The Devil's Bible

by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

  “Have you ever done that?”

  “Yes.”

  “With me?” He pulled his hand away.

  “No.”

  “Would I know if you did?”

  “Probably not.”

  Angelo picked at a loose thread in the rug, then he cocked his head toward her, studying her for a moment. “What about super speed?” His eyes twinkled.

  “No.” She laid her head back on his chest and laughed. “I’m not a comic book character.”

  “Well, it sounds like you haven’t really tested what you can do.”

  “I’ve spent the past seven centuries working to blend in with the people around me. You don’t have any idea how hard that is. I have to change how I speak, how I hold myself.” She rubbed her eyes. “I didn’t do a very good job of that today. But mostly, I try not to think about the things I can do. I just want to be a normal person.”

  “So you consider yourself human?”

  His words stung.

  “My mother was human,” she whispered as she sat up.

  “But not your father?” This felt too similar to the conversation with Bishop Sebastian.

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  “You really don’t know what you are, do you?” The intense curiosity was back in his voice.

  “What I am is tired and ready for bed. We have an early morning.” Mouse pushed herself up, walked back to the bed and crawled in.

  Angelo started to ask another question but stopped when she sighed. He leaned back against the wall and sat in the silence. Mouse listened to his heartbeat, revved up with discovery and wanting more. It battled against his slow, methodic breaths. Half an hour later and finally calm, he curled up in the bed beside her, but as the room lit up with one last flash of lightning, a question slipped out.

  “Where are we going?”

  “A place I never wanted to see again.” She shivered and pulled the covers up to her chin. “It’s called Podlažice.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Can you hear me now?”

  The whisper filtered through the birdsong across the clearing in the woods. Mouse dug her fingernails into the red flesh of a plane tree seed, peeling it until she reached the hard core. And then she threw it.

  “Ouch!” Angelo yelled. “That hurt.” He stood up from where he was crouched several yards away and rubbed the side of his head.

  “Then stop,” she said, laughing.

  “I’m just testing your super hearing.”

  “And how about my aim?” Mouse held up another plane seed.

  Angelo put his hands up, smiling as he forfeited, then raked the sweat off his face with his forearm and went back to searching the thick underbrush.

  They had driven out of Prague before the sun was up. Mouse wanted as much daylight as she could get for the search; she knew it would be tough to find the ruins of the monastery. Podlažice didn’t exist anymore. Over the years, archeologists had looked for the suspected birthplace of the Devil’s Bible but never found it. Of course, Mouse had an advantage—she had actually been there and knew where to start looking. But everything had changed. She and Angelo had been hunting the woods for hours without finding so much as an old stone, and now the sun was moving below the tree line.

  Once again, Mouse scanned the darkening shadows for any sign of another of her father’s spies. Confident that they were still safe, at least for the moment, she turned her back to Angelo, slowing her breathing and letting her sight blur as she eased herself into a trance. All day, Mouse had fought against the memories of this place. She had kept herself grounded in the present with Angelo, with the young trees, with the distant sounds of cars on the road—anything that would keep the past and Podlažice at bay. Mouse had been scared to let herself remember too well, afraid she would lose herself in that despair again, but now she needed the details of those memories to help her find the ruins. She was running out of time.

  She laid her hand on a tree trunk to steady herself and then let her mind slip back to that day so long ago when the monks at Podlažice had first found her. She gagged at the remembered sour taste of pond water flooding her mouth. She blinked, trying to focus, but her eyes scratched against the dry sockets, burning. As she looked up into the clearing, where there had been only saplings and high grass, ghostly walls began to grow in the fading light. Now Mouse could see the monastery as it had been, and she began to stumble toward what was once the entrance on the east side.

  “Hey, wait,” Angelo called as he jogged toward her and put his hand on her back.

  His touch broke the spell, and the phantom Podlažice sank silently into the forest floor. But in that brief moment, Mouse had found what she needed. It looked like a simple mound of dirt at the back corner of the clearing. The last of the afternoon sun lit the top of the small hill and played with shadows on the scattered leaves and bracken. But as she neared it, Mouse could feel her father’s touch. He had been here. The echoes of his power dusted everything.

  She and Angelo crawled over a log to reach the other side of the mound. The opening looked eerily like the Mouth of Hell in Monster Park—with large misshapen boulders for eyes and lips of dirt and rotten leaves pulled back in a sneer, daring her to enter. All it needed were Dante’s words: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

  Mouse was able to crawl easily into the opening on her elbows. It was a much tighter fit for Angelo.

  “Is this the monastery?” he asked as he lay in the dirt, shining the flashlight across the crumbling stone walls.

  Mouse nodded; she had her bearings now. “It’s the lower floor of the east wing. There should be a staircase over here somewhere.” Mouse took the flashlight and crawled toward an area too dark for the light to penetrate until she was directly on it. Even then she could only see a deeper dark leading below.

  “You think it’s safe to go down there?” Angelo eyed the cracked stone steps.

  “I don’t have a choice. But you stay here.” Her voice was shrill with worry at the risk she had taken. She should have come alone.

  “I’m going with you.” Angelo dragged himself to Mouse with his elbows. “At least I’ll get some headroom as we climb down.”

  At each step they took, the stone stairs cracked a little more, sending bits of debris pinging into the darkness, and the farther they descended, the more Mouse felt herself coming undone—something was pricking at her mind, like a cat toying with a ball of yarn, its claws pulling at the threads.

  “The pages are here. I can feel it.” Her breathing was fast and shallow, and she sounded wrong, like an echo.

  The staircase spiraled into a long hall. Toward their right, just a few feet past the landing, the ceiling had partially caved in, but to the left, the flashlight flickered on regularly spaced doorframes, some gaping and others partially obscured by decayed doors and fallen beams. The hall ended at a wall with gnarled roots jutting through the seams of the stones like the fingers of some dead thing working to pry them apart.

  Mouse stumbled at the last step, losing her footing—not only among the scattered debris but in time, too, as the past sifted into the present. She could hear the requiem the monks had sung for her all those years ago; the haunting, hollow chant breathed through what was left of the monastery.

  Mouse moved toward the caved-in area to the right, crouching as the ceiling sank lower and lower until she was finally on her knees. She shined the light into the far corner against the interior wall. A small opening led farther beyond into the dark.

  “Back there,” she said, shaking her head as she tried to make the memory fade, but it was more real than the musty decay of the ruins. She sat still for a moment, her eyes closed against the double vision of past and present.

  “I don’t want to be here,” she whispered.

  Angelo laid his hand on her back.

  Mouse rested her head against the stone and looked at him, but she couldn’t focus. Everything was blurry, and she wasn’t sure whether she was here w
ith Angelo or back in the past with one of the monks leading her to her death.

  Angelo leaned toward her to be sure she heard him. “Let’s leave. You can’t go in there anyway. You won’t fit.”

  His voice grounded her for a moment and her head cleared slightly.

  “I have to go in, Angelo. It’s a Mouse-hole.” She pressed her lips against the quiet giggle that caught in her throat. She wasn’t blinking, and her pupils had dilated until her eyes were nearly all black.

  The cell she had shared with her father lay just beyond the opening. His power swirled all around her. She could taste it the same way she’d tasted salt in the air near the ocean. Given the rotten wood and decayed mortar, all of this should have collapsed long ago and turned to dust. Her father must have preserved this place through the centuries, made it so only she would be able to find it. It meant the pages were likely on the other side of that opening. But to get them, she would have to go in.

  Mouse leaned toward the opening, but Angelo was still holding her hand.

  “The walls don’t look stable. If you go in there, Mouse, I might not get you back.” He pulled her face toward his, leaned in and put his lips on hers. Her body answered his, moving into his kiss, pressing against him. He let go of her hand to bring his own behind her head and hold her closer.

  Without warning, Mouse pulled away, dropping the flashlight at his knees as she thrust herself into the darkness. The stone cut into her back as she shoved herself through the hole.

  Angelo lunged after her and slid as far as he could into the opening. The walls were so thick it was more like a tunnel, but it was so small the outer opening cut into his shoulder, wedging him between the packed rubble and the floor. He could see that the tunnel widened on the other side, and, to the right, he saw the bottom of Mouse’s boot.

  “Mouse, come on. Grab whatever’s there and get the hell out.”

  But something had gone wrong when Mouse crossed what was left of the ancient threshold. The thing that had been playing at her mind now ravaged it. She crouched, looking wildly around the cell. Mouse knew where she was, but not when. She could hear noises beyond the door. Was it Bishop Andreas come again to check on his book? Or was it someone else? Her father?

  The room was lit with an odd glow, and she looked around for a candle and for her parchment, inks, and quills, but there was only a small metal box. Mouse squatted near it.

  “Copper, copper, green with age. Not brass that darkens or gold that stays,” she said in a singsong voice.

  A light bounced off the walls and glinted a moment on the metal box, catching Mouse’s attention.

  “Hello?” she whispered.

  “Mouse. Come out.”

  “I’m at Podlažice,” she said.

  “Yes. Come out now.” Angelo talked to her like she was a child. She sounded like one, her voice high and thin, and it scared him.

  “There’s something I have to do . . .” She was trying to understand, but her mind was a tangled mess, and the thing playing at her made it impossible to think.

  “Yes. Look around. Do you see anything?”

  Mouse let her eyes adjust to the wavering light.

  “A box.”

  “Get it and come out.”

  She was still looking around the cell.

  “There are pictures on the wall. They are glowing. Did I paint them? I don’t remember them.”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Get the box and come back to me.”

  But in her mind, Mouse was listening to someone else. It was a memory of her father talking to her as they worked on the Devil’s Bible.

  “You think you have choices.” He had patronized her with his tone.

  “God called it free will,” she had spat back.

  “But you are not a child of his. You are mine.”

  “I’m half-human.” She heard the doubt in her own voice.

  “Technically. Though all my other efforts failed. Thousands of them over the years—dead before they left the womb. All but you.” He let the implication soak into her. “You may be half-human, but you are definitely your father’s daughter.”

  “I’m not like you.”

  “Ah, you’re just a normal girl full of goodness and light?” His arrows hit their mark.

  She turned away from him.

  He snatched her arm, swinging her back toward him. He raked off the top stack of parchment, pages scattering through the cell, until he found the pictures she’d done of him and Heaven. He shed his handsome human visage to match the grotesque one he pointed to in the manuscript.

  “You have a choice to make, dearest. Accept who you are and come with me. You’ve seen the truth of me these past weeks. I’ve been honest and open with you. You know I am not the creature your childish Church has invented to scare you into blind obedience. I require no such allegiance. You may do as you wish. I just want you with me.” Even in this deformed state, with thick, charred skin, his eyes pleaded with her tenderly. “Or, you can continue your futile quest for this.” He pointed to her picture of the Heavenly City on the page opposite the Devil’s portrait.

  In the picture, her city was empty. Mouse could not paint the joyful saints inhabiting Heaven because each time she tried, the pain stilled her brush. The words of Mother Kazi had haunted Mouse during those long, dark days at Podlažice: “You were not made for the Church, Mouse.” Mouse had long thought the Church was the only hope for Heaven she had, but those words closed the doors of the Church to her. So her Heavenly City was divine brick and mortar only, a ghost town, empty of souls.

  As the memory faded, Mouse could hear Angelo calling for her. His voice brought her back to the present. “Forget the pictures, Mouse. Just grab the box and get out of there.”

  “I didn’t paint these. My father did,” she mumbled. She fought against her mental fogginess as she studied the frescoes on the wall. Each was outlined in an eerie glow, pulsing with power—a telltale sign that Lucifer, the Light-Bringer, had been here.

  Mouse knew she was supposed to be doing something, but it kept slipping away from her. Frustrated at her inability to concentrate, she put her hands on either side of her head, tightening her scalp and widening her eyes, distorting them with tension. Slowly, an understanding came to her. This was a game of temptations, and her father had played it once before with another adversary he had wanted to recruit to his cause. He’d played dirty back then, too, waiting until forty days of fasting had taken their toll. This time, he just rigged the game so that his power would slip into Mouse’s mind to keep it muddled, making her more vulnerable to his persuasion.

  She grit her teeth against another onslaught of disorientation, trying to hold on to some clarity but feeling like a patient going under anesthesia, powerless to clear away the fog. The cell walls slipped in and out of focus as she tried to make sense of the pictures her father had painted.

  There were three of them: one was a copy of her portrait of her father, the second was a replica of her abandoned Heavenly City, and a third was a painting she had never seen before. But why were they glowing? What did he want her to do? Mouse wondered what would happen if she just grabbed the box and ran. She reached out for it, her fingers lightly brushing its copper top, and, in the far corner of the cell, a brick crumbled into pieces as if someone had pulled at an invisible seam holding it together. Others nearby started to quiver. Then Mouse pulled her hand back, and they stilled once more.

  She heard Angelo calling to her again. He sounded angry.

  She knelt near the small opening so he would hear her. “Angelo, please listen. I can’t . . . I can’t think well. You need to stop yelling so I can think. I need to figure this out.” Her mind was beginning to cloud again, and she knew she had little time to decide what to do.

  “Figure what out?” Angelo growled.

  “The pictures on the wall. I think they’re a test or something.”

  “You can’t do this alone, Mouse. We’ll come back and—”

  “
Yes. You go. Good-bye.” Her voice was hollow, like a child talking during a dream.

  She turned away from the sound of Angelo screaming her name.

  Mouse lifted her hand toward the wall, slowly tracing her fingers along the first painting, the image of her father that looked just like the one she had painted so long ago. The luminescent fresco brightened at her touch, wrapping around her hand and sending a surge of warmth through her fingers, up her arm, and into her chest. It was comfortable, welcoming.

  And then it wasn’t.

  It kept growing, squeezing her heart and making it race and jump, pushing against her lungs until she couldn’t breathe. It was going to break her ribs. She arched, stretching her chest and trying to make more room. Mouse felt drunk with the onslaught of power, sure she could and should master anything she wanted.

  Her mind filled with images of her desires. A baby at her breast. Flashes of her sculptures on display in famous museums. Her mouth on Angelo’s, him whispering his love for her as their naked bodies moved together. Herself kneeling in the presence of something she knew to be God, and her body lit from within by a brilliant glow. All of it came rushing at her again and again.

  Mouse squirmed against the thrill. It was all too much.

  And she knew none of it was possible.

  In an instant, her want turned into fury. The power in her grew hot with blue flame. She could feel her lungs begin to blister, and she knew her flesh would melt and she would be blackened and covered in thick waves of scars. Just like her father. Her anger ignited the power, and she saw the image of herself kneeling before God erupt like a bomb of light, throwing God back from her. She stood victorious, laughing.

  Mouse’s scream of rage, so like her father’s, tore through her throat and bounced against the walls of the cell just as his had, the power in her filling her up. She wanted to kill something.

  Then she heard Angelo.

  He was screaming, too. Banging the flashlight against the stone.

  Mouse dropped to her knees and clamped her hand over her mouth, pressing so hard her teeth cut into her lips. “No. I won’t.” The words bubbled in the blood at her mouth.