The Devil's Detective (23 page)

Fool looked about him, wondering where God was hiding. In the mud? In the earthen slope, where tangled roots jutted from the soil? In the shit and blood? It seemed impossible.

“What happens to them now?” asked Adam when Fool and Summer finally climbed out from the pit, clambering up the sides by sinking their feet and hands into the moist soil and using the roots for stability.

“They go to be questioned,” said Fool, “assuming Morgan can get anything from bodies in this state.” He thought about the roots and said, “And then I have to visit the Man, to see if he can tell me any more about what he saw, or whether there was anything here of him.”

“They will be questioned? Have more indignities piled upon them?”

“They may have seen something and be able to tell us. This is the same murderer, according to the tube, but it's different. These aren't Genevieves, and there was more than one. This is frenzied, out of control, and it may have missed something.”

“Missed something?”

“Some piece of soul, still in there. Morgan may find it, may be able to speak to it.”

“How?”

“There are artisans even in Hell, Adam,” said Elderflower, the first time he had spoken since arriving with the angels. “Morgan and his colleagues have ways of speaking to the souls and the flesh of the dead.”

“Perhaps I can help,” said Adam and walked over to the pieces of folded tarpaulin laid out on the ground with their damaged contents. The porters moved away, their gaze dropping. One raised his hand to shield his eyes from Adam's gleam; Fool realized that he no longer saw the light unless it changed or increased, that he had gotten used to looking
at both Adam and Balthazar.
What did that say about him?
he wondered. That he was changing, or becoming hardened? He didn't know.

Adam unfolded the corner of one of the tarpaulins, wrapping it back to reveal the corpse of a woman. She was still dressed in a loose jacket and smock, stained with mud and blood. Her head was twisted around and tilted, her broken neck bones bulging under her skin. Adam knelt and placed one hand on the dead woman's head. His dark robes trailed in the mud, his light increasing, and then he rose and said, “No. There is nothing left.”

“Nothing?”

“No. This poor thing and all her companions are gone; this is all that remains. Mere flesh.”

“Still,” said Fool, “I should like Morgan to at least view them. He may have some skills learned from Hell that may be useful.”

“No. They should suffer no further indignities,” said Balthazar, stepping forward. He raised one hand and he
gleamed
, as bright as Heaven, brighter, the light rushing through red and becoming an inferno of white and glaring, forcing Fool to turn away. He heard one of the porters moan, and then the light was gone, leaving ghosts of itself crawling in his vision. When he turned back, greasy smoke, gray in the evening light, billowed from under the sheets of tarpaulin. Fool watched as the woman's head, at the center of a wash of whiteness, began to smile. No, not smiling, it was her flesh shriveling as though being burned without actually burning, the hair tangling up and vanishing, her lips pulling back, her eyelids sparking to nothing, her eyes boiling and then evaporating. Her skin peeled back to reveal the muscle and then bone beneath, and then they, too, were aflame, crumbling down to dust, and then she was gone. The other tarpaulins bulged and rose as harsh blue light and palls of smoke poured out from under them and then mud around Fool's feet bubbled briefly as the blood steamed and evaporated. The stench of something scalded filled the air and he heard someone vomit.

“They were the property of Hell,” said Elderflower when the burning had stopped.

“Yes,” said Balthazar, “and I gave them release.”

“Which is not your responsibility.”

“No,” said Adam, “and he will be spoken to about this act. Heaven will take ten more souls to compensate Hell for its loss.”

“Fifteen.”

“Agreed.”

“Acceptable,” said Elderflower. “Shall we go? We are done here and should rest. There are more Elevations to discuss tomorrow.”

“It wasn't there,” said Fool. “It was somewhere else. It killed again, more this time. Where did it go? Where will it go next?”

The Man did not reply in words but his many limbs lifted and rustled around Fool, the mouthed things turning toward him and opening and closing aggressively. “You expect me to predict the future for you, little Fool, little man?” came the leathery voice eventually. “To tell you the what and where of things? No, Fool, you are my amusement, nothing more. I gave you the information I had, but what you do with it is your business.”

“I went to the Heights,” said Fool. He was angry again, the stench of the dead Aruhlians still thick in his nose despite the fact he had slept, washed, and changed his clothes since wading around in their remains. He had attended the morning's discussions in the Assemblies House ballroom, bored, listening to the trading. Souls going upward, extra slotted in for Balthazar's indiscretion, bartered and bought and sold. Looking through the grimy windows and the roiling, ever-moving crowd, he had kept his face still and raged inside. What was it, this demon that seemed to slip through Hell's streets unnoticed? That could slaughter apparently at will? Had nobody seen
anything
?

After the meeting, Fool met with Summer before going to the Man. She had spent the morning asking people, scattering messages printed on thin paper on the trains asking for help, had pinned more of her pictures of Diamond on walls all around the Houska, but had received no responses other than dismissal.

“It's strange,” she told Fool. “Normally, I think that people do know but they won't say, but now I think they genuinely don't know. The
demons left me alone and let me talk to people; people weren't aggressive with me. The opposite, really; it felt like they wanted to help but just couldn't. Even Gordie would have struggled, I think.”

So, no one had seen anything, no one knew anything; even the dead remained silent, their lips torn apart but sealed. He knew as little now as he did when he and Gordie had found the first corpse.

No, that wasn't quite true. He knew that it was a demon so old and powerful that even other demons were likely to fear it, that it had no interest in fucking but only the violence it could inflict, that it tore the souls of the dead loose and consumed them in its frenzy.
There's more
, thought Fool,
more I know, more I have learned. I know it takes only those who are alone, which must mean it can be seen but simply doesn't want to be. Why? Because it must have some fear of being recognized, or caught, which means it can
be
caught. Genevieves are the perfect victims because they have so many demons in their lives, spend so long alone with them, that one demon must blend into another after a while.

And it was getting more confident. The Aruhlians, alone in their pit, couldn't be seen from outside the field, but there were six of them and it had attacked anyway, sure that they couldn't escape or harm it. It must be huge, powerful. Someone had to know something.

Which left the Man, and his information.

“I'm glad I entertain you,” said Fool, “but I need more help.”

“A fair exchange, Fool,” said the Man. “Tell me about the Heights and I will tell you what more I know.”

“The Heights? There's nothing to tell. I saw nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“I went inside but I had no chance to ask anything—not that they'd talk to me anyway. Only Rhakshasas being there allowed me safe exit.”

“Really? They would kill you?”

“Without a second thought. They're demons, the oldest and most powerful in Hell, and I'm simply a human. Now, tell me.” He was giving orders to the Man, he realized.
Little foolish Fool
, he thought, glancing at the Man's many mouths ranked next to him and behind him and above him, lining the branches that the Man had become. Many of the mouths looked hungry, their edges and thorns browning, not their usual lustrous green.

“It's a terrible thing,” said the Man, “carrying out terrible acts. Those in the pit had little chance against it. It filled the sky with blackness and fire and tore them apart before they could scream, Fool, as it did at the lakeshore with that poor man, and then it went back, went toward the Heights. Go back, Fool, go back to the Heights and wait for it. It will come, and you will know it when it does; wait for the most terrible thing of all and that will be what you're looking for, Fool. The most terrible thing of all.”

Fool thought about the roots in the pit wall, about how the Man spread, and heard himself speak, the voice sounding as though it came from someone else, somewhere else.

“Is it a demon? You're sure?” What was that tone in his voice? Disbelief? Accusation? Fool wasn't sure.

The Man went into a shiver, the room bucking and whirling around Fool.

“Why would I lie?”

“Everyone lies,” said Fool. “There's little truth here, didn't you once say that to me?”

“There is truth,” said the Man. “Go back to the Heights, Fool, and find Hell's truth there.”

Fool waited but the Man said nothing more. Finally, he reached into his pocket and removed the feather; it was with him all the time now, and he drew some odd sense of security from its presence in his jacket. Holding it aloft, its glow filling the room, he waited for the Man to respond, to offer more in exchange for a chance to hold the feather again, but he did not speak again.
Dismissed Fool, told to go back to Crow Heights, back to the center of Hell, and expected to do what he is told
, he thought, and turned to go.

And then turned back. “Why are you so desperate to get me to go back to the Heights? If this demon is as terrible as you say, you could tell me when it emerged and then I should be able to spot it easily. And how do you know what it did at the lakeshore?” he asked, moving back toward the Man. “You told me that you don't yet reach that far, that you hadn't seen it. What's going on?”

Fool waited for the Man to speak, but he did not.

Instead, he slumped.

The mass of him in the corner relaxed and folded down on itself, the limbs around the room dropping. His mouths fell, dangling down. From some a thin green slime trickled and the air filled with a smell of rottenness and mold. Fool had never seen the Man like this before, and as he looked more carefully, he saw other discordant notes in the room. The flying things were clustered in among the Man's branches, but there were more of them and they did not react to the movement of the mouths, seeming less skittish. Less scared. Puddles of the green slime were scattered across the floor around the room, some dried and some still fresh, and tangled vines lay in knots across the floor. It was the changes to the Man himself that were the most marked, though; he had shed leaves and they lay in the corners of the room and in thick piles at the base of the walls. He had little luster left in his remaining foliage, and his branches were dry, their bark beginning to peel.

Fool stepped toward the Man's main bulk, the place where his body had been when he first came here. “What's wrong?” he asked. The Man did not reply.

Fool, unsettled, sure now that something was wrong and had been wrong for a while but that he had not noticed, drew his gun. The flying things shifted and muttered around him.

“What's wrong?” He wished that he knew the Man's name, but he had always simply called him the Man of Plants and Flowers or the Man. With a little jolt, he realized that he only ever used the name of one other human in Hell, Summer, now that Gordie was gone. He knew the names of more angels and demons than men or women. It was Hell, he knew, made to keep people apart, people keeping themselves unnoticed where they could, and at that moment he hated it, not with his everyday hate, the hate everyone felt for it, but with something more, something that burned and burned and kept burning inside, that took the fires that were already in him and drew them ever onward. He hated, and he was angry, and the Man was silent.

For the first time, Fool reached out to touch the Man. He did so with the hand holding the feather, keeping it gripped with his bottom three fingers and stretching out with his index finger. The top of the feather brushed against the tightly whorled fronds that made up the Man's body, its bone gleam bright against the Man's darkness. This close, Fool saw
that the tiny petals and leaves that formed the branches of the Man's chest and belly were curled and browning. He ran the feather up and down the Man, not knowing why but sensing it might be useful.

At the feather's touch, a long groan came from the Man. It wasn't words, exactly, more the sound of an exhalation being squeezed out from lungs and over vocal cords that were struggling to function.
Did the Man have lungs or vocal cords? A heart? How much humanity was left in him?
Fool wondered.

The Man groaned again as the feather ran up and down him. This time, Fool thought he recognized a word in there, “lies” stretched out and made into something elastic and uneven.

Another brush, another groaned “lies.” Instinctively, Fool turned the feather around and thrust it, stem first, between the Man's branchlike ribs. It slid in easily, the most perfect dagger into desiccating flesh, and the Man groaned, much louder this time. “Lies, Fool,” he said, “all lies.”

“What are?”

“Me, Fool …” The Man's voice was ragged, distorted, trailing off at the end of the words. “Me.”

The feather's light shone out from the Man, pulsing, throwing shadows across Fool. “I'm a lie, Fool.”

“How are you a lie?” asked Fool, thinking he understood but not wanting to.

“I'm dead, Fool,” the Man said.

Fool yanked the feather out of the Man as his bulk began to tilt forward. He jumped back, tripping over a strand of cabled, woody flesh stretched out across the floor behind him and falling heavily. He lost his grip on the feather and for a second it drifted up in the air above him, illuminating the scene with a vivid clarity.