The Devil's Poetry Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2017

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, Kindle Scout, and Kindle Press are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  For Franny, my first Reader, with all my love.

  Contents

  Start Reading

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  More in The Devil’s Poetry series

  Before You Go. . .

  Acknowledgments

  Only man fears the coming of the night.

  —The Book

  Chapter 1

  I’d never realized war could be so quiet. The National Service letters had whispered through our doors that morning. It seemed such thin pages should have torn under the strain of such a heavy message.

  I didn’t get one. Not yet.

  I was still seventeen. My time would come.

  Even now, as we shivered in the school car park despite the afternoon sun shining bright and hard above us, there was no sound. The last thing we wanted when so many of us had our own call-up papers crumpled in our pockets was to honor the dead, but no one would have refused. We stood unspeaking as we waited for the military vehicles to appear carrying their sad cargo. The silence chilled my skin like snow.

  I scanned the crowd, my gaze flicking over to Gavin leaning by the doors, his face too pale but his dark eyes bright and hard. To his left stood Alec. Our eyes met for a moment before he looked away without acknowledging me.

  I crushed the sliver of hurt and looked back to the road.

  The slow convoy would roll down Grammar School Lane and onto the High Street. The shops would empty there, and the people would wait in silence at the curbside. I had seen them often enough, the old women clutching garden flowers, willowherb, poppies, foxglove, to throw under the wheels of the hearses.

  “English flowers, dear,” an old lady once said to me. “The scent tells our boys they’re home.”

  To her, our troops would probably always be “boys,” but these days as many women were called to fight as men. I wondered who lay in these wooden boxes, where they had served. Whether they had families watching and waiting for them, as their bodies were flown back into Britain and welcomed home through our tiny village.

  The highest-ranking member of the veterans would stand to attention at the War Memorial, ready to call the salute. The roads were closed to other traffic.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and let my thoughts drift away, but all I could see was Amber’s puffy face that morning in class as I had slid into my seat next to her.

  “Joe?” I had murmured. Her brother was eighteen, a year ahead of us.

  She’d nodded. “He’ll be in the first wave. September birthday.”

  “Is he OK?” It had felt stupid to even ask, but I hadn’t known what to say.

  Her lip had trembled slightly. “No. Not really, Callie. He’s putting on a brave face for Mum, though. She can’t stop crying.”

  “Oh God.”

  She’d straightened up and pushed her hair back. “Well, there’s nothing we can do to stop it. I say we go out tonight.”

  I’d frowned. I’d planned to bury myself in a book. I always hid in someone else’s story when things got rough. I hadn’t managed to answer, though, because our head teacher, Mr. Patterson, had slipped through the door, his apologetic body language at odds with the sharp rap of his heels on the tiled floor. He’d spoken of his sorrow, but he didn’t need to—his mouth was thin as a pencil line, and his cheeks and eyes had developed new dark hollows along the bone.

  He’d told us the things we already knew: about the oil wars, Russia and China squaring off, about the ongoing conflicts in Iran, Afghanistan, and the Middle East.

  “We, of all people, don’t need to be reminded of the cost of those wars. But I also want you to know that not everyone who has been called up will go to the front line. Some of you will be in counterterrorism units in the UK.” He’d looked around the room, his eyes meeting every face, as if trying to ferret out the necessary bright side from one of us. It hadn’t worked. He’d swallowed.

  “Remember, wars also stop. Eventually. And life goes on.” He’d attempted a brave smile, but it just made his face wrinkle into old age. “Life goes on. Don’t forget that. Don’t stop living today because you are worried about tomorrow. The India-Pakistan peace talks in London could change the mood of all of this.” He’d paused, searching. “You all have futures,” he’d whispered. “Don’t give up.”

  As the purr of engines and rumble of wheels brought me back to the silent crowd, the girl next to me started trembling. I didn’t know her, but after a moment, I took her hand. She held on without looking at me. I followed Amber’s gaze to Joe standing with his friends. They looked so young, each face a blank page.

  We watched the hearses with their Union Jack shrouds roll past us. In that moment, it seemed like they carried our futures, our voices. And they left us nothing.

  I turned to Amber. “Screw it,” I said. “Let’s go out.”

  ***

  The music pounded through Miasma, the one club in York where the bouncers didn’t check IDs too carefully. I sipped a drink and pulled out my phone to text Amber. It was dead, and not just the battery. It smelled vaguely of burned plastic. Damn it. Well, it was too late to worry about it now. I searched the crowd instead and found her on the dance floor. Arms over her head, she sashayed and twisted in the press of bodies like a mesmerised snake.

  The floor trembled with each thunder roll of the bass, and the spotlights swinging through the darkness swirled huge shadows onto the walls. It’s an ocean storm, I thought. I’m Viola from Twelfth Night, shipwrecked and thrown onto a foreign shore.

  Amber draped her arms around some boy’s neck, laughing. I should join them, I thought. Dance. I envied my friend’s easy confidence. She didn’t even need courage. She just did the things she wanted to do, without ever feeling self-conscious. If anyone watched her, she laughed and invited them to join in. If I stepped onto the dance floor I felt like one of the spotlights was suddenly all mine, that everyone stopped to watch, and I’d shrivel like a bug in a jar.

  Amber only thinks when she needs to. I overanalyze everything.

  Like now, when I should be dancing.

  Pull yourself together, Callie, I urged myself. Time is short. You have to live while you can.

  Joe seemed to feel the same way. I could see him at the edge of the chill-out, kissing some redhead like his life depended on it.

  I shrank until my shoulder
blades hit the exposed brick wall, and I noticed a guy sitting at the bar, dark hair shrouding his face. He looked out of place, older than the teenage crowd that frequented Miasma. He watched me for a moment, and I dropped my gaze, unsettled, stepping back into someone’s arms.

  I disentangled myself, each of us doing a frantic two-step, before I realized I had bumped into Alec. He swallowed, and after an awkward moment, gave a curt nod. “McKenna.”

  McKenna? Where did he think we were, Eton?

  “Carstair,” I replied sarcastically, and he moved past me to the bar.

  I crushed the unbidden memory of Alec laughing, meadow grass waving above us as we lay on our backs making up ridiculous lyrics to love songs. Of a summer spent hanging out. Of talking. Of a single tentative kiss. I’d thought it was the beginning of something.

  Then school started.

  Forget it. Whatever unspoken consensus said we needed to be having fun right now, to savor these last moments of freedom, it clearly wasn’t working for me. Even the sweaty air of the club held a tinge of desperation, the voices an undercurrent of fear beneath the frivolity. My evening was done. I grabbed my bag and coat from under the table and started to push my way through the bodies by the bar, struck by how people are soft and warm individually but all elbows and hardness en masse. I wriggled and squeezed and excuse me’d, tugging my bag after me through the tangle of legs.

  So I didn’t notice the moment the fight broke out. I didn’t see the guy who threw the first punch or the face of the boy who flew backward into me, landing on me as we hit the floor.

  “Stay the hell away from my girlfriend,” someone yelled, and the prone lad crushing the air from my lungs disappeared, yanked away by an unseen hand.

  The fight spilled out across the floor, and those closest staggered back. I scrambled aside and peered over the sea of heads to try to find Alec or Amber, my back aching from the impact with the tiled, sticky floor. I pulled myself along the bar, gripping the beer-slick edge, trying to stay upright as the crowd surged against me. The dance floor had become a melee. The strobe lights pounded on, throwing blades of light across cheekbones before plunging us back into momentary darkness. I forced my way forward, catching snatches of arguments as I went—

  “Always looking at other girls—”

  “Stupid bit—”

  “She’s always been a cow, even in nursery—”

  “You always say that—why do you always bloody say that?”

  An elbow caught me on the jaw, and I spun, my fall broken by a girl who wept as she tried to gather the scattered contents of her handbag from under stamping boots. I tried to push myself back onto my feet, but legs pounded into my sides. I grabbed a male leg and tried to claw my way to standing.

  A bottle smashed against the wall, the fragments sparkling in the disco lights. On the stage, oblivious of the shower of beer and broken glass, stood two men, their faces unmoved and their eyes blank, scanning the crowd. They looked too old and shabbily dressed for a nightclub, but I couldn’t explain the thrill of terror I felt. Their heads moved mechanically, back and forth across the room, as though the all-out chaos was irrelevant.

  Something smacked me on the head, but I didn’t turn. My heart thundered, and my breath came in serrated sobs. I dropped to the floor and scooted backward, crab-crawling blindly until my back pressed against the bar. I should have stood, fled, but I stayed, paralyzed by the unshakeable, irrational thought that they were looking for me.

  If I moved, they would see me like owls hunting a mouse. I shrank down further, shaking, camouflaged by chaos. Huddled next to me, the other girl sobbed, her mascara bruising her eyes. She looked like a doll in the rain, abandoned and ragged.

  I didn’t give her another thought. I didn’t think about my friends, I didn’t pray that Amber was unscathed, or look for Gavin to emerge from the bedlam and rescue me. I couldn’t think. My heartbeat and the noise and the thumping music became one terrifying backdrop of sound, and it was all I could do to breathe. I forced myself to look up, and, as I found their faces, my heart stopped.

  Both gazed straight at me, unmoving. A fluorescent light shattered above me with a blinding bright flash. I cowered and blinked the explosion from my vision. When I looked up, their eyes appeared white and empty.

  I opened my mouth to scream, but, before I could make a sound, a strong male hand grabbed my arm roughly and dragged me back toward the door. His momentum pulled me to my feet, but I stumbled. I pushed my feet in front and braced myself against him, but it was like water-skiing, my feet sliding helplessly in his wake.

  He turned and bellowed at me, “Move. There are more of them behind.”

  It was the guy from the bar, the one who had been watching me. I half-ran, half-fell after him through the crowd. He shoved people aside easily, carelessly, his grip biting into my bicep. We were almost at the door when a biker, seemingly enraged with everyone, swung into our path and threw a savage punch toward bar-guy’s head. He let go of me, and his first blow left the tattooed man gagging and clutching his throat. One more blow to the back of the head and the biker’s face hit the brickwork with a sickening crack. I shrank back, but bar-guy grabbed me again, and I hesitated for only a moment. Whoever he was, instinct said he was better than what was behind me.

  We spilled out onto the street, and he released me. My arm felt bruised, the back of my head throbbed, and a deep aching pain, like the worst toothache ever, spread up my left jaw. Curiously, my fear started to subside—at least the gut-wrenching-panic part of it.

  “Come on. We need to leave.”

  Suddenly, I felt fear of a whole new kind. The kind of stranger-danger fear parents instill in you from the first time you go to the shop alone.

  “Who are you? Why were you watching me in there?” He could have been waiting for a chance to prey on someone.

  “Calm down. I’m not your enemy. We have to get away from here.” He sounded American.

  “I’m not going anywhere with you. You’re a complete stranger.”

  He considered this. “Maybe. But I won’t kill you. They will.”

  I struggled to collect my thoughts. “Look, whatever that was, it had nothing to do with me. It was only a drunken fight. Everyone’s kind of tense around here.”

  “That’s what you felt in there? That it was nothing to do with you? When they looked at you?”

  I wished I could pretend I didn’t know who he meant by “they.” I swallowed. “I admit I was scared. That kind of brawl isn’t normal for York, you know?”

  “Oh, it certainly wasn’t normal. However, it has everything to do with you. And the war. We have to go.” He scooped my bag up on to my shoulder, and I took a step back without thinking. This guy was some kind of crazy.

  “Look, erm, thanks. It was really kind of you to help me out of there. I’ll get a cab. I’ll be fine now, thank you.”

  I could hear sirens in the distance. Actually, not so distant. He glanced around, seeming suddenly nervous. “Look, I don’t have time to debate this. Let’s get you in a cab.”

  “I’m fine, really, I—”

  “You’ve banged your head. Making sure you get home is the least I can do.” He propelled me forward down Peter’s Street, and, almost before I knew it, shoved me into the back of a taxi.

  He handed the driver something. “Low Cottage, Lifley, please.” He turned to me and thrust a small package into my hands. “Don’t read it. Just keep it safe,” he said.

  The taxi sped away, leaving him far behind me, before I could ask him how he knew where I lived.

  ***

  Dad was out. Not that it would have made much difference. We’d barely spoken in ten years, unless you counted the occasional burst of parental paranoia.

  I raced to my room, dropped the bag on the bed, and checked that the door from my room to the garden was bolted. Then I sank to the floor, bruised and exhausted, tugging my bag down after me. I took out the package, peeling back the layers of tissue until I caught glimpses o
f blue leather and glints of gold-tipped edges. Finally, it lay in my hand like it had always belonged there.

  It was a book.

  It seemed so old with its creased blue leather and yellow parchment. I vaguely wondered if I should be wearing gloves. The corners were broken and peeling slightly, the folds in the spine white with age. The inside was beautiful. Pages of curling, handwritten text nestled at the center of an explosion of color. Red, gold, searing blues and greens so bright they hurt my eyes. It reminded me of a miniature prayer book, a tiny version of the illuminated manuscripts the Lindisfarne monks had created.

  I was entranced, but, at the same time, something in my stomach shuddered and tightened. I scanned the first few lines. It was poetry, but how old, I couldn’t tell. The style changed again and again, verse to verse. It was like someone had tried to cram rock, pop, soul, and gangsta all into the same track. Bits of it seemed really old, others modern. Yet it kind of worked. A raw, surging music thrummed under the surface. Maybe someone had kept changing it. Updating it?

  I gave up reading and sat until my legs cramped, poring over the images. They were strange but so rich with detail. Animals and plants and biblical scenes crawled up the margins, crowded the words. It was brimming with them, stitched into the borders, clustered in corners, sometimes four or five to a page. On one, a woman grasped a snake by its throat, its tail wrapped around her legs. On another, an antelope leaped, its back legs moments from the lion’s jaw. They creeped me out.

  Enough. I slipped the book under my pillow and climbed into bed, trying to ignore the curtains which rustled with every breath of wind, and the creaking of the tree outside. I had grown up in the countryside, and its noises and darkness had never frightened me before. Yet, for the first time, I wished I didn’t sleep on the ground floor.

  As I closed my eyes, I imagined blank eyes staring in, probing the corners of my room like searchlights, looking for me.

  Chapter 2

  The London chapel was silent. Cardinal Henry Campbell lowered himself heavily, his knees and the worn kneeler both creaking in protest, and began to pray. He asked for comfort and compassion, not for himself, but for the soldiers fighting across the globe.