The Devils of D-Day Page 15

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘An American gentleman named Sparks. He was one of the people involved in the special division during the war.’

  Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet sighed, as if he expected that kind of behaviour from Americans.

  ‘Is it true?’ I questioned him. ‘Are they really here?’

  Thanet said: ‘Yes. They’re sealed in the cellars. All twelve of them. It’s been part of my job to work out away of using them again.’

  ‘Using them again? Wasn’t once enough?’

  ‘Probably. But you know what departments of defence are like. Anything cheap and unusual and lethal always appeals to their sense of humour. And these days, they particularly like nasty alternatives to nuclear weaponry.

  So they dug out the file on the ANPs, and sent me here to see what I could do.’

  ‘And have you done anything?’ asked Madeleine.

  ‘Not much so far. We’ve had a couple of beggars out of their sacks and had a look at their bones and their general physiology, and we know that as long as their seal is broken, they can take on flesh again, and live. That was how it was done in World War Two, and that’s why we haven’t broken any of the seals. But we’re planning on greater things, once we’re sure we can keep them under control.’

  ‘Greater things?’ I queried. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Well,’ said the colonel, with a furrowed frown, ‘we were going to try to conjure up their master, because he’s supposed to be several thousand times more powerful.’

  ‘Adramelech?’ breathed Madeleine, her eyes wide.

  ‘That’s right. The great and terrible Samarian deity. Well, I wouldn’t have believed it back when I was at Sandhurst, but once they showed me what that special division had done under Patton …’

  He looked at me with a meaningful inclination of his cropped and white-haired head.

  ‘There were photographs taken after D-Day, you know,’ he told us. ‘Photographs and even colour films. They were quite extraordinary. I should think that, apart from the H-Bomb, they’re unquestionably the most spectacular and most secret things that NATO have got.’

  I said: ‘How can we control something like Adramelech, when we can hardly control these thirteen devils of his?’

  Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Well, that’s a tricky one, and that’s why I’m rather worried that you’ve brought our friend Elmek over. We don’t know how to control these devils for certain, and we certainly have no idea what to do with Adramelech. We don’t even know what Adramelech could possibly look like, and that’s always supposing one could actually see such a thing with the human eye.

  One way we’ve kept the situation under control is by leaving the thirteenth devil where it was, in France. Oh yes, we knew it was there. But we wanted to leave it there, at least until we worked out a foolproof way to prevent these other twelve beggars from setting fire to us, or giving us leprosy, or strangling us with our own guts.’

  I reached out for Madeleine’s hand. Her fingers were very cold when I touched them.

  ‘Now they’re all back together, of course, there’s a definite risk that they’ll summon up their master,’ said Thanet. ‘Patton’s men prevented such a thing from happening during the war because they promised Adramelech some human sacrifices, and plenty of blood. One could do such a thing in wartime. But now, well … the only blood that’s immediately available is ours.’

  I took out another cigarette, and lit it. Outside the door, the snow had stopped falling, but the sky was still a grim metallic green. The Citroen stood silently by the kerb, and through the reflecting glass of the rear window, we could just make out the side of the copper-and-lead trunk.

  ‘I was afraid of that, too,’ I said hoarsely, and Madeleine looked away with an expression of such sadness that even Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet noticed it, and half-raised his hand to comfort her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  They gave us tea in Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet’s upstairs office, and we sat on uncomfortable folding chairs while he took out his files on the special division of tanks—codename Stripes. He leafed through them with the quick, concentrated frown of a speed-reader, pausing now and then to study a chart or a graph, and to glance up at Madeleine and me and give a swift apologetic moue for the time he was taking.

  The office was cold, and the pale-blue walls with their defence maps of Britain and Western Europe made it seem even colder. A radiator the size of a small pig rattled and steamed in one corner, but it was all noise and no heat. There were three khaki tin filing cabinets on the opposite wall, and these, apart from Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet’s desk and three collapsible chairs, were the only furniture.

  I stood up and took my cup of scalding tea across to the window. In the dull, glistening street below, three British Army sergeants were lifting Elmek’s box from the back of the Citroen. The devil hadn’t spoken a word since our arrival, but we knew the risks of ignoring it. It expected to be reunited with its twelve brethren, and if it wasn’t, then God help any of us who were close to a window, or a knife, or anything that could cut into human (lesh.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet cleared his throat, and neatly collated his files in front of him.

  ‘Did you find anything.’ I asked him.

  He pulled a face. ‘Not very much, I’m afraid. Not much more than I was aware of already. The whole history of this particular operation was kept under wraps, and there really isn’t a great deal of documentary evidence to go on. It appears from the early approaches made by the Pentagon to the British War Office that General Patton was largely responsible for thinking it up and carrying it through, although Eisenhower certainly knew about it six or seven months before D-Day. There are several references here to Operation Stripes, and this paper here is the requisition order for preparing the tanks. Each tank cost eighteen thousand dollars to refit, mainly because of the steering mechanisms, which were partly remote-controlled.’

  Madeleine said: ‘Does it mention Adramelech? Does it say how they kept him under control?’

  Thanet slowly shook his head. ‘There’s only one reference here that might be relevant. It refers to the transportation of German prisoners-of-war to England, including one French woman, a Nazi collaborator. They were taken to the army camp at Aldershot under the direct authority of Colonel Sparks- that’s your American friend—and Colonel T. K. Aliingham, who was his British counterpart, and that means their movement order must have had something to do with Operation Stripes.

  It’s possible that these prisoners may have been used to appease Adramelech.

  Sacrifices, for want of a better word.’

  ‘A man for each of the thirteen devils, and a woman for Adramelech himself,’

  Madeleine suggested quietly.

  ‘Quite possible,’ said Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet, smiling an uneasy smile. ‘Your theory is as valid as anybody’s. That movement order is the only written evidence of those prisoners that survives.’

  I came away from the window and laid my thick-rimmed government teacup back in its saucer. ‘Colonel Thanet,’ I told him, ‘we may have only a few hours, even a few minutes, before those thirteen devils get together and call up their master. Then what are we going to do?’

  ‘We’re not going to panic, and that’s for certain,’ said the colonel. ‘First of all, we’re going to make quite sure that the devils’ religious seals are quite intact, because there isn’t much they can do while they’re nothing more than exorcised bags of bones.’

  ‘Supposing Elmek can free them—bring them back to life?’

  ‘It would have to be a pretty powerful kind of devil to do that. Each one of those seals has been blessed by seven Roman Catholic priests and kissed by a Roman Catholic cardinal. You may be cynical about religion, but I can tell you from my own experience, that’s strong medicine.”

  Madeleine lowered her eyes. ‘We have seen Elmek cutting up clerics like so much cheese,’ she said softly.

  ‘
Well, the best thing we can do is go downstairs and have a look for ourselves,’ said Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet. ‘They should have brought your box in by now, so our ANPs are all together again for the first time since the war.’

  He stood up, and tugged his tunic straight. ‘You haven’t finished your tea,’ he remarked, in obvious surprise.

  I shrugged, embarrassed. ‘I guess army refreshments are pretty much the same all over the world,’ I told him

  He peered into my cup. ‘Funny. I thought our chaps made pretty good tea.’

  At that moment, the door opened, and one of the sergeants came in and saluted.

  ‘The box is down in the quarantine area now, sir,’ he reported. His beret was glistening with snow. ‘Very weighty it was, too.’

  ‘Very good, sergeant,’ said Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet. ‘We’re on our way now. Mile Passerelle? Mr McCook? Would you care to follow me?’

  We clattered down the uncarpeted stairs, past the hall where we had first walked in, and along a corridor to the back of the house, where there was a wide cellar door, built of solid oak and hinged with steel hinges. To my right, out of the glass panes of the back door, I could see a sodden, tangled garden, and the dingy houses in the next street. Somewhere deep beneath our feet, a Tube train rattled on its way to Earl’s Court.

  The sergeant unlocked the cellar door, and swung it open. When I saw the back of it, I gave Madeleine a nudge, and pointed. Nailed on to the wood was a cross identical to that silver crucifix welded over the hatch of the tank at Pont D’Ouilly. Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet said: ‘That’s what you’d call our longstop, if you played cricket. We have it re-blessed every year by Father Mullaney, just to make sure.’

  With his head bowed to avoid the low whitewashed ceiling, Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet stepped through the cellar door and down the wooden staircase. I followed, and Madeleine came behind.

  At the bottom of the stairs, we found ourselves in a wide white basement, lit by naked bulbs in wire cage holders. Along the walls of the basement were twelve plain trestle tables, six each side, and on each table was a black, dusty sack. The twelve acolytes of Adramelech, nothing but bones right now, but each capable of hideous and warlike life. In the centre of the floor, silent and still, lay the copper-and-lead trunk that we had brought over from France. Elmek, or Asmorod, the devil of sharp knives.

  We walked slowly up and down the room, looking at each of the sacks in turn. Then Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet said: ‘Well? What do you propose we do?’

  ‘We have to identify them first, devil by devil,’ I told him, looking around the basement. ‘Then we might be able to exorcise them. I have the books upstairs.’

  ‘You can exorcise them? How?’ asked Thanet. He looked sceptical.

  Madeleine said: ‘By the invocation of angels. It’s the only way.’

  The Lieutenant-Colonel’s face went tight. ‘Angels?’ he said, incredulous. ‘Did you say angels?’

  Madeleine nodded. ‘You can believe in devils, colonel. Why can’t you believe in angels?’

  ‘Because they’re—well, because they don’t exist, do they? Or do they?’

  I rubbed my eyes tiredly. ‘We don’t actually know, colonel. But it seems to me that it’s the only alternative we have left. Father Anton gave me a book about invoking angels, and so did the Reverend Taylor, and they were both well versed in the techniques of exorcism. I guess it’s the only way.’

  There was another deep, rumbling noise; only this time I wasn’t so sure it was the Tube. I looked quickly at Madeleine, and she said: ‘Please, Colonel. I think Dan is right. We don’t have much time.’

  Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet cast his eyes around the basement, and then at our box, and sighed. ‘Very well. If you think you can do some good. But I warn you—if anything looks as if it’s going to go wrong—or if you attempt to damage any of these ANPs—then I shall have you out of here straight away. These things are government property, and it’s worth my whole damned career if you break ‘em.’

  Slowly, ominously, the lights in the basement began to dim; as if some other enormous power source was feeding off the electricity. I snapped to Madeleine: ‘Get those books—quick! They’re up on Colonel Thanet’s desk!’ and then I pulled the Lieutenant-Colonel away from Elmek’s copper-and-lead trunk.

  The lights dimmed and dimmed until all we could see was their orange filaments, barely glowing in the darkness. Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet called: ‘Sergeant Boone!

  Bring three men down here with Sterlings!’

  The darker it grew, the quieter it became. We could hear shouting and footsteps upstairs in the house; but down here in the cellar the silence seemed to tall in on us like soft tufted cotton. Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet touched my arm in the strange twilight and whispered: ‘What is it? Do you know what it is? What’s happening?’ ‘It’s Elmek,’ I whispered back. ‘Ten-to-one it’s Elmek.’ We hadn’t seen or heard the lid of the trunk open, but when I looked down at it, the lid had been thrown right back, and even in the faint light of the glowing electric filaments, I could see the stained, centuries-old silk that lined the trunk’s insides, and I could also see that it was empty.

  I gripped Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet’s shoulder in warning, and I slowly scanned the basement with straining eyes for any sign of our thirteenth devil.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet said: ‘This is all most odd. I don’t know what the damned things are trying to achieve.’

  ‘I guess they want their freedom,’ I told him. ‘They’ve been sewn up in these goddamned sacks since the eleventh century, apart from that brief excursion during the war. And they also want to bring their master back into the world.’

  ‘You really think they’re going to raise Adramelech?’ ‘That’s what Elmek said. And Elmek should know.’ In the depths of that basement, we heard a long, slow breathing noise, like the breathing of a man under heavy anaesthetic. I looked down towards the far end, between the trestles, where it was darkest. For a moment, I couldn’t see anything at all, but when I screwed up my eyes I thought I could make out a darker shape. A shape that I dreaded more than any other. The dwarf-like form of the devil Elmek, with his nightmarish eyes and his hideous rustling body. ‘Elmek,’ I said softly. ‘I command you.’ Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet turned to me in incredulity.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked me, impatient and fretful. ‘Who are you talking to?’

  I ignored him. There wasn’t time for explanations. The basement was beginning to shake like the engine-room of a ship at sea, and I could hear the wooden trestles rattling against the walls and the floor.

  ‘Elmek, listen. We have fulfilled our bargain. What about yours? Here are your twelve brethren. Give us back our priest, Father Anton, and give us back Antoinette.’

  The devil stirred, and chuckled. Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet took a step backwards, and tried to tug me back as well.

  ‘Elmek,’ I said again.

  There was a moment’s silence, and then the devil said: ‘I have told you before. Only Adramelech can breathe back life into your departed friends. We must first summon Adramelech.’

  Thanet shouted: ‘Sergeant!’

  A rush of heavy boots began to come down the cellar steps. Sergeant Boone came first, a solid-looking soldier in light khaki fatigues and a maroon beret, carrying a light machine-gun under his arm. Behind him clattered three others, all with those bullet-like heads and young implacable faces that British soldiers seem to have developed through unnatural selection.

  ‘Down the end there, sergeant,’ said Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet crisply. ‘Hold your fire for now.’

  I pointed out, rather morbidly: ‘Do you really think that guns are going to do us any good, sir?’

  Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet gave me a sour glance. ‘I’m sure they won’t, Mr McCook.

  But we have to be prepared for every eventuality.’

  We waited for a few minutes in the dark and silence of that London basement, and I could see the soldiers looking apprehensively a
t the way the light bulb filaments glowed and pulsed like electric worms. At the far end of the basement, completely concealed in shadows, Elmek watched us and waited.

  ‘Elmek,’ I said at last, ‘what do you want us to do?’

  The devil shifted in the dark.

  ‘We can’t help you summon Adramelech unless you tell us what to do,’ I prompted it.

  Elmek said, in the voice of an old woman: ‘Bring down the girl. We must have the girl here.’

  Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet said: ‘First of all, we have to know what you intend to do with her.’

  Sergeant Boone and his men looked at their colonel in bewilderment. To them, he was their superior officer, and nobody hiding in the shadows down at the end of a basement would normally dare to speak to their superior officer with such blatant disrespect.

  Sergeant Boone said: ‘We could always go down there, sir, and snatch him. Corporal Perry and me were both in Ulster, sir. It’s our specialty.’

  Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet didn’t turn to look at his sergeant. He simply ordered:

  ‘Don’t move, sergeant. Not until I tell you,’ and kept staring into the darkness.

  ‘The girl’s coming,’ I told the devil. ‘She went upstairs, but she’s coming.’

  Among the shadows, I could perceive how Elmek constantly stirred and altered shape. Madeleine had been right about it. It was probably elated at joining its brethren, and it was churning through an endless physical metamorphosis in sheer excitement. I saw suggestions of diseased and slithering shapes in the darkness that made me feel nauseous, and when Sergeant Boone’s men grew accustomed to the dim light, and could make out for themselves some of the sickening and repulsive forms that glistened and slithered at the end of the basement, they exchanged looks of mounting mystification and horror.

  Through the muffling, suffocating silence, I heard Madeleine coming downstairs and opening the cellar door. Then she appeared, with my two books under her arm. I nodded towards the dark end of the cellar, and told her: ‘Elmek. It’s appeared.’