The Devil's Bible

by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

  “It’s me, Angelo,” Mouse answered. The caretaker had already pulled himself up and was leaning against a tree, but she was still scrambling for the cane when Angelo broke through the trees.

  “Cosa hai fatto per lei?” Angelo asked the caretaker accusingly as he rushed to Mouse’s side, handing her the cane and helping her stand.

  “Non io! Lei mi ha attaccato!” the old man spat back.

  “I am so sorry, sir. Are you hurt?” Mouse asked as she pulled free of Angelo and reached toward the caretaker who darted behind the tree.

  “What does he mean, you attacked him?”

  “Let’s just go, Angelo.” Mouse nudged him as she took a step toward the path leading out of the park. The old man was fine, but even though he posed no threat, she still felt uneasy. She was pretty sure now that she’d only imagined those voices at the Mouth of Hell, but she wasn’t prepared to take the risk.

  “Si. È meglio lasciare! Sto chiamando la polizia!” the caretaker shouted as he held up his phone.

  “Please, Angelo. Let’s go.” Mouse scanned the dark woods behind them as she pulled Angelo to the path.

  “What is it?” he asked, peering into the shadows, too.

  “Nothing. Come on before he calls the cops.”

  She saw Angelo bite back more questions as he grabbed his tripod and hurried with her down the path and out to the car. They were halfway back to Rome before he spoke.

  “What’s going on, Mouse?”

  “I can’t, Angelo.” She watched the passing lights of the towns nestled into the hills along the road.

  “You thought that old man was there to hurt you.” He was angry. “You thought there was someone else out in the woods, too, didn’t you?”

  She wouldn’t answer him.

  “Mouse, I want to help you. I can see that you’re in trouble. But I need to know what’s going on.” He glanced over at her, but she wouldn’t look at him. He tried a different approach. “What were you doing? That night I found you in the church?”

  She had been amazed he hadn’t asked this sooner. She could read all those tourists in the park, yet Angelo kept surprising her. It made her feel new again, like seeing colors after centuries of grays.

  But Mouse hadn’t shared herself with anyone since Ottakar, and that was before she knew what she was.

  “I can’t talk about—”

  “Someone’s done a number on you, Mouse. I’ve seen wounded people before. I’ve been there myself. I get that it seems easier to close yourself off from it. Like that thing doctors do to an open wound to stop the—”

  “Cauterize. That’s what it’s called. They sear the tissue until—” The words came automatically, a teacher’s words, a healer’s words more comfortable than trying to find a way to answer what he was asking.

  “But if you seal it all up, it’s like shutting yourself off from life. Your heart can’t beat anymore. You might as well be dead.”

  “That’s the idea.” She spoke so softly she was sure the words died before he could hear them.

  “Is it that bad?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you just honing your priestly virtues—‘And the greatest of these is charity’?”

  “Damn it, Mouse, can’t you let someone be your friend?”

  “I told you, Angelo. I don’t have friends.”

  When he spoke again, his voice was softer. “Last night, I said I didn’t know why I was doing any of this. I still don’t understand what’s going on, but I know helping you feels right. And it has nothing to do with my calling.” He knew it wasn’t quite true as he said it. “So talk to me. It can’t be that bad.”

  Mouse felt like she was in free fall with this man she barely knew who kept touching her deepest secrets. But Angelo was right. She had pressed the hot blade of anger and fear and guilt against the wounds she’d suffered—abandoned without even a name, shunned, betrayed by the man she loved at only sixteen, forced to forfeit her only son, and then her discovery of what she was and, later at Marchfeld, of what she was capable. Mouse had burned all the gaping wounds until she had shut herself off from them and suffocated herself in grisly scar tissue. A moveable inclusus but walled up just the same.

  “Yes, it’s that bad,” she said.

  “You want to kill yourself.”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I can’t tell you all of it, Angelo. I’m not ready and you aren’t either. But the other night at Santa Maria, I wanted out and I could only see one way to make that happen.”

  “And now?”

  Mouse had been asking herself this for two days. When she answered him, she answered herself, too, though she didn’t know what it meant.

  “Now. Maybe things are different.”

  But the healer in her knew the dangers of opening old wounds with false hopes.

  PODLAŽICE MONASTERY,

  BOHEMIA

  1278

  Outside her cell, the bishop called feverishly for the Brothers.

  Mouse sank to her knees as her father’s overpowering voice in her head was suddenly gone, and all her own thoughts and fears came swirling back in the undertow. There was so much at stake—Nicholas most of all. But her father would smell weakness and despair like any predator hunting for an easy victim.

  If he violated her mind again, he needed to find her calm, a person confident in her choice to go with him. To keep all the other thoughts at bay, to suffocate her fear, she filled her mind with counting—steps, breaths, heartbeats, and then, finally, the chinks of metal on stone as the Brothers began to tear down the wall.

  The grind of the stones as the Brothers worked them loose grated against her ears, as if they were pulling her apart, too, piece by piece, but as the light drove through the cracks like blades, Mouse fought against the joy that instinctively blossomed.

  Yes, there would be sunshine and birdsong and fresh air. But there would also be fear and bitterness and running. Mouse could not let herself indulge in any of it—neither the dark nor the light. So she gathered up all the parts that made her Mouse—her feelings, her memories, her hopes—and she wound them up like yarn on a spindle, twisted tight. She hid them away in a walled-up cell deep inside herself.

  When the hand broke through the opening in the wall, reaching in to exhume her, she did not take it. Mouse laid her own hand against the low lintel, steadying herself before stepping out into the hall, leaving the world of the dead for the land of the living. She did not feel like she belonged in either—a ghost trapped in the shell of herself.

  There had been no redemption for Mouse and no resurrection either.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It was late when Angelo dropped Mouse off at the flat and then headed off to finish taking the pictures of Santa Maria for Bishop Sebastian. He didn’t invite her to come, and she didn’t ask. Neither of them wanted to revisit the bloody altars and dark crypts of the other night.

  Mouse was already regretting what she’d said on the ride home from Monster Park. Father Lucas had trained her well about keeping her secrets. Even Ottakar had never known the truth about her special gifts; he had never gone looking for answers beneath the surface of what he saw in her either. But Angelo didn’t seem to take anything at face value. He was curious and willing to look for answers in the impossible. It made her vulnerable—and a vulnerable Mouse was a dangerous one, too.

  As soon as Angelo left for the church, Mouse crammed her stuff in her bag and called up the train schedule on Angelo’s computer. But as she hobbled around the flat looking for paper and pen to write a note telling him she’d gone and thanking him for the sanctuary he’d given her, she found herself in his room and lost in his pictures again. She lay on his bed staring up at the photo of the river and trying to understand what drew her to this man.

  It was well after midnight when she heard the door close. She started to sit up, to call out to Angelo, to
do what needed to be done so she could leave. Instead, she reached out with the gift that had brought her so much joy as a child and so much pain ever since. It had been a very long time since Mouse had searched a person’s soul, but, with a flutter of both dread and anticipation, she closed her eyes and felt for Angelo in the other room.

  She saw his glow highlighted against the blackness of her mind. The intimacy of it tore loose a longing in her, a reminder of what she could never have but so desperately wanted. She made herself breathe normally, feigning sleep, as she watched the glow walk toward the bed where she lay curled on her side, hands tucked under her cheek. Angelo stood, looking down on her. He was so bright, even brighter than her memory of Father Lucas. The light blurred around the edges of his physical form.

  He watched her for a long time. As he bent to lift a strand of hair that had settled on her lips, his fingers barely brushing her cheek, she almost spoke. But then the light emanating from Angelo changed somehow. She tried to figure out what was different about it—it was just as bright, just as full, but she knew something had shifted as he was watching her, and the idea of what that might mean frightened her.

  “Good night, Mouse,” he whispered at the doorway.

  Mouse lay thinking until soft light framed the shades.

  Angelo was gone again when she woke, but as she came through the hall after a shower, still squeezing water from her hair into a towel, he was opening the door to the flat.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “Did you even sleep?”

  “A bit.” He seemed a little too bouncy.

  “You’ve had espresso—and a lot of it, I’m guessing.” She smiled up at him.

  “The elixir of the gods. And for people with a deadline.” He walked a step past her in the hall and tossed one of two black folders onto his bed.

  “May I have a look?” She nodded her head toward the package on the bed.

  “Ah . . .” Mouse heard the hesitation and worried that she had crossed another invisible line, but Angelo handed her the folder still in his hand. “Sure. These are the ones of the church. I’ve got to take these to the Bishop today. His office is hidden at the back of the Sala Regia at the Vatican. Would you like to come? After I’m done with business, we could stroll through the museums.” He looked down doubtfully at her still discolored and puffy ankle. “Well, as much as you’re able.”

  “I’d love to.” So much for her plan to leave, Mouse thought.

  “Good. We can talk art and then maybe have a bite to eat and let you see something of Rome besides me taking pictures.” He turned to walk down the hall to the kitchen but stopped midstride. “Do you have anything else to wear?”

  Mouse glanced down at the blue Laura Marling concert shirt she’d worn for the past two days. She had grabbed a handful of underwear, socks, and another T-shirt or two when she’d fled Nashville, but she hadn’t thought she’d need anything after that night at Santa Maria. “Not appropriate for the Sistine Chapel, I’m guessing?”

  “I doubt Michelangelo cares, but Bishop Sebastian is a little traditional.”

  “Could you go get me something you think would be appropriate?” She was already limping toward her canvas bag at the foot of the couch.

  “Wouldn’t you rather go?”

  “I hate shopping.”

  She turned at his silence and saw his raised eyebrows.

  “Don’t tell me you buy into sexist stereotypes—girls and their shopping?”

  “No, I’m just shocked that you trust me to pick something.”

  Mouse lowered her eyes quickly. “It’s only clothes.” She jotted down her sizes and handed over the note with her credit card. She realized her mistake when she saw Angelo studying the blue plastic, but it was too late to take it back.

  “Emma Lucas?” He frowned as he looked up from the card.

  Emma Lucas had been the person Mouse plucked from the pile of identification papers on her bed in Nashville. She hadn’t thought Emma Lucas would live long. Mouse tried to figure out how to give him an explanation without lying, but then his mouth pulled into a crooked grin.

  “I suppose you couldn’t be Mouse to MasterCard, huh?” He cocked his head, looking at her, and she was afraid that he was about to ask another impossible question. Instead, he surprised her again. “I like Mouse better.”

  An hour later, he handed over a shopping bag and seemed entirely too pleased with himself.

  “Uh-oh,” Mouse said, trying to peek into the bag.

  He snapped the bag shut. “No judging until you try it on.”

  She pushed herself up from the couch and limped back to the bathroom, resigned to like whatever he’d chosen rather than risk hurting his feelings, but he’d actually done well—or someone in the shop had. The dress fit perfectly, lightly skimming her body, and the flared skirt hit just below her knee—Bishop Sebastian–appropriate she assumed. Angelo had also bought a simple pair of flats, easily manageable for her bad ankle. So much for the stereotype of men and their bad taste, Mouse thought with a grin.

  As Mouse walked slowly up the steps to the Vatican entrance, Angelo matched his pace to hers.

  “Have you ever been to the museums?” he asked.

  “I came . . . a long time ago.”

  “In a galaxy far, far away?” He teased. “Sorry, it’s just that you keep saying that, ‘a long time ago.’ You can’t be more than twenty-five. How long could ‘a long time ago’ have been?”

  Mouse laughed but gave no answer.

  As they approached the ticket counter, she could see glimpses of the art on the other side of the line of people at the security scanners. The rich air smelled of oils and polished woods and, though carefully climate-controlled, the place still evoked a sense of wildness. Mouse had spent many hours in art museums and never tired of them.

  Angelo showed his credentials to one of the attendants at the counter, chatting casually in Italian, and then reached out his hand to Mouse. Without thinking, she wove her fingers through his and let him guide her into his world of high art, absolutist religion, and an uncompromising certainty of good and evil. It felt natural, holding his hand. He’d been right: She was starting to trust him. Perhaps too much.

  As she had told Angelo, Mouse had come to the museums once, but it was shortly after they opened to the public in the 18th century. She had bypassed the crowds meandering through the various museums and headed immediately for every visitor’s ultimate destination: the Sistine Chapel. The beauty there snared her. Michelangelo’s vision told a dark tale of the Fall of Man and a judgmental God. She had wanted to be part of that story of humanity, but it read like an impossible fairy tale for her. Michelangelo’s tormented souls had the hope of redemption. Mouse had no place in the narrative or in this sacred space. She had fled into the library courtyard to a secluded bench and watched the other visitors transcend their humanity for an afternoon.

  Fortunately for her, the way Angelo led took them through the Pauline Chapel rather than the Sistine, then back to the secluded offices until he finally paused before a large wooden door with a shiny brass nameplate: Bishop Bernardo Sebastian. Angelo knocked confidently and smiled down at her where she leaned against the wall for support.

  “It would have been easier if you’d let me get a wheelchair,” he taunted.

  She rolled her eyes at him just as the door opened. Angelo kneeled and kissed the ring of the older man who stood inside the cavernous office. The man looked to be in his sixties, trim and athletic with a sharp jawline and traditional Roman nose. He was quite handsome. He pulled Angelo into his arms, hugging him and smiling warmly. They exchanged pleasantries in Italian, forgetting her for a moment, though the Bishop kept cutting his eyes toward her. She listened as Angelo introduced her, doubting very much that they knew she could understand every word. Then he turned to her and spoke in English.

  “Your Excellency, this is my friend, Emma Lucas. Emma, this is my mentor and friend, Bishop Bernardo Sebastian.” Mouse saw the hesit
ation play at Angelo’s lips when he said “Emma,” and the idea that he had trouble calling her anything but Mouse made the smile she turned to the Bishop genuinely bright.

  “My Lord Bishop.” She bowed slightly in his direction.

  “Ms. Lucas. Lovely.” The Bishop’s accent was much thicker than Angelo’s, and she felt conspicuous as he assessed her. He didn’t even try to hide it as his eyes moved slowly up her body. “Please, come join me.”

  He led them through the large office lined with dark shelves crowded with books. Small lamps created lit universes randomly in a corner, at a chair, around a table. The Bishop gestured toward a table to the left of an imposing desk outfitted with two computer screens and a bank of phones. A few books lay scattered across one end of the table they now circled, and a silver tray with tea service sat in the center.

  “I was having some tea. Though I’m afraid I’ve none of your holistic concoctions, my son. Nothing prayed over or handpicked.” He chuckled and patted Angelo on the back. “Just plain Earl Grey. I picked up the habit during my stay in London some years ago. I suppose it was the same visit when I met you, Angelo.” He glanced over at Mouse.

  She understood the Bishop’s strategy immediately; he wanted to remind her of the long relationship he’d had with Angelo, to position her as the outsider. She nearly laughed at the predictability of the Church considering a woman a threat. As Angelo and Mouse sat, the Bishop poured tea, and, as if in a scene from a Jane Austen novel, he offered lumps of sugar and a plate of small cakes and sandwiches. Mouse worked at not smirking. Angelo seemed uncomfortable, but she suddenly found herself much less intimidated by the Bishop than she had been.

  “So, you finally have the pictures for me.” He extended his hand toward Angelo, but he was looking pointedly at Mouse as he spoke, his eyes narrowed. She felt a first wave of caution.

  “Yes, Your Excellency. I think, I—I hope you like them.”

  Mouse was surprised to hear the unease in Angelo’s voice, and she tensed on his behalf as she watched the Bishop flip through the photos. He paused only at the pictures of the church frescoes damaged by time and the elements. He shook his head and tsk-tsked as he studied them.