon, that is the best we can offer.”

“Can you ask him?”

“No. No one speaks to Mayall, no one asks Mayall, Mayall is the asker and the speaker.”

“But if Mayall sees things, surely he can tell me what he saw and this whole situation can be sorted out?”

“There is no situation, Fool; there are simply accidents, a series of coincidences.” Israfil again, chipping in, voice disdainful.

“One of the Joyful did the impossible and woke up, accidentally climbed out of the pool, broke the window from the fucking outside, tried to climb through, and stabbed himself to death.”

“Assuming the body was there, then perhaps that's what happened.” Airy, uninterested.

“And what of the things before?”

“Before?”

“Before I came to Heaven. There were things before, incidents, things that can't be explained. That's why I'm here, after all.”

“No,” said Israfil, but Fool saw her eyes dart away from his as she spoke, recognized the sign of a truth avoided.

“Then why am I here?” he asked. “Why did Mayall and the Malakim ask for me?”

“I don't know,” said Israfil, eyes back on Fool now, glow rippling and raging, and that was the truth; she didn't know and it
burned
her, caustic and bitter and scalding. “Possibly they felt it amusing to see a monkey from Hell perform tricks and scurry after its own tail?”