Inside Man

by K.J. Parker

BETTER THE DEVIL YOU KNOW, so allow me to introduce myself: I’m the Devil. Or at least, I’m his duly accredited proxy and representative, part of his organization, part of him in a deeply spiritual sense, flesh of his incorporeal flesh, spirit of his profoundly antisocial spirit. I do little jobs for him (actually, properly speaking, for them; he’s a body corporate, like a swarm of flies—see under “My name is Legion: for we are many”), such as occasional tempting, a bit of general legwork, but mostly bread-and-butter demonic possession. In that capacity, I’m your worst nightmare, the most horrible thing that can possibly happen to you in this world or the next. You couldn’t bear to look me in the face, something the sun and I have in common, but let’s not go there quite yet. You really don’t want me inside your head; trust me on this if on nothing else. It may therefore come as a bit of a surprise to you to learn that I’m basically on your side, or at least that we’re ultimately singing from the same hymn sheet, you and I. Suppose the hand dislikes the ear, and the ankle despises the shoulder blade, and the appendix thinks the colon is full of it. Would it matter, so long as they all obey the brain and believe in what it’s trying to do? Maybe the rain hates the sea—I don’t know. They all have something in common. We all do, even you and me. I like to think that what we have in common is what’s right. Other people, however, don’t necessarily share our view.

A thousand years ago, the Third Horn was endowed by Duke Sighvat III to sing masses for his soul in perpetuity, in shifts, round the clock; the idea being that if you can afford to pay Holy Mother Church a very large sum of money, then once you’re dead, a continuous, unbroken chorus of prayer will rise up from the exceptionally pious monks of the Third Horn, imploring divine mercy for your soul for ever and ever. The logic is irresistible. No matter that when you were alive, you were as evil as a barrel full of rats and that you died in your sins, entirely unrepentant. The Third Horn monks, the very best saints that money can buy, are men of such irreproachable sanctity that He can deny them nothing; therefore, you are forgiven for their sakes, not your own. It’s a sweet deal at a sensible price. Say I sent you.

The monks offer up prayers for the dead twenty-four seven, using precisely calculated forms of liturgy of known and proven effectiveness, the same formulae over and over again, like lawyers conveying a freehold, while unending ages run. My job is to sidle up to a choir monk in full flow; slip in through his ear, eye socket, or open mouth; and distract him, insinuating into his mind an irrelevant, mundane thought, sapping his concentration so that he mumbles, lets the stress fall on the wrong syllable, gets a word wrong or in the wrong order, maybe misses out a whole phrase. That, naturally, invalidates the whole prayer—those who live by the letter of the law die by the letter of the law, and you can’t have it both ways—and the soul of some evil rich bastard has a nasty five minutes in the blissful Hereafter, until the next cycle of prayer starts and he’s safely enveloped once again in protective intercession.

So there we are, me and Brother Eusebius, who’s basically all right in my book. He’s seventy-six years old, joined the order as a novice when he was nine; as of compline today, he’s recited the mass for the dead 142,773 times. There’s a thing called muscle memory. It’s how archers and swordsmen and athletes train. You do something often enough, your body can do it perfectly, even when your mind is miles away. The muscles that control Brother Eusebius’s tongue and larynx run as smoothly and efficiently as the great mechanical clock in the Third Horn bell tower: word-perfect, unflappable, automatic. His mind is away with me, gazing into the ineffable light of His presence, but his lips are still shaping the magic words, in exactly the right order, with the stresses in exactly the right places. I enjoy a challenge, but this guy’s got me beaten. Ah well. Tomorrow is another day, and tomorrow and tomorrow. No big deal. Light duty.

him wonder— He sees me inside a deacon from Odryssa visiting the Third Horn library to consult a commentary on Theodosius. There’s always one or two new faces in a big, cosmopolitan monastery like the Third Horn; it’s one of the things he and I both like about the place. I happen to know, having been inside his mind earlier, that he’s rather fond of sesame-seed rolls, which is why I crept into Brother Cellarer’s head and planted there the notion of baking them today. Some people might call it demonic possession, but to me, it’s just being considerate. Brother Eusebius nibbles the end off his roll and looks at me over it. “Not bad.” “Personally,” I reply, “I could do without the hint of cinnamon.” “Me, too, but nothing’s ever perfect. Thank you.” Oh. “What for?” He smiles at me. “Sometimes, to win us to our harm,” he says with his mouth full, “the instruments of darkness bring us buns. Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”

And that’s me told. I sigh. “Don’t beat yourself up about it,” he says. He’s a short man with dark skin, white hair, and pale brown eyes. “Actually, you’re not bad—you’d fool most of the pinheads we get in the profession these days.” He nibbles a bit more of his bun. “Was that you inside my head earlier?” I nod. “Sorry about that.” “No, please, don’t apologize.”

“And He—?” “Exists, yes.” Pause. “I thought you knew that.” “Believed,” he says softly. “As opposed to knowing. There’s a difference.” “I suppose so,” I say. “Well, then. And now you know.” “As opposed to believing.” He frowns slightly. “Rather an extraordinary position to be in, for someone in my line of work. Being sure, I mean.”

“Doing deals with the—” “It’s not a deal,” I point out, “since you’ve already received the benefit, free, gratis, and for nothing. Therefore, there would be no—” “Collusion?” “I believe the correct legal jargon is consideration. No bargain. Just a graceful gesture of thanks on your part. Call it a professional courtesy, from one old lag to another.” “I don’t know.” He looks at me. I sigh. “It’s one of those cases,” I say, “where the order of events is of the essence. If I came to you and said, ‘Snafu the mass for the dead, and in return I’ll show you the face of the living God,’ then, yes, that would be actionable and we’d have you for it. But where there’s no reciprocity, and no ongoing obligation—” “Moral obligation.” “Moral obligation to one of our lot? Oh please.” He grins. “It would be a sin.” “True,” I say. “But a forgivable one.” “If you do the sin with the intention of repenting later, the repentance doesn’t count.” “Tell you what,” I say, “I’ll pray for you. How would that be?”

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.’

sigh. “Fine,” I say. “You win. Though in all fairness, I should point out that ingratitude is also a sin.” “Nobody’s perfect.” He grins. “I’ll pray for you if you like.” “Thanks,” I say, “but I have an idea I’m a bit above your prayer grade. No offense.” “None taken. And it’s the thought that counts.” “No,” I tell him. “It isn’t.”

once spent eleven years in the mind of a poor widow who sold cabbages out back of the Poverty & Justice, at the Hippodrome end of Brook Street, just before the war. She was nobody: nobody’s wife, nobody’s daughter, nobody’s mother, nobody’s reliable tenant or valued employee. Nobody would ever miss her, take any notice if she started acting funny—or funnier than she usually did, poor addled creature. Even if I got rumbled, nobody would pay good money to have her put right, because that’s work for highly trained specialists, and their services are expensive. Seen as too ugly and too dumb to be worth exploiting. (I don’t think I’d want to be a human, somehow; you people never seem to have got the knack of looking out for each other.) She wasn’t worth anything to anybody, except me.

It’s just a job, that’s all—a job for which we get no pay, no thanks, and a volcanic bollocking if things don’t go exactly according to plan. We do it because that’s who we are. You lot got free will; we were assigned our respective functions. We serve; therefore, we are. Furthermore (in theory, at least), every function in the divine service is of equal value, from archangels and cherubim down to night soil operatives and tempters. From each according to his ability, to each . . . Well, there is no to. We require nothing except work to do, which is provided for us, and we’re supposed to be grateful.

Even before I was officially fragile, I relished (and still do) the very occasional moment of quiet, stillness, and peace. Not something I tend to encounter in my everyday life. When I’m on the job—was on the job, pre-fragile—it’s often quiet, sneaking around on tiptoe so as not to alert the householder to your presence, but the stillness tends to be the pre-storm variety, and you can forget all about peace. When you’re deep inside the mind of the sort of people we generally get called on to inhabit—let’s say I’ve been in some pretty grim places in my time, and nearly all of them have had bone walls. It’s noisy in there, what with all the sobbing and the yelling and the horrible vivid memories played back at maximum volume, over and over again. One thing you can’t do under such conditions is hear yourself think. The Third Horn chapel is, by comparison, an earthly paradise.

Brother Eusebius explains it by saying that just as human mortals can’t look directly at the sun without damaging their optic nerves, they can’t directly address Him face-to-face and person-to-person without risking spiritual damage— (“It makes you go blind, in other words.” He grins at me. “Exactly.”) —so they seek the intercession of an intermediary, in accordance with the properly constituted chain of command: priest to guardian angel to archangel to principality to power to virtue to dominion to throne to cherub to seraph to Holy Mother and eventually to the big boss himself. It’s all about proper channels, which proverbially run deep, and doing things the right way, so that everybody knows where they stand and the file copies end up in the right folders.

Not the first time I’d possessed an unborn child; maybe that’s why I got the job, because it’s not the sort of assignment that comes up every day, and there are technical issues. A certain level of experience and expertise would, therefore, be useful. It’s a long-term gig. If you go in that early, you can’t come out again until the kid’s at least five years old, not without killing it; besides, the whole point of going in before the subject’s even been born is to create a really high-class munitions-grade sleeper, an ultimate inside man. Ah well, not like I had anything better to do for the next twenty-thirty-forty years, and it was bound to be peaceful. No banging about, shouting, goading the subject into screaming fits, broken bones, acts of mayhem. Much more my sort of thing, because if you’re designing and creating a long-term weapon, you want it to be well equipped, versatile, efficient, high performance; therefore, you want a cultured, educated mind in a strong, healthy body, with good social skills, an ear for music, a thorough basic grounding in the arts and sciences, theology and scripture and everything else a person might need in order to carry out an important mission, the particulars of which are to be announced later but which might involve anything, so best to be prepared. It was my duty, in other words, to turn the subject into as close as I could get to the perfect human; the Saloninan Übermensch; a compendium of all the qualities, skills, and virtues; the...

The prime directive of our order and Rule Number One: First, do no harm. If that sounds vaguely familiar to you, by the way, I’m not surprised. Your lot stole it from us, a long time ago. But we demons formulated our code of practice while the ancestors of your human doctors were still picking lice out of each other’s fur. First, do no harm: so I slide slowly and with infinite care through the upper layers of the unborn infant’s mind, like a thoughtful husband easing into bed next to his sleeping wife. Doing no harm in this context means not letting the subject know he’s being taken over. It’s an incredibly traumatic thing for you people, to know you’re being possessed. It’s terrifying and you can’t bear the intrusion—think what it’s like when you’ve got a sharp bit of grit in your eye, and then consider how infinitely more sensitive your mind is, and how much more damage you can do by rubbing at it. But all your instincts scream at you to fight, and you’re not to know that fighting us isn’t actually possible. Really—don’t try. The more you kick and thrash around, the more you bruise and break yourself, but you can’t touch us, naturally. We aren’t there, in your terms. We are spirit, essence, not of the body; not insubstantial, but composed of a kind of substance you could never even begin to understand. And if that sounds patronizing, you’ve missed the point. You really don’t want to be in a position where you could begin to understand us.

curdle out of insubstantiality into substance. What I curdle, incidentally, is your brains, but the resultant mess isn’t me. The knots and bogies of coagulated goop suddenly formed inside your head aren’t me incarnate. They’re still just proteins and fats and hemoglobin, the stuff you’re made of. No, I’m the process, if that makes any sort of sense at all. When I go in, I catalyze, I set changes in motion. In Orthodox Trinitarian terms, there’s now three of us in one: you, me, us.

It says in the code of conduct: Having effected a legitimate entry, an officer shall not desert his post unless relieved by a colleague, ordered to evacuate by a superior, or expelled by a duly authorized agent of the opposition. Desertion is a very serious matter, a court-martial offense, and if you’re found guilty, the punishment is absolutely nothing at all, because what can they possibly do to someone like me? Break my sword and snip my buttons off? They already did that. Demote me and put me on light duties? Yes, please. Accordingly, I back away toward the mouth of the eustachian tube, my preferred choice for a speedy getaway. He’s quicker than me, and much stronger. He reaches out and grabs me. It’s absolutely true that we can’t be killed or even damaged, since we’re immutable and not susceptible to any sort of change, while unending ages run. But we can feel pain. Boy, can we feel pain. He gets his fingers round my head, his thumbs in my ears, and squeezes. I feel pain. Lots of it. When he’s finished doing that, he lets go. “You’re one of them,” he says. I stare at him. I’d assumed he was one of us. His appearance—but you can’t judge by appearances, not when you’re dealing with insubstantial beings. He sounds and acts like one of us. But apparently he isn’t. “Who are you?” I somehow manage to ask. “Me? I live here.” Oh boy.

In one sense, they’re a parallel service to ours. In other respects, they couldn’t be more different. For a start, they’re all freelancers. Once they’ve qualified and got their tickets, they go out into the world and practice their vocation for money, usually a great deal of money. There aren’t very many of them—it’s not something you can simply decide to do, you have to be born to it, with the knack, a very rare gene, a mutation, not something that runs in families, like red hair—so demand for their services always outstrips supply, and the universal scientific principle of Survival of the Richest tends to direct their efforts toward possession victims in the higher income brackets.

Now, about pain. For you lot, it’s a useful and positive thing. It tells you when something’s wrong with you. Admittedly, it’s a bit naïve in believing that once you know about the problem, you can invariably put it right, so maybe as a system it could do with a little fine-tuning, and presumably they intend to do that in the Mark 2, which I gather is due for release anytime now, though for some reason my breath remains unheld.

I’m halfway to the earhole when I stop and think about it. Remember what I told you about possessing an infant? Once you’re in, you can’t leave until they’re at least five years old, not unless you want to kill them. Do I want to kill the little horror? Need you ask? But I can’t. The prime directive of our order, Rule Number One: First, do no harm. (Actually, there are two schools of thought about that. One scholarly faction disputes the reading, blaming textual corruption in the manuscript tradition. What it should say, according to them, is: At first, do no harm. Wait a bit, get yourself nicely settled in, and then roll up your sleeves and start laying about you with the poker. It’s an entirely valid reading if you accept the textual emendation, and the philological evidence is ambiguous—a matter of personal choice, basically. Unfortunately, I made my choice a long time ago. I read first; no at.)

Yes, I urge myself, but just contemplate this monster and ask yourself: Will the world be a better place with him or without him? To which I give the only possible answer: Not my call to make. For all I know, the Plan has big things lined up for the little bastard to do. Nobody, especially a lowly field-grade officer like me, has the right to go fooling around with the weft of the great tapestry. Decision-making on that scale should be left to the proper authorities. They’re on the fourth floor, incidentally, second level, the other side of the water cooler from the Department for the Regulation of the Fall of Sparrows: a dedicated, hardworking team who are passionate about what they do, and if you screw things up for them, they’re on you like a ton of bricks. Besides, I tell myself, he’s only a kid; he doesn’t know any better. What he needs is someone to straighten him out, explain things, teach him the difference between right and wrong. There would be a certain irony if that person should turn out to be me, but no matter. Someone somewhere presumably knows what He’s doing. Meanwhile, Rule Two: Thou shalt not second-guess the fourth floor.

“You’re the one who’s in trouble,” I pant. “Really. How’d you make that out?” “Unprovoked attack. Excessive force. I wasn’t even inside anyone. You abducted me.” “You were engaged in extreme blasphemy. I exercised my discretion under section 6 and placed you in close confinement to avoid further desecration of a scheduled holy place.” He stamps on my metaphorical ear. “Now I’m exercising my discretion under section 6a and preemptively preventing you from resisting arrest. Praying, for crying out loud. You should be ashamed of yourself.” “If I confess that I was praying, will you stop hurting me?” “No.” “Fine. I wasn’t praying.”

There is, of course, no seventh floor. Instead, there’s a variation on the theme of existence where a faint memory of what I used to be, more a caricature than anything else, drifts in and out of partial consciousness just long enough to compile duty rosters and docket monthly returns. It’s all, they tell you, about efficiency. You don’t actually need memories or a personality or an identity to do routine administrative chores; in fact, you’re better off without them. No distractions. Just the job in hand, and the bare minimum of functionality necessary to get it done. You can see why we snigger behind our hands when we look at your paintings and frescoes of Hell. Is that how you perceive eternal damnation? Brimstone? You people simply don’t have a clue.

Clerical work is as close as any of us can hope to get to death: oblivion, the untroubled dreamless sleep of the deskbound.

Division exists outside sequential linear time, so for him, all the future is foreseeable. “It’s a sweet thought,” I say, “but on balance, I’d rather not.” The word balance does unpleasant things to my metaphorical inner ear, and I wobble alarmingly. He grabs my virtual arm. “It’s all right,” he says, smiling pleasantly. “Even if you did topple and plunge headlong, flights of demons would rush up and break your fall. It’s all part of the service.” “That’s good to know,” I say. “But I wouldn’t want to be a nuisance to anyone.”