The Devils of D-Day Read online

  ‘How can you say that unless you investigate it?’ I asked her. ‘I don’t knock superstition, but here’s a superstition we can actually test for ourselves.’

  She took back her hand, and crossed her arms across her breasts as if to protect herself from the consequences of what she was about to say. ‘Dan,’ she whispered.

  ‘The tank killed my mother.’

  I raised an eyebrow. ‘The tank did what?

  ‘It killed my mother. Well, it was responsible. Father isn’t sure, but Eloise knows it, and I know it. I have never told anyone else, but then nobody else has shown such interest in the tank as you. I have to warn you, Dan. Please.’

  ‘How could the tank have killed your mother? It doesn’t move, does it? The guns don’t fire?’

  She turned her elegant Norman profile away from me, and spoke in a steady, modulated whisper. ‘It was last year, late in summer. Five of our herd died from disease. Mother said it was the tank that had done it. She always blamed the tank for everything that went wrong. If it rained and our hay rotted she would blame the tank.

  Even if one of her cakes wouldn’t rise. But last year she said she was going to fix the tank for ever. Eloise tried to persuade her to leave it alone, but she wouldn’t listen.

  She went down the road with holy water, sprinkled it across the tank, and spoke the dismissal of demons.’

  ‘The dismissal of demons? What the hell’s that?’

  Madeleine touched her forehead. ‘The words of exorcism. Mother always believed in devils and demons, and she has the words in one of her holy books.’

  ‘Well, what happened?’

  Madeleine slowly shook her head. ‘She was only a simple woman. She was kind and she was loving and she believed deeply in God and the Virgin Mary. Yet her religion couldn’t save her. Thirteen days after she sprinkled the holy water on the tank, she started to cough blood, and she died in hospital in Caen after a week. The doctors said she had some form of tuberculosis, but they could never say precisely what form it was, or why she had died so quickly.’

  I felt embarrassed now, as well as afraid. ‘I’m sorry.’ Madeleine looked up, and there was that wry smile again. ‘You have no need to be. But you can see why I’d rather you didn’t go near the tank.’

  I thought for a while. It would be easy enough to forget the tank altogether, or simply add a footnote to Roger’s book that the last remaining Sherman tank of a secret special division was still decaying in the Norman countryside, and that local yokels believed it was possessed by evil. But how can you dismiss something like that as a footnote? I didn’t particularly believe in demons and devils, but here was a whole French village that was scared half to death, and a girl seriously claiming that malevolent spirits had deliberately killed her mother.

  I pushed back my chair and stood up. Tm sorry,’ I said, ‘but I’m still going to take a look. If it’s true, what you said about your mother, then we’ve got the biggest supernatural story here since Uri Geller.’ ‘Uri Geller?’ she frowned. I coughed. ‘He, er, bends spoons.’ She sat at the table looking a little sad. Then she said: ‘Well, if you insist on going, I’ll have to come with you. I don’t want you to go on your own.’

  ‘Madeleine, if it’s really that dangerous—' ‘I’ll come with you, Dan,’ she repeated firmly, and all I could do was lift my hands in acceptance. I was glad of the company anyway.

  While I turned the 2CV around in the yard, Madeleine went to get her overcoat. The clouds were beginning to clear a little, and there was a washed-out moon up above us like a white-faced boy peering through a dirty window. Madeleine crossed the yard, climbed into the car, and we bounced off across the ruts and the puddles until we reached the road. Just before we turned, Madeleine reached over and squeezed my hand. ‘I would like to say, “good luck,” ‘ she whispered. Thanks,’ I told her. ‘And the same to you’

  It took us two or three minutes to reach the hedge where the tank lay entangled. As soon as I saw the shape of it, I pulled the Citroen over on to the opposite verge, and killed the motor. I lifted my battery-operated tape recorder out of the back seat, and opened the car door.

  Madeleine said: ‘I’ll wait here. Just for the moment, anyway. Call me if you need me.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Down here by the river, under the brow of the cliffs, the pallid moonlight barely reached. I crossed the road and stepped right up to the tank, touching its cold corroded mudguard. It seemed so dead and desolate and rusted that, now I saw it again for real, it was hard to believe that there was anything supernatural about it. It was nothing more than the abandoned junk of war.

  There was a rustling sound in the grass around the tracks, and I froze. But then a rabbit jumped out from underneath the tank, and scampered off into the hedge. It was kind of late in the year for rabbits, but I guess they could have made their nest inside the tank itself, or underneath it somewhere. Maybe that was the real answer to Pont D’Ouilly’s haunted relic—squeaking and rustling wildlife.

  I walked round the tank as far as I could, but its right side was completely tangled in brambles, and it would have taken a sharp machete and three native bearers to go round and take a good look at that. I satisfied myself with the left side and the back. I was interested to see that even the air vents for the engine had been welded up tight, and so had the grille over the driver’s porthole.

  Slinging my tape recorder over my shoulder, I heaved myself up on to the tank’s mudguard. I made a lot of noise doing it, but I didn’t suppose that thirty-year-old ghosts really objected that much to being disturbed in the night. Carefully, I walked across the blackened hull, and my footsteps sounded booming and metallic. I reached the turret, and hammered on it with my fist. It sounded very empty in there. I hoped it was.

  As Jacques Passerelle had said, the tank’s hatch was welded shut. It was a hasty-looking weld, but whoever had done it had known his job. As I strained forward to look at it more closely, however, I saw that the hatch was sealed by other means as well—means that, in their own way, were just as powerful.

  Riveted over the top of the tank was a crucifix. It looked as if it had been taken from the altar of a church and crudely fastened to the turret in such a way that nobody could ever remove it. Looking even nearer, I saw that there was some kind of holy adjuration, too, engraved in the rough metal. Most of the words were corroded beyond legibility, but I could distinctly make out the phrase ‘Thou art commanded to go out.”

  Up there on the hull of that silent ruined tank, in the dead of winter in Normandy, I felt frightened of the unknown for the first time in my life. I mean, really frightened. Even though I didn’t want it to, my scalp kept chilling and prickling, and I found I was licking my lips again and again like a man in an icy desert. I could see the Citroen across the road, but the moon was reflecting from the flat windshield, so I couldn’t make out Madeleine at all. For all I knew, she might have vanished. For all I knew, the whole of the rest of the world might have vanished. I coughed in the bitter cold.

  I walked along to the front of the tank, pushing aside wild brambles and leafless creeper. There wasn’t much to sec there, so I walked back again to the turret, to see if I could distinguish more of the words.

  It was then, as my fingers touched the top of the turret, that I heard someone laughing. I stayed stock still, holding my breath. The laughter stopped. I lifted my head, and tried to work out where the sound might have come from. It had been a short, ironic laugh, but with a peculiarly metallic quality, as if someone had been laughing over a microphone.

  I said: ‘Who’s there?’ but there was silence. The night was so quiet that I could still hear that distant dog barking. I laid my tape-recorder on top of the turret and clicked it on.

  For several minutes, there was nothing but the hiss of the tape coursing past the recording head, and that damned dog. But then I heard a whispering sound, as if someone was talking to himself under his breath. It was close, and yet it seemed far away at the same time. It was
coming from the turret.

  Shaking and sweating, I knelt down beside the turret and tapped on it, twice. I sounded as choked up as a grade school kid after his first dry martini. I said: ‘Who’s there? Is there anybody inside there?’

  There was a pause, and then I heard a whispery voice say: ‘You can help me, you know.’

  It was a strange voice, which seemed to come from everywhere at once. It seemed to have a smile in it as well; the kind of voice that someone has when they’re secretly grinning. It could have been a man or a woman or even a child, but I wasn’t sure.

  I said, ‘Are you in there? Are you inside the tank?’

  The voice whispered, ‘You sound like a good man. A good man and true.’

  Almost screaming, I said: ‘What are you doing in there? How did you get in?’

  The voice didn’t answer my question. It simply said, Ton can help me, you know. You can open this prison. You can take me to join my brethren. You sound like a good man and true’

  ‘Listen!’ I shouted. ‘If you’re really inside there, tap on the turret! Let me hear that you’re in there!’

  The voice laughed. ‘I can do better than that. Believe me, I can do far better than that.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  The voice laughed softly. ‘Do you feel sick?’ it asked me. ‘Do you feel as if you’re seized with cramps and pain?’

  I frowned. I did, as a matter of fact, feel nauseous. There was something in my stomach that was turning over and over; something foul and indigestible. I thought for a moment that it was something I ate for lunch; but then I was seized by a stomach spasm that made me realise I was going to be violently ill. It all happened in an instant. The next thing I knew, my gut was racked by the most terrible heaving, and my mouth had to stretch open wide as a torrent of revolting slush gushed out of me and splattered the hull of the tank. The vomiting went on and on until I was clutching my stomach and weeping from the sheer exhaustion of it.

  Only then did I look at what had made me puke. Out of my stomach, out of my actual mouth, had poured thousands of pale twitching maggots, in a tide of bile. They squirmed and writhed all over the top of the tank, pink and half-transparent, and all I could do was clamber desperately off that hideous ruined Sherman and drop to the frozen grass, panting with pain and revulsion, and scared out of my mind.

  Behind me, the voice whispered: ‘You can help me, you know. You sound like a good man and true.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Father Anton carefully poured me a glass of Malmsey and brought it across his study at arm’s length, as if it was a medical specimen. I took it unsteadily, and said, ‘Thank you, father. That’s very kind.’

  He waved his hand as if to say not at all, not at all; and then sat his baggy ancient body in an armchair opposite, and opened up his snuff box.

  ‘So you went to hear the voices,’ he said, taking a pinch of ground tobacco.

  I nodded.

  ‘You look, forgive me for saying so, as if they alarmed you.’

  ‘Not them. It.’

  Father Anton snorted, sneezed, and blew his nose like the Trump of Doom. Then he said: ‘Demons can be either. One demon can be them, or it, or whatever they please.

  A demon is a host of evils.’

  I reached across to the small cherrywood sidetable and picked up my tape-recorder.

  ‘Whatever it is, father, it’s here, on tape, and it’s an it. One infernal it.’

  ‘You recorded it? You mean, you did actually hear it?’

  The old priest’s expression, which had been one of patient but not altogether unkind indulgence, subtly darkened and changed. He knew the voice or voices were real, because he had been to the tank himself and heard them. But for me to come along and tell him that I’d heard them, too—a perfect stranger without any kind of religious knowledge at all—well, that obviously disturbed him. Priests, I guess, are used to demons. They work, after all, in the spiritual front line, and they expect to be tempted and harassed by demonic manifestations. But when those manifestations are so evil and so powerful that they make themselves felt in the world of ordinary men, when the bad vibes are picked up by farmers and cartographer then I reckon that most priests get to panic.

  ‘I didn’t come around last night because I was too sick,’ I told Father Anton. ‘I wanted to, but I couldn’t.’

  ‘The tank brought on your sickness? Is that it?’

  I nodded, and my throat still tightened at the thought of what had poured out of my mouth.

  ‘Whatever it is inside that tank, it made me vomit worms and bile. It took me half a dozen whiskys and a handful of paracetamol to get me over it.’

  Father Anton touched the ecclesiastical ring on his finger. ‘You were alone?’ he asked me quietly.

  ‘I went with Madeleine Passerelle. The daughter of Jacques Passerelle.’

  Father Anton said gravely: ‘Yes. I know that the Passerelles have been troubled by the tank for a long time.’

  ‘Unfortunately, Madeleine didn’t hear the voice firsthand. She stayed in the car because it was cold. But she’s heard the recording, and she saw for herself how sick I was. The Passerelles let me stay the night at the farm.’

  Father Anton indicated the tape-recorder. ‘You’re going to play it for me?’

  ‘If you want to listen.’

  Father Anton regarded me with a soft, almost sad look on his face. ‘It has been a long time, monsieur, since anyone has come to me for help and guidance as you have. In my day, I was an exorcist and something of a specialist in demons and fallen angels. I will do everything I can to assist you. If what you have heard is a true demon, then we are facing great danger, because it is evidently powerful and vicious; but beguiling as well.’

  He looked towards the empty fireplace. Outside, it was snowing again, but Father Anton obviously believed it was more spiritual to sit in the freezing cold than to light a fire. I must say that I personally preferred to toast my feet and worry about the spirituality of it later.

  Father Anton began. ‘One thing I learned as an exorcist was that it is essential correctly to identify the demon with whom you are dealing. Some demons are easy to dispose of. You can say “The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, boo!” and they vanish back to hell. But others are more difficult. Adramelech, for instance, who is mentioned in the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, which I have on the shelves right here. Or Belial. Then there is Beelzebub, Satan’s successor, who was always notoriously difficult to banish. I never faced him myself, and it is probably best for me that I didn’t. But I have an interesting account of how he possessed a nun at the Ursuline Convent at Aix-le-Provence in the seventeenth century, and how it took seven weeks of determined exorcism to dismiss him back to the netherworld.’

  ‘Father Anton,’ I said, as kindly as I could. ‘This is all kind of medieval. I mean, what I’m trying to say is, we have something here that’s evil, but it’s modern.’

  Father Anton smiled sadly. ‘Evil is never modern, monsieur. It is only persistent.’

  ‘But what happens if we have an ancient demon right here?’

  ‘Well,’ said the priest. ‘Let us first hear the tape. Then perhaps we can judge who or what this voice might be. Perhaps it is Beelzebub himself, come to make a match of it.’

  I wound back the cassette, pushed the ‘play’ button, and laid the tape-recorder on the table. There was a crackling sound; then the clank of metal as the tape-recorder was set down on the turret of the tank; then a short silence, interspersed with the barking of that distant dog. Father Anton leaned forward so that he could hear better, and cupped his hand around one ear.

  ‘You realise that what you have here is very rare,’ he told me. ‘I have seen daguerrotypes and photographs of manifestations before, but never tape-recordings.’

  The tape fizzed and whispered, and then that chilling, whispery voice said: ‘You can help me, you know.’

  Father Anton stiffened, and stared across at me in undisguised shock. />
  The voice said: ‘You sound like a good man. A good man and true. You can open this prison. You can take me to join my brethren. You sound like a good man and true.’

  Father Anton was about to say something, but I put my finger against my lips, warning him that there was more.

  The voice went on: ‘You can help me, you know. You and that priest. Look at him!

  Doesn’t that priest have something to hide? Doesn’t that priest have some secret lust, concealed under that holy cassock?’

  I stared at the tape-recorder in amazement. ‘It didn’t say that. There was no way it ever said that.’

  Father Anton was white. He asked, in a trembling tone: ‘What does this mean? What is it saying?’

  ‘Father, father,’ whispered the tape-recorder. ‘Surely you recall the warm summer of 1928. So long ago, father, but so vivid. The day you took young Mathilde on the river, in your boat. Surely you remember that.’

  Father Anton rose jerkily to his feet, like a Victorian clockwork toy. His snuff tipped all over the rug. He stared at the tape-recorder as if it was the devil himself. His chest heaved with the effort of breathing, and he could scarcely speak.

  ‘That day was innocent!’ he breathed. ‘Innocence itself! How dare you! How dare you suggest it was anything else! You! Demon! Cochon! Vos mains sont sales avec le sang des innocents!’

  I reached out and seized Father Anton’s sleeve. He tried to brush me away, but I gripped him more firmly, and said: ‘Father, it’s only a trick. For Christ’s sake.’

  Father Anton looked at me with watering eyes. ‘A trick? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Father, it has to be. It’s only a tape-recording. It’s just some kind of trick.’

  He looked nervously down at the cassette recorder, its tape still silently spinning. ‘It can’t be a trick,’ he said huskily. ‘How can a tape-recorder answer one back? It’s not possible.’

  ‘You heard it yourself,’ I told him. ‘It must be.’