The Devil's Detective (7 page)

“My home is a simple place, Fool, hardly a fitting venue for a slayer of demons,” said the Man. The words sounded as though they were being formed by rubbing pieces of leather together, liquid and hoarse, and Fool wondered how long the Man would be able to carry on talking. Not long, probably, and after that, would he communicate by rasping his leaves together? Or would one of those cups start to flap, forming words without breath or tongue? He was almost completely lost now, Fool saw, entirely buried beneath a riot of plants and flowers that filled the entire back half of the room.
The Man of Plants and Flowers
, he thought. It was what the Man had introduced himself to Fool as, was what he had been then and what he was now, more so than ever, and then what the Man had said filtered through Fool's brain and he was brought up short.

“Demon killer?” he asked. “What?”

“Haven't you heard?” asked the Man, laughter bubbling under his words like things being torn from mud. “You killed a demon at Solomon Water yesterday.”

“I didn't,” said Fool, “I—” and then he stopped. Killed a demon?

“Of course you did,” said the Man. “The humans are talking about it. They bring me the news, Fool, all my human friends, who need favors from me or want information in return for information. I hear them, Fool! You were seen, my old friend, and if only I had grown that far I would surely have seen it for myself. You tussled over the sad remains of a poor, dead human, fighting to give him the dignity in death that he lacked in life, and killed the demon that challenged you. It's everywhere, this tale of Fool the demon killer.”

“But I didn't,” said Fool again, suddenly feeling the world yaw beneath his feet. Demon killer? It made no sense, it wasn't even close to what had happened, and he had no idea how the other demons might react, or the Bureaucracy, if they thought he had killed one of their own. The Man's flesh whispered around him, drifts of light and dark fragmenting in the
air as he moved, the noise of him soft and sly.
I didn't
, thought Fool, and he felt suddenly hot and cold and tiny and lost and yet somehow terribly, awfully
visible.

Was this it? Was this where Hell noticed him?

“Of course you didn't,” said the Man, still slipping about him. “I'd imagine that you didn't even scare that minor thing, did you? And how is your head, beaten Fool?”

“Sore,” said Fool truthfully. The pain was melting now, losing its fresh sharpness and becoming the dull bloom of bruised flesh.

“But even that, Fool, even that is something to the watching crowds. You were injured, and yet still you stood your ground against the little nameless thing. A human standing against a demon? Unheard of! Not and surviving anyway, Fool, you know that; this is Hell, and no human ever challenges a demon, but you did. Demons are Hell's original inhabitants, and they hate us for our very existence and for invading their domain, and they kill that which stands against them and that which they feel like killing. But not you, Fool. You stood against them,
killed
one of them, and yet you live.

“Whether it's true or not doesn't matter, of course, because those humans saw what they have waited for a long time to see, a human challenge a demon and win. Who cares about the truth when they have a story like that, Fool, eh? And stories, like me, they grow, don't they? You, above all, should know that.”

It was true, Fool knew. On the rare occasions that he and the others managed to investigate one of the crimes whose details were contained in the canisters, every witness, every person, gave them different information. The greater the time that elapsed between the crime and the investigation, the more disparate the stories became, fed by the fear and the uncertainty that everyone in Hell felt, each version gathering weight, increasing in size, until finding the truth at its core became almost impossible. The job of the Information Men, he often thought, was not so much to gather information as to sift through it, trying to find the common threads among all the differences.

The mass in the corner of the room shook slightly, the fronds rustling, and although Fool could see no face within it, he had the impression that the Man was peering at him intently. Around him, the stems and
cables of greenery twisted, as though there were a breeze in the room, the leaves and flowers and fringed open cups turning toward him.

“Give, Fool,” said the Man, and the cup nearest Fool's head seemed to open even wider, the raw purple of its interior gleaming wetly. “I hear strange tales about the body, about what was done to it.”

“The man's soul was gone,” said Fool. “Completely consumed.”

The Man made a noise like a sigh, and the room itself trembled around Fool as he absorbed the information. Fool waited until the trembling had subsided, watching as the last vestiges of it made their way along the branches and shimmered out of the petals and leaves that filled the room, and then asked, “What can do that? Have you heard of anything?”

“It would have to be big, and old,” said the Man. “I haven't heard of anything, haven't felt anything like that. Hell was full of them once, but not for a long time. I suppose it may only just have raised itself, or have been asleep for these last years. There's a delegation from Heaven down at the moment.” It wasn't a question, so Fool didn't reply.

“Sometimes, delegations rattle the balances of Hell, and things emerge from the mud and the dirt because of them. This is a small place, Fool, inhabited mostly by humans who are little more than a moving feast and the demons who live off their nightmares and pain and misery but whose appetites are weak. There's little real evil left. Most of it has retreated, lives in the darkness at Hell's heart, and rarely emerges. There's savagery there, Fool, savagery that makes the everyday cruelties you see look like mere love bites.”

Fool listened in silence, thinking of the people he saw every day, their eyes always wary, the heads down, and wondered about how much worse a greater evil could be. How much more fear could people feel? How much more terror and pain could they carry? As if to punctuate his thoughts, one of the Man's mouths lunged and grasped an unseen creature, clenched around it with a crunch of splintering bones and a wet spray of blood.

“I'll listen for it, Fool,” said the Man a moment later. “If there is something, it shouldn't be hard to find, should it? It'll wear its horrors like a suit of clothes, don't you think, and nothing it goes near will remain untouched, human or demon or plant.”

The Man's bulk shifted again, this time away from Fool. The tangle
of him, of the things that sprouted from his flesh and grew away from him, filled the space from floor to ceiling. In the corner of his eye, Fool saw a flying thing alight on the edge of one of the cups. It bent, sniffing cautiously at the fleshy palms within. The Man made a sound, almost inaudible, wet with desire, his attention now completely off Fool. Fool turned to leave, not wanting to see or hear what would come next, but he was too late; another wet, ragged crunch came to him as he reached the doorway, accompanied by the Man's own gasp of delight. As Fool stepped back into the dim corridor, the Man, once a human but now something that Fool did not have a word for, called, “Come back soon, Fool, and I'll tell what there is to be told.”

There was a dead man in the road.

His head was missing and blood still spilled slowly from the ragged stump of neck, spreading in a clotting pool around him. Two small demons, little bigger than the missing head, were perched on his back, picking at his flesh; a third was lying in the gutter, covered in blood and rubbing at its swollen, stubby genitalia. Fool went toward the dead man, shooing away the demons. They hopped back from the corpse, glaring at Fool, not retreating far. His feet on the bloodstained dust, Fool knelt, and as he did so the one masturbating ejaculated, making a hooting, whistling sound. The other two darted over and began licking at it but neither, Fool saw, ever moved its attention from the dead body for more than a moment, even as they sucked at the strings of yellow semen that rolled across their companion's belly.

The headless man was barefoot and wearing thin trousers; his top half, what remained of it, was bare. There was dirt, old and black, ground into the man's skin; a factory worker, then. There were scratches across his back, some shallow (from the little demons' claws, Fool supposed) and several deeper, more aggressive wounds. The soles of the man's feet were scored and raw, and his left heel had a piece of glass impaled into it. A trail of bloody footprints led to the fallen figure, winding raggedly back across a few feet of cracked pavement to a cluster of buildings, bars, and closed factories. These were the straggler bars, out on the edge of the
Houska, violent in a grimy, small way, dressed in less glitter and with fewer attractions than the larger establishments closer in to the center.

As Fool looked along the trail of footprints, someone appeared from between the buildings, saw the body and Fool crouched over it, and stopped. It was a human. The three little demons chattered to each other and one, taking advantage of Fool's shifted attention, darted toward the body and tried to snatch another piece of flesh from the sundered neck. Fool saw it coming and hit out with the back of his hand, sending it skittering back. Its body was hot, the heat sending a flash of pain across his knuckles, and the demon snarled at him, baring tiny, blood-streaked teeth.

Fool looked at the three warily; they probably couldn't hurt him—they were too small and had fed too well on fresh flesh and old fear to be a serious threat—but still. He drew his gun and pointed it at the snarling one, gesturing with the barrel. It snarled again, and the one in the gutter made another whistling sound; the third, finding no more ejaculate on its companion's belly to suck up, started to lick the blood from its companion's face. Fool glanced over at the figure by the buildings. Whoever he was, he had started to jitter, hopping from foot to foot, and Fool suddenly understood that he wanted to tell him something,
needed
to tell him, but not where he could be seen or heard, that he was frightened of the telling and that the fear was growing and he was preparing to run. Fool had to get to him now.

When he looked back, the first demon had returned to the neck, was harrying at the flesh with tiny, pincered claws. Even as Fool cried out angrily and hit at it with his gun, the demon popped a tiny piece of dripping skin into its mouth and started to chew. As it tasted the things caught in the skin, released by the rapid movement of its tiny jaws, a triumphant look came over its face. Fool made one last effort, poking at it with his gun, but the thing merely snarled again, baring teeth that had pieces of torn human between them, and batted at the end of Fool's gun barrel, trying to knock it away. If there was danger, it was from this one, not the other two; it was the leader of the little pack, stupid as dirt, trying to face down Fool.
Silly thing
, he thought briefly and remembered the crunch of things being eaten by the Man, and pulled the trigger.

The gun boomed, the sound rolling across the expanses of road and then bouncing back in a flat plosive, and the demon vanished in spray of orange. This close, the bullet tore through its belly, the vacuum of its passing reducing to steaming vapor what intestines it did not drag out and spatter in a wide fan across the road. The other two demons screeched, darting away, pleasures forgotten as shadows leaped, startled, away from the corpse and then snapped back into it.

In the flash of angry light from the gun's blast, the figure between the buildings was revealed as a young man, his face wide and moonlike as he watched the little demon disintegrate. He looked at Fool, his expression one of terror, terror and something else that Fool couldn't identify, and then he turned and ran.

Fool gave chase without much hope of catching the man; he was younger than Fool and looked like a factory worker, thin and cordlike. Not healthy, maybe, but healthier than Fool, who did little physical exercise, who had noticed his muscles becoming less taut in these past months.

The man darted back between the rows of shuttered doorways, and Fool went after him, already feeling the stitch of lost breath punching into his side. Instead of escaping, however, the man slowed by the entrance to a small bar. In the pallid, streaked light falling through the glass door, the blood that lay across him in a spray stretching from his waist to his neck was clear. He looked back at Fool, then at the bar, and then he ran again, this time fast, and when he disappeared around a corner, Fool didn't bother to follow.

The man had slowed by the bar, looked at it. It was as clear a message as Fool could ever remember getting, information unbidden, unforced. He didn't know the bar, but then, he didn't know many of them that well. He sometimes went to one of the few Sorrowful bars, places where humans could drink without demons bothering them, but most of the places in the Houska were demon places where humans were mere staff or chattel. Some of the ones on the outskirts, like this one, nameless and small, were places where uneasy crossovers occurred, where the factory workers drank on their way home, mingling with demons starting their night's entertainments, and mostly the two groups left each other alone.
No one would talk to him, no one would welcome him there.
What was the point of entering?
he wondered.

The dead man's head had been torn from his neck.

Fool shook his gun, feeling the reassuring weight of the next bullet forming, another of Hell's random gifts; only Information Men had guns, and their ammunition was created from the air by the Bureaucracy according to a system only they understood. Fool thought about Hell, about nameless death, about a human brave enough to try to show him something even as he ran, and about bodies on streets.
How many have I investigated during my time here?
he wondered.
How many
haven't
I investigated?
It was impossible to remember. How many of those deaths had he given reason to, solved? That was easier to remember: perhaps fifteen or twenty, and for those few, how many had he brought to justice? Even easier: none. Whether it was the predation by a demon powerful enough to tear a person's soul loose in a flash of blue light, or the savaging of a factory worker and a set of footprints that marked out the last walk they had taken, death was a constant here, and all of them, Fool included, were merely links in the chains it formed.