The Devil's Poetry

by Louise Cole

  ***

  I struggled to my feet. My little thought swelled until its rightness filled me with something close to laughter. I had been so wrong, it was absurd. All those wasted years.

  “Take your hands off me.” I stepped forward, willing my legs to stay firm. “I am a sacrifice, but you don’t understand that. You understand force and pain and taking. I am giving. I am willing. You know why?”

  I spun around and let the images fly from me, of my friends, of the cities I had seen wrecked, of the news footage of war and young soldiers and urban riots. I focused on faces creased and tear-stained, each line and mark telling a story. I felt back to my connection to the book and heard my voice start to speak, a whisper of words over the mounting chaos. The poetry was about life and death, beauty and sadness, about connection and loss, about hope and relationship.

  I pulled on its power, felt it channel through me, spinning its wild magic through the skies. Let everyone see, let everyone behold the awe and majesty and depth of life.

  The nothing-girl took a step back.

  “It’s not about who loves me!” I roared. “That’s all you can think about: what do you get, what do you want, what do you need. Me, me, me. Give me, help me, love me. Well, you are wrong.”

  She was almost enveloped by clouds now, and I pursued her, pulling all the grief, the sadness I had conjured behind me.

  “It’s not about whether I am loved,” I yelled into the storm. “It’s about how much I love! I love this world. I love its people. I weep for them, I hope for them, and today”—I drove myself on, ignoring the sudden light-headedness—“today, I will die for them. So they can live.”

  I fell to my knees as the wave of grief, of pathos, of despair and sadness rushed through me, coalesced around me, muddy and cloying. I choked and surrendered to it, weeping, and it washed over me, like a wave of old blood. It fled into the storm, which swirled backward and the shadows from behind me were racing across the landscape to join it, leaving the greens and golds of the earth pure and clean.

  “I won’t fight for one side or the other. I fight for them all.”

  I hit the earth with a soft thump. I had sand and dirt in my mouth, but I didn’t swallow or spit. I vaguely knew I hadn’t finished, that the reading wasn’t over, that I must close the gateway. But I had no more strength. I watched the storm race away, as though chased by a cleansing wind, then I closed my eyes, with the sun warm on my face.

  I wished she would come to me, one last time, and stroke my hair until I slept. I imagined the warm weight of my mother next to me and the slight graze of her wedding ring against my scalp.

  “Why did you leave me?” I whispered to her.

  “Get up,” she replied. “It’s not time to sleep.”

  ***

  Jace watched Callie push away from the wood and stone, stand straight for a moment as he wrapped the bandage as tight as he could before she fell to her knees. He wanted to lift her, carry her away, but he didn’t dare. She was still speaking, the poetry dancing through her lips. He had promised he would let her finish. He wasn’t thinking straight. The music had infected him, spun him around.

  He couldn’t let her die. She couldn’t die. What was the mission objective? He couldn’t remember. A sweet calm would steal over him and then be knocked back by a wave of terror as he saw her again. He felt drunk, so drunk he would drift, and then everything would slam back into focus as though he had collided with a wall.

  A shield. If he couldn’t restore his shield, he was useless to her. He forced himself to block out everything but a single thought. Narrowed his world to a single moment, a single idea.

  Just breath. And her.

  ***

  I squeezed my eyes shut against the tears.

  “Callie, get up.” I had forgotten her voice. It was smooth and clear. A warm hand grasped mine and lifted me to my feet. Her perfume billowed around me, her hair bright in the sun. A host of outlines stood on the horizon behind her.

  “You came for me.”

  She smiled. “You must go. Before the reading ends.”

  “I have to finish it.”

  “I love you,” she said, and the heel of her hand struck me like a hammer in the middle of my chest. It knocked the breath from my lungs, and I was falling backward, flying before a chorus of uplifted voices. Some quiet and smoky, like distant memories; others urgent, strong, musical. The voices of men, women, children, chanting in unison around me. Other languages, other visions. Other Readers. My cheek struck the stone step of Canada House as though I had been thrown there. My face throbbed and my mouth filled with blood.

  But I spoke the final section with the voice of a legion. The sweetest, the strongest was my mother’s voice, carrying me, line by line.

  Nature is my book

  I read the scraps of spirit-torn matter

  I read the clay tall

  I read the anguish and beauty

  and profound loss of birth

  And bless them with my words.

  I am the Reader

  I am the poem

  I am the dance of the word

  and each repurposed breath.

  I read the water and the sky

  The stardust turned leaf

  The fire gone cold

  The bone turned stone.

  I read the past for the future

  I am the pattern

  the tapestry

  the tale.

  I am the knife

  that cuts loose the soul

  from its singular prison.

  I am the union

  and the remembrance.

  I am everything and all is in me.

  Then my head was quiet, and the doorway was gone. The sound of my own voice carrying alone across the vast silence of time and space shocked me. I floated, passive yet focused.

  I heard the final words shower from me like a rainstorm, not from the book but from me.

  “This is no longer the work or the word or the world of God alone. It was given to us. We are each other’s.”

  The blackness came, complete and silent. I understood. I surrendered. The book dropped from my hand, and, as I fell into empty space, only one small sound followed me—the anguished voice of my sweet warrior calling my name.

  ***

  Foreign Secretary Mick Sanders threw a thick pad of clean paper at every delegate. He felt reckless, a little drunk. He wasn’t polite or gentle about it. There was a time for anger. And this was it.

  “What is the meaning of this?” The Pakistani Defense Secretary pushed to his feet. He looked dazed.

  “You’ll see. Now listen, gentlemen, because I am only going to say this once. I am not speaking to you now as a politician or a diplomat or a negotiator. I’m speaking to you now as a father. I will have your attention.”

  His assistant pressed a folder into his hand with a murmur then retreated.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Lock the door on the way out.”

  Dan Brewer, the Canadian Ambassador, cleared his throat. “Mick, I know you mean well, but this isn’t the way—”

  “It is the only way. I realize that now. I have a son. He’s a good man. A young man. I know he could do great things.” Sanders’s lip trembled slightly, and he took a breath. “Yet he might not get to do anything, because he reported for military duty yesterday morning, along with seventeen thousand other young people.

  “Mr. Foreign Secretary, you said to me the other day that our yesterdays defined our future. I think you are wrong. Our children define our future. Our children are what’s best and brightest and most hopeful about this world, and right now, your intransigence, your fear, is threatening every one of them.

  “There isn’t anything I wouldn’t give to see my son safe. You could have my job, my house, even my honor. You could take what you wanted. So I am asking you now each to write down on the pad in front of you what you and the parents of your countries would be prepared to give to keep your sons and daughters safe. Not what your g
overnments or your taxpayers or your people will give or what you will do on behalf of your country. What a parent would give for a child.” Sanders tipped the contents of the folder out onto the desk. “For these children.” The photos slid across the polished wood, and, one by one, hands sought and claimed their own. “Because, I promise you, if you do not find agreement now, it is our children who will pay.”

  He glanced around the room, but these were not the same men as this morning. Their fingers stroked the shiny paper as though their children could feel their caress. I’m reaching them, he thought. Or did the music touch them, too?

  He strode back to his seat. “I promise you, as a father, that door won’t open again until you’ve made all our children safe.”

  ***

  Jace opened his eyes, calm and focused. Callie lay on the step, blood trickling from her mouth into a sticky pool beneath her cheek. She was still speaking.

  Eerie silence surrounded them. The soldiers held their guns loosely in their hands; the journalists stood like statues.

  He lay on the step next to her, to hear her words, his shield impenetrable now. She was his focus and the more he focused on her the stronger his shield became.

  He wasn’t sure, but he thought the poem had stopped. Her eyes flickered and just as he was about to lift her, they snapped open, and she spoke again.

  “This is no longer the work or the word or the world of God. It was given to us. We are each other’s.”

  Her eyes rolled back in her head, and her pulse fluttered once in her neck. The book and the microphone rolled out of her hands onto the stone.

  “Callie.” He grabbed her and sprinted for the van. “Callie.”

  He threw her across the seat. Thank God the keys were in the ignition. The tires squealed as he shoved the gas pedal through the floor. She’s done it, he thought. The streets are peaceful. Maybe she’s saved the world.

  But if she dies, I won’t care.

  ***

  Cyrus woke up screaming. He could taste blood and the sour dirt of the marble step. The music had ebbed but the pain kept him skewered to the stone. By degrees he raised his head. He was invisible to the smiling crowds, his cries unheard amid the happy chatter.

  He could see more of his kind, scattered across the road like felled crows. The lucky ones.

  He scrambled out from the crevice of the wall, his foot catching something which tumbled away as he stood.

  Cyrus trembled as his fingers touched the cold blue cover.

  A minute later, both he and the book were gone.

  ***

  The news stations all covered the reading. The BBC reporter looked happily perplexed.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Sally. A young girl took one of our microphones, and she must have uploaded some kind of file into the computers, because the next thing we knew, we were broadcasting the fabulous digital footage you have seen. She was also performing the audio, I think, although it’s a little unclear, because the technicians tell me it’s a seamless piece of data.”

  “What does that mean, Christina?”

  “It means they can’t separate the words from the images. They have no idea how she did it. Yet, the truly remarkable thing about this is the way the crowd fell silent. We’re getting reports that the riots petered out shortly afterward in other cities as well. I really have no explanation, except . . . well, it’s beautiful. Moving. Sad. But hauntingly beautiful.”

  “We have some images here from this remarkable piece of performance art. Can you tell us a little about it, Christina?”

  “People have reacted to this in very different ways, Sally. Some are saying it’s religious, that it’s about self-sacrifice, I’ve heard some people claim it’s a homage to the natural world. And many, of course, see it as a prayer for peace.”

  “What did you think, Chris?”

  “It made me think of Wilfred Owen. He said, ‘My subject is war and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity.’”

  Jace turned the sound off and returned to his seat in the hospital waiting room. He sent a text to Amber’s landline from her own cell phone. “C’s OK. You? Jace.”

  “We’ve stitched her up, we’ve given her a lot of blood, and I think she’s stable.” The doctor looked unsuitably happy. “We’ve had a lot of people caught in the riots who came here in worse shape. Perhaps our luck is changing.”

  Jace started to pull his blood-stained jacket on, but it was still damp. He dumped it in a bin. “I’m taking her home.”

  “Whoa, not so fast.” The doctor put his hand on Jace’s chest. “I said, stable, not well. She needs to stay. She’s got stitches in her leg, and she’s concussed, not to mention the wound in her abdomen.”

  Jace pulled him into a corner. He pointed to the TV. “That’s her,” he said. “They tried to stop her. They tried to kill her. They will try again. I can’t protect her here.”

  The doctor gazed at the TV screen, an expression of wonder on his face. “She really did that? They’ve called it Heartsong.”

  ***

  I woke up in the back seat of a car, nestled next to Jace. I felt woozy and stiff, but nothing hurt.

  “Hey.” Jace stroked my cheek.

  “Where are we?”

  “Your doctor asked a porter to drive us out of the city.”

  “I have a doctor?”

  “Mmm-hmm. He’s a fan.” He put his mouth next to my ear. “They’re all feeling very mellow just now.”

  “It worked?”

  He stroked back my hair. “It worked.” He took my hand. “So how come you didn’t die?”

  “You got me to a doctor,” I managed a weak smile. “Plus, my mum helped.”

  “Your mother?” He sat back.

  “You know how you said it would take an army of Readers? Well, she sent me an army. She got me out.” I peered out the window. “Where are we going?”

  “We’ll hole up somewhere quiet, get a private doctor, and, as soon as you’re fit, we’re out of here.”

  “We’re leaving?”

  “Dominican Republic. Your father bought the tickets.”

  I looked out at the city. People were clearing debris from the streets and tending one another’s wounds. Children peered out from doorways. It was a different world. I sighed.

  “You OK?” he asked.

  I turned to him, feeling the first pain wrench through my side. “It’s just—everyone I love is in North Yorkshire.”

  “Yes.” His fingers loosened around my hand.

  “And the book is gone.”

  “Yes.” His green eyes clouded.

  I tugged him toward me. “So why do I feel I have everything I need?”

  His lips quirked into a smile. “You do?”

  “Yes,” I said, kissing him gently. “Right here. Right now.”

  Epilogue

  Alec threw down the bottle into the grass. His hands shook. The pictures wouldn’t stop. They burned in his head the way his skin had burned when he watched that stupid show. His mother had cooed and wittered and laughed, and he had tried to plug his ears so he couldn’t hear the music searing him like acid.

  He saw himself, gunned down in some godforsaken stretch of desert, his body rotting in the sun, unloved, unwanted. Lost in sand made thick and oily with blood under a sky as shiny as glass.

  It was all that bitch’s fault. Callie had opened her big mouth, and he’d lost the only thing keeping him from the draft. He’d told Callie he loved her, and she’d shafted him with it. Then the music came, and her voice had danced and laughed in his head as she cursed him.

  He picked up the hunting rifle he’d received for his eighteenth birthday. He would show her. He wouldn’t let it go down like that.

  The oiled barrel of the Winchester was like silk. He stroked it and carried it in the crook of his arm, tenderly, like a dead animal. In the moonlight, his eyes glimmered white.

  More in The Devil’s Poetry series

  Read the next instalment of Callie’s story, O
n Holy Ground, to be published Q3 2017.

  The reading is over and Callie survived. Suddenly the game has changed. A living Reader who can manipulate the magic of the book is an irresistible opportunity for the demonic Cadaveri, who are now legion, and the Order’s more mundane enemies alike. But the Order of Sumer wants all its assets back—dead or alive.

  When Jace is killed, Callie finds herself alone in the US, with no passport and no money, hunted by the Order and haunted by the strange connection the reading has opened between her and the Cadaveri. Callie must re-evaluate everything she believes about the reading—and find a way to get back home against all the odds.

  As she runs for her life, one question plagues her: Are you still a hero if you fought on the wrong side?

  Before You Go. . .

  Reviews are like gold dust. They are very valuable to writers and very useful to other readers. Please take two minutes to tell us what you thought of The Devil’s Poetry on Amazon. Thank you.

  Acknowledgments

  Books are a team effort. I’m immeasurably indebted to my first reader, my sister Fran, who has never let me give up—and to my son, Cian, whose irreverent and ruthless disrespect for my work is coupled with an unerring instinct for how to improve it.

  I’d like to thank Kindle Press for publishing this novel, and my agent Polly Nolan of Greenhouse Literary Agency for her belief in the book and all the ways she helped to make it better.

  And I would like very much to thank all those neighbors, colleagues, friends, family members, and readers who supported The Devil’s Poetry with such enthusiasm through its Kindle Scout campaign and such joy at its success. I can’t tell you what it means to share something so important to me with all of you. Your generosity is extraordinary.

  Writing can be a lonely business, and one of the secrets about writers is that, while they huddle solo over a keyboard, they are often flying in a virtual flock. My flocks have included countless authors who have helped me with this book, or just helped to keep me sane. They include my Firedance friends, Julie Erwin, Bill Sauer, Steve Godden, Ren Warom, Mike Gallant, Kevin Wright, Gary Bonn, Alf Haywood, and, most particularly, the ceaselessly kind Janet Allison. I haven’t forgotten early readers from Litopia including Lesley, Katja, Sue, Eve, Kristin, and Suzanne. And thanks to Jaqueline Ward for her guidance on Scout, Jenn Ashworth for her cheerleading, and Emma Haughton for being my first reviewer.