The Devil's Bible Read online

  For Jim, Shane, and Beth:

  anchors in the tempests,

  wings to help me soar.

  Part One

  The strongest and the fiercest spirit

  That fought in heaven, now fiercer by despair.

  —Paradise Lost, Book II, Lines 44–45

  PROLOGUE

  AVIGNON, 1236

  It happened like the others, sweat and blood, screaming, and then—disappointment.

  “I am very sorry,” the doctor mumbled as he wiped his hands on the sheets between the woman’s legs.

  The father thought about snapping the doctor’s neck. He had done that once before. But the sting of failure cooled his rage. He had no one to blame but himself and the woman, and she would be dead soon anyway. Now it was just a matter of ridding himself of the unfortunate outcome. He had no need of a girl.

  He watched as the nurse lowered the baby into the arms of the woman lying twisted among bedcoverings soaked with blood and afterbirth. She lifted her breast and teased the infant’s lips with her nipple until, mewling with hunger, it opened its mouth and latched on to suck. The mother whispered a lullaby: “On t’aime, ma petite. On t’aime. Le bon Dieu, au ciel, t’aime. On t’aime, ma petite. On t’aime. Ta mère, à jamais, t’aime.”

  The father cocked his head in confusion at the tender moment. Compelled by a craving to understand this intimacy that was so alien to him, he took a step toward the bed.

  “Like the others, my lord,” the doctor interrupted. “A girl. But this one is alive. Shall I dispose of it?” He smirked with self-importance.

  The father turned swiftly, his arm snaking from underneath the cloak and closing around the doctor’s neck. His claws sank into the doctor’s flesh. When he snatched his arm back, he held the doctor’s ragged and bloody throat in his hand. He flung the bits of shattered cartilage as he pivoted back toward the bed.

  The mother lay dead.

  The nurse and the infant were gone.

  The father moved to the open door and listened for the sounds that would expose them; he heard nothing but a peal of thunder as it found its way down the alley. He sniffed the air to catch their scent, but the rain muted everything and mingled smells together like soup. He knew he would not be able to track them.

  “Unexpected,” he whispered.

  This girl—this disappointment—would live. For now. He needed to turn his thoughts toward his next conquest—the one that would profit him a son. He took the edge of his cloak and pulled it over his shoulder, folding himself into the blackness of the night.

  Cowering in the deeper dark of a bend in the alley not far past the still gaping door, the nurse laid her face gently against the baby’s head, silently pleading: Don’t make a sound. Be quiet. Quiet as a little mouse.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The cicadas were singing in the early afternoon. Their rhythmic ditty mingled with the soft sweetness of the just-blooming magnolias and the warm sunshine. Mouse breathed in air that was full of the promise of the coming summer.

  She’d just turned in final grades, and, starting tomorrow, the days would be hers to do with as she pleased. Mouse started to smile at the thought but caught herself. A smile opened the door for happiness, for joy, and she wasn’t quite ready for that. Not yet. She sighed instead as she turned down the sidewalk toward the student center and her last task of the semester: the history department’s end-of-year lecture and reception.

  Typically she found some excuse to get out of such public and social gatherings, but the chair of the department, Dr. Williams, had stopped by Mouse’s office that morning and made it clear that attendance was mandatory for anyone who wanted to keep her job. And Mouse very much wanted to keep teaching. She struggled with one-on-one interactions with students and colleagues, but, in the classroom, she felt almost normal.

  She yanked at the outer door of the student center, shivering at the blast of too-cold, air-conditioned air as she stepped into the crowded lobby. Offering the curt nods of necessary acknowledgement, she made her way to the table lined with name tags and programs. She grabbed hers and headed to the auditorium where there would be a little more breathing room. Mouse didn’t do close spaces and crowds. The onslaught of perfumes and colognes, the hundreds of disparate chatters and bodies pressing past triggered her claustrophobia.

  Even as a child, Mouse had never liked small spaces, though once upon a time she had enjoyed being among people, especially at parties where she could listen to the music and dance. But not anymore. Now, even at a professional gathering like this one, the pats on the back and the casual hugs, the bits of gossip shared, people saving seats for each other—it all reminded Mouse of how isolated she really was. How different. And how dangerous.

  Mouse kept to the back of the auditorium, leaning against the wall near the doors. She kept her eyes on the speckled carpet at her feet and counted the ratio of black specks to white to gray. It was a trick Father Lucas, her childhood mentor, had taught her when she needed to control her emotions—filling her mind with something monotonous and mundane worked like a sedative. Mostly it was her temper she wrestled with back in those days, but now she counted to shut out the world. All of it, all the time. No joy; no despair. No love; no anger. Feel nothing. It was safer that way—safer for her and for everyone else.

  The houselights dimmed, tossing a blanket of darkness on everyone in the auditorium, and the people grew quiet.

  “I’d like to welcome you all to this year’s Burns History Lecture.” As Dr. Williams meandered through the obligatory flattery of deans and other administrators, Mouse realized she had no idea who this year’s guest lecturer was. She looked down at the program, but it was too dark to read. As Dr. Williams rattled off the highlights of the yet-unnamed lecturer’s resume, degrees, and publications, Mouse could hear a hint of disapproval in his voice. Something pinged in the back of her mind, a quiet early warning.

  “Please join me in welcoming our distinguished guest, Dr. Jack Gray.” The crowd offered polite applause.

  Mouse looked up sharply and then her shoulders sagged. She knew the young man who stepped out onto the stage, but the last thing she needed was to deal with a complication from her past.

  She could tell Jack Gray was fighting back a chuckle as he leaned into the microphone. “Thank you for that warm welcome, Dr. Williams.” He shoved a hand into his jeans pocket and ran the other through his hair. Mouse pressed herself against the brick wall at her back. Jack hadn’t changed much since she’d last seen him.

  Mouse had occasionally run into former students at conferences over the years, but after the initial awkwardness—“Oh my, you haven’t changed a bit. I’m sure you don’t remember me, but I was in your class”—Mouse had simply avoided more contact by shunning the conference dinners and receptions, slipping in late to panels and leaving early. She would secretly give herself a moment of pleasure to hear that her students were doing well and remembered her fondly, but she couldn’t afford long-term relationships and so kept her distance.

  Jack Gray was different though. She’d made a mistake with him.

  “I’m beginning to question the sincerity of your Southern hospitality,” he said to the audience. “Because despite the very polite smiles and kind inquiries about my flight, I have the impression that some of my fellow historians may have invited me here under duress.” He let the chuckle bubble out this time. Jack Gray had always been very sure of himself. He threw his hands up in mock surrender. “But that’s okay. Believe me, I understand. My academic pedigree isn’t nearly as long or prestigious as most of yours, and, of course, there’s the issue of my subject matter.”

  The title slide of his presentation flared to life on the screen behind him. It was a picture
of his just-published book: Who Wrote the Devil’s Bible? Mouse pressed harder against the back wall of the auditorium and dug her fingers into the spaces between the bricks, the rough edges of the stone cutting into her cuticles.

  She thought she had left Jack Gray several states and thirteen years away. Maybe his coming here was coincidence. Maybe he didn’t even know she was here. It was certainly not surprising that he’d been researching the Devil’s Bible; he’d been doing the same when she saw him last. It was why she had left. She’d hoped that her absence would cause him to lose interest, but clearly he had continued his work. She wondered how much he had learned since then. How dangerous was he?

  “We scholars like to call it the Codex Gigas—literally, ‘giant book,’” he said as he flicked the slide to show the cover of the ancient text. “A nice, safe, and scientific title based on what we think we know about it. It was the biggest book of the Middle Ages and compiled the most important historical and religious documents of its time. It was once considered an eighth wonder of the world. Giant, indeed. Monumental, even. There is simply no other book like it in the world—not then, not now.” Mouse could hear the fervor in his voice, and she didn’t like it.

  “And yet we know so little about it. Where was it scripted? What happened to the legendary missing pages? Who took them? And why? We haven’t even answered the most basic mystery of all: Who wrote it?” He paced as he spoke, then stopped, center stage, and clicked the projector remote. A distorted, horned beast, clothed only in an ermine loincloth, split-tongue flickering and clawed hands raised, now loomed on the screen.

  “Was it the Devil, as legend claims?” Jack Gray spoke in a mock horror movie voice, and his audience laughed with him. “Did poor Herman the monk, walled up in his cell, eventually admit the impossibility of his penitent task—to write a single book containing all the world’s knowledge—and call on Satan to rescue him?”

  Mouse could feel the anxiety building, like bugs crawling in her chest, and her mouth had gone dry. But she couldn’t leave until she knew what Jack knew.

  “Of course, it wasn’t some demonic conspiracy any more than it was ancient aliens,” Jack Gray scoffed. “But we’ve let the myths work their magic on us all the same. Like some bogeyman, they’ve scared us off of doing real, academic study of this magnificent medieval manuscript. Surely it’s not the Devil’s Bible, but in order to put that ridiculousness to rest, we must answer the question—who really wrote the Codex Gigas?”

  Dr. Gray clicked the slide again, revealing a series of ampersands and minims that Mouse recognized all too well. The graphs of the handwriting samples, all measured and ruled, were a stark contrast to the previous portrait of Satan, and the stuffy room sighed with relief to be returned to the mundane and knowable facts of their field. Even Mouse felt her tension uncoil a little. This wasn’t about her. This was simple, academic inquiry, an extension of the project he’d started in her class at Chapel Hill thirteen years ago. He probably didn’t even remember their conversation.

  But Mouse remembered. He had come to talk to her about the paper he was writing for her class, a paper about the Devil’s Bible.

  “It’s called the Codex Gigas, Jack. And it’s not worth your time,” she had answered.

  “I know you’re not interested in it. You didn’t even talk about it in class. But I’m fascinated with it.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s shrouded in mystery. No one knows who wrote it or even where it was written.”

  “It was written at Podlažice monastery.”

  He cocked his head. “Nobody believes that. All the sources I’ve read say that monastery was way too small to be able to make a book like the Devil’s Bible.”

  “That’s just academic prejudice, Jack. They take what they know about other ancient books and assume that a small, insignificant monastery like Podlažice wouldn’t have monks with the education or the ambition to script a book like the Codex Gigas, much less have access to high quality parchment or inks or gold leaf.” Mouse sighed. “So because it doesn’t fit their expectations, scholars can’t accept the fact that it was written at Podlažice.”

  “The fact that it was written at Podlažice?” He leaned forward onto her desk. “How can you be so sure?”

  Mouse had replayed this scenario in her head a hundred times in thirteen years, not because she could undo it, but to remind herself that, despite her discipline, she could still screw up. If she had just swallowed her ego and brushed him off, claiming that it was only her opinion and that she was probably wrong, Jack might have forgotten all about it. But she had lied instead. “I read something about it by another scholar, a specialist in ancient books, if I remember correctly,” she said. “He believed the book was written at Podlažice.”

  Jack Gray’s follow-up was predictable, something she should have easily anticipated. “Oh, what was his name? I’d like to take a look at the article.”

  And so she had to lie again. “I don’t remember.”

  Mouse never forgot anything. It was one of the “gifts” inherited from her father—abilities that she considered curses, abilities that made her anything but normal. She remembered everything: what she and Jack had been wearing that day, what music had been playing on her laptop, the exact order of the books on the shelves against the wall of her office behind Jack’s head. And she remembered the arrogant surety in her voice when she told him the Devil’s Bible had been written at Podlažice. She had left no room for doubt.

  But though she might remember it all, she doubted that Jack did. He had pestered her for the rest of the semester to give him the name of the article she’d read. He was clearly hooked by the mysteries of the Devil’s Bible, but she had dismissed his persistence as the act of a student trying to prove himself. She’d left Chapel Hill because she thought it was the safest way to avoid more contact with him, not because she thought she was in any real danger. That’s what she did anytime there was a hint of trouble or inconvenience—she ran.

  Not far enough, she thought now, as Jack Gray’s voice brought her attention back to the stage.

  “The distinctive script marks on the screen are unique to this writer, like a thumbprint. We know the writer scripts differently than a typical scribe of the time, and yet, we’ve always insisted that he must be a monk.”

  Mouse wondered where he was going with this.

  “But my study of these marks leads me to believe that we’ve been very wrong in our assumptions. I don’t think he was a monk at all. Clearly the writer had an uncommon education and was quite an artist—which is even more rare for the time and place. So I think it’s fair to conclude that we’re talking about someone of worth, perhaps a member of the nobility.”

  Mouse couldn’t help but smile a little. Jack was so close yet so wrong.

  “As a scholar, I wasn’t satisfied with what we thought we knew, and, thanks to a generous grant from a patron who wishes to remain anonymous, I was able to obtain access to the Codex with a team of specialists and their cutting-edge technology. Our analysis of script style, size, and, most significantly, measurements of the pressure of the writer’s hand on the page based on the depth of indentation in the parchment, suggests that our writer is . . . a woman.”

  The joy Jack Gray took in the communal gasp from the audience played on his face. In the back of the room, Mouse had gone completely still.

  “Now, before I walk you through the basics of the study, I want to take a moment to thank a mentor. Had it not been for her wisdom in challenging me to think outside the box of conventional medieval scholarship, I wouldn’t be here today.” Jack smiled. “She’s actually now one of your own, and I’m pretty sure I saw her in the audience earlier. Please join me in thanking Dr. Emma Nicholas.” He pointed toward the back of the room and began clapping. Everyone turned, squinting against the projector light into the darkness of the back wall, staring at Mouse.

  She had spent her life trying to be invisible and now hundreds of people were staring at h
er, waiting. She couldn’t breathe, and the reflection of the stage lights started to pulse at the edges of her vision. As Mouse lowered her head, she saw the lanyard hanging around her neck: EMMA NICHOLAS. All these people were staring at Emma Nicholas, she reminded herself, not at her. Not at Mouse. She had held plenty of titles over the years—most recently Assistant Professor—but in her mind, she was always just Mouse. No one had ever given her a proper name. But society seemed to demand something more substantial than “small rodent” for applications to graduate school, passports, and name tags, so she had invented “Emma Nicholas”—a name borrowed from people she had once belonged to, who had once belonged to her.

  That had been a long time ago. Now, no one knew her as Mouse. No one knew her at all. And it had to stay that way.

  She cut her eyes up to Jack Gray, who was no longer clapping. He leaned against the podium, smirking, and Mouse understood that he meant this as his first salvo.

  Well, she’d done battle before and with far more dangerous opponents.

  She pulled her head up, smiled, gave a quick nod, and raised her hand to acknowledge the still-applauding audience. She waited until they turned their attention back to Jack, who had begun to explain the science behind the technology used in his research. Then Mouse slipped quickly and silently out the door.

  Mouse bounced her leg against the stool as she sat with her back to the door of the pub. She had already counted the pavers in the student center lobby and then her steps up to the third floor, but nothing was working to slip her back into that impassive state she needed. Her heart was still thumping, and she could feel the heat of embarrassment in her face, fueled by a growing anger.

  “Know the score?” Jack Gray asked as he leaned into her, tossing her the note she’d left for him with the attendant at the book-signing table.

  Mouse turned and saw the disappointment in his face. He’d thought he’d get the jump on her, slipping up from behind, but she wouldn’t be caught unaware again. She had smelled him as soon as he walked in the door. Heightened senses were another gift from her father, and for once she was appreciative of the advantage they offered. She meant to put an end to whatever game Jack was playing.