The Devil's Evidence (19 page)

It's pointless,
Fool thought.
They're worse than the demons in Hell, so blind and determined that this place is perfect. And it should be perfect, shouldn't it? This is Heaven, the place of perfection, so why isn't it?

Why isn't it perfect?

Fool didn't know, but he saw one thing clearly: whatever was happening in Heaven was getting worse. He turned away from the angels, facing away from the building, and saw movement at the edge of the far fields. Something stepped back, drawing itself into the tall grass that grew there, becoming part of the shadows, but not before Fool had seen it clearly.

The scribe. The scribe, watching him again.

Before Fool's head gave the command, his feet were moving.

He covered the space between the building and the edge of the grassy area quickly, accelerating as he went, muscles unused to this kind of action and beginning already to protest. From the corner of his eye he saw Summer and Gordie follow, saw the crowds of the Joyful fall away from them as they ran, felt the heat of the sun above him, and this was good, this was right, this was action after all the uncertainty and inactivity, this was movement both literal and figurative, and he ran.

He hit the grass and pushed in among the high stalks, stepping into a place of shadow and fractures. Something snagged at the healing lines of pain across his cheek and tugged and he jerked back, fearing an attack, but it was simply the stalks reaching for him, their high tips above his head, their edges stiff and sharp. It dragged against him as he pushed farther in, rough and stiff across his body, grass with tiny serrations along its edges. Fool raised his gun hand and used it to shield his face, trying to work out where the scribe had gone.

“Stand still,” he said to the still-moving Summer and Gordie, and then waited until the sound of them had settled to nothing. At first, there was only the sound of the grass rubbing against itself, a low hiss like the distant exhalations of some slumbering creature, and the near silence was like a living thing curling around him and caressing his skin. Then, on the edge of his hearing, Fool heard the faint sound of feet hitting the earth and a body crashing through the grass somewhere ahead, stumbling. Ahead? No, not quite. He listened again.

Ahead and to his right.

Fool turned slowly in that direction, moving forward and peering through waving stems that were now above his head. It was impossible to move quietly; the grass stems tugged against his clothes as he passed them and brushed together, making a surprisingly harsh, bitter sound. To his rear, Fool heard Summer and Gordie following and he motioned for them to stay behind him.

Was the scribe still running? He couldn't hear it anymore, but surely it hadn't gotten so far ahead of him that it was out of earshot? No, there it was again, the sound of something driving itself forward, crashing and breaking thick stems as it went. It sounded clumsy, desperate but slow, hampered by the vegetation, thrashing.

Fool followed.

Farther into the field the grass was denser, harder than ever to push through, but the denseness worked in Fool's favor. He could see the scribe's trail now, a path marked in broken plants and churned earth below. Why was it running from him? It should know he posed no threat.

Only he did, didn't he? He had killed demons, killed them fairly regularly, in fact. He was Fool, the killer of demons, and it probably feared for its life and whatever soul it possessed. Should he call to it, reassure it that he meant it no harm, he simply needed to talk? No, he didn't know the thing's name, or if it even had one, and simply calling out “scribe” would feel wrong. He pushed on, following the trail the small demon had left for him.

Something was standing in the grass to his side, watching him.

Fool froze. He could see the figure in his peripheral vision, motionless, a thing of shade, feet back from him in the stems and made into an abstraction by an interlocking crosshatch pattern created by the grass stems and their shadows. Fool cautiously dropped a hand to his gun, withdrawing it slowly. As he did a breeze blew, ruffling Fool's hair, and the figure shifted slightly, a fractional spinning movement. Fool jerked back, bringing the gun up fully but not firing.

There was another figure behind the first one, and more behind that one, ranks of them standing in pools of shade, hidden by the thick growths. The grass was course here, old, the stems knotted and tangled, dense clusters of it twisting together to form shapes that looked almost like stunted trees. All the figures were still, seeming to watch him, a forest of them, arms outstretched and hands dangling like the scarecrows he had sometimes seen in Hell's fields, although what purpose they served he had never been able to ascertain.

The scribe forgotten for a moment, Fool approached the first figure. Still it didn't move, resolving out of the patterns of light and dark first into a human rather than angel or demon, and then into a woman, another of the sleeping Joyful. Her hair was wild, standing out from her head in knotted tangles and twists, and her skin was a rich ocher color. She was older, her face lined, her eyes closed, and she was dressed in a loose smock. It was baggy around her outstretched wrists, and her feet, emerging from below the hem, were bare and sunk several inches into the soil.

She was being lost to the plants.

Grasses had pushed up between her legs and had grown up under her clothing, the tops of one or two of the stems emerging from the neck of the dress and tangling into her hair. More stems emerged from the open expanse of her sleeves, green tips tickling around the woman's wrists. Fool could track the growth and travel of them by the way the material of the dress bulged over the woman's shoulders as the grass was forced to turn by the material barrier, some toward the neck, some pushing along her arms. The seam of the dress had split in one place and small tendrils of greenery had pushed their way out of the opening, the questing face of the plants turned up to the sun.

How long had this woman been standing here?

Fool went past her, seeing that all the other figures were the same, men and women standing in the field, sleeping and dreaming or being somewhere else or whatever it was that Heaven allowed the Joyful to do, and the grasses had grown up through their clothes and their feet had sunk into the earth. The farther back Fool went, the older he thought the Joyful were. Or, at least, the longer they had been there; the deeper he went, the less of the human he could see and the more they were festooned with growths. One of the figures' faces was completely lost behind a thick mass of plant material, the fronds covering him and burrowing into the hair of his head like some twisting green crown. Fool let his gun hand drop as he walked among the Joyful, and put the gun in its holster. Whatever was happening here, he didn't think these people were a threat.

They looked different from the others he had seen, their skin tanned by the sun and somehow thicker, rougher. Where their hands were visible and not lost, the growths were gnarled and callused, fingers thick with skin pads, nails squared and chipped. Here, their clothes were often splitting away entirely, forced into torn rags by the pressures of the plants growing between cloth and skin. One or two of the figures were entirely naked except for the growths, and Fool was reminded uncomfortably of the Man, sitting in the corner of his room and gradually becoming lost to another form.
Was this how he started?
wondered Fool.
By simply staying in one place too long and dreaming? But of what? Of change? Of the earth? Do these Joyful love the earth so much they want to be a part of it?

Finally, Fool found himself standing in the middle of a group of Joyful, all almost gone beneath the growths now. They were cruciform masses of green and brown, tangling stems and vines smothering the humans at their core. Insects buzzed around them and the air was warm and smelled sweet, of honey and healthy wood and the rich musk of soil and growth and light.

Fool saw movement to his side. At first, he thought it was one of the Joyful turning again, making one of those tiny, shivering rotations, but it was not. Something pale was approaching from deeper in the field, glimmering light emerging from the shadows. He stepped behind one of the motionless people, using them as cover and peering around them to watch what was happening. Was it the scribe? No, not the demon, it was small and dark and this was definitely light, and there were two of them, delicate shapes coming toward him through the forest of grass and people. He wondered then if it might be Summer and Gordie, but quickly dismissed the idea. They were still somewhere behind him; he could hear them moving through the crowd of the Joyful, the noise of them the harsh rustle of disturbed stems and of careful, crackling footsteps.

The figures were pallid, twinkling in the shadow, moving slowly but not, he thought, furtively, and as he watched, the shapes came closer and then he saw them for what they were and two angels stepped out from between the grass.

They were smaller angels, the sort that Fool had seen at the beach and outside the pool and at the fairground, the kind he had come to think of as caretakers. They moved silently, managing to pass among the grass without disturbing it, apparently slipping without difficulty through spaces that were far narrower than they appeared to be. Silently, they walked around several of the Joyful before finally coming to a halt in front of a figure who Fool could tell was male only by the fact that a part of a bearded chin was still visible between the growths, and whose clothes were little more than fragments of cloth discarded to the ground and whose presumed nudity was covered from view by thick growths of green and brown grass.

Fool carefully stepped back from the figure he was hiding behind, retreating as silently as possible to hide behind another shape. If the angels heard him, they gave no sign. One of them began to sniff at the Joyful, starting at his head and then descending, sliding across the man's belly and then down his legs before coming back up the man's rear, taking constant stretching inhalations as it went. The other began to run its hands over the man's body, delving into the grass to touch the skin beneath, stroking and pulling and tweaking as it did so. There was no aggression in either's actions; both were gentle and slow. Eventually, the sniffing angel unhinged its face, expanding itself and taking the rear of the man's head, grass and all, into its mouth. The angel's eyes closed in pleasure as it fed, its throat working as it swallowed and its light pulsing to a rhythm Fool couldn't feel.

Finally, the angel broke the contact. Looking at its companion, still without speaking, it nodded and as it did so its face drew back in. Fool watched, fascinated, as the mouth collapsed back to something approaching normality, the throat rippling as it smoothed and narrowed, becoming a normal neck again. Light flickered in its open mouth, tiny sparkles of yellow and blue, and then it swallowed a last time and they were gone. A flush bloomed over its skin, a roseate glow that shone briefly and then was gone. While it lasted, it sent warm shadows into the space around it that turned the Joyful into delicate pink statues.

In response to the nod, and the end of the feeding, the second angel stopped running its hands over the man and produced a long, curved blade from the air, the knife appearing from nothing. It began to cut at the grasses by the man's feet, tugging away the plants as it did so. As the grass was removed, the man's body became visible, a pale and wasted thing that seemed to be all skin and joints with little flesh around the skeletal frame. Without the supporting strength of the plants to anchor it upward, the man collapsed back, unable to bear his own weight, and fell into the first angel's arms. The angel laid the man on the ground gently, folding his arms over his chest and straightening his legs, brushing fragments of grass from his face and his hair back from off his forehead so that his closed eyes and mouth were exposed. The man did not move and the two angels stood over him for a moment, heads bowed. It was impossible to tell whether the angels were male or female, they were sexless and smooth in their grace, and then they moved on.

The two went to the next Joyful and repeated the process.

Soon, as Fool watched, the angels had gathered four of the Joyful, each laid alongside the others as though they were crops being harvested, stopping when the fifth person the angel fed from was obviously different and it shook its head after it detached. The two then stood and waited until eventually, after what could have been minutes or could have been a few seconds, a flurry of smaller angels drifted down from the sky and surrounded the four prostrate figures.

These weren't the blackest angels Fool had seen at the beach but were similar, small cherublike things that reminded him of the Orphans, but Orphans remade into perfect beings. They were a pale brown, their skin gleaming in the sunlight, and they hovered on wings that weren't feathered but were gossamer, thin membranes that reflected the sun in a rainbow of flashing colors. They had pudgy fingers, fat little bellies that jounced as they flew, and their eyes were entirely white, without pupil or iris.

These new angels clutched at the Joyful and then, when each of the tiny figures had a solid grip, beat their delicate wings and lifted the men and women into the air. Fool watched as they rose, spiraling upward and away until they vanished. The two caretaker angels stepped silently back into the grass, merging with the shadows until they, too, were gone. Fool let out his breath, kept trapped inside until then to avoid detection, and stepped out into the small clearing that had been created in the field. He placed his feet where the feet of a Joyful had been until only recently and looked back into the now-clear and flawless sky.

What had he just watched?

Beside Fool, Summer stepped out into the clearing and looked into the sky. She was crying but didn't appear to be upset, her face turning to follow the path that the angels and the Joyful had taken, the tears that streaked her cheeks glinting. Behind her, Gordie was crouching and looking at the ground, moving the cut grass about with a hand as though stirring a pot of stew. What was he looking for, or looking at? Fool wondered. Was he trying to become an Information Man again, or remembering what he had been before his death, looking for clues? Clues to what? How could anything explain the things they had seen? Heaven was proving more unknowable than Hell had ever been.

Of course it is,
he thought.
We're from Hell, all three of us, what chance have we got of understanding?

As Fool watched Gordie, he remembered that he had been chasing the scribe before this oblique distraction had occurred, and he turned back to the trail left by the small demon. How far had he let the thing get by forgetting about it? He cocked his head, listening, but heard nothing. Was it so far away that he would be unable to pick up the sound of it again? Fool took several slow steps along the broken path, still listening.