The Devil's Poetry

by Louise Cole

  Wulf stepped over the woman and began to empty cupboards into a grocery bag bearing the words “bag for life”. The irony made him smile. The child roared and squealed, its little face as terrified as a pig in an abattoir.

  Wulf felt nothing.

  ***

  After dinner, I stood by the window, looking into the garden. Jace was out there somewhere. It made me feel safer. I was pushing my face against the glass, watching for any sign of him in the darkness, when I realized I could be seen, snub-nosed against the window, much more easily by Jace, than him by me. I hastily straightened up and was running my fingers through my hair, just in case, when Amber phoned.

  “Listen, I came up squat on your secret order. If they are real, and they certainly seem to be, they really are secretive.” She hesitated. “There’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe you should sit down.”

  “Amber, tell me.”

  “I was googling everything I could think of, and so I did your mum.”

  My heart was still. “And?”

  “There’s some stuff about her work at York University and an obituary.”

  “Yes. I know all that.”

  “There’s a piece from a local paper. Callie. She didn’t die in a car crash. She was found hanged. It was presumed a suicide.”

  I dropped the receiver onto the bed. No car crash. A dead Reader. Oh my God. They caught her. I felt . . . numb. My mum had died a long time ago. I had grieved a long time ago. This didn’t change that, and yet . . . it felt like I’d been grieving for all the wrong reasons. She’d been alone and scared, and . . . I hadn’t even known. Even when she was dead, I hadn’t been able to sympathize with what she’d gone through, feel for her the way she needed me to. Did that matter?

  “Callie? Callie?” Amber’s voice was distant.

  I picked up the phone again. “Where did they find her?”

  “The Marchbanks’ barn.” Amber was silent for a moment. “Cal, I’m so sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have looked, I was—”

  “Then I’m glad we burned it to the ground. Thanks. I’ve got to go.” I hung up. I couldn’t talk to anyone. Not even Amber. I walked to the kitchen in a daze, carefully, as though my feet couldn’t trust the ground to be there with each step. My dad was fussing with some herbs. The news was on in the background with some government minister talking about the war.

  “I don’t have to tell you that the situation is grave, but the UN has sanctioned more troops to cover the Asian borders, and we are of course committed to making these peace talks a success . . . ”

  Dad looked up, saw me. “It’s a bad business, this. If they don’t get it sorted, I worry for the fate of this sorry world.”

  Now he wants to have a conversation, I thought. You lied to me. All these years, you lied to me.

  I didn’t know why I had even come in here. I just needed . . . space. “I’m going in the garden.”

  Outside, thin strips of moonlight silvered the grass, shifting and drifting like ghosts. The cold sank steel teeth into my arms.

  One of the Order would be around, I guessed, probably hidden in the coppice behind the hawthorn. I didn’t care about the darkness or the Order or the cold. I walked down the lawn, past Dad’s herbs and the trees, to the tatty fence which cut us off from the field beyond. I stopped there looking at the trellised wood, snaking in and out of itself, my head as empty as the night. I forced myself to name it, to think the words. Hanged. A noose tightened around her neck until she couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t scream.

  My foot lashed out at the fencing, a piece of timber flying into the night, and I kicked it again and again, the heavy post bending slightly under the onslaught, bruising my foot, a shard of wood flying back and hitting me in the face and still I didn’t stop, slamming my right leg into it like it deserved to die, to be nothing, to be crushed and splintered and forgotten.

  Arms lifted me from behind, and still I kicked out, my feet stretching to reach the last broken crisps of timber, to powder the fragments.

  “Callie. Callie, shhh. Calm down. Calm down.”

  I didn’t listen. I just thrashed and punched. It was minutes before I hung there, still, empty, like someone had turned me off again. It was minutes before I could speak. I wasn’t afraid. I knew it was Jace holding me. I knew I was safe. Didn’t care one way or the other.

  “Why didn’t you tell me they killed her?”

  “I’m—Callie, you knew your mom died. Didn’t you?” He sounded bewildered.

  “Not like that,” I said quietly. “I didn’t think she died like that.” At some point he had turned me to face him, holding me close, and I pressed my hands against his chest gently, forcing a distance. “I thought being a Reader was a good thing. But it killed her.”

  He released me. “Oh God, Callie, I’m so sorry. If we’d known . . .”

  “You did know.” I lashed out at him, raining my fists down on his chest until my hands hurt. “You did know.”

  “I don’t know what happened. Exactly. Only the manner of her death.” He caught my arms and held them. “Do you want me to find out?”

  “Was it before or after she read?”

  “Before.”

  I started to breathe too fast, huge racking sobs that left no room for tears but which hurt my chest and made my legs fold under me. Jace pulled me into his arms and held me there at the foot of the oak tree while I choked and shook. He made no effort to stop me. He wrapped his arms tight around me and pressed his head against the top of mine.

  Later, I woke in my bed, still wearing my shirt and underwear. Jace was asleep at the foot of the bed, head on a folded sweatshirt. I got up and fetched a blanket and draped it over him. He opened his eyes.

  “I could have been an evil prowler,” I whispered.

  “You weren’t.” He caught my hand and held it for a moment. “I am sorry,” he said. It felt as though he was apologizing for more than my grief, for the whole situation.

  “It’s not your fault.” I tried to smile, but he dropped my hand and his gaze.

  “You should go back to sleep.”

  I slipped back under the duvet. “Dad didn’t see you?”

  Jace nodded at the window. “I picked the lock on your door. Anyway, he was in his study.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  I could hear my pulse drumming in my ears as soon as I put my head against the pillow, the thundering feet of an army. “You said my mum died before she got to read? When the oil wars were first kicking off?”

  Jace grunted softly.

  “So things have become this bad because she wasn’t here to stop them?” I kept my eyes on a tiny slit of moonlight at the edge of the curtain. Maybe looking at something else let me pretend my mind could disconnect from the words. Or maybe I was literally looking for light beyond the darkness.

  “That’s one way to look at it,” he murmured.

  “Is there another?”

  A floorboard creaked as Jace rolled over and propped his head on his arm. “This isn’t your Mom’s fault, Callie. The Order must have found another Reader, after her, I guess.”

  “You don’t know who?”

  I sensed, rather than saw, him shrug in the darkness. “I only know about your Mom because of the connection to you.” He sighed. “The world isn’t safe right now, because the Order doesn’t always get it right. The timing of the reading, or where it happens. I mean look at World War I or II. Maybe they tried and failed, or maybe they could only affect a part of it, you know? Maybe the one place that hasn’t gone down in history is where the reading happened. I don’t know. But I think they are always guessing when to intervene, which point might prove pivotal.” He looked up at me, his face more than half lost to shadow. “All we know for sure is now is dangerous.”

  “Jace?” I whispered.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “You’re not going to leave, are you?”

  There was a pause. “No, Callie,” he said, eventually. “I’m going t
o stay right here.”

  I fell asleep, feeling better protected than I had in a long time.

  Chapter 10

  The baby started crying again. The woman fumbled for the light switch in the dark, feet searching for slippers but finding only the rough weave of carpet. She padded barefoot out of the room. On the landing, she gripped the banister tight until her veins showed blue through the back of her hand. No. No, not now. Not when she was up, awake. The panic attacks only came in dreams and the gray twilight between sleeping and waking. Not now, not when she was awake.

  Still, her heart hammered, and her breathing squeezed too fast in and out of her lungs like a bellows, sharp little wheezes with no oxygen in them. The baby screamed, and she hurried into her daughter’s room in the dark, seeing nothing but her dead husband, nothing but dirt and blood and that little medallion he had always worn half-buried in the muddy track.

  She forced her eyes wide, saw the child’s red, angry face, scrunched and snotty. She experienced a sudden certainty that the baby knew. Her daughter knew her father was dead. And the child screamed as though it wasn’t her fault. If they hadn’t had a child the woman could have gone to find him, bring him home. If they hadn’t had a child, they could have run. She took a breath and screamed back.

  “Shut up! Shut the hell up, you stupid child! Just shut up!”

  Downstairs, the back door closed silently, the dark figure scooping up his bag of food and clothes and hurrying away into the night.

  ***

  I crawled on my belly through the undergrowth, making as little noise as I could. The enemy were all around me. A trickle of cold sweat ran down my spine. I pulled a grenade from my pack, half-buried it in the earth, lifted the spring, and wound a small thread of wire around it. Carefully, carefully, I spooled the wire and slowly pulled it across the track I had made, tying it off on a twig. Let them follow if—

  “Callie.”

  “Huh?” I sat bolt upright, sweat soaking my shirt. My father stood in front of me. Jace was nowhere to be seen.

  “I know it’s Sunday, but are you intending to get up at all?”

  “Oh. Right.” I waited until my father had left the room before I climbed out of bed. The book tumbled free of the sheet. I quickly picked it up and pulled out the box, but then I hesitated. I should keep it with me. For safety.

  No, a small voice whispered. I want to keep it with me. I tucked the book into my bag.

  I stood under the shower trying to wash off the essence of the dream, but the scent of foliage and sweat and mud was still in my nostrils when I dried myself. I pulled on jeans and a vaguely clean sweater.

  “Going to Amber’s,” I yelled, and I was out of the door before he could stop me.

  Jace met me at the bottom of the drive, swinging open the passenger door of a car.

  “Please tell me you weren’t thinking of walking anywhere,” Jace said.

  “I didn’t know where you were.”

  “I’ll never be far away. You can count on it.”

  I climbed in, more relieved than I wanted to admit that he hadn’t bailed on me. Besides, his smile lit a little fire inside me, which tumbled like a Catherine wheel through my general confusion. It didn’t help me decide about the reading, but it did make everything a little bit brighter.

  I had to make a decision. I didn’t know anything about this reading except what they had told me, and what they had told me was pretty compelling. How could I refuse when the lives of so many—the lives of my friends, perhaps—were at stake? All I had to do was, what? Read some poetry? Put like that, it was a no-brainer. My mother had been prepared to do it, and she had been a lot older and smarter than me.

  It was also the reason she’d left me. It got her killed. Had she chosen this over me? Acid burned in my chest.

  “You ready?” Jace hadn’t turned the ignition. It felt like he was asking a thousand things at once.

  “For? You’re going to have to be more specific.”

  “The peace talks start on Tuesday. We need you to read to make them successful. Ella has stuff to tell you, things you’ll need to know to do it right. So we have two days to prepare you.” Jace spread his hands wide. “Are you in or not?”

  “Sure.” For the moment.

  Was it worth it, Mum? Trying to save the world but abandoning your daughter? The acid bubbled like rage, but, even so, I knew I was hooked. If I was ever going to answer those questions, I needed to walk in her footsteps. I wasn’t stupid. I knew the anger was just the top edge of grief. A grief that wanted her back, badly. Her scent, her smile. The woman who crept out with me to see herons fishing so early we were bathed in moonlight.

  I knew another reason I wanted to carry on, but I didn’t like to look at it head-on. The book itself. If I said no, they would take it away, and my stomach tightened at the thought of losing it. I could feel it even now, not physically, but like a warm glow at the back of my mind.

  Ella was waiting for me when we arrived at the cottage.

  “OK,” I said, trying to disguise my nervousness. “Reader at the ready. What do I have to do?”

  “We’re going to practise harnessing and projecting emotion,” said Ella, gesturing to an armchair and then sitting opposite me.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, you know how the Cadaveri make everyone feel? That’s because they project their energy. It’s how they’re built. Readers do the same thing, and that’s why the reading affects so many people on an emotional level.”

  “I thought I’d be studying the book.” Its themes, allusions, rhyme structures. All the stuff I was good at, in other words. But emotion? I was already out of my depth, and we hadn’t even started.

  “We’ll start easy with a word game. Tell me the first word you think of when I say something. Tomato.”

  “Pasta.”

  “Fear.”

  “White.”

  “Love.”

  “Death.”

  Ella stopped and smiled.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Let’s try something else.”

  We worked for two hours with games and talking about feelings. It was like Oprah meets Freud. I felt I was making no progress whatsoever.

  “Can’t I just read the damn thing?”

  “Not if you want to do it successfully. Tell me your first happy memory. Something that filled you up with joy.”

  I instantly thought of my mother’s face, as she leaned over a book with me, her eyes twinkling, one hand on my hair. “I wrote a poem when I was about seven, which the teacher said was brilliant. I felt like I was walking on air.”

  Ella frowned. “There was something else. Before that.”

  “No.” My memories of my mother were private. They were mine. They were all I had of her. The thought of Ella gate-crashing my emotions made my skin crawl. Luckily, she couldn’t read my mind.

  “I know there was,” she insisted. “You switched. You felt truly happy for a moment and then—it went.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t let anyone get that close. Not even Amber knew everything about me, and she was the Jane to my Elizabeth (Jane being the smart sister in Pride and Prejudice). Apart from anything else, I wouldn’t do that to Amber—she handled enough of my crap as it was. No way was I sharing my soul with someone I met two days ago.

  “Callie, you need to understand something,” said Ella. “Reading the book isn’t about speaking the words. It’s about sharing yourself. It pours through your mind and carries you out with it into the world. We are trying to give people something beautiful and meaningful, something which reminds them why life is precious. If you can’t share one really meaningful memory with me, how will you do that?”

  I had no answer. I hadn’t seen it like that. I imagined reading and people hearing not the words, but my most private thoughts. I zipped my sweatshirt up to the neck and curled in the back of the chair.

  “You’re defensive.”

  “Yeah, I think you’ll find that h
appens once someone’s tried to kill you a few times.”

  Ella laughed. “No, you were defensive long before that.”

  “Where do the Cadaveri come from? I mean, who are they?” The question was intended to derail Ella from her relentless dredging through my memories and feelings, but as her face tightened, I realised this really wasn’t something she wanted to discuss.

  “We have no time for history lessons, Callie. We have to get you ready.”

  “I don’t understand why they want to stop the reading. What are they? Are they human? Are they demons? I deserve to know what I’m up against.”

  “You aren’t up against them. Jace and Miles and Richie are up against them. You just have to focus on your job.” Her face was sealed tight like a Tupperware box. What was she keeping inside?

  “This isn’t fair.” I shook my head at her slowly. “You’re sitting there wanting to know my most private thoughts, my deepest secrets, and yet you don’t give anything away that you don’t want to.” I planted my feet on the floor and stood up. “How can I trust you when you don’t tell me anything?”

  Ella got up and started toward me, but I put out my hand.

  “I do tell you things, Callie, I just don’t have time to tell you everything. I don’t know everything.” She sighed heavily. “What is it you want?”

  I met her gaze, eye to eye. “I just want the truth. It’s all right for you. You can tell if someone is lying.”

  She gave a sharp laugh. “You should be careful what you wish for. The truth doesn’t set you free, Callie. It just makes life harder.”

  “I don’t believe that,” I whispered.

  “Jace told me that you found out about your mother’s death. Tell me, were you happier when you learned the truth? Did it liberate you?” Her mouth looked cruel, twisted, but her eyes . . . they held something like pain.

  I looked at the floor. I felt like a hot swarm of bees was crawling inside me. She had no right, even if she wasn’t wrong.