The Devil's Evidence (6 page)

“You are wanted,” said Mr. Tap, yanking Fool off his feet in a violent, startling jerk, and Fool knew that he had missed his chance and that if there had ever been a time for running, that time was past.

Fool's head was in a bag that smelled of blood and vomit.

He had tried to lift his gun, still in his hand from his time with the Man, but Mr. Tap was quicker, or Fool too slow, and the demon had wrapped Fool's fist in its bony hand and squeezed until Fool felt his fingers would be cracked against the gun's stock. When he yelped in pain, the sound escaping from between clenched teeth that wanted to give Mr. Tap no satisfaction, Mr. Tap loosened its grip and said in a strangely conversational tone, “Drop it.” Fool dropped it.

Mr. Tap spun Fool about, tying his hands behind his back and pulling the bag down over his head; Fool's last view of Hell was of the farmlands beyond the copse, the dry fields stretching out and the ragged lines of workers moving across them. Then he was lost in a bitter darkness and was lifted, draped over Mr. Tap's bony shoulder, the edge digging into his belly, and then they were running. He was jolted, bouncing, the smell of the bag in his nostrils, dust tickling at his eyes when he opened them until he eventually left them closed; there was nothing to see anyway, just blackness and the fears that his mind wrote in the bag around his head.

He didn't know how long it took, in the end. Ten minutes? An hour? Fool's sense of time had deserted him, somehow closed out of that terrible bag along with the light; he knew only that the journey was ongoing, and he waited and itched and imagined the worms from the cracks in Mr. Tap's skin wriggling between the folds of his clothes and burrowing into his skin, writhing and burning, and then it was over. Mr. Tap suddenly halted and Fool was flung down, crashing hard onto a stone floor. He was flipped over onto his front, face pressing against the rough burlap of the sack and the foul odor was deep in his nose and mouth like muddy water, and then his wrists were untied and the blood was rushing back into his hands in a painful wave.

“Good-bye, Fool,” said Mr. Tap in that same conversational voice. There was a sharp clatter by Fool's head and then the sound of footsteps as Mr. Tap left.

Fool sat up, reaching cautiously for the bag over his head.
What will I see when I remove it?
he wondered.
All the disappeared, hundreds of us heaped together, Hell's forgotten left together in some vast cell? Marianne, gathered from the streets as well, bagged and broken? Will they be dead? Will I be? Or am I alone, a man in the darkness?
He tugged at the rough material, the bag came away, and the space about him was revealed.

Fool was in a small, anonymous room. It was mostly bare except for a long table at one end and a door behind the table, with high windows set in one wall. The panes in the windows were grimy, cataracted with dirt and showing nothing through themselves except a gray that might have been sky or the ceiling of a corridor.

When Fool looked back at the table, Rhakshasas was sitting behind it.

“So, we find ourselves here again, Thomas Fool, Commander of the Information Office of Hell,” Rhakshasas said, and the entrails around its torso squirmed and tightened and loosened as it spoke. The demon was huge, filling the end of the room, its arms lying on the table. When it moved, it left brown and red smears behind it that glistened before drying to silvery flakes. After several long moments of silence, it spoke again.

“Yet again, you challenge Hell and we have to decide what to do with you. Is it true, what Mr. Tap says?”

“I don't know, what does he say?” asked Fool and immediately regretted it.
I am the Commander of the Information Men of Hell, Rhakshasas itself has just used my full title, which must mean something, something I can't see, can't work out, don't antagonize him, little insolent Fool.

“That you killed a bauta?”

“A bauta?”

“An Evidence Man, Fool, going about the lawful carrying out of its duty.”

I thought so.
“No.”

“No?”

“It was not going about lawful duty, it was killing an innocent man.”

“Innocent, Fool? Here?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Do I?” asked Rhakshasas, leaning forward, its tone if anything even colder. The entrails swelled around it, pumping themselves up, making the demon seem even larger. Were they a part of Rhakshasas, or some separate creature living on it like a parasite? Fool wasn't sure, watched fascinated as they wriggled, moving like snakes around the demon's shoulders and torso. “The bauta believed him to be guilty at the time of the incident, Fool. That makes you a murderer.”

“No. It had been told that the man's guilt was impossible but chose to ignore the evidence presented to it by more experienced officers.”

“ ‘More experienced officers'? You, Thomas Fool, most important of the Information Men in Hell?”

“Yes. No. Yes, it came from me, but no, I'm not the most important.”

“I'm glad you recognize that, at least. And you have made no progress on the fires?”

“No.”

“And are there other things you may tell the Archdeacons, Fool? Things we need to know, which may mitigate your actions?”

The Man lives.
“No.”

“Then we have a problem, Fool. The bauta may have been impetuous, but it has the right to act according to how it sees fit. Mr. Tap and the Evidence Men may do as they like to reach the truth, Fool, and the bauta's consumption of the man's fears and pain would have revealed to it the truth of his innocence. You prevented this truth from being revealed, got in the way of justice, simply because you did not like the methods being used, and yet who are you to make that choice? You interrupted the Evidence Man in the course of his duty, Fool, and the Archdeacons cannot ignore it.”

Fool looked down, dropping his eyes from Rhakshasas's constantly moving skin of gut and slime, away from the smell of it and the face that sat atop the moving body, grim and with eyes that were bloody and dark. His gun was on the floor by his feet.

“Would you pick it up, Fool, try to shoot me?” said Rhakshasas, seeing Fool's gaze pick up the weapon.

“If I'm to die,” said Fool, bending and deliberately retrieving the gun, turning it in his hands slowly, “then I may as well take my chances.”

“Die, Fool? Who said anything about dying? No, Fool, you misunderstand. We're sending you to Heaven.”

Heaven.

The word looped lazily out of Rhakshasas's mouth and caught Fool in the side like a punch. It rocked him, sending his balance tilting, and he stepped sideways and dropped to one knee. His gun fell from his hand, skittering away across a floor that seemed to yaw and pitch beneath him.

Heaven.

Did this mean he was saved? To be Elevated? Had he atoned for his sins, whatever they were? Did it? Fool raised his head to look at Rhakshasas, who was leaning back in its chair and looking at Fool intently.

“Heaven?” It was hard to even speak the word. Had he ever spoken it out loud before? He wasn't sure, but didn't think so. Most people in Hell kept it inside themselves, like some secret talisman that would tarnish if they let it out, their emblem of hope, hope that this time they would be picked, that this time they would be raised to the place above them that gleamed in the clouds, that this time was their time. Hope, always hope.

Rhakshasas was smiling now, still watching Fool, mouth split into a wide grin revealing teeth that were little more than black stubs.

“That was fun,” it said at last.

“It was a lie?” said Fool, cursing the tiny, fragmented dreams that had birthed themselves in him, that had risen in his head and filled his vision. Did he really think he'd been picked for an Elevation? Rewarded for his service to Hell's Bureaucracy? Did he really still believe it might happen?

Yes. Yes, the worm was still turning in his belly, sending waves of nausea through his body, wasted adrenaline souring in his muscles and the taste of fire in his mouth.

“A lie? No, of course not. I rarely lie, Thomas Fool. I'm angelic stock, after all, and lying has little part of an angel's makeup. You are going to Heaven, Commander of the Information Office of Hell, you are simply not being Elevated.”

Fool reached out and picked his weapon up. The hard floor had stopped moving now, was steadier, balance returning as the waves of sickness ebbed within him. He turned the gun around and peered into its black barrel, trying to see if he could discern the tip of the bullet in its narrow throat.

He was crying, again. Fool squeezed his eyes shut, felt tears break loose and make their way down his cheeks, opened his eyes again and stared once more into the darkness. What would happen if he pulled the trigger? Blew his brains out behind him, stopped this terrible cycle of fear and misery and hope and disappointment and violence? Simply ceased to be, unmade himself?

“It won't fire,” said Rhakshasas. “You should realize that. We won't give you such a simple escape, it's far better to see you toil and toil and still fail. This is Hell, after all. Now, we have business. Stand, please, and we can begin.”

Fool didn't move. Heaven—it dangled before him, almost visible in the room's air, a gleam somewhere in the gun's barrel, Heaven but no Elevation. He took a last look into the darkness of the weapon, bringing it close to his eye, and then flipped it around and dropped it into his holster. When he stood, he was pleased to find he felt steady, although his vision was still fogged with tears.

“Good,” said Rhakshasas, also standing. The demon filled the end of the room, the intestines around it moving constantly, the bulk of it drawing in the light and creating dark, foul-smelling shadows. It moved around the table and came to stand before Fool, the smell of it thick, warm, oozing, and reached out clawed hands, taking hold of Fool's shoulders.

“You are the Commander of Hell's Information Office and all Information Men,” it said, leaning forward so that its face was close to Fool's, filling his vision. “Tears are a luxury, and there is no space for luxuries in Hell.”

A tongue covered in ragged spikes emerged from Rhakshasas's mouth, pushing past the rotted teeth, and licked Fool's cheeks. Its touch was surprisingly delicate, almost a caress, but the smell of it was grotesque, a reek of old feces and food gone to waste and bodies gone to rot. Rhakshasas pushed its face closer to Fool's, tilting its head slightly, and then its mouth opened wider and the tongue clamped on to him, wrapped around his head. The demon let out a long, slow sigh as it suckled at his tears, yanking Fool forward as he tried to jerk back, lifting him from his feet, moaning.

Finally, the demon let its head fall away, gasping aloud. It dropped Fool and shook itself, swallowing loudly. Its tongue pulled back, wiping slowly across the demon's face in lazy swirls before retreating into the mouth. Rhakshasas's coiled guts clenched, glistening, and then they, too, relaxed. “Delicious,” the demon said. “Now, shall we get on?”

There were three of them, two older demons and one scurrying thing that Fool assumed would be little more than scribe and general servant.

“This is the Delegation,” said Rhakshasas, “and you will serve them during your time in Heaven.”

They were in one of the smaller rooms in Assemblies House, the central hub of the Bureaucracy's functioning in Hell. The first of the demons was apparently made entirely of larvae, a human-shaped figure that constantly writhed, maggots falling from it and crawling back into the mass in an ongoing stream. It had no face, but there were impressions where mouth and eyes should be in the thing that might have been a head atop its boiling, wriggling shoulders. It was, disconcertingly, wearing a cape that flapped and a hat that even when it was still rocked because of the movement of its maggot flesh.

The other was worse.

It was as though someone had stitched together the remains of hundreds of dead animals, all rotten, so that the flesh dripped and slithered and bones showed through the mess of it. Its head might have once been a dog's, its chest the remains of a bird, ribs exposed and covered in ragged feathers, arms long and spindly but ending in pads from which claws extended and retracted. It had no eyeballs, only weeping sockets that contained glittering red sparks in their depths, and its lips were torn and hanging, revealing teeth that were uneven and yellow. It wore an old suit, dusty where it wasn't wet with slime and filth, buttoned closed beneath the collapsing rib cage but too small, so that in the gap between trousers and jacket more rotten flesh was visible. Its feet were bird's feet, long-toed, mostly bone and leather. Neither was introduced to him by name.

They're sending the worst of Hell,
thought Fool,
the most grotesque. This is about the look of things as much as the content. This is about the face we show in the trades, in the making of deals between Heaven and Hell, the appearance we decide upon and the way it makes those that look upon us feel. This is about how we make ourselves appear fearsome and fierce and
hellish
so we can get the things we want. This is the business of Bureaucracy.

He glanced down at the new uniform Rhakshasas had given him, a black suit and shirt that fit him well and soft leather boots, the first footwear in Hell that Fool had possessed that was comfortable. They had dressed him up, too, a doll to make the Delegation look good; the jacket was long so that it moved when he did, swirling like wings, and the suit and shirt were made of soft material that seemed to absorb the light. Wearing it made him feel like a shadow.

Fool the shade,
he thought,
little foolish shade.
They had made him into something new, something to present to Heaven, not an Elevated soul but a servant one, a part of Hell sent forth to barter and deal. He fingered the edge of the jacket, hand pale against the dark fabric, and felt even more like a ghost, not the Thomas Fool he had come to know over these last weeks and months but something new and unknown.

“We are almost ready,” said Rhakshasas, “are we not?”

“Yes,” said the stitch demon, its voice bubbling and wet. This was the Delegation's leader, the one through whom the trades would be finalized. Discolored saliva fell from its mouth as it spoke, dripping to its chest and adding to the stains that covered its suit. It inclined its head toward Fool and said, “Does it know its position?”

“Behind you,” said Fool. “Serving you. Doing your bidding.”

“Good,” said the thing, more foul liquid spattering out as it spoke. The other watched silently, pieces of it falling, hitting the floor, and crawling eagerly back to their host.

“Thomas is an obedient servant,” said Rhakshasas, coming close to Fool. “He is the first of Hell's humans to be sent to Heaven without being Elevated, the first and possibly the last. He will serve us without question, won't you, Thomas Fool?”

Fool opened his mouth to reply, and that's when Rhakshasas's coat of entrails leaped off the demon and swarmed around him.

The stench was terrible, thick and sour and rich and foul, but the feel of their touch was worse. They slithered, wet and warm, around his head and neck, burrowing under his new uniform, forcing it away from his body and ripping it, wrapping around his torso and legs and arms, tightening, leaving him naked.

Burning.

Fool tried to shriek but the thick ropes of gut were clamped around his face, pulsing, blocking his mouth and, oh God, things moving within the tubes. He could
feel
chunks beneath the skin of the intestines, churning and shifting, the pressure of them warm against him. A loop of it pushed into his mouth, flattening his tongue against his teeth, pushing his jaws apart, the taste of it foul. He retched, the vomit gathering in his mouth, backing up his nose, and he couldn't breathe and he was gagging and it didn't matter because he was burning, he was
burning,
the coils tightening and digging in and burning and burning and burning. Fool began to choke on the vomit, managed to spit some of it around the blockage in his mouth. Breathing in was impossible, breathing out impossible, there was just the taste and the smell and the burning. His jaws ached, mouth full of gut and slime, and a grimy blackness was crashing in on him and
Is this it, is this the end?
Fool wondered and then the moving entrails were gone and he was on the floor and coughing and vomiting and screaming.

He didn't know how long he lay there. He retched until his stomach ached, drawing in vast breaths between each spasm, spraying out bile and trying to get the smell of shit from his nostrils and the taste and texture of Rhakshasas's gut from his mouth. Waves of something that was like fever rolled through him, shivering him alternately hot and then cold, shaking his limbs in a palsy. He tried to get a hand underneath him to lever himself up but could not, managed to rise perhaps three or four inches, and then collapsed back down. Another wave of sickness gripped his stomach, but he only dry-heaved, unable to produce anything but long, winded groans that eventually died away to jagged, pained exhalations.

Finally, Fool felt able to move and rolled gingerly over onto his back and away from the pool of vomit. After a moment of swaying, uneasy dizziness, he felt confident enough to sit, arms propped behind him, legs still weak. He let his head loll back, taking deep breaths, sucking the saliva from his teeth and spitting it out to try to clear the last of the taste from his mouth.

In spitting, Fool had turned his head, and as he did so something danced in the corner of his eye. He looked back around, unsure of what had caught his attention, the raging burn across his skin throbbing but fading, and looked to see what he'd seen.

He was tattooed.

Rhakshasas's guts had left their mark across him, all across him, black swirls and lines and shapes inked across his legs and arms and belly. There were circles surrounding ragged triangles, ellipses joined end to end in an untidy chain, something that might have been a thorned branch or splintered bone, dots, a series of wavy lines laid over each other, a series of apparently unconnected letters and runes, a blot with uneven edges. He reached out, hand unmarked and shaking, and rubbed the skin of his thigh. The marks there, a complex interlocking pattern of ovals and rectangles, stung when he touched them, and did not vanish no matter how vigorously he rubbed. It was the same on his calves, his stomach, his cheeks, his forearms and shoulder, the same everywhere; his body was covered from his ankles up to his chest and down his arms to mid-forearm. There were even lines disappearing into the depths of his crotch and delicate new traceries across his scrotum and penis.

He'd been fucking tattooed.

“Get up and clean yourself,” said Rhakshasas, its outer layer of entrails now coiled back around it, moving silkily over its shoulders and in tightening, breathing loops around its chest.

“What did you do to me?” asked Fool, climbing unsteadily to his feet.

“Branded you,” said Rhakshasas, its tone unconcerned. “You go to Heaven as our man, as the Commander of the Information Office of Hell. The marks on your skin will remind you of a simple fact that you may wish to forget when you reach the place of gleaming spires and glittering perfections. You, Thomas Fool, are Hell's. You belong to the Bureaucracy, to Mr. Tap or any other demon that wishes to possess you, to
me,
and not to anyone or anything else, not even to yourself.”

Fool stared at Rhakshasas, at the two demons of the Delegation, at the scurrying thing, and then looked around for his gun. He shivered, cold rather than sick, and saw his clothes lying crumpled on the floor in an untidy heap. They were covered in streaks of slime that dried as he watched, crinkling and flaking to a series of decaying silver trails. When he picked them up, he discovered that the shirt was torn and the trousers split down the center, legs held together only by a few threads of the waist. Another lost uniform.

His gun was under the dead clothes and he went to pull it from his holster. As it came free, however, a hand clamped itself over Fool's and Mr. Tap said, “We find ourselves in this position for a third time, Fool. There will not be a fourth.”

Fool hadn't heard it come in, was half bent and unsteady, tried to turn, but Mr. Tap pushed him, sending him easily to the floor. From Fool's low vantage point, Mr. Tap seemed to tower, gaunt body a collection of angles and shadows against the ceiling.

“You have a regrettable habit of attempting to draw your gun against your owners,” said the demon. “Control your temper and remember your place, human. The next time you reach for your weapon in my presence, you will lose your hand. Are we clear?”

“Yes,” said Fool. His body ached, his head ached, his stomach muscles clenched when he moved, and his skin had been decorated, no longer felt like his own. He rose to his feet,
little always falling-down Fool,
wincing as he did so.

“You are leaving us, Fool,” said Mr. Tap, “but do not worry, I will look after your Information Men as though they were my own troops in your absence. I'm sure they and my bauta will get on wonderfully and will work together seamlessly.”

Fool didn't reply. What could he say? He was caught, again, in one of Hell's displays of power over its human inhabitants.
I got noticed,
he thought,
and now we all suffer.

“Another uniform,” said Mr. Tap, nodding at a neat pile of clothing on the table next to Fool. They hadn't been there before the attack by the intestines, but then, neither had Mr. Tap. Fool dressed slowly, each movement sending sharp pains through him. As his tattooed skin disappeared into the uniform, Fool thought about being branded, about being owned.

About being chattel.

“All clothed? Good!” said Rhakshasas. “Tell me, Fool, are you ready?”

“Yes,” said Fool, meaning no, biting down on the hope, on the fear, on the pain, feeling his newly inked scars rub against the fabric of his uniform, feeling small and helpless. “I'm ready.”

The Delegation left to go to Heaven.

They were taken to the courtyard of Assemblies House, where a transport, old and small and cramped, was waiting for them. Its driver was a demon with no arms but a host of tentacles, its face a moon surrounded by shaggy hair. It was wearing a peaked chauffeur's cap that showed signs of having been burned, brought in through the Flame Garden. It gestured at them, opened the front and rear doors, backed away bowing and scraping its face across the rough ground until it reached its own seat and climbed into the vehicle.

Fool squeezed in the back between the rotting demon and the one he'd assumed was the scribe, having deliberately kept himself away from the larvae demon. Even so, the bugs that constantly fell from it crawled across the transport's floor and seat, wriggling around his new boots, ripples surging along their fat, segmented bodies as they quested. Rhakshasas and Mr. Tap were in the front section of the transport, which was larger and roomier; Mr. Tap peered back at Fool through a glass panel in the dividing wall between the two sections for the entire length of the journey, its melted face split by a grin in which its teeth waggled back and forth as though gesturing greetings to him. Fool tried to ignore it.

Fool saw the glow before he saw the flames themselves, a red heartbeat reaching into Hell's sky. Closer to and the movement became more discordant, fingers of flame leaping from the pits and clutching upward, falling back only to reemerge in a new shape. The transport drew to a halt and they climbed out, Fool shaking bugs from his feet, finding them in the creases of his trousers and knocking them out and to the ground. The demon, who had still not spoken, reached down and, surprisingly tenderly, picked up the bugs with fingers made of long sticks of tightly bunched, shifting creatures, and placed them back into itself. Fool didn't know whether to apologize, and then did so anyway; it certainly wouldn't hurt. The demon ignored him.

Rhakshasas and Mr. Tap joined them at the entrance to the Garden and began to converse with the stitched demon, listing things it needed to discuss and listening as it told them what it intended to do. Fool moved away, enjoying the heat of flames and the way the warmth drifted around him. Ash fell slowly from the sky in great lazy spirals, making the earth around the Garden dark and soft. Already, his boots and trouser cuffs were coated in the stuff, leaving gray streaks, and it was settling on his shoulders like flaked skin.

Beyond the gates at the Garden's entrance a concrete path snaked through the flames, wide enough so that, if a human stayed at its center, the flames that curled around the path's edges wouldn't reach them and they would remain unburned. He watched, fascinated, remembering the burning buildings, enjoying seeing flames without wood and glass and human at their heart. They seemed free, somehow, unfettered, leaping and rolling, curling back across themselves, lifting up and then dropping down like the waves of some huge, simmering ocean.