The Devils of D-Day Read online

  It was a strange, throaty voice; too deep for a woman, really, but too vibrantly female for a man. The dim figure stirred, and moved silently across the room. I could just make out a pale face—a smudge of grey in the grainy blackness.

  ‘Who are you?’ I demanded. ‘Who are you?’

  The figure didn’t reply for a while. It seemed to be grating its teeth together, with an edgy, squeaking sound. Then it said: ‘We take many forms you know. Many substances. Aren’t you afraid?’

  I said: ‘Are you Elmek?’

  “Elmek or Asmorod or Kaphis. We have more names than nights that have passed since the crucifixion. Don’t think that your book can identify us, because it won’t.’

  ‘What do you know about that?’

  The thing gave a hoarse, blowzy laugh. ‘I know that you. are wasting your time on religious folly. Angels! You must be demented. You have struck yourself a bargain with me, my friend, and with my master Adramelech, the Grand Chancellor of Hell, the peacock and the serpent. Don’t talk to me of angels!’

  Madeleine said: ‘What are you going to do with us? You’re not going to keep your bargain, are you?’

  There was a sound of crackling, as if the beast were tugging its knuckles, or biting into bones. Then it said, in a much deeper, more slurred and masculine voice:

  ‘Bargains are struck for good and evil. Bargains have always been struck for good and evil. The priests and the bishops have struck bargains before, and not been disappointed. We didn’t only fight at Senlac,you know. We were there with Charlemagne, and we were there with jeanne d’Arc. No wonder the English burned her! The stones told of monstrous devils whirling around her head in battle, and they were true, mon ami. It is only now that the church has seen fit to rewrite its history, and deny the existence of all the unholy allies it used for its so-called holy wars!’

  Madeleine was shivering in fright. I put my arm around her and held her close, but the devil wasn’t disturbed.

  ‘Think of the Spanish Inquisition,” it whispered. ‘Think of the torture chambers of England and France. Each had its devil! In times gone by, devils walked the earth freely, and they still walk the earth! They made bargains with men, for mutual advantage, because man is an evil creature, thank the stars, as well as a good one.’

  Over in the corner of the room, near the door, I saw a faint blueish light, like the phosphorescence in the ocean at night. Then, to my horror, something began to appear out of the darkness. I stared and stared, and, half-distinguishable in the shadows, its mouth stretched back in a wolfish grin, was a beast that could have been a devil, could have been a whoreish woman, could have been some hideous slimy subaqueous squid. There was a sour smell in the room, and the blue light crawled and nickered like the foul illumination from decaying fish.

  I saw everything in that moment that disgusted and horrified me. I saw what looked like a woman’s hands seductively drawn back up a curving shining thigh, only to realise that the thigh wasn’t a thigh at all, but a desperately wriggling trunk of tentacles. I saw pouting lips that suddenly turned out to be festering cuts. I saw-rats crowding into the mouth of a sleeping woman. I saw living Mesh cut away from living bones, first in ribbons of skin and muscle, and then in a stomach-turning tangle of sodden flesh.

  Madeleine, beside me, shrieked.

  ‘Elmek.’ I yelled, and rolled out of the bed towards the ghastly apparition.

  There was a paralysing burst of white light, and I felt as if someone had cracked me over the head with a pickaxe handle. Dazed and dazzled, I fell sideways on the cold lino, bruising my shoulder against the leg of the bed. I tried to get up, but something hit me again, something heavy and soft.

  Madeleine screamed: ‘Dan! It’s in the bed! It’s in the bed!’

  Stunned, wiping blood away from a split lip, I gripped hold of the edge of the mattress and pulled myself upright. Madeleine was beating in terror at the blankets, as if something had scurried its way under them, and was crawling around her legs.

  For a half-second, in the eerie blue light of that failing phosphorescence, I saw something reach out from under the covers and touch her naked leg. It was black and claw-like and hairy, like a grossly overgrown spider. I hit at it, yelling in fear and anger, and then I seized Madeleine’s wrist and yanked her off the bed and halfway across the Moor.

  There was a moment of sheer panic when I thought that whatever was under those blankets was going to come crawling after us. I heard something heavy drop off the bed, and the scratch of claws on the floor; but then the blue light suddenly began to flicker again; and go dim, like a torch with used-up batteries, and the sour odour of devil began to fade away. I heard a soft soughing noise, a wind where no wind could blow, and then there was silence. Both of us crouched on the floor, panting from fright. We listened and listened, but there was no sound in the room at all, and after a while we cautiously raised our heads.

  ‘I think it must have gone,’ I said quietly.

  Madeleine whispered: ‘Oh God, that was terrible. Oh my God, I was so scared.’

  I switched on the overhead light. Then I went over to the bed and prodded at the covers with the broken bedside lamp. In the end, I gathered up enough courage to lift the blankets and turn them over. There was nothing there. If it hadn’t been a terrifying illusion, then it had left us.

  Madeleine came up behind me and touched my back. ‘I don’t think I could sleep any more,’ she told me. ‘Not in that bed. Why don’t we start out for London?’

  I found my wristwatch where it had been knocked on the floor. It was five-thirty in the morning. It would soon be dawn.

  ‘All right,’ I said, feeling very little better than I had when we first went to bed. ‘It looks like Elmek’s pushing us on, in any case. Remind me to remember that devils rarely sleep.’

  Madeleine put on her blue jeans without panties, and combed out her hair in front of the dingy mirror. I said: ‘I can’t take much more of this. I don’t even know why it does these things.’

  ‘Maybe it’s boasting,’ suggested Madeleine. ‘They’re supposed to be vain creatures, aren’t they, devils:”

  ‘It could be that. If you ask me, it’s just relishing how frightened we are. It intends to squeeze the last ounce of fear and agony out of us two and get its goddamned money’s worth.’

  Madeleine tugged a grey ribbed sweater over her head. It was so cold in that bedroom I could see the outline of her nipples through the thick Shetland wool. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I have the feeling it’s excited, as if it’s getting itself all worked up to join its brethren. All that boasting about what devils had done in the past. And that figure, whatever it was, with all those squids and snakes and things. That was like some horrible kind of showing-off.’

  I brushed my hair, and did my best to shave with a blunt razor and no soap. There were dark smudges of tiredness under my eyes, and I looked about as healthy as a can of week-old tuna. In fact, I was so exhausted that I could hardly feel frightened any more. When we were ready, we tiptoed out on to the landing, and went downstairs through the dark, creaking house. There was no-one around, so I left three pounds on the hall table, and we let ourselves out into the freezing early morning.

  The sun came up over the Sussex Downs just as we were driving out of Brighton. On each side of us, the long frosted hills stretched into the haze; to Chanctonbury Ring in the west, and to Ditchling Beacon in the east. At that time of the morning, in winter, Sussex has a strangely prehistoric feel to it, and you become uncannily sensitive to the memory that Ancient Britons trod these downs, and Roman legions, and suspect that across the smokey plain of the Sussex Weald, the fires of Anglo-Saxon ironfounders could be seen glimmering in the depths of the forests. Beside me, Madeleine sat huddled in her coat, trying to doze as we turned northwards towards London. We drove along roads white with ice, past old cottages and pubs and filling stations and roadside shops advertising home-made fudge and large red potatoes. Behind us, in the back of the car, the copper-and-le
ad box was silent as a tomb. The sun rose on my right, and flickered behind the spare trees as I sped on to the motorway. In another hour, we would reach the suburbs of London. By noon, we would probably discover whether Elmek was going to keep his bargain or not. I thought of the saying that ‘he who sups with devils must needs use a long spoon’, and it didn’t encourage me very much.

  As we left the fields and the countryside behind, and came into the crowded grey streets of Croydon and Streatham, the sky grew ominously dark, and I had to drive with my headlamps on. On the wet sidewalks, shoppers and passers-by hurried with coat-collars turned up against the cold, and a few first flakes of snow settled on my windshield. The traffic was crowded and confused, and it took another hour of edging my way between red double-decker buses and black shiny taxis before I crossed the Thames over Chelsea Bridge, and made my way towards the Cromwell Road. The snow was falling heavily now, but it melted as soon as it touched the busy streets and pavements. I passed Sloane Square, with its fountains and bedraggled pigeons; turned left at Knights-bridge, and then juddered along in solid traffic past Harrods and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Today, London looked grimly Dickensian and as we drove by the Natural History Museum, with its twisted Gothic pillars and its gardens arranged with petrified trees, I felt as if bringing this medieval devil into the city was part of some dark and sinister Victorian plot. Only my tiredness and my fear reminded me that what was inside that locked trunk was hideously real, and that this morning in December in London was overshadowed with the vicious horror of mankind’s most ancient enemies. I lit up a cigarette, and coughed.

  At last, we arrived outside 18, Huntingdon Place. It was a late-Victorian house of grimy yellow-and-grey bricks, in that gloomy hinterland between Cromwell Road and High Street Kensington, all shared flats and registry offices and unfashionable mews.

  I pulled the car into the kerb, and nudged Madeleine awake. She blinked, and stretched, and said: ‘Are we here already? That was the best sleep I’ve had in days.’

  There was no sign on the black spiked railings outside the house to show that it still belonged to the Ministry of Defence. But I climbed stiffly out of the car, and walked up to the front door to see if there was any kind of identification by the two rows of doorbells. There was nothing at all, not even the name of a tenant. The door itself was firmly locked, and by the condition of its cracked grey paint, looked as if it hadn’t been decorated for twenty years. I tried to peer through a dirty pane of spiderweb glass beside it, but inside the house it was completely dark.

  Madeleine came across the sidewalk. ‘Any luck?’ she asked me.

  ‘I don’t know. It looks as if it’s empty. Maybe they just shut- the devils up here and left it.’

  ‘But that was thirty years ago.’

  I shrugged. ‘We could always ring the bell and see.’

  I looked back towards the Citroen, parked against the kerb in the softly-falling snow.

  ‘We have to get in here somehow,’ I told her. ‘Otherwise it’s going to be cold cuts for lunch.’

  ‘Maybe the next-door neighbours know something,’ she suggested. ‘Even if the house is empty, it must belong to somebody. If we could only get ourselves a key, and take a look round. We could always pretend we wanted to buy it.’

  I stepped back and looked up at the second and third floors of the house, blinking against the snow that fell in my upturned face. ‘I can’t see any lights. I guess it must be empty.’

  I went back up to the porch and pushed all the bells. I could hear some of them ringing in different parts of the house. Then I waited for a while, shuffling my feet to bring the circulation back to my toes. Madeleine looked at me tiredly, and I knew that both of us were pretty close to the end of our tether. A taxi drove by, blowing its horn.

  We were just about to turn away when we heard a noise inside the house. I raised my eyes in surprise. Then there were sharp footsteps coming along the corridor, the rattle of security chains, and the door opened. A lean young man in a black jacket and grey business pants stood there, with a haughty and enquiring expression on his face.

  ‘Did you want something?’ he asked, in that clipped voice that immediately told you he’d been given a superior education and probably read Horse & Hound.

  I gave him an uneasy kind of a smile. ‘I’m not sure,’ I told him. ‘Does this building still belong to the War Office?’

  ‘You mean the Ministry of Defence.’

  ‘That’s right. I mean the Ministry of Defence.’

  The young man looked sour. ‘Well, that depends who you are and why you wish to know.’

  ‘Then it does?’

  The young man looked even sourer.

  I said: ‘The reason I want to know is because I have some property that belongs to the Ministry of Defence. Part of a set of wartime equipment. And what I’m doing is bringing it back.’

  ‘I see,’ said the young man. ‘And would you mind telling me what this piece of equipment might be?’

  ‘Do you have a superior officer here?’ I asked him.

  He gave a patronising grimace. ‘I haven’t even said this is Ministry property yet.’

  ‘Okay,’ I told him. ‘If it is Ministry property, and you do have a superior officer, tell him we have Adramelech’s thirteenth friend. Right out here, in the back of the car ‘

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Just tell him. Adramelech’s thirteenth friend. We’ll wait here for five minutes.’

  The young man pulled a very disconcerted face, and then he said: ‘I suppose you’d better wait inside. I won’t be a moment.’

  He opened the door wider, and we stepped into a musty-smelling hall with an olive-green dado that was worn shiny with age. I lit another cigarette and passed one to Madeleine. She wasn’t an experienced smoker, and she puffed at it like a thirteen-year-old with her first Camel, but right now we needed anything that could steady our nerves. On the peeling wall just behind us was a mildew-spotted photograph of Earl Haig, and if that wasn’t an out-and-out admission that I8, Huntingdon Place belonged to the Ministry of Defence, I don’t know what could have been, apart from a tank parked outside.

  I took out my handkerchief and blew my nose. What with losing two nights of sleep, and chasing around in the bitter winter weather, I was beginning to show all the symptoms of a head cold. Madeleine leaned tiredly against the wall beside me, and looked too drained to say anything.

  After a few minutes, I heard voices on the upstairs landing, and then an immaculately-creased pair of khaki trousers came into view down the stairs, followed by a crisp khaki jacket with a Sam Browne belt and medal ribbons, and then a fit, square face with a bristling white moustache and the kind of eyes that were crows footed from peering across the horizons of the British Empire.

  The officer came forward with a brisk, humourless smile. He said: ‘They didn’t give me your names, unfortunately. Remiss of them.’

  I flipped my cigarette out into the snow. ‘I’m Dan McCook, this is Madeleine Passerelle.’

  The officer gave a sharp, brief nod of his head, as if he were trying I0 shake his eyebrows loose. ‘I’m Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet, Special Operations Branch.’

  There was a silence. He was obviously expecting us to explain why we were here. I looked at Madeleine and Madeleine looked back at me.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet said: ‘They tell me you have something interesting.

  Something that belongs to us.’

  ‘I guess it does in a way,’ I told him.

  He gave a tight, puckered smiled. The kind of smile that my grandfather, who came from Madison, Wisconsin, used to describe as ‘a close view of a mule’s ass.’ He said: ‘Something to do with D-Day, if I understand correctly.’

  I nodded. ‘You can threaten us with the Official Secrets Act if you want to, but we know what happened anyway, so I don’t think there’s much point. We know about the thirteen ANPs that you British loaned to Patton, and we know what happened to them afterwards. Twelve
of them came here, and were sealed up, and the thirteenth one was left in a tank in Normandy, and conveniently forgotten. What we have out here, in the back of our car, is your thirteenth ANP.’

  The colonel looked at me with those clear, penetrating eyes. I could see that he was trying to work out what kind of a johnny I was, and what official category this particular problem fitted into, and what the correct follow-up procedure was going to be.

  But what he said wasn’t army jargon, and he didn’t say it like a man whose decisions are usually taken by the letter of the military rulebook. He said: ‘Are you telling me the truth, Mr McCook? Because if you are, then I’m very seriously worried.’

  I pushed the door wider so that he could see the Citroen parked at the kerb. ‘It’s in the trunk,’ I told him. ‘And it’s the real thing. Its name is Elmck, or Asmorod. The devil of knives and sharpness.’

  He bit his lip. He was silent for a while, and then he said: ‘Is it safe. I mean, is it sealed up, in any religious way?’

  I shook my head.

  The colonel asked: ‘Do you know anything about it.’ Anything about it at all?’

  ‘Yes. It told us it was a disciple of Adramelech, the Grand Chancellor of Hell. We took it out of the tank in France because it was disturbing the people who lived near it, and because Mile Passerelle believed it was responsible for killing her mother. But since then, it’s killed three other people, and it’s threatened to do the same to us.’

  Madeleine said to the colonel: ‘Monsieur L’colonel, you don’t seem at all incredulous.

  I would even say that you believed us.’

  The colonel managed a twisted little grin. ‘It’s hardly surprising, mademoiselle. It has been my particular brief for the last six years to look into that ANP business after D-Day. I probably know more about that special division of tanks than anybody alive.’

  ‘Then it’s true?’ I asked him. ‘The other devils are really here?’