The Devils of D-Day Read online

  I was as puzzled and scared as he was, but I didn’t want to show it. I had the feeling that the moment I started giving in to all this weirdness, the moment I started believing it for real, I was going to get tangled up in something strange and uncontrollable. It was like standing at the entrance of a hall of mirrors, trying to resist the temptation to walk inside and find out what those distorted figures in the darkness were.

  I pressed the tape-recorder’s ‘stop’ button. The gloomy room was silent.

  ‘Sit down, Father Anton,’ I asked him. ‘Now, let’s play that tape back again, and we’ll see how much of a trick it is.’

  The old priest said: ‘It’s Satan’s work. I have no doubt. It’s the work of the devil himself.’

  I gently helped him back to his armchair, and picked up his snuffbox for him. He sat there pale-faced and tense as I rewound the tape back to the beginning, and then pushed the ‘play’ button once again.

  We waited tensely as the tape began to crackle and hiss. We heard it laid down on the turret again, and the dog barking. Then that voice began once more, and it seemed colder and even more evil than ever. It sounded as if it came from the throat of a hoarse hermaphrodite, some lewd creature who delighted in pain and pleasure and unspeakable acts.

  ‘You can help me, you know,’ it repeated. ‘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 sitting rigid in his seat, his knuckles spotted with white where he was clutching the frayed upholstery.

  The voice said: ”Father Anton can take away the cross that binds me down, and cast away the spell. You can do that, can’t you, Father Anton? You’d do anything for an old friend, and I’m an old friend of yours. You can take me to join my brethren across the waters, can’t you? Beelzebub, Lucifer, Madilon, Solymo, Saroy, Then’, Ameclo, Sagrael, Praredun—'

  ‘Stop it!’ shouted Father Anton. ‘Stop it!’

  With unbelievable agility for a man as old as ninety, he reached out for the tape-recorder, held it in both hands, and smashed it against the steel fireguard around the grate. Then he sat back, his eyes staring and wild, snapping the broken pieces of plastic in his hands. He dragged out the thin brown tape, and crumpled it up into a confused tangle of knots and twists.

  I sat watching all this in total amazement. First, I seemed to have a tape-recorder that said whatever it felt like. Now, I had a priest who broke up other people’s property. I said: ‘What’s wrong? Why the hell did you do that?’

  The priest took a deep breath. ‘It was the conjuration,’ he said. ‘The words that can summon Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies. There were only three more words to be said, and that demon could have been with us.’

  ‘You’re not serious.’

  Father Anton held up the smashed fragments of Sony tape-recorder. ‘Do you think I would break your machine for nothing? Those words can bring out of the underworld the most terrible of devils. I will buy you another, never fear.’

  ‘Father Anton, it’s not the tape-recorder I’m worried about. What concerns me is what goes on here. If there’s a creature inside that tank, can’t we do something about it?

  Exorcise it? Burn it out. Blow it up?’

  Father Anton shook the smashed-up tape-recorder out of the skirts of his cassock and into the waste-paper basket. ‘Exorcisms, my friend, are woefully misunderstood.

  They are hardly ever performed these days, and only in very serious cases of possession. As for burning the tank, or blowing it up, that would do no good. The demon would still haunt Pont D’Ouilly, although he would be more like a fierce dog on a long leash instead of a fierce dog inside a locked kennel. He cannot finally get away until the holy cross is lifted from the turret, and the words of dismissal erased.’

  I opened the cigarette box on the table and took out a Gauloise. I lit it up and took a long drag. I was getting used to this pungent French tobacco, and if it didn’t have as much tar in it as a three-mile stretch of the Allegheny Valley Expressway, I think I could have smoked it all the time. I said: ‘Whatever it is, it obviously wants out.’

  ‘Of course,’ agreed Father Anton. ‘And it appears to have a strong desire to rejoin its fellows. Its brethren. Perhaps it means that there were demons or devils possessing the other twelve tanks.’

  ‘You mean all of them were possessed?”

  ‘It seems likely. Why were they all painted black? Why were they all sealed down?

  You have said yourself that the Germans felt as if the devil was on their heels. I don’t know whether you have yet had time to read your friend’s history of the war, but the Orne Valley was taken at record speed—far more quickly than any of the surrounding countryside. Caen was shelled flat. But here—the tanks came through at top speed, and nobody short of Our Lord Himself could have stopped them.’

  I blew out smoke. ‘What you’re suggesting is that this special division was made up of demons? I don’t see how that’s possible. Demons are—well, dammit, they’re demons. They’re medieval. They’re imaginary. They don’t fight wars.

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Father Anton. That’s precisely what they do do.’

  ‘But how come nobody ever heard of this special division before? How come the Army even allowed it to happen? That’s supposing it did happen, and all this isn’t some kind of hoax.’

  ‘Much that happened in the war is still secret. And, anyway, what were thirteen tanks among hundreds? Perhaps your government decided on a little experiment with black magic.’

  ‘Father Anton, this doesn’t seem real. If there’s one thing that the Pentagon is not involved in, it’s black magic!’

  Father Anton went across to the tall window and looked down on his courtyard.

  Although it was mid-morning, it was as dark as late afternoon, and a few flakes of snow were tumbling idly across the village. The church clock struck eleven.

  ‘What people forget,’ he said, ‘was that the war was mystic and magical in the extreme. Hitler set great store by magic, and made a particular point of confiscating the Spear of Longinus, the very spear that pierced Christ’s side on the cross, from the Hotburg Museum in Vienna, because he believed that whoever possessed it could control the destiny of the world. On the side of the Allies, many experiments were made in sending messages by telepathy, and in levitation, and there was a Dutch priest who claimed he could invoke the wrath of the ten divine Sephiroth to bring down German planes with bolts of fire.’

  I listened to this patiently, but I felt weary and sick. I said: ‘Father, this is all very well, but what are we going to do about the tank?’

  Father Anton turned towards me. ‘There is nothing we can do, monsieur. Wiser men than us have sealed that evil entity away, and it would be foolish to disturb it. It’ the authorities will not remove the tank, then it will have to stay there.’

  ‘And the Passerelles will have to suffer the consequences for the rest of their lives?

  You know that Madeleine believes the tank killed her mother?’

  The old priest nodded. ‘She didn’t tell me, but I guessed as much. I wish there was more that I could do. All I can say is that I am very thankful we were left with only one tank, instead of many.’

  I took a last hot drag of my Gauloise, and stubbed it out. ‘Well, I think you’re being too cautious,’ I told him. ‘Maybe it’s time that someone gave the Passerelles a break, and maybe it’s time the Pentagon got their dirty washing back.’

  Father Anton looked at me and crossed himself. ‘I can only warn you, monsieur, that to open the tank would be more than foolish. It would be tantamount to suicide.’

  I stood up, and brushed ash off my pants. ‘The tape-recorder was I89 francs,’ I said.

  ‘But I’d be more than happy with half of that. It was kind of a joint venture, after all.’

  Father Anton slowly shook his head. ‘Perhaps one day I will understand Americans,’

  he
said. ‘And, perhaps one day they will understand themselves.’

  I met Madeleine for a glass of wine at lunchtime, in a small smokey cafe unappealingly called the Bar Tour-istique. A grossly fat woman in a floral housecoat served behind the bar, and occasionally forayed out to slap at the red formica-topped tables with a wet rag, as if they were disobedient dogs who kept playing up. The house wine was robust enough to clean your family silver with, but I’d managed to find a stale pack of Luckies in the local tobacconist’s, so my palate wasn’t complaining quite so vigorously as it had this morning.

  Madeleine came in through the plastic-strip curtain looking very pale and waif-like, and when she saw me she came across the bar and put her arms tight around my neck.

  ‘Dan, you’re all right.’

  ‘Of course I’m all right. I’ve only been talking to Father Anton.’

  I took her speckled tweed coat and hung it up next to a sign that warned Defense de Cracker. She was wearing a plain turquoise-blue dress that was probably very fashionable in Pont D’Ouilly, but in Paris was about eight years out of style. Still, she looked good; and it was a lift to meet someone who really cared about my welfare.

  Ten-ton Tessie behind the bar brought us our wine, and we clinked glasses like onetime lovers meeting in a seedy bar at the back of Grand Central Station.

  ‘Did you play Father Anton the tape?’

  ‘Well, kind of.’

  She touched my hand. ‘There’s something you don’t want to tell me?’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess we’re at a crossroads right now. We can either open the tank up, and find out what’s in there, or we can forget it for ever, just like everyone else has.’

  She reached up and stroked my cheek. Her pale eyes were full of concern and affection. If I hadn’t been feeling so goddamned sick last night, lying doubled-up in the Passerelle’s draughty spare bedroom, I think I might have tiptoed along the corridor and tapped on Madeleine’s door, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that making love is the last thing you feel like after puking a mouthful of maggots; and I guess that even those who love you dearly find it kind of hard to give you a wholehearted kiss.

  She sipped her wine. ‘How can we leave it there?’ she asked me. ‘How can we just leave it there?’

  ‘I don’t know. But the mayor and the civic authorities and even Father Anton himself seem to have managed to leave it there for thirty years.’

  Madeleine said: ‘You must think that I have a bee in my bonnet.’

  ‘Where did they teach you to say that? The school of colloquial English?’

  She looked up, and she wasn’t smiling. ‘The war was over years and years ago.

  Didn’t we lose enough? Enough fathers and brothers and friends? They still sell postcards of Churchill and Eisenhower at the seaside resorts, and that makes me angry. They saved us, yes, but there is nothing glorious to celebrate. To fight wars is not glorious, not for anyone. It is better to forget. But, of course, they have left us their tank, and we can never forget.’

  I sat back in my cheap varnished chair. ‘So you want to open it up?’

  Her eyes were cold. ‘The thing itself said that it wanted to join its brethren. What can it want with us? If we let it out, it will go to meet its friends, and that will be the end of it.’

  ‘Father Anton said that opening the tank would be as good as committing suicide.’

  ‘Father Anton is old. And anyway, he believes that demons and devils have power over everything. He told me that once, in catechism class. “Madeleine,” he said, “if it weren’t for Jesus Christ, the whole world would be overrun with demons.” ‘

  I coughed. ‘Supposing we open it up and there is a demon?’

  She leaned forward intensely. ‘There must be something, Dan. Otherwise we wouldn’t have heard that voice. But demons don’t have horns and forks. There’s probably nothing inside there at all that the human eye can see.’

  ‘Supposing there is?’

  ‘That’s what we have to find out.’

  I drank some more wine, and I could almost feel it put hairs on my chest as I sat there. I said: ‘What do they put in this stuff? Rust remover?’

  Madeleine answered: ‘Ssh. Madame Saurice used to entertain an American sergeant in the war, and she knows English well. All the slang English, like shucks.’

  ‘Shucks? You sure it wasn’t the war of I8I2?’

  Madeleine said, ‘I never wanted to open the tank before, Dan. I never met anyone who gave me the strength to do it. My father wouldn’t have touched it; nor would Eloise. But Eloise will tell us how to ward off demons and evil spirits while we do it, and I’m sure Father Anton will give you help if you ask him.’

  I lit another cigarette. ‘I don’t see why it’s so important to you. If you dislike the tank that much, why don’t you move away? There isn’t anything to keep you in Pont D’Ouilly, after all.’

  ‘Dan, it’s important because it lies on my father’s farm, and my father’s farm has always been home. Even if I go away for ever, that farm will still be the place where I was brought up, and that tank will still be there.’

  She drank a little wine, and looked at me intently. ‘And, anyway,’ she said, ‘I have dreamed about that tank ever since I was a little girl. That tank has given me terrible dreams.’

  ‘Dreams? What kind of dreams?’

  She lowered her eyes. ‘They were cruel dreams. Nightmares. But they were exciting as well.’

  ‘Sexually exciting?’

  ‘Sometimes. I dreamed of being forced to have sex with bristly beasts and strange creatures. But sometimes the dreams were different, and I imagined that I was being mutilated or killed. That was frightening, but it was exciting, too. Pieces were being sliced off me, and there was lots of blood.’

  I reached across the table and held her thin wrist.

  ‘Madeleine… you know this tank isn’t a joke. What’s in there, whatever it is, is something really malign.’

  She nodded. ‘I have always known it. But I have also known, all my life, that one day I would have to face up to it. Of course, I tried to evade my responsibility. I tried to persuade you not to go down there to make your recording. But I am led to the conclusion that the time has probably come.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it looks as though we’ve talked ourselves into it.’

  She gave a fleeting, humourless smile.

  Later that afternoon, I telephoned Father Anton and told him what we were planning to do. He was silent for a long time on the other end of the line, and then he said: ‘I cannot persuade you otherwise?’

  ‘Madeleine’s set on it, and I guess I am, too.’

  ‘You’re not doing this out of a mistaken sense of affection for Madeleine? Because it can only do her harm, you know. You must realise that.’

  I looked across the polished floor of Pont D’Ouilly’s post office, marked with muddy footprints where the local farmers had come in to draw their savings or to post their letters. There was a tattered poster on the wall beside me warning of the dangers of rabies. Outside, a thin wet snow was falling, and the sky was unremittingly grey.

  ‘It has to be done sometime, Father Anton. One day that tank’s going to corrode right through, and that demon’s going to get out anyway, and maybe someone completely unsuspecting is going to be passing by. At least we have some idea of what we’re in for.’

  Father Anton was silent for even longer. Then he said hoarsely: ‘I’ll have to come with you, you know. I’ll have to be there. What time are you planning to do it?’

  I glanced up at the post office clock. ‘About three. Before it gets too dark.’

  ‘Very well. Can you collect me in your car?’

  ‘You bet. And thank you.’

  Father Anton sounded solemn. ‘Don’t thank me, my friend. I am only coming because I feel it is my duty to protect you from whatever lies inside that tank. I would far rather that you left it alone.’

  ‘I know that, father. But I don’t think
we can.’

  He was waiting for me at the front door of his house, dressed in his wide black hat and black button-up boots, his cape as severe and dark as a raven. His housekeeper stood behind him and frowned at me disapprovingly, as if I was particularly selfish to take an old man out on an afternoon so cold and bleak; probably forgetting that it was colder inside his house than it was out. I helped him to climb into the front passenger seat, and smiled at the housekeeper as I walked around the car, but all she did was scowl at me from under her grubby lace cap, and slam the door.

  As we drove off across -the slushy grey cobbles of the priest’s front courtyard, Father Anton said: ‘Antoinette is what you probably call a fusspot. She believes she has divine instructions to make me wear my woollen underwear.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure God cares about your underwear as much as He cares about anything else,’ I told him, turning on the windshield wipers.

  ‘My friend,’ replied Father Anton, regarding me solemnly with his watery eyes, ‘God will take care of the spirit and leave the underwear to look after itself.’

  It took us about ten minutes to drive the back way around the village to the Passerelle’s farm. The trees all around us were bare, and clotted with rooks’ nests; and the fields were already hazy and white with snow. I beeped the Citroen’s horn as we circled around the farmyard, and Madeleine came out of the door in a camel-hair duffel-coat, carrying an electric torch and an oily canvas bag full of tools.

  I climbed out and helped her stow one kit away in the back of the car. She said: ‘I got everything. The crowbars, the hammers. Everything you told me.’

  ‘That’s good. What did your father say?’

  ‘He isn’t so happy. But he says if we must do it, then we must. He’s like everyone else. They would like to see the tank opened, but they are too frightened to do it themselves.’

  I glanced at Father Anton, sitting patiently in his seat. ‘I think that’s how the good father feels about it. He’s been dying to tackle this demon for years. It’s a priest’s job, after all. It just took a little coaxing.’