The Devil's Evidence by Simon Kurt Unsworth

the horizon seemed to be getting closer, as though it was a fixed point that they were approaching, the space around them shrinking, bearing down on them. The creatures on the outside became more frantic, moving ever faster across the surface of whatever it was that stopped them from entering, limbs constantly seeking and prying and testing, mouths biting, teeth grinding. There was still no space between the creatures, just a single vast movement that was all longing and fury and desperation. The sound of them was as fragmented and unnatural as the sight of them, a cacophony that came from everywhere and yet had no recognizable noises in it. Was that a breath? A roar? The sound of a scream? No, it was none of those things and yet all of them, sound turned on its side and torn inside out and made alien and distorted and grating. Fool walked on.
    An hour or a minute or a day later, they stopped.
    The Delegation had arrived at a doorway. It was tall, high enough for a demon the size of Rhakshasas to walk through without ducking, and its frame was on fire, the wood of the door blackened and smoking. Wambwark reached out and knocked once, hard. The door swung open slowly, bright white light falling through the entrance and onto the path; where it hit, the path steamed, the earth sizzling and contracting. Wambwark reached into the light, holding its arm there for a second and looking; the illumination dripped across the mass of maggots, doing no apparent harm. As though decided, Wambwark flapped its cape over one shoulder, pushed its hat back, and stood taller and stepped through, into the light.
    The demon grew brighter and then it was gone.
    Catarinch stepped to the doorway, paused, then walked into the light. After a few seconds, the scribe followed. Fool was glad to see that the small demon, a scruffy thing with loping arms that reached nearly to the floor and a ruff of torn and broken feathers around its neck, looked nervous before it went through.
    Fool took a deep breath, stood as straight as his aching body would allow, and went after the demons. The light glared, dazzling him, forcing him to close his eyes. He smelled something sweet and fresh, unlike anything he could remember. Something unspoiled that made him think of fields in which there were no demons and in which the grass grew green and strong, and then a huge, gentle voice spoke.
    “Thomas Fool,” it said, “welcome to Heaven.”

6
    The field below them was filled with humans.
    Fool and the Delegation were standing at the top of a gentle slope whose grassed surface was a smooth, dark green. The doorway was behind them, a patch of wavering, shifting darkness through which Fool could still see the distant writhing of the creatures from outside. All around them were humans.
    There were more people in one place than Fool had seen before; even the great crowds of the Sorrowful, those poor bastards waiting in vain for Elevation from Hell to Heaven, couldn’t come close in number to the mass of people below him. They weren’t packed tightly; the field was vast, its edges distant lines marked by simple wooden fences. Beyond the fence was another field, also full of people.
    The crowd was not entirely still; people within it moved. Watching them was like watching the shadows of sunlight in water, a constant gentle swirl as they ambled along, slow and apparently without aim. It made streams in the crowd, flows and trickles that moved along then oxbowed back, curling on themselves. Some of the people turned as they walked, constantly revolving, arms out to their sides and heads bobbing; others didn’t move at all, or simply swayed as they stood, heads back and faces to the light of Heaven’s sun.
    Fool looked up, half expecting to see the burning darkness of Hell above them, a reflection of the view of Heaven that was available to Hell’s inhabitants, but the sky above him was a blue he had never seen before, light and deep and endless. It was broken here and there