The Devil's Evidence (12 page)

“You'd side with a demon against me?” asked Benjamin, finally looking around.

“No,” said Fool. “I'd protect the members of the Delegation of which I am a part against injury or death. I have no choice.”

“Yes. It is your duty, and possibly your curse, I see that. Very well, Thomas Fool,” said Benjamin after a long moment. His fire whipped away from the fallen demon and disappeared, his glow softening but not entirely vanishing, and he stepped back. As Wambwark rolled and sat up, waiting for the bugs now scattered across the floor to return to it and remake its leg and arm and hand, the angel spoke again.

“You are guests here, not free souls, none of you, and you need to remember that. The next time you are violent without permission, the next time you attack Thomas Fool or any other person here, I will take my pleasure in separating each part of you from every other part, and this time I will not stop, I will rid Heaven of the evil you represent. Do you understand?”

Wambwark, still remaking itself on the floor, made a noise that could have been assent, and although it was hard to tell, Fool thought it might have been glaring at him; Catarinch merely nodded, short and sharp, and when it carried on walking, it knocked Fool aside with its seeping elbow as it passed.
Even when I help, they hate me,
he thought, and then,
Fuck it, next time I'll let Benjamin slice them to nothing.

The envelope was on the desk in Fool's room, and the invitation to see Mayall was contained within it.

The path to Mayall's home started at a large fence, its bars topped with elaborate metal fleur-de-lis, its gate already open. Benjamin left him at the head of the path and gestured along it.

“He's in the building and he'll meet you there,” was all Benjamin said.

“You're not coming?” asked Fool, suddenly nervous. Benjamin and to some extent Israfil had been the only constants during his time in Heaven, and he found that walking away from the angel was oddly difficult, as though he was stepping out onto brittle mud that might break and let him fall through at any moment.

“I have not been invited, Thomas Fool,” said Benjamin. “No one sees Mayall without an invitation, and no angel is ever invited.”

“Never?”

“Never. Mayall is a solitary thing, apart from his own kind, surrounded by the resting inhabitants of Heaven and by his own thoughts. I must stay, Thomas Fool, and you must go. I will meet you here after you and Mayall have finished.”

Fool went. The path was long and threaded its way between fields of neatly mown grass, lined by tall trees whose caps of green leaves blocked his view of the sky as he walked under them. The path turned gently and his feet made soft sounds on the stone roadway as Fool went among the trees. It was cooler in the shade, the smells of earth and grass thick and clean in his nostrils, and the undergrowth rustled about him. The noise was curiously reassuring. Finally, the path turned back on itself in a gentle sweep before emerging from its ranks of accompanying trees to reveal Mayall's home.

The building was facing Fool, the path designed to bring the visitor out of the trees and to be looked at directly by the structure. It was, for the most part, long and low, two wings stretching out on either side of a taller central section like arms open in welcome. It was made of red stone or brick, had ivy creeping across it, the plants verdant green capillaries that shifted slightly in the breeze. The wings were two stories high and topped by a neatly tiled roof, but the central section was at least four or five stories tall, visible before it disappeared into banks of very low cloud, a white puffball mass that crept around the upper windows and cast its shadows on the ground about him. The underside of the cloud was stitched with darker gray patches that made it look heavy and deep, a ceiling above him that was claustrophobic in its proximity.

Fool approached the building across a graveled forecourt, his footsteps louder here, crunching, and came to a set of doors that were already open. There was a person standing by the doors, head down behind a curtain of long hair, beckoning him, one arm waving slowly at Fool as though the waver was underwater. When Fool got closer, he saw through the hair that it was a man, and his eyes were closed.

There was a sign on the wall by the doors, weathered wood attached to the stonework by rivets whose heads dripped rust, and although there was writing on the sign, words across the center of some kind of crest, Fool could not read it. It wasn't that he didn't understand it because it was in some other language, but the words themselves seemed to shift and slip whenever he tried to focus on them. When he looked away, the words slithered across the sign's face in his peripheral vision, always retaining their basic shape, almost making some kind of sense but never forming into anything he could properly recognize. The crest also blurred and twisted, refusing to hold any form, simply hinting and suggesting. Was that a lion? A dog? A shield? Fool couldn't tell. When he looked at the sign directly, everything in it broke apart, became a flurry of gray and brown shapes that held no meaning he could recognize.

“Thomas Fool,” called a voice from beyond the doors, “enter, please. I am so looking forward to meeting you!”

The sleeping man beckoned Fool forward again, this time actually going as far as taking a light hold on his elbow and simultaneously pulling and ushering him up the steps toward the doors. Fool allowed himself to be led to the doors, hands nervously brushing down his neat black uniform but feeling the smooth lines of the fabric as a rough and clumsy thing under his fingers, and then he was through them and into the space beyond.

Fool was in a long corridor with a tiled floor and walls lined up either side by regularly spaced doorways and, between the doorways, rows of wooden cupboards and metal lockers. From the ceiling above hung light fittings, long bars of illumination held by two chains. Dust hung in the air in the thick skeins, caught by the light and curling slowly, chasing themselves around in languid twists. The corridor smelled of wood and chalk and, more faintly, of sweat and old paper and something that Fool could only think of as concentration or intense attention; this was a place where people
thought
.

Above the lockers and cupboards strung out along the exposed faces of the walls were posters and pennants, but like the sign outside the words on them were impossible to read and kept rippling, changing whenever Fool looked at them, attaining only a half-formed reality at the edges of his sight.

Except for the man who had ushered him inside and who was now standing inside the doors with his head bowed and his shoulders slumped, arms hanging loosely, the corridor appeared empty. At its far end was a staircase that rose, widening as it did so to open out into the long horns of two upper corridors. A banner hung across the wide space in front of the staircase, covered in the now-familiar shifting words and shapes.

Fool, for want of anything else to do, began to walk toward the staircase, glancing at the cupboards and open lockers as he went. Some of the cupboards were glass-fronted and contained shelves on which stood small statuettes in gold or silver, set on plinths with tiny plaques on them; others were wooden-doored, closed and locked. The lockers were in sets, blocks four across and three high, all of them a dull green, most dented and battered. In one or two open lockers, he saw books haphazardly stuffed into the narrow spaces, piled on each other. The books looked old, well worn. Unable to help himself, he took one out and let it fall open in his hands. The pages were crumpled, some torn, covered in yet more of the shifting text as well as diagrams, lines, and angles that blurred and moved constantly. He put the book back, stepped again into the center of the corridor, and then saw them.

The nearest door had glass panels in its top half, and through them Fool could see rows of people sitting at desks. None were moving but each appeared to be concentrating on something hidden from his view. He moved closer to the door, peering in through the glass, seeing more of the room beyond.

There were perhaps forty of them, sleeping humans, seated at plain wooden desks. Some had paper in front of them on the desk surfaces and were writing, or at least pretending to write; their hands held pens or pencils and moved across the pages, but the marks they made were simply scrawled lines as far as Fool could see. Others merely stared at the far end of the room where an angel was standing motionless beside a large blackboard, across which white chalk lines were appearing and then vanishing; Fool could dimly hear the faint scratch of the lines being made and the low slosh of them being unmade.

“They're in school,” said a voice from behind Fool, the breath of the words brushing across his ear. He started, jumped, and banged into the door, his forehead knocking against the glass panel sharply. Whoever it was behind him laughed, loud and delighted, and clapped its hands. Fool turned, rubbing his forehead, and found himself looking at an angel who was grinning more widely than anyone Fool had seen before.

“Thomas Fool,” the angel said, “welcome, welcome! I'm Mayall, and this is my home, and you are welcome to roam its corridors at will!”

Before Fool could speak, Mayall reached forward and grasped his hand, shaking it furiously. The shake became almost frenzied, Fool's arm being yanked up and down until Mayall suddenly let it go and spun away, turning the rhythm of the shake into a kind of loose caper, his feet beating a jig on the floor. He laughed as he spun, the sounds echoing along the corridor and layering so that for a moment it sounded as though the corridor was filled with hundreds of laughing creatures rather than simply one. Mayall finally came to an uneven halt, gasping and still laughing, facing Fool and wobbling slightly as though he was dizzy. He panted, his tongue hanging from his mouth, a pink worm wriggling delightedly around his chin.

Mayall was unlike any angel Fool had seen before. He was dressed differently, clothed neither in flame nor feather, and not in robes but in trousers and an old shirt that was stained and wrinkled. His hair was long and so thick it looked almost greasy, swept back from his head, bouncing manically as he moved and dropping in lank strings that he continually had to brush back. His feet were bare and filthy, dirt in black swathes between his toes and disappearing up under the trouser cuffs, and his eyes were huge in a face that was handsome but not perfect in the way that other angels' were. He had lines across his forehead, although whether of frown or laughter Fool couldn't tell, and his mouth had an odd set to it, almost a pout of petulant humor.

He looked human.

At least, human apart from the wings that beat the air behind him, outstretched and constantly flapping, although even they looked somehow less than angelic, the feathers not aligned perfectly, noisy as they moved. Mayall had little of the stillness of the other angels Fool had met and none of the calmness; he
jittered,
constantly moving, his hands rising and falling as he spoke, his eyes darting around, taking everything in.

“It's such a pleasure,” said Mayall, “such a pleasure. Thomas Fool, the investigator from Hell, here in Heaven. We are honored.”

“Israfil doesn't think so,” said Fool without thinking.

“Israfil's a fool,” said Mayall and then roared with laughter again. “A fool! No offense intended, Fool, you're your own fool, as Israfil is hers! Both fools but different fools, Heaven's fool and Hell's Fool! Perhaps you should be friends, yes? Do you see?”

“Yes,” said Fool, not doing so, trying to keep up. “You wanted to see me?”

“See you, meet you, touch you, smell you!” said Mayall. “I told the Malakim we needed you, and I was right. We need your help, Fool, we've lost the skills that you have so recently gained.” Mayall suddenly spun and launched himself down the corridor, leaping up into the space and roaring with laughter and swooping through the air in front of the staircase, cycling around the banner before crashing back to the floor in front of Fool. His landing was clumsy and he staggered, arms flailing, into the wall, knocking a set of lockers down and sending their contents across the corridor in a scatter of paper and dust.

“Damage,” shouted Mayall, “there's damage in Heaven! Heavenly damage!” He began to dance again, spreading the paper more widely. Fool watched, utterly confused, as the angel kicked and slapped at the mess, tearing and ripping at the books and throwing small pieces of paper into the air to float above them, wavering in the updrafts of his wings.

“Paper in the air, paper on the floor,” the angel said as he danced among the chaos, “paper in the lockers and paper by the door!” He carried on chanting lines of doggerel and poetry as he kicked and leaped, all interspersed with laughter and hand claps and snatches of hummed tunes. The paper snowstormed around him, the air filled with torn pieces and battered dust, never allowed to rest because of the angel's dervish movements and agitations. He went on for maybe two or three minutes before finally coming to a halt, panting, letting the fragments of page fall to the floor in drifts around him.

“This is the only place in Heaven where things get damaged,” he said, his voice suddenly low, serious. “We're frightened of it, of damage, we've become too perfect, we've forgotten how to face imperfection.”

“I don't understand,” said Fool. Being with Mayall was exhausting; even after the scant minutes of his visit, he was tired.

“Come with me,” said Mayall and set off down the corridor. He walked rapidly, speaking in a constant stream as he went.

“Heaven is a place of joys, Fool, that's the point of it. We gather them together, the people who have earned their place here, we fish them out of Limbo after their lives of toil and we let them experience the places of their most private dreams, the places they were happiest. Those places become real around them, and so Heaven mirrors their loves and
becomes
their loves, and they stay until they're ready to move on. Look at them here, in school. They remember school as a place of safety, enough of them, so Heaven creates a school for them to be safe in while they dream their own Heavens into existence.”