The Devil's Bible

by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

  Mouse fought the urge to cross herself, a leftover habit from her childhood at the abbey. She knew exactly what he had felt in the Devil’s Bible, but she couldn’t talk about it. She leaned forward and turned the radio up. This time, Jack held his tongue.

  “Turn left here,” she said a few minutes later, and Jack turned onto a winding street that ran alongside Fort Negley. The road narrowed quickly with thick brush growing in the abandoned lots on either side. There were few streetlights and no other cars.

  “Where the hell are we?” Jack asked.

  “This is the most likely place to find Solomon.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “She’s homeless and there’s a tent city up in the woods where she stays sometimes.”

  “Wait, your one friend is a homeless person? And her name is Solomon?”

  “Pull over. I see her bike.” As soon as they stopped, Mouse jumped out of the car and headed up toward camp.

  “Whoa! Where’re you going?”

  “I’m going to find Solomon.”

  “In the dark woods with the homeless people?” Jack asked.

  Mouse turned around. “If you’re scared, you don’t have to come. But I would appreciate it if you stayed with the car in case we need to—”

  “I’m coming.” The car beeped as he locked the doors. “Can’t call myself a man and let some girl go running off into the woods unprotected.”

  “Don’t bother. ‘Some girl’ can take care of herself,” Mouse said as she disappeared into the trees.

  No one in the camp had seen Solomon, but they sent Mouse toward the railroad tracks. Solomon sometimes preferred to be away from the others; she liked her solitude. Mouse understood.

  But it was odd for Solomon to leave her bike behind.

  Weaving between the trees and underbrush down the back of the hill, Mouse felt a shiver of foreboding crawl up her spine. As she neared the tree line, a high, panicked barking rang out, and Mouse took off running like it was the starting pistol of a race. Jack Gray struggled to keep up behind her. They broke through the woods into what looked like a dump filled with the discarded souvenirs of domestic life—refrigerators with their doors ripped off, stacks of deteriorating microwaves, ovens with the grime of cooked suppers left inside, washing machines with their lids left up like gaping mouths. Little Wise was running in circles beside a rusted-out dryer. He was barking and whining intermittently.

  As Mouse neared, she could see there was something in the dryer basin.

  “Solomon?” Mouse felt heavy with dread. Her feet crunched in the gravel as she took another step closer, bending down to look in the dark opening. “Solomon?”

  “You get on out of here before he finds you.”

  Mouse sighed with relief. She’d been sure Solomon was dead. Mouse knelt beside the dryer, the gravel biting into her knees. “Are you hurt?” Her voice rang hollow and thin as the basin swallowed the sound.

  “I tell you, we got to go,” Solomon urged as she stuck out her hand. Mouse pulled her clear of the dryer. Years of exposure and wandering had been tough on Solomon and, even though she was barely middle-aged, she looked and moved like an old woman.

  Mouse assessed her quickly—just a few scrapes on her hands and face, but she was shaking all over and her breathing was fast and shallow. Mouse had spent enough time on battlefields to know the signs of shock. Solomon had seen something. Something terrible.

  “We got to go before he comes back.” Solomon reached down and gathered Wise into her arms.

  “He who?” Jack asked as he looked around.

  Solomon puckered her lips and squinted, her deep wrinkles folding in on themselves. “Death,” she said, her soft Southern drawl so at odds with the word that it set Mouse’s teeth on edge, like metal screeching against metal.

  Jack Gray looked up at Mouse. “She’s nuts. Let’s get out of here.” He bent to grab Solomon’s arm.

  “What do you mean you saw Death?” Mouse asked, seven centuries of experience pricking the back of her neck in uneasy anticipation.

  “I seen him bending over her when I come down the hill. I was just heading to see if the market folks had put out any good food in the trash. They do, sometime, you know.” Solomon was staring off into space. “I didn’t make no sound. I know how to mind my own business. But Wise here, he growled a little, mostly to let me know we didn’t want to be messing with any of what was happening.” She leaned her cheek against the dog’s head. “And that old Death, he turned to look at me and saw I was nobody he wanted, so he walked on down the road. But he carried something with him as he went.” Solomon ran her hand over her face. “They were dangling from his hands, bouncing against each other and dripping on the pavement. I’d seen it as he held her up, his hand behind her head.”

  “Saw what?” Jack asked.

  But Solomon was looking at Mouse when she answered. “Em, he done took that girl’s eyes.”

  PODLAŽICE MONASTERY,

  BOHEMIA

  1278

  Fine feathers of ice ran along the stone joints of the cell wall. Winter was coming to Podlažice.

  But Mouse didn’t care about the biting cold—she was torturing herself with the Psalms. David’s book of prayers and songs had been Father Lucas’s favorite. As a girl, when she struggled with her oddness and her unusual abilities, he would make her recite the words of the Psalms to ease her suffering and to build her faith that God had a plan for her.

  She’d spent most of her young life trying to figure out what that plan was, and just when she thought she’d found the answer—a simple life raising her son, a normal life filled with normal joys and normal problems—it all turned to ash as she read the letter Father Lucas had written when he knew he was about to die.

  Mouse remembered every word of it, but for a long time, the only part that played in her mind was the part that branded her: Some call him Semjaza or Satariel. Others call him Abaddon, the Destroyer. The Father of Lies. Satan. This is what sired you. This is your father.

  This is what Father Lucas had written in his letter.

  Mouse had grown up thinking God had made her special so she could do good in the world. What was she supposed to do when she found out that her father, her creator, was God’s sworn enemy, the Father of Lies? It made her whole life a lie. And it made her too dangerous to be Nicholas’s mother.

  So Mouse had left her little boy with Ottakar while she ran away into the Sumava wilderness thinking to live out her days alone where she could hurt no one else.

  And so she had. Until Marchfeld.

  She wasn’t angry at God—not anymore. What part did he play in her life? None. She was no child of his. He had not shaped some divine plan for her, and despite Father Lucas’s efforts to convince her otherwise, Mouse now knew better than to expect mercy.

  She had begged for it as she knelt beside Ottakar’s dying body. Blood and spit and mud flying everywhere as the soldiers flung themselves at each other, the horses crashing against one another, all of them screaming, and Ottakar trying to say her name as blood bubbled through his lips. Mouse had begged God then. And what had he done? Nothing.

  “You have the books out of order.”

  Mouse jumped. She had been lost in her misery and had not heard her father pull himself in through the dark.

  “Go away.” She would not look at him. He didn’t scare her; what did she care about what he might do to her? Torture would be a relief. Death would be an answer to the prayer she couldn’t speak. The only thing that frightened Mouse was the power that woke with her anger. She would not let him rile her again. She bent to the parchment and focused on the scratch of the quill.

  He lowered himself to sit cross-legged on the stone floor at her side. “So you know the Old Testament by memory?” he asked.

  “I was raised in an abbey,” Mouse said, as if that explained things.

  “Even the Pope couldn’t recite the entire Old Testament by heart. It’s a waste of your gifts. They’re all watered-down
myths and faulty histories anyway.” His velvet voice couldn’t quite mask the belligerence.

  “Have you read it?” Mouse hadn’t meant to ask a question, but it surprised her that he would bother with scripture.

  “Many times.” His eyes twinkled, but he kept the laugh to himself. “Though I’ve never seen the books in that particular order. Why do you put Samuel and Kings there?” He nodded to the piles of parchment Mouse had laid out along the floor—the Pentateuch in a neat stack followed by the books of the Prophets and then Job, I and II Samuel, I and II Kings, and then the Psalms she was working on.

  “Father Lucas had me read them this way.”

  “Father Lucas?”

  Mouse’s throat tightened. She hadn’t meant to tell her father anything, nothing personal anyway. It seemed dangerous. “Just . . . someone,” she answered.

  “Someone who cares for you?”

  “No. He is dead.”

  “But he did care for you.”

  Mouse gave a single nod.

  “And he had you read the books this way, why? So you could see the sufferings of Saul and David and God’s other pets not as histories, but as what?” Energy rolled through him as he worked toward some insight into the forces that had shaped this girl. “As wisdoms like Job? To show you the true nature of a fickle and arrogant God who would send evil to torture his most beloved? Surely not—not Father Lucas, a man of the Church. What did he want to give you by having you read them this way? Why put the Psalms there?”

  “They are hope in the darkness.” Mouse sounded like an echo repeating Father Lucas’s words.

  In that moment, the excitement of discovery that had been dancing in her father’s voice stilled, and his head snapped around to look at her. “What did this man know about you?” Anyone who knew her secrets might know his as well. It made him vulnerable.

  “Nothing,” Mouse said, though she could hear the fear in his voice and was sure he could hear the lie in hers.

  “Tell me who he was and what he knew.” Mouse felt the compulsion as he spoke. Like a swarm of snakes, he turned and twisted in her mind, violating her as he worked to control her.

  But despite his efforts, Mouse kept silent.

  His eyes widened in surprise. He was accustomed to being obeyed—people had no choice but to acquiesce to the power of his command. Yet this girl ignored him and followed her own will. That made her very dangerous. His eyes lingered on her throat, the subtle ridges of cartilage and the jump of the blood in her veins.

  “Who were Ottakar and Nicholas?” he asked more gently, calling up the names that he had pulled out of her mind earlier, names that meant nothing to him but everything to her. He wondered if they knew her secrets.

  “It does not matter. They are dead.”

  “Are there others—friends or family?”

  Mouse sighed. She could give him an easy truth this time. “No one. They are all dead.”

  He relaxed at her answer—no one who might know too much about her and thus too much about him. His enemies would salivate at the chance to learn what they could from this girl. He looked back down at the parchment, searching for another way to get her to expose herself.

  “I confess I find these texts a bit biased, a collection of Yahwist propaganda.” He allowed the chuckle this time. He got no reaction from Mouse, so he asked, “What do you find in there?”

  “Truths. Maybe.”

  His eyes narrowed as he studied her face. “And why does that make you sound so sad?”

  “Because I think they are not my truths.” It wasn’t a question, but Mouse looked up at his face for an answer anyway. She got none.

  “You wonder if you have a soul?” he asked softly.

  Mouse shrugged. When she was a girl, she had known she was odd, but she didn’t know she was special until one day when she was lost in the woods and looking for Mother Kazi, the woman who had helped to raise her at the abbey. Little Mouse had closed her eyes and seen the glow of Mother Kazi in her mind, and then she had run toward that glow and out of the dark woods. She knew that what she had seen was Mother Kazi’s soul, and Mouse had innocently believed that her ability to see souls had been a gift from God.

  For a time, she loved studying the souls of others—Father Lucas’s especially, because it was soft and bright. But when she looked inside herself, Mouse could find no glow. She’d made herself sick with looking, eyes rolled back in her head searching for some flicker of light inside. Eventually, she had gotten so discouraged by the darkness she found in herself that she stopped looking. When she found out who her father was, it all made sense. Mouse didn’t have a soul.

  Her father’s laugh startled her. As she watched him clapping his hands like a child, Mouse got angry, and her own power purred to life.

  “Stop!” she yelled.

  He kept laughing. He liked to provoke people, to push them beyond their limits, and to make them lose control. But, as he felt her power rise, he wondered: If he made her mad enough, would she try to do to him what she had done at Marchfeld? Would she be able to?

  As quickly as he had started, he stopped laughing. It was too dangerous to play with this girl and her power that was so different from his.

  So he decided on a new strategy. “I’m sorry. I just figured out why you are working so hard for penance. You think that if you follow all the rules set out in those pages—see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil—you’ll get a soul in the end. That’s it, isn’t it? If you have a soul, then you can have forgiveness.”

  Mouse was seething—embarrassed at being exposed and pained by the truth he told.

  “But for you there is no end.” He meant it to be comforting. It wasn’t. “And can you forgive yourself for what you’ve done? Killing Ottakar? Killing Nicholas? I am sure you did not mean to do it,” he said quietly. “But if you cannot forgive yourself, then how can you expect God to?”

  Mouse could hardly see to write. Her hand was shaking, but she needed something to help her control the rage building in her. She grabbed a stack of blank parchment and jammed a needle through leaf after leaf to make guide holes in the four margins.

  “Go away,” she said.

  She huddled over the pages and pressed a finely shaved bone awl against the parchment, dragging it from guide hole to guide hole, making a furrow on one side and a ridge on the other. The lines were sharp and straight. She counted the lines as she went—six top-to-bottom in the center of the leaf and at the edges, one hundred and six lines horizontally in two columns—the same for sheet after sheet. They made a perfect grid, controlled and precise. They would keep her hand steady as she wrote just as they calmed her mind as she crafted and counted them.

  She didn’t have to look up to know her father was gone.

  Mouse worked until sleep claimed her. Hours later, she woke to the lemony sweet smell of linden blooms. She sat up quickly, disoriented, thinking for a moment that she was back at the castle at Hluboka lying under the linden trees with Ottakar. But the darkness grounded her; the only candle left burning in her cell offered little light as the flame was barely a glow in a sea of melted wax. When Mouse lit another candle, she saw the small tower of parchment stacked neatly at her workspace on the floor, a branch of linden blossoms resting on top.

  She could not imagine where he’d found them this time of year. But it was what lay underneath that took her breath away: the rest of the Old Testament and all of the New, complete, and copied in a script that perfectly matched her own.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Jack Gray scoffed. “What does she mean Death was here?”

  Mouse shrugged, but she stood up and started to scan the woods behind Solomon.

  “Surely you don’t believe her,” he said.

  Mouse knew what kinds of dangers lurked in the dark—things Jack would dismiss as a fairy tale she knew all too well to be real.

  “Come on. Let’s get her to a hospital or something,” Jack said.

  But Mouse didn’t move. She kept peering into
the deeper shadows of the tree line, looking for some sign of what had terrified Solomon. Because Mouse was also afraid and not just of Solomon’s Death.

  In the early years, when she thought her “gifts” came from God, Mouse had used her power on purpose once to resurrect a newborn baby—surely a good and sacred act. But then she’d learned the consequences. Drawn by her power, the hollow-eyed children had descended on Prague and tormented the people until Mouse was able to lure the creatures away and trap them in the pit at Houska.

  Mouse learned the rule pretty quickly—using her power was like lighting a candle in the midst of a dark expanse and then blowing it out. The more power she used, the brighter and longer the candle would shine, and the easier it would be to find her. What happened at Marchfeld had been like turning on a searchlight, but the other moments were only flickers in the night, and whatever dark creatures came looking for her still had to grope about in the dark. Mouse had hoped that the slip of power she’d used on Jack in the bar had been so insignificant—the flash of a firefly—that it would go unnoticed. She worried now that she was not so lucky.

  “Look, I’m leaving. You can come or not.” Jack seemed to have reached the end of his patience.

  “I see something,” Mouse said softly as she strained her eyes against the dying light. She pointed. “Over there.”

  “Don’t you go look,” Solomon warned.

  “I have to,” Mouse said, her feet dragging a little in the dirt as she moved toward the dark heap that lay in front of a decaying stove. She heard Jack Gray creeping along behind her. Mouse could feel the fear in him.

  She smelled the girl’s perfume first—violets and gardenias and a little bit of vanilla. She strained to hear a heartbeat, a breath. Mouse was almost prepared for what they saw, Jack Gray not at all.

  “Oh, God!” He spun away, gagging.

  Mouse knelt to touch the dead girl’s arm. Still warm. Her empty eye sockets still glistened with blood.