The Devil's Bible

by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

  She would finish this last one before they landed in Rome—a perfect replica of Hildegard’s chained and mutilated demon gloated over by God’s faithful.

  Rome was different than Mouse remembered. There were too many people and too many cars.

  Coming out of the Trastevere station, she found herself caught in the current of the crowds, bodies slamming into hers, sweat and exhaust choking her. The squealing brakes and loud, laughing tourists, car horns blaring, and the discordant thrum of voices tore away what little was left of Mouse’s composure. She wrapped her arms around her chest, digging her fingers into the flesh at her sides and trying to make herself as small as possible, invisible like a ghost winding through the ancient streets she knew so well.

  Over the many years of plagues and wars and wandering, Mouse had witnessed plenty of death—good deaths and bad ones, easy deaths and violent deaths, some long and slow, and others shockingly sudden. But no matter the kind of death, the dying all wanted just one thing in the end: some sense of home to comfort them as they left the living.

  Mouse had travelled in wagons and carriages and caravans and trains transporting the dying back home. Some of them made it, and the dying was easier. But others on battlefields, in hospitals or dank alleys far from home begged for the same thing. They wanted Mama or Daddy to hold them. They clutched at trinkets or photos and escaped into their memories. They begged Mouse to sing a song from their childhood. They all wanted home.

  But Mouse couldn’t go home. Bohemia as she’d known it no longer existed. It was the one place she’d never gone back to in her seven centuries of wandering. Everything would be different—torn down and rebuilt and renovated. There would be no comfort of the familiar there.

  So Mouse had come to Rome to die.

  She’d been to the city often, especially in the early years. She’d spent more time in Rome, off and on, than any other place in the world. The Church had always been poison for Mouse, and she’d turned her back on it many times. But then in her loneliness, Father Lucas’s gentle words compelling her to believe in God’s goodness would tug on her faith again. And she’d find herself in Rome trying to discover a place among the angels and demons. It never lasted long, but she always came back.

  Being in a place where at least the architecture was older than she was almost made Mouse feel young again. On one of her trips, she’d found a little basilica—Santa Maria in Cosmedin—that reminded her of the churches of her childhood. Its beauty came from its simplicity, but it was the story of the little ragtag church that drew Mouse in. Built on the ruins of some of the most ancient worship sites in Rome, the building had started as a place of refuge for the city’s poor. At times, it had been built up by the Church and decked in gilt and gold, but then it was handed off to monks who didn’t want it. It was forgotten and allowed to fall into disrepair until it was finally abandoned to more outcasts—Greek refugees and then Syrian and Iraqi Catholics.

  If there was ever a church where Mouse might belong, this was it. A church for the unwanted. Mouse felt at home there.

  This was where she wanted to die.

  The belfry of Santa Maria in Cosmedin erupted from the pavement as she finally neared the piazza. She ran into the wall of tourists waiting to try their hands in the Bocca della Verità, the Mouth of Truth, under the porch, but Mouse already knew herself a liar. What she wanted was inside the church.

  As she stepped into the nave, she breathed in the smell of old wood and faith. In this unadorned church so carefully preserved to hold time still, Mouse could imagine herself come home, Mother Kazi off somewhere crushing herbs to make a poultice and Father Lucas just around the corner with a book in hand that he was coming to show Mouse.

  She waited until the small group of tourists in the nave moved toward the far apse to look at St. Valentine’s skull so she could slip unseen into the aisle to her right and up into the matroneo, a balcony for the women. She slid into the small space on the far side of the pew and rolled herself into a ball, her canvas bag tucked against her chest.

  As she let her head drop against her bag, she felt the wetness on her face and realized she must be crying. She was terrified of what she had to do. But once the tourists were gone, in the quiet of the church, she knew that Father Lucas and Mother Kazi would come to her, if only in spirit. They would help her be brave enough. She only had to wait for the church to close.

  And Mouse had always been good at waiting.

  She woke shivering in the empty church, her muscles taut and cramping. Sluggishly, she made her way down the stairs toward the east apse. But Mouse couldn’t afford to be weak with the work she had to do. She dumped her bag near the marble divider and fished out a small leather sack and a package of plastic utensils she had stashed from the flight.

  When she was a child, Father Lucas had taught her spells of protection. She had learned exorcisms from the Church. And, in the Book of the Watchers, the angels themselves had taught her a binding spell. Mouse had often tried to remember that spell, which had sealed the hollow-eyed children to their doom, but although every word of every book she had ever read lived in perfect clarity in her perfect memory, the words of that ancient book slipped through Mouse’s mind like water, and she could remember none of it. It was the book’s last defense: to keep the knowledge of the angels secret from the world of men. The book itself was ash, burned at Father Lucas’s own hand when the Inquisition came calling.

  But Mouse didn’t need to bind her father. She just needed to summon him.

  She gripped the cold marble balustrade as she shook with another tremor—her body giving in to the shock and exhaustion of the past few days. What do we do for shock, child? Mouse could almost hear Mother Kazi asking, her quiet tone resonating with calm and patience and the confidence that Mouse knew the answer.

  “Breathe,” Mouse whispered as she pulled in air, slow and deep, through her nose. “Focus on the present.” She grounded herself in the hardness of the marble, her eyes closed, and then she moved toward the presbytery, letting her memory guide her and giving her mind over to the task. When she neared the altar, she opened her eyes and crossed herself out of habit.

  Mouse had never imagined a time when she would beckon the darkness she’d spent her life running from, so as she had waited in the Nashville terminal for her first flight, she spent hours mentally searching through thousands of remembered pages to find a summoning spell. Most she rejected pretty quickly as fake, but she found what she needed in a grimoire, a book of magic instruction typically penned by charlatans or demons in disguise. This one had been written by a pope. Honorius, known for his kindness, had crafted spells to summon all manner of dark things, not for his own ambition or gain but because he wanted to know the face and nature of his enemy.

  Mouse already knew those. She didn’t need to understand her father better. She knew him well enough that she would never give him what he wanted, never join him, no matter what promises he made. No, what she wanted to know was how to make it all end—the running, the being an outcast, the immortality—and her father was the only one who could help her. Once, in her cell at Podlažice, for just a moment, Mouse had made her father angry enough to kill her. She had seen it in his eyes. Now she just needed to rekindle that rage, and he would give her what she wanted: oblivion.

  She ripped the plastic bag with her teeth, pulled out the serrated knife, and laid it on the altar. The stone had lived for thousands of years before her, and it had been consecrated to its holy work long before she was born. It told her she was nothing, which made her feel childlike and vulnerable.

  She imagined the ages-old echo of Father Lucas’s voice bouncing against the church’s vaulted ceiling. Have you found trouble, little andílek?

  “It found me,” she whispered. Her face was wet with tears. She was like all those other people facing death—frightened and calling out for her Father.

  Like anyone, Mouse was afraid of the pain she would have to suffer—but what really terrified her was
what might happen after. If she made her father mad enough to kill her—and she knew she could—where would she go . . . after? She was shaking again, and then Father Lucas was there again in her mind with the words from the letter he’d written to her so long ago as he faced down his own fear, knowing that he was about to be tortured and most likely die: “‘For thou, O God, hast tested us; thou hast tried us, as silver is tried.’ I know what is coming and I am ready.”

  Mouse dug the knife into her left wrist, tearing at the flesh until a steady stream of blood flowed. The words of the summoning spell ready at her lips, she watched the drops of blood splatter like exploding stars on the white marble as she shaped the pentagram.

  “What are you doing?” Though only a whisper, the voice seemed too loud for the space.

  At first, Mouse thought she was half-remembering, half-hallucinating again, but these were not the words of Mother Kazi or Father Lucas. She looked up, squinting into the nave, and saw the silhouette of a man. She tried to fight through her mental fogginess and dreamlike state to figure out who he was. Not her father, her senses said. But as he shifted his weight, Mouse’s instincts took over, and she began to assess what kind of threat he posed. He was much taller than she; it would make him clumsier and slower. His khakis and simple white shirt told her he wasn’t a guard, and he held candles in each hand. He looked comfortable, like he belonged there. Not like her.

  In the quiet seconds while they stared at each other in surprise, Mouse’s blood made sick plopping noises as it dropped to the floor. Then she noticed the dozens of other candles flickering around the apse and the camera tripod near the opposite aisle.

  How had she missed those? How had she not heard him coming? She felt languid and stupid as her eyes settled on the man again. He started to lower the candles to the floor. He kept his eyes on her.

  Mouse bolted. She ran toward the marble divide along the left side of the apse and jumped. In her peripheral vision, she saw the man jump, too, over the first short wall of the schola cantorum. A few steps past the divide, Mouse was wrapped in total darkness but kept her speed until suddenly there was no floor. She flew headfirst down a stairway that had been cloaked by the dark. Her left shoulder slammed into each stone step as she slid until she crashed into the wall with a sickening pop like a gunshot. Searing pain exploded across her back as the tendons ripped and her shoulder snapped out of its socket.

  Driven by her panic, Mouse regained her footing almost immediately and turned toward the deep blackness of the crypt beneath the altar. Holding her left arm to her chest and hobbled by pain in her ankle, Mouse eased along the wall in the dark. Her right shoulder and hip dipped into open spaces and then found solid stone again as she made her way around the room. Desperately. she shoved her right hand back into each of the openings, looking for an exit. She found none.

  No doors. No windows. No way out except the way she came.

  She was trapped again. Whatever else happened, Mouse would find no escape tonight. She would wake up tomorrow and still be a murderer, still hunted, still alone, still alive.

  Mouse dragged herself to a niche in the corner behind the stairway. She remembered reading that the crypt used to hold relics. As she pulled her body into the tiny space, some part of her thought ruefully that at her age, she would count as a relic. Some part of her chuckled quietly at the thought.

  The rest of her wished herself as dead as the skull of St. Valentine upstairs.

  PODLAŽICE MONASTERY,

  BOHEMIA

  1278

  Mouse was singing when her father silently stepped through the wall behind her.

  There sat upon the linden-tree

  A bird, and sang its strain;

  So sweet it sang, that, as I heard,

  My heart went back again.

  She bent to trim her quill and dip it in the ink, but she kept singing. Her father stood frozen under the spell of her voice as it swirled around him. The words and the softness of her tone soaked up her joy and sorrow and pierced him, filling him with what she felt. He thought perhaps a flutter of that emotion which had so long ago been burnt and turned to ash, now tickled in his chest, and he swallowed against the unfamiliar knot in his throat.

  A thousand years to me it seems

  Since by my fair I sate,

  Yet thus to have been a stranger long

  Was not my choice but fate.

  Then, in an instant, his old bitterness surged and choked out whatever Mouse had been conjuring in him. He sneered as he looked at her again. The cell had grown much colder over the past weeks, and Mouse had suffered—her muscles stiff and achy—but the cold did not bother him. And yet, he pulled his cloak around him tightly before stepping into the candlelight.

  “I have something for you.” His voice betrayed none of the tenderness of the moment just passed.

  Mouse looked up, surprised. Her father had stopped bringing her gifts; she’d been glad, taking it as a sign that he had given up on buying her affection or acceptance or whatever it was he wanted.

  He held out a couple of leaves of scripted parchment. “Bread crumbs should you ever lose your way.”

  “What?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing. You’ll understand sooner or later. It’ll be interesting to see if you’re a Cain or an Abel—follow the rules or do whatever it takes to win.” He flapped the pages at her. “It’s for your book.”

  It was the story—his story—that he had been working on for days. Mouse took the pages eagerly and read them quickly. When she finished, she just stared at them.

  “You don’t like it?” he asked, snickering.

  She looked up, studying his face carefully. He seemed different today, much more like the teasing prankster he had been at the start. She heard the mischief in his voice. As she read his manuscript again, she looked for some hidden malevolence this time. She found nothing.

  “I do not understand,” she said.

  He laughed until he grabbed at his stomach and slid down the cell wall. “It is quite a simple story, my dear. Try again,” he said as he finally caught his breath and stretched out on her pallet.

  She read it once more. It was a simple story and one that had been told time and again—an ambitious man wanting more, a thirst for power, greed, bitter rebellion, and bloody war. The only difference in her father’s story was the nature of those fighting and the spoils of victory. God and Satan. Immortality or eternal damnation. The souls of humanity.

  Some parts of his manuscript read like Josephus’s summaries in the Antiquities—truncated anecdotes heavy with dull narration. The rest of it was too much like Isidore’s Etymologies, dry and academic, which was fine for a book meant to teach, but not for a story. Especially not one like this. She thought perhaps he had written it to be read by others, the way he had wanted his painting crafted for others—just another kind of mask—but where was the intimate truth for her?

  “What else?” she asked.

  “You’re not satisfied with the most epic battle of all time?”

  “It does not seem epic.”

  His cackle bounced around the cell. “Your priests have spoiled you, girl. They scare you with stories of evil things lurking in the dark, waiting to consume the good.” He let his fingers stretch out into claws and shook them at her. “They paint for you pictures of battles between beasts, mighty swords raised and storms of fire raining on the damned.” He pulled himself lithely to his feet.

  “I tell you that Armageddon will be quietly won in the beat of a single heart.” He held his hand out. “But since you don’t like my story, give it back.”

  Mouse refused to give it to him. “What have you done to it?” she asked, certain that there must be something more, some other game he was playing.

  “Give it back!” He filled himself with power, his human mask discarded and the tendons in his neck bulging with the effort to command her. He wasn’t angry; he just wanted to see if he could control her.

  Mouse trembled under the force
of his command but she held tightly to the manuscript.

  His eyes narrowed as he studied her. He took his mounted power and penetrated her mind the way he had done at the beginning, fingering her memories and emotions. He toyed with her, tested her. But he could not break her.

  “You are stubborn,” he said, finally releasing her and leaning heavily against the wall.

  She lifted her chin defiantly. “I do not like being told what to do.”

  “Me neither.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  By the time the beam of light oscillated along the stairs down into the crypt, Mouse knew she was in trouble.

  She had no defenses left to fight the onslaught of shock and exhaustion brought on by the past few days. She tried to take another deep breath, but the movement sent spears of pain through her shoulder. And she tried to focus on the present moment in the crypt, but her mind kept playing tricks on her, filling the empty alcoves with dead things. The man in her laundry room. The girl without eyes. The soldiers at Marchfeld. Ottakar. Father Lucas. Back and back, year after year, dead thing after dead thing, and all of them because of her. Even the very first—her mother—dead because of Mouse.

  The man stopped at the foot of the steps, his flashlight creating a halo on the crypt floor beneath him. He looked like an alien craft hovering before a landing. He was alone.

  He raked the light around the small space until he saw her, folded in on herself in the corner behind him. The glow of light glistened on a pool of blood that had run over the edge of the niche and onto the crypt floor. Slowly he lifted the light, following the line of her leg up to her face. She flinched. He took in the dark hollows around her eyes and the way she held herself, arms tucked under her chin and hands balled. She was barely holding it together. The front of her shirt was soaked and her neck was smeared in blood.